When we first attempted to find truth in the world, the truth seekers called themselves philosophers. Once philosophy had become polluted with Platonism, the more Aristotelian thinkers were driven to science. I think one day science will be left behind in the same way and seekers of truth will go elsewhere.
Great news, we won! While all of those issues aren't resolved perfectly, they are largely solved. Religious leaders just don't have the clout they did twenty years ago. Nobody cares what the Pope says. It's over, or will be over soon.
Now, in my opinion, atheists should choose to be gracious winners. We should attempt to find common ground with the religious, and agree to disagree where we can. We don't need to turn into the monster that we have just slain and put our boot on their neck. Revenge stories like that are best left in the old testament.
It’s nowhere near resolved yet.
If you've not heard of him, look him up, there's gold you're missing.
What are some examples of this? I'm also an atheist (although I detest the label) who was raised Catholic and seriously considered joining the priesthood. But a life guided by reason and rationality I've found to be so much more fulfilling than the guilt and fear that made up much of my Catholic life.
At the start, the scientific dogma was that masks don't work, and travel bans don't work, and worrying about COVID was irrational alarmism. Anyone who suggested otherwise was treated as not believing in science (this extended to censorship or at least misinformation banners on major social media platforms).
Now, the scientific dogma has flipped, and for example anyone questioning the effectiveness of masks is treated as a science denier.
The "Science" dogma that the general public is induced to adhere to gets filtered through these institutions.
Science changes course as more data comes in.
At first there wasn’t evidence that masks worked, once that had been accrued science was pro-mask.
The reason people questioning the effectiveness of masks is called a science denier is because there have been innumerable studies on the effectiveness of masks, and every one that has stood up to scrutiny has come out in favor of masks.
Calling scientific consensus that is backed but huge amounts of direct evidence “dogma” is nonsense.
Dogma is an absolute opinion on something in the absence of (or indeed denied by) evidence.
And that's reason to express epistemic uncertainty when basing one's conclusions off limited data.
> At first there wasn’t evidence that masks worked, once that had been accrued science was pro-mask.
First of all, there was already evidence that masks worked.
Second, officials did not tell people that we lacked evidence that masks work - they told people that masks don't work period.
> The reason people questioning the effectiveness of masks is called a science denier is because there have been innumerable studies on the effectiveness of masks, and every one that has stood up to scrutiny has come out in favor of masks. Calling scientific consensus that is backed but huge amounts of direct evidence “dogma” is nonsense.
The studies show limited effectiveness of masks, particularly with newer variants that have higher exhaled viral loads. People who argue that the benefits of masking are outweighed by the costs are labeled science deniers. This is despite there being some evidence of negative impacts from masking (e.g. on childhood development).
Some said we lacked evidence, others said they didn’t work. There was no single voice on this.
This is not how that worked. The evidence in terms of tests and trials is inconclusive, either for or against masks, in terms of experimental evidence of effectiveness. Nevertheless East Asia was all fro masks from the beginning and the WHO, CDC, FDA, Surgeon General were against, very vehemently. The western establishment changed their minds based not on experimental evidence but on people going "Are you morons? You're saying masks are literally useless? Not of limited use, actually worthless? Do you understand how airflow and droplets work at all?"
Besides, it is perfectly scientific to change your beliefs and guidance based on new evidence, especially when it comes to novel diseases and a generation-defining pandemic.
But there is clearly a faction of media and political institutions which wield "Science (TM)" as a cudgel to stifle public debate / opinions - and they aren't even doing it out of bad faith / political opportunism - they're doing it because they believe it's important to have the general public universally believe in established science "facts".
Your portrayal of the recent scientific dogma as being discriminatory of people who don't wear masks does not match mine, however. As far as I know, the current dogma is "get vaccinated and no one really cares if you have a mask on or not, maybe wear one when your grandma comes over though and consider getting a booster if your regional leaders are advising you to".
Anyway. The culture war is still firmly between the un/vaccinated, not the vaccinated but unmasked.
edit: Maybe try leaving the bay area if you disagree.
