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Sounds like a clever, witty, and charming guy. Would be very interesting to talk to him; I like his style of talking. Curiously ironic that he cites a consensus

Sounds like a clever, witty, and charming guy. Would be very interesting to talk to him; I like his style of talking. Curiously ironic that he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers (at least, modern philosophers, most philosophers in history believed in God..) as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God, which appears to be a popularity contest (and echo-chamber), then later in discussing a scientific belief says "This I do believe, but have no proof." Sounds like some faith to me... (and I agree that there is probably a surprisingly simple and elegant theory underlying all of physics, based on what I understand and see of the universe) Of course, I've found that most atheists tend to have faith in science without actually understanding science (though plenty do understand the science) and have some personal, emotional reason for not believing in God rather than a well-thought out chain of reasoning; but most people believe things for personal and emotional reasons, so it isn't surprising. It is always a bit humorous to ask them why they believe in science or what it is they believe and get back answers based on a fanatical devotion to, and blind trust in, the priesthood of "pseudo-"scientists like Dawkins, who makes all sorts of unsupported meta-physical claims in his books. I would always encourage atheists to investigating with an open mind, and to learn more about their system of beliefs, and more about logic. They should do what they believe is correct, and should always seek the truth, but be open to discovery of truth even when they may not like it. Most real scientists have a healthy skepticism towards the correctness of at least part of their own theories.

