Here's what I almost guarentee a Christian priest would answer:
"Let Christ in to your heart and life, allow him to be your personal savior, and I guarentee you that you will receive a testament of the truth of these things".
Why not budda? Or Allah? Or Gaia? Or Apollo? Or Elvis? Every religion is a minority. If Christians claim only they are right, then they must think most of the world is deluded and they must therefor accept that it must be relativly easy to be deluded regarding religon. BUt on the other hand, if they allow that beleif in any god can produce the same inner, untestable statement of truth, then they must acknowledge that perhaps it's not so much the god that matters but rather the belief itself....
Which many might do. Christianity as a whole is a rather fragmented patch of related but distinct beliefs. Among these is the so called Christian Humanist. Another take might be that, like the blind men and the elephant, each religion has a correct, but limited, view of the Almighty. Yet another view might be that each present religion grew from the same seed of truth, and have long since strayed and erred. Religion is not cohesive like science. Religion is not based upon an independantly verified truth. If science is about removing the human component from our understanding of the universe (removing bias, superstition, etc.), religion is about understanding the universe through the human component.
Well I strongly disagree here as you might imagine. All religions make scientific claims: virgin births, turning wine into blood, physical miricles, the power of prayer and so on. All of these things are testable and measurable. Morality is easily measurable for example. A well designed questionaire or experiment is all it takes. There have been many studies measuring morality and you might expect, they all find no relationship between religious beleif and morality. There are moral religious people and immoral religious people, same with athiests and any other large demographic group.
What if I answer "I like to kill people" on your questionaire? Is that a moral or amoral act? How do you even begin to define "good" and "bad" in a purely scientific manner? Science is great at being impartial, but it does not deliver any value systems with which to judge the world. You could maybe develop a theory about the effect of murder on societies and trust, etc. but at some point someone is going to have to make a judgement call about what is desirable and what is not. That's the realm of religion, philosophy, etc. Things that are definately
not scientific.
The term "meaning" is human centric and presumes aprori that there must be a meaning, that existance and everything else must mean something to humans. This is obviously not the case. Similarly, humans have brains evolved to deal with the macro world with it's 4 dimensions. It should not be surprising that humans have a hard time understanding additional dimensions or that that time itself started with the big bang and that asking "what came before the big bang" is not well formed.
I would say that the argument that "of course humans don't understand higher dimensions, because we don't have the capacity" is anti-human centric. Imagine for a moment the beginning of life on earth. The first thing that learned how to move can only move in a straight line. It's immediately out-competed by a creature that can swim in two dimensions. That creature is immediately out competed by a creature that can move in 3 dimensions. etc. etc. If we can only observe 3 physical dimensions and a strange one way dimension, that must mean that those are the only dimensions that have meaning in our existance. Higher dimensions may or may not exist in any real sense, but they do not effect our normal, everyday life.
Same way that relativity does not effect normal, everyday life. You want me to believe in relativity? I can use suspension of disbelief for a moment, but you'll need to provide empiracle evidence very soon after. Thankfully, it was just a handful of years after a single man created a new theory that it was confirmed by empiracle evidence. My assumption was justified.
I will take the existence of higher dimensions as an assumption in a scientific theory, in the same manner as I took relativity. String theory is like, what? 30 years old? With thousands of scientists working on it. And it's not even
done. How many falsifiable experiments do we have? Talk about much to do about nothing. You're straining my powers of assumption. It's just like a software project. You need to test each individual function against specification. In science, you need to test every single assumption against evidence. String theory has put the horse before the carriage, and the result is a huge theoretical mess with no practical use. Relativity gave us nuclear plants and bombs within just a decade or so. String theory hasn't even been able to figure out how to test itself yet!
Really the whole idea that science and religion are in direct competition with each other is extremely stupid.
I used to feel this way. I used to take a live and let live approach. I changed my mind the day a bunch of religious whack jobs flew airplanes into buildings. Religion and the irrational beliefs in an afterlife (not to mention unlocked cockpit doors) allowed that to happen.
Sept. 11 was about as much about religion as the crusades were: meaning only a flimsy pretense. Think about it. If it was a Muslim war against Christianity, they would have attacked the Vatican. If it was a Muslim war against Jews, they would have attacked Israel. Instead it was an attack on
trade. On capatalism. It's a political attack by a political organization that hides behind its religion for justification. They're upset with American support for the monarchy in Egypt, or something like that.
People hide their hate behind religion because they're ignorant and stupid. Don't blame religion. Islam certainly does
not advocate military attacks on civilian targets. People don't need help being hateful.
But supernatural beleifs in direct contradiction to reality are dangerous.
Are dangerous
to whom? To the people? Big deal. You're upset when they intrude on
your life. And rightfully so. That violates the very founding principle of your country: libertarianism (which, by the way, is a philosphy and not a science. How would you scientifically define the idea of the right to be left alone?). But that isn't the fault of belief. That's the fault of people. And people will act stupid and hateful regardless of what religion, belief, or philosophy the believe in (or don't). If anything, religion, belief, and philosophy are what prevents Man from being stupid and hateful all the time. How easy would it be to fall in to a science-only world view, and adopt Social Darwinism as a guiding principle? How would that make you any better from someone who falls in to a religion-only world view and adopts I-don't-understand-that-it-must-be-magic guiding principle? Both views can cause so much harm.