>First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.
Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle.
Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not.
Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
(Heck, most people are even incapable of deriving the math answers somebody like Archimedes or Pythagoras arrived at 2.5 milenia ago, and all they know of a work as basic as Newton's is that there was some falling apple involved, or, if they really paid attention at school, that f=ma).
This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating, but I encounter it online way more often than I would expect. I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet. No faith needed, and anyway.. I can go build a simple computer and prove it all out myself. The nature of the trinity, or sorting out whether hell exists or not and which religions are going there for which behaviors, is just a totally different endeavor.
Which is not to say that philosophy or religion are pursuits that should be banned or are worthless. I am just tired of the overused rhetorical trick of muddying the waters between them to confuse people and win arguments on the internet.
I think there’s an important distinction to be made here, as I’ve had a lot of the same frustrations as you. Science itself is genuinely NOT religious, and can truly be used to understand the nature of the world, and make practical use of that understanding.
But, if it’s true that man is a religious animal, it’s going to mean that people will always take a religious bent on any major topic in their lives. And so the way that many people experience and understand science may in fact have religious qualities, but this is actually going to be true of any major topic in people’s lives.
At the risk of mis-stating the hypothesis, the book is more about the active coupling or entrainment of bio-rhythms between individuals as what 'love' is. That we are able to regulate the bio-rhythms of others with our own, and we do so when we feel 'close' to those people in some way or other.
The argument is not that the science is same as religion.
The argument is that individuals dont rationally objectively verify or figure out every experiment and scientific claim. I stead, we all rely on trust to institutions and processes to tell us how it is.
Which is how it is. Most people dont even know how science actually work beyond elementary school level of simplification. And even if you actually do science as a job, you know only small part of it relying on trust everywhere else.
Yes, and my response is that the average person doesn’t rationally need to intellectually revalidate every scientific and technological fact from first principles because we are surrounded by overwhelming evidence, and that highlighting that not everyone has done that is not actually all that clever or relevant if you think about it. No faith in shadowy institutions is required to see the facts of technological and scientific progress all around me.
And then you have done validation of some of the proposition of modern science and technology.
But quite a lot "science" can not verified in the same manner as some physics, math, chemistry and biology can.
And to go from the fact that some science is verifiable and then conclude that everything which tries to take on the label science or follow similar rituals to the verifiable sciences, also deserves the same respect is quite a long jump.
In fact "science" or scientism seems to be one of the more dangerous religions nowadays, as the rituals of peer-review, papers and conferences, holy institutions like universities and sacraments of tenure and ph.d are very easy to adopt without being even remotely verifiable (or even slightly rational).
the person of faith would also counter you with 'overwhelming evidence' of what God is doing for him...
sometimes, this evidence is just subjective, at other times, it is clear and can be measured.
Another analogy that I have heard is that 'magic' is when one is just wowed by what they see without being able to understand how it happens. Apple products bring that 'magic' though it can all be explained away in technical terms if one tried.
-this ‘Universe’ (seems to me) is so incredibly intelligible and information rich (information theory rise, e.g. entropy timeline of the observable universe).
-there seems to be something rather than nothing
-there doesn’t seem to be anything that happens without a cause (except, it seems to me, our will).
The problem is your clear and measurable points don't actually point to a god. If you see some meaning in them that enriches your life that's great but they don't really count as evidence to those outside your religion (except perhaps when they also claim it as 'evidence' of their flavour of goddess).
1. Your brain/body evolved to interpret this richness in a universe that is unintelligible to us a conscious brain that evolved in that universe would almost certainly view those unintelligible to us rules as intelligible lest there be no purpose to that consciousness. Our brains also quite demonstrably processes unintelligible (to us) things as intelligible when they are not.
2. This is true in any universe where someone is around to point out that something exists and is a priori with or without creator beings.
3. Our will is either deterministic (happens with a cause) or it is not. In the case that it is deterministic we can ignore this example (which personally is my view). In the case it is not then the non deterministic part is reduced to the result of quantum coin flips altering the result in the larger scale world. Assuming so there are two possibilities either everything else is also happening at that level without a cause (which is counter to your point that it is only will that behaves this way) or the quantum coin flips are in some way deterministic which means so is will.
