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I mean this with no offense but I think you're reflecting the deficit in thinking I mention. E.g. here: > If you're just saying that people can use religions

I mean this with no offense but I think you're reflecting the deficit in thinking I mention. E.g. here: > If you're just saying that people can use religions to make themselves feel better by believing in things that are false, I assume you're using science's rhetoric of false here. Which is really just can it be observed using the tools & vocabulary of science. > I have serious problems with this sentiment that there's some other way of knowing things besides studying reality What is reality? Is science reality? Science has models. We are mistaken to think that "particle" is somehow a brutally real thing. "Particle" is a word used to model observations. > It is perfectly possible for example to derive a workable moral systems without involving religion. This is a contentious statement. There are intense debates about this. The Peterson/Harris Vancouver debates are famous (infamous?) vigorous but futile attempts at trying to sort this out. Actually -- just to make sure I'm clear. You can't derive a workable moral system from scientific axioms/observations. Now someone may report to be an atheist and report that they have a moral outlook that involves respect for fellow man. I guess I won't insist that its Religion; I simply insist its not Science that is giving them their moral outlook.

kiba 7y ago
Now someone may report to be an atheist and report that they have a moral outlook that involves respect for fellow man. I guess I won't insist that its Religion; I simply insist its not Science that is giving them their moral outlook. When people claimed that god exists, then it is a claim that can be challenged. If someone claimed that Jesus Christ came to back to life, then it is a claim that can be challenged. Ditto for system of morality where certain aspects can be subjected to empirical testing. It's intellectually dishonest to say that Christians or some other religion X have no claims that could be subjected to scientific scrutiny.
- tabtab 7y ago
  Science doesn't create "goals", only describes impacts at best. It has no will or motivation by itself. But I am bothered by the idea the primary reason religious people behave is due to fear of becoming BBQ. What about personal pride in not being a jerk?
  - anticensor 7y ago
    Not science, but scientists do define goals for themselves.
  - wellpast 7y ago
    The Hellfire fear is a naive interpretation of what most religious people derive from their religion.
    - tabtab 7y ago
      Some groups do claim that "fear of God's wrath" (or Satan's) makes people behave better. I will agree that different sects have widely different interpretations of such.
  - kiba 7y ago
    I am not making any claim that "science" have goals.
  - roca 7y ago
    If Hell exists then fear of it is healthy. Empirically I don't know any Christians for whom that is a primary motivator. In Protestant Christianity in particular, that's a weak motivator because it is generally taught that all a Christian's sins are forgiven through Jesus, so choosing to commit a sin will not send us to hell. (Patterns of sinful behaviour might, however, rightly cause us and others to question the sincerity of our commitment to Jesus.) Personal pride in not being a jerk is a good motivation, but that kind of motivation can easily turn to self-righteousness. For Christians, a healthy motivation is to consider Romans 6 and understand that if we really believe we are sinners and we really believe our sins are forgiven through Jesus, then we should please him by doing what he wants, out of love and gratitude.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  > If someone claimed that Jesus Christ came to back to life, then it is a claim that can be challenged. True, but doesn't change that science ultimately deals with models we create to explain our observations. They're nowhere near as nilly-willy as, say, scientology, sure. But it's also not 100% objective, everything is filtered through us, or the models and instruments we make. > And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer-readings which we can observe, The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber. -- Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Domain of Physical Science (1925) > Ditto for system of morality where certain aspects can be subjected to empirical testing. I honestly have no idea what aspects of a moral system one could test empirically, could you give an example? The way I see it, science can tell us that malnutrition in kids can affect their development and how, but it can't tell us whether it's right or wrong to let children starve, for example. It can't even tell us if it's better for people to be healthy or sick, happy or unhappy, and so on. It can at best measure physical reality accurately and even with some predictive power, but that still leaves all the moral questions (I can think of right now) to us.
chousuke 7y ago
> I assume you're using science's rhetoric of false here. Which is really just can it be observed using the tools & vocabulary of science. What useful definition of true and false exist besides the scientific one? And why would any religion have a claim to this? > > I have serious problems with this sentiment that there's some other way of knowing things besides studying reality > What is reality? Is science reality? Science has models. We are mistaken to think that "particle" is somehow a brutally real thing. "Particle" is a word used to model observations. Reality is that which we attempt to describe using science. Any other definition is nonsensical, because of we want to actually know anything that is practically useful, we have no choice but to accept reality as real. If you disagree, please provide another definition and show me how it's useful. > Actually -- just to make sure I'm clear. You can't derive a workable moral system from scientific axioms/observations. There's no reason for moral axioms to be scientific. We can simply decide that striving towards universal wellbeing is morally good, and that suffering should be minimized. The difference is that I don't drag the baggage of religion with me. > Now someone may report to be an atheist and report that they have a moral outlook that involves respect for fellow man. I guess I won't insist that its Religion; I simply insist its not Science that is giving them their moral outlook. I think you're wrongly equivocating "religion" with simple value statements here. I personally think that this kind of rhetoric is dangerous and gives religion as a concept more credence that it deserves, but I won't go any further on that topic. EDIT: I was missing a rather crucial 'but'. I hope I didn't confuse anyone.
