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"non-scientific worldview" I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a

"non-scientific worldview" I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a time when everyone went to church) For example - Darwin had trained to be an Anglican vikar prior to his journey on the Beagle and wrote to his future wife letters full of discussion of divinity. Newton was obviously deeply religious and wrote more about religion than about physics. In fact his view of gd as singular was considered to be heretical by the Anglican church but was perfectly aligned to the old testament - what I am getting at here is that he didn't just happen to have faith by default but had a very deep and personal one. At the conclusion of principia Mathematica he wrote tons friend that he believed this work would make it obvious to a thinking man that presence of gd. Georges lemaitre who came up with the big bang theory was a Belgian Catholic priest. The secular science at the time was adamant about the Greek model of the eternal universe, and we owe our modern view of it to someone who came into the situation already believing a moment of creation. Einstein was famously a non practicing jew who nonetheless at age 11 had taught himself Judaism and later in life advocated for he study of talmud. I can't claim him to be a practitioner but his own writing speaks to a certain expectation of how the universe ought to be (that was later proven out in math) and a belief in a sort of spirit of the universe. The point isn't that he was an orthodox jew but that he is very far from a modern atheist. So I don't actually agree with this idea that religion is non scientific when we owe our deepest scientific understanding to men who saw themselves and the universe through a religious lens. That's not to say that there's no ignorance in some religions and among some practitioners but rather that religion at its best can claim really significant contributions that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best.

tock 6mo ago
They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it. > that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best There are plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. These are unrelated things.
- xyzelement 6mo ago
  >> They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it. Can you justify that claim? >> plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. Feynman is a good example of that. He was raised in a religious family and went to synagogue every week. His dad challenged him to continuously challenge the orthodox knowledge which I suspect the father himself saw within the talmudic tradition etc. As feynman rejected Judaism and religion in general he nonetheless hung on and hugely benefited from the approach his religious father instilled on him. Similar to what I said about Einstein above I am not trying to claim feynman for religion but I think he's very far from "today's atheists" if that makes sense. If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was. >> These are unrelated things As per above I don't see it that way.
  - tock 6mo ago
    > Can you justify that claim? Can you? > Feynman is a good example of that. "Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this." > > If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was. Right. If we are just gonna reach for stuff like this then I'm gonna say Feynman wouldn't turn out to be who he was if he believed in religion. > As per above I don't see it that way. Belief without evidence. Hey I get it now!
    - dh2022 6mo ago
      Brilliant response. Thank you!!
    - co-ent 6mo ago
      > Can you? How could there have ever been religious men of science? The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. - Werner Heisenberg
      - Gander5739 6mo ago
        An interesting postulate.
- notlenin 6mo ago
  I do science and mathematics, and I am 'religious' - I believe in God, which I define simply as the universal consciousness - in other words, I believe the universe has a soul. Much as how Erdos talked about 'proofs from the book', I believe that mathematical and scientific truths exist 'in the mind of God', ie, the universal consciousness, which, by definition, is aware of everything, already knows the truth that we seek, and the process of mathematical and scientific discovery is therefore simply a process of learning more about God. The flow state that one enters into when working is, in my mind, a sort of communion with the divine, which leads to the creation of great work. This is similar, in my mind, to Michelangelo's quote about "seeing David in the marble and setting him free" - the statue already existed in the universal consciousness, and this consciousness guided Michelangelo into bringing it into being. The proof of $THEOREM exists, your job is to find it, and the universe will gently nudge you in the right direction. But obviously, that's just my opinion/point of view. You could just as easily believe that the universe is not conscious, and truth is discovered simply by a combination of luck and effort, and that would probably work just as well ^^
AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
I'll go further. Oppenheimer and Whitehead (neither Christian) have stated, in their respective histories of science, that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science, that it could not have originated in a society with a different worldview. Why? Because the Christian view was that God was a reasonable God, and He made the universe. And because He also gave us reason when He made us, we should be able to understand the universe by reason. All these men, from Newton down to Faraday, looked at the universe and expected to be able to find out how it worked, because of their religion. Their religion didn't lead them to a non-scientific worldview. Their religion led them to create the scientific worldview.
- foobarian 6mo ago
  That's an interesting take. Many years ago, I was chatting with a coworker who had emigrated from China; we got into topics like these, and something he said stuck with me all these years. He basically lamented that Chinese civilization is so deeply driven by Confucius thought, and expressed envy at the Western world's Christian underpinnings saying that it was better at driving people to search for "the truth."
  - dh2022 6mo ago
    Christianity is built upon “believe and do not doubt”. Sorry, I think your Chinese friend was a bit starry-eyed about Christianity…
    - svieira 6mo ago
      Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is almost literally a millennium old at this point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_quaerens_intellectum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_quaerens_intellectum (and much older if you take it back to Saint John's response to the resurrection John 20:8-9)
      - dh2022 6mo ago
        What you wrote is quite obscure. Much more popular is "believe and do not doubt". Also: Jesus' response to Apostle Thomas after his resurrection from the dead is recited during every Easter mass: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries. But this is a straightforwardly transparent attempt at apologetics. It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals. Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism. The usual argument at this point is a No True Scotsman. All those other religions do these things. Never the claimant's own. But for every Pope Leo - who seems like an unusually decent example - there are five Kenneth Copelands, and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires. Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel. Community in practice should be wider than that. There's some extra stress involved in finding your own way, especially in a culture of forced competition. But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.
- something765478 6mo ago
  > It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals. But that's a problem with American evangelicals, not religion as a whole. The earliest universities were sponsored by the church; and the works of ancient scholars were preserved by Catholics and Muslims. > Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism. Sure, but religion also has a long history of fighting against those claims; a lot of slaves adopted Christianity, and used it as a tool to fight against oppression. It was also a large part of the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King Jr was a Baptist Minister, and Malcolm X was a Muslim. > and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires. Plenty of grift among the sciences too. Look at the replication crisis, or companies like Theranos and FTX. In the United States, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death. > Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel. You should probably stay off Hacker News then. For example, plenty of people here celebrate electrification, even though the raw materials needed for that are mined by children and slaves. > But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US. I'm curious, do you have any examples?
keiferski 6mo ago
Probably the most obvious lesson you learn from studying religion(s) is that the word itself is functionally useless. It’s so broad a term that includes basically all intellectual history up to the present, political history, across all countries, civilizations, etc. Which is why if anyone starts claiming that “religion is good/bad” in simplistic terms, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. It is far too broad a label to make such declarations.
- xyzelement 6mo ago
  Just wanted to say I agree. The thing that caused a savage to throw a virgin into a volcano and the thing that caused newton to seek deep into the construction of the universe shouldn't be explained by the same word.
stringfood 6mo ago
Religion is fundamentally against scientific ideas because it presents a bunch of frankly unlikely ideas and then says we cannot test them. Christ rising from the dead cannot be tested and it lives outside of science. Also a lot of religious people in past have poined to Bible as reasons for why sceientific ideas like heliocentrism were correct and it ended up being completley wrong! You are cherry picking the few examples were Religion actually helped science when most of the time it was fought every revelation. Also 90% of people were religious back in the day that doesn't mean 90% of all inventions have religion to thank for it. The fact is that many religions are not testable and though they bring tremendous happiness to its users are not true.