There is a lot of work in the social sciences showing that whether one asserts there is free will or not (as you allude to) is correlated heavily towards belief in God.
If there is no free will, it is interesting that the universal laws of Physics would create clouds of atoms that assert there is a God :)
Trust develops over time. We can trust scientific institutions because of past successes and how their construction promotes future successes. Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function. It is not the case that all forms of trusting institutions are intellectually equal.
> We can trust scientific institutions because of past successes
For those that have them, yes. Not all institutions that are called "scientific" have them, though.
> and how their construction promotes future successes.
For those for which this is true, yes. It's not true for all institutions that are called "scientific".
> Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function.
I'm not sure how true this actually is. Top tier universities like Harvard call themselves "scientific institutions", but they're really just hedge funds that happen to do research and teaching as a side gig. And the fact that almost all university research is funded by governments means that along with the expansion of government into more and more areas of our lives, comes the expansion of what is called "scientific" for purposes of getting government funding.
Which is why the blanket "lying media" and "fake news" rhetoric is so dangerous. It removes that trust—often unjustifiably and usually in total—without specifying what other institutions or processes can be trusted instead for reliable information besides a known orange-tinted salesman with an affection for Mein Kampf.
GANs and other deep fakes are going to be weaponized and absolutely obliterate the foundations of this country if that trust in legitimate journalism cannot be adequately restored in time. All journalism is biased, but we're not talking about bias; we're talking about up is down.
Very soon literally anyone can be shown saying anything… to anyone else… anywhere… wearing anything (or nothing)… with resources akin to a typical gaming computer. As a nation, we are woefully unprepared for that day, and we will pay dearly for that lack of preparation.
Okay, you've made the claim they all lie. It's up to you to provide the evidence since I can't prove a negative. I can't point to a news story that lacks lies and claim they're all true. It's up to you to put up specific examples and demonstrate a pattern of deception.
PBS News Hour
Frontline
Reuters
BBC News
NPR's morning and evening news
Associated Press
Then papers of record (excluding editorial column or op-ed):
Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
Miami Herald
etc.
Please provide specific examples of their lies. I'll even take honest errors that never received a retraction.
Move on to more opinion-based outlets like:
The Hill
The Atlantic
Pro Publica
Mother Jones
In these, provide examples where what's written goes beyond bias or persuasion into "lie" territory.
While we're here, show where dedicated fact checkers like FactCheck.org have lied or omitted their sources so as to prevent outside verification.
Even Fox News rarely if ever lies. Biased as all hell, but no outright lies at the main news desk. Their opinion shows on the channel on the other hand, it's hard to find an honest hour among them.
And local NBC, CBS, and ABC affiliates? Yeah, I'm gonna need some specific examples where they regularly lie to the American public beyond, "They were mean to Trump."
> It's up to you to provide the evidence since I can't prove a negative.
If you honestly can't come up with a mountain of evidence on your own, then either you have not been paying attention at all, or we live on different planets. Or you have simply not bothered to independently check anything they say. (More on what "independently" means below.)
And if you honestly believe that the sources you cite (and yes, I'm talking about what is billed as straight "news", not opinion) are reliable, then good luck with that. I hope for your sake that it doesn't catch up with you at some point, but I won't be holding my breath.
And btw, my claim is not that everything they say is lies. Much of what they say is true. The problem is that you can't trust them not to lie; given any statement they make, you have to consult independent information (more on that below) to decide whether you can trust it or not. And the more politically charged the topic--in other words, the more that is at stake in terms of power--the less you can trust them not to lie. Whenever the chips are down, they have shown that they will put ideology and spin, to protect their own power and the power of those in government whom they agree with, above truth.
