The most convincing proof isn't found with NASA or any photographs or verbal claims though IMO, it's simply that China and Russia would never have allowed the USA to get away with faking it and they both had the technology to know if it was being faked.

That's not a problem for me. It's only a problem when it conflicts with something you want to believe.

But simply accepting miracles as the truth and ceasing to look for other explanations is intellectually honest? Religion acts as an inhibitor to genuine, open learning precisely because it provides explanations that are not intended to be questioned. Goddidit, stop looking for other explanations, there's no need to. Some religions go further and make it a punishable crime to look for other explanations.

It seems to me here, that you've inadvertently admitted that the religious approach to explaining what we observe isn't intellectually honest.

Sean Carroll's blog post I think appropriate here.

Though having said that it's less appropriate in the context of Tyson's actual position reported in the OP.

Conspiracy types aren't wired to accept information, only affirmation.

The whole moon landing hoax rage was popularized by a relatively small group of wackjob nobodies that fooled lazy people into thinking they were credible. Bill Kaysing, Ralph Rene, and Bart Sibrel are the ones I was most familiar with and were cited constantly as experts. In reality, they were self-published randoms with no expertise and no meaningful education. It used to annoy me, today I'm more than content to let people embarrass and marginalize themselves because they're committed to believing what they need to.

I honestly don't know enough about travelling to the moon to know if this is accurate or not, so I'll take your word for it, that other countries would have known if they faked it.

A couple of things. I don't reject any of your conclusions, just your approach. Occam's razor has it's limitations and we should recognize them. Also, you could have an atheist and a theist, who have come to opposite conclusions by employing intellectually dishonest approaches.

I'm not talking about simply accepting anything. There are those who do that, but it would likewise be dishonest to simply look around and not physically see God, and conclude God must therefore not exist, it's the same mistake the dishonest theist has made.

On a slightly unrelated note, Occam's razor is itself built on the presupposition that our world-view is correct. That is, our inherent logic is correct, and all our assumptions of the universe are correct. That's why I think the more meta your approach becomes, the less it applies. After all, we are not asking what happened to the cookie sitting on the table in a house with a toddler in it.

This seems like a direct response to Hawking's Grand Design. Not sure if the dates add up, but it seems likely.

The blog post is recent enough and the book from Hawking a couple of years old but Carroll directly references comments made by Hawking three years ago.

In any case what I object to is scientists making taking poorly informed philosophical positions denying the use of philosophy while ignoring of the best of current philosophy.

Dan Dennett delivers a really robust review of this type of thinking in his response to Sam Harris Free Will

Nice, I'll read it when I get back from work. I've read some of Dennett, he seems like a very intelligent philosopher, but I'm unimpressed by Sam Harris, but his attitude likely bothers me more than his arguments. He doesn't strike me as the most humble guy.

Should I have some background on Free Will to get the most out of this response?

I initially took to The Moral Landscape despite disagreeing with some of his premises but I've come to think I was impressed by some pretty poor philosophy before realising what better philosophy looked like. The review is comprehensive enough that it presents Harris's position on free will so you don't require any background.

I have never concluded that no gods exist, I simply haven't been convinced that they do. I find the evidence for the existence of gods to be so weak as to be virtually indistinguishable from wishful thinking.

I don't think it gets more 'meta' than religion. You suggested that applying Occam's razor and then simply not looking any further for an explanation would be dishonest, but science doesn't simply stop looking, it considers all possibilities even if it has what it considers an explanation most likely to be true. Conversely, religion applies Occam's razor, comes up with the most obvious answer that god is real (although I don't actually agree that god is the simplest answer), and then stops looking for an alternative. Goddidit explains everything, you no longer need an alternative. I think that's dishonest. It's also a barrier to progressive learning.

How willing are you to entertain an alternative explanation to 'goddidit'?

It seems fairly clear to me that Occam's Razor does not apply to the question of the existence of God.

Saying goddidit is an ultimate explanation. We can say that and still seek scientific explanations for how it works.

What is an alternative explanation as to why the universe is understandable and predictable?

How do you square the bolded claim with the fact that almost all of the early scientists were religious men, some of them deeply religious? No doubt some versions of religion do inhibit genuine, open learning, but I don't see a good reason to think that this is a general characteristic of religion. For most of its history, the majority of the preservation and advancement of knowledge in Europe was done by or under the aspices of the Christian church.

In fact, the "god of the gaps" criticism was originally made by a nineteenth century Christian writer, and it has continued to be urged by theologians since then.

Also, there are atheistic ideologies, such as communism, that have acted as inhibitors to genuine, open learning, but I think you would agree that it would be incorrect to infer from the existence of the USSR that atheism inhibits learning.

I wasn't speaking about you specifically in any of my ramblings, I was speaking philosophically. Just an fyi in case you perceive me as insinuating anything, which I was not.

For all purposes you don't believe in God, though. I could also take the stance that I believe in God, but I could be persuaded that he doesn't exist with the right counter-evidence. We are not talking about certainty, after all, you don't believe in God, but I do, and we both can acknowledge that we could be mistaken.

