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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.

by 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!

JackFr 8y ago
> Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. Nonsense - that ignores that fundamentally science is a human activity. Because it is a human activity it is open to the same biases, self-deceptions, fads, groupthink and political pressures as any other human activity. Apart from that, implicit in your defense of science and attack on religion is a belief that true knowledge can only be attained through the scientific method, and nothing which is true can be acquired outside of experiment and observation, which itself is a faith based (though pragmatic) argument. That being said, I make no claims for the existence of a God, Abrahamic or otherwise. At the same time you could be a little more circumspect and humble about what you know to be true.
- srean 8y ago
  The key phrase is 'falsifiable in principle' this God business (and it is indeed a business, if not all of it) is not. One can have all ones faith in flying spaghetti monster as one cares to have but there is no way even in principle to falsify it if it turns out that it is false.
- memonkey 8y ago
  If anybody is curious about the work of Science being a fundamentally human activity, check out Bruno Latour. I'm sure there are others, but this is one I've recently discovered. NYTimes did a good article on him: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...
  - JackFr 8y ago
    Nice piece.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300187
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  I'm not saying humans are infallible, but trying to argue that "the scientific method isn't perfect because people aren't perfect" is nonsense, especially if the conclusion you want to draw is that "therefore we should respect faith as an alternative means of determining truth". The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature. In fact, it's practically the only tool we have. Almost every major advancement our species has made has been because someone had a theory, figured out a way to test it, and came to a conclusion with some degree of confidence that they were then able to act upon and share with others. Since this is a thread about philosophy, "truth" (and how one determines it) is extremely relevant. Epistemology is a whole branch of philosophy. If you're truly skeptical, one could even argue that true knowledge cannot be attained at all, and all we can hope to do is arrive at conclusions with as high a degree of confidence as possible. My point is that science offers a way to increase confidence in a conclusion, religion does not. It's as simple as that.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    > The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature. I agree. But I also believe freedom is better than slavery. I value wisdom over ignorance. And I believe those things without any proof. The scientific method cannot prove to me that murder is wrong, and yet I hold it to be true. So despite the fact that I agree with the power of the scientific method, I'll cop to truths that I believe without proof.
    - mopierotti 8y ago
      Proof is a hard goalpost in any domain, but science, and by extension the scientific method, can support the belief that murder is wrong through a couple plausible paths. The study of evolution gives a mechanism through which a sense of morality is 'hardwired' into us for its adaptive benefits. Or, less teleologically, the study of our own brains can provide evidence for us as humans just not liking certain things. Additionally, a technique like group simulation could show that allowing murder is against the average individual's interest. I'm not claiming I come to my beliefs through deliberate scientific reasoning, but I do think that science has important things to say about most things.
vec 8y ago
> 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! There's a few thousand years of Talmudic scholarship you might want to read up on, just to pick one of the more obvious from among the many counterexamples. Almost every religion is a much broader and much more intellectually diverse intellectual project than their respective fundamentalists would like you to believe.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai. Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.
  - vec 8y ago
    You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and personally fulfilling spiritual journey and a valuable perspective within the community at large), but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?". It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations. In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
sheepmullet 8y ago
> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works. > you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views In practice that is true for science too. I take it on faith that scientists are trustworthy and doing their best to uncover truth.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  > I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works. As an example, Leviticus is fascinating if read as "here's the political structure of a herding culture". It's visibly more of a constitution than a religious text, including the allocation of taxes, a permanent administrator class, a penal system, and a statute of limitations on debt.
gaius 8y ago
you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims Sheer nonsense. The Enlightenment, the greatest period of scientific advancement in human history, was driven by people who saw it as their sacred duty to understand God's Creation. Atheism in the form of the Soviet Union dragged us backwards.

by mfoy_ 8y ago

JackFr 8y ago

> Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. Nonsense - that ignores that fundamentally science is a human activity. Because it is a human activity it is open to the same biases, self-deceptions, fads, groupthink and political pressures as any other human activity. Apart from that, implicit in your defense of science and attack on religion is a belief that true knowledge can only be attained through the scientific method, and nothing which is true can be acquired outside of experiment and observation, which itself is a faith based (though pragmatic) argument. That being said, I make no claims for the existence of a God, Abrahamic or otherwise. At the same time you could be a little more circumspect and humble about what you know to be true.

srean 8y ago
The key phrase is 'falsifiable in principle' this God business (and it is indeed a business, if not all of it) is not. One can have all ones faith in flying spaghetti monster as one cares to have but there is no way even in principle to falsify it if it turns out that it is false.
memonkey 8y ago
If anybody is curious about the work of Science being a fundamentally human activity, check out Bruno Latour. I'm sure there are others, but this is one I've recently discovered. NYTimes did a good article on him: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...
- JackFr 8y ago
  Nice piece.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300187
mfoy_ 8y ago
I'm not saying humans are infallible, but trying to argue that "the scientific method isn't perfect because people aren't perfect" is nonsense, especially if the conclusion you want to draw is that "therefore we should respect faith as an alternative means of determining truth". The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature. In fact, it's practically the only tool we have. Almost every major advancement our species has made has been because someone had a theory, figured out a way to test it, and came to a conclusion with some degree of confidence that they were then able to act upon and share with others. Since this is a thread about philosophy, "truth" (and how one determines it) is extremely relevant. Epistemology is a whole branch of philosophy. If you're truly skeptical, one could even argue that true knowledge cannot be attained at all, and all we can hope to do is arrive at conclusions with as high a degree of confidence as possible. My point is that science offers a way to increase confidence in a conclusion, religion does not. It's as simple as that.
- JackFr 8y ago
  > The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature. I agree. But I also believe freedom is better than slavery. I value wisdom over ignorance. And I believe those things without any proof. The scientific method cannot prove to me that murder is wrong, and yet I hold it to be true. So despite the fact that I agree with the power of the scientific method, I'll cop to truths that I believe without proof.
  - mopierotti 8y ago
    Proof is a hard goalpost in any domain, but science, and by extension the scientific method, can support the belief that murder is wrong through a couple plausible paths. The study of evolution gives a mechanism through which a sense of morality is 'hardwired' into us for its adaptive benefits. Or, less teleologically, the study of our own brains can provide evidence for us as humans just not liking certain things. Additionally, a technique like group simulation could show that allowing murder is against the average individual's interest. I'm not claiming I come to my beliefs through deliberate scientific reasoning, but I do think that science has important things to say about most things.

vec 8y ago

> 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! There's a few thousand years of Talmudic scholarship you might want to read up on, just to pick one of the more obvious from among the many counterexamples. Almost every religion is a much broader and much more intellectually diverse intellectual project than their respective fundamentalists would like you to believe.

mfoy_ 8y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai. Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.
- vec 8y ago
  You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and personally fulfilling spiritual journey and a valuable perspective within the community at large), but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?". It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations. In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.

sheepmullet 8y ago

> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works. > you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views In practice that is true for science too. I take it on faith that scientists are trustworthy and doing their best to uncover truth.

InitialLastName 8y ago
> I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works. As an example, Leviticus is fascinating if read as "here's the political structure of a herding culture". It's visibly more of a constitution than a religious text, including the allocation of taxes, a permanent administrator class, a penal system, and a statute of limitations on debt.

gaius 8y ago

you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims Sheer nonsense. The Enlightenment, the greatest period of scientific advancement in human history, was driven by people who saw it as their sacred duty to understand God's Creation. Atheism in the form of the Soviet Union dragged us backwards.