8 ms·

I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how

I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent). If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general. If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-... One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.

garmaine 6y ago
> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Compartmentalization.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing? Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders). If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.
  - AuthorizedCust 6y ago
    I find your example is more strongly of the corruption of fundamentalism on the person rather than of compartmentalization.
  - splithalf 6y ago
    I’d prefer my scientists to be less confident in their understanding of the world, and more humble about their knowledge. Maybe reading Kuhn does that for most people today, but there’s a long tradition of religion fulfilling a similar function, allowing “mystery” back in, emphasizing the imperfection of man. Religion should instill an attitude of “I don’t know, but I want to know.” That’s the right attitude for discovery.
AuthorizedCust 6y ago
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad. > being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.
- fossuser 6y ago
  The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things. This means even if most people most of the time are perfectly pleasant, they can get swept up in other stuff that gets out of hand and hurts people. If you can't persuade someone with evidence based reasoning because their position is based on 'faith' or belief in the face of contrary evidence I don't know what to do with that. There are forms of religious people that dismiss all the 'crazy' things and just have some vague mysticism - which is probably the least harmful form, but is a little odd to me. People like to feel a part of something grand I suppose - but we already are. Existence is pretty amazing even without the human religious myths being true. Maybe one day the myths will be just a part of our collective history (as many older ones currently are).
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things I don’t think that’s true at all, and possibly the opposite is true. Comparing Bangladesh, where I’m from, to America, people here are a lot less religious. But I wouldn’t say the net amount of “crazy” believes is different. People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion. American culture around eating and fitness, and particularly the “clean food” stuff is a good example of this. It’s for the most part completely unscientific, but fervently believed.
    - quickthrowman 6y ago
loveistheanswer 6y ago
>If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Can you steelman what the basic thing is that religious people get wrong?
- fossuser 6y ago
  A lot of the creationist arguments stem from "irreducible complexity" or a misunderstanding of natural selection (the "eye just formed itself somehow"). Both of these things sound reasonable when explained in isolation to someone who grew up with religion, but natural selection is much stronger (light sensing cells benefit survival way before they're an entire eye) etc. It's the 'watchmaker' argument - things must have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist. This always ignores the natural follow up - who created god then? There is no good answer for this (and it just creates an infinite regress). Religious steelmans are weird, because the arguments out front are not the real objections or even the real debate (which makes things confusing). The real debate is more about belief in belief, tribal affiliation, perceived morality, and identity. The arguments out front are mostly rationalizations to try and explain away contrary evidence. Religious people are arguing from a position entirely driven by motivated reasoning. They're not trying to uncover the truth, they're trying to defend what they already know to be true. You see this occasionally on the atheist side too (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as...) the difference though, is the evidence is there if you care to look. If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.
  - loveistheanswer 6y ago
    Indeed, I've known a lot of religious people like the ones you speak of. And I've known and read from many other "religious"/deist people who think those types of people are silly. >If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit. How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?
dcolkitt 6y ago
> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially. It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts. [1] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime_rates#fn__3 http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [2] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-people-more-likely-give-charity-study/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  > To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially. That's different from religiosity correlating with "being a good person" though, which I'm interpreting as "the ability to act both morally and independently". It does seem that some people need religion to be a good person, because they lack the moral structure to do without (due to trauma or bad parenting or whatever). For those people, religion allows them to function in society with a set of business rules, but they still tend to lack a solid moral/ethical decision matrix to function on their own or act outside the contexts they have rules for.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  You are assuming causality there. It could be that an individual’s mindset could lead to both less criminality and more religious participation. It’s not obvious that sending criminals to church would make them less criminal.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  One of your sources is overtly Christian and the other is quite conservative[0]. Here is an academic survey of such studies; seems a lot more nuanced: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261834488_Religion_and_Crime https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261834488_Religion_... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times
mgh2 6y ago
This is a precursory investigation into some beliefs, using logic instead of emotion: https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22 https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22
rayiner 6y ago
As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpret and peoples’ views aren’t really based on the data anyway. (Try talking with a gun control advocate. First note that homicides went down in Australia after gun buybacks. Note reaction. Then note that homicides were going down at the same rate before gun buybacks as after gun buybacks. Note reaction.) And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I don't disagree really - there's still space for intuition and making a guess in places with limited information. I also agree most people are using evidence to drive motivated reasoning for a pre-existing conclusion rather than using it to try to struggle towards whatever the truth may be. The god question is pretty old though, and most of the religious arguments are pretty clearly wrong/bad. They've lost most of their ground to actual experiments and the scientific method. I suspect this is why we see church attendance continuing to decline.
- tptacek 6y ago
  There is no strongly-held opinion anywhere in the world that you can't play that rhetorical trick on, which may be why there are whole papers that have been written about why it's almost never persuasive to deploy gotcha statistics that way.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    is this a rebuttal or an agreement? I think the point of the example was that most people can't rigorously defend their strongly held opinions. they just throw gotchas at each other.
elcritch 6y ago
You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share. Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4]. More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan 4: https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ 5: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-in-the-bible https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-...
- fossuser 6y ago
  I don't mean to imply that a religious person can't be outlier smart in other ways (Knuth being a great example but there are many others), but that doesn't mean something isn't broken with their world view. People are wildly inconsistent by default (myself included) and it takes great effort to try and recognize these kinds of failures in order to correct them. In fact, the smarter the person is - the more complex their rationalizations typically are. As far as finding major religions support a rational world view, it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything so I won't do that here. I'll just say that while I'd like that to be true, I think that it's not.
jariel 6y ago
" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time " Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion. Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point. Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good. 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Science is a tool, not a Truth.
- progman32 6y ago
  > that would be missing the point. Which is? > Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good. It can be, for some people. Not all. My personal relationship to the greater good has more to do with reasoned arguments rather than spirituality. > 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Would you agree it's a highly important tool?
  - jariel 6y ago
    Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe. In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason. In order to even accept the very notion of 'reason' you have to accept some kind of higher truth. In addition you have to accept that there is 'a reasoner'. You can't avoid taking a metaphysical posture - this is the anti-rational position that a lot of knee-jerk opposition to religion is founded upon. There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' - the Church founded all the best/most Universities in the world, and every other university is modelled after that. The Motto of the Ivy Leagues are: 'Truth' or 'Truth and Light' or 'Light' etc. i.e. metaphysical aspirations. Religion is the contemplation of higher order truths, mixed in with a bunch of applied social stuff. Therefore: "Preferring Reasoning to Religion" is to misunderstand religion (i.e. Apples to Oranges), although to be fair, a lot of religious adherents do have a problem with that as well.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe. No, it doesn't. (Scientific materialism posits rules, it concludes (or models with) randomness only where the best efforts to model rules without randomness fail. > In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason. False. There's not teleological purpose, if that's what you mean by “reason”, which is a heavily overloaded term, but all the others (including reason in its causal sense) are compatible with scientific materialism. > There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' That depends on the Church; and recently the ones which don't have a fundamental conflict with reason have been losing people to irreligion, while those which do have such a conflict have had all the growth. So, over time, the religion that exists progressively has more of a conflict with reason.
nickelcitymario 6y ago
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion. The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme. And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it. I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake). If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction. Again, what's the solution? Heck if I know...
goatcode 6y ago
>If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."
austincheney 6y ago
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? That is pretty ridiculous. It’s like saying if there is bad science the scientific theory is broken.
bjourne 6y ago
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is often quoted as the fundamental tenet of Christianity. > If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Donald Knuth is a devout Christian and he has been right about lots of very complicated things.

