Does one need to be an atheist to be considered a true scientist?

Does one need to be an atheist to be considered a true scientist?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
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Yes.
>inb4 butthurt religious retards saying that their truths are just as valid

no

One needs to publish research papers that further human understanding of nature to be a scientist.

A man cannot produce good work if he is not inspired, and religion is the best way to inspire someone, so although God is not necessary for science, it helps.

Absolutely not. As long as there is a separation of what they're taking from religion and not allowing it to obscure their thought process in a logical everyday way.

> "their truths"

who the fuck says the "truths" of atheists is "true"
pic related is what we thought was how an atom looked like
it was "true" untill it wasn't true anymore.

In most cases, no, as long as your beliefs don't directly contradict with the field (for example being a creationist and a biologist.)

The exception is with psychology. If you're any more than vaguely religious or deistic you're going to have problems, because so many religions make psychological claims, especially Christianity.

I think you need to be a sceptic to be a true scientist. And I dont know how you could be religious and a sceptic

Nope. A true scientist must be open minded and not biased by their own personal beliefs.

MODS

>True scotsman.
There have been many great scientists who believed in supernatural phenomena, let's not pretend there haven't been. However, when engaging with the supernatural, they are no longer being scientific.

People have a fantastic ability to compartmentalize and dissociate conflicting ideas. One can be an evolutionary biologist Monday through Saturday and still be a creationist on Sunday.

You do know that Atheists can be just as closeminded as Christians, right?

>I am 12 and this is deep

I hate to say something this elitist but I think true scientist are agnostic. Atheism is almost as bad as religion IMO.

No. A valid example would be my old physics teacher who believed that God created the Universe and the laws of physics have defined it ever since. We'll never know for sure what created the Universe so why not call it "God"?

xkcd.com/774/

What's wrong with being a creationist while being a biologist? As long as someone is researching properly and adhering to the scientific method, their religious beliefs don't matter. Cognitive dissonance isn't such a bad thing

this desu

especially faggots like
who feel good about themselves for not believing in muhh fantasyyyy

You cant be just agnostic.

Wåt

Being open-minded is one of the most important qualities of a scientist as nature can be very counter-intuitive.

Being an atheist doesn't protect you from being a bigot.

I'm not agnostic but I think one needs to be agnostic to be a true scientist. Always willing to accept a new truth and very open-minded. "I'm sure God exists" is as bad as "I'm sure God doesn't exist". Science still has a long way to go unraveling the mysteries of nature before one can ascertain whether a deity exists or not.

Agnosticism in this sense refers to your attitude towards your held position. If you do not actively believe in a god, you are an atheist.
Agnosticism for its own sake rejects science entirely.

You can be a cog in the scientific machine and make useful contributions to science while being religious. But you can't master or understand science as a discipline while being religious. Where "true scientist" falls on this continuum is something I will lead to the beholder.

Thats cool and all but I'm not in the same camp as the vast majority of self-identifying (agnostic) atheists that admit the possibility of God but make it quite clear that they think the chances of God being real are far less than 1%.
Think God and no God are equally likely. I don't fit in with that crowd at all.

>Think God and no God are equally likely
You mean, they both have a chance of 50% to exist?

ya

No.

Religion has been opposed to science at every turn in history

>Atheism is as bad as religion IMO

youtube.com/watch?v=avep_1vbUOA
youtube.com/watch?v=2ulkFhAmE6M

>I know nothing except for American Protestantism but I'm going to overgeneralize to the whole world and to all of human history

>You mean, they both have a chance of 50% to exist?
Yeah, either God exists or he doesn't. Simple statistics m8.

I think God might be scientifically proven to be real some day but at this time we can't prove it. Kinda like aliens, they might be out there, but we can't prove it. I think it's just as silly to say "aliens are impossible" as to say "God can't exist."

Nice projection faggot.
Modern evangelicalism is a minority.
> inb4 survey done on fox news site about fox news watchers

Religion is the reason we had literacy in the first place.

OK, so you're saying atheism is true until God is shown to exist. Good, I expect we'll hear from you when that happens.

I really wish other atheists didn't use ignorance as their reasoning.

