It's even worse than that. For religious scientists, often belief is directly contradicted by the evidence at hand. The reason this still somewhat works is because humans can exist (and sometimes thrive) in a state of profound cognitive dissonance.

I don't remember right now who said this first, but the phrase "religion poisons everything" comes to mind. Like a trojan on a computer, religion fortifies the brain against external influence. Most insidiously, religion poisons the ability to freely reason about data specifically and the environment generally. If there is such a thing as a poisonous meme, this is it. To use a biochemical phrase, religion has evolved to competitively inhibit the brain's logical and moral facilities, and in doing that it has developed heavily optimized strategies for maximizing infectiousness and resilience.

For one thing, it lacks a sufficient explanation for the scientific/mathematical contributions and intellect of people with religious/supernatural belief; people such as Donald Knuth, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Euler, Pascal, and so on.

For another, it conflates beliefs with mental habits. The point with empirical science, or math, or any other such discipline is the adherence to a set of intellectual practices rather than a particular set of conclusions that may (or may not) result from employing those practices.

Now beliefs are important, but at least for empirical science the usual criteria is that a belief be held only insofar as it is useful. Holding to the Physical Causal Closure (PCC) principle can be quite useful for investigating natural phenomenon, but plenty of intelligent people have been willing to break from it when they think it will help explain other aspects of life.

Of course, the PCC principle is not the result of research in empirical science, but rather its beginning. It is itself a philosophical, pre-scientific thesis, and should be dealt with as such. Incidentally, it is because of observations like these that Positivism is no longer a widely accepted philosophy.

Lastly, it is frankly uncharitable. What's more likely, that most of the world is brain-damaged and/or mentally stunted, or that you are oversimplifying the issues?

Nevertheless: it's possible for a scientist to be completely wrong about most things, and yet produce valid scientific theories. Only when superstition and science collide directly, work usually suffers. Otherwise cognitive dissonance works pretty well. You also have to keep in mind that historical figures had a different cultural outlook than we do today, and I'm boring myself as I write this.

Uncharitable may well be a fair charge, I take it. Other things that don't rank high on my list of credibility indicators are: the number of people believing something, and the social authority of the people believing it. This is all incredibly obvious historical baggage we're carrying around from a time when the goat was the pinnacle of technical achievement. However arrogant this may seem to you, I think a bit of brutal honesty is in order.

However, having said that, I'm fully aware that no amount of argumentation can convince a believer (see my other comments on how religion closes that avenue after it infects a brain). I'm sorry if all that sounds pompous, arrogant, or just plain stupid to you.

At a very fundamental level, religious and secular people might never be able to have a meaningful discussion about the nature of the world. It's probably for the best that we usually maneuver around these black holes on HN.

There are better places for such discussion. However, I consider it a general rule that in all hangouts for intellectually curious people, if you flippantly say something controversial, expect to be challenged.

>However, having said that, I'm fully aware that no amount of argumentation can convince a believer (see my other comments on how religion closes that avenue after it infects a brain). I'm sorry if all that sounds pompous, arrogant, or just plain stupid to you.

I am not primarily arguing to convince you, but for the benefit of observers who are not as personally involved in our exchange. Besides, I think you are probably a thoughtful and intelligent person, and as such I would not expect you to be convinced of something over the course of a debate. Rather, if you did change your mind it would be on your own time and after much reflection.

I am sorry, however, that you believe religion is a incurable mind virus. Perhaps if you did not believe as you do, then you would take a different approach with your arguments.

>Other things that don't rank high on my list of credibility indicators are: the number of people believing something, and the social authority of the people believing it.

This, in and of itself, doesn't make you any different than a conspiracy theorist. I don't mean to say that you are one, and I don't necessarily hold authority or consensus very highly myself, just that rejecting them doesn't tell me much about your rationality. Regardless, my point was not that you should believe something because a lot of people, some of whom were pretty smart, also believed it. More about my actual point below.