> travel bans don't work, and worrying about COVID was irrational alarmism…
Clearly you were listening to different medical and scientific advice than I was seeing at the time. The medical establishment was warning about the dangers from very early on. The question about travel bans was mainly about timing, not whether they would be needed or not.
This is not some crackpot interviewer.
I work with good hearted scientists everyday. Science is amazing. Science is the foundation for my whole goddamn life. But, our leadership did not hold up to the standard I was expecting them to. And, they crumbled under political influence and their inability to lead with objectivity and truth. They are weak. Almost childish (see it for yourself). It is no surprise they eroded public trust.
String theory? Read Smolin, who points out that for decades, string theorists dominated physics, despite the absence of experimental evidence.
Expert systems? I saw this back in the mid 1980s at Stanford, when the CS department had gone all-in on expert systems. Claims were made that strong AI was just around the corner. This from a technology that doesn't really do all that much. You write simple statements about something in a notation based on predicate calculus, after which you can ask questions. You get out pretty much what you put in. Systems like that still exist, mostly as chatbots for answering the easy questions so customer support doesn't have to talk to you. A programmed FAQ, basically.
And those are hard sciences. Economics is hopeless. Psychology is worse.
(I made the unpopular comment at the time that expert systems would turn out to be more important than syntax-directed parsing, but less important than relational databases.)
As Fred Hoyle once said, "Science is prediction, not explanation". The parts of science that work lead to engineering that works and products that work. Belief is then unnecessary.
If we look at the history of the Varna, particularly the Brahmin, if I'm not mistaken... From my fragmented recollection, the Brahmins created increasingly sophisticated and esoteric rituals which began to jointly increase in expense. They were eventually castigated [EDIT: the Vedic religion was actually challenged by a variety of religions, this period, ≈700BCE, gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism.] for this — I'd say science draws a pretty close parallel.
It's increasingly opaque, expensive, esoteric, and despite all that it's informing opinion, debate, and policy. It's also a closed circle that is arbitrarily delimited, and given high autonomy and authority in society. Not to mention most people have a poor grasp of the fact that science isn't the truth. It also does little to inform us in the way of morality, yet it appears the "rationalists" (pardon, I've no better term) in usurping religion, have little in the way of an answer for this. Yet the constituent mass that composes it is one of the most trusted groups[1]. Which is easily exploitable if you factor all this together, not unlike religion. And it has been leveraged for maligned purposes, before and will continue to be.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mis...
Think about the statement "We believe in science in this house". What does that even really mean? As you considered joining the priesthood, you should know there is a great deal of scholarship that priests engage in. Not just religious scholarship, but the study of the natural world. Many of the minds that pushed humanity forward were priests. Priests believe in science, but the people who put those signs on their lawns tend not to agree.
That gets me to my point, science isn't a noun to me. Yet everyday I keep hearing how the science has spoken. Often, when I look at the evidence provided and I deem what was said to be correct. Just as often, I find small sample sizes, hacked p values or a logical flaw with the conclusion. If I start a dialog about my findings in the wrong places, I get told I'm anti-science by people who didn't even read the paper.
If forced to provide a good example it would the talk of Covid escaping the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This has become a more main stream opinion in the past month or so, but if you wanted to discuss the possibility of this around this time last year, you would've been called a conspiracy theorist by people who reportedly "believe in science" or even be censored by some of the major platforms in the name of science. That is the opposite of the science I grew up with.
Part of science is acknowledging epistemic uncertainty yet still acting on imperfect information.
I think for most people it means that they believe the process of using science to discover how the world works is better than the other alternatives offered by religion, philosophy, conspiracy theories, etc. They don’t usually think it’s infallible, just better than the alternatives.
I don't see how you can claim with a straight face that priests believe in science. Religion at its core is asking for belief without proof. Science is the opposite.
Further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lay_Catholic_scientist...
You are robbing yourself if you don't speak to priests you encounter. They tend to be very well read people, with an interesting perspective on the world if you can be tolerant enough of them.
What I've meant above is hostility in the literal sense. As in, trying to oppose science with some religious fantasies, like with Intelligent Design, or pretty much anything Catholicism says about human sexuality.
Faith is believing things without evidence.
If you have evidence for a thing, you don't say, "i believe it on faith".