As far as independently checking what they say is concerned, that's the problem I referred to in the GP: there are no "independent" reliable sources you can use. You have to do it entirely on your own, cobbling together what information you can from as close to primary sources as you can get it. (For example, whenever I see, say, a report issued by a government agency, or a scientific paper, mentioned in the media, I don't even bother reading the media article; I go looking for the actual report or paper itself and read that. The report or paper might still be telling me things that are questionable, but at least I'm reading the primary source.) And of course most people don't have the time or the wherewithal to do that, which is why this terrible state of affairs persists. But that doesn't make it any less terrible. At least now, with the Internet, with so many ways for people to post first-hand information about things, we have some ability to collect our own data instead of having to live with whatever the media gives us. We used to have none at all, except for the rare cases where either we ourselves were first-hand witnesses to some event (and btw, pretty much anyone who has had first-hand knowledge of something that got covered in the media will tell you that the media account was nothing at all like what they saw first-hand), or we knew personally someone who was and could evaluate what they told us based on our knowledge of their past track record of reliability.
Asked for specific examples of lying from any of those sources. Show me one. Put just a single link and say why it's a lie. It shouldn't be hard considering the depth of claimed journalistic malfeasance.
You made the claim. Now prove it. My claim is that these news outlets are on the up and up. I have listed the ones I trust.
Don't just say, "They all lie." That's lazy and disingenuous. Put up just a single example of a lie, and I'll be listening to your side of things. Otherwise you're just the crazy guy on the corner with the tin foil hat talking about lizard people. "You can't trust anyone" sounds conspicuously paranoid.
I made an account just to respond to this, for that guy. It will be easiest if I just post the original pieces which gathered such information, but you can follow the links within them yourself.
NPR, Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, etc etc "independently confirmed" that Trump had protestors gassed to stage a photo op [1], that the officer in DC was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher [2], that Russia placed bounties on US soldiers [3], absolutely none of which happened, as we now have proof. Few retractions were made. You absolutely cannot trust a single word coming from the media apparatus, about anything, at any point.
You'll notice your one source is Glenn Greenwald. One.
Be a shame if his account of the tear gassing in front of the church were backed up by the pastor of said church. Except the pastor (who was also hit with the tear gas) backs up the accounts of the protestors. Protestors who were still out because the curfew had not begun yet. Details. Details.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867532070/trumps-unannounced-...
You will hopefully note that CNN (who Greenwald calls out) is NOT on my list of credible sources. Saying that CNN is guilty of airing half-baked stories buys you little in this discussion.
Greenwald is not a source, his posts are just an aggregate of sources. Washington Post, which you did list, is implicated in 2 or 3 of the three I posted.
I don't expect outlets to never make mistakes, but I do expect that a dozen outlets don't all independently confirm the same lie. That's not journalism, it's coordinated propaganda. And because the retraction come quietly or not at all, you'll never know if what you read was real or fake at any given moment. For that reason none of them can be trusted.
In regards to your paragraph about the tear gassing, it's quite clear you did not read the articles I posted. They were in fact gassed, but it had nothing to do with Trump or his photo op; that is the lie.
As an alternative, since you brought up primary sources, you could always show a case where one of the news outlets I mentioned took a story from somewhere else, who took it from somewhere else, who either made it up or turned the chain of citations into a self-referencing circle.
That would be a perfectly acceptable demonstration of "fake news" that would draw me in to listen to your side of things.
> This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating
That's not my idea, take it to people who are treating science as such. You know, "believe the science" crowd, that will just take at face value whatever media happens to say at the time.
Electricity and the internet are out of scope for religion. Religion is closer to humanist subjects, sociology, psychology, ethics etc.
When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, he had to be persuasive enough to get people to believe that electricity wasn't just a parlor trick you do with a glass rod and a silk scarf. It's also how clouds create lightning, and the fundamental forces are the same.
You have to remember in the 18th century, lightning killed a lot of people. The fact that lightning rods did, in fact, do what Franklin said they would do was persuasive evidence.
I'm not an expert on the history of Ben Franklin, so I don't know if he ever had to explain that lightning doesn't exist to provide divine retribution. But he did have to get each local church to allow a lightning rod on the steeple with a proper connection to grounding, so I'm sure there were some interesting conversations.