>Nevertheless: it's possible for a scientist to be completely wrong about most things, and yet produce valid scientific theories. Only when superstition and science collide directly, work usually suffers. Otherwise cognitive dissonance works pretty well. You also have to keep in mind that historical figures had a different cultural outlook than we do today, and I'm boring myself as I write this.

OK, my point: cognitive dissonance is a pretty different phenomenon from infection by a memetic parasite. Your claim was that religion "has evolved to competitively inhibit the brain's logical and moral facilities" and that it "poisons the ability to freely reason about data specifically and the environment generally". If people with religious belief were so inhibited in their logical facilities, and could not freely reason about data or the environment, we would not expect them to be able to make mathematical, scientific, or technological advancements. They clearly have, and they continue to do so despite the cultural outlook of today (Knuth, for instance, is still alive).

Furthermore, when I talk about the large number of people who are religious, I am not saying "it's silly to think so many people are wrong"; I am saying "it's silly to think so many people are mentally handicapped". Especially since so many of these people are able to contribute to business, the arts, the sciences, etc.

Now, I am not saying that you are stupid, or handicapped (Indeed, your HN profile and web site indicate the opposite). Just that your thesis is bad psychology.

>I think a bit of brutal honesty is in order. You will find that, in this, we are in agreement.

Allow me to try to rephrase your explanation: it states that religion act as a kind of shield for the brain[1] (this is bliss) while at the same time blinding him to hard facts[2] (this is ignorance). Did I read too much in your explanation or summarized too much ?

[1] external influences

[2] the ability to freely reason about data specifically and the environment generally

On a related note, I remember Dawkins spoke about memes and how ideas can be seen as some kind of virus that are subject to evolution.

> On a related note, I remember Dawkins spoke about memes and how ideas can be seen as some kind of virus that are subject to evolution.

I haven't read his books yet, but this stands to reason. Memes share a lot of characteristics with organisms, and humanity has built a great eco system for them in recent years. The first time I realized that ideas are actually evolutionary programs was in the 90s when I read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

    how do you reconcile the use of 
    evidence for establishing belief 
    in one domain, and then not require 
    this in another?

Now onto the main point, the difference lies with what is provable and what isn't. Many religions believe in a being that is not provable. Or believe in teachings for the betterment of society. These aren't provable or disprovable theories (whether you believe that is their nature or they are intentionally designed that way!) There are religions where one of the central tenets is that science and reason must be in agreement with the religion itself.

Personally I think the two can be seperated, and the problem only comes when religious leaders preach science. Religion, for me, covers a set of unprovable concepts.

I also wouldn't say people are too quick to diffuse the science vs. religion argument, I think pg has a few comments on what causes flame wars! (And a rather excellent essay relating to labels / identity [1]).

[1] - http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

The point is do you think it has a greater than 0.00001% of being true? How can you possibly justify such a high probability estimate? In the space of millions of possible hypothesises, the probability of any one being correct is incredibly small. Especially with Occam's Razor, simple explanations are far more likely to be true. And religion is a very over-complicated explanation.

We use evidence to rule out explanations which can't be true, or more accurately lower their probability (the evidence could just be a coincidence or a fluke, for example.) To raise the probability of a specific religion being true, you would need a lot of evidence. Which simply doesn't exist and in fact we have lots of counter-evidence (things that religion say that turned out to be false for example.)

Scientists do spend their lives looking at things that haven't been proven, but they have to have to think they have a greater than, say, 10% chance of being true to be worth their time.

Take for example the question more general question of whether or not there is a creator behind the universe. There is no real way to prove, or at least no one has come up with a way to do so, whether or not this is the case. As a result, either answer is equally valid/invalid.

What we call science today is a formalization of what humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years: looking for patterns and relationships in cause and effect. The very act of making the first wheel, paper out of papyrus thousands of years before the lumber industry, or a calendar by looking at the stars is an act of scientific exploration that probes not just the natural world, but how we discover what the natural world really is. Over time that methodology has included into our cultural knowledge things like gravity and horticulture while excluding things like rain dances and homeopathic medicine.

