"non-scientific worldview"

I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a time when everyone went to church)

For example - Darwin had trained to be an Anglican vikar prior to his journey on the Beagle and wrote to his future wife letters full of discussion of divinity.

Newton was obviously deeply religious and wrote more about religion than about physics. In fact his view of gd as singular was considered to be heretical by the Anglican church but was perfectly aligned to the old testament - what I am getting at here is that he didn't just happen to have faith by default but had a very deep and personal one. At the conclusion of principia Mathematica he wrote tons friend that he believed this work would make it obvious to a thinking man that presence of gd.

Georges lemaitre who came up with the big bang theory was a Belgian Catholic priest. The secular science at the time was adamant about the Greek model of the eternal universe, and we owe our modern view of it to someone who came into the situation already believing a moment of creation.

Einstein was famously a non practicing jew who nonetheless at age 11 had taught himself Judaism and later in life advocated for he study of talmud. I can't claim him to be a practitioner but his own writing speaks to a certain expectation of how the universe ought to be (that was later proven out in math) and a belief in a sort of spirit of the universe. The point isn't that he was an orthodox jew but that he is very far from a modern atheist.

So I don't actually agree with this idea that religion is non scientific when we owe our deepest scientific understanding to men who saw themselves and the universe through a religious lens.

That's not to say that there's no ignorance in some religions and among some practitioners but rather that religion at its best can claim really significant contributions that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best.

They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.

> that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best

There are plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. These are unrelated things.

Probably the most obvious lesson you learn from studying religion(s) is that the word itself is functionally useless. It’s so broad a term that includes basically all intellectual history up to the present, political history, across all countries, civilizations, etc.

Which is why if anyone starts claiming that “religion is good/bad” in simplistic term, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. It is far too broad a label to make such declarations.

I'll go further. Oppenheimer and Whitehead (neither Christian) have stated, in their respective histories of science, that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science, that it could not have originated in a society with a different worldview.

Why? Because the Christian view was that God was a reasonable God, and He made the universe. And because He also gave us reason when He made us, we should be able to understand the universe by reason. All these men, from Newton down to Faraday, looked at the universe and expected to be able to find out how it worked, because of their religion.

Their religion didn't lead them to a non-scientific worldview. Their religion led them to create the scientific worldview.

Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries.

But this is a straightforwardly transparent attempt at apologetics. It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals.

Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism.

The usual argument at this point is a No True Scotsman. All those other religions do these things. Never the claimant's own.

But for every Pope Leo - who seems like an unusually decent example - there are five Kenneth Copelands, and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires.

Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel.

Community in practice should be wider than that.

There's some extra stress involved in finding your own way, especially in a culture of forced competition.

But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.