this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Science and religion are two entirely separate things. Treating religion like science is bad, but treating science like religion is worse.
You cannot "believe in" science; it is not intended to tell you how to live a moral life or provide meaning to your existence, etc. If you try and make it do that, you are not being scientific, you're being dogmatic.
These concepts aren't related to each other, and shouldn't be compared.
Science is descriptive where religion is prescriptive. Granted there are some origin storys in religion (Eve's sin or Noah's rainbow) but we've had people dismissing their own fables back in the classical age, instead trying to hypothesize how things are really.
This is how Adonai can be a total git and yet declared as just and righteous and benevolent by fiat, what raises challenges to the properties of justice, righteousness or benevolence. Apologists usually retreat to semantics.
Science has its own approach to morality, which is to frame it as a consequentialist formula. Exempli gratia, looking at the histories of civilization, we can see that whenever the bourgoisie neglects the needs of the proletariat, civil unrest, genocide and war follow. Therefore, we might infer that a) the bourgeoisie might be able to defer civic collapse by establishing and enforcing unconditional civil rights and accommodations for its population, and b) that no society has ever been able to do this in perpetuity. The thousand year reich is still a fiction.
The religious equivalent is scriptural passages to kings ( govern wisely ) and to bonded servants, ( obey ), without any elaboration on the mechanics or consequences.
Consensus among religious scholars is that scripture (whether Christian, Muslim, Hellenic, Nubian or whatever) are just early attempts at moral philosophy distilled down to divine command theory, which is very basic deontological ethics (creed-based ethics). With centuries (and centuries) of further thought on the matter, our religious ministries have focused more on profiteering than on keeping up with the times.
This is true, but also it's prescriptive about different things... religion is focused on morality, which isn't the kind of thing science is useful for; morality is a philosophical and religious thing.
Or "the lord moves in mysterious ways," type hand waving.
I wouldn't call that science, that's philosophy
This is ... a political science theory relying on haphazard historiography, maybe?
I do not know anyone claiming to have a "science of morality" that I would consider to be scientific, or moral...
Huh. You seem to be using words in ways that are not consistent with how I understand them.
I do not understand what you mean by philosophy or morality according to your responses. You might be writing in a different language than I am.
Ok... "science" is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
So it requires empirical data, a theory you can test (and disprove), attempts to disprove it, and the ability to use that theory to correctly prove future events.
Philosophy and historiography are studies; they seek to explain and understand systematically, but without predictive power or falsifiability. They aren't sciences.
Morality is a subjective, personal and interpersonal phenomenon; it's not something you can have a science of. You can study the way people think about morality, but there is no science of morality.
There have, however, been lots of pseudo-scientific movements and appeals to "science" by people who want to make their goals seem "scientific" and therefore non-evil and totally rational. Eugenics is a good example.
Science develops models of the mechanics of the universe. Some are very simple and fundamental (such as the law of falling bodies) and some are complex and abstract (such as the tendency of mammals, including humans to stay loyal in the prisoner's dilemma, paradoxically when they're better served in the immediate situation to betray). Yes, some scientists who focus on the harder, less abstract sciences may not like the more abstract ones with fewer absolutes, but they are sciences and still provide us with predictable results.
You're right that no-one is an authority on mores, through religious ministries do try to assert that they are an authority (or are able to find scripture that attests that their opinion is right). But there is a scientific approach. Firstly, there's the matter of what social mores have evolved (and some, such as the ethic of reciprocity, have) then (defining morality as an aspect of systems of social organization) what known human history shows about how our social systems fail, and the mores that facilitate the longevity of those systems (or quicken their dissolution). So while science can't tell you what you want, the models we have can inform how we might get there.
Moral philosophy covers not just what should be right or wrong, but how to derive action from it and how we fail to do so. The whole Trolley Problem thought experiment, while it is an example of a paradox of deontological ethics (by taking a wrongful action you can make a situation less terrible), the variations show us our emotional assessment of the scenario strongly informs what action we see as suitable. It's easier to pull a lever to switch the path of a trolley. It's a lot harder to personally execute by handgun an innocent refugee to save their fellows. Hence why there's so much controversy on Kant's take on deontological ethics. (Kant wouldn't lie to Nazi Jew-hunters to protect the lives of Jewish refugees, though he lived before the Holocaust, so the scenario was the Murderer at the door.)
So my take from moral philosophy is one backed by countless scientific studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: We naked apes don't adhere to mores but feelings anyway. For day-to-day living this serves us well, but as the fascists take over in the United States, it's evident that has its limits, and is even putting the species at existential risk. The question is not if we can find a better morality, because we don't care what Jesus said (or anyone else), rather if we can find psychological tricks to nudge the population towards a more ethical system of organization. And that will take more science.
So absolutely true. Until people realize this, memes like these sound stupid.
This meme is targeted at religious people who think that their belief makes things true. Pretending that religion is true is responsible for countless millions of murders.
Sure, science is amoral, but that's got nothing to do with truth.
I mean, it does from a moral philosophical standpoint I suppose, insofar as using science to justify your actions as moral is usually as misplaced as using religion to do so.
The issue with OP is that more or less any clever religious person is able to retain their belief that their religion is valid and instructs them to do [whatever they wanted to do anyway] while accepting the validity of science, too.
However, both are ways people seek to, understand the world around them.
I'd love to see your source for "belief" in science being worse than religion.
It's not worse than religion, it just is religion. Treating religion like it's science only convinces those that want to be convinced.
... But making science into a religion makes you less likely to doubt what "science" says. Since doubt is the basis of empiricism, removing it from science destroys the utility of science... and that's bad.
Cool, then we agree.
When I say "science" I'm broadly referring to the scientific method, which is the assumption of a deep ignorance that can only be relieved by constant measurement and testing.
Yes; it is not something you should "believe in", which was my point. It isn't an alternative type of faith.
I think there's a good argument to be made that there will inevitably be a subsection of the population that NEEDS to be told what to believe. They cannot function in a chaotic world.
And I think it's not a small minority either.
By treating science like religion we limit the harm that these people can do. If they dogmatically follow something, let them dogmatically follow "the science".
Unfortunately these people can't distinguish actual science from bad science or completely made up things that claim to be based on science.
I mean, bad science is usually still better than good religion
I’m curious, who are these people that treat science as a religion? Do you have any notable examples? I keep hearing about these people, but I have never seen them myself. I can’t help but feel like this is coming from religious people who would mistakenly say say that atheists have “faith” in science the way they have faith in a god.
No, I'm an atheist... I hear what you're saying, but this kind of person pops up all the time, some even on this thread iirc.
Think of the kind of person who, without thinking critically about it or making any attempt to understand it, blindly starts sentences with, "Science teaches us ___". No ability to differentiate scientific theory from pseudo scientific nonsense, and glad to half-remember something they learned poorly in high school to justify "through science" whatever crappy thing they want to do.
Think if many an intel screed about "females" and "evolutionary psychology" or the pseudo scientific racism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
"Yes, but that's not actually science," I hear you say. Yes, that's the point; it's jumbled up dogma in service of being a dickhead, which is what I mean by "treating science like religion."