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You're engaging with religion only as an explanatory mechanism for physical occurrences, whereas the weight of the argument for and against religion are on philosophical and logical grounds. It's not a strawman, as many people have used God to fill the gaps in our understanding of the physical world, but it's entirely irrelevant to the really interesting discussions on the subject. If you want to see what religious people are on about, and why some scientifically literate people continue to have faith you need to understand those arguments.



I mean, I grew up in a very religious environment and have met and had long discussions with religious scholars. You can couch it in as much sentimentalism and philosophy as you want, but to me it almost always falls apart when you dig to the real roots of religious scholarhsip and philosophy. Ultimately these people decide to have some level of faith in a thing that is contradictory to all evidence we have. It is an interesting thought experiment, but I can't find any principled reasoning behind it all at the bottom. Yes there are a lot of religious scholar types who will agree with all of science, and they continuously reform their belief system and philosophy around the scientific evidence. It is like having a belief system that wobbles and wiggles like Jello. Not to say that science has all the answers and is purely axiomatic, but at least that is its goal. Religious scholarship has a completely different agenda in my opinion and starts from a very different place when it tries to reason and I fundamentally disagree that it is a "really interesting discussion" beyond how people get sucked into believing it all. Without being dismissive, I do think I have a basic grasp of those arguments and I find them wholly lacking. A lot of it comes down to things their parents taught them and their inability to get rid of their deep seated beliefs about the nature of existence.




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