Yup I’m angry at stupidity an all it’s forms and guises, problem ?

Yup I’m angry at stupidity an all it’s forms and guises, problem ? — invicta

Just that you're like the mirror image of the angry atheist, making the same sorts of claims about stupidity.

Yes I’m not angry at faith or lack of it. I’m angry at stupidity because it leads to ignorance and ignorance leads to evil.

I’m angry at stupidity because it leads to ignorance and ignorance leads to evil. — invicta

The stupidity of religious people and atheists? Or are only atheists stupid?

Both I don’t care what you believe or not believe in, just stupidity.

Ok. But what counts as stupid? If we are able to identify stupidity then are we saying we are not stupid - we are above it in some way, no?

Stupid is dismissively concluding crap such as god’s existence or not existence. @Tom Storm

Stupid is dismissively concluding crap such as god’s existence or not existence. Tom Storm — invicta

Well, many atheists don't conclude there is no god. I don't. I simply say I am not convinced. I think we've had this discussion.

I've also noticed that many theists are against religion and favour science, so the debate is a lot more nuanced than some people think.

No I don’t usually let stupidity slide for the reason that stupidity in action has real world consequences if it’s not confronted.

I just accept stupidity as one of those fecund qualities humans are naturally endowed with. What are the real world consequences you see - climate change, the rise of religious nationalism, teen suicide rates - or do you hold to more of a conservative worldview?

I don’t wish to justify stupidity of course because I’m not immune to it myself. I do something stupid at least once a day.

But it’s the combination of stupidity with arrogance that creates problems because the actions of the stupid person are not seen as stupid at the time, but it’s the persistence of it and not learning from the mistake. You really can’t change stupid nor can you lead a horse to water and make it drink.

So what do you do?
@Tom Storm

So what do you do? — invicta

About stupidity? I think stupidity is an unwinnable war.

No, I beat stupid people all the time, especially at logic and chess. Although a drunk guy beat me once, perhaps I underestimated him when he says he’d been drinking for 7 hours straight.

There’s all kinds of stupid of course but the advantage of the smart person is they can adapt whereas the stupid not so much.

In any case for me the Christian faith has taught me a few things such as humility, the theist who don’t practice them ain’t a real Christian. It also teaches charity yet I find Christians who are the opposite.

In essence it teaches against vanity and we need this in the age of idols and social media more than ever.

Sure humility and compassion and kindness are secular too but sometimes I just feel like whacking the kardashians with my king James’s over the head repeatedly till they start being a bit kinder or just stop saying stupid shit, and if I fail removing their stupidity at least I’ve removed their dense makeup.

Please note I’m not a woman beater, though I’m sure the bible says to keep women in check somewhere :rofl:

I think we see this differently. Explanations are explanations. Besides religious explanations do not always provide comfort. They often provide fear and trembling and terrifying obligations. — Tom Storm

Have you ever wondered why people enjoy horror movies? Comfort does not function with just being in a pink cloud happy place. Comfort through the invented authority that people get through religion is about getting guidance in thought and experience, emotional guidance requires emotional balance to be able to guide through the emotional range humans have. People don't seek comfort by being put in a room filled with soft pillows, they seek comfort by not being alone in experience. Especially having a mentor in such a place. When the mentors are gone, we invent them. The invisible friend, the actual friend who seems much more emotionally stable, the husband or wife, the authority leader who seems to know more, or... the higher power to surrender to because then, everything will be fine. All of them, guide the emotional journey of a person, even if it's a fantasy in their head. Religion is a form of storytelling in which the fictional characters become real in the minds of the believers. All in service of that comfort.

The key thing here is that I'm not saying anything negative about this comfort, I'm saying it is crucial, maybe even essential to our very existence. But instead of forming a society around a more rational approach to this need for comfort and authority, people confuse themselves into looking at religion as something other than what it is, giving it merits it does not or should not have.

The point for me is that both world views attempt to make sense of the world - explanations. How they go about it is of course quite different but that has no impact on the fact they are both trying to explain reality. — Tom Storm

The key difference is the approach and end goal. Science does it out of curiosity and the end goal is knowledge, understanding, and the will to create out of all the entropy.

Religion does it out of comfort with the end goal of proving that these comforting ideas are real or else render this comfort false. The driving goal for religious people to explain reality to be in line with their religion is to confirm, not to explain. This confirmation is driven by the fear of losing the comfort of the idea they invented as the foundation for existence. And through generations, it is hard to rid yourself of a comforting fantasy that has for hundreds of years been said to be true. Looking at history, the ones who proposed models of reality that went against the church or common ideas about existence were fearless in front of the safety of that comfort. For them, they upheld truth higher than comfort and through that, they were able to understand the difference between confirmation bias and truth/facts. As society matured and understood more and more it started to form rules surrounding all of this and then science as we know it today was formed, but this dislocation of the human bias only happened recently through historical perspectives.

