this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Edited and responded to. Was also busy with a larger response.
Now your points make sense. I generally agree with the stance you have presented. I also think that most critically thinking people would also be able to get this position as well.
That said, when looking at the flow of thread responses here I can see why people are annoyed and your comments are generally downvoted. The initial responses, while consistent with your more thorough presentation, can be construed as a false equivalence argument (which is where the bad faith argumentation accusation I made comes from). Generally, dealing with religious trolls who use nearly identical arguments, who also gish gallop and such drives people insane.
Disagreements in the scientific community and disagreements in religious communities are not the same. Suggesting that they are equal reeks of religious trolling trying to discredit the scientific method.
Great! My only defense is that I tend to have very little time to post - and what started as casual disagreement turned into something I wanted to see through.
Speaking of, I still disagree - and more specifically I'll say that both are epistemic communities, engaged in epistemic debates, using agreed upon epistemic practices and techniques for members of those communities.
Again, just because you (and I!) have problems with those epistemic practices is no reason to describe their debates as foundationally different. Unless I'm wrong, you and others in the thread have argued that the debates - on the basis of the forms and types of evidence being mobilized - are problematic compared to those in science. If we're talking about the evidence as the problem, we're talking about epistemology, not controversy.
While my core point here is (admittedly!) relatively tiny and pedantic, the argument here highlights what I see as the bigger problem, which is that many atheists are willing to count the lived messiness of epistemic communities against the religious, while they raise science to be some gleaming, monolithic, purely logical practice. It's not, making shared knowledge is messy, and saying so does not make science any less legitimate.
I actually do think this is part of the problem. For me, we haven't even gotten to the question of evidence. Religious "knowledge" is based around non-falsifiability of certain doctrines and axioms. Even within their own epistemological frameworks they have non-falsifiable arguments. This is fundamentally at odds with scientific process which must be fundamentally falsifiable.
Religious disagreements are fundamentally different than scientific disagreements. From an epistemological core they are different. Either things are falsifiable or they are not. I would go so far as to argue that religious arguments typically are epistemologically unsound for this reason, regardless of evidence.
Agreed! Vaguely. I'm not sure I'm sure of that - but only because I personally just don't know enough religion to confirm.
Disagreed, following on from Kuhn and Lakatos (not exactly a high-quality source, but it's a reasonably to the point overview of the criticisms of falsifiability).
In a broadly over-general way, people who adhere to both science and religion attempt to make sense of their experiences as everyday practice. Both lay-persons and experts (across both science and religion) attempt to mobilize what they understand as the shared practices by which valid knowledge is produced. Those shared practices can be different across science and religion - but not always, note the adherence to formal academic practices and traditions among Western religious experts, and the study of religion in academia - but they are both epistemic practices differently structured, if often incommensurable.
Frankly, this is a terrible argument.
There are two distinct things happening here.
This argument blurs the line between theoretical and practical application. It fails to address the problem that even theoretically the religious position is fundamentally different from the scientific position and it posits that the practical application of the theoretical position for science is equivalent to the practical application for the religion, which is even farther apart than the theoretical in my opinion.
It misattributes the scientific and religious positions in the practical and theoretical stance. Theoretically science doesn't discover "truth". It provides evolving frameworks for observed phenomenon to occur. Your argument, as I understand it, functions exclusively in this area here, where it conflates the experienced lives of individuals with the theoretical underpinnings of religion. Religious theory may claim to try to explain observed phenomenon, but it is incapable of altering it's premise thus it must alter or ignore observed phenomenon to fit the theory.
This is fundamentally different. Practical application of bad "science" may also do this, but it is widely held that this isn't good science.
Finally we get to the practical/practical case, which is where a very pithy point can be made. Practically both science and religion make mistakes, and we shouldn't denigrate religion for the same practical mistakes science makes (or has made).
Which is also just an absurd argument. Just absurd. We should absolutely, 100% hold both accountable for there mistakes and roast them both in the fire. Every single thing science has done that is terrible should be hung out to dry. We should also hold every single terrible thing religion does out to dry as well.
I can't even wrap my head around how absolutely absurd the argument is that we shouldn't absolutely roast this bullshit when we see it.