Religion is meta, which is why we shouldn't use Occam's razor (OR) to investigate it.

It also occurs to me that you may not be using OR correctly. For instance, if we conduct an experiment 9 times, and get the same results 9 times, when we suggest that the 10th time will also be the same, is that by OR? It is the hypothesis with the least assumptions, and it is the simplest answer, but no one would credit this to OR, it doesn't apply to everything.

As for goddidit, I don't see why it's a barrier. If I believe that God creates rainbows, that doesn't mean that I can't discover what makes a rainbow possible and everything that entails. No different than acknowledging the lack of understanding what happened before the big bang, but still being able to investigate how things operate as a result of it.

I've never claimed that progress can't be made in a solely religious context, but a paradigm that says 'you can figure out anything you want as long as it doesn't conflict with our divine explanations' can never make genuine progress can it. Any progress it does make is necessarily going to be a limited and restricted type of progress.

Much of the progress in Europe during the period where the Christian church was dominant was made because the church was the primary source of the means by which people could study. I think that genuinely open progress was made despite the church by people who were prepared to consider alternatives to 'goddidit' i.e. they broke out of the constrained religious paradigm. Some of them paid for it with their lives, that's how keen the church was to maintain it's own explanations and not to consider alternatives.

I'm not sure this is the same thing as what I'm saying. Filling gaps in our knowledge with 'goddidit' as a lazy way of explaining things is not the same as the necessarily inhibiting effects 'goddidit' has on learning.

There are different forms of atheism, some of which inhibit learning more than others. I think that all that you can infer from Communism acting as an inhibitor to genuine learning is that Communism is the model of it's own inhibiting effect, it's certainly not a regular rule that you can extrapolate to all forms of atheism.

I used to think that science is an open system that encompassed the more constrained systems such as religion. Then I decided that NOMA applied and science could never address divine theories because it doesn't accept supernatural explanations (MethNatsm) but now I'm back to thinking that that science can answers supernatural explanations because as long as the evidence supports a scientific theory (Useful, Consistent, Predictive, Repeatable etc etc) then what was previously have been considered supernatural can now be shown to have a natural explanation.

I'm not sure that your 'I could be wrong' and mine are the same. I've never come to 'an understanding that Christ isn't real and isn't active in my life' (a reversal of something you said). For me, it's just not proven. Also, my lack of belief simply doesn't necessitate any action, there are a lot of things I don't do instead. So because of your statement, and because you act on your beliefs in a way that I think necessitates a stronger level of belief than my disbelief (think about how little effort you put into believing the Ganesh is't real), I think your level of certainty is far higher than mine.


People do attempt to justify religious beliefs by using it though. (I'm not sure you can 'investigate' anything with it, it's just another way of expressing the rule of Parsimony)

It's a barrier because you can't discover anything that contradicts your divine theories. Your paradigm can't answer question like 'what if god didn't do it?'. Anytime you do that, you just disproved your own religion's version of events, something that religions discourage (hence the inhibiting factor) but that actually happens on a fairly regular basis and strangely still doesn't seem to put a dent in people's willingness to carry on believing everything else their religion tells them is true.

We just chuckle now at the idea that the sun orbits the Earth, but there was a time when expressing any kind of doubt about that was considered blasphemous and could get you killed, as could actively researching alternative explanations. Our progress toward understanding how our solar system actually operates was not thanks to the church, it was despite the church.

You made an entire thread on this topic. It didn't go well for you.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...truth-1297473/

This is always true. Even scientific progress is a limited and restricted type of progress. Progress will be confined to the things that are conceived as being progress.

Ahhhhh... the Mightybooshian concept of 'goddidit' re-emerges. This was also discussed thoroughly in the linked thread.

Filling gaps of your knowledge with "Goddidit" is a lazy way of explaining things.

Oh, hey... this was the thread where you made a list of people persecuted by Christians for their scientific advances that included people who pre-existed Christianity. To my memory, you still haven't admitted that this was an error.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=24

This is a true statement and it holds true across religion as well as culture more broadly. I think it is important to be specific about the criticisms we are making and who we believe the guilty parties are. You used the word "paradigm" which is a good descriptor. What kind of paradigm restricts scientific inquiry and what kind of paradigm promotes scientific inquiry?

To single out religion in a general sense and charge "religion" with halting scientific inquiry is a bit difficult to support IMO. We can pick specific groups in a specific period of time (which is a good thing to do) and make a case that science was inhibited. However, to then extrapolate that into a general statement that religion halts inquiry is not correct IMO. I don't believe you are making such a generalization here MB but I see prominent atheists do this all the time.

In short, some cultures are going to promote science and some cultures will halt inquiry. World views, religion, atheism etc. are going to play different roles at different places at different times in history.

I don't think it's about the "effort you put into believing", instead it's about the consequences of your beliefs. You do not believe in God, so you will naturally live a different life than me.

I'm not following you here, can you give me an example of justifying religion by OR?


This seems like errors that are committed by individuals, not groups of people. There are Christian scientists who do not commit the fallacies you are suggesting, and I'm sure there are atheist scientist who commit some of these errors.

