You have no fucking clue dude. People come to college knowing fuckall about evolution, believe cloning is impossible because "souls" and dumb shit like that. The valedictorian of my high-school for example, didn't believe in evolution for fucks sake.
Ah cool we're making shit up again. Lets see I was forced to go to Sunday school until high school, baptized, communion, confession and the whole 9 yards yet I learned for myself that I simply don't believe there is a God out there. Am I some special flower? No because people can make decisions for themselves.
Do you seriously believe that being forced to go Sunday school since high school, going through communion and confession has no effect on someone's belief structure? You don't think this indoctrination (and there really is no other word for it) allows children to make free and honest decisions about religion?
I just believe I'm no smarter than anyone else. I had all the facts laid out in front of me and came to the conclusion it didn't add up. Granted my house hold wasn'tsuperreligious but to this day my mom isn't in love with my decision. But if I arrived to this conclusion with the amount of church that was put in front of me I don't see how others couldn't as well. If someone believes in young Earth and creationism then that is what they believe in. I don't know if people that could believe in something like that would make for great scientists or not. Or if it even hinders their ability to become scientists. Even if we prove, without a shadow of doubt, the Big Bang occurred we still can't go back in time and prove how that mass got there and what caused it to explode (at least not with our present technology.) So there will always be an argument for a God and religion. I don't think science and religion are at odds in the modern era. Religion certainly set science back a ton in the dark ages but I believe people are allowed to freely and openly discuss ideas that counter religion any more. At least on internet forums and science sites.
Conjecture your honor!!!
I don't think anyone is saying you can't be religious and a good scientist. There are plenty of religious scientists even now who are religious. However, I would make two points. a) As you raise through the "tiers" of scientists, those that deal with physics, astrophysics, and biology (slightly less so), the religiosity declines greatly. b) Scientists need to be careful NOT to fall into the trap that Newton and countless others fall into once they hit a barrier of knowledge. Ancient civilizations thought the Sun was god. In antiquity, the Earth was the center of the universe because God. Copernicus proved otherwise (and waited until his deathbed to publish his findings). Ptolemy mapped the stars but couldn't figure out why the planets kept moving back and forth - called it God. Newton figured out the orbits, pretty much inventing calculus in the process - hit a barrier in his calculations - called it god. LePlace refined the calculations and no longer needed that hypothesis. Neither could even imagine that we'd eventually be able to travel the stars or even leave earth. We now have people saying God must have created the universe/big bang since we don't know yet...but what happens when we do figure it out? The goalposts will get moved again so that whatever is at the edge of our knowledge gets attributed to God. My main problem is people filling in God into things we don't know, when the evidence makes an infinite amount of other possibilities just as probable. Could we be part of a multiverse, a black hole's singularity, a computer simulation, a petri dish of some other beings, a unicorn taking a shit, or yes, we indeed did come out of nothing. They're just as viable, and in some cases MORE viable than a god explanation. It's human nature to want to attribute the unknown to a "thing or person". And it makes a lot of people feel good that there's a purpose to their lives given to them from elsewhere. That doesn't make it true, as history keeps teaching us.
If you can't see how him spending years of his life messing with alchemy and trying to reconcile it with his other beliefs instead of doing actual science was detrimental, I don't know what to tell you.
He could have just spent that time masturbating. Is now masturbating detrimental so science?
Yep, we may not be able to "prove" conclusively, but some of the explanations have higher probability than others. Some have implications that we can use to discover other things and drive further research. For example, the Big Bang Theory has implications, we can test them, motivate research in particle physics, etc. The "God did it" explanation motivates nothing other than reading the Bible more often.
Masturbation doesn't disagree with any science. Alchemy, other beliefs in pseudoscience and religion directly interfere with your ability to do science because they make claims about the world that we know are false.
If this were true then we woulnd't be here. You are downplaying human curiosity which rose not to answer the "who", but to answer the "how".
How often did a scientist invoke god and then recant, saying oh, wait, I looked into it more and figured it out! Seriously, I'd love to be enlightened to the anomalies, but as far as I know this has never happened. It's other people/scientists who decide to look into it more.
Uh, yes, all of those things are detrimental to the advancement of science when put against working on experiments or postulating new theories. AKA things Newton actually did well.
Then how he managed to do both?
Dude you got me. I have no idea what science is. Ghosthunting and UFOology can be pursued as sciences also and they are all equally valid to people like you that know what science is. Good to know.