In the end, you either accept the rigor and structure on knowledge and certainty developed by science and the scientific method (which, by the way, created modern civilization as you see it today) or you don't. If you accept it, religion by its very definition (supernatural and all that) conflicts with science. If you don't, then there is a basic difference in core assumptions and there really is no argument.

If you start with the hypothesis that the universe was constructed by a conscious creator, how do you address that scientifically? As far as I can tell, the answer is, you can't.

It doesn't matter whether you call yourself a theologian, philosopher, or scientist, if you're going to make an assertion or assumption, you have to back it up. If you don't, you operate outside of the human body of knowledge that can be confirmed as true, or even remotely accurate.

>> Until you get clear evidence, it is a matter of philosophy, and you can fill it with anything that doesn't contradict the known facts.

NO YOU CAN'T. Why? Because the nonsense ("philosophy") you fill it with STILL REQUIRES EVIDENCE when you claim that something positively certainly EXISTS such as a creator of the universe. You can claim you HYPOTHESIZE that there exists a creator, but it is on YOU to prove that a creator exists, not on anyone else to disprove it, especially when the scientific body of knowledge, both theoretical and experimental, shows no evidence and no sign of a creator outside of humans projecting their own desires.

You only require evidence if you expect others to believe the same thing. I'm not arguing that anyone should believe in any religion. I'm arguing that a scientist can hold religious beliefs without conflict.

> the scientific body of knowledge, both theoretical and experimental, shows no evidence and no sign of a creator outside of humans projecting their own desires.

This seems like it would strongly depend on who you ask. I'm not even sure how you would come up with a criteria for this (although maybe that is just limitations in my own imagination).

There is no evidence for any of the rest of it, no evidence of interference by gods, no evidence of any real communications either. So saying you think the universe was created by [a conscious entity?] a god is entirely different than saying that you believe in a particular religion and all its narratives and usually inherent contradictions.

I posted a similar comment above, but this completely misunderstands probability theory. If you can't prove something 100% true or 0% true there is still an inbetween more than "equally valid or invald." Something could have a 0.00001% chance of being true or a 99% chance of being true.

In the space of all possible explanations, the chance of religion being the correct one is exceedingly small. Especially if you consider Occam's Razor that simpler explanations are more likely to be correct. Religion is a very over-complicated explanation.

I'm not interested in if any particular religion makes sense or doesn't make sense to you. My point is that the the debate over different religions is at its core a philosophical argument not a scientific one. A point you confirmed by making a philosophical argument against religion rather than a scientific one.

All beliefs are just probability estimates of how certain you are that they are true. If you are very certain of something then you must have a high probability estimate that it is true. If you aren't certain then it must be lower. If you say "I'm 90% sure this will happen." Then you should expect to be right about 90% of the time you say that.

If what I'm saying isn't intuitively obvious or if you just want to learn more, read this: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes/

In any case the idea that religion isn't disprovable is completely false: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova...

The lesswrong article you linked to does not disprove religion. You certainly can disprove dogmatic ideas that have surrounded various religions, but that is not the same thing as disproving religion.

For example, what if I said I believed that the universe was created by a conscious creator? This is clearly a religious statement, but as far as I can tell there is no way this statement can be addressed scientifically.

I would say less than 1%. That is if you were to bet me $1 that next year someone will mathematically prove that, I would bet up to $100 that it doesn't.

I am not talking about statistics here but uncertainty. Probability in the Bayesian sense is just a measure of how certain you are of something.

I can't prove that the sun won't rise tomorrow. Even if we didn't have any scientific understanding of what the sun was or why it appeared to orbit the Earth, I still would bet at great odds that it would also rise the next day.

