The counterargument is wholly anthropomorphic; while it is true that science is biased toward reality (it hinges on an agreement about pervception of results, and agreement about logic in making conclusions from results) reality is biased toward neither science nor religion. If anything it is biased toward survival in a broad sense, as far as life-forms are concerned.

It is odd, but I believe there is some scientific evidence that self-selected religious beliefs (not those shoved down one's throat) correlate with longer survival, statisically. I would have to hunt around to find the paper from which I recall this, and memory could be wrong.

Let me add, PnL, that I appreciate your clarity and articulateness, but I don't give a hoot if this is your first or one thousandth foray into this discussion. We've had them a dozen times on this site alone. There is no more force in an ad meum argument than there is in an ad hominem one.

Little Hawk has argued that money is a religion-like subject, and elsewhere has argued that the logic of science is religion-like in its adherents, but I think this is just slipshod semantic foolery. The differences, in terms of what we do to get information, how we evaluate data, and how we accept data, are quite palpable.

I suppose you could run up a case like this: religion is the pursuit of truth about spiritual matters; all beings at some level are spiritual entities; therefore anything that grabs there attention is a spiritual quest. It was on such a line of reaosning that I founded the Temple of the Golden Globes, for those whose Quests led them to meditate on mammary glands. It is entirely a specious line of reasoning, as far as the topic is concerned. It might have some ultimate Truth hidden in it but not one that would stand up to logic.

Which brings us to Bill's point about science. Within the perception-and-reasoning machine of the human perspective, certain process of seeing and thinking are pretty much thought of as common to anyone using a normal language system.

Science has built on this accepted mode of transaction since the day of Galileo's first lens and E pur si muove." But I think anyone who has even begun to master Godel, Escher, and Bach will perhaps acknowledge that there is a self-referential aspect to the dialogue. Phenomenology which stands outside the vocabulary is easily said to stand, also, outside the realm of those things which can be sensed, measured or experienced by skeptics practicing hard science, and this, in turn, is a self-fulfilling assertion. To conclude from this neat barrier that the phenomenological events often described (enlightenment, out-of-body experiences, telepathy of various degrees, remote viewing, non-local perception and so on) are outside the range of possibility, to be dismissed because their communication is of the wrong hue, is close-minded in the extreme. Scientists of one sort kind of relish that condemnation because they think they need to be close-minded in the skeptical sense in order to be true to their epistemological creed. This is comfortable, if self-serving, for them.

It is not, however, a step toward truth, as such; it is only a step toward scientism. It makes of science a kind of categorical imperative which, in an amusing twist, can be said to betray its own highest goals.

To put it more simply, science is a way of knowing, but it can become rootbound and undermine its own purpose by rejecting alternative ways of knowing.

I am reminded of the story of Mark Twain whose wife decided to teach him to stop cussing so much. She walked into his billard room and let out a stream of the foulest cussing she could muster. He looked at her with great amaze until she finished and then told her calmly, "The words are all there, my sweet, but the music is missing." (Or words to that effect).

A