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Right, this is just Dawkin's-type nonesense with a patronizing mask on. In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of fa

Right, this is just Dawkin's-type nonesense with a patronizing mask on. In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding. All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong.. One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Putting your belief in an entire enterprise of empirical observation doesn't change the act itself, your not smarter because you happen to live at this time where you can put your belief into this particular enterprise of modern science, its just the cards you were dealt.

lern_too_spel 4y ago
> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Dawkins's point is that you don't have to believe in something that is clearly wrong, like horoscopes and Christianity, and you can choose not to make major decisions (like punishing people) over beliefs you have no evidence for and have evidence against. The problem with the author is that he points out people believing in stupid things like shamans and gods and assumes that they must have a smart reason for it. Horoscopes and Christianity are the modern day equivalent, and there is no smart reason for the people who believe in those to do so today, so there is no reason to suppose that there used to be for their equivalents in the past.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  You pray to the alter of "smartness" and your God is no less vengeful and irrational as all the others!
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    As I mentioned above, an insult is not actually a form of rational argument. Science works. Religion doesn't. When I want someone to fix my broken arm or build a bridge, or pretty well anything else I would want to do, I'm going to go with the system that works. You cannot just brush that part aside!
    - dokem 4y ago
      Religion worked for thousands of years to create society and a shared code of ethics and morals. To say otherwise is an uneducated understanding of human history. It may be outdated in many ways now but to say it doesn't work is not a take that gets you any closer to understanding how the world and people work, it just sounds edgy and spiteful.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
        Tom didn't say otherwise. You're arguing against a straw man. To say there are smarter options now is different from saying it didn't work then. Getting illiterate people to gather for a sermon where they could be told to avoid shellfish that could kill them and to avoid harming other people (because an invisible wrathful being would catch them even if the society they lived in did not) served a purpose then that we have developed better systems for since.
      - teawrecks 4y ago
        You've got it backwards. Non-human species develop societies and naturally evolve arbitrary codes of ethics for how they should treat each other based on what keeps the society alive. Humans were no different, then we evolved language, and immediately began retrofitting religion to these arbitrary sets of ethics to justify them. Brains are glorified pattern matchers, but we hadn't yet figured out how to judge the quality of a perceived pattern, so in a desperate fit of apophenia, religions naturally emerged. Eventually we stepped back and developed systematic ways of distinguishing good patterns from bad. We call this system science. Edison said, "I didn't fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work." I see the thousands of religions that humans have come up with as those 2,000 non-light bulbs, and science as the one method that works. Now that we have a working light bulb, we can throw out those other attempts.
        dokem 4y ago
        Religion helped us reach the next stage of societal evolution far beyond what existed before language. For instance, the catholic church forbidding cousins to marry is largely considered the cause of a large leap in both genetic diversity, health, intelligence, and a more expansive social network. This is just one example. Religion is just the word for the collection of knowledge about how the society should operate and I think you are getting too caught up on the metaphysical aspects. The comparison to animal societies and the idea that everything was figured out before we had written language.. hardly an idea worth engaging.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    That cognitive dissonance you're feeling comes from justifying horoscopes and jihad in order to try to avoid feeling silly about your unjustified beliefs. Being smart is the opposite of irrational. Vengefulness is orthogonal to correctness. If the punishment serves to increase the length of your life, it is rational (equivalently, smart). If not, it is stupid.
    - beepbooptheory 4y ago
      Nobody should feel silly! These are good conversations to have. Would it not be more correct to say that the opposite of irrationality is, well, rationality? This is important because rationality is something I assume we agree is a characteristic of humans. Humans can't help but be rational, which is why irrational behavior can be the exception that proves the rule. To say "being smart" is the opposite suddenly creates a a somewhat unscientific rift among human animals, doesn't it? But I do get why you want to say that for your argument, but you should be a little more nuanced in order to get one over on me. Not that I am particularly smart or anything, but just because I am listening to what you are saying. But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you? That is a somewhat novel argument in this context.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
        > Would it not be more correct to say that the opposite of irrationality is, well, rationality? If you are smart, you must be rational. The contrapositive must also be true. If you are irrational, you cannot be smart. My comment points out that your argument that worshipping at the altar of smartness is irrational makes no sense. > But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you? This is self-evident. If you die, all other rewards lose their utility.
        beepbooptheory 4y ago
        I don't understand. Some people spend their whole lives in prison because of false convictions, others live beautiful and exciting lives and die before they're 30. I'd probably want the latter there, but I guess you'd want the former? Edit to your edit: I have had the pleasure to know and study with some of the "smartest" people around in the hard and soft sciences, and let me tell you they can definitely act irrationally (we use the euphemism "eccentric" to gloss over this). Consider a genious mathematician who happens to have OCD. Does their sometimes irrational behavior mean they can't be smart? Have you ever seen "smartness" in a microscope?
dokem 4y ago
An example of this would be the fact that science ultimately provides an approximate truth, really a truth relative to the other accepted scientific truths, as time progress and it can relax itself into the scientific web of understanding. However, many scientific evangelicals will take any current study or hypothesis as immediate truth. This is blind faith and poor understanding of the process. Essentially, they elevate scientists to priesthood where they have direct communication with the higher power where they have access to ultimate truth.
- DougN7 4y ago
  That was beautifully said.
TomSwirly 4y ago
