This is not new info to me. Trying to apply currently available methods to explain things they aren't equipped to handle is a very common trait of a lot of rationalists through out history, most scientists I know who are religious do not necessarily believe there is anything reason can not apply to, just that reductionism and premature efforts to claim something has been figured out are a bad habit amongst a lot of thinkers. As of this time, we really do not know that everything can be explained, and when one claims it can be, one is taking it on faith. Generally, when we encounter any phenomena that exhibits Emergence we take on faith that it can be explained as a complex system arising from simple rules, and with good cause. However to this date we've actually managed to explain virtually none of these systems, even when we've got the system mastered, like classical mechanics. We often can't explain completely how it arises.You say 'compartmentalization' as a sneer at scientists who you believe are trying to pretend some things can not be studied, those of us who do this by and large do not hold such a view, we believe some things may not be able to be studied, that there may be limits to we've not yet encountered, but mostly we believe you should not jump the gun, because we have a long history of people generating pseudo-science by claiming to have figured things out and using good hard logic to convince most everyone else that it must be true and trying to say otherwise is heresy. Many of us have found that the general desire of people to be able to state something absolutely, to say 'case closed', often prematurely buries doubts and opposition. Right now even systems we have very good reason to assume are ruthlessly mechanistic, like the human brain or the weather, still elude anything approaching being rigorously understood, what we know of their rules comes almost strictly from observation where we can at best observe what major factors are altered, not alter them ourselves, so we can't say for certain if they really are strictly based off simple principles.

I'm pretty confident, have a lot of faith one might say, that if you measured every single packet of energy entering and leaving a living human brain you'd come up with a sum of zero and that the entropy of the system will, once you account for the outgoing and incoming, have increased, but nobody has ever checked to my knowledge, and I doubt anyone who has has done so rigourously. So I don't view saying that these things are not yet understood and may not be understandable as some appeal to the mystic, a desire for them not to be understood, I see it as a simple statement of truth, and a healthy display of humility.

Also faith doesn't have to be some glaze-eyed mystical nonsense, people have faith their lights will work when they hit the switch long before they understand why it works, as few ever do besides 'switch throw, power into machine'. They know it works, they know their foot doesn't sink into the ground even though gravity is dragging on them, they know that coffee helps wake them up in the morning... can't say I've ever studied the actual science involved in Caffeine or any other Xanthine before, but "they do the trick". Long before you knew why the table in your childhood kitchen didn't sink into the ground you knew that it didn't, and you accepted it as solid truth.

We both accept the concept of Dark Matter even though we've yet to find a piece of it and know very little concrete about it, because 2) We've gotten very good at measuring mass and we're missing a bunch, and 3) We've exhausted most of the more mundane options. But we're missing 1) We have faith in peer-review, because I've never taken a single astronomical measurement beyond some sunspots and you, if the age listed in your profile is correct, probably haven't either. We put a lot of faith in the scientists who have, with good cause, but that doesn't change what it is, and it doesn't mean their isn't a risk of pitfalls in doing that. Consider pink unicorns, most people would laugh if you said you believed in them, kinda silly in some ways consider how mundane a horse with a horn and a pink coat is compared to a lot of the more bizarre life we've turned up, but the very notion is absurd, of course with billions of worlds (presumably) in each of the billions of galaxies, the notion of a creature existing that would meet any reasonable standard of 'horse' and have a pink coat and a horn, isn't just possible but nearly ironclad. We can more or less rule out any being on Earth, and even be pretty confident none ever existed, but we can't really be sure. There's a lot locked up in that, the way people would laugh at that or something like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, even though those last two have probably been 'seen' by more people than have seen a Coelacanth.



See, you exhibit this bad habit. Off the top of my head I would say from anecdotal evidence that the most obvious reason for this larger number of atheists amongst scientists is likely no more than that people who are atheists are more likely to become scientists. Most freshmen going into science I've met who expressed a view were atheists. Regardless, for something like this data to be usable for what you are claiming, you really should have a poll of novice scientists compared to fully-educated ones, and see if there is a difference. Ideally by asking those same people ten or twenty years down the road... drew a bad conclusions IMO. The presumed goal of quoting that was to show that a knowledge of science makes people more likely to be atheists, that the more science someone knows, the more likely, on average, they are to be an atheist, but the data quoted would not relate. Maybe want it to be true and weren't thinking too objectively?



It was used that way, Helene's follow up, as well as some prior posts we've exchanged on the board, make me feel pretty confident about that.

And no, no belief deserves protection from criticism, not special protection anyway, but there are matters of custom and courtesy for polite conversation between people, I try to refrain from having anything but civil conversation on this site, not necessarily friendly, but civil, and whatever you might wish to be the case, society general frowns on referring to someone as irrational for believing in God. I know that I will have a hard time remaining civil to anyone who insists on saying things I view as demeaning, particularly when they weren't relevant to the thread and I'd already expressed a desire not to discuss them, I was informing her of that.



I assume that is meant as a 'friendly request' as opposed to a cheap shot, and I'll try to add in more breaks. I do make use of a lot run on sentences, bad habit, though so you know I generally type that way during informal comments, and am not planning to put special effort into changing it, if you feel that is to much of a hurdle to reading my comments then it may be in your best interest not read or reply to them.