Comment by avz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avz | Hacker News Reader

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There is a palpable difference between the universe described by many religions and the universe described by science. The former is all built from concepts rooted in human society such as father, son, judgment, commandment, obedience, sacrifice, punishment etc. The latter is built from eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable, reference frame, superposition etc. The former feels small, ordinary, familiar and manmade. The latter feels like we're fumbling for words to describe something that fundamentally transcends ordinary human experience.

BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind, e.g. ten commandments, seven days of creation. Even the supposed large numbers such as 144,000 never come close to what you need to describe nature such as the number of stars in our galaxy (around 10^11) or the number of atoms in a human body (order of 10^27). See physics constants for even better examples. Also, religions often describe reality using numbers that look suspiciously memorable in decimal notation. OTOH, nature never gives us round decimal-friendly numbers for constants. I think this also makes religion feel manmade and science authentic.

The word "religion" has a lot of baggage associated with it where it seems to invoke a stereotypical undereducated westerner who interprets ancient spiritual texts literally. There's a lot more than just that. Ancient Buddhist cosmology frequently uses metaphors to describe aeons, such as grinding mountains to dust by brushing it with silk cloth once per century, etc. They do the same with countable objects to describe the numbers of worlds and so forth.

I have the opposite experience you described. Contemplating the infinitude of reality draws me toward religion via logic. Through contemplation it seems to follow that there's something important happening with meaning beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps GP and GGP were "stereotypical westerners who interpreted ancient spiritual texts literally". I for sure was, having been brought up in particularly scripture-obsessed denomination of Christianity. But I'd argue that view holds true for all Abrahamic religions, which comprise the majority of active faiths on Earth. Religions based on the Bible tend to be half faiths, half community management handbooks. Despite promises of various forms of life everlasting, they're very much focused on micromanaging the profane, the mundane.

>stereotypical undereducated westerner

I take offense with this description. Take Christianity and Islam and you've got half the world's populations. Are those 3.5 billion people all stupid westerners?

Who said anything about stupid? I'm not sure why you dug that description up but I think it says more about your views than mine.

This reminds me of my favorite Richard Feynman quote:

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

"For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it."

Or, indeed, any religions.

You are projecting christian view a bit here.

Buddhism and perhaps other Indian religions have some really large numbers, e.g. http://allergrootste.com/big/book/ch1/ch1_7.html

Another large number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi#Origins

second that. it's so easy to be atheist in west in the midst of modern understanding of science and universe. but if you venture out to other religions and scriptures in countries like India you keep discovering more ancient scriptures with much larger sense of time and advanced thoughts like multiverse[1].. May be inadvertently but even some scriptures have approximated the age of earth to be 4.3 billion years which is not accurate but closer [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology#:~:text=Every%....

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(aeon)

The scale of numbers in some Buddhist works such as the Flower Ornament Scripture are unimaginably large (infinities for every infinite item).

> BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind...

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies[1]

1. https://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/22-17.htm

Given the sheer scale of it all, statistically there must be uncountable ants, and human-likes, and gods, and gods OF gods. Do we understand 'em? Of course not. So we make up human-scaled stories about 'em. What would ants say about us?

Atheism is about not believing in any God. That’s different than not believing in any religion.

Believing in god(s) and believing in religion is the same thing, is it not?

Nope. Religion is thinking you can SPECIFY god, and interpret it. Godel had some thoughts about that ;)

I'm not sure I agree. I think you're conflating religion with the broader term of spirituality, which indeed is not explicitly rejected by atheism. Religion as in theism / deism, however, is.

It’s not a matter of opinion, fortunately it’s a regular word in the English language that has an established meeting.

First definition I find of religion: "A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."

Almost every atheist will reject religion, given what religion typically is and which is captured pretty well in the definition above.

We’re not debating the definition of the term religion, but take a look at the definition for atheism. That’s what we’ve been discussing, what does it mean to be atheist?

what's wrong, or inauthentic, about being man-made?

Man-made is relatable. It’s understandable. It’s comprehensible. All things that the universe, when considered in its entirety, could never be.

God was supposed to have created men not the other way around.

Nothing, but I suspect your concept of "religion" is not the same as the parent's. Some people think of religion is a valuable tool humans invented to help them govern their lives . To others, religion is a doctrine that teaches ostensibly facts about the nature of the universe. Typically these facts lead to conclusions such as "humans SHOULD do x, MUST NOT do y", etc.

Two completely different concepts, one word. So it's a bit confusing. But for someone discussing the second type of religion, saying it's "man-made" is definitely a knockout punch.

It's hypocrisy to claim that religion X is divine revelation only to turn out to be man-made.

I don't think there's anything wrong with religions that acknowledge (and even embrace) the man-made aspect.

https://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/size-doesnt-matter-...

TLDR: Importance does not equate to size, just as space does not equate to mass nor mass to value (value being the particular distribution of elements within a mass).

gag, pet peeve of mine. Religion is, to quote TeMPOraL "Religions based on the Bible tend to be half faiths, half community management handbooks."

you can generalize that statement very far; religion is one of the key "technologies" which allows communities to scale past 5K people. Think "city".

Thus religion has a very different purpose than physics. It is about psychological health on a community and individual level.

The stories of physics, on the other hand, "eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable,..." don't really tell you much about how to handle things when your neighbor's barking dog is frustrating you.

(insert snarky comment about engineering a force field to solve the problem)

Even assuming that the bible is the literal word of deity, it is inconsistent to believe that the creation stories of genesis are descriptions of actual physical processes. because that is not why deity put those stories there. because deity was talking using a language which is 1.5-3K years old (let's agree to not argue dates, I'll accept the date you prefer), and words like "world" and "universe" meant something very very different back then than they do today. So if it is deity's literal word, then it must literally mean what it meant in the context of that earlier culture.

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