So what is the certainty that the universe was created by a conscious creator? Well we can look at all the possible explanations and assume they have equal probability. Then you can use Occam's Razor and assume that simpler hypotheses are far more likely to be true than more complex ones (and a god is a rather complex one as it has to explain the existence of an intelligent being with the power and desire to create universes.)

You can call this a "philosophical" argument or a "scientific" one, or something else entirely. Science is basically the same thing, assuming simpler theories over more complex ones, and assigning certainty to different theories.

Also there is nothing special about religion. All the same arguments would apply when talking about, say, the existence of an invisible pink dragon that resides in my garage. I'm guessing your certainty of that is rather low though.

The problem with your dragon example is that it is testable. This moves it in to the realm of science.

Anyways you can't say the invisible dragon in my garage is testable. Say you throw flour on it. I just say "maybe the dragon is impermeable to flour." You try to touch it. I say "It moved to avoid being touched." You listen for sounds. I say "it's a quiet dragon." Etc. This is similar to religions constantly changing every time some fact they claim gets proven false. I could always just say "the existence or non-existence of the dragon is outside the realm of science."

At the end of the day I still highly doubt you are going to believe there is a dragon in my garage. In fact I doubt you will accept even the tiniest possibility that there is a dragon in my garage. Well maybe tiny possibility but not worth considering. Not any larger than any other crazy idea people can come up with.

This is perhaps a very complicated way of reasoning back to the standard idea most scientists will tell you: "It's stupid to believe things without evidence" or "most theories turn out to be wrong."

As I said, religion isn't special. Everything here applies to it just as much as the dragon.

A good explanation of Bayesian reasoning: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes/

Your example still isn't the same as mine. Mine didn't involve goal post moving. For your example to be the same, you would have to start off with a dragon whose presence is not detectable in any way. What's the difference between an empty garage and one with an undetectable dragon in it? Absolutely nothing. I'm not saying you should believe in the dragon, I'm saying that determining the presence of the dragon is not done scientifically.

So where did the prediction itself come from? My brain, obviously. And that's not a bad thing. Humans are generally good at estimating probabilities. It is essentially what the brain evolved to do. This isn't unique to humans though, there are computer algorithms which can do similar tasks, and mathematical formalizations for calculating certainty.

You can and should be able to assign a probability estimate to anything. When you open your garage door you should expect not to see a dragon. You should be very certain that you won't, actually.

You can't not have any degree of certainty about something. You can expect something to happen. You can expect something not to happen. You can be slightly certain that something will happen. You can be moderately certain. You can think it might have just as good a chance as happening as it does of not happening.

But you can't have no idea what so ever how likely it is to happen. You have to have some expectation of how likely an event is to happen, you can't have no expectation at all.

There is no such thing as a "separate realm" where ideas can't have any certainty values of how likely they are to be true.

As for moving the goal post, religion has moved the goal post plenty. From perfectly testable predictions, to less testable claims, to claims that can't be tested at all.

If you are upset that I, personally, moved the goal post, then just pretend that it was my ancestors that claimed there was a dragon in my garage, and my grandparents decided it was invisible, and my parents decided that it was impermeable to flour, and now I believe that it is a completely untestable dragon, and have decided that dragons are not a matter that is testable by science, and that I've been completely consistent with this belief.

Wait what?

Yes you can assign a probability to everything, it doesn't necessarily mean anything, but you can do it. I hope that is not how you prove all of your math problems.

I'm sorry I must not have been clear in my previous post. I did not mean that you personally were moving the goalposts. I meant that your hypothetical person who believed in garage dragons was moving the goalposts. I was trying to argue that your analogy was a straw man argument.

Also, your argument that 'religion has moved the goalposts' Would be an example of an association fallacy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Let's say you have to bet money on whether or not P=NP will be proven next year. You get to choose the odds you are willing to take it at, and you want to do it so that you will win the most amount of money on average. The on average is the important part.

So if you say you are 99% sure that it won't, that merely means you would make a bet where you will pay $1 if it doesn't happen, and get $100 if it does. If you made a hundred such bets and lost only 1% of the time, you would walk away with just as much money as you started with.

