OK, this is what I do not understand. Scientific principle and simple logic dictates that you cannot discount the existence of something on account of not having any evidence to support it. As the old adage goes “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

We don’t have any proof that we are the only form of sentient life in the universe. So no honest scientist should be able to tell you, definitively, that we are. Or, for that matter, that we aren’t. We just don’t know.

So I don’t understand why so many of those that claim to fly the flag of scientific reason are always so quick to disregard anything said along those lines. IMHO, a true scientist should be saying “I have insufficient data to either support or refute that theory, and therefore I can’t know for sure whether this is true or not.”

Instead I see the “Religion is for the weak minded”, “Intelligent design is a cop out” and “People who believe in aliens are crackpots” arguments. All of which are fundamentally unscientific and logically flawed assumptions, based on little or no scientific evidence whatsoever.

Yes, there may be some weak minded crackpots that believe in all of that stuff, however to adopt the attitude that if someone believes any of that, then they are weak minded, love deprived crackpots, is a logical fallacy. And inaccurate to boot.

Why don’t people apply the same analytical scientific process they claim to hold dear to these discussions as well?

I think you are missing the point. Whether any universally omniscient entity exists or not is, at least for now anyway, irrelevant from a scientific perspective, because it can be neither proven nor disproven experimentally. That is how the scientific process is supposed to work.

Many who make the same argument, and claim scientific backing, are rarely actually talking about science. You are talking about the choices that people make. I agree with you, people make decisions on their own, regardless of whether there is a God or not. However you have also associated the belief in a religious figure with evil and weakness, and in my experience, that is simply not the reality of how people work.

For every religious nut that has God in a box, and a rape garden in his back yard, there is another religious nut building shelters for the homeless, running a soup kitchen, or doing missionary work, in dangerous environments in impoverished countries.

You have religious people who heartlessly massacre others, and yet others who would blindly give up their lives for others, simply because of how each of them have interpreted the *exact* same belief system.

There is both good and bad, weakness and strength in both those that have a faith of some kind and those that do not, and the determining factor is not religion, but rather what lies in the hearts of the people in question. Evil breeds evil, be it religious, secular or scientific, and good breeds good. IMHO, it is as simple as that.

People are driven by many things, some of them many times crazier than a mythical pie in the sky, but these beliefs all have the same capacity for good as they do for evil. I think it is hard for people to accept that it is actually the evil in their own hearts that make them do bad things, and easier to blame something they can call a construct based on fiction, like religion.

I think you’ve just proven my point.

*Nothing* about the way you came to your conclusions was scientific. You have simply chosen whichever hypothesis or POV you feel makes the most sense to *you*, and arbitrarily dubbed it “scientific”.

“Absence of evidence where evidence should be present is evidence of absence.”

Let’s assume, for a moment, that we are not alone in the universe like you suggest, and that your addendum to the old saying was valid. How would you qualify the “where evidence should be present” clause of your revised saying?

For example, how, exactly, would you propose that we detect evidence of a race that could be countless millennia more advanced than we are, if they really didn’t want to be detected?

ID is a cop out, because it cannot be falsified, which is required for it to be a scientific hypothesis.

This is patently false. Partially because the term “Scientific hypothesis” is meaningless. A hypothesis is a guess. A calculated guess, that may be based on existing science, but a guess all the same. The real science comes from the process used to arrive at that hypothesis, not whether or not it can be experimentally verified or invalidated.

There are many “scientific” theories, based on scientific principles, that we cannot currently prove or disprove. If you go and watch the origin of the universe video over in Internet-D, there is a lady who proposes that, before the big bang, time, and space did not exist.

This is not a theory we can currently either verify or disprove. We may never be able to do so. However it is still a valid hypothesis. If that is a cop-out, then there an extremely large body of scientific theory out there that is all cop-out material.

“There are scientific and rational explanations for their experiences that require no little green men.”

While I agree with the sentiment (vis a vis the motives of little green men), I disagree with your application of ockhams razor. The existence of alternate theories for any given phenomenon does not automatically invalidate any of the other theories. That is rationalization, not science.

A scientific approach would require that we be able to experimentally either verify or invalidate these folks claims, which, at the moment, we cannot. Therefore while I also believe there are many much more reasonable explanations for these incidents, I cannot disregard any of the other explanation just because they don’t seem likely to me.

That, to me, would be unscientific. I like the simplicity of ockhams razor, however it is not really a scientific approach, and in real life applications it is very flawed. Not only is it subject to interpretation, but I have seen too many things occur that are so entirely unlikely, that I find it useful only in cases where you have no other options.

Well said. And all in one paragraph too… I really need to learn brevity… *sigh*