Religion or Science - How do they compare?

Of course we have the evidence, you've been shown it many times. You might prefer to forget it but the evidence is there. We absolutely do not. You can believe something different but please stop making these silly claims on behalf of others. There is no universal right and wrong, morality does change over time and between societies. You can see that in the bible itself. The actual evidence tells us the exact opposite - as our societies evolve empathy and compassion for others increases at a nation level. I'd show you the charts but you'd just block them fom your mind and make the same claims in a month's time.

It's simpler than that.Science deals in evidence-based knowledge.
Religion is concerned with belief.

Or that atheists are too smart to get caught.....

Yeh, but your task is to prove the premise to be true, elseIF candy floss is the secret to everlating life
THEN anyone that eats it will live forever.ie it's an utterly poinless bit of pseudo logic.

I just demonstrated that what you proposed as logic was, in fact, not logical.You simply stated what you believe. Please don't confuse that with logic.

Your statement is true. As is mine. All it says isIF A is true
Then A is truePerfectly correct and utterly useless. Very Trumpian It is believed to be true by millions. Maybe a tad childish?

We've done this over and over.'Contending' is just another word for asserting and what you're asserting is your belief. Well fine, but we know this and it's not moving anything forward.What we actually *know* is that man is an evolved animal. All his traits have evolved. If we accept that our emotions, like our physical bodies, have evolved - anger, fear happiness, jealousy, love etc - and that empathy - which is the source morality - also evolved (we have evidence of this), then why can't morality have evolved? Why does it need a god?

For you. That's not true GDR, those of us that don't share your beliefs accept the evidence that morality like all other human traits evolved and is still evolving naturally. You simply prefer your beliefs over the facts.

Perhaps you can say which of the facts below you think are beliefsIt's a fact that man is an evolved animal
It's a fact that man's emotions evolved like his physical body
It's a fact that empathy is the emotion that allows us to have caring feelings for other people and want to protect them from harm
It's a fact that people that have some specific forms of brain disorders lack empathy and do not share our moral vaues. We call these people psychopaths.
It's a fact that we can see the parts of the brain where empathy 'happens'. It's got nothing to do with god's 'small voice' or hearts.
It's a fact that empathy is a brain process.
It's a fact that our societies change/develop our moral values using laws and the criminal justice system to create more just and ordered societies over time.
It's a fact that when these systems break down, societies sink back into disorder.
It's a fact that there's no evidence for any god-like involvement in any of this process
It's a fact that I am not relying on any belief to create this list.

That would be an immoral code, not a moral code. Well not quite, no.There *is* a universal moral code programmed into us called empathy. It tells us right from wrong and is the source of the 'golden rule'. If there's a 'still small voice' it's the brain function we call empathy. Unless we're psychopathic or trained to ignore it we are all affected by it to a greater or lessor extent. We can overcome it with our intellect, but it's still there holding us back from doing the worst and informing our secular laws by reinforcing and normalising good behaviour and punishing bad.This is why violence and crime has reduced in every society in the developed world for centuries.

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In a study (link is external) published in the Journal of Neuroscience on October 9, 2013, Max Planck researchers identified that the tendency to be egocentric is innate for human beings — but that a part of your brain recognizes a lack of empathy and autocorrects. This specific part of your brain is called the the right supramarginal gyrus. When this brain region doesn't function properlyor when we have to make particularly quick decisionsthe researchers found one’s ability for empathy is dramatically reduced. This area of the brain helps us to distinguish our own emotional state from that of other people and is responsible for empathy and compassion.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/.../the-neuroscience-empathyEdited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Do you disagree? NO! There are oviously no absolutes - that's why morality has changed over time. My opinion is pretty much the same as yours in matters of murder, rape, theft, slavery etc and the same as the society's and the times we live in - roughly. We all look back now at the horrors of the past and declare them immoral. If you accept that empathy evolved - as you appear to do - then you also know how it came to exist 'in the first place'. Ie it evolved, just like all our other traits.So what's special about empathy not's not special about, say, jealously, rage, love, hate, fear, smell, upright stance, hairlessness etc etc etc?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Now that's a weird but interesting statement.Homo sapiens have only existed for around 300,000 years. The term sapiens comes from sapient meaning wisdom. We are the only known species that has the capacity to think about the future which enables us to understand the consequences of our actions and not act merely instinctively.Empathy is a brain function. It exists to lessor extents in other 'higher' mammals. It provides the feelings of compassion for others that our species has and allows us to get on with each other. As a result we are who we are. And as a result a daffodil is what it is.I'm struggling to understand how there can be a free-floating morailty out there somewhere. It has to live inside a sentient being with the ability to choose its actions. Where is it and what is it? We say that state murder is moral. War, capital punishment, abortion. I often disagree. Others don't. And these positions change over time. Not too long ago the only punishment for a 'crime' was death. No absolutes even with murder then. A statement of personal belief is not an argument. We are talking here specifically about morality and science has identified it's origins and even pinned it down to the specific area of the brain it operates from.It has also derived the overall driver of how organism behave the way they do. The why of our behaviour is also known - it's so that we can live together.Don't confuse all those specifics with the why of everything. Yeh, well, you've begged the question yet again.What science has done is push the 'design' further and further back so that now it doesn't even look like design. Back to just a tiny hot point in nothing which expands into a universe so big that we can't fathom it. And on one small planet amongst trillions, billions of years ago something looking a bit like life popped up which later developed a conscience. And it was all planned?And from there you leap to a Christian god that answers prayer? Come on, it's bonkers. On the one hand he's totally absent for billions of years letting things develop from first principles, the next he's a Christian god demanding worship and performing miracles.This same god, presumably deliberately, also leaves out of some the of the people he created the very component that makes them moral creatures at all. Why??And of course you also have to answer why you think there has to be a why anyway....