As it happens, I have known a number of former evangelicals who have deconverted and most of them have stated that science has made the world a whole lot less scary on account of the supernatural not being the explanation of why we are here. — Tom Storm

Yes, that is true. Maybe because in scientific answers, the confirmation becomes actual truth (when proved). When something is explained it is no longer scary. However, it doesn't change the fact that horrors exist for real. The horrors of people doing others harm, the horrors of a faulty mind, the horrors of nature, the horrors of spacetime breaking down, horrors of alien life. There are a number of things that are still scary about reality without there ever being anything supernatural. They've just experienced that they don't need a supernatural layer of horror on top of all that.

However, as I've been saying, they still exist under the psychological need for comfort and authority over them, as all people do. The psychological relationship between the experience in religion and the experience of parents/mentors when growing up is missed whenever there are discussions about religion and science.

What I'm trying to point out is that we frequently equalize between science and religion all the time in discussions, when they aren't really the same thing. Just because both share some similarities in searching for answers, the surrounding factors, psychology, and so on, differ so much between them that we give the wrong framework around what religion is. It is also in evangelists' best interest to frame religion on equal grounds to science. But to talk honestly about these two, we need to study the fundamentals of psychology driving why people conduct science and why they live by religious belief.

No, I beat stupid people all the time, especially at logic and chess. — invicta

Sounds like winning is important to you. I'm too stupid to understand chess or logic. A woman tried to teach me chess, but I found it insufferably boring as I do all games.

I've been an atheist since I was young. I have a number of theist friends, but some dislike religion as much or more than I. What I have learned about belief is that there is no such thing as a Christian or a Hindu as such. Believers tend to embody a version of a faith they think is correct. It is often at odds with other believer's versions of the same faith. And all of them believe they have the correct interpretation. Lots of dogma and certainty going in this space and yet no way to demonstrate which version is correct.

How would you would describe your variety of Christianity? Why does it matter to you?

I’d describe myself as a Quaker, so no middle men like preachers, priests or any clergy apart from the odd ceremonial occasion such as a wedding or a funeral.

So handpicked values, and I only pick the best

So handpicked values, and I only pick the best — invicta

That's what they all say.

Sure if you disagree agree against the precepts of humility, compassion, kindness and the discouragement of vanity and revenge. If your values as an atheist are superior to these then by all means keep them to yourself.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
— 1 Corinthians 13

Science will not replace religon because it has a hard time answering one very big question: "who am I?" Most religions say you are one soul in a world of many. Science currently has no good answer. You are consciousness created by the brain: how? If so then why? If consciousness is epiphenomenal and not a force of nature what is its evolutionary survival value?
Religion is based on superstitious faith but science also has faith that these questions will be eventually answered without a major shift in its current paradigms.

Science and religion are two different things and there's no point in pitching them against each other [...] — Christoffer

Certainly!

My point was more that people are turning science into something else - something that resembles a new kind of religion.

And that kind of ties into my next point:

Science is about facts and the pursuit of facts, [...] — Christoffer

I don't think science discerns facts. I think it creates predictive models.

The idea that science produces Truth with a capital 'T' is what risks science being turned from a useful tool into a religion or ideology.

I don't think science discerns facts. I think it creates predictive models.

The idea that science produces Truth with a capital 'T' is what risks science being turned from a useful tool into a religion or ideology. — Tzeentch

In comparison to religion, it does, even if the inner workings of science essentially never claim to end in "truth". It becomes a semantics problem in the argument if we break down these words. By "truth" I mean some essential principles of comparison, like: Religion says the sun is the sun god but science have shown, through evidence that it is a magnetically bound gravity well of high energy matter forming other matter through fusion producing enough heat to warm us. We can science the sun further and find more complex quantum mechanical properties or even turn what we know on its head with new discoveries, but it is certainly more true than the religious claim. The same goes for pretty much everything that has been validated by science, especially things that became a foundation for some technology since that technology wouldn't work if our models weren't true in relation to the reality we create this technology within. Creating that technology requires certain truths to be valid and it's not really predictive anymore, but confirmed.

In comparison to religion, [...] — Christoffer

I don't see why such a comparison would be relevant to the nature of science.

The same goes for pretty much everything that has been validated by science, especially things that became a foundation for some technology since that technology wouldn't work if our models weren't true in relation to the reality we create this technology within. Creating that technology requires certain truths to be valid and it's not really predictive anymore, but confirmed. — Christoffer

I think it simply requires the models to be accurate enough. That standard is usually set by some arbitrary measure like whether it provides adequate accuracy for practical application.

