The general thrust of Mangani's statement is accurate.

* The Bible opposes the very virtues needed for science to function. * My opponent is equivocating on "faith" and "contradiction" * My opponents argument breaks down to the idea that religions are establishing the truth of nothings rather than somethings, and thus do not oppose such notions. However, this is inaccurate view of what religions are attempts to do. They are attempts to actually understand the actual world in actual ways. * No part of this argument suffices to establish the "general thrust" of Mangani's argument, but rather attempts to establish the tiniest subsection. --- Let us recap the arguments and objections thus far raised. For the sake of this debate, we largely ignored Mangani's statement and focused only on the smallest sliver in an attempt to find something accurate about it. Mangani claimed that the Bible doesn't contradict science. It includes only the minimal observations of a primitive culture. These observations it seems are largely what Mangani considers to be scientific understandings. That making the most primitive observation and using that idea as the setting for a work of myth qualifies something as scientific. We ignored this and largely focused on a more philosophical underpinning of science qua science. We agree to forgive primitive people for primitive understanding and not declare with a broad brush that bad explanation ultimately suggests bad science. The world really does seem flat when we walk around on it. The sun does seem to rise and set in much the same fashion as the moon. The moon seems to be a lesser light to the greater light of the sun. Snakes seem to jarringly lack legs. The sky very notably does not fall to the ground like everything else. The stars seem to be really really tiny. These are the most basic and obvious interpretations of primitive people and are only used as part of the setting for the Bible. However the objection still exists that the basic ethics needed to do science are opposed by the Bible and the Early Church. On the other side Pro has raised the argument that there is no overlap between mythos and logos and science is a process rather than a metaphysical underpinning and thus cannot be contradicted as such. These are the issues we'll be finishing with. --- My opponent claims that progress becomes a misnomer because there's no way to progress aside from established human goals. However, this is far from the nature of actual science and farther still from the use in which I used the term. First, science often discovers amazing truths without seeking to find them. Penicillin in dirty dishes, diversity in a group of finches, big bang in a hiss, expansion in red-shifted lines, elliptical orbits in 6 arcseconds of Mars, Neptune in the wake of Uranus, antimatter in the curve of particles, relativity in the constant speed of light. Science often makes progress without seeking to make progress. It wasn't some goal at a unification of electricity and magnetism it was some kid who came up after class and looped a wire and watched it jump. Second, it isn't that progress is made which makes it science it's the idea that progress can be made. The concept that we can improve our understanding that there is something to be known which we do not at this time currently know. The earliest inkling of science was the idea that the world was knowable. That there were things about the cosmos that we could determine for ourselves. With technological advance and our constant evolution of thought this seems to doubtlessly be true. However, one could understand how the objection to the idea that we should improve our knowledge or that we could would be disastrous to the enterprise of science. Science is exploration and you don't always know what you're looking for or find what you sought. My opponent also offers the concept that there is some degree of faith in science. That for the sake of parsimony we need to assume the truth of all the lower concepts that the system is built upon. This is not an accurate description of what is needed for science and is equivocation with what is meant by faith. Faith in science is often synonymous with trust, and even then it is often the case that it would take more effort to disbelieve a notion than it would take to believe it. We establish in science principles to a sufficient degree that it takes a greater leap of faith to disagree with them than to accept them as correct. Whereas when referring to religious faith we are often talking about accepting the absurd without evidence. These are two different meanings of the word. Second, when we do an experiment we need not assume all the underlying established bits of science. This is the domain of empirical testing. If those little sub-bits don't actually work out, they will change the results. In effect the test result is retesting all of the notions the experiment is built upon in order to demonstrate the result. So we see that the methodology and concepts are vindicated by empiricism. That when we accept what exists as the final arbiter of what is real we can progress with regard to the evidence. This is why empiricism is a virtue of science and why it is needed for scientific inquiry. Without testing ideas against the reality of the natural world we would have no anchor to properly understand the world. We retest all of our ideas when ever we test the next one and use that to build our ideas and increase our understanding. The only missing virtue is curiosity, which is to say that we should want to understand the world. Foster these and we foster science, suppress them and you suppress science. The underlying reason why the Bible contradicts science is because in every case it opposes these virtues. It does not so limit itself to a mythical understanding of the world. It purports to be a real understanding of the real world. It is easy for us to look back and make the claim that the Bible was speaking in myth and that somehow when it says something it didn't really mean it, but the virtues of the Bible are the antithesis virtues of science. It is in that way that the Bible opposes science. The Bible opposes science by condemning everything needed to conduct it. --- The idea that the Bible is somehow a different way of knowing is absurd. Given Newtonian physics I can tell you the position of the Earth 10,000 years from now and the exact location of Mars in our sky. Given Einsteinian physics I can tell you how much time I would experience traveling to Alpha Centauri. These are both useful and in that usefulness they explain a large number of empirical facts in a compelling and coherent way. The Bible however does not provide any such uses. The concept that a myth-based worldview is largely like an evidence-based worldview much the same as non-Euclidean geometry is much like Euclidean geometry fails on every count. My opponent's argument is that mythos and logos are like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry or Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. The underlying argument is roughly that science deals with how we can figure out how existing things work, whereas religion only deals with non-existent things. Since we aren't actually dealing with anything real how could the Bible contradict science? We are well started on our rebuttal to consider that this "non-explanation" stands in stark opposition to progress, empiricism and even curiosity. That if we declare science a process we could argue that nothing could "contradict" it. This would be similar to arguing that I'm not "contradicting" your attempt to clean your house by running around your house messing things up. This again must be chalked up to equivocation. That's not how we're using that word. Opposing the very effort by opposing the fundamental requirements suffices to condemn religion in the name of science.