malmsteen 8y ago
The point of science is that its supposed to be verifiable/ provable at least by someone. Its "trust" (in that "someone" or "group of people" who can prove it)... not "faith". Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  I've explained this to people a couple of times who make the "faith in science" argument. The difference is that you -can- verify it, not that you did verify it. Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.
  - balfirevic 8y ago
    Another good way to frame that is to say that we have reasonable expectation (based on previous accomplishments) of scientific discoveries being true.
    - srean 8y ago
      I think it would be fair to say that the goal science aspires to is "not obviously wrong". It is indeed a moving target and a tough one.
  - superqwert 8y ago
    I think you may have a different understanding of "faith in science" than brobdingnagians. It could mean anything, such as: 1. A belief that the scientific method will definitely approach reality (a realist/pragmatist claim) 2. A belief that the current consensus is right - (but it could be disclaimed) 3. A belief that science will explain everything, so one could discard other studies, such as philosophy or theology. Each of these positions can be disputed and may be wrong (especially since they were not acquired by the scientific method, but arrived at by philosophical thought), so to some extent you need some "faith" to accept these statements to be true.
    - 13415 8y ago
      Position 1 is analytically true. No scientist believes position 2 in general. Regarding particular subject matters and well-confirmed theories, on the other hand, it's pretty much uncontroversial. No cell phone would work and no plane would fly if the underlying physical theories were flat-out false. Position 3 is probably analytically true, too. The idea that there is something that can in principle not be explained by taking a close scientific (=skeptic, methodical, experimental, precise) look at it hardly makes any sense.
      - Miltnoid 8y ago
        What do you mean by "analytically true"
- goatlover 8y ago
  But not everyone who has faith agrees with that. You have apologists, theologians, and even philosophers (more so in the past) who argue that the faith can be defended via logic and evidence. I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap. Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.
- civility 8y ago
  That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.
  - civility 8y ago
    Science doesn't prove things. It fails to prove they are false, and in doing so it leaves you with things that are reasonable to believe.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    > The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.
    - civility 8y ago
      I don't want to sound too snarky, but "moved on" sounds like we're talking about fashion... Has modus tollens moved on too? I haven't studied modern philosophy (or Popper), but if there is a concise explanation I'd like to hear it.
      - deleted 8y ago
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      - drostie 8y ago
        I mean the biggest thing was Kuhn coming along and saying "experimentally, it doesn't work that way." What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong. So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models. Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes? This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it. So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles. You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.
- wl 8y ago
  It's unprovable that science is the best method to arrive at truth about the universe. Remember that science attempts to come up with the best explanation for the evidence we have, often using experimentation to resolve questions. The answers are always tentative—ready to be thrown out if better ones come along. Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.
  - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
    >Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless. Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
    - superqwert 8y ago
      Google: faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians" So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - jawns 8y ago
      I suppose that's one definition of faith, but it's not the definition I would use to describe my faith. My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
      - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
        > Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it. It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.
acqq 8y ago
That the gods are man made is not a discovery of recent times but was known by the thinkers in antique and started to be obvious again some 500 years ago, as the whole continents were discovered that appeared nowhere in the holly texts. Soon enough, the heliocentrism was discovered and got the magnificent scientific explanation with Newton. And so on and on: today we know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, that we’re all made of the stuff either made in the Big Bang or inside of the stars... It’s simply not matching any “holly” text. So whichever of those you’d like to believe, there’s your main problem, not the people who typically just don’t believe in one more diety than you.
- foldr 8y ago
  Of all the possible threats that science might pose to Christian doctrine, it's odd to choose heliocentrism and the age of the Earth as examples. Those facts are fully compatible with the Nicene Creed, and few serious Christain thinkers have ever thought that the Bible had to be interpreted as a scientific textbook. As far back as the third century, Origen was pointing out that the creation narrative shouldn't be taken literally.
  - drunken-serval 8y ago
    Notably, the Catholic church doesn't have a problem with the current scientific theories of the creation of the world. They don't take Gensis literally. They view the creation story in contrast with other creation stories of the religions of the time. Notably, that there is a single, eternal God directing all things for good rather than a pantheon of gods in conflict.
- blancheneige 8y ago
  > most atheists tend to have faith in science without actually understanding science quoting OP because you kind of just confirmed his point. no, we do not know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, that we’re all made of the stuff either made in the Big Bang or inside of the stars. these are theories, the most fundamental axioms of which still escape us, if they exist at all. their success should not be turned into the deceptive illusion of having reached true knowledge.
FabHK 8y ago
Wow, you are really equating * subscribing to an aesthetic hunch about fundamental physics (which has no consequences on how to lead our lives at all!), with * subscribing to an epistemology of revelation, and the ancient, unethical, incoherent scribblings of the Abrahamic religions (with big, bad consequences for our lives), as both being instances of some harmless, justified (or justifiable) "faith"? That's very wrong. His hunch about the underlying structure of physical law is not comparable to people clinging to religion in today's world, neither in justification nor in consequence. Note BTW that he cites prevalence of atheism among philosophers as an instance of convergence towards truth (not as a reason for accepting atheism). Please don't foist simple logical fallacies on him. > Of course, I've found that most atheists tend to have faith in science without actually understanding science Funny, I've found most atheists to be better versed in both science and religion than most theists. > I would always encourage atheists to investigating with an open mind, and to learn more about their system of beliefs, and more about logic. Thanks. I'd expand your enjoinment to study one's system of belief and logic to include not only atheists, but everyone; surely the rank of atheists will then continue to swell. As an aside, it would help if you could break down your writing in paragraphs.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Good response! To add to your points, GP also misses a really important distinction between science and religion and the way each system arrives at conclusions. Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. If, as GP says, you are taking it on faith that some "scientific conclusion" is true, you're merely deferring expertise on the matter. Much like when your tech support guy says your hard drive is shot and you need to replace it, you just trust that he's more likely right than not, and take his advice. If you didn't want to believe him, you could go back to school to learn everything there is to know in the field and find out for yourself whether or not your hard drive is salvageable. You may even come to a different conclusion! With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views: Believe this because I tell you to!