> In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? > Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding. That is the correct answer! How will you refute it? > All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong.. Oh. Big disappointment: you have no refutation, just a lot of insults.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  It is simply a claim, it is one that I would probably attribute to myself sometimes if I'm being honest! I am forced into the act of secular belief like all of you after all, I'm no better. You can feel secure in your beliefs without feeling superior because of them, and you can understand the specificity of our modern scientific framework without sacrificing the force of the scientific story. If you really really think the scientific method or whatever is the end all of human belief, that is precisely a reason to try and stay humbled in that belief, not the opposite. That is just being a good scientist. If you feel insulted by what I said, that is quite telling of your own insecurties and another reason you should pause and breath and listen to others, instead of telling yourself over and over again how smart you are.
roelschroeven 4y ago
> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Can you expand a bit on that? Because to me statements like that are not right or wrong because to me they don't really mean anything. Clearly to many people it does mean something, because you are far from the only one to make statements like that. To be clear, I don't mean any of this in a condescending way; I'm truly trying to understand. For starters, what exactly do you mean by 'faith' and 'to believe in something'? I presume that believing in a god will certainly fit the definition, but what about people who are not religious? Would something like believing in the general goodness of people fit the definition? The thing is, when I read or hear a statement like 'you have to believe in something' I try to determine whether is applies to myself, and then I have a problem. Do I believe in something? I don't know. I don't believe in a god, that's for sure. I do believe in evolution, for example, in the sense that I believe it exists (or more precisely perhaps, I accept the evidence in favor of the theory). But somehow I feel things like that are not what is generally meant by 'something to believe in'. But then I feel like there's nothing really meaningful left that I believe in. And of course then I start to question why I should have to believe in something. But maybe that's just because of a misunderstanding on my part.
- weard_beard 4y ago
  “We just don’t know” only gets you so far. In order to participate in modern society constant little assumptions sneak into your thinking. At about the rate videos are uploaded to YouTube. AKA faster than we have the time and capacity to audit them. We all have faith in the same way we all have spam in our inboxes. It doesn’t mean we all think a Nigerian prince is going to make us rich.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Lots of angles here. For one thing, consider, like a Humean skeptic, small things. You believe if you hit a billiards ball with another, it will roll away at a certain vector. How might we justify this belief? You might say, "well I have seen billiard balls interact before, and this prediction is consistent with my past experiences, I have no reason to believe otherwise." Hume would say: "the belief itself that you can predict a phenomena based on prior analogous observations cannot be justified alone by those observations." That is, there is nothing in your experience alone that proves that things that act one way in the past will continue to act that way in the future, there is something like belief there. But you are probably smarter than that. You would say, "well the study of physics shows that we can generalize the behavior of bodies in space such that we can predict their behavior. And look! We can make planes and computers and such with these generalized rules, so they must be real." But what fundamentally has changed here? Not only is it ultimately the same act of belief, but now you are at best 1 step removed from actual experience. Not only are you putting some belief into the consistency of the universe, you are putting it into a giant infrastructure of research and peer review and state-interest and grants that you can't possibly be personally a part of entirely. You have in fact contracted out your empirical life to others! Because it is "better" or "worse" as a story, does not change the fundamental act of belief. Hume, I believe (its been a long time), would say this kind of believing is a habit, which makes sense to me. To get even crazier, consider even perception itself, as Husserl did. You are looking at a table in your room, you can't see the other side of the table, but you "know" its there. But what do you really know? You know that perception itself tends to present a "world" with certain characteristics like extension, where moving around an object will present different parts of it. But that perception "shows" you a world like this does not justify the world itself, only the characteristics and tendencies of your perception. This is what I mean in principle, perhaps we "know more" but we are certainly not "smarter" than religious people of the past. We just have longer stories for things. Stories that are sometimes, but not always, more fruitful. And a related but different angle: I think even secular/atheist/agnostic people who aren't even necessarily militant weirdos like Dawkins/Harris unconsciously must contextualize themselves and their life in a world of belief. Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief. You go about the world and live your life based on unconscious assumptions that there is fundamentally a ground you are standing on, whether you are a philosopher or not.
teawrecks 4y ago
> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain…In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar." - Richard Feynman The only thing I believe is that what I believe can and should change to fit the data I have available.
feoren 4y ago
> In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? In literally hundreds of ways; if you took the effort to read almost any atheist forum you'd find them. I'll give you what I think is most important one: Scientific secularism is obsessed with proving itself wrong; religion is obsessed with proving itself right.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  It rather obviously isn't or you wouldn't have competing factions within religions (and I think you'll accept you often do).
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  I dont understand how this is an argument for what we are talking about? We aren't talking about scientific secularism or religion in themselves, but how a person can relate to either of them. Science itself isnt walking around trying to prove themselves wrong, people do science and have a belief of what its supposed to be.
  - feoren 4y ago
    Some people have a belief that they have five fingers on their right hand. Some people have a belief that 1 + 1 = 2. Some people have a belief that the world is flat and worldwide governments are conspiring, for shits and giggles apparently, to deceive you. Are all these beliefs equal? I can count the fingers on my hand. I can understand the definitions of "1", "+", "2", and "=", and verify to my own satisfaction why that statement is true. I, and anyone else, can challenge these beliefs, and I personally commit to changing them if the challenge is successful. That's not what happens when flat-earthers or the religious have their beliefs challenged. It's completely the opposite. They refuse to change their beliefs even when their own experiments prove them wrong. They usually refuse to challenge their beliefs at all. You're choosing to use this word "belief" in very different ways, and then pretending it means the same thing. It doesn't.
    - 4y ago