I've seen a few things quite concerning, specifically with COVID. However, the overall message (that I'm guessing you'd disagree with) to trust the experts, isn't necessarily a call for deference/faith either.
The concern is that people will go out looking for validation of their preconceived biases, listen to misinformed parties, possibly with perverse incentives, or political motivations. It's not all about shutting down discussion, as much as keeping the crazies from preventing the public from gaining herd immunity.
The two do (religion and rationality) are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Only if the religion is unfalsifiable. If it can be proven false then it's irrational to believe in it. If it can be proven true there is no need for faith.
If the beliefs are benign then one could make a case. Even so I prefer believing only what can be proven over ignorance and self deception.
If i don't need evidence,
I can believe white people are better than black people and take it on faith. I can believe men are better than women and take it on faith. I can believe cis people are better than lbgtq+ people and take it on faith.
If i don't have to demonstrate the accuracy of my claims, My claims are as valid as your claims.
According my mental dictionary, religion and rationality are mutually exclusive when the religious doctrine is proven irrational.
The angst is still there though - it's just directly applied towards modern culture war fault-lines rather than towards religion / belief in god.
I'm an atheist, but my atheism is my own.
And, in that, I realise that the number of degrees of freedom of an atheist are only slightly greater than those of a devout religious type, in that there are almost infinite things that "label" doesn't define, whilst a very limited number of things (1 for an atheist, a few more for a religious person) that a label does define.
You are an atheist. You are a catholic. You are a woman. You are Japanese. Few words, but even less meaning.
I just (re)watched the space snake episode of Rick and Morty last night:
“Imagine being a racist snake. Hey, other snake, I hate you because you’re the wrong colour snake!”
Could you clarify this? Plato & Aristotle have both gone in & out of fashion within different communities of thought over the centuries, sometimes in with one group and out with another at the same time. Humanism and Platonism came together around the 14th century in a push back against pure Aristotelian thought, and that seems like it would be much earlier than the shift you have observed. Further down the road, Leibniz described himself as closer to Plato than Aristotle but was part of the natural philosophy tradition that evolved into modern science. More recently both, Bertrand Russel and Kurt Godel were both platonists of some flavor. =
Is the shift more recent, the past half-century or so? Or a specific aspect of platonism that has taken hold?
To this point, I have a few things to say. Plato's more abstract and metaphysical thinking is largely compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is my reading of history that when we have embraced these more metaphysical ideas, it has often lead to great suffering and barbarism. The inquisition, the crusades, etc.
There was a time where only the clergy were able to talk about religion, as a common person you would simply be ignored out of hand. I see that sort of thinking in the allegory of the cave. I see this sort of thinking today where it is claimed that someone without a degree can't have a opinion on a scientific topic.
In contrast, the Wikipedia article for Aristotelianism claims that:
"In the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna and Averroes translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic and under them, along with philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, Aristotelianism became a major part of early Islamic philosophy."[0]
This is why lots of stars have Arabic names, during their golden age they were the first to discover and chart them.
From there, it is my view that Aristotle's ideas form the core of thinking that lead to the Renaissance as access to his works became more common in Europe. The Renaissance obviously was a huge influence on the founding fathers. America with it's right of free speech, is probably the only place that something like modern scientific thinking could take off.
In contrast to the allegory of the cave above, Aristotle was the first to speak about "common sense"[1]. He elevated the common man (it was almost two thousand years ago, cut him some slack) where Plato felt them unworthy.
> Is the shift more recent, the past half-century or so? Or a specific aspect of platonism that has taken hold?
It's subtle, and I'll be the first to admit this isn't something I can prove, it's more how I feel. Roughly 15 years ago I noticed the start of the idea that someone needs credentials to speak on a topic within the skeptic community, prior to that you'd be called out for making argument from authority[2]. We went from, lets have a debate to shut up, are you a expert, show me your papers. I'm no philosopher, but I see the former as more Aristotelian and the latter as Platonism.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism
My own observations on the recent issues of authority are a little different though, viewing it as part of a longer trend. From my (limmited) perspective it seemed like before the power of the internet, Expertise ruled the day. When the internet really hit mainstream in the early 00's there began a great skepticism of experts, that there was no reason to regard their assessment any higher than another. And there's a little something to that since there's no inherent reason why a non expert can't understand something too. But then it seemed to go too far-- expertise is sort of just another way of saying someone has a lot of experience, which can provide a useful perspective. And citing authority is not always a fallacy of appeal to authority. But the push against expertise went too far, and people began discounting someone's point of view precisely because they were an expert if there was a disagreement rather than on the merits. I saw this play out in things like Wikipedia Talk pages about topics.
