You also neglected to address the following... Do you really want to quote from a man who said that Christianity is childish? How does that help your position?
This is one of the commonest tricks in the apologists' toolbox - encounter a difficult or inconvenient question or comment, and fail to acknowledge it much less rebut it. Much of the time, this works, as one probably would need to keep a list of all of the questions and comments left that deserved a reply, but got none. I don't know how hard I'm willing to work to expose this cowardly tactic.
I've also taken to proposing what that answer most likely would have been given the desire to avoid the topic, welcoming the absentee poster a chance to correct me if I'm wrong. In this case, I propose that whoever you wrote that to didn't feel up to defending the choice to quote Einstein. I'm guessing that he knows very little about Einstein's thoughts on religion and god, saw some quote cherry-picked for him from some apologetics site, and posted unaware of what would follow, and unprepared to deal with it.
Edit: New idea - place a "Ø" beside each such question or comment, and use that as a search parameter to relocate these posts to see if they were answered. I've added one below already. This may be too labor intensive to be practical, but I think I'll give it a try.
Bible: There was a Flood that covered the entire earth about 4000 years ago.
Science: There was no Flood that covered the entire earth about 4000 years ago. That looks like the basis of a competition to me.
Nah.. those are just competing religious beliefs. 'Science!' says no such thing. It can only assemble the facts and evidence, it cannot concoct plausible explanations for the data.
Assembling facts and evidence requires a working hypothesis to have some basis for deciding which pieces of evidence are relevant to whatever problem is being considered, so, the scientist already has a hypothetical in mind that might unify the findings, and an idea of what additional evidence might be found to further support or disconfirm his hypothesis.
..science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. ~Albert Einstein
Einstein's opinions outside of physics are irrelevant. I disagree with Einstein. Science is not lame without religion. Religion is what makes it lame. Consider how it affected the intelligent design program. It made it pseudoscience. They went in search of a god that they couldn't find, but saw anyway in claims of irreducible complexity, all debunked. They began a deceptive campaign aimed at taking an end run around case law restricting the teaching of creationism in school, and were exposed in their deceit during the Dover trial. Several creationists' reputations have been stained. Religion was less than useless to science here. It harmed it.
Furthermore, no scientific theory requires a god or could be improved in its explanatory and predictive power by the ad hoc insertion of a god into it. Newton tried with his work on the celestial mechanics of the solar system. His existing theory predicted that the tug of Jupiter and Saturn on the smaller rocky planets like Mars and Earth would destabilize their orbits and eventually either cast them into the sun or out of the solar system. Newton lacked the mathematics to consider three or more bodies exerting a gravitational influence on one another. So, Newton added his god to keep things in check
From Newton's Principia
- “The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”
There's an idea that adds nothing to the science and can be used for nothing. Fortunately, Laplace came along 130 years later with some new mathematics, perturbation theory, and demonstrated that the solar system is stable without the hand of any god needed. When Napoleon asked Laplace why he never mentioned the creator in his work, "I had no need of that hypothesis." This is the course of history - gods consistently being replaced by models of mindless matter passively obeying regular rules, and never the other way around.
So Einstein is clearly wrong if he is to be taken at face value, and if he meant religion in some poetic sense, then the words are even less meaningful. They're not even wrong if we don't know to what Einstein refers when he says
religion. They're to vague to have meaning.
love the cutsey insults, to label anyone who questions the sacred tenets of your religious beliefs, as 'Deniers!!' Don't forget, 'Haters!! That's another favorite of progressive indoctrinees
Nobody has insulted you. You simply take offense at being criticized, although as we see here, you're pretty quick yourself with the insults.
You are the indoctrinee, a regressive indoctrinee. You seem to disesteem progress. That's understandable. Progress has been hard on religion and faith. Where do your ideas come from if not indoctrination? Did you invent your religious beliefs, or learn them from a book or a pulpit? What evidence was offered when you were told that a god walked the earth? Nothing supporting the claim, so how did that idea get into your head?
There are only two ways to get an idea into a head. If you're dealing with a seasoned critical thinker, you'll need a compelling argument and sufficient supporting evidence, which is the opposite of indoctrination. It's academic style education, as when one reviews a series of similar fossils ranging from deeper, older, and more primitive forms to more superficial, more recent, and closer to modern ones. Nobody needs to tell the critical thinker what that means or what to believe, and if he's a student in a classroom, nobody will ask him what he believes. They will ask him if he knows what was found and what others concluded from the evidence on tests, but they won't ask him if he believes the scientists. A creationist could get an A in such a class without anybody knowing that he rejected all of the science if he could understand it and repeat it on a test.
And if your dealing with a mind willing to believe by faith, just repeat your message. Maybe a nice hymn like "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." Repeat every Sunday morning to music and voila - passive and uncritical absorption of an unevidenced meme. Don't ask how we know that Jesus loves us. And you can be certain that the propagandist cares very much what his subject believes.
That's indoctrination. Please don't confuse these traditions.
You have a habit of simply ignoring comments like this one. Please give me the courtesy of telling me where and why you disagree if you do. Address the words written and the points made rather than simply waving it all off and writing writing words that don't address the argument made.
If you don't, it will be assumed that the argument defeated you.
But instead of dogmatically repeating your opinions of MY UNDERSTANDING, why don't you present your own facts, evidence, and arguments?
It's all been done already. This is a 28 page thread, and you came in toward the end. The refutation of Genesis' compatibility with science was well evidenced and argued. The flood story and the discrepancies between the biblical account and the science were discussed extensively.
Why wouldn't others comment on your level of understanding (or your debating etiquette)? Aren't you here to compare science and Genesis? Your understanding of both is relevant.