The point of the thought experiment is you don't get the luxury of saying "I don't know", you have to actually make a decision of how certain you are. And you can't take 10 years to calculate how certain you are mathematically either, you have to make a decision. And it's all probabilistic. You decide what bet to take based on how likely you think it is to happen. This is how we make most our decisions. We couldn't go about our daily lives if we didn't do this.

I don't think it's an association fallacy. I am not saying "All claims religions made in the past turned out to be false when tested, therefore all religious claims are guaranteed to be false." I was just trying to point out the history of religions removing more and more of the actual testable claims. Because the testable claims are all that's left, since everything else has long since been proven to be false.

I understand that people work up all sorts of heuristics for their daily lives, but that doesn't constitute scientific proof. There still just heuristics.

> Because the testable claims are all that's left, since everything else has long since been proven to be false

How can testable claims be all that's left. If it's testable then it can be proven or disproven. Did you mean untestable?

They were all in line with what we'd probably accept as scientific reasoning behind natural phenomena, but deferred to religion on more philosophical (and not physical) questions: "Why are we here?" "What's the meaning of life?" "Why should I be good towards other people?"

(I know part of these are at least touched on by some of the humanities sciences - moral philosophy and psychology, but the scientists I've experience with were biologists & chemists and not as well versed in those fields as their own)

if someone made a list of statements, most of which were false but some of which were unverifiable why would anyone accept, as truth, the unverified claims?

if anything accept part of the Bible, cherry picking, is worse (logically) than accepting all of it.

- How can you vote for or otherwise support a politician if you don't agree 100% on everything with that politician?

- If your friend enjoys the same music that you do, but not the same food, would that necessarily make you not go to a concert with that friend?

- How can you enjoy a book written by an author if you strongly disagree with that author's personal beliefs? Do those beliefs necessarily invalidate anything and everything that this hypothetical author writes? As a real life example, take Orson Scott Card: do his personal views about homosexuality make his Ender books any worse?

I'm not sure I follow this... Why is this so bad. Let's say that my view of the bible is a set of self-replicating instructions that were carried through time as culture. Today I deem some ideas helpful parts of my culture, and some not to so helpful. I choose to follow the former. Is this logically inconsistent?

The idea that divine texts are a particularly privileged source of factual information is not universal among religions (or even among religions which have divine texts, or even among major branches of, e.g., Christianity.)

If they did mean scientists who take all of scripture literally, then no I don't actually know any of those.

That said, I've seen these sophisticated theists' faces when they walk into a local church (London E17) and realise that the congregation is basically one step up from the Pentecostals and sincerely believe that good things happen to good people, if bad things happen to you then you must be a bad person, and the world is probably 6,000 years old and flat, and that these are actually the people Dawkins was talking about in The God Delusion. I successfully refrained from smirking, 'cos I didn't want to be rude.

Religious belief is quite frequently based on evidence; it often isn't empirical evidence that is verifiable independently because it is grounded in personal internal experience, so it isn't the kind of evidence on which science works, but there is nothing inconsistent about:

1) recognizing empirical/scientifically-based beliefs and other beliefs as separate kinds of belief, and 2) preferring the empirical evidence in the domains for which it is relevant and available, but still 3) accepting other experience as the basis for non-empirical beliefs in areas where empirical evidence is not available (or even relevant.)

> Pick your religion, what method do you use to evalute it's 'factualness' vs some other religion?

Not everyone who has a religion is concerned with evaluating it against other religions in terms of "factualness".

I view the scientific method to be an instrument to gain knowledge with a common criteria for evidence, not something that represents absolute truth, which in my oppinion is not within reach outside of logic and maths and other self contained systems. But there is a trade off there, in that they by themselves can not produce anything but tautologies without empirical observations as a basis for the premises, unless you believe in synthetic a priori.