Now perhaps the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction again. I guess the hope is that at some point, at least for a while, it will stay in the middle for a while. As Aristotle liked to say: "The mean between extremes". I've always tried to keep that outlook-- skepticism towards most extremes. So it goes
I had this same experience with atheism groups too (albeit when I was much younger)... it just gets boring. I think the repetition in religion is much more drawn out. You've got thousands of pages of text and so it takes a lot longer to reach that point of "yeah I've heard this before..." and by that time you've built up a community that has more activities than just reading a sacred text.
This sentence is meaningful once you define what you mean by Platonism and Aristotelian, and once you do so with definite meanings sufficiently close to what they seem to mean, I really don't think this is correct at all.
I'd say that is more the weird american athiest-as-persecutee strand.
Human behavior is possible, but difficult to shape on the individual level. There's much more inertia at larger scales and if these are things that should change, it will be very difficult.
Religion groups have done a very good job at fulfilling their primary purpose: to continue to exist (this purpose is not unique to religions, as continued existence is the purpose of all groups whether they accept it or not)
Take the topic of abortion. Catholics have always been against it. Southern Baptists and evangelicals were largely either indifferent or in favor of it being rare but legal until the mid 1970s when the Heritage Foundation lumped it in with a group of other things they sold as "moral issues" in an attempt to sway religious groups on economic issues.
Now, given that we're talking about the South here, what issue do you think would be considered a moral issue by a majority white Southern population of that era?
If you guessed segregation, give yourself a pat on the back. While the fight for segregation has largely been lost by conservatives, they took that emotional energy and kept it going with abortion and laissez-faire capitalism, basically creating an entire ideological framework from the ground up and "discovering" Biblical support for their positions.
Today, evangelicals and southern baptists are steadfast in their opposition to abortion. But Roe was a Southern Baptist, and so was her lawyer, and as the article below shows (with two articles from the era of Roe embedded),
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/baptist-...
that was anything but "biblically settled" doctrine at the time. Funny how we went 1900+ years and abortion only became an issue in an attempt to exclude a group.
> The Leges Henrici Primi, written c. 1115, treated pre-quickening abortion as a misdemeanor, and post-quickening abortion as carrying a lesser penalty than homicide. "Quickening", a term often used interchangeably with "ensoulment" or "animation", was associated with the first movement of the fetus in utero. This movement is generally felt by women sometime in the third to fifth month of pregnancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_abortion#Christiani...
(The fun sectarian conflicts back then look much, much wilder from today's viewpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism )
A data packet from a streaming movie is meaningless when you look at the 1's and 0's going over a wire. You have to step back and impose a framework of understanding, protocols and specifications that exist outside of the computer itself, before you can watch the movie. An atheist transistor could never be given "proof" that a movie exists using a sequence of bits. The concept of "movie" exists outside of the world of binary. Religion is to humanity what protocols and specifications are to a stream of binary data. This is frustrating to the types who consider themselves to be rational and fact based, because by definition it cannot be proven within the system. The difficulty for the hard nosed atheist is that all of the most important human questions, including their desire to convert us all to atheists, cannot be accounted for in their reductionist framework. This is usually dealt with by simply ignoring the dissonance.
What you call "religiosity" I would call fundamentalism, and it is a natural human phenomenon which will manifest no matter what the professed religion or non religion of a person.
Human concern about the ultimate questions of life will not go away no matter what religion we ascribe to ourselves. The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. Throwing it away and making these questions ad-hoc or even worse, subconscious, is asking for the serious consequences you alluded to in your comment.