tock 6mo ago

They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it. > that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best There are plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. These are unrelated things.

xyzelement 6mo ago
>> They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it. Can you justify that claim? >> plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. Feynman is a good example of that. He was raised in a religious family and went to synagogue every week. His dad challenged him to continuously challenge the orthodox knowledge which I suspect the father himself saw within the talmudic tradition etc. As feynman rejected Judaism and religion in general he nonetheless hung on and hugely benefited from the approach his religious father instilled on him. Similar to what I said about Einstein above I am not trying to claim feynman for religion but I think he's very far from "today's atheists" if that makes sense. If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was. >> These are unrelated things As per above I don't see it that way.
- tock 6mo ago
  > Can you justify that claim? Can you? > Feynman is a good example of that. "Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this." > > If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was. Right. If we are just gonna reach for stuff like this then I'm gonna say Feynman wouldn't turn out to be who he was if he believed in religion. > As per above I don't see it that way. Belief without evidence. Hey I get it now!
  - dh2022 6mo ago
    Brilliant response. Thank you!!
  - co-ent 6mo ago
    > Can you? How could there have ever been religious men of science? The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. - Werner Heisenberg
    - Gander5739 6mo ago
      An interesting postulate.
notlenin 6mo ago
I do science and mathematics, and I am 'religious' - I believe in God, which I define simply as the universal consciousness - in other words, I believe the universe has a soul. Much as how Erdos talked about 'proofs from the book', I believe that mathematical and scientific truths exist 'in the mind of God', ie, the universal consciousness, which, by definition, is aware of everything, already knows the truth that we seek, and the process of mathematical and scientific discovery is therefore simply a process of learning more about God. The flow state that one enters into when working is, in my mind, a sort of communion with the divine, which leads to the creation of great work. This is similar, in my mind, to Michelangelo's quote about "seeing David in the marble and setting him free" - the statue already existed in the universal consciousness, and this consciousness guided Michelangelo into bringing it into being. The proof of $THEOREM exists, your job is to find it, and the universe will gently nudge you in the right direction. But obviously, that's just my opinion/point of view. You could just as easily believe that the universe is not conscious, and truth is discovered simply by a combination of luck and effort, and that would probably work just as well ^^

