Science

People who believe in God generally believe that a purely analytical and scientific method of forming knowledge is constrained to a subset of reality that cannot encompass God. Atheists on the other hand, typically say that God is merely one of numerous theories that lack coherence and supporting evidence, and that these shortcomings already constitutes sufficient proof of God's non existence.

The belief that we control our decisions is seemingly undermined by the fact that the future is an inevitable consequence of the past. When we put our foot on a car's accelerator, we know that this causes chemical combustion in the car, and that the car has no choice but to go faster. Similarly, the putting of our foot on the accelerator was also caused by chemical combustion - one in our own brains. For this reason, many philosophers and scientists regard free will as illusionary.

Cryonics is the preservation of an animal by cooling with the hope that future medical advances can revive that animal. Modern cryonics make use of cryopreservatives to minimize cellular damage caused by freezing, particularly to the brain. Advocates of the procedure typically believe that so long as the critical structure of the brain is preserved, a person could one day be brought back to life.

Many religious thinkers do not find a purely scientific account of the universe plausible. Areas where the scientific explanation is questioned include the universe's origin, life on earth, human consciousness, and human morality.

One of the major clashes between the scientific world view and religious world views, is that science does not support a belief in life after death. Christianity and Islam regard life as preparation for judgement at death, which will determine one's fate in the afterlife. Judaism regards death as not the end, but is much less focused on the afterlife than life itself. Buddhism and Hinduism believe in continual rebirth until enlightenment is attained.

There are two contradictory accounts of the age of earth. One is the scientific account, which claims that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. The other is a biblical account, which claims that the earth is approximately 6000 years old. The scientific position is that there is overwhelming evidence for their view, while Christian Science points to contradictions and anomalies in that position.

The belief in an immaterial soul requires that central aspects of a person, such as consciousness, memories, and personality, are not contingent upon our physical bodies. The concept was first formalized in western philosophy by Rene Descartes in the 17th century, who proposed that our soul interacts with our body via the pineal gland in the brain. That theory has since been rejected by mainstream science.

Shortly after death, the brain starts deteriorating due to blood circulation stopping. For cryonics to be practical, there must be a sufficient window of time between legal death and information-theoretic death (when vital structure in the brain is lost), in which cryonic preservation must take place. Skeptics of cryonics claim that as in little as 5 minutes of ischemia (a restriction of blood flow), the brain is irreversibly damaged.

There are a number of companies today that charge for cryopreserving a body (or just a head) immediately after death. To minimize damage from freezing, the dead bodies are injected with cryopreservatives. A vital question is whether this process protects the critical neural structures in the brain. If not, then the process is by anyone's criteria a waste of time, since "information-theoretic death" will have occurred.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is a scientific body formed by the United Nations in 1988 to summarize research on climate change for the purpose of informing policy makers. Those who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming have questioned the objectivity of the organization.

The earth's climate is a system that contains feedback loops. If an input variable changes in a feedback loop, it effects the system in a way that changes the input variable itself. These changes cumulatively increase in a positive feedback loop, but progressively dampen in a negative feedback loop. The concern with increasing CO2, is that more CO2 in the atmosphere will warm the earth, in turn causing more CO2 to be released due to effects such as warmer oceans, i.e. a positive feedback loop.

Since the industrial revolution, humans have been emitting greenhouse gases that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believe are responsible for Global Warming. While the majority of climatologists agree with the IPCC's conclusions, skeptics suggest that the IPCC's climate models are flawed and that recent climate changes should be attributed to natural causes.

The earth's climate is described with GCMs (General Circulation Models or Global Climate Models). GCMs are complex, containing many input variables and positive and negative feedback loops. These models are simulated on supercomputers to create predictions. The IPCC's predictions are based on an aggregate assessment of several GCMs.

Climate models require input data from many sources, such as the temperature of the atmosphere and ocean around the globe. While recent history affords us direct measurements, such as by satellite, more distant history requires indirect measurements, such as those derived from examining ice-cores and tree-rings. Some skeptics claim that data the climate models are based on is both insufficient and unreliable.

Prediction markets allow people to bet money on predictions, with the purpose of providing more accurate predictions for policy and business analysts. Prediction markets are often contrasted with alternative methods used to tap collective intelligence, such as expert committees. Advocates of prediction markets claim that prediction markets are more accurate than their alternatives, but are underutilized due to irrational concerns regarding their accuracy, as well as susceptibility to subversion.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are amongst the most popular destinations on the web. No doubt in some cases this has contributed to Internet Addiction Disorder, but have they on the whole had a positive effect in our lives?

Skeptics of the conventional account of the collapse of the twin towers suggest that their fall was not physically possible except by timed explosives.

The belief that smoking causes cancer is supported through both epidemiological studies and research into the underlying mechanisms by which smoking damages the body. Skeptics suggest that the epidemiological studies are biased, and that the underlying mechanisms are not yet properly understood.

The IPCC's Global Climate Models (GCMs) predict that hotter climates will have more extreme weather patterns, such as hurricanes.

Opponents of gay rights assert that homosexuality is a recent sickness of society that has temporarily upset our natural heterosexual state of being. Gay advocates retort that this claim is demonstratively false, since homosexuality occurs frequently in many species. Furthermore, they point out that the question is irrelevant due to the "Appeal to Nature" fallacy, which lures people into concluding that if something is unnatural or outside of the norm then it isn't good.