No doubt you can point to examples where Christians have hindered the truth, but I don't think blaming it on religion is helpful, it's the individual who is to blame, who happens to subscribe to religion.

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to reject whatever distinction you are making between "genuine progress" and regular ol' progress as being arbitrary and biased. Progress is progress and scientific progress in particular should be measured by how much of an improvement an idea is over the status quo at the time, not how far it is from where we are now.

Please list the scientists that paid for breaking out of the constrained religious paradigm in their scientific theories with their lives.

So? My point is that many mainstream religious people also reject goddidit explanations of natural phenomena. Thus, it isn't inhibiting their learning.

I agree with all this. I also think it is true of religion. You don't. Why not?

Okay.

It's not individuals, the problem is with the paradigm because it's a terrible starting place for genuine learning. Take the most fundamental question of all as an example, where did the universe come from? In your paradigm, the answer is 'goddidit'. Well ok then, no need to look for another explanation right? There's only a need to look for another explanation if the answer 'goddidit' might be wrong but it can't be. Any Christian scientist who is looking for an alternative explanation is actually abandoning that central paradigm in order to do so. At that point that they're no longer acting in a way that's consistent with central Christian tenet because their new paradigm is 'we don't know what caused the universe'.

Conversely, even the most hard atheism is only limiting itself by ruling out just one possibility, that goddidit, so it can never be as inhibiting to learning as religion which rules out everything except goddidit.

How can a system that rejects everything that contradicts that a divine being is responsible for everything be considered to be as progressive as a system that is prepared to accept any reasonable explanation?

I didn't mention scientists or scientific theories, I said 'people'. I'm not being nit picky or evasive, this is meaningful distinction. If you'd like a list of people who have been executed for heresy in matters of dogmatic theology I can provide one?

Which doesn't change that the paradigm itself is necessarily limiting and if applied generally would generally have a limiting effect. That when it has been applied, it limits learning. That there have been periods in history when it has been a significant barrier to learning beyond what can be learned within the limited paradigm.

Do you think that the progress that has been made wouldn't have been made without religion? Or perhaps that without religion, we would be much further head of where we are now? What's your general view?

As I said to NR, even the hard atheism is only limiting itself by ruling out just one possibility, that goddidit, so it can never be as inhibiting to learning as religion which rules out everything except goddidit.

Wow, I just reread that last paragraph and I must have edited it quite a lot and then got distracted by something and not checked it properly because it barely makes sense to me and I know what I was trying to say.

Oh, so communism, for example, wasnt limiting itself by ruling out free market capitalism, by killing off artists, writers, restricting the freedom of the press, controlling and funnelling scientists into certain areas of research, restricting access to books and ideas?

Scientists do not put that much emphasis in discovering "where the universe came from". The big bang theory is sufficient for both camps, and any scientific analysis concerns itself with things which occurred after, not before.

Philosophical investigation concerns itself more with these kind of questions, and within these kind of investigations, theists and atheists alike can put aside their world-views to look at different theories.

Having a belief that God put the big bang in motion, versus some other explanation, for example, it created itself, doesn't really show me that progress is being hindered to a substantial degree. I can agree with you that if one wants to hold the view that the earth in the centre of the universe, because of some misguided notion that this is biblically accurate, then I can agree with you that that incident is a hinderance, but I don't agree that there mere belief (or disbelief) in God is itself the cause of a necessary hinderance.

Your premise is false. There is nothing inherent to religion such that it has to view non-theistic explanations as unreasonable. In fact, I would say that it is common for religious people to view non-theistic explanations as reasonable. So you haven't actually distinguished between religious and non-religious systems

You said this:

The "them" in the second sentence refers to people who were prepared to consider alternatives to "goddidit." So I'll rephrase my request, please give me a list of people who were prepared to consider alternatives to "goddidit" who were killed by the church because they were so prepared.

All paradigms are limiting--that is their purpose. They are meant to organize the world into more manageable chunks by giving you a structure and categories by which you can understand what is going on. Telling me that religion is limiting is kind of true (I don't actually think religion is a paradigm, but whatever), but again, that is exactly like all other paradigms, including scientific naturalism.

I think this is a historical question, and like most historical counterfactuals, difficult to find a good answer that isn't just sheer speculation. In this case however, since religion is such a constant presence in human society, I think we have almost no way of knowing the answer to this question. I'm not sure we have any idea what the world would be like a thousand years ago if there were no religion.

What I think we can do is look at the impact that the actually existing religions have had on the world (though again, this is a very difficult historical question, probably only knowable by experts). Here I've seen no convincing generalizations about the role of religion in encouraging or discouraging scientific progress. However, I do think that at some points in history, some religious leaders and institutions were doing more than anyone else to preserve and advance scientific learning.

Maybe. Don't know how you would show that though.

Atheism is not the right comparison. Atheism is, as you like to point out, the absence of belief. Thus, it is not surprising, nor should it be a criticism of a worldview that it is more limiting than atheism, which is not a worldview.