Atheism that relies too much on scientific justification

There are many reasons to be an atheist, but I think that the particular brand of atheist who expects that science just answers the question about religion relies on really faulty reasoning.

Why?

Because the existence of God isn't a question that science can answer. How do you set up an experiment to test for the existence of God? How do you set something up so that the data can be falsified, meaning that it could be either proved false or not, regarding God? You can't. It's not like analyzing the age of a particular strata of rock or doing a chemical experiment.

But, while some people would say that because you can't do an experiment that the idea is invalid, I say that there are a number of things that you can't do an experiment about that we still think exist and are valid in our day to day life. Morality is one of those things. You can't reduce morality to scientific laws, you can't reduce ethics to scientific laws, yet we still think that ethics and morals are important. And for people who say that it's all about adaptation over time to particular individual and group constraints, like individual or group survival, I'd say that that might explain a minimum of morality but it can't explain why we agonize, hopefully, about moral questions that are much more sophisticated than just survival and what needs to happen for survival. As Kant pointed out, if we just wanted to look out for collective survival we could execute everyone who committed any offense in order to send a message to the rest of the group that they better not break the law in any sense, but for some reason we see that as unjust, that we should give people more of a chance and not execute them for shoplifting. It would be perfectly logical to do it, but yet there's something beyond both individual survival or group survival that makes us have compassion for someone accused of a minor crime if the punishment for it is death. Where does this come from?

But anyways, morality and ethics can't be proven right or wrong yet we still use them and still talk about them. It's the same way with God. Just because we don't have an experiment that can prove or disprove the existence of God doesn't mean that that proves that God doesn't exist. Morality exists.

The best people can do is to attack "Superstition". People figure that if you can disprove the existence of Saints in history or the provenance of relics, or try to discredit "folk cures", that you've therefore disproven God. That isn't so.

I believe that the world is millions of years old, I believe in evolution, and I believe in a spiritual reality, and I don't consider any of those things to be in contradiction.

The Catholic Church, for example, even though I'm not Catholic or Christian, believes that evolution is a fact but that God works through laws of nature, meaning that God could be working in the world constantly but because he would be beyond all the laws of nature he could intervene without making it seem like all the laws of nature had been broken. He could do that too, and the Church believes of course that he has done that, but it's not necessary.

Yes, the Catholic church supports moral absolutism in things like stem cell research but it's actually very flexable when it comes to its relationship with science.

Religion and spirituality is essentially and experiential reality and the scientific community will never have access to that sphere of experience with which to fuck with and prove or disprove. Instead, people who have experienced true spirituality will always be able to tell through comparing notes with the experience of others that they're experiencing phenomenon in common, and that will always be the baseline of proof.

Science answers its own questions, the politics of experience answers its own, and the two spheres are separate, yet neither one is less than the other.

I can't picture the idea people have of life that really believe that all that human experience is about is coming together to fuck, reproduce, and collectively survive. It's all based on instincts! It's all based on evolved strategies to survive! Yeah, and while you analyze life through that lens you miss the meaning in life completely. What a pointless life to believe that everything is determined and that all of people's desires and hopes are ultimately based on biological adaptation. My thought is that if you honestly believe that then you'll never live; instead, you'll limit yourself to what your dessicated interpretation of life allows you and never get beyond it. Scientific explanations will become self fulfilling prophecies and you'll miss living and miss life entirely in your pursuit of explanations like that.

Trust your experience, trust what you see both in your life and in relation to society and other people, and navigate your life based on that, don't live your life by scientific principles. Your experience will always be more valid because only you are inside your reality; scientific principles are general laws without any self guiding them.

When it comes right down to it life is your basic experience, and no matter what you think explains it, in the morning you wake up and you have to deal with life experience, not with scientific principles.