>This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating, but I encounter it online way more often than I would expect.
Well, "frustrating" is not a scientific argument itself, it's a subjective feeling. More like what a faithful would feel against blasphemy. Isn't it at least a little ironic?
>I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet.
Which is neither here, nor there. You still need to trust tons of abstractions you can't evaluate and don't control, the claims of experts and snake-oil salesmen, the policy of goverments, the products and initiatives of corporations, advertising, statistical data, etc. all of which are telling you they're "based on science" but nonetheless contain loads of p-hacking, cherry-picking, bad methodology, non-reproducable BS, and downright snake-oil selling, to the point of often doing the opposite of what actual concrete science would advise.
The fact that you have some artifacts you can use just tells you that science can produce concrete things. Doesn't tell you evaluate different courses of action, evaluate science results and scientists, understand science-drive policy decisions, and so on.
>I can go build a simple computer and prove it all out myself.
99.999% of the people can't and never will (practically, not merely potentially). So for them it's more like the junkie saying "I can quit heroin anytime I want, I'm not addicted".
Science and technology would not be able to produce concrete things if understanding it was practically beyond 99.999% of people or if it was remotely nearly as fundamentally corrupt as you are describing.
"Science and technology" are a vague abstraction. What people mean when they describe science as becoming a religion is more specific - they're using "science" as a shorthand for academic institutions specifically and the various maladies that go along with that, maladies like:
- The reproducibility crisis in social sciences
- The floods of BS coming out of public health research, a crisis for which we don't even have a name yet
- The journals who only care about impact and not about scientific integrity
- Politicians who appear to be completely controlled by modellers who never validate their models and whose predictions are always wrong
- People who are instinctively loyal to that whole set of power structures and rituals, such that they dismiss any claim of scientific misconduct as conspiracy theories, as ignorance, etc.
and so on. The fact that certain fields of study and other parts of society have been able to use the scientific method to produce concrete things doesn't automatically imply that all (so-called) scientists do so, and given the proliferation of scientific fields that produce nothing concrete, doesn't even imply the majority do.
> Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not
See my response to tonymet upthread.
> Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because the scientists themselves don't have a track record of correct experimental predictions to begin with. (String theory, for example.)
But for theories like, say, General Relativity, there is a huge track record of correct experimental predictions, and those predictions include things in our everyday experience now, like GPS. It's true that most people cannot verify for themselves the entire chain of reasoning that leads from the Einstein Field Equation to how their GPS device works, but they know that GPS works from their personal experience, so they know that whatever theory scientists are using to make GPS work, works. They don't have to take that on trust.
In other words, for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions.
Yep, you are correct. At some point "scientific theories" become practical stuff.
One thing that's missing in a lot of books is: how sure are we about the various statements? How much of it is well tested (Newton, Einstein - though we still had a lot of recent confirmation), how much is still out there (example: BCS theory), how much of it is a "feel good explanation" (hybridization theory) or how much is "the math works out wonderfully if we ignore the skeletons in the closet and the theory sounds a bit crazy" (QFT/QED)
> for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions
What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy? Lot's of real world impact, low confidence in experiments, imo
> What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy?
Not much.
> Lot's of real world impact
Because the theories have influence far out of proportion to their actual track record, yes.
> low confidence in experiments, imo
You can't run controlled experiments in either of those fields, so it's not so much a matter of low confidence in experiments as no ability to do them in the first place. There are some general patterns that can be picked out, but both disciplines deal with non-repeatable human situations that require non-repeatable human judgments to deal with them. Even to call them "sciences" is a stretch, except on a very general usage of the term "science" to basically mean "something people study".
A layperson doesn't need to be able to reproduce mathematical proofs to understand something that is obvious and material in front of them that is explained by the proof.
Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle.
Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not.
Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
(Heck, most people are even incapable of deriving the math answers somebody like Archimedes or Pythagoras arrived at 2.5 milenia ago, and all they know of a work as basic as Newton's is that there was some falling apple involved, or, if they really paid attention at school, that f=ma).