Sunday, July 11, 2010

Atheist Fallacy #1 - Belief in God Limits Curiosity and Scientific Inquiry

The first in a series of at least 20 of Fallacies believed or at least used by some atheists and naturalists to either advance the notion that atheism/naturalism is better than Chrsitianity, or that Christianity is either not true or limiting.

I have started with this fallacy, because it is so demonstrably false, and because the only source of the hypothesis is the feelings of the atheist.  He has a hard time seeing how a committed theist or Christian could be open to finding species-to-species evolution as an atheist is, or exploring evidence of life on other planets, or the existence of strings or emotionally involved genes.  But this is false and provably so. 

The scientific movement was powered by Christians, underwritten by Christian Universities, and taught to students in Christian Churches and Schools.  The fact of some resistance to accepting some aspects of new ideas is not unique to Christians.  And often the rejection of the science by Christians turned out to be true.  I would be most curious indeed to hear from any among the atheist community who believes they can make a scientific case for this fallacy.

1 comment:

Bernardo said...

I never claim that theism MUST lead to a lack of curiosity about mechanical processes. That would indeed be fallacious. What I said is that, in practice, theism TENDS TO lead to a lack of curiosity about mechanical processes.

"The scientific movement was powered by Christians..."

Way back when, people used to think that ALL things are directly caused by God or gods. Sure, it was mostly Christians who allowed people to realize that SOME things are not directly caused by God or gods; SOME things are caused by natural mechanical processes. But it does take an atheist (or at least a deist) to keep going and show that ALL things, any given thing, can be caused by natural mechanical processes.

Theists don't WANT to believe that everything is natural. Naturalists do. So of course we have more motivation to uncover those mechanisms.

Is a Christian every bit as capable of discovering/modeling those mechanisms? Yes. Are Christians as motivated to do so? No.