lern_too_spel 4y ago

> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Dawkins's point is that you don't have to believe in something that is clearly wrong, like horoscopes and Christianity, and you can choose not to make major decisions (like punishing people) over beliefs you have no evidence for and have evidence against. The problem with the author is that he points out people believing in stupid things like shamans and gods and assumes that they must have a smart reason for it. Horoscopes and Christianity are the modern day equivalent, and there is no smart reason for the people who believe in those to do so today, so there is no reason to suppose that there used to be for their equivalents in the past.

beepbooptheory 4y ago
You pray to the alter of "smartness" and your God is no less vengeful and irrational as all the others!
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  As I mentioned above, an insult is not actually a form of rational argument. Science works. Religion doesn't. When I want someone to fix my broken arm or build a bridge, or pretty well anything else I would want to do, I'm going to go with the system that works. You cannot just brush that part aside!
  - dokem 4y ago
    Religion worked for thousands of years to create society and a shared code of ethics and morals. To say otherwise is an uneducated understanding of human history. It may be outdated in many ways now but to say it doesn't work is not a take that gets you any closer to understanding how the world and people work, it just sounds edgy and spiteful.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      Tom didn't say otherwise. You're arguing against a straw man. To say there are smarter options now is different from saying it didn't work then. Getting illiterate people to gather for a sermon where they could be told to avoid shellfish that could kill them and to avoid harming other people (because an invisible wrathful being would catch them even if the society they lived in did not) served a purpose then that we have developed better systems for since.
    - teawrecks 4y ago
      You've got it backwards. Non-human species develop societies and naturally evolve arbitrary codes of ethics for how they should treat each other based on what keeps the society alive. Humans were no different, then we evolved language, and immediately began retrofitting religion to these arbitrary sets of ethics to justify them. Brains are glorified pattern matchers, but we hadn't yet figured out how to judge the quality of a perceived pattern, so in a desperate fit of apophenia, religions naturally emerged. Eventually we stepped back and developed systematic ways of distinguishing good patterns from bad. We call this system science. Edison said, "I didn't fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work." I see the thousands of religions that humans have come up with as those 2,000 non-light bulbs, and science as the one method that works. Now that we have a working light bulb, we can throw out those other attempts.
      - dokem 4y ago
        Religion helped us reach the next stage of societal evolution far beyond what existed before language. For instance, the catholic church forbidding cousins to marry is largely considered the cause of a large leap in both genetic diversity, health, intelligence, and a more expansive social network. This is just one example. Religion is just the word for the collection of knowledge about how the society should operate and I think you are getting too caught up on the metaphysical aspects. The comparison to animal societies and the idea that everything was figured out before we had written language.. hardly an idea worth engaging.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  That cognitive dissonance you're feeling comes from justifying horoscopes and jihad in order to try to avoid feeling silly about your unjustified beliefs. Being smart is the opposite of irrational. Vengefulness is orthogonal to correctness. If the punishment serves to increase the length of your life, it is rational (equivalently, smart). If not, it is stupid.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Nobody should feel silly! These are good conversations to have. Would it not be more correct to say that the opposite of irrationality is, well, rationality? This is important because rationality is something I assume we agree is a characteristic of humans. Humans can't help but be rational, which is why irrational behavior can be the exception that proves the rule. To say "being smart" is the opposite suddenly creates a a somewhat unscientific rift among human animals, doesn't it? But I do get why you want to say that for your argument, but you should be a little more nuanced in order to get one over on me. Not that I am particularly smart or anything, but just because I am listening to what you are saying. But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you? That is a somewhat novel argument in this context.