I don't see why such a comparison would be relevant to the nature of science. — Tzeentch

In the context of this discussion pitting the search for answers to reality through either religion or science. Within that context, religion is inferior and also does not have the same foundation for why.

I think it simply requires the models to be accurate enough. That standard is usually set by some arbitrary measure like whether it provides adequate accuracy for practical application. — Tzeentch

Sure, the goal is still to reach as close to the truth as humanly (with our machines and tech) possible. Religion doesn't do that, it settles on what confirms the pre-decided and invented truth. If religious attempts to answer questions of reality actually tried to be accurate, it would collapse any confirmation and implode the belief that was supposed to be confirmed. This is why I position that religion doesn't really have much to do with science, only that there's an illusion of similarity through religion trying to answer scientific questions. But all of it boils down to seeking comfort through illusion, to comfort existence by confirming things without having to be thorough and accurate.

When people realize the psychological purpose of religion, it's much more clear that we need a rational replacement for the rituals and way of thinking that exist in religion, without slapping on illusions and fantasies. The psychological purpose of religion is important for our wellbeing and existence, the religion itself is not.

Science will not replace religon because it has a hard time answering one very big question: "who am I?" Most religions say you are one soul in a world of many. Science currently has no good answer. You are consciousness created by the brain: how? If so then why? If consciousness is epiphenomenal and not a force of nature what is its evolutionary survival value?
Religion is based on superstitious faith but science also has faith that these questions will be eventually answered without a major shift in its current paradigms. — lorenzo sleakes

That science cannot answer those questions does not mean it gives validation to religion, it only concludes that all answers aren't answered yet. Throughout the history of science (modern non-biased science), we have been constantly answering "unanswerable questions" and religion has always moved the goalposts for "what science cannot answer". That doesn't mean that scientists have "faith" the unanswered questions will be answered, they don't care about faith in that way, they search for knowledge out of curiosity.

These attempts to create similarities between science and religion just seem like ways to try to place religion on equal terms or drag science down to some imaginary level, but it's not correct. Science and religion have two different functions and religion is not to answer questions, but to comfort existence. If people want a life without fantasy and superstition, they still need to find rituals, traditions, and awe that don't require religion. You can check my longer initial post in this thread for that.

As for answering the evolutionary purpose of consciousness, it has logic in how evolution and natural selection work. Human consciousness could simply have been the initial evolutionary trait of being unpredictable in both survival and hunting. With our other mental qualities being emergent side effects of this primary function. To say that there are no answers is to disregard the things we actually know, have researched, and tested.

I also think that many confuse scientists saying "we don't know" with "we don't know anything". It's a core tenet of science to not conclude anything as any truth-axiom. But something that has been tested and confirmed to an accuracy ratio of 1 000 000 to 1 is still considered "we don't know" by scientists, even if it's so confirmed that we utilize it for making technology that actually works based on such a finding. General relativity is still within "we don't know", but it is still confirmed and used in technologies like GPS. So, much of our cognition, much of our brain, and how we function is already very confirmed and used in medical science and practices, but a lot we still don't know. That doesn't mean scientists say "we don't know anything" or "we are wrong" or "religion is right".

:up:

Yep, I don't believe religion is going away any time soon. And I also don't hold the view that humanity would be better off without it. — Janus

I’m curious about your reasoning that humanity wouldn’t be better off without religion. Can you explain why?

Is there a useful thread here on post modernism and truth? I would be keen to read something accessible on the subject. — Tom Storm

Scientific belief succumbs to the structure of the proposition.It asks only whether something is or is not the case, true or false. In doing so, it presupposes the sense of the case it is adjudicating. But more fundamental than asking if something is the case or not , is asking what is at stake and at issue. By asking this , we put into question and decenter the very sense of the case. And in fact , every time we examine the truth of a statement , we are in some measure at the same time decentering the basis around which belief revolves.

Joseph Rouse writes:

“Realism is the view that science aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.”

By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.”

How else would one go about killing a religion? — praxis

You can't kill a religion. As beliefs are not killable. They resurface from natural thought, exploration and desire for fundamental answers.

If everyone was a scientist, some of them would move away from science in a quest for an alternative. If everyone was religious, many of them would move away towards something alternative (science). Neither subjective nor objective views of reality can ever be fully eliminated (killed).

They're mutually neccesary.