garmaine 6y ago

> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Compartmentalization.

fossuser 6y ago
I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing? Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders). If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  I find your example is more strongly of the corruption of fundamentalism on the person rather than of compartmentalization.
- splithalf 6y ago
  I’d prefer my scientists to be less confident in their understanding of the world, and more humble about their knowledge. Maybe reading Kuhn does that for most people today, but there’s a long tradition of religion fulfilling a similar function, allowing “mystery” back in, emphasizing the imperfection of man. Religion should instill an attitude of “I don’t know, but I want to know.” That’s the right attitude for discovery.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad. > being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.

fossuser 6y ago
The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things. This means even if most people most of the time are perfectly pleasant, they can get swept up in other stuff that gets out of hand and hurts people. If you can't persuade someone with evidence based reasoning because their position is based on 'faith' or belief in the face of contrary evidence I don't know what to do with that. There are forms of religious people that dismiss all the 'crazy' things and just have some vague mysticism - which is probably the least harmful form, but is a little odd to me. People like to feel a part of something grand I suppose - but we already are. Existence is pretty amazing even without the human religious myths being true. Maybe one day the myths will be just a part of our collective history (as many older ones currently are).
- rayiner 6y ago
  > The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things I don’t think that’s true at all, and possibly the opposite is true. Comparing Bangladesh, where I’m from, to America, people here are a lot less religious. But I wouldn’t say the net amount of “crazy” believes is different. People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion. American culture around eating and fitness, and particularly the “clean food” stuff is a good example of this. It’s for the most part completely unscientific, but fervently believed.
  - quickthrowman 6y ago

loveistheanswer 6y ago

>If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Can you steelman what the basic thing is that religious people get wrong?

fossuser 6y ago
A lot of the creationist arguments stem from "irreducible complexity" or a misunderstanding of natural selection (the "eye just formed itself somehow"). Both of these things sound reasonable when explained in isolation to someone who grew up with religion, but natural selection is much stronger (light sensing cells benefit survival way before they're an entire eye) etc. It's the 'watchmaker' argument - things must have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist. This always ignores the natural follow up - who created god then? There is no good answer for this (and it just creates an infinite regress). Religious steelmans are weird, because the arguments out front are not the real objections or even the real debate (which makes things confusing). The real debate is more about belief in belief, tribal affiliation, perceived morality, and identity. The arguments out front are mostly rationalizations to try and explain away contrary evidence. Religious people are arguing from a position entirely driven by motivated reasoning. They're not trying to uncover the truth, they're trying to defend what they already know to be true. You see this occasionally on the atheist side too (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as...) the difference though, is the evidence is there if you care to look. If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago
  Indeed, I've known a lot of religious people like the ones you speak of. And I've known and read from many other "religious"/deist people who think those types of people are silly. >If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit. How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?

