fisk

Religious “knowledge” is based around non-falsifiability of certain doctrines and axioms. Even within their own epistemological frameworks they have non-falsifiable arguments.

Agreed! Vaguely. I'm not sure I'm sure of that - but only because I personally just don't know enough religion to confirm.

...scientific process which must be fundamentally falsifiable.

Disagreed, following on from Kuhn and Lakatos (not exactly a high-quality source, but it's a reasonably to the point overview of the criticisms of falsifiability).

In a broadly over-general way, people who adhere to both science and religion attempt to make sense of their experiences as everyday practice. Both lay-persons and experts (across both science and religion) attempt to mobilize what they understand as the shared practices by which valid knowledge is produced. Those shared practices can be different across science and religion - but not always, note the adherence to formal academic practices and traditions among Western religious experts, and the study of religion in academia - but they are both epistemic practices differently structured, if often incommensurable.

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Here's a book on what you're talking about - African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design

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.

Great! My only defense is that I tend to have very little time to post - and what started as casual disagreement turned into something I wanted to see through.

Speaking of, I still disagree - and more specifically I'll say that both are epistemic communities, engaged in epistemic debates, using agreed upon epistemic practices and techniques for members of those communities.

Again, just because you (and I!) have problems with those epistemic practices is no reason to describe their debates as foundationally different. Unless I'm wrong, you and others in the thread have argued that the debates - on the basis of the forms and types of evidence being mobilized - are problematic compared to those in science. If we're talking about the evidence as the problem, we're talking about epistemology, not controversy.

While my core point here is (admittedly!) relatively tiny and pedantic, the argument here highlights what I see as the bigger problem, which is that many atheists are willing to count the lived messiness of epistemic communities against the religious, while they raise science to be some gleaming, monolithic, purely logical practice. It's not, making shared knowledge is messy, and saying so does not make science any less legitimate.

Edited and responded to. Was also busy with a larger response.

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.

No, this is just the end to a side discussion about objectivity - my main critique is that disagreement among adherents to a given religion should not be a reason to dismiss them.

But I'll admit I'm having more fun than I am trying to really educate, and agree with your assessment that I am doing a mediocre job at best.

As for making people angry (or, more likely, annoyed) - apologies! My aim is to challenge, not annoy. Mostly.

Yeah! Check it out.

No, I'm just slow. An academic with small kids.

Well, let's start with Wikipedia:

"Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986), "Introduction", God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 5, 12, ISBN 978-0-520-05538-4, 'It would be indefensible to maintain, with Hooykaas and Jaki, that Christianity was fundamentally responsible for the successes of seventeenth-century science. It would be a mistake of equal magnitude, however, to overlook the intricate interlocking of scientific and religious concerns throughout the century.'

Then let's go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is really all I'm trying to say anyway:

"...authors from the late 1980s to the 2000s developed contextual approaches, including detailed historical examinations of the relationship between science and religion (e.g., Brooke 1991). Peter Harrison (1998) challenged the warfare model by arguing that Protestant theological conceptions of nature and humanity helped to give rise to science in the seventeenth century. Peter Bowler (2001, 2009) drew attention to a broad movement of liberal Christians and evolutionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who aimed to reconcile evolutionary theory with religious belief... Several historians (e.g., Hooykaas 1972) have argued that Christianity was instrumental to the development of Western science. Peter Harrison (2007) maintains that the doctrine of original sin played a crucial role in this, arguing there was a widespread belief in the early modern period that Adam, prior to the Fall, had superior senses, intellect, and understanding. As a result of the Fall, human senses became duller, our ability to make correct inferences was diminished, and nature itself became less intelligible. Postlapsarian humans (i.e., humans after the Fall) are no longer able to exclusively rely on their a priori reasoning to understand nature. They must supplement their reasoning and senses with observation through specialized instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes."

Finally - the reason I say some of this in the first place - is from my familiarity with Foucault, and his history of the emergence of the "disciplines". While Foucault is more specifically focused on what might be briefly described as the human sciences (or sciences aimed at the control of populations), he describes:

"...the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power... the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual. And this implies that power of a pastoral type, which over centuries —for more than a millennium— had been linked to a defined religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing “tactic” which characterized a series of powers: those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers."

Then similarly in The Subject of Power:

“Given this, in the Western world I think the real history of the pastorate as the source of a specific type of power over men, as a model and matrix of procedures for the government of men, really only begins with Christianity” (pp. 147–48). I'd bet that if this was a little more my subject area I could dig up more on discourses of truth and the relationship to Western science within his work - but even here the sheer number of scientific disciplines this touches is significant.

Beyond that, no - science is not a meritocracy. I can tell you that from the inside, or I can point you a huge literature on the ways that science is anything but - start with the concept of the Matthew Effect.

Again, when you talk about what "religion is based on" you're taking up an epistemic criticism. Same when you flat call religion bullshit. You're talking about making decisions between the different ways that people form knowledge. Fine, have at it. But don't start claiming that people disagreeing with one another within a social group is somehow cause for that entire social group and their ideas to be dismissed.

You can, in fact, make evidence up or make claims completely without evidence, and both of these things happen in science all the time.

Religion is dirty, inconsistent, and biased Science is dirty, inconsistent, and biased - that doesn't mean science is diminished by our knowing and acknowledging that.

We shouldn't make arguments that pretend science is anything but what it is, or we're engaging in the same polemics that religious zealots do.