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The problem with the religion-based worldviews is that it opens us up to a vast amount of made up believes and leads to a huge variety of different axioms that

The problem with the religion-based worldviews is that it opens us up to a vast amount of made up believes and leads to a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up or public discourse. I think it's vastly preferable to just accept that we don't know the answer to some questions, rather than making something up.

roca 7y ago
The problem with non-religion-based worldviews is that you still have to bridge the fact-value gap somehow, which necessarily entails "a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up our public discourse". In fact it's worse: some religious worldviews are moored to truth claims, but secular-materialist moral philosophy fundamentally can't be.
- reedwolf 7y ago
  >you still have to bridge the fact-value gap Why?
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  With those as well, it's important to go for small axioms. For example Peter Singer's avoidance of suffering is a great example, much better for building a shared moral system than giant assertions like "abortion is evil".
lm28469 7y ago
I mean, the current state of science isn't that far from your description either. Instead of "shut up it's magic" we have "shut up it's quantum physics", the experts in the field are the first ones to admit that they don't understand what they're doing/finding. "See that thing here, that's black matter", 10 years later: "Well actually that's some dark matter mixed with black matter, what is black matter your ask ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". Science is too busy describing and analyzing every minute details that it doesn't offer anything useable in the real world / daily life (on a personal level), that's where beliefs/philosophy intervene imho.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  > Science is too busy describing and analyzing every minute details But that's what science is. It's the iterative process of observation and deduction -- a bottom-up ontology built from observation, experimentation, and interpretation. It's built on the philosophical assumption that reality is orderly, fundamental physical laws (and constants/quantities) are the same everywhere, and that they were the same in the past and will be the same in the future. Those are just working assumptions - we have no reason to assume they're universally true, but they've been very helpful in a practical sense. Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, offer first principles and a system of inductive logic and reasoning based on them (well, those that are coherent - many are not). It's a top-down reasoning system based on (hopefully) just a few axioms, that (hopefully) provides coherent answers on questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny -- the sorts of answers the human heart needs to have a sense of context in life.

roca 7y ago

The problem with non-religion-based worldviews is that you still have to bridge the fact-value gap somehow, which necessarily entails "a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up our public discourse". In fact it's worse: some religious worldviews are moored to truth claims, but secular-materialist moral philosophy fundamentally can't be.

reedwolf 7y ago
>you still have to bridge the fact-value gap Why?
ajmurmann 7y ago
With those as well, it's important to go for small axioms. For example Peter Singer's avoidance of suffering is a great example, much better for building a shared moral system than giant assertions like "abortion is evil".

lm28469 7y ago

I mean, the current state of science isn't that far from your description either. Instead of "shut up it's magic" we have "shut up it's quantum physics", the experts in the field are the first ones to admit that they don't understand what they're doing/finding. "See that thing here, that's black matter", 10 years later: "Well actually that's some dark matter mixed with black matter, what is black matter your ask ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". Science is too busy describing and analyzing every minute details that it doesn't offer anything useable in the real world / daily life (on a personal level), that's where beliefs/philosophy intervene imho.

TimTheTinker 7y ago
> Science is too busy describing and analyzing every minute details But that's what science is. It's the iterative process of observation and deduction -- a bottom-up ontology built from observation, experimentation, and interpretation. It's built on the philosophical assumption that reality is orderly, fundamental physical laws (and constants/quantities) are the same everywhere, and that they were the same in the past and will be the same in the future. Those are just working assumptions - we have no reason to assume they're universally true, but they've been very helpful in a practical sense. Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, offer first principles and a system of inductive logic and reasoning based on them (well, those that are coherent - many are not). It's a top-down reasoning system based on (hopefully) just a few axioms, that (hopefully) provides coherent answers on questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny -- the sorts of answers the human heart needs to have a sense of context in life.