Science in everyday life seems to have an odd place in religious communities.  Like everything in the world of religion, its inhabitants pick and choose which parts of science they are prepared to acknowledge and which not.  If a religious person is dying of cancer you can be sure they’ll suddenly become very interested in the science of cancer treatment.

If, on the other hand, science steps in to unravel an ancient mystery shrouded in the shadow of religious ignorance then all of a sudden they don’t want to know about it.

Nobody is as ignorant as one who doesn’t want to know.

Because of this false perception of toe-stepping, which is really all that religious types feel towards science in general, science gets a lot of unfair bad press in those communties.  I hope that the rest of this article will help to give a fresh perspective on the reality of science.

When humans evolved the brain as we know it today the world must have been a very strange and scary place indeed.  The everyday environmental entities whose understanding we take for granted today like rushing rivers, fire, wind and thunder just didn’t have anything near an explanation in that age.

With the human brain we’ve come to know and love came the natural inclination to find out why and how things work the way they do.  It rains.  It gets windy.  If you throw a stick up in the air it comes back down to the ground in a consistent way.

The process of observing, testing, and observing again in order to gain an understanding of why and how things are is known as science.

There’s no qualification or minimum requirement for invoking the scientific process.  We’re all natural scientists.

Thanks to the process of observing and being able to solidify conclusions from previous observations we have been able to build a constantly growing knowledge base of scientific facts which has allowed us to become comfortable in our surroundings.  Not only do we understand the world around us but can now also manipulate it to suit us.

Science as a process has an innate humility and innocence which cannot be perverted.  Science has proven, and is a constant reminder, that knowledge is power.  The real beauty of science is that, in principle, any scientific fact can be disassembled into its most basic components and verified by an independant observer.  This means that the scientific process has a built-in reliability mechanism like nothing else.  Without this reliability, the possibility of you being able to read this article in the way you are from where you are sitting would be non-existant.

We can all find a little piece of science somewhere in our lives that we can truly appreciate for how it enables us.

I want to close with a famous quote from Sir Isaac Newton:

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

A minister of the church was quoted as saying: “See?  We can be hip, cool, funny and sexy too!”.  OK, that’s not a real quote, but you just know they’re thinking it.

That’s all.

And that’s a problem.

The problem is that the word atheism only tells us something about what a person isn’t; it doesn’t tell us anything about what that person is.  It doesn’t tell us what they stand for, anything about their moral code or anything they do believe in.

People arrive at atheism in different ways.  Some people are raised without the presence of a religion and are atheist by default, and others (like me) have religion forced into their childhood and see the light later on in life.

If you look at the reasons a particular person becomes an atheist you can begin to get a clearer picture of who they really are.  Unfortunately as far as the general public is concerned it seems that there are two camps: the religious, and everyone else.  I’m really not happy with being just in the “everyone else” basket, because there are people and standards in here that I really don’t like.

For this reason I identify myself as a civilisationist.  Bit of a mouthful I know, and not very catchy, but I feel it’s the most appropriate.  Here are some of the things it stands for:

• Respectful, ethical and humble moral code.
• Minimisation of suffering for all sentient beings.
• Goodness for goodness’ sake.
• Progress of the human race in all forms to these ends.

There are various side-effects of this, which include atheism and the abolition of religion, because religion is easily the single biggest obstacle of civilisational and scientific progress.

I appeal to all atheists to really think about what you stand for.  Be more than just another atheist in the “everyone else” camp.  The world needs you and your goodness.

$31

The biggest contributor was Thomas Christopher, with a grand total of $17, so I’d like to thank him specifically for his support in ignorance.

Being a Saturday I suspect today’s “debating” won’t be as heated as yesterday’s, but I will post tomorrow’s total at around the same time anyway.

Every morning until the project reaches its (revised) goal of $20,000 I will post the total of the previous day’s religiously-inspired donation amount after I’ve made the donation.

Hopefully it doesn’t get too out of hand, my poor wallet is already cringing at the thought!

Chance is a purely scientific, mathematical concept.

If you flip a coin, there is about a 50% chance it will land heads-up, and 50% chance it will land tails-up.

Your chances of winning a 6 number lottery with 49 numbers to choose from are 1 in 13,983,816.

The probability in these cases is determined by various finite elements and are exactly calculable.

Let’s move on to randomness.  The official use of the term “random” differs depending on the context.  Generally speaking, I would offer the following simple definition:

The apparent lack of intent or pattern.

I specifically use the word “apparent” because the degree of randomness observed can be largely subjective based on various aspects of the observer.

As an example, I’ll share a recent experience I had with my car.  One day, on my way home from work, I noticed that the speedometer had stopped working.  Shortly before I got home it started working again.  I didn’t think much of it, but over the following weeks it happened a few more times.  It appeared to stop and start again at random.

Eventually I started recording on paper when it would stop working, for how long, and also various associated data like the speeds involved, outside temperature, temperature of the car etc.  Over time a pattern emerged. Once I had acquired enough information it no longer seemed random.  The speedometer seemed to stop working when the temperature of the car and air outside were cold, but once the car warmed up after driving for a certain period of time the speedometer would start working again.

A mechanic later confirmed that there was just enough of a disconnection in the cabling to cause the recorded behaviour.

Randomness is a psychological perception.

Air travel is statistically the safest form of mechanised transportation.  This means that based on data collected over the period of time that aircrafts have been used, compared to similar data gathered for other means of transport, there have been far fewer injuries and deaths involving air travel.

However, if something does go wrong during an aircraft flight the number of injuries and fatalities, and the chances of severe injury, are usually significantly higher than that of other commonly used methods of transport.

Now, miracles have made their way into our vocabulary.  This unnecessary addition is more commonly known as extremely good luck.  Luck is also a psychological perception.  I’m sure we’d all be willing to make the emotional statement that a lottery winner is lucky.

When 3 people survive a plane crash out of a Boeing with 247 other passengers it may be tempting to deem the situation a “miracle”.  I would call it a tragedy, involving 3 extremely lucky folks.  It wasn’t exactly a miracle for the 247, was it?  It would also be no gamble that the plane crash was not a random event.

I’m a regular guy living in Wellington, New Zealand and I want to try to unlock the shackles of religious dogma and stop the spiritual abuse.

I have a number of posts planned and intend to keep you up to date with the latest Atheist news from around the country.