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      > Would it not be more correct to say that the opposite of irrationality is, well, rationality? If you are smart, you must be rational. The contrapositive must also be true. If you are irrational, you cannot be smart. My comment points out that your argument that worshipping at the altar of smartness is irrational makes no sense. > But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you? This is self-evident. If you die, all other rewards lose their utility.
      - beepbooptheory 4y ago
        I don't understand. Some people spend their whole lives in prison because of false convictions, others live beautiful and exciting lives and die before they're 30. I'd probably want the latter there, but I guess you'd want the former? Edit to your edit: I have had the pleasure to know and study with some of the "smartest" people around in the hard and soft sciences, and let me tell you they can definitely act irrationally (we use the euphemism "eccentric" to gloss over this). Consider a genious mathematician who happens to have OCD. Does their sometimes irrational behavior mean they can't be smart? Have you ever seen "smartness" in a microscope?

dokem 4y ago

An example of this would be the fact that science ultimately provides an approximate truth, really a truth relative to the other accepted scientific truths, as time progress and it can relax itself into the scientific web of understanding. However, many scientific evangelicals will take any current study or hypothesis as immediate truth. This is blind faith and poor understanding of the process. Essentially, they elevate scientists to priesthood where they have direct communication with the higher power where they have access to ultimate truth.

DougN7 4y ago
That was beautifully said.

TomSwirly 4y ago

> In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? > Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding. That is the correct answer! How will you refute it? > All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong.. Oh. Big disappointment: you have no refutation, just a lot of insults.

beepbooptheory 4y ago
It is simply a claim, it is one that I would probably attribute to myself sometimes if I'm being honest! I am forced into the act of secular belief like all of you after all, I'm no better. You can feel secure in your beliefs without feeling superior because of them, and you can understand the specificity of our modern scientific framework without sacrificing the force of the scientific story. If you really really think the scientific method or whatever is the end all of human belief, that is precisely a reason to try and stay humbled in that belief, not the opposite. That is just being a good scientist. If you feel insulted by what I said, that is quite telling of your own insecurties and another reason you should pause and breath and listen to others, instead of telling yourself over and over again how smart you are.

roelschroeven 4y ago

> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Can you expand a bit on that? Because to me statements like that are not right or wrong because to me they don't really mean anything. Clearly to many people it does mean something, because you are far from the only one to make statements like that. To be clear, I don't mean any of this in a condescending way; I'm truly trying to understand. For starters, what exactly do you mean by 'faith' and 'to believe in something'? I presume that believing in a god will certainly fit the definition, but what about people who are not religious? Would something like believing in the general goodness of people fit the definition? The thing is, when I read or hear a statement like 'you have to believe in something' I try to determine whether is applies to myself, and then I have a problem. Do I believe in something? I don't know. I don't believe in a god, that's for sure. I do believe in evolution, for example, in the sense that I believe it exists (or more precisely perhaps, I accept the evidence in favor of the theory). But somehow I feel things like that are not what is generally meant by 'something to believe in'. But then I feel like there's nothing really meaningful left that I believe in. And of course then I start to question why I should have to believe in something. But maybe that's just because of a misunderstanding on my part.