dcolkitt 6y ago

> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially. It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts. [1] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime_rates#fn__3 http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [2] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-people-more-likely-give-charity-study/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...

arrosenberg 6y ago
> To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially. That's different from religiosity correlating with "being a good person" though, which I'm interpreting as "the ability to act both morally and independently". It does seem that some people need religion to be a good person, because they lack the moral structure to do without (due to trauma or bad parenting or whatever). For those people, religion allows them to function in society with a set of business rules, but they still tend to lack a solid moral/ethical decision matrix to function on their own or act outside the contexts they have rules for.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
You are assuming causality there. It could be that an individual’s mindset could lead to both less criminality and more religious participation. It’s not obvious that sending criminals to church would make them less criminal.
ericbarrett 6y ago
One of your sources is overtly Christian and the other is quite conservative[0]. Here is an academic survey of such studies; seems a lot more nuanced: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261834488_Religion_and_Crime https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261834488_Religion_... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times

mgh2 6y ago

This is a precursory investigation into some beliefs, using logic instead of emotion: https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22 https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22

rayiner 6y ago

As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpret and peoples’ views aren’t really based on the data anyway. (Try talking with a gun control advocate. First note that homicides went down in Australia after gun buybacks. Note reaction. Then note that homicides were going down at the same rate before gun buybacks as after gun buybacks. Note reaction.) And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.

fossuser 6y ago
I don't disagree really - there's still space for intuition and making a guess in places with limited information. I also agree most people are using evidence to drive motivated reasoning for a pre-existing conclusion rather than using it to try to struggle towards whatever the truth may be. The god question is pretty old though, and most of the religious arguments are pretty clearly wrong/bad. They've lost most of their ground to actual experiments and the scientific method. I suspect this is why we see church attendance continuing to decline.
tptacek 6y ago
There is no strongly-held opinion anywhere in the world that you can't play that rhetorical trick on, which may be why there are whole papers that have been written about why it's almost never persuasive to deploy gotcha statistics that way.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  is this a rebuttal or an agreement? I think the point of the example was that most people can't rigorously defend their strongly held opinions. they just throw gotchas at each other.

elcritch 6y ago

You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share. Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4]. More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan 4: https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ 5: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-in-the-bible https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-...

fossuser 6y ago
I don't mean to imply that a religious person can't be outlier smart in other ways (Knuth being a great example but there are many others), but that doesn't mean something isn't broken with their world view. People are wildly inconsistent by default (myself included) and it takes great effort to try and recognize these kinds of failures in order to correct them. In fact, the smarter the person is - the more complex their rationalizations typically are. As far as finding major religions support a rational world view, it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything so I won't do that here. I'll just say that while I'd like that to be true, I think that it's not.

jariel 6y ago

" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time " Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion. Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point. Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good. 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Science is a tool, not a Truth.

progman32 6y ago
> that would be missing the point. Which is? > Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good. It can be, for some people. Not all. My personal relationship to the greater good has more to do with reasoned arguments rather than spirituality. > 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Would you agree it's a highly important tool?
- jariel 6y ago
  Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe. In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason. In order to even accept the very notion of 'reason' you have to accept some kind of higher truth. In addition you have to accept that there is 'a reasoner'. You can't avoid taking a metaphysical posture - this is the anti-rational position that a lot of knee-jerk opposition to religion is founded upon. There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' - the Church founded all the best/most Universities in the world, and every other university is modelled after that. The Motto of the Ivy Leagues are: 'Truth' or 'Truth and Light' or 'Light' etc. i.e. metaphysical aspirations. Religion is the contemplation of higher order truths, mixed in with a bunch of applied social stuff. Therefore: "Preferring Reasoning to Religion" is to misunderstand religion (i.e. Apples to Oranges), although to be fair, a lot of religious adherents do have a problem with that as well.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe. No, it doesn't. (Scientific materialism posits rules, it concludes (or models with) randomness only where the best efforts to model rules without randomness fail. > In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason. False. There's not teleological purpose, if that's what you mean by “reason”, which is a heavily overloaded term, but all the others (including reason in its causal sense) are compatible with scientific materialism. > There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' That depends on the Church; and recently the ones which don't have a fundamental conflict with reason have been losing people to irreligion, while those which do have such a conflict have had all the growth. So, over time, the religion that exists progressively has more of a conflict with reason.

nickelcitymario 6y ago

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion. The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme. And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it. I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake). If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction. Again, what's the solution? Heck if I know...

goatcode 6y ago

>If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."

austincheney 6y ago

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? That is pretty ridiculous. It’s like saying if there is bad science the scientific theory is broken.

bjourne 6y ago

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is often quoted as the fundamental tenet of Christianity. > If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Donald Knuth is a devout Christian and he has been right about lots of very complicated things.