- roca 7y ago
  > We can simply decide that striving towards universal wellbeing is morally good, and that suffering should be minimized. Your "axiom" will also have to define what "universal wellbeing" and "suffering" actually mean, and how these maxima/minima are to be computed, etc. That is not simple at all. Having done that, you have to admit that your decision is arbitrary (except, hopefully, it aligns modestly well with the evolved/cultural preferences of some set of brains). I hope you won't lapse into dishonesty and tell brains that reach different conclusions from their evolved/cultural preferences that your decision is "right" or "wrong" in any sense similar to the "right" and "wrong" of scientific truth. Unfortunately I have never yet met anyone who is able to resist that temptation.
UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Re: your last statement, you can say it is not science that gave people[0] their morals, and I would agree. Science didn't create humans, so it can't be blamed for human's properties. But it is a job of science to describe how those morals emerge and why they are the way they are: yadda yadda, evolution, group selection, basic biological realities, some other natural mechanisms I haven't heard about. Thousands of man-years of research to be done yet I'm sure. It is also a job of science to extend and improve existing moral framework where it fails due to internal contradictions. Because that framework was created by many millennia of biological and cultural evolution, mostly in small tribe hunter gatherer context, once you move people out of that context things start to work less well. Things like scale insensitivity and loss aversion affect our moral intuitions. Depending on how the question is posed you can judge exact same outcome to be a good or bad, moral or immoral (no wonder philosophers spend all their time running more and more elaborate trolley experiments). For me that indicates that morals are more like evolved heuristics for cooperating in tribal environment than a set of divine rules bestowed by a triple-omni deity. [0] - Both atheists and religious people get their core morals from the same place. What that place is, is being contended.
- dabbledash 7y ago
  There is distinction between investigating how people’s moral intuitions work, which science can do, and answering the question “what is actually Good.” Many materialists would say the latter question doesn’t have an answer, because there is no such thing as morality outside of human opinion.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    I generally agree with that, but would extend it to hypothetical other sentient beings, artificial or otherwise. With every species having potentially distinct moral frameworks that can have different answer to that question. You could say I'm a species-level moral relativist. :) Still, answering "what is actually Good" is not a trivial question because self-contradicting moral intuitions are too easily confused. Here is where science works better than other approaches (most of which involve just intuiting harder or relying on sloppy intuitions of ancients) -- if for example you value individual rights and have to decide if mandatory vaccinations are a Good or a Bad thing, there is no substitute to using a scientific approach, investigating outcomes as fully as possible and then morally intuiting at those much more fleshed out scenarios. Let say you found out that mandatory vaxxing everybody would save X number of people, kill Y number with side-effects that would otherwise survive, cause Z amount of secondary goodness (ie some members of public becoming less selfish) and Ω amount of secondary badness (ie other members of public becoming paranoid and state authoritarian). Now you can look at those projected outcomes and weigh them using your conflicting intuitions and decide which parts you care more about. And if numbers change, maybe your judgement also changes.
dabbledash 7y ago
I agree that there are claims (normative, aesthetic, etc.) that are not amenable to scientific inquiry. But most religious people would claim that 1) a god exists and 2) that god has observable effects on the material world. If claim 2 is true we should be able to use the usual tools to know it. If claim 1 is true but claim 2 is false, that is practically indistinguishable from a situation where God does not exist at all.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > If claim 2 is true we should be able to use the usual tools to know it. Not necessarily. The "usual tools" presume objects that react minimally to observation, and they tend to loose potency when the objects being studied are aware of observation and especially of its intent. You see reactions to this fact in psychological research, which often has to mislead experimental participants to get them to react less unnaturally, for instance. If God exists, He knows of your tests and may choose to have you point your "usual tools" somewhere else when He's "having an observable effect."
- catawbasam 7y ago
  Re claim 2, I claim that it has an effect on my experience: Though I was at one time an atheist, I experienced what I can only describe as the presence of God or the divine spirit. I am far from the only witness. Does this count as an observable effect on the material world? I am certainly a material being living in the physical universe, but you could not detect that experience with a telescope. Maybe with an MRI? Dunno. Of course you can claim the experience was probably a delusion. But you'll never convince me of that.
  - dabbledash 7y ago
    I definitely count that as an observable effect on the material world. There’s not enough information for me to know what caused it, but yeah I think it’s a totally normal datapoint. I’m not arguing about the existence of God per se, I’m saying that I find the idea that claims about God are totally different than other kinds of claims unconvincing.

