3 ms·

God vs. Science

3 points by b-man 17y ago

pmichaud 17y ago
The articles poses a question at the beginning about science sort of replacing religion in the popular psyche. It implies that as science explains more and more about our world, people will naturally accept it as obviously true. It just doesn't work that way. Overcomingbias.com and lesswrong.com spend a bunch of time talking about how religion isn't a position chosen after careful consideration of evidence. It's a social cohesion, tribal thing that operates in a totally different process of the brain, and serves an entirely different purpose than logic serves. If science were going to replace dogma because of the overwhelming weight of the evidence, it would have done so already.
- lhorie 17y ago
  I agree. It's worth noting that the vast majority of religious people don't actually care about how the universe ticks; it simply makes no difference to their daily lives. It's too bad that only the loud extremist minorities get all this passive aggressive press.
pmichaud 17y ago
On another note, responding to the statements that no one "knows" religion isn't true, I offer this: My friend Billy and I were sitting in my living room the other day when I told him that in the kitchen, there was a bottle of tequila. He went into the kitchen and saw some El Jimador, and when he came back he knew there really was a bottle of tequila in the kitchen. So we didn't need to go to ABC to pick some up for later. Now, in a technical sense, Billy doesn't actually /know/ there is a bottle of tequila. He saw it, but many possibilities exist: 1) He was mistaken, and the power of my suggestion made him mistake a bottle of bourbon for a bottle of tequila all the way across the kitchen. 2) He actually hallucinated, maybe he doesn't realize that he's Schizophrenic. 3) I tricked him by placing a fake bottle of tequila in the kitchen. 4) etc. So in the pure technical sense, Billy can't say for certain that there's no bottle of tequila. However, for the purposes of planning a party for later that night, we'll be utterly shocked if the bottle isn't there. I'm not going to grill him: "But dude, how do you KNOW the bottle is there?" -- he saw it, it's there. We'll say the probability of the bottle being there is ~1 (which means approaching 1, a la a mathematical limit. Mathematically we can treat it as 100% probable, but the ~ acknowledges that it's not literally 100%) So let's say a religion formed around the idea that my kitchen contains a bottle of tequila. Someone who didn't believe it could plausibly say: No one really knows if the tequila exists, because that would require a PERFECT knowledge of the kitchen, and no one can have an absolutely perfect knowledge of Pete's kitchen. Humans are fallible, therefore we will never TRULY know if the bottle exists or not. So to that person I say, you are correct. Instead of there being a probability of 1 that the bottle exists, there is instead a probability of ~1. So the rational thing to do is behave as though the bottle is present, because the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that it's there. There is maybe a one in a billion or one in a trillion chance that it's not. When we have the party later that night, I enjoy a Margarita on the rocks, with sea salt around the edges of the glass. I add my drunkenness (I had several margaritas) to the evidence that the tequila bottle exists. The party is a success. Yay! So, my point is that it's not correct to act like ~1 is the same as .5 -- many people try to say that because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, that the chance of God (the God of the Book, anyway) existing is 50/50. It's actually more like ~0.
jpwagner 17y ago
Dawkins is so thick-headed. He has a bias about how believers think, and applies this to all of his arguments. Check out this passage from page 6: DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding. COLLINS: That's God. DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case. Collins has just told him his definition of God and Dawkins rejects it. I honestly don't want to jump into an argument on the merits of each side, but intolerance is unacceptable. There certainly exist religious nuts, but this God-delusion belief is itself dogma and is blind to the articulate believers. PS--in that Ben Stein movie (Expelled) Dawkins himself states that life could have been brought to this universe from a higher being, but that that higher being itself had to come from somewhere. This IS "God" for many people. Not very many people believe God is some guy with a white beard who yells and throws lightning bolts.
- jpwagner 17y ago
  Oh...awesome passage: DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt. COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is. Dawkins is again ridiculous. He's defining "miracle" as "impossible event" which is absurd. He's also supposing that people of faith lose scientific skepticism. The retort that he's the only one denouncing something is brilliant.
  - 17y ago