The biggest institute throughout the enlightenment and renaissance era was the church. Western religious institutions funded the dawn of modern science in an effort to better understand their deity's world. The father of genetics did his research in a monastery, and Isaac Newton, an unorthodox Christian, got his funding from the church-founded Cambridge. Don't bullshit saying religion has been against science at every turn. Modern science came from the church. If you wanted to be literate, let alone a scholar, you went to the religious institutions.

Take a middle-school history class before you go spouting bullshit.

>Doesn't know what Protestantism is.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States
Protestant(46.5%) [Pew further subdivides Protestant into Evangelical Protestant (25.4%), Mainline Protestant (14.7%), and historically Black Protestant (6.5%).]
Catholic (20.8%)
Mormon (1.6%)
Jehovah's Witnesses (0.8%)
Orthodox Christian (0.5%)
Judaism (1.9%)
Islam (0.9%)

>As long as someone is researching properly and adhering to the scientific method
Well that's the point. You can't use the scientific method to study biology while rejecting the fundamental theory of biology because of preconceived beliefs. That is antithetical to the scientific method. If evolution has no bearing on what you are studying then you could argue that you can still adhere to the scientific method in that area, but that won't happen in practically any field of biology.

>rejecting the fundamental theory of biology because of preconceived beliefs
Don't act stupid; you know damn well what he means.

Still, there need to be words for the different classes of creationist.

Non-sequitur and bullshit.

No, I honestly don't. Creationism in modern usage refers to a rejection of evolution. Most Christians, who believe God created everything including life, are not referred to as creationists.

To be considered one? No. To be one? Yes.

The church only supported scientists insofar as those scientists supported their own goals. They were not supporting science as an institution, they were supporting themselves. This is clear in the persecution of scientists who deviated from the church's scientific dogma. Saying that the church supported science (which really means the church supported certain scientists) does not mean they were also not standing against it.

no, because you can selectively apply the scientific method. study some esoteric detail while still going to church. however applying the scientific method to the god question will result in the conclusion that there is insufficient evidence for this skybeing and therefore not worthy of belief.

>Implying the God question was the only one.

If that's what you took from that post then you're fucking retarded and you have no business conducting any kind of research.

>their own goals
Understanding God's world.

The biggest instances of religious institutions hindering science were the burning of the library at Alexandria and the execution of Galileo. These were both done in a political context.

Also, about that second one, in order to maintain the calendar, keeping the holidays (read, "holy days") at the right place in the year, the heliocentric model was adopted by church astronomers even though Galileo lost his life for supporting the very notion of it. It's politicking is what it is, and bullshit like that is still very much alive in politics today. If an age comes where people no longer hold on to, I can guarantee there'll still be someone in office taking advantage of people's wants and ignorance.

no
>louis pasteur was a catholic

of course not

atheism is the new tryhard "me too" label adopted by average-brains and wannabe intellectuals.

if you have an IQ around 120-140 (online tested only ofc) and you are a STEM major, and you are an atheist, 95% of the time it is just to fit in and "be smart"

Belivers are morons, atheists are morons, people who claim to be above atheists and theists are morons, you all are morons, I'm a moron.

Discussions about religion are the worst kind of ideological masturbation.

>Understanding God's world.
It's more like reaffirming whatever you think God's world should be. If understanding is your goal, there should be no barriers to skeptical inquiry. Religion at it's core is a dogmatic institution which will be in conflict with science as long as that dogma attempts to say anything quantifiable about the real world.

>These were both done in a political context.
Is this supposed to minimize it or excuse it? Because it does neither.

There is a word for believing that the building blocks for the universe but not life itself were brought about by divine intervention. The word is deism. I'd put it right up there with atheism and Buddhism in terms of being accommodating to modern science.

I'd say a good test for a definitive answer will one day be a computer that is taught only the rudiments of objective natural science. If I were to place a bet, I'd say that computer would be agnostic.

>THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

>If I were to place a bet, I'd say that computer would be agnostic.
Only using the worst definition of the terms.

Nearly all atheists are tea kettle atheists. They aren't claiming there is no deities, they state there is insufficient evidence to believe in any of them. By this definition, your computer would be an atheist.