kiba 7y ago

Now someone may report to be an atheist and report that they have a moral outlook that involves respect for fellow man. I guess I won't insist that its Religion; I simply insist its not Science that is giving them their moral outlook. When people claimed that god exists, then it is a claim that can be challenged. If someone claimed that Jesus Christ came to back to life, then it is a claim that can be challenged. Ditto for system of morality where certain aspects can be subjected to empirical testing. It's intellectually dishonest to say that Christians or some other religion X have no claims that could be subjected to scientific scrutiny.

tabtab 7y ago
Science doesn't create "goals", only describes impacts at best. It has no will or motivation by itself. But I am bothered by the idea the primary reason religious people behave is due to fear of becoming BBQ. What about personal pride in not being a jerk?
- anticensor 7y ago
  Not science, but scientists do define goals for themselves.
- wellpast 7y ago
  The Hellfire fear is a naive interpretation of what most religious people derive from their religion.
  - tabtab 7y ago
    Some groups do claim that "fear of God's wrath" (or Satan's) makes people behave better. I will agree that different sects have widely different interpretations of such.
- kiba 7y ago
  I am not making any claim that "science" have goals.
- roca 7y ago
  If Hell exists then fear of it is healthy. Empirically I don't know any Christians for whom that is a primary motivator. In Protestant Christianity in particular, that's a weak motivator because it is generally taught that all a Christian's sins are forgiven through Jesus, so choosing to commit a sin will not send us to hell. (Patterns of sinful behaviour might, however, rightly cause us and others to question the sincerity of our commitment to Jesus.) Personal pride in not being a jerk is a good motivation, but that kind of motivation can easily turn to self-righteousness. For Christians, a healthy motivation is to consider Romans 6 and understand that if we really believe we are sinners and we really believe our sins are forgiven through Jesus, then we should please him by doing what he wants, out of love and gratitude.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
> If someone claimed that Jesus Christ came to back to life, then it is a claim that can be challenged. True, but doesn't change that science ultimately deals with models we create to explain our observations. They're nowhere near as nilly-willy as, say, scientology, sure. But it's also not 100% objective, everything is filtered through us, or the models and instruments we make. > And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer-readings which we can observe, The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber. -- Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Domain of Physical Science (1925) > Ditto for system of morality where certain aspects can be subjected to empirical testing. I honestly have no idea what aspects of a moral system one could test empirically, could you give an example? The way I see it, science can tell us that malnutrition in kids can affect their development and how, but it can't tell us whether it's right or wrong to let children starve, for example. It can't even tell us if it's better for people to be healthy or sick, happy or unhappy, and so on. It can at best measure physical reality accurately and even with some predictive power, but that still leaves all the moral questions (I can think of right now) to us.

chousuke 7y ago

> I assume you're using science's rhetoric of false here. Which is really just can it be observed using the tools & vocabulary of science. What useful definition of true and false exist besides the scientific one? And why would any religion have a claim to this? > > I have serious problems with this sentiment that there's some other way of knowing things besides studying reality > What is reality? Is science reality? Science has models. We are mistaken to think that "particle" is somehow a brutally real thing. "Particle" is a word used to model observations. Reality is that which we attempt to describe using science. Any other definition is nonsensical, because of we want to actually know anything that is practically useful, we have no choice but to accept reality as real. If you disagree, please provide another definition and show me how it's useful. > Actually -- just to make sure I'm clear. You can't derive a workable moral system from scientific axioms/observations. There's no reason for moral axioms to be scientific. We can simply decide that striving towards universal wellbeing is morally good, and that suffering should be minimized. The difference is that I don't drag the baggage of religion with me. > Now someone may report to be an atheist and report that they have a moral outlook that involves respect for fellow man. I guess I won't insist that its Religion; I simply insist its not Science that is giving them their moral outlook. I think you're wrongly equivocating "religion" with simple value statements here. I personally think that this kind of rhetoric is dangerous and gives religion as a concept more credence that it deserves, but I won't go any further on that topic. EDIT: I was missing a rather crucial 'but'. I hope I didn't confuse anyone.