And what has humanity gained from all their efforts? Having been raised in a formal religion I'd say nothing was gained and thousands of human years wasted. Years that could have explored more fruitful endeavors or even just lived with less persecution and suffering.
> tolerance of incoherence
Do you really think we're living in an overly tolerant society?
I guess you could kinda say that about the conquest of the Holy land in the Old Testament, but I think that's a specific case not a general principle of taking from others by divine right. What examples were you thinking of?
As for divine violence all the abrahamic religions have been involved in force land grabs and killing rule breakers or non-believers.
Isn't religiosity also (primarily?) a personal experience, founded on a form of (learned) introspection?
The emphasis on personal aspects of religion in the recent centuries is mostly due to Protestantism, which values personal faith above all else.
At least Christianity has a track record you can judge, for better or worse, and some notion of redemption.
It also pays to think about the word "natural" and all that it implies. our desires are not simply rational thoughts that independently arrive in our minds - look at the different objects of desire among different cultures. There is no untouchable "natural" desire that is so holy that it should be off limits to regulation.
Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.
Oh I'm not criticizing religion for having a framework. I'm criticizing it because it's the wrong framework. Of course some natural desires must be regulated. That's just self control. People don't need unprovable superstitions to stop killing each other. For whatever small crumbs of peace religious harmony may have brought religion has brought plenty of excuses for war, murder, and hatred.
Cults are central to culture, it's true but we can still show a lot of conflicts around ethnic, cultural lines that seem to lack a religiously motivated dimension.
I think this line of argumentation should be retired - it's just not robust. It is an attempt to gain the moral high ground by secularists and maybe before the 19th and 20th centuries we could imagine it would be true but there have been too many secualr conflicts of a massive scale to sincerely hold this polemic in 2021.
Existence of problematic non-religious frameworks doesn't negate the wrongness/harmful of religion.
Both religious and non-religious memes can be bad at the same time.
> I think this line of argumentation should be retired - it's just not robust. It is an attempt to gain the moral high ground by secularists...
Even if you dismiss thousands of years of wasted effort and active harm there is the ongoing harm and waste still happening. This isn't harmless LARPing. People are being shamed, ostracized, and even killed in 2021 over these--at best unprovable--beliefs. Religion also encourages lazy thinking with appeals to authority, confirmation bias, and often faith over evidence.
Perhaps those weakest and most marginalized by these memes.
> Clearly, it's a human meme that has some positives and no dramatic downside that would have caused it to die out.
Is it so clearly positive? Not in my experience. Natural selection doesn't instantaneously stop every injustice. It could be humanity had just been caught in a valley between the least bad options until it could ascend out of a malaise, like the dark ages. The Middle East has some of the most religious populations yet I wouldn't say they evolved into a beacon of human progress.
As a framework for society at scale, Christianity gave us the western world as we know it. It gave us abolition of slavery at a time when belief in the equality of people was a religious belief that couldn't easily reconciled with the self-evident disparities in the level of development of different civilizations. Atheism gave us eugenics, communist horrors, etc.
Your point is correct on its face, but the fact is that people will believe in some framework or another.
Is Christianity the dominant or even a significant factor which made the western world better?
> Atheism gave us eugenics, communist horrors, etc.
Are you sure you're not throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Racial 'purity' goes back at least to the Torah. Eugenics and other horrors aren't any more the result of atheism than Judaism or Capitalism.
Insofar as a culture is only sustainable through arbitrage—importing people from religious societies (Latin America in the case of the United States, the Muslim world in case of Western Europe)—that seems indicative of a “problem” to me.
Can you elaborate?
> Insofar as a culture is only sustainable through arbitrage...
Culture can be sustained at lower than current population levels. And increasing population is much less painful than reducing it. Also, reasonably well managed immigration is a huge net positive for any society.
That said, a world of uneducated people raised on belief without evidence--all competing for too few resources--isn't exactly sustainable. Even more so now that humanity has so many tools to destroy itself and most complex life.
I'm starting to think... Yes?
Being from Bangladesh I like to think of the counterfactual where you run a village according to hedonist atheist american culture. Everyone would quickly die of starvation.
Plenty of atheists are well fed and happy.