brownbat 8y ago
> he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers... as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God... It seems incredibly unlikely someone would cite the popularity of agnosticism to establish the certainty of atheism, so I am fairly confident that was not the move he was making. Looking back at the prompt: > "Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth..." Pretty sure he was just giving a counterexample: a convergence which he happens to believe to be true, along with compatabilism for free will. He's not making some appeal to popularity to resolve the issue. After reading it I'm not even sure whether he considers himself an atheist or agnostic.
- FabHK 8y ago
  > I'm not even sure whether he considers himself an atheist or agnostic. Presumably he wouldn't cite the convergence towards atheism as an example of convergence to the truth if he'd consider it mistaken. So that assumption is safe, I'd think.
  - brownbat 8y ago
    > Presumably he wouldn't cite the convergence towards atheism if he'd consider it mistaken. Same could be said of agnosticism, which he also specifically mentions. Probably an atheist if you're just listing that as a more probable position things could "converge" towards-- I was really just surprised at brobdingnagians' confidence in Maudlin's religious views, based on a passing reference to the entire body of philosophers, from which inference brobdingnagians later levels a charge of hypocrisy, because elsewhere Maudlin discloses an unevidenced belief when pressed on another (nonreligious) matter without even indicating how strongly he holds that possible hunch. Thought it was worth an aside that brob might not have perfectly pinned Maudlin down.
- 13415 8y ago
  The two are not mutually exclusive, you can be an atheist or theist agnostic, but also a positive or negative atheist. You probably mean the colloquial use of agnostic fornegative atheist - the position of someone who does not believe that a god/supernatural being exists -, in contrast to positive atheism, the position of someone who believes that there is no god/supernatural being. There is no problem with this colloquial use, I just wanted to clarify that the "professional" terminology does not match it.
Koshkin 8y ago
On faith in science, see Penrose: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10664.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10664.html
salmonfamine 8y ago
It's hard to actually address this comment since it's such a ramble, but I think you make some disingenuous rhetorical moves that deserve to be addressed. You employ a rhetorical move that some theists have used in the past -- namely, casting doubt on the veracity of scientific beliefs by painting them in the guise of religion. This is also a convenient move that lets you characterize huge swaths of academia that disagree with you by questioning their psychological motives for holding the beliefs they do. And now that philosophy and science are reduced to priesthoods, what makes them better than religion? After all, most atheists "have some personal, emotional reason for not believing in God rather than a well-thought out chain of reasoning; but most people believe things for personal and emotional reasons, so it isn't surprising." As if the motivations behind a given belief have any ramifications on its truth value. This effectively allows you to justify belief in God without actually making any arguments for it -- as if in the hypothetical vacancy of science and philosophy we're left with no choice but to default to theism. I would encourage you to investigate the philosophy of belief and God in more detail, and to be "open to discovery of truth even when [you] may not like it." There is a great deal more literature on the subject than the pithy writings of Dawkins et al (of whom I am no fan) that deal with the subject in much greater detail, and with much more nuanced arguments than you're giving the entire discipline of philosophy credit for. Also, for the record, I am not an atheist or an agnostic. I am not a philosopher, and I didn't even major in it college. There's a lot of great philosophy out there I haven't even tried to tackle. But I appreciate its value. I think it's clear you're arguing in bad faith. And I'm disappointed that such an argument is the first thing that comes up on an article like this on HN.
- blueprint 8y ago
  > You employ a rhetorical move that some theists have used in the past -- namely, casting doubt on the veracity of scientific beliefs by painting them in the guise of religion. Are you not doing the same thing back to him ? If you disagree, then please tell me the definition of science.
  - mfoy_ 8y ago
    "Science" is just a collection of tools and processes. "Scientisits" use those processes to attempt to arrive at true conclusions. This can be very difficult. Over time, "science" (the nebulous institution) can build up enough accrued "truths" that it can make interesting conclusions with a decent degree of confidence. (Note: scientific studies that are reported by clickbait headlines are not what I'm talking about.) The point is, that you can personally go learn how it all works, follow the studies, and attempt to replicate them, even, to arrive at the same conclusions. Or, if you find issues along the way, you can point them out and contribute to the corpus of "scientific knowledge" by removing an invalid "truth".
gumby 8y ago
> Of course, I've found that most atheists ... have some personal, emotional reason for not believing in God rather than a well-thought out chain of reasoning I found this statement really fascinating: as you said "Of course" I take it that you presume that the belief in some number of gods to be innate? Do you think it an evolutionary advantage and manifestation? The part I elided (many atheists exhibit an essentially credulous belief in "sience" without knowing what it is) I have observed too (though "many?" I don't know) but humans are, you know, humans. And this is only about people who argue the issue -- what about those who simply don't care and never talk about it?
- scythe 8y ago
  >as you said "Of course" I think "Of course" is used because his beliefs, which follow, may be expected by the reader based on his previous statements.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Well, regardless of who is believing what, the issue is their reasons. I.e. why do they believe what they do. Atheists/agnostics who do not understand science, yet believe it anyways likely do so because they are confident that they, or anyone else, could understand it if they put in the necessary effort to do so. The same can not really be said of theists/deists. I'd be happy to be proven wrong here, of course.
gjm11 8y ago
You have simply misunderstood if you think he > cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics [sic] among philosophers [...] as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God because that isn't what he's doing at all. The interviewer asks him what he thinks about David Chalmers's lament that philosophy isn't converging to agreement on the truth on big questions like the existence of God. (Note: Chalmers's actual paper on the subject, which you can find by chasing a couple of links from the OP here, puts the existence of God in its list of big questions but concedes later on that on that particular question there is convergence. So the interviewer has misrepresented him a bit.) He responds by saying he doesn't agree: that philosophy is converging to agreement on the truth on the big questions the interviewer asks him about. Of course he doesn't go into why he thinks the positions he says philosophers are converging to are correct. The arguments on any of them could fill many books, and have in fact done so. The interviewer asked him a short question about philosophy converging to the truth; he gave a short answer to that question. [EDITED to add:] After writing that, I notice that FabHK's reply points out the same thing. I'm leaving this here in case the extra detail I give is helpful.