Could be that everything is just a story, whether it is religion or science, and the story you pick works for what you want until it doesn't and you have to change your story. That would mean you will never know what is right, but you will know what isn't right when your story no longer works.
In that way, you would never have to know what is real, because if it changed, you'd just change your story.

Only problem would be those that got so used to their story they didn't change it regardless of whether it didn't work.

That would be a problem...

Ofc but it pisses off a lot of Christians (including myself) when you figure out Christ was a passing tranny and created the biggest matriarchy ever masquerading as a patriarchy

Agnosticism is the rational point of view. You could be a deist or whatever within that scope. I tried being Christian for a while but I've given up again. No you don't need God to derive morality I wish you did but fuck

No, in fact some great scientist were driven to better understand the great universe god created, and even funded by religious organizations.

You can learn how a car works without ever meeting the engineer. But it helps to meet him.

>You can learn how a car works without ever meeting the engineer. But it helps to meet him.
Really makes you think.

The greatest scientists in history were religious, so no. In fact, atheism seems to actively work against being a great scientists. I can't think of a single scientists, great or even memorable, that was an atheist.

Atoms don't look like that?

you're the fucking retard here, cupcake.

Considering the scientific method is the answer to the question "What is the best way of acquiring knowledge?" God's existence is meaningless if you propose an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

Doing literally anything else is falling for the religion meme

>religion is the best way to inspire someone

sure, to rape, murder and pillage (also to deny evolution, prevent stem cell therapy [see related: feels vs. reals] and genetic engineering because muh playing God)

More important than being religious is knowing statistics, Occam's razor, and that correlation does not imply causation.

>cupcake
fite me irl 1vs1 kid

A true scientist is one that is open to either the existence or nonexistence of god and sits and waits for evidence to be able to prove one or the other. But the truest of scientists don't think much about it because they know said information does not exist. That they can spend more time on things that could be proven.

At the end of the day we all believe in something, you can't be just a logical positivist.

But to realize, through logic, that you only lean towards one belief because brains make decisions based on the information given, as a survival function. Then realizing you can't know forsure and keeping an open mind. IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

belief != faith

>“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Werner Heisenberg

>muh argument from authority

also who's God?

The guy was one of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced.

>literally the argument from authority

I guess alchemy is also a thing, since Newton devoted more time to that than he did to calculus and planets?

He did not.
There are very strong philosophical arguments in favor of God's existence which you'd understand if you pulled your head out of your ass for two seconds.

If you were humble you wouldn't assume that I didn't understand those arguments.

Newton wrote more about alchemy and his opposition to organized religious than about physics or math. Transcendence can be quite inspiring as well as motivating (cf Abbé Lemaître). If you look into his bio, espescially his feuds and obsessive executions, you discover a full blown psychopath. Smart doesn't mean good - Illumination includes the unhuman.

Claiming to be an atheist doesn't make you one. People brought up in a monotheistic culture are largely oblivious to the source of their subconscious thought patterns that inform their conscious thinking process. Once you recognize the pattern you see it in action almost everywhere, your own thoughts included. What do text book saints, celebrities and brands have in common? Worship, idolism, Veeky Forumsentism - easy prey for official reality, the science of petrified conformity.

From cultural distance: You don't see your nose until you close one eye.

(Some history: www.physics.wustl.edu/alford/general/newton.html)

>Implying there's a bottom to the glass of natural sciences
>Implying he wasn't just pretending to be retarded

Name a good one that actually functions.

Your casual disregard of Heisenberg's statement is clearly indicative of retardation. I can be humble and assume you're a retard at the same time.

There is a fundamental order to the universe, e.g. electrons repel each other. Out of all the ways the world could work, we see only one, very precise fundamental order, this implies choice, therefore, a creator.

lol you are so retarded I can't even.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

>only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing and reflecting upon fine tuning [of the universe]

>Most often such arguments draw upon some notion of the multiverse for there to be a statistical population of universes to select from and from which selection bias (our observance of only this universe, compatible with life) could occur.
>some notion of the multiverse
For which there is literally zero proof. Fuck off with your pseudoscience.

You're talking to two user's retard :)

2 in 1 I guess.

>For which there is literally zero proof
>defending God
>mfw

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. I have fallen for the religion bait again. I promise to be more careful in the future.

