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Comment by broscillator | Hacker News Reader

> But sometimes, people tend to conflate a materialistic world view (maybe even strong determinism) with believing in the scientific method.

I would say more than sometimes. It seems that if you're not like that, you're immediately labeled religious.

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I like to disturb materialists, aka believers in the mechanical universe, with three observations: physics stands on GR and QM; GR says that any thing can dissolve into light (photons) that can, in principle, form any other thing; QM says that the entire universe evolves as one entity, that QM calls the wave function.

>GR says that any thing can dissolve into light (photons) that can, in principle, form any other thing

That's doubtful, source?

>QM says that the entire universe evolves as one entity, that QM calls the wave function.

It's local, but mystics expect nonlocal one.

Religious is also a modern pejorative. It's pretty silly the way it's used given that extreme atheism is just as dogmatic as so called religious faith.

Disbelief in specific magical thinking of ancient people and belief in the magical thinking of ancient peoples are not all that similar.

Though I see how they can look that way when you intentionally omit details about the claims of either side, as human discourse is reduced to Tweet size comments of negligible value.

Nowadays there's many believers of simulation theory, which is pretty much magical thinking.

And like religion that belief is based on social memes, not on science.

Right but people are complex beings susceptible to social memes. Science fundamentally is a tool, but so is writing, which was used to establish and disseminate religion (in the beginning was the Word). The bible might contain wisdom and good lessons, but it's value is obfuscated and degraded by fundamentalist fanatics. The same can happen with the products of science.

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