malmsteen 8y ago

The point of science is that its supposed to be verifiable/ provable at least by someone. Its "trust" (in that "someone" or "group of people" who can prove it)... not "faith". Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.

cyborgx7 8y ago
I've explained this to people a couple of times who make the "faith in science" argument. The difference is that you -can- verify it, not that you did verify it. Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.
- balfirevic 8y ago
  Another good way to frame that is to say that we have reasonable expectation (based on previous accomplishments) of scientific discoveries being true.
  - srean 8y ago
    I think it would be fair to say that the goal science aspires to is "not obviously wrong". It is indeed a moving target and a tough one.
- superqwert 8y ago
  I think you may have a different understanding of "faith in science" than brobdingnagians. It could mean anything, such as: 1. A belief that the scientific method will definitely approach reality (a realist/pragmatist claim) 2. A belief that the current consensus is right - (but it could be disclaimed) 3. A belief that science will explain everything, so one could discard other studies, such as philosophy or theology. Each of these positions can be disputed and may be wrong (especially since they were not acquired by the scientific method, but arrived at by philosophical thought), so to some extent you need some "faith" to accept these statements to be true.
  - 13415 8y ago
    Position 1 is analytically true. No scientist believes position 2 in general. Regarding particular subject matters and well-confirmed theories, on the other hand, it's pretty much uncontroversial. No cell phone would work and no plane would fly if the underlying physical theories were flat-out false. Position 3 is probably analytically true, too. The idea that there is something that can in principle not be explained by taking a close scientific (=skeptic, methodical, experimental, precise) look at it hardly makes any sense.
    - Miltnoid 8y ago
      What do you mean by "analytically true"
goatlover 8y ago
But not everyone who has faith agrees with that. You have apologists, theologians, and even philosophers (more so in the past) who argue that the faith can be defended via logic and evidence. I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap. Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.
civility 8y ago
That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.
- civility 8y ago
  Science doesn't prove things. It fails to prove they are false, and in doing so it leaves you with things that are reasonable to believe.
- FabHK 8y ago
  > The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.
  - civility 8y ago
    I don't want to sound too snarky, but "moved on" sounds like we're talking about fashion... Has modus tollens moved on too? I haven't studied modern philosophy (or Popper), but if there is a concise explanation I'd like to hear it.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - drostie 8y ago
      I mean the biggest thing was Kuhn coming along and saying "experimentally, it doesn't work that way." What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong. So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models. Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes? This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it. So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles. You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.
wl 8y ago
It's unprovable that science is the best method to arrive at truth about the universe. Remember that science attempts to come up with the best explanation for the evidence we have, often using experimentation to resolve questions. The answers are always tentative—ready to be thrown out if better ones come along. Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  >Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless. Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
  - superqwert 8y ago
    Google: faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians" So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - jawns 8y ago
    I suppose that's one definition of faith, but it's not the definition I would use to describe my faith. My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
    - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
      > Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it. It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.

acqq 8y ago

That the gods are man made is not a discovery of recent times but was known by the thinkers in antique and started to be obvious again some 500 years ago, as the whole continents were discovered that appeared nowhere in the holly texts. Soon enough, the heliocentrism was discovered and got the magnificent scientific explanation with Newton. And so on and on: today we know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, that we’re all made of the stuff either made in the Big Bang or inside of the stars... It’s simply not matching any “holly” text. So whichever of those you’d like to believe, there’s your main problem, not the people who typically just don’t believe in one more diety than you.

