I'm still partial to "Success is the slow judge of right and wrong" and my own "I maintain nonetheless that Homo Sapiens is, by definition, an apex predator; our natural philosophy is born of the wolf, not of the sheep" HOWEVER:

Quote:

I don't understand why the Christians I meet find it so confusing that I care about the fact that they are wasting huge amounts of time and resources playing with their imaginary friend. Even non-confrontational religion hurts atheists because we live in a society which is constantly wasting resources and rejecting logical thinking.

 

 is almost perfect save for the "Logic" part, because "Logic" is such a rigid concept that it all most CERTAINLY rejects the manner in which most civilizations have progressed. It rejects creative reasoning- to which our species owes many of its greatest achievements.

My suggestion: replace "logical" with "rational". Much more precise in intent and portrayal of theists, I think.

There is something to that, as we see in the threads with the 'wall of logic' supposed to prove God, as if logic could prove anything not 'built-in' to the presuppositions you start with.

Basic logic is necessary for valid reasoning, but nowhere near sufficient. You have to have a way to handle probabilistic assessments, weigh up the evidence, etc, since in most things we have nowhere near enough solid info to base a strong logical argument, and many things are inherently too 'fuzzy' or informally defined or too multi-facetted or complex to practically manage with basic logic.

And the logics intended to handle situations beyond basic propositional logic become less clear and more open to dispute, which is the case with the variations of modal logic. The 'real world' doesn't lend itself to such simplified models in most situations.

This is why science uses a combination of math and empiricism, and some form of probability calculus to manage the more uncertain data.

thanks for the input, I changed logical to rational.

Scientists use the same creative processes everyone else does to come up with new ideas, new possible explanations (hypotheses), and so on.

It also uses such processes to devise new experiments, ways to explore and test new ideas. But crucially, it adds the step of systematic checking of any new ideas against existing knowledge, to decide whether they seem to offer a better explanation for some problem, or represent a genuine new insight into reality, before treating them as representing 'real' knowledge.

Without this additional step, people just run with anything that seems to work for them psychologically, like 'God', demons, magic, whatever, regardless of  whether it actually holds up to a more considered examination.

The 'scientist' has more often been the one breaking out of the shackles of established ideas and assumptions, to show that astronomical objects don't all orbit the Earth, that heavy objects don't fall correspondingly faster than light objects, that Time is not Absolute, that the stars are distant objects like our Sun, that distant fuzzy smudges in the night sky are whole independent collections of stars, that many diseases are due to tiny life-forms, not bad smells and 'vapours', that our blood actually circulates around our body, and so on and on.

So I think you have it backwards to some extent at least. The crucial issue is that speculation and creative thinking and 'wild ideas' from someone lacking a background in scientific understanding of a subject are less likely than those of someone with a deeper understanding of science to lead to really fresh new insights into reality.

Without the new insights of science, gained from deep and systematic study of reality, all the wild 'creative' speculation in the world is ultimately just re-hashing the same limited set of intuitions and ideas we are born with and acquire from our parents and from society's traditions.

The ultimate source of genuinely new ideas is from uncovering fresh new aspects of reality, IOW from reality beyond our brain.