[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[Mark Smith]

On 04.12.2007, at 17:51, José Trejos wrote:

> Many religious beliefs can coexist with scientific
> knowledge.

They can coexist in a community, but not in an individual if that  
individual is really a disciplined scientist. That individual can (and  
should) recognise that the religious hocus-pocus cannot be completely  
and definitively disproven. That individual can even participate in  
the religion, but as soon as that individual really believes in it,  
that individual has ceased to be a scientist (at least according to my  
definition (: ).



> The existence of "a supreme being" that some call God is
> not necessary for science but can not be either proved or disproved
> scientifically. Atheism is actually a kind of fundamentalism.

Atheism is not necessarily a certainty that there is no god. By  
definition it is the lack of a belief in a god, but I'll grant you the  
general case that all good scientists ought to be religious agnostics.  
That was where you were headed wasn't it ?