Protip, Galileo actually renounced his theories in a kind of very caricatural "I'm too old for this shit" fashion, so they didn't kill him.
I know that wasn't your main point but hey, someone had to be the autistic one here

I don't care.
So you have no counterargument, I see.

First off Secondly there are parts of this order that derive from one another to a degree so changing a single constant might be impossible.

There is also no reason to assume that the fundamental order could even be different than it is.

God is also an exception for some reason having intelligence derived from absolutely nothing and is as such capable of making a choice that doesn't depend on prior states at all for the argument to make any sense.
God is also an exception to requiring a creator for some reason whereas the universe is not.

No but you should strongly consider what religious beliefs you have and why you hold them. If you would rather cling to dogma in the face of evidence regarding scientific matters then you aren't a true scientist.

>I don't care.

>Argument from authority

makes sense.

First off, I replied to here The fundamental order, by definition, could be anything, hence the word "fundamental". Whether that thing is compatible with life is another matter.
As for the origin of god, we have no idea what manner of being this "god" is, we may never even be able to comprehend this "creator". What we can do is attempt to understand the universe, a universe we can touch, measure and perform experiments in. Questions about the origin of such a creator, while valid, do not detract in any way from my original statement here as this statement results from direct observations in the physical world. God is beyond the scope of the physical world and thus probably beyond our level of reasoning.

What a nice diplomatic way to say "theism is irrational"

How do you know a multiverse is any more or less improbable than a god?
There is no evidence for either but you reject one out of hand and consider your philisophical argument of the fundamental order being derived from choice valid.
Both are unfalsifiable statements so whether one or the other is true (ignoring that it is a false dilemma) is pure speculation.

You also ignore that there is no reason to assume that the fundamental order of the universe could differ from how it currently is.

Your original statement is that the fundamental order must have been chosen but you have given no mechanism through which such a choice can arise, instead putting god on a special incomprehensible pedestal.

Please share those arguments

I now remember why I don't hold dialectics with theists, cause God is an exception to everything of course. Turtles all the way down amirite?

>what is anthropic principle

How dense are you? For the anthropic principle to make sense, there doesnt need to be multiverse. And even if that was the case. At least multiverse is predicted by a scientifically sound theory

That has never been proven.

Intellectual (me):1
Pseudo-intellectual:0

I am an atheist as well.
I'm just an educated atheist.
Here are my beliefs:
Empiricism, falsifiability, fallacy checking, the scientific method, the socratic method, humility, scientific consensus, etc.

I don't believe in jumping to conclusions or siding with an unproven concept and calling it proven with emotional fervor.
That's irrational.
The only rational thing is to remain neutral until something is proven true with experimentation or some form of evidence.
Presumption is never evidence.

>Intellectual (me)

Please refer to pic related

Yes, the anthropic principle. I know abut this already. What has that to do with anything?

But please tell me, if god and the multiverse are equally plausible:
What models predict god? Based on what math is god necessary?

>How do you know a multiverse is any more or less improbable than a god?
>There is no evidence for either but you reject one out of hand and consider your philisophical argument of the fundamental order being derived from choice valid.
While there is no scientific proof for either, there are philosophical arguments for the existence of god, while none exist for the multiverse. Of course, philosophical reasons for the existence of god is what we're debating here, something you don't think exists.
>You also ignore that there is no reason to assume that the fundamental order of the universe could differ from how it currently is.
Why can't we assume it could differ? What logical contradiction makes this assumption invalid?
>but you have given no mechanism through which such a choice can arise
Of course I didn't, I don't have the first clue to how it could arise, but with the assumption that the fundamental order could differ (something you unreasonably disagree with), my statement is logical.
Why don't people read the rest of the thread before replying?
I think what you're trying to say is that what I'm saying (order implies god) leads to a contradiction (where did god come from), therefore what I'm saying is wrong, but it doesn't. There is no contradiction because a god that created the universe would be outside the scope of the physical world.

>falsifiability, fallacy checking

memes

If a being creates logic, would it not exist outside of logic as understood by humans, or is this just your catholic residue seeping though?

>Why don't people read the rest of the thread before replying?
I did.
Please share those arguments