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Comment by tresqotheq | Hacker News Reader

And if "people" are limited by resources, say if someone need an LHC to verify something..what really is the difference...?

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The difference is not only in whether they are verifiable, whether they are verified, but also whether things which are produced from them actually seem to work. Religious claims fail at all three: they are not verifiable, they have not been verified, and they don’t seem to work.

Moving goalposts much?

> which are produced from them actually seem to work.

Oh yea, religeious things also seem to work. For example, prayers and other religeous offerings. That is how these things survive so long.

Except when we test them, they don’t seem to work after all. Would you fly on an airplane engineered by someone trained in engineering, or a plane engineered by someone who relied only on inspiration from a deity? Would you go to the hospital with doctors who practice typical Western medicine, or a hospital in which the doctors only pray over you? Etc.

>Except when we test them, they don’t seem to work after all.

Have you heard about the replication crisis in your "western science"?

There is no "western" science. It's just science and it works the same wherever you are. Same as there is no "western mathematics".

Why are you and a few other people on the side of religion argueing so much against the west? Science vs religion does not care what the longitude you find yourself in. Or is "eastern science" somehow different?

Science is not perfect, how could it as it is made up of humans and we clearly are not perfect. It's still waaaaaay better than religious doctrines.

Yes, I have. The next step beyond thinking "Aha! Replication crisis!" is that the replication crisis is directing you towards its correction: the goal is replication, correct? And in many instances we fall short of that goal. The corrective action is to refine standards to which we hold scientific research. It is not correct to say, "Darnitall, we have a replication crisis, science is no better able to get us closer to things which are true than religion, divination, palm reading, astrology, and coin flipping." And that is exactly the sense in which the replication crisis is improving our ability to figure out which things are more likely to be true than others.

And no, that’s not moving goalposts.

It is, because you can verify the claims of a holy man if you go meditate in a cave for a couple of decades.

Since no one is willing to do that, people used to accept their word for a fact. The same is the case with science claim that cannot be verified by common men who depend on them.

That they are also "believing", might be hard to get through the thick skull of these modern "science" gushers. They fail to see that "science" can be just a label, strapped to anything businesses wants to sell.

  >  It is, because you can verify the claims of a holy man if you go meditate in a cave for a couple of decades.

This is the most ridicolous thing I've read in a decade on HN. Congrats I guess?

You can readily go and verify a lot of claims of science and I gave you an example in another comment. What claims about god can I go and verify? I'm eager to try.

The missing ingredient is that if the common men--who you think have no better option than to depend blindly on someone they choose to believe--build a civilization based exclusively on the meditations of these holy men who they have accepted as the repositories of truth, they will find that their society will fall to those societies which have a, shall we say, more empirical basis for their view of the world.

The fact that things seem to work does not mean that they actually do work. We all are subject to cognitive biases which can trip us up. Most people aren’t very good at recognizing when that happens. That’s why these things survive so long.

>The fact that things seem to work does not mean that they actually do work.

Well, the same can be applied to your "western science" as well..

Correct. And over time we--both as individuals and collectively as a civilization--gradually cull those things which seemed to work at one time but have become clear that they do not, and gradually adopt those things which seem to work better than those. In the end, over long periods of time, what matters is what does work, not what seems to. A society which believes than matter is made of small blue regular polyhedra will fail to develop as well as a society which continually culls and refines its beliefs based on experimental evidence.

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