AnimalMuppet 6mo ago

I'll go further. Oppenheimer and Whitehead (neither Christian) have stated, in their respective histories of science, that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science, that it could not have originated in a society with a different worldview. Why? Because the Christian view was that God was a reasonable God, and He made the universe. And because He also gave us reason when He made us, we should be able to understand the universe by reason. All these men, from Newton down to Faraday, looked at the universe and expected to be able to find out how it worked, because of their religion. Their religion didn't lead them to a non-scientific worldview. Their religion led them to create the scientific worldview.

foobarian 6mo ago
That's an interesting take. Many years ago, I was chatting with a coworker who had emigrated from China; we got into topics like these, and something he said stuck with me all these years. He basically lamented that Chinese civilization is so deeply driven by Confucius thought, and expressed envy at the Western world's Christian underpinnings saying that it was better at driving people to search for "the truth."
- dh2022 6mo ago
  Christianity is built upon “believe and do not doubt”. Sorry, I think your Chinese friend was a bit starry-eyed about Christianity…
  - svieira 6mo ago
    Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is almost literally a millennium old at this point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_quaerens_intellectum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_quaerens_intellectum (and much older if you take it back to Saint John's response to the resurrection John 20:8-9)
    - dh2022 6mo ago
      What you wrote is quite obscure. Much more popular is "believe and do not doubt". Also: Jesus' response to Apostle Thomas after his resurrection from the dead is recited during every Easter mass: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago

Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries. But this is a straightforwardly transparent attempt at apologetics. It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals. Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism. The usual argument at this point is a No True Scotsman. All those other religions do these things. Never the claimant's own. But for every Pope Leo - who seems like an unusually decent example - there are five Kenneth Copelands, and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires. Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel. Community in practice should be wider than that. There's some extra stress involved in finding your own way, especially in a culture of forced competition. But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.

something765478 6mo ago
> It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals. But that's a problem with American evangelicals, not religion as a whole. The earliest universities were sponsored by the church; and the works of ancient scholars were preserved by Catholics and Muslims. > Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism. Sure, but religion also has a long history of fighting against those claims; a lot of slaves adopted Christianity, and used it as a tool to fight against oppression. It was also a large part of the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King Jr was a Baptist Minister, and Malcolm X was a Muslim. > and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires. Plenty of grift among the sciences too. Look at the replication crisis, or companies like Theranos and FTX. In the United States, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death. > Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel. You should probably stay off Hacker News then. For example, plenty of people here celebrate electrification, even though the raw materials needed for that are mined by children and slaves. > But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US. I'm curious, do you have any examples?

keiferski 6mo ago

Probably the most obvious lesson you learn from studying religion(s) is that the word itself is functionally useless. It’s so broad a term that includes basically all intellectual history up to the present, political history, across all countries, civilizations, etc. Which is why if anyone starts claiming that “religion is good/bad” in simplistic terms, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. It is far too broad a label to make such declarations.

xyzelement 6mo ago
Just wanted to say I agree. The thing that caused a savage to throw a virgin into a volcano and the thing that caused newton to seek deep into the construction of the universe shouldn't be explained by the same word.

stringfood 6mo ago

Religion is fundamentally against scientific ideas because it presents a bunch of frankly unlikely ideas and then says we cannot test them. Christ rising from the dead cannot be tested and it lives outside of science. Also a lot of religious people in past have poined to Bible as reasons for why sceientific ideas like heliocentrism were correct and it ended up being completley wrong! You are cherry picking the few examples were Religion actually helped science when most of the time it was fought every revelation. Also 90% of people were religious back in the day that doesn't mean 90% of all inventions have religion to thank for it. The fact is that many religions are not testable and though they bring tremendous happiness to its users are not true.