I asked where is it and what is it?Unless you have at least some kind of working hypothesis, I'm just going to say it's a total fabrication invented by primitive peoples. Ok so you've abandonned your position of a free-floating, absolute morality and you accept that cultures create their own moralities. You also accept that our societies have become more compassionate over time.It's also clear that it's the development of progressive secular institutions that have made Western societies more compassionate. In those countries where those institutions are less developed and/or where religions or other dogmas are in power, compassion for the individual is less developed. The 2,000 years of religious totalitarianisn was something that had to be overcome before human rights could evolve to the extent that they have. Eh? If there is a universal morality it would be expected to be universal and constant. Like gravity. Not totally flexible and developmental. Yes we know. It's still not an argument. You present it as if if is. My mother believes that it's bad luck to put new shoes on a table. So what? Without any supporting evidence we can move on without comment. This is what you do all the time, assume agency. To claim agency you have to observe an agent. Present your agent. If it was a simple as this, you would by now have pointed to the maker of god’s assembly line. You can't; you impose your understanding of human processes onto the universe. We make stuff, so there must be something bigger than us that made us. Well no, that's a total non-sequitur.For us the process IS the why. You accept the process of evolution, there is absolutely no sense of purpose or design in the long and random course that has taken. It's absolutely nothing like an assembly line - it's a total fluke that frogs exist let alone people. If we ran the process again, it's highly unlikely that we'd recognise any living organism. It's a fluke that H. sapiens exist - if the meteor hadn't hit the earth the dinasaurs wouldn't have died out and the tiny shrew-like creature that gave rise to modern mammals and us probably wouldn't have developed further. Did god send the meteor? I'm not suggesting it, I'm telling you that it's so. We have mountains of evidence for it and you accept all of it. You just have a bit of magical thinking left where some unknown moral entity pulled a string 13 billion years ago and disappeared without trace. You have a magical belief that comforts you, I have evidence, science and rational conclusions. You have built your house on sand haven't you? Adding unproveable and unevidenced assumptions on top of each other. I've spoken to several people who say these things. Every time they reluctantly tell me what these experiences are they turn out to be the most ordinary things you can imagine. Maybe yours was different? We know that life developed from a very simple organism into the diversity and complexity we see today. There is no why there. You're asking a human question, there's no reason at all why there needs to be a why. The physicists tell us that the universe itself doesn't need a why. This is something ordinary people can't/won't understand, they need purpose and create a supreme being to provide one. But not happy with that, they then create tens of thousands of religions to go with it.You are only a Christian because you were born in a Christian culture, almost certainly to Christian parents. Just another accident. No why involved.

Yes Phat human values change. However, GDP is referring to a absolute, universal, freeform morality free from human failings - the source of which is his god. He claims it's the source of our morality. I claim that it's a brain function (and a hormone called oxytocin) - both of which evolved. Elephants?There's no evidence for anything 'bigger' than us. Or do you know something I don't? Something that defies natural laws. ie super-natural. But we've done this..... We didn't take any responsibilty, we just noticed that all the myths and campfire stories of supreme beings and people being formed from ribs and dust and floods and loafs and fishes and and and.... are just that, made up stories to satisfy our dumb questions. Stuff we made up before we knew how anything at all worked.

Yes, we know, but repeating your belief tells us nothing except that you believe something. There have been hundreds, thousands of gods. All fabricated. Why is yours different? You're still missing the point. I don't hold any belief about 'why'. I don't accept that there needs to be a 'why'. I claim that it's this insistence that there must be a why that had lead to the invention of all these totally unevidenced gods. Correct. We have evidence for how our own morality developed and works and none whatsoever for your freefloating, universal morality. But morality *IS* imposed on our consciousness. Unless we are afflicted with psychpathy or brain damage we can not avoid feeling compassion for others. Empathy - and thus morality - is part of our physical make-up, like having two hands. This is just fantasy. How could anybody agree? it's a non-sequitur. There is no logic in the statement 'I exist therefore god exists'. 'Certain' randomness? The evolutionary process requires randomness, it's one of it's core precepts. It's the 'mindlessness' that you are fond of pointing out. I suppose it would be useless to remind you that what you believe is irrelevant. I'm only interested in what you can support with reasoned argument and evidence. If you're simply going to keep saying that you believe what you believe, we're not going to get anywhere. Or it was inevitable given the amount of time and material in the universe. Man needs to answer 'why’. Does that mean that there's an answer? Or that it's a valid question? So far there have been thousands of answers - all of them pure imagination. Pretty much every belief system has been disproven piece by piece so that now you're left trying to find god further and further way. Perhaps he's in dark matter? He's gone from being literally a man on a cloud to a quantum. As we learn more he retreats further. And as noted, the ONLY reason you believe that is because you were born into a Christian society to Christian parents. Accident. I absolutely would be. It would be impossible not to be. A combination of ignorance, brain washing and threat meant everybody had to believe. I believed myself until I was 13. We believe what we are told in the absence of other data. Yes, it's an accident for me personally that I wasn't born into a theocracy but it's not an accident that society itself is becoming less theocratic as it learns more and allows its members to think rationally for themselves.