What gives you the superior position? .
It's superior results. Science has lit up the nights, given us engines and motors, global telecommunications, polio and smallpox vaccines, and has sent men to the moon and back. Life is longer, safer, healthier, more comfortable and more interesting because of science.
What have faith based systems given the world? What useful information about our world has come from your holy book? None.
Science isn't my god or my master. The one who is the creator of science is the one I believe. He demonstrates his existence even in microscopic life.
But He didn't tell us about that microscopic life, or how it could help or harm us, or how to construct microscopes to examine it, did He?
Imagine if your god had told us, "Harvest the penicillin fungus on bowls of seaweed extract imbued with broth and harvest its output to consume when sweating and coughing mucus." But it didn't, did it? It either doesn't exist, or it sat idly by indifferent to man's plight.
Man created science. He created the scientific method, and has used it to elicit insights that allow him to understand, predict, and at times control much of reality. No god helped. No holy book helped.
First, men like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Vesalius, Harvey, Bernoulli, Dalton, Avogadro, Priestly, Boyle, Coulomb, Lavoisier, and Volta, told us how things work. They showed us a clockwork universe that ran automatically. That was the first wave of scientists.
Something very interesting followed. If the universe operated automatically - if currents flowed through wires without having to be told to do so, and planets orbited suns in in regular and predictable patterns without having to be pushed around, then a god was no longer needed to do those things. The designer, builder and ruler god like Jehovah was no longer needed, and the deist god, who created the universe we see and then departed it - designer and builder, but not ruler - was born. We still required the builder god. How else could all of this be here otherwise?
Then came the second wave of scientists like Hubble and Darwin that showed us how the universe built itself starting from a material seed, the singularity, and later, the tree of life from a single ancestral cell. Now the builder god was no longer necessary.
With that began the age of atheism as the Christian god became relegated to the origins problems, problems that we have no reason to think require gods, either. This is the god of the gaps, and its church has been at war with science ever since, although increasingly, more and more of its adherents are assimilating the science into their Christian worldview insofar as they can.
I believe that the majority of Christians accept evolution now, but it obviously cannot be Darwinian evolution, a blind and undirected process in which mutations are random, a process from which so many outcomes are possible that each of them is as unlikely including the one we see, and man was not designed. I don't think you can call a belief Christianity if it doesn't include the Christian god directing man's coming into being.
Still, we have this residual hostility to science as you embody.
But getting back to the age of atheism, which we are entering, Dawkins summarized it nicely with, "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
Gods are not needed in any of our existing scientific theories such as the germ theory of disease, atomic theory, relativity theory, quantum theory, evolutionary theory, big bang cosmology, and plate tectonics, and there is no reason to think that they will be needed to solve the twin origins problems, which will close off those gaps.
I'm pretty sure that I would also have been a theist had I lived before that first wave of scientists, and a deist if I had lived between the first and second wave of scientists. Nothing else would have made sense.
But I was born in the mid-20th century, and I am an atheist. And as the age of atheism unfurls, our numbers will continue to grow as the number of theists decrease, and those that remain become increasingly less fundamentalist.
Man's religious phase will ultimately be the period connecting the time when he first became intelligent enough to ask why, and the time when he found the answers. Many questions remain unanswered yet, but we can see the pattern now.
