How do you reconcile materialism with idealism?" Whenever I hear a philosophical question like that, I think "Here we go. We're going to use smoke an… - Aron Ra

The zealots imposing their religion in public schools never understand that they’re even doing anything wrong. They think they’re being oppressed or attacked if they’re disallowed from indoctrinating everyone else’s kids. And it doesn’t help that all the kids in town have already been indoctrinated. Because they don’t understand what the problem is either, and and secular government requirement will invariably be seen as some sort of victimization, which feeds right into the typical Christian persecution complex. People like this never seem to understand the necessity of secular government until or unless they have to give fair consideration to Muslims. Then suddenly the Christians leap over to my side of the political spectrum, demanding separation of church and state just as I do. Hypocrites.

It is no hoax that mammalian embryos temporarily have pharyngeal pouches, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the gill slits in modern fish embryos, and that the divergence of development from there matches what is indicated in the fossil record. This is fact, not fraud. And none of these facts should be true unless evolution were true also.

While scientists themselves may be religious men of many different faiths, their methodology was designed to be the antithesis of faith because it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be must be testable and potentially falsifiable. Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren’t explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of anything. In fact such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery. This is one of many reasons why science depends on methodological naturalism; because unlike religion, science demands some way to determine who’s explanations are the more accurate, and which changes would actually be corrections. Science is a self-correcting process which changes constantly because its always improving. Only accurate information has practical application. So it doesn’t matter what you wanna believe. All that matters is why we should believe it too, and how accurate your perception can be shown to be. So you can’t just make up stuff in science (like you can in religion) because you have to substantiate everything, and be able to defend it even against peers who may not want to believe as you do. Be prepared to convince them anyway. Its possible to do that in science because science is based on reason. That means you must be ready to reject or correct whatever you hold true should you discover evidence against it.