Yeah I legitimately understand - I'm being critical of the arguments for science here, and normally the only people who do that are not arguing in good faith.

What evidence is there for the fundamental assertion within Christianity that the Christian god exists in the first place?

None, as far as I'm aware! I'm not defending the religion.

What room is there for questioning that assertion?

In some factions, plenty. In others, not so much. I've met plenty of Christian folks that don't believe in intelligent design, and it's not like they're immediately ejected from the church - and this appears to even be true among Catholic leadership. It's a controversy.

And don’t give me that “intelligent design” bullshit

I think you have the wrong idea about me, which is understandable, given how annoying I'm being.

Yeah, I know you're getting bad faith vibes, I get it. No. Fellow athiest, overly educated, social scientist and critical theorist. I've read all of my sources - but I'll admit that one of them (whatever Christian site I liked to) was a quick skim to confirm that yes, this was a long discussion about the different factions and their disagreements, and that was exactly the point I was looking to make.

The original post - the image itself - demonstrates a genuine lack of understanding of the history and philosophy of science. I've cited Fleck elsewhere in the comments. It's just a meme community, I can let that slide.

The comments that seem to be suggesting that disagreement among members of a religion is sufficient to dismiss their ideas is, however, more worrying. Disagreements and their resolutions (or lack thereof) are key features of scientific discovery - we need diverse perspectives, we need people who disagree, we need people who argue their positions in compelling and challenging ways. To call out those disagreements as epistemic flaws in contrast to science dismisses the incredible importance of disagreement and controversy in not just science but in all areas of human and social life.

As I've said elsewhere in the comments - both science and religion are messy, problematic, lack internal consistency, and have caused great human and environmental harms. That doesn't mean science isn't useful, and science isn't diminished by our frank discussion of it.

edit: reviewer @fkn has requested a revision of paragraph two, and the author acknowledges that all of the above was written in haste (and surrounded by loud children)

*edit 2: apologies, I was replying from my inbox, didn't get the context. Yes, I've read Epistemic Cultures on many, many occasions, and probably have suggested others read it as many times.

No, it actually makes no sense that a relgion can simultaneously believe that the earth is 6000 years old AND that it’s billions of years old based on how they interpret canon.

Again, to you. That makes sense to the people who do believe that. It's just simply that you have - literally - different ways of making sense.

The OP on this thread only says "That’s a 100% true observations. Most religions can’t even agree with themselves." and I'm (being a giant pain in the ass and) responding specifically to your emphasis that it is this disagreement that invalidates religious thought. I still hold that there's no issue with disagreement within or among religious groups, in terms of the validity of their worldviews.

Religions have come up with ways of determining who is "right" under various conditions of dispute, just as science and other fields (like law), have. I am by no means a Catholic scholar, but I am very much under the impression that the religious texts Christianity are based on require translation efforts, and that those translation efforts can lose meaning in translation, not just between languages but between historical contexts - like many other historical texts. As such, they require study and interpretation - something that even those most fervent and uneducated of followers seem to understand.

The biggest difference, however, is that you can test a scientific interpretation, repeat a study, etc. You can be proven wrong or validated as right.

As it turns out, not all the time. In fact, not even all that frequently. Popper criticized the idea of verification, Kuhn criticized the idea of falsification, and neither idea solves the demarcation (between science and non-science) problem. For a quick reference that won't require a number of books, try this.

You see, it really doesn’t make any sense...

It doesn't make sense to you based on what your ideas of legitimate knowledge are - and you're making some major generalizations about how religion operates. For some religions there is a monotheistic deity, and for some of those religions the word of that deity is immutable law. But even in those cases, there is significant debate over what exactly constitutes the "word of God" - I mean, it's why there's so many different sects and factions (and even those argue internally). Just like in science, there are different interpretations of our observed world, and some interpretations become more dominant than others - and not always because they best align with our observations of the physical world.

There can be many interpretations of all texts, including both religious and scientific texts. Those multiple interpretations come from being different people with different backgrounds, experiences, and cultural upbringing - rather than convenience or zealotry by necessity.

Scientists read the same texts, and study the same subjects all the time and come to different conclusions and that's seen as a positive - arguably because the only way to deeply understand anything is from multiple perspectives. Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs happen when alternatives to deeply established ideas emerge.

Religious folks believe a whole diversity of things, just like atheists and scientific folks do.

We don't need to argue the legitimacy of atheism as a position by making science into something it's not - namely an unbiased, entirely monolithic, entirely perfect way of understanding the world.

Religion is not silly, its sets of cultural practices and beliefs that a huge majority of the population finds meaningful in some way - and for that reason deserves some form of respect even by non religious folks. Religion isn't the problem. Many forms of dominant religious practice, however, have shown to have real, human, social, and environmental harms. That's the problem.

My preferred answer to that question is through what Harding describes as Strong Objectivity, although we might choose others.

It's not that culture and language preclude us from finding the truth, it's that we need to have an understanding that truth is always mediated - there is no such thing as purely objective, bias-free, "truth". So the position that science and technology are cultural products precludes the idea of "truth" but not the idea of consistency. Put differently, yes, even cranky critical social scientists go to the doctor.

Thanks!! I posted here thinking it would "be the place to have a discussion" but then realized - hey, GitHub already does that. I'll get over there soon, if I'm enjoying the discussion here.

Exactly! Except that doesn't exist over here in Lemmy.

That's what I'm asking, but with a little new functionality. Either way the core thing I want is meta-communities, aggregating whatever communities users might want into a single feed.

Sure (and hi!)

The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id, both instances of "android" communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two "android" communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same "community".

The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to "update" their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.

The third part is that the system would check to see if the subscribing user (or creator of the meta-community) could actually interact with all of the instanced communities from the one they are currently at, and let them know if there were issues with federation.

I like this idea as well, if it would do a different kind of work at a different community level. The thing that's missing here is that it recenters control at the mod level, rather than at the user level - and I can see how that might be more appropriate, if I'm also enamored with the idea that individual users would gain access to a new kind of influence (should they get popular enough with their community sorting).