Hacker News Reader

> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views: Believe this because I tell you to!

There's a few thousand years of Talmudic scholarship you might want to read up on, just to pick one of the more obvious from among the many counterexamples.

Almost every religion is a much broader and much more intellectually diverse intellectual project than their respective fundamentalists would like you to believe.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai.

Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.

You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and personally fulfilling spiritual journey and a valuable perspective within the community at large), but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest.

Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?".

It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations.

In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.

> but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest.

I agree. I take a fundamental interpretation approach to the Bible. I firmly believe that science must jive with my belief-set. If it doesn't, there are serious questions that I need to answer.

Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible.

I don't purport to know everything, nor do I think I'll ever manage to answer all the outstanding questions. I also don't claim correctness on either side of the question. What is important for me is cognitive resonance.

> Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally [...]

No. I would counter that religion (in general) seeks to answer the "why" of it all.

> It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.

"Seek and you will find..." in this case, we go looking for answers and eventually, (sometimes) in matters that can't be handled scientifically, we settle on suitable answers.

"Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible."

It's not clear the Bible has much to say about these at all.

Fundamentalists insist that it does, but there are many other strands of Christian thought that disagree.

And thus more questions. One of the axioms I struggle with in these sorts of discussions is the idea of Truth, or ground truth, or absolute truth: this idea that there is some complete representation of reality that possesses is-ness (it exists and we perceive only a small piece of it).

If we assume there is a ground truth (as an axiom, inductively suggested by persistent results from physical experimentation), then we still can say nothing of the God that created it (this, all of this expansive and perplexing existence). In fact, science as it stands cannot answer questions that we cannot test.

How do you test for the existence of a being that is not a part of what we live in? Even if the God overlaps with our existence (a core tradition of Christianity being omnipresence) what test can we leverage to show He is here?

All of this leads to the dispersed opinions of many, many people. We have supposed two things so far: there is a God, and there is some absolute representation of our universe (above I called it existence).

Given ground truth, how might we approach the texts that are said to explain God? As a society (my guess is many people do this) we tend to overlay what we "know" onto things we don't understand.

For example, in Genesis we have words like erev and boker which are translated consistently as "morning" and "evening". But its ancient Hebrew, we don't actually have the meaning as it was intended. We have lost the societal context that informed the deeper meanings of those words. So we guess. We think they mean morning and evening. But that's at best ambiguous.

They could mean "order" and "disorder", as they are used in other contexts to mean that.

I'm sure I could meander about and come up with a logically sound chain of interpretations, but I only left this here to illustrate just how difficult the interpretation of simple things can be.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai.

If you're Orthodox, both the written Torah and the Oral Torah (Talmud) were capital-R Revealed by a supernatural authority at Mount Sinai.

Yes, the study notes for the book were revealed with the book. If you find this confusing, well, go pick up Rudin's Principles to Mathematical Analysis.

And so it came to pass that Rudin Revealed both baby Rudin and big Rudin, and it was good.

That was, inadvertently, pretty funny, although I was more referring to the way that you usually wouldn't tell someone, "Oh, just go read Rudin" if they really wanted to understand analysis. Instead, you'd give them Rudin and an entire semester's worth of lecture notes and recitation sessions -- which is how we actually educate people.

> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it.

I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works.

> you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views

In practice that is true for science too. I take it on faith that scientists are trustworthy and doing their best to uncover truth.

> I don’t think that’s true - I think an atheist can gain a lot of understanding about human nature by reading religious works.

As an example, Leviticus is fascinating if read as "here's the political structure of a herding culture". It's visibly more of a constitution than a religious text, including the allocation of taxes, a permanent administrator class, a penal system, and a statute of limitations on debt.

you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims

Sheer nonsense. The Enlightenment, the greatest period of scientific advancement in human history, was driven by people who saw it as their sacred duty to understand God's Creation. Atheism in the form of the Soviet Union dragged us backwards.

> Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more.

Nonsense - that ignores that fundamentally science is a human activity. Because it is a human activity it is open to the same biases, self-deceptions, fads, groupthink and political pressures as any other human activity.

Apart from that, implicit in your defense of science and attack on religion is a belief that true knowledge can only be attained through the scientific method, and nothing which is true can be acquired outside of experiment and observation, which itself is a faith based (though pragmatic) argument.

That being said, I make no claims for the existence of a God, Abrahamic or otherwise. At the same time you could be a little more circumspect and humble about what you know to be true.

The key phrase is 'falsifiable in principle' this God business (and it is indeed a business, if not all of it) is not. One can have all ones faith in flying spaghetti monster as one cares to have but there is no way even in principle to falsify it if it turns out that it is false.

If anybody is curious about the work of Science being a fundamentally human activity, check out Bruno Latour. I'm sure there are others, but this is one I've recently discovered. NYTimes did a good article on him: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...

Nice piece.

Discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300187

I'm not saying humans are infallible, but trying to argue that "the scientific method isn't perfect because people aren't perfect" is nonsense, especially if the conclusion you want to draw is that "therefore we should respect faith as an alternative means of determining truth".

The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature. In fact, it's practically the only tool we have. Almost every major advancement our species has made has been because someone had a theory, figured out a way to test it, and came to a conclusion with some degree of confidence that they were then able to act upon and share with others.

Since this is a thread about philosophy, "truth" (and how one determines it) is extremely relevant. Epistemology is a whole branch of philosophy. If you're truly skeptical, one could even argue that true knowledge cannot be attained at all, and all we can hope to do is arrive at conclusions with as high a degree of confidence as possible.

My point is that science offers a way to increase confidence in a conclusion, religion does not.

It's as simple as that.

> The scientific method IS the best tool our species has when it comes to determining truths about the laws of nature.

I agree.

But I also believe freedom is better than slavery. I value wisdom over ignorance. And I believe those things without any proof. The scientific method cannot prove to me that murder is wrong, and yet I hold it to be true.

So despite the fact that I agree with the power of the scientific method, I'll cop to truths that I believe without proof.

Proof is a hard goalpost in any domain, but science, and by extension the scientific method, can support the belief that murder is wrong through a couple plausible paths.

The study of evolution gives a mechanism through which a sense of morality is 'hardwired' into us for its adaptive benefits. Or, less teleologically, the study of our own brains can provide evidence for us as humans just not liking certain things.

Additionally, a technique like group simulation could show that allowing murder is against the average individual's interest.

I'm not claiming I come to my beliefs through deliberate scientific reasoning, but I do think that science has important things to say about most things.

>But I also believe freedom is better than slavery. I value wisdom over ignorance. And I believe those things without any proof.

You believe these things on the same kinds of evidence you use for believing the sun will rise tomorrow.

I think that it's a problem when we talk about the outputs of different forms of verification as if those things shared a common identity. They may share a similar property of undeniability, but they are not the same thing, and in point of fact, they are not comparable. The phrase "freedom is better than slavery" is not better or worse than "1 + 1 = 2" or "water boils at 100 C". I think that the idea of a singular thing called "truth" is actually fairly harmful.

So when I say "I believe freedom is better than slavery" and "I believe 1+1=2" that they are two distinct, possibly incomparable forms of belief. Maybe.

>I think that the idea of a singular thing called "truth" is actually fairly harmful.

I disagree with that.

> I disagree with that.

Duly noted.

> Almost every major advancement our species has made has been because someone had a theory, figured out a way to test it, and came to a conclusion with some degree of confidence that they were then able to act upon and share with others.

Citation please.