As Arbiter points out, you’re relying on gaps in our knowledge and attempting to place god within those gaps, which is at very least a precarious place for a supreme being to exist.

But my attacks on Egnor have more to do with his intellectual laziness than his religion. While I would disagree with his theism in any case, the first point you make (aside from the “understand what was the ‘intent’ of this creator” part) is why I have very little problem with deists. But that’s not what Egnor’s saying. Instead, he’s claiming that we MUST have a spiritual something–something we can’t understand, observe, or study–in order to understand how the human mind works. And he makes a terrible argument to refute it.

If he wants to believe in his personal Magic Man, he’s welcome to. But when he dishonestly portrays that position as one that has explanatory power equal to the scientific method, I object.

I suspect I am less hard on religion than PZ. Certainly religions that have gone out of their way to integrate the discoveries of science into their faith are welcome, as are those that teach individual conscience rather than dogmatic conversion. I have great respect for many Quakers and Buddhists, for example. But I cannot have “proper educated dialog” on the internet with anyone who would place faith and mysticism above reason and evidence.

Unfortunately such beliefs are becoming increasingly unnecessary. That’s God-of-the-Gaps essentially. Of course, certain questions may never be answered, but I think the default position would be skepticism rather than certainty.

1.the universe was created in a very special state of minimum entropy and its evolution obeys a set of very specific rules that man through science will gradually discover, and that this could have been the work of an intelligent creator. It would be very helpful to start trying to understand what was the “intent” of this creator, if any.
2. science does not understand all of these rules yet and that there are some key questions that it is still incapable of answering :
-what happens after death ?
-what happened at/before the big bang
-how did life appear from an inert assembly of atoms
3. that there may exist physical phenomena that are yet to be discovered that go beyond the standard model of particle physics
4. that the copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics is not yet complete. That the theory of evolution is not yet complete. That we do not yet fully understand gravity, the cosmological constant problem and the rotational speeds of galaxies being clear scientific evidence that some new physics will have to be discovered, and that these could have a huge impact on the answers to the points in 1., as well as on how the brain works.
4. that a hypothesis such as the existence of a “soul”, located in the brain is not necessarily a “crackpot” hypothesis. That this could be a physical concept to be derived from the new physics to be discovered. That it completes the theory of evolution as known today and renders it more efficient..That what happens with the “soul” after death could be goverened by a set of physical principles, in other words, that what happens after you die is conditionned by what happens during your life.

Isn’t it because theists on one hand, have become, at large, incapable of understanding the writings of science, and on the other hand atheist scientists are becoming as dogmatic as the theists.

I think the time has come that religion starts revising a bit its old habits and accepting the fact that the bible / coran …etc had been written at a time to be understood by the people of that time. That mankind has made some progress in its understanding of nature through science. And that science understands that as long as it cannot explain everything, there will be room for spiritual beliefs that will have to evolve as science makes progress in its understanding of the laws of nature.

That there should be a proper educated dialog between science and religion and not the series of insults that are so pervasive in the blogosphere.

A real theory of grammar would use syntax and word meaning to evaluate sentences–and such theories do so. Using reason and developing a testable theory. Yea!

The Egnor theory of grammar would posit that the word “something” must have a meaning given to it by an unknowable source whose methods and motivations are unknown.

Yawn. I tell you what: I’ll keep defending evidence and reason, and you can make excuses for Egnor defending a mystical explanation that makes no predictions and evokes unseen movers.