weard_beard 4y ago
“We just don’t know” only gets you so far. In order to participate in modern society constant little assumptions sneak into your thinking. At about the rate videos are uploaded to YouTube. AKA faster than we have the time and capacity to audit them. We all have faith in the same way we all have spam in our inboxes. It doesn’t mean we all think a Nigerian prince is going to make us rich.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Lots of angles here. For one thing, consider, like a Humean skeptic, small things. You believe if you hit a billiards ball with another, it will roll away at a certain vector. How might we justify this belief? You might say, "well I have seen billiard balls interact before, and this prediction is consistent with my past experiences, I have no reason to believe otherwise." Hume would say: "the belief itself that you can predict a phenomena based on prior analogous observations cannot be justified alone by those observations." That is, there is nothing in your experience alone that proves that things that act one way in the past will continue to act that way in the future, there is something like belief there. But you are probably smarter than that. You would say, "well the study of physics shows that we can generalize the behavior of bodies in space such that we can predict their behavior. And look! We can make planes and computers and such with these generalized rules, so they must be real." But what fundamentally has changed here? Not only is it ultimately the same act of belief, but now you are at best 1 step removed from actual experience. Not only are you putting some belief into the consistency of the universe, you are putting it into a giant infrastructure of research and peer review and state-interest and grants that you can't possibly be personally a part of entirely. You have in fact contracted out your empirical life to others! Because it is "better" or "worse" as a story, does not change the fundamental act of belief. Hume, I believe (its been a long time), would say this kind of believing is a habit, which makes sense to me. To get even crazier, consider even perception itself, as Husserl did. You are looking at a table in your room, you can't see the other side of the table, but you "know" its there. But what do you really know? You know that perception itself tends to present a "world" with certain characteristics like extension, where moving around an object will present different parts of it. But that perception "shows" you a world like this does not justify the world itself, only the characteristics and tendencies of your perception. This is what I mean in principle, perhaps we "know more" but we are certainly not "smarter" than religious people of the past. We just have longer stories for things. Stories that are sometimes, but not always, more fruitful. And a related but different angle: I think even secular/atheist/agnostic people who aren't even necessarily militant weirdos like Dawkins/Harris unconsciously must contextualize themselves and their life in a world of belief. Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief. You go about the world and live your life based on unconscious assumptions that there is fundamentally a ground you are standing on, whether you are a philosopher or not.

teawrecks 4y ago

> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain…In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar." - Richard Feynman The only thing I believe is that what I believe can and should change to fit the data I have available.

feoren 4y ago

> In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"? In literally hundreds of ways; if you took the effort to read almost any atheist forum you'd find them. I'll give you what I think is most important one: Scientific secularism is obsessed with proving itself wrong; religion is obsessed with proving itself right.

olddustytrail 4y ago
It rather obviously isn't or you wouldn't have competing factions within religions (and I think you'll accept you often do).
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I dont understand how this is an argument for what we are talking about? We aren't talking about scientific secularism or religion in themselves, but how a person can relate to either of them. Science itself isnt walking around trying to prove themselves wrong, people do science and have a belief of what its supposed to be.
- feoren 4y ago
  Some people have a belief that they have five fingers on their right hand. Some people have a belief that 1 + 1 = 2. Some people have a belief that the world is flat and worldwide governments are conspiring, for shits and giggles apparently, to deceive you. Are all these beliefs equal? I can count the fingers on my hand. I can understand the definitions of "1", "+", "2", and "=", and verify to my own satisfaction why that statement is true. I, and anyone else, can challenge these beliefs, and I personally commit to changing them if the challenge is successful. That's not what happens when flat-earthers or the religious have their beliefs challenged. It's completely the opposite. They refuse to change their beliefs even when their own experiments prove them wrong. They usually refuse to challenge their beliefs at all. You're choosing to use this word "belief" in very different ways, and then pretending it means the same thing. It doesn't.
  - 4y ago