foldr 8y ago
Of all the possible threats that science might pose to Christian doctrine, it's odd to choose heliocentrism and the age of the Earth as examples. Those facts are fully compatible with the Nicene Creed, and few serious Christain thinkers have ever thought that the Bible had to be interpreted as a scientific textbook. As far back as the third century, Origen was pointing out that the creation narrative shouldn't be taken literally.
- drunken-serval 8y ago
  Notably, the Catholic church doesn't have a problem with the current scientific theories of the creation of the world. They don't take Gensis literally. They view the creation story in contrast with other creation stories of the religions of the time. Notably, that there is a single, eternal God directing all things for good rather than a pantheon of gods in conflict.
blancheneige 8y ago
> most atheists tend to have faith in science without actually understanding science quoting OP because you kind of just confirmed his point. no, we do not know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, that we’re all made of the stuff either made in the Big Bang or inside of the stars. these are theories, the most fundamental axioms of which still escape us, if they exist at all. their success should not be turned into the deceptive illusion of having reached true knowledge.

FabHK 8y ago

Wow, you are really equating * subscribing to an aesthetic hunch about fundamental physics (which has no consequences on how to lead our lives at all!), with * subscribing to an epistemology of revelation, and the ancient, unethical, incoherent scribblings of the Abrahamic religions (with big, bad consequences for our lives), as both being instances of some harmless, justified (or justifiable) "faith"? That's very wrong. His hunch about the underlying structure of physical law is not comparable to people clinging to religion in today's world, neither in justification nor in consequence. Note BTW that he cites prevalence of atheism among philosophers as an instance of convergence towards truth (not as a reason for accepting atheism). Please don't foist simple logical fallacies on him. > Of course, I've found that most atheists tend to have faith in science without actually understanding science Funny, I've found most atheists to be better versed in both science and religion than most theists. > I would always encourage atheists to investigating with an open mind, and to learn more about their system of beliefs, and more about logic. Thanks. I'd expand your enjoinment to study one's system of belief and logic to include not only atheists, but everyone; surely the rank of atheists will then continue to swell. As an aside, it would help if you could break down your writing in paragraphs.

mfoy_ 8y ago
Good response! To add to your points, GP also misses a really important distinction between science and religion and the way each system arrives at conclusions. Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. If, as GP says, you are taking it on faith that some "scientific conclusion" is true, you're merely deferring expertise on the matter. Much like when your tech support guy says your hard drive is shot and you need to replace it, you just trust that he's more likely right than not, and take his advice. If you didn't want to believe him, you could go back to school to learn everything there is to know in the field and find out for yourself whether or not your hard drive is salvageable. You may even come to a different conclusion! With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views: Believe this because I tell you to!

brownbat 8y ago

> he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers... as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God... It seems incredibly unlikely someone would cite the popularity of agnosticism to establish the certainty of atheism, so I am fairly confident that was not the move he was making. Looking back at the prompt: > "Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth..." Pretty sure he was just giving a counterexample: a convergence which he happens to believe to be true, along with compatabilism for free will. He's not making some appeal to popularity to resolve the issue. After reading it I'm not even sure whether he considers himself an atheist or agnostic.

FabHK 8y ago
> I'm not even sure whether he considers himself an atheist or agnostic. Presumably he wouldn't cite the convergence towards atheism as an example of convergence to the truth if he'd consider it mistaken. So that assumption is safe, I'd think.
- brownbat 8y ago
  > Presumably he wouldn't cite the convergence towards atheism if he'd consider it mistaken. Same could be said of agnosticism, which he also specifically mentions. Probably an atheist if you're just listing that as a more probable position things could "converge" towards-- I was really just surprised at brobdingnagians' confidence in Maudlin's religious views, based on a passing reference to the entire body of philosophers, from which inference brobdingnagians later levels a charge of hypocrisy, because elsewhere Maudlin discloses an unevidenced belief when pressed on another (nonreligious) matter without even indicating how strongly he holds that possible hunch. Thought it was worth an aside that brob might not have perfectly pinned Maudlin down.
13415 8y ago
The two are not mutually exclusive, you can be an atheist or theist agnostic, but also a positive or negative atheist. You probably mean the colloquial use of agnostic fornegative atheist - the position of someone who does not believe that a god/supernatural being exists -, in contrast to positive atheism, the position of someone who believes that there is no god/supernatural being. There is no problem with this colloquial use, I just wanted to clarify that the "professional" terminology does not match it.

