there's a reason why we call it evidence…

When you write about religious affairs with a skeptical eye, you’re bound to get plenty of negative feedback. It’s inevitable and expected. But more often then not, I’m surprised at just how similar those criticisms can be. For traditions with centuries upon centuries of argumentative material to fall back on, there’s not much variety in a standard reply from someone who thinks you’ve offended his or her faith by questioning how it applies to what we know about the modern world. For example, this comment is an ideal representative of what those replies typically sound like. And because I’m an evil science writer, I’m going to go through it point by point…

The search for truth requires an open mind otherwise scientific observations are mere opinions.

Let’s stop at the search for truth part. Science is constantly looking for objective evidence as to how everything we know came to be the way it is and how it works. In order to stay objective, it requires tangible proof that can be independently repeated and confirmed and the same standard applies to scientific observations. Seeing a particular star being born in a nebula thousands of light years form Earth isn’t an opinion. Everyone who has a telescope powerful enough can go out and see the same thing. Then, based on what they see, they can come up with a model of how stars are born, each part of the model being observable, verifiable and backed up with a whole lot of numbers. Mere opinion? I beg to differ.

Your statement, Humans are products of natural selection which means that who and what we are was shaped by climate change, predation and genetic drifts over the millions of years that our branch of the evolutionary tree split from early hominids and ended up with us is obviously your dogma.

Really? Because I have a few hundred fossils, extensive tomes of genetic studies and volumes of papers that were reviewed by countless experts who deal with every facet of human evolution backing me up. Like I said in the previous paragraph, it’s not just an opinion when you can summon plenty of proof for your position. When presented with fossils and countless academic studies you could plug your years, shut your eyes and shout until your vocal cords break from the strain lest you hear an expert talking, then dismiss everything you saw as nothing more than a dogma. But all you’ll be doing by that is demonstrating your immunity to objective facts. I made a statement based on evidence. To dismiss it out of hand after declaring that we should all have open minds in “the search for truth” is paradoxically close-minded.

Denying a creator flies in the face of reason and intelligence and defines a fool who has said in his heart that there is no God.

Take note my fellow heathens and heretics. If we don’t believe in his ideology, we’re all unreasonable fools. If only we were blessed with sufficient intellect, only then we would realize that it makes perfect sense that we’re all in communion with a creature we can’t see, hear, smell or taste and who’s effects we can’t detect with even the slightest bit of certainty. Evidence? Proof? Confirmation? Foolish mortals! Don’t you know that the almighty deity in question is not to be tested by our pitiful instruments? You’re just beggiing for eternal hellfire!

All right, I’ll stop now, I promise. But my point remains. Going around and arbitrarily slapping labels of dogma and reason according to one’s personal opinion rather than the weight of tangible evidence behind the object or idea being slapped with that label, is perhaps one of the highest forms of intellectual laziness. As a person with a scientific mindset, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of a deity. I just need proof. And not all the fluff we typically hear about how God is in the laughter of children (that’s endorphins) or in the greenness of a blade of grass (that’s chlorophyll) but something we could confirm and analyze. Until then, all they have is faith and that doesn’t have enough weight in the objective world.