Do, you really want to turn this thread into a doctrinal debate between Scientism & Christianism? — Gnomon
Why not.
But my point was missed, so I'll put it again, more directly. There are those who leave one fundamentalism only to find another, who putting down one bible, choose another. Such folk might miss the distinction ↪Tom Storm makes. — Banno

"There are those" seems to be covertly pointing at yours truly. Likewise, the poster-who-shall-not-be-named falsely accuses Gnomon of substituting New Ageism for Scientism. But he's dead wrong, and so are you, if you interpret a> my defense of metaphysical Philosophy*1, as a rejection of physical Science, and b> my references to Holism as a sign of New Age beliefs. Holism*2 is actually a modern scientific concept that was adopted by New Agers, and by Quantum Physics pioneers.

In some circles --- believers in the inerrancy of Empirical Science --- Gnomon has gained a rep for Science -bashing. They equate my criticism of their alt-religion belief system as directed toward the insitiution of Science itself. That's like a Catholic, who interprets any Protestant pope-criticism as God-bashing. The problem is not with the scientific evidences, but with mis-placed faith in the ancient philosophy of Materialism*3.

For the record, Gnomon is not bashing Empirical Science in this thread. And is not advocating for replacing one fundamentalism with another. That is the exact opposite of my intention. Instead, I was accusing Scientism of claiming to have a source of authoritative Truth in "settled science"*3.

*1. In modern philosophical terminology, metaphysics refers to the studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/metaph-body.html

*2. Quantum Holism :
A composite quantum system has properties that are incompatible with every property of its parts. The existence of such global properties incompatible with all local properties constitutes what I call "mereological holism"--the distinctive holism of Quantum Theory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01438

*3. Is Scientific Materialism "Almost Certainly False"?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-scientific-materialism-almost-certainly-false/


FWIW, 's "distinction" mis-interpreted the intent of my assertion. I actually agree with his appraisal of Scientism*4. But the "source" I was referring to is an official biblical compendium of "settled science". One poster in particular has made repeated references to "settled science" as-if it was a real thing*5.

*4. For adherents of Scientism though, there is no single source of authority [settled science] on The Truth of how & why the world works as it does. — Gnomon
"I understand scientism as the opposite of this. It is an unassailable certainty that science is right and not tentative. In other words, the single source of authority about how the world works is science - hence scientism." ___Tom Storm

*5. "I was merely pointing out the difference between scientism and science. An important distinction." — Tom Storm
Yes. I only use the derogatory term "scientism" in order to make that same distinction. Science is supposed to be a Fact system, not a Faith system. Science is always tentative, and seldom settled. Hence not an authoritative Bible for Materialists to thump.


The OP seems to be asking if Secular Science has the "right stuff" to replace religion*6. Then noted that due to the "-ism" (belief system) in the name, Scientism might be construed as a religious belief system*7. But he clarified that Science (without the -ism) does not have the metaphysical (values ; ethics) credentials to qualify as a religion. He seemed to be defending non-ism- Science from being confused with Scientism as a pseudo-religious belief system. I do think the belief system of Scientism is a corruption of the original ideals of Empirical Science --- to let the "book" of Nature be the final authority.

I agreed with Tim's distinction. Then I made a few remarks about Final Authority in religion, which Scientism claims to have in "Settled Science". I noted that neither Scientism nor non-ism-Science has the kind of biblical or papal authority characteristic of Christianity. That was intended to be a positive aspect of Empirical Science, avoiding inclinations to fundamentalist Faith. But some, such as Tom apparently construed that assertion as denigration of Empirical Science. Hence, we got off on a side-track, that some interpreted as Empirical Science bashing.

*6. "It seems that science is in need of religions’ values, ethics, and morals. Might science absorb values, ethics, and morals from religions? From purified religions, of course.
Or might science somehow evolve to address the concerns and questions traditionally addressed by religion? That seems to be on science’s trajectory." ___
Note -- Would empirical Science be able to objectify morality, as in Utilitarianism?

*7. Scientism :
"there is a good argument to be made that scientism isn't science, and that science doesn't deal with key aspects religion does, e.g. ontology". ___

You can't kill a religion. As beliefs are not killable. They resurface from natural thought, exploration and desire for fundamental answers. — Benj96

Of course you can, simply eliminate every trace of it, and that would include its adherents. Not that that would be easy, especially if it were a popular religion. As Janus pointed out though, you'd essentially be replacing one ideology for another, which is beside the point.

By claiming that a religion is fundamental, natural, and discoverable with exploration, you're basically saying that it's true or that you're a believer.

If everyone was a scientist, some of them would move away from science in a quest for an alternative. If everyone was religious, many of them would move away towards something alternative (science). Neither subjective nor objective views of reality can ever be fully eliminated (killed). — Benj96

You seem to be saying that religion and science merely fulfill a desire for an alternative view of the world. I think there's more to it than that.