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That does not make a lot of sense. Folks would rather say that aspects of science are useful within a given realm and provide the evidence for it. "Good" is a value judgement that only makes sense by adding premises. For instance, you can say that saving lives via medicine is "good". From there you could infer that medical sciences therefore serves a "good" purpose. But there is not reason to simply accept a statement without any evidence.

Nope. All of 'em. There is nothing hypothetical about any of the gods people have worshipped. The bones of their sacrificial victims testify. Jehovah is the biggest hypocrite of all, according to his self-styled biographers. Of course, he was conceived in the likeness of a bigger, meaner, more powerful Abraham, so what can you expect but a loving father who kills his son to appease himself? He is said to have created man in his own image and fashioned woman from a mere sparerib. (This is the version Christians prefer. But the first version, the one that's most likely to have come from Chaldea of Genesis has him making lots of both, just as he made lots of other animals. They left it in, I suppose due to editor's oversight and later nobody dared to mess with the holy text.) But then, look at two fun-house mirrors showing two deformed images. Which reflects which? Priesthoods in different hierarchical societies invent the gods that best exemplify their own rulers, then add some embellishments and magnify. Then they set the ruler's requirements into a code of religious tenets - divine laws to be obeyed on pain of the most horrendous punishments they could devise. Then imposed them on the people and forbade the teaching - or even suggestion - of any alternative ways of thinking. That's all right. I can't think what it could possibly produce anyway Big time!

So much suffering going on there! But the cat won't learn morality without torture, so bring out the feather wand!

This seems to conflate science, in the pure sense of empirical inquiry, with technology - a set of particular applications of science. Science in itself does not preclude choosing to live a primitvist lifestyle (indeed one could easily envision scenarios where a society developed advanced ecological knowledge and then based on that deliberately abandoned a hi-tech way of life). People derive values based on scientific knowledge, but science itself is value neutral - it is just an array of empirical methods and techniques for testing (experiments). Humans, as moral agents, still have to develop valuations on whatever knowledge or craft is derived from science. This is why "scientism" is largely a straw man term used by people who have an ideological agenda.

For the record, this is Linus. 🥰

I don't mind you putting down religion and gods, but be careful what you say about cats 😁 .

Science does not simply make sense, although there is a need for self-consistency. Science must be 'verifiable' to the extent that there has to be possible falsification. ( usually in the form of experimental evidence ) Religion, a 'faith', has no such requirement, and could not possibly come close to meeting any such requirement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape

Science in itself is a essentially a methodologies that are used to create an understanding of certain phenomena. Any value judgement to be made would need to be contextualized. While not advanced, they clearly have created an understanding on some level of their world and figured out consistent elements and taught them to the next generation. Some animals show similar abilities. One could argue what level of systematic application some form of empiricism have to have in order to call it a science, and I am sure, opinions will differ. Regardless how we want to call it, I am still unsure why folks would need to accept that axiom that science is good by itself. You might believe it, or not. It has no impact on science itself. I should specify: I am not in which context you intend to use term "axiom" (and what point you wanted to make). I presume in an epistemological sense, but a) there are different forms and b) I don't really see how your example fits any of them. The closest is probably a pragmatist approach, but then it would probably more accurate to state that "science works". Rather than trying to shoehorn a judgement into it. But Eise and others will be better in dissecting this kind of argument.

I don't have any irrational motives for not believing in gods. At the most basic level, we've seen how Iron Age peoples thought their gods were responsible for many phenomena. Then, over the intervening centuries, we've seen rational explanations replace those mystical beliefs. In the end, there's no real questions I have that aren't answered by the knowledge humans have accumulated. If the churches were wrong about so much, maybe they were wrong about it all. I also don't think of it as "disbelief". I'm not actively refusing to believe in gods. I'm not reluctant to accept them. I simply see no evidence of them, so they don't qualify to be included in the way I explain anything. The idea that any atheist doesn't want there to be gods "simply out of spite against followers of a God" is laughable. Where's the reasoning behind that? Fear of the challenge of wild-ass guesswork about life after death? Please. The part about morals is actually quite insulting, given how morally unaccountable the churches have been throughout history. If you want to discuss morality here, I'd be happy to show you how weak your faith is in that regard.

And being omnipotent, when he created me, he KNEW that in 100 years he was going to cast me into hell. What a dick. If god were moral he would not create me in the first place as he knew I would be damned to hell when I died.

It would have to explain all the coupling parameters and all the mixing angles of the standard model. It would have to explain why there are exactly 3 families of fermions, (electron, tau, mu) and corresponding quarks (u,d; c,s; t,b) --families of particles. It would have to explain not-so-well understood components of gravity (vacuum energy and dark matter) There is a swathe of accidental events that would not necessarily have to be included. Example: Why did a Mars-sized planetoid collide with Earth circa 3.9* billion years ago? Why did the Permian, Cretaceous, etc, extintions take place? Why am I here, drinking some wine, talking to you? (that's certainly part of everything), etc. Those are considered historical contingencies. Other cosmological problems you would be forgiven for not being able to explain, like matter-antimatter asymmetry, details on CMB etc. * 4.5? I don't remember. I almost forgot: It wouldn't hurt to know (if possible) why all dimensions are unobservable except for 4. All in all, that's a decent summary of what scientists understand by "theory of everything".

In most studies we employ methods to automatically prune human sequences (i.e. hits to human database) out of our data set. While interesting, it likely has little impact on farming practices as most farmers do not really like targeted approaches.

There is no proof of this concept of expansion and if it is true then the universe is wider than it is deep and we don't even know the size in any direction.

Thats all good but it doesn't get us to the edge of the fiscal universe.