Revelation & Discovery

The arena in which atheists and Christians can agree and work together is the arena in which revelation and discovery have the exact same evidence signature.

Many Christians are afraid of this arena, because the have been effected by a modern illness in which the limits of space, time, locational consciousness, etc- are all secretly attributed to God. This is one of the reasons people tend to think there are other places somehow fundamentally more existential than this one- they have to place God in his own realm, very far away from us, so that their model of God works.

But, the discovery that particular proclivities, for instance, substantialy increase rates of disease, death, and substandard outcomes for the next generation is objectively indistinguishable from the revelation of the same. A person reports the manner in which he found out about it, and even in everyday mundane science, if you investigate, tidy little narratives unravel, and science itself appears to be combination of randomness, mysticism, and no small amount of charlatanism.

There's a lot of charlatanism about, but it is easier to call out in religious circles. Scientific studies are supposed to be reproducible, so we tend to lend them more credence, but there is a lot less reproducing going on that is generally assumed. Various climate scientist have even decided to hide the data from which they drew their highly unreliable models.

I remember a discussion with someone about the evolutionary psychology surrounding people's belief in God, versus the actual existence of God. She, it appeared, could not understand my point here.