Koshkin 8y ago

On faith in science, see Penrose: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10664.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10664.html

salmonfamine 8y ago

It's hard to actually address this comment since it's such a ramble, but I think you make some disingenuous rhetorical moves that deserve to be addressed. You employ a rhetorical move that some theists have used in the past -- namely, casting doubt on the veracity of scientific beliefs by painting them in the guise of religion. This is also a convenient move that lets you characterize huge swaths of academia that disagree with you by questioning their psychological motives for holding the beliefs they do. And now that philosophy and science are reduced to priesthoods, what makes them better than religion? After all, most atheists "have some personal, emotional reason for not believing in God rather than a well-thought out chain of reasoning; but most people believe things for personal and emotional reasons, so it isn't surprising." As if the motivations behind a given belief have any ramifications on its truth value. This effectively allows you to justify belief in God without actually making any arguments for it -- as if in the hypothetical vacancy of science and philosophy we're left with no choice but to default to theism. I would encourage you to investigate the philosophy of belief and God in more detail, and to be "open to discovery of truth even when [you] may not like it." There is a great deal more literature on the subject than the pithy writings of Dawkins et al (of whom I am no fan) that deal with the subject in much greater detail, and with much more nuanced arguments than you're giving the entire discipline of philosophy credit for. Also, for the record, I am not an atheist or an agnostic. I am not a philosopher, and I didn't even major in it college. There's a lot of great philosophy out there I haven't even tried to tackle. But I appreciate its value. I think it's clear you're arguing in bad faith. And I'm disappointed that such an argument is the first thing that comes up on an article like this on HN.

blueprint 8y ago
> You employ a rhetorical move that some theists have used in the past -- namely, casting doubt on the veracity of scientific beliefs by painting them in the guise of religion. Are you not doing the same thing back to him ? If you disagree, then please tell me the definition of science.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  "Science" is just a collection of tools and processes. "Scientisits" use those processes to attempt to arrive at true conclusions. This can be very difficult. Over time, "science" (the nebulous institution) can build up enough accrued "truths" that it can make interesting conclusions with a decent degree of confidence. (Note: scientific studies that are reported by clickbait headlines are not what I'm talking about.) The point is, that you can personally go learn how it all works, follow the studies, and attempt to replicate them, even, to arrive at the same conclusions. Or, if you find issues along the way, you can point them out and contribute to the corpus of "scientific knowledge" by removing an invalid "truth".

gumby 8y ago

> Of course, I've found that most atheists ... have some personal, emotional reason for not believing in God rather than a well-thought out chain of reasoning I found this statement really fascinating: as you said "Of course" I take it that you presume that the belief in some number of gods to be innate? Do you think it an evolutionary advantage and manifestation? The part I elided (many atheists exhibit an essentially credulous belief in "sience" without knowing what it is) I have observed too (though "many?" I don't know) but humans are, you know, humans. And this is only about people who argue the issue -- what about those who simply don't care and never talk about it?

scythe 8y ago
>as you said "Of course" I think "Of course" is used because his beliefs, which follow, may be expected by the reader based on his previous statements.
mfoy_ 8y ago
Well, regardless of who is believing what, the issue is their reasons. I.e. why do they believe what they do. Atheists/agnostics who do not understand science, yet believe it anyways likely do so because they are confident that they, or anyone else, could understand it if they put in the necessary effort to do so. The same can not really be said of theists/deists. I'd be happy to be proven wrong here, of course.

gjm11 8y ago

You have simply misunderstood if you think he > cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics [sic] among philosophers [...] as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God because that isn't what he's doing at all. The interviewer asks him what he thinks about David Chalmers's lament that philosophy isn't converging to agreement on the truth on big questions like the existence of God. (Note: Chalmers's actual paper on the subject, which you can find by chasing a couple of links from the OP here, puts the existence of God in its list of big questions but concedes later on that on that particular question there is convergence. So the interviewer has misrepresented him a bit.) He responds by saying he doesn't agree: that philosophy is converging to agreement on the truth on the big questions the interviewer asks him about. Of course he doesn't go into why he thinks the positions he says philosophers are converging to are correct. The arguments on any of them could fill many books, and have in fact done so. The interviewer asked him a short question about philosophy converging to the truth; he gave a short answer to that question. [EDITED to add:] After writing that, I notice that FabHK's reply points out the same thing. I'm leaving this here in case the extra detail I give is helpful.