Thank you, thank you! And for my next trick, I will transform this conversational topic before your very eyes into a bouquet of beautiful flowers! You can see here I have nothing up my sleeves...

With regards to recycling as brought up below... Environmentally speaking, the danger to the world at present is more related to two factors:

1) Fossil-fuel consumption, leading to increased pollution, leading to ozone reversal (ozone on the ground, CFCs in the air), and
2) Ecological displacement, forcing animals to extinction because humans need the land and care more about themselves than the animals.

It would be a rare human who didn't care about animals at all, but ask any human if they would be willing to die for their pet. I can tell you right now that I wouldn't. Then ask any human if they would be willing to die for their child. I can tell you right now that I would.

Recycling does put more vehicles on the road, but trash buildup is much, much worse. Garbage is dumped into our oceans and onto our land in frighteningly large amounts. Rats are spreading disease, killing off natural predators who feed on them, and natural consumers are unable to survive in an environment with waste pollutants, which can range anywhere from physical problems like getting cut on a tin can or being strangled by a plastic beverage holder, to insidious problems like poisoning and hormonal changes.

Recycling produces a little more pollutants, sure, but it's better than going out into the woods and cutting down a 50 square-kilometre swath of pristine outback just so we can build a new aluminum mine.

Biggest difference between science and religion:

Science asks questions to find the answers.
Religion claims to have the answers before any questions are asked.

Indeed, indeed it would. =P

The funny thing is, in my experience pro-recycling claims are made on supposition, and anti-recycling claims tend to be looking into the pesky facts and asking annoying questions.

Ultimately people are probably on the same side: If something is more efficient and does less harm to the world if it's recycled rather than created from scratch, should we recycle it? Almost everyone would probably say yes.

If something consumes more total resources or does more harm to the world by being recycled rather than re-created from scratch, should we skip the recycling? Almost everyone would...oh wait, no, pro-recycling people tend to say we should recycle in that case anyway.

Well, we're on the same side some of the time!

If we quit every time we ran into a problem, we'd be extinct within a week.

Who said quit?

But until the technology is there, why do more harm than good in the meantime?

Actually, wait, that's a good philosophy: "I'm gonna drive my Hummer cause someday they'll make Hummers that don't pollute. I'm just ahead of my time!"

...This just went from a little quirky to way past the cuckoo's nest.

BlackBirdOmega wrote:

Exactly.

People say we are destroying the world, that is a pretty egotistical thing to say. The world has been here for billions of years and will be here billions of years from now. Eventually either the sun will explode or the Earth will repair itself. Either way, man will be gone long before then, so we're not destroying the world, the world is destroying us.

You sir are a gentleman and a scholar.

I'm not sure how a 20-year-old quote by Carl Sagan can be counted as a score for the science team. His expertise was astronomy, a field where scientists are especially used to redefining their theoretical understanding of everything. Other fields don't enjoy that to the same extent, and are particularly entrenched. But many religions do question and reevaluate, some of course more than others. Carl Sagan was a pop scientist whose wisdom consistently failed outside his own field.

The view that it's science vs. faith is not universal, either. Many religious folks see science walking hand in hand with faith. Where the issue has run aground has been in places where mainstream science has abandoned the scientific method and run off into territory that could just as easily be considered faith. I would say as far as the creation vs. evolution argument (and that's what it's really all about, isn't it?) that in modern times there's a lot more good science than bad going in. But creationists have consistently raised the point that evolution is predicated on a lot of bad science; a lot of good science has since been heaped on it, but many underlying assumptions have never been adequately challenged or reevaluated. There's a layer of doubt down there much thicker than the KT boundary, and frankly those who have seen science as at odds with religion have never bothered to dig it up. In the end this false dichotomy has disserved both faith and science.