Study: Brain Objectifies Women as Body Parts, Men as Whole: Is Objectifying Women Natural?

You are making an extreme generalization by grouping all persons with any association with religion in one category. Since a discussion of the scientific validity of religion is far off-topic, I will just point out that for a meaningful discussion you would have to define what you mean by "people of religion." I would say that the range of "people of religion" could include the most avid follower of one of the world's major religions, with the experience of each being very different but based on historical thought, to the skeptical scientist who demands positive scientific proof. Einstein, for example, could very loosely be called religious since he believed in a pantheistic god "who doesn't play dice with the universe." A more contemporary scientist, Frank Tipler of Tulane University has written a book entitled _The Physics of Immortality_ in which he defines God as the "omega point" which is an entity becoming apparent at a particular point in the evolution of this universe. Because of the basically limited capacity of the human brain, many "people of religion" from Einstein to the minster of the corner church take a leap called "faith," when confronted with incomprehensible reality. It was this kind of "faith" or intuitive, right-brained reasoning which has led Einstein and other scientists to great scientific discoveries. So I would say that "people of religion" incorporate the right brain's intuitive thinking with the left brain's sequential evaluation of scientific fact to make a leap of "faith." Wow, I really didn't mean to go on about this, so I will stop and apologize to the moderators if they consider this off-topic and inappropriate.

Since we haven't yet been reprimanded for off-topic posting and I'm not sure what the rules are here, I will just add that you make a good point. Certainly the ultimate, primary criterion for establishing scientific fact is empirical data which can be replicated. However, in reality, the initial impetus for obtaining that empirical data is often a kind of intuitive thinking which could be considered comparable to the faith that characterizes religious belief. For example, Einstein had a goal of unifying all of the four known forces to produce a grand explanation of the universe, the G.U.T. or Grand Unifying Theory which is still sought today. Einstein died without achieving his goal, but his "faith" or the "intuition," or whatever you call it, which led to General and Special Relativity theories, survived without proof in a way similar to the tenacity of religious faith in the absence of proof. For Einstein, religion was science. And the proof of his relativity theories rested primarily on his mathematical predictions, not on empirical studies. Similarly, Stephen Hawking, a currently active, practicing physicist, who couldn't be classified as an "earlier" scientist, has based all of his scientific discoveries on mathematical prediction rather than empirical evidence. It's a bit difficult to acquire empirical evidence for black holes and their properties since they cannot be observed, but Stephen Hawking has, again, predicted the properties of black holes based on mathematical premises. Like Einstein before him, Stephen Hawking's theories seem to have their origin in intuition or the kind of metaphorical thinking that originates in the right brain as opposed to the sequential, rational thinking of the brain's left hemisphere. If you read his books, you will see the basis for this statement in his use of metaphor to explain time, for example, which is similar in nature to the metaphor of the elevator traveling to infinity which inspired Einstein's theories of relativity. While "faith" and right brain "intuition" have not been scientifically proven to be similar, religion considered in a much broader sense than that typifying historically organized religion could considered to be scientific in a very broad sense.

Well, we haven’t got scolded yet, so I’ll answer. You are entirely correct about how concepts/ideas and the like in science get their start from someone’s wondering how or why something happens or exists. We call those theories. Taking your Einsteinian example, his two (2) relativity theories were classified as just that, theories, until the empirical evidence, such as the two (2) visions of star systems on each side of a light-bending galaxy were shown to exist, that was later, first test was light behind the sun during an eclipse, anyway. That experiment among many others showed Einstein’s theories and their predictive capabilities to be good enough to then classify them as “generally accepted” facts, much like Darwin’s evolution theory was tested multiple times along with its predictive capability to where it now is a “generally accepted” fact. Belief in a deity, on the other hand is professed by some as a “fact” without any substantiating evidence nor any demonstrated predictive capability. Einstein never offered his equations as proof, he offered them as a way to read the universe and predict what will happen (by which he in effect redefined gravity). He relied on others to demonstrate whether his theories could be proved or not. Your right again, Hawking is a theoretical physics genius and has never, to my knowledge, performed experiments to demonstrate any of his ideas. But he holds his ideas out as theories, somewhat arrogantly some might say because he IS smarter than most everyone else, but he only claims them as his mental gymnastics suggesting theories of how things might be to result in what we observe. Such as his ultra-brilliant work on black hole event horizons. Thus stands the difference, scientists offer theories based on mental gymnastics and then publish their ideas so the lab rat scientists can conduct the experiments to support or torpedo those theories. I see this not in the apologists and practitioners of religion.