3 points by b-man 17y ago

The articles poses a question at the beginning about science sort of replacing religion in the popular psyche. It implies that as science explains more and more about our world, people will naturally accept it as obviously true. It just doesn't work that way. Overcomingbias.com and lesswrong.com spend a bunch of time talking about how religion isn't a position chosen after careful consideration of evidence. It's a social cohesion, tribal thing that operates in a totally different process of the brain, and serves an entirely different purpose than logic serves. If science were going to replace dogma because of the overwhelming weight of the evidence, it would have done so already.

lhorie 17y ago
I agree. It's worth noting that the vast majority of religious people don't actually care about how the universe ticks; it simply makes no difference to their daily lives. It's too bad that only the loud extremist minorities get all this passive aggressive press.

pmichaud 17y ago

On another note, responding to the statements that no one "knows" religion isn't true, I offer this: My friend Billy and I were sitting in my living room the other day when I told him that in the kitchen, there was a bottle of tequila. He went into the kitchen and saw some El Jimador, and when he came back he knew there really was a bottle of tequila in the kitchen. So we didn't need to go to ABC to pick some up for later. Now, in a technical sense, Billy doesn't actually /know/ there is a bottle of tequila. He saw it, but many possibilities exist: 1) He was mistaken, and the power of my suggestion made him mistake a bottle of bourbon for a bottle of tequila all the way across the kitchen. 2) He actually hallucinated, maybe he doesn't realize that he's Schizophrenic. 3) I tricked him by placing a fake bottle of tequila in the kitchen. 4) etc. So in the pure technical sense, Billy can't say for certain that there's no bottle of tequila. However, for the purposes of planning a party for later that night, we'll be utterly shocked if the bottle isn't there. I'm not going to grill him: "But dude, how do you KNOW the bottle is there?" -- he saw it, it's there. We'll say the probability of the bottle being there is ~1 (which means approaching 1, a la a mathematical limit. Mathematically we can treat it as 100% probable, but the ~ acknowledges that it's not literally 100%) So let's say a religion formed around the idea that my kitchen contains a bottle of tequila. Someone who didn't believe it could plausibly say: No one really knows if the tequila exists, because that would require a PERFECT knowledge of the kitchen, and no one can have an absolutely perfect knowledge of Pete's kitchen. Humans are fallible, therefore we will never TRULY know if the bottle exists or not. So to that person I say, you are correct. Instead of there being a probability of 1 that the bottle exists, there is instead a probability of ~1. So the rational thing to do is behave as though the bottle is present, because the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that it's there. There is maybe a one in a billion or one in a trillion chance that it's not. When we have the party later that night, I enjoy a Margarita on the rocks, with sea salt around the edges of the glass. I add my drunkenness (I had several margaritas) to the evidence that the tequila bottle exists. The party is a success. Yay! So, my point is that it's not correct to act like ~1 is the same as .5 -- many people try to say that because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, that the chance of God (the God of the Book, anyway) existing is 50/50. It's actually more like ~0.

jpwagner 17y ago

Dawkins is so thick-headed. He has a bias about how believers think, and applies this to all of his arguments. Check out this passage from page 6: DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding. COLLINS: That's God. DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case. Collins has just told him his definition of God and Dawkins rejects it. I honestly don't want to jump into an argument on the merits of each side, but intolerance is unacceptable. There certainly exist religious nuts, but this God-delusion belief is itself dogma and is blind to the articulate believers. PS--in that Ben Stein movie (Expelled) Dawkins himself states that life could have been brought to this universe from a higher being, but that that higher being itself had to come from somewhere. This IS "God" for many people. Not very many people believe God is some guy with a white beard who yells and throws lightning bolts.

jpwagner 17y ago
Oh...awesome passage: DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt. COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is. Dawkins is again ridiculous. He's defining "miracle" as "impossible event" which is absurd. He's also supposing that people of faith lose scientific skepticism. The retort that he's the only one denouncing something is brilliant.
- 17y ago