Thanks for list Paul and will try to get to some of them.

SORRY FOR LONG POST, IGNORE IF YOU WISH.

But it seems to me that some of this discussion founders on what words 
mean. It also founders on our inability to communicate clearly with each 
other. For instance?
For instance, I intermittently, going back years, have had problems with 
other folk missing out things when I write/speak. Part of it comes from 
growing up in N Ireland where we tend to be very concise and whole lakes 
of meaning can sometimes be expressed with attention to context, tone of 
voice, using precisely the correct word at the right time.
This is quite different from the way many folk in SE England speak.

An example of context which is relevant to this discussion--while living 
in SE England I was struck by how "godless" the folk were. This is not 
pejorative; simply a statement of the difference between my generation 
in Ireland and the same generation in England. With my generation in 
Ireland, the whole spiritual thing was _there_, maybe we paid little or 
no _conscious_ attention to it but it was still there, inside us. 
Whereas most English folk I met did not have that.


Consequently, discussions with my English friends back then on religious 
matters required mutual recognition that not only were we coming from 
totally different backgrounds and socio-cultural milieus but there was a 
whole lorry load of internal contextual sort of stuff that needed 
significant effort to explain to the other. In my case, it was the 
spiritual aspect of existence; with my English friends, it was whatever 
other belief system they had.

I have noted, must recently, that I have failed to make it clear what I 
actually meant in some of my comments on this thread. I have omitted 
bits and pieces.

Now getting on to Paul's post, below. The bit about how science makes 
progress by disproving things---surely there is a whole lot more to it 
than this? Apart from the fact that some of the stuff I have read 
recently in the experimental psychology field very clearly does not 
support this as the sine qua non of progress, surely there are at least 
two distinct aspects to how science works? I agree that one aspect is 
the deliberate effort to disprove a theory, a la Popper. But if 
scientists never come up with any theories in the first place, then 
there is nothing to disprove.
Surely science proceeds, in its purest form, by experimentation, 
observation, generation of hypothesis, testing of same by inter alia 
making predictions and testing them out, repeat repeat repeat until 
something that seems pretty sound emerges as an explanation of specific 
phenomena? And testing to destruction is part of the procedure?
Of course in real life science can be just as messy as the humans who do 
it and thirst for knowledge can be supplanted by need to do a PhD, get 
research funds, crank out a few papers for promotion or just wipe the 
eye of the guy in the next lab.
Surely some of the greatest advances in science over the last few 
centuries have involved a bit more than simply trying to disprove things?
Appreciate my knowledge is limited but would welcome some more 
contributions on this point.
Re comments on why some of us appear not to understand how science 
works--I think the matter is a whole lot more complicated than that and 
as per my own words above and Julian's comments on Dawkins/Weinberg, one 
of the many complicating matters is where you actually take your cut off 
point in a discussion or a field of enquiry. Cut off points are 
important, perhaps vital, for meaningful discussion but simply 
dismissing comments because those making them have a different cut off 
point is not useful.

Rather, this needs definition of the cut off point.

An example--I talk to a hospital specialist about a patient with a 
problem. I may have to accept, in order to get any value out of the 
discussion, that there are aspects of the patient's condition he will 
not spend time discussing. Maybe the psychological background is very 
important to the current physical symptoms but since that is not his 
field, he will not discuss it or even take it into account. This might 
or might not be a good thing and I cannot make any rigid rules about 
whether _he_ is right to focus on what he can deal with or whether _I_ 
am right to take everything I know on the patient into account. With 
enough experience of similar problems, I may be able to draw up some 
useful guidelines on how to handle such discussions.


Another point that bothers me in this discussion, someone said that it 
was important to have a level playing field in consideration of 
religion, god and science. It would appear that, at least in some 
places, religion seems to have the upper hand and religious beliefs are 
accepted without question or criticism while science is subjected to a 
deliberate dismissal. Despite the fact that scientific theories are 
subject to so much questioning, debate and testing to destruction.
On the face of it, this would seem an unfair way of looking at important 
elements of life and society.

Where does this happen, now and in the UK?

I agree whole-heartedly that there are other societies where certain 
religious beliefs have amazing power and unwarranted influence over 
daily life. I also agree that 40 or 50 years ago, this was the case in 
the Republic of Ireland and I was very stuck by that, when I went to uni 
there in 1973. Listening to my friends talk about the influence of the 
Catholic Church in Ireland, comparing that to its influence in N 
Ireland, even in 1973 there was a major difference. Of course we 
Catholics were very much in the minority in N Ireland, not just in 
numbers but our political power (due to gerrymandering and various other 
unsavoury activities) was even lower than our population share. We also 
had Paisley et al spouting on about Catholics being anti-Christs!

But where, now and in these islands, is there widespread purblind 
conviction that religious beliefs are all you need and that science 
should be flushed down the toilet?
I would have thought the opposite was the case; that religion actually 
is having a hard time of it, trying to be heard these days in most parts 
of the UK.



As for philosophy---would it be fair to say that philosophy is in some 
ways more relevant to how people live and interact and answer questions 
like why am I here? The latter question is probably not answerable by 
science, at least not by the non-teleological variety.


<<of the way that science works.  It does not work in the same way as 
philosophy does.  Science makes progress by disproving things, not by 
proving them.  There is not a single scientific theory or law or 
hypothesis that has ever been proved, and never will be.  That is what 
distinguishes RD’s God Hypothesis from philosophical ways of approaching 
the subject.>>

Declan