It is not that fact, that is usually argued. It is the claim, that this investigation actually gives any benefits over sleep/brainstorming/you name it.
Meditation, yoga are examples of the good one's. Sacrificing babies, worshipping cows are the bad one's.
Religions don't provide us with the tools to actually determine whether something is real or just a story.
The scientific method is to my knowledge the only feasible way to figure out the ground truth.
Religions do promote exploration of ideas, but they are mostly a waste of time and energy that might be better spent elsewhere.
The scientific method can't be used to figure out truth. It can't be used to prove anything. It is an extremely useful method for describing how the world likely works, and for building tools.
It tells us nothing about what the goals of society should be even though it can help us learn how to accomplish those goals.
Should we try to build a society that optimizes for per capita happiness today, or should our goal be to maximize total happiness by ensuring as many people can exist as is physically possible in the future.
This is the realm of philosophy and religion.
>Religions do promote exploration of ideas, but they are mostly a waste of time and energy that might be better spent elsewhere
Our modern concept of egalitarianism is mostly a product of religious thinking. I'd say that idea wasn't a waste of time.
Are you aware of the hedonic treadmill?
> Our modern concept of egalitarianism is mostly a product of religious thinking
You must be kidding. Religions promote the most brutal form of inequality ever. Study up on "dalits" in India.
Whilst some deeply anti-religious ideological systems promote highly anti-equality ideas like eugenics, racial supremacy, "social Darwinism".
For that reason, it's best you keep sneers like "you must be kidding" out of comments on this topic; it's a profoundly complex issue that requires nuance and care, not ridicule.
2) Religious too, see above. What's karma? Who will be condemned to hell in Abrahamic religions?
3) Please educate yourself before trying to correct others and being plain wrong.
That there exists some religions that promote the idea of equality?
Sure. Over about 6 years I read multiple books and watched countless videos by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris etc, and was fully bought into their “all-religion-is-evil” worldview.
Then I kept educating myself further.
Is there something I’m missing that you can suggest?
As another commenter pointed out, you didn’t say anything to refute my argument.
But you’ve implied that nuanced arguments are less preferable than dogmatic ones, which is surprising for someone critiquing religion.
How the world works is the truth which science seeks to figure out. And scientific method is the best tool we have for that task. Certainly much better than religion, which starts with "the truth" and then walks backward to prove it.
However I get a feeling you use different meaning of the truth, than I do. If by it you mean some profound reason for our lives, then I agree that is not the truth that science seeks.
I'm arguing with the notion that science can't be used to figure out the truth. Even if it can't reach the truth in the mathematical/logical sense, it is still the best tool we have to move in the direction of truth.
Where did I say otherwise?
Science doesn't allow us to make value judgements. The closest ethical framework we have to allowing us to use science to make value judgements is utilitarianism. But it still relies on axiomatic assumptions about what is intrinsically good. The decision as to what axioms to choose is philosophy, not science.
You didn't explicitly say otherwise, but the way you put your objection doesn't make too much sense if you were just nit-picking the fact that proof and evidence are distinct concepts and that what was called "truth" would more precisely be called "rationally justified belief" or something.
> Science doesn't allow us to make value judgements.
Yeah, actually, it does, for all intents and purposes.
> The closest ethical framework we have to allowing us to use science to make value judgements is utilitarianism.
Well, somewhat depending on details, but sure, overall I think that's a defensible statement.
> But it still relies on axiomatic assumptions about what is intrinsically good.
No, it doesn't. All it requires is consensus about what people consider good. Luckily so, as "intrinsic good" is obviously an instance of "intrinsic value" and thus nonsense for the same reason.
> The decision as to what axioms to choose is philosophy, not science.
No, it's primarily science, because (a) those axioms are decided by consensus (just as in mathematics), and consensus is oviously a thing you can only study empirically, and (b) if the choice of axioms is supposed to make any sense, it is based on observations of consequences, which are also a matter of empiricism. Of course, philosophy also deals with the question, but philosophy without the empirical observations won't get anywhere on that question.
You just moved it down a layer. What choice of axioms would lead to desired outcome x? Once you've decided on desired outcome x, science can help, but now the philosophical question is: "How should we determine what the desired outcome should be?" Consensus? Why is consensus better than just going with what zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC believes?
Nope.
> What choice of axioms would lead to desired outcome x?
Yes, that is the part about figuring out consequences.
> Once you've decided on desired outcome x, science can help, but now the philosophical question is: "How should we determine what the desired outcome should be?"
No, that's really a bad question. Or rather, it's first of all an ambiguous question. One can interpret that question as "What method should we use to determine the desired outcome, given a desired meta-outcome" or something of that sort, which is obviously just another question about consequences in disguise, and thus is obviously one that is accessible to empiricism. I'm guessing that's maybe not what you mean, but I just want to make sure we don't chase another equivocation. So, if we ignore that interpretation, what remains is a bad question, for two reasons:
1. It's similar to "intrinsic value", in that "should" without a goal it is directed towards is ill-defined, so you are essentially asking "What do you have to do to reach a goal, absent the goal?", which is a similar nonsensical structure to "What's the judgement of a valuer, absent the valuer?"
2. Even if we suppose that you had an answer that X is what you should do, regardless what your goal is, that answer would be useless. If you are talking to someone who already agrees with you that X is the thing they should do, it's pointless to say to them "you should do X!", because they are already doing X. And if you are talking to someone who does not agree with you, it's equally pointless, because simply stating "you should do X!" has zero potential to convince them of anything, even if that statement happens to be true somehow.
If you want to convince someone that they should do something, you have to show them how it helps them achieve their goals. Just saying that they should do something regardless what their goals are won't get you anywhere. If someone's goal is to kill as many people as possible, telling them "you should not kill other people, and that is the truth" won't have any effect whatsoever. You have to either show them a conflict with some other goal of theirs that they might consider more important, or you have to create that conflict (such as, if their goal is to live in freedom, by threatening to put them in prison while being credible that you can actually make that happen).
> Consensus? Why is consensus better than just going with what zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC believes?
That question doesn't make sense. It's not a matter of whether consensus is better than something else, it's just that consensus is what is, whether it is good or not. Either you get some significant proportion/the majority/everyone to do adopt a certain view, or you don't. Going with what I believe is not an alternative to consensus, it's just one of the many options as to what could potentially become the consensus, and if there is no consensus that you should go with what I believe, it is of no consequence that what I believe is better than what the current consensus happens to be.
You might as well be asking why digestion is better than eating apples. It's just a confused question.
And just to make sure we are not equivocating: This is by definition not about the question whether we should adopt consensus based governance structures, say. Because that is a question about consequences, and thus a question that is accessible to scientific inquiry.
All these questions as to "what is the ultimate goal/value/intention/taste" are simply the wrong question, in that they make an unfalsifiable assumption that makes any answers to those questions useless, while at the same time leading you to ignore the interesting questions that actually have some solid answers, which also largely obviate the need to ask those pointless questions.
Questions such as "How did it happen that humans have a social structure that uses consensus between individuals as a survival strategy?", or "How did it happen that humans have a tendency to help other humans even when there is no immediate benefit to them?", or "How did it happen that humans generally prefer happiness to suffering?", but also "Is it actually true that helping other humans without an obvious immediate benefit indeed does not have any benefit to the person helping?".
Those and many other similar "how" questions have quite a body of knowledge to answer them, with loads of evidence to back up those answers, and some very interesting and often highly unintuitive insights, and understanding both the questions and the answers is way more intellectually satisfying than making up some "ultimate invisible valuer" in order to prop up nonsensical concepts like "intrinsic value" or "ultimate should".