roca 7y ago
> We can simply decide that striving towards universal wellbeing is morally good, and that suffering should be minimized. Your "axiom" will also have to define what "universal wellbeing" and "suffering" actually mean, and how these maxima/minima are to be computed, etc. That is not simple at all. Having done that, you have to admit that your decision is arbitrary (except, hopefully, it aligns modestly well with the evolved/cultural preferences of some set of brains). I hope you won't lapse into dishonesty and tell brains that reach different conclusions from their evolved/cultural preferences that your decision is "right" or "wrong" in any sense similar to the "right" and "wrong" of scientific truth. Unfortunately I have never yet met anyone who is able to resist that temptation.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago

Re: your last statement, you can say it is not science that gave people[0] their morals, and I would agree. Science didn't create humans, so it can't be blamed for human's properties. But it is a job of science to describe how those morals emerge and why they are the way they are: yadda yadda, evolution, group selection, basic biological realities, some other natural mechanisms I haven't heard about. Thousands of man-years of research to be done yet I'm sure. It is also a job of science to extend and improve existing moral framework where it fails due to internal contradictions. Because that framework was created by many millennia of biological and cultural evolution, mostly in small tribe hunter gatherer context, once you move people out of that context things start to work less well. Things like scale insensitivity and loss aversion affect our moral intuitions. Depending on how the question is posed you can judge exact same outcome to be a good or bad, moral or immoral (no wonder philosophers spend all their time running more and more elaborate trolley experiments). For me that indicates that morals are more like evolved heuristics for cooperating in tribal environment than a set of divine rules bestowed by a triple-omni deity. [0] - Both atheists and religious people get their core morals from the same place. What that place is, is being contended.

dabbledash 7y ago
There is distinction between investigating how people’s moral intuitions work, which science can do, and answering the question “what is actually Good.” Many materialists would say the latter question doesn’t have an answer, because there is no such thing as morality outside of human opinion.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  I generally agree with that, but would extend it to hypothetical other sentient beings, artificial or otherwise. With every species having potentially distinct moral frameworks that can have different answer to that question. You could say I'm a species-level moral relativist. :) Still, answering "what is actually Good" is not a trivial question because self-contradicting moral intuitions are too easily confused. Here is where science works better than other approaches (most of which involve just intuiting harder or relying on sloppy intuitions of ancients) -- if for example you value individual rights and have to decide if mandatory vaccinations are a Good or a Bad thing, there is no substitute to using a scientific approach, investigating outcomes as fully as possible and then morally intuiting at those much more fleshed out scenarios. Let say you found out that mandatory vaxxing everybody would save X number of people, kill Y number with side-effects that would otherwise survive, cause Z amount of secondary goodness (ie some members of public becoming less selfish) and Ω amount of secondary badness (ie other members of public becoming paranoid and state authoritarian). Now you can look at those projected outcomes and weigh them using your conflicting intuitions and decide which parts you care more about. And if numbers change, maybe your judgement also changes.

dabbledash 7y ago

I agree that there are claims (normative, aesthetic, etc.) that are not amenable to scientific inquiry. But most religious people would claim that 1) a god exists and 2) that god has observable effects on the material world. If claim 2 is true we should be able to use the usual tools to know it. If claim 1 is true but claim 2 is false, that is practically indistinguishable from a situation where God does not exist at all.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
> If claim 2 is true we should be able to use the usual tools to know it. Not necessarily. The "usual tools" presume objects that react minimally to observation, and they tend to loose potency when the objects being studied are aware of observation and especially of its intent. You see reactions to this fact in psychological research, which often has to mislead experimental participants to get them to react less unnaturally, for instance. If God exists, He knows of your tests and may choose to have you point your "usual tools" somewhere else when He's "having an observable effect."
catawbasam 7y ago
Re claim 2, I claim that it has an effect on my experience: Though I was at one time an atheist, I experienced what I can only describe as the presence of God or the divine spirit. I am far from the only witness. Does this count as an observable effect on the material world? I am certainly a material being living in the physical universe, but you could not detect that experience with a telescope. Maybe with an MRI? Dunno. Of course you can claim the experience was probably a delusion. But you'll never convince me of that.
- dabbledash 7y ago
  I definitely count that as an observable effect on the material world. There’s not enough information for me to know what caused it, but yeah I think it’s a totally normal datapoint. I’m not arguing about the existence of God per se, I’m saying that I find the idea that claims about God are totally different than other kinds of claims unconvincing.