TEC said-
Just because science has not yet discovered how something can happen... does not mean that it did not happen or that it is impossible.
AND
I don't even hink science would state that it will never be possible for cells and such to be reanimated, to the point of 'resurrecting' a person who has died. Just don't have the know-how yet.
You DO see the difference between those situations, right?
Proving God's existence is NOT on the same level as cells being reanimated, since the differences are incredibly HUGE!
In comparison, we know that:
1) cells exist
2) cells die (cell death, AKA apoptosis)
Therefore, scientists would like to be able to stop and/or reverse apoptosis in order "resurrect" people. Conquering death is an ancient quest of mankind (BTW, it would raise some extremely problematic and difficult ethical issues along the way, but it's OT here).
Now compare that to the challenge of proving God, where we don't know ANYTHING about ANY Gods, except that it's an ancient belief that has persisted for millenia, since there's no sign of activity of gods; what had previously been pointed to as proof of God's existence (eg the complexity of life, AKA Paley's watch) has been explained by scientific investigation and evolution.
Scientists are not just sadistic kill-joys out to crush the religious faith of believers: it's that there's NOTHING, absolutely NO evidence whatsoever to point TO anything spiritual like Gods, so there's NOTHING to examine (except the minds of those who believe: that's what 'neurotheology' is all about, the scientific investigation of belief by studying the brains of believers in MRI). In contrast, there's TONS of evidence pointing to men's hand in the perpetuation of delusional beliefs in Gods.
TEC said- You know, if you research the situation in Ethiopia and how the land has been raped for profit, you will find man and his greed at the source of the famines and starvation. Not just there, but in many other places also. Some men are trying to help counter what man, himself, has done by sending money/food/supplies... some do nothing... some try to help counter situations that man has created that cause harm closer to home. Science only needs to find an answer to the starving children in Ethiopia because of the decisions man made to begin with.
It would be nice if believers quit saying things like 'man, himself' did this or that and only has himself to blame, since to an atheist, that's pretty much what is presupposed: there are no Gods to come along and bail us out, and the World has been and always will be whatever it is that we make of it. If there's injustice in the World, then there's always some who are able to deny their role in causing harm to others, or who rationalize their actions away by saying, "if I didn't take the money from the public coffers, someone else would". Then there's those who are empathetic to the plight of their fellow humans and will want to help, NOT necessarily for the victims, but for OURS.
At this point in human existence on the Planet, altruism is selfish, since the World is now more-interconnected, where those living on the other side of the planet are inter-connected via trade. And since we are a social species; the next step in the evolution of homo sapiens is primarily attitudinal and behavior-based, to put aside old-fashioned and long-disproven racial and religious distinctions to recognize that all humans have won the race to become the dominant species on the planet, and now we sink or swim together. I suspect it'll take about 2,000 more years, but it'll have to happen eventually.