At any rate, I'm not arguing for mind dualism nor will I attempt to answer any of the questions you posed. I argue that it is completely pointless to speculate in any way about something which exists outside of the bounds of knowledge (science).

I was merely agreeing with the assertion of the OP:

> [faith is required] if the claim is that there is or is not an after life

An afterlife can not be shown to NOT exist even if consciousness if fully explainable by science. There is no special knowledge to be found in logic/philosophy that exist outside of science. Therefore, we only have faith in either case.

So yes, it would be quite a leap of faith to assume that there is some spiritual existence where our minds reside and which happens to line up perfectly with events in this this causal world. Doesn't mean it's wrong - this hypothetical modern version of the afterlife is cleverly constructed to be completely untestable from this side of death's veil. But it can be shown rigorously and mathematically to be a strictly more complex theory with precisely the same predictive power for this world (and with lots of odd answers when questions are pressed).

It's like positing epicycles for the motions of the planets. Personally I just find it easier and more satisfying to believe the Earth moves. I adjust all the other collected knowledge Occamian reasoning, so why not this too? I don't like being a hypocrite.

>It's like positing epicycles for the motions of the planets.

The two are not at all related, unless one of us claims the hand of god or some other metaphysical force is moving the planets. Such a claim would not be testable and the same caveats would apply to it, too.

Your intuition could be correct, but how would we verify it? We have no experience with the afterlife. It is impossible to test this knowledge in any way (apart from dying but then communicating the results are the problem).

The only thing we can do is acknowledge the fact that we can not say anything sensible one way or the other.

Unless you can prove that humanity is better off with statistical significance, please shut up about religion on hacker news! :)

What proof do you offer?

It is also what leaves the door open for more transcendent views. Eastern religions, in particular, are founded on the basic idea that your everyday experience is illusory.

You dismiss religious beliefs as based on "essentially nothing". In fact, the basis of religious belief in the most general sense is conscious experience. The kinds of conscious experience that you would probably call hallucinations. But, referring again to the link above, you are probably disposed to call shared perceptions "real", and non-shared perceptions hallucinatory. Religiously, metaphysically, or even philosophically minded people might call that arbitrary. Chauvinistic even. We act like consensual reality is real because it's convenient, intuitive, and seems to get us good results in consensual reality.

You say "zero credible evidence of an afterlife." That's true, if you restrict yourself to what's usually considered "evidence" in science. Evidence that more than one person can perceive at the same time. But individuals can go further if they really want to see whether there's anything to see. Are you willing to dedicate yourself to a meditation practice for a long time? Psychedelic drugs? Flatliners (the 1990 movie)?

I'm not recommending that anyone do anything dangerous. Just pointing out that there are things you can observe first-hand, that aren't likely to be replicated in a study.

It's true that if you don't restrict yourself to the world of facts, you can do pretty much anything. And there are lots of contexts where I'm doing things decidedly not rooted in facts, such as enjoying and producing works of fiction for entertainment. However, if we're going to talk about the nature of the world, adhering to facts becomes mandatory. Otherwise, there is not a lot of meaningful exchange to have at all. Of course it's fun to kick hypotheses around - but a supernatural world view is usually not a mere hypothesis, it's a postulate made in conscious and willful contradiction to evidence.

For instance, I like Lord of the Rings, but the moment I insist people should take seriously my belief that orcs are under my bed, I have crossed the river into the land of delusion. Of course I'm free to entertain that belief, but people publicly calling it out as bullshit is not Chauvinism, it's an honest and rational response.

For example, if a have a religion that only contains a single belief, that the universe is created by a conscious being. How do you produce evidence that contradicts that? I would argue that you can't because science can't address that. It is a purely philosophical question.

The kind of evidence we gather through scientific observation points to a world that works completely without supernatural intervention, and with advancing scientific knowledge the kind of acrobatics you have to perform just in order to keep escaping the light radius of discovery become more and more elaborate, outright denial of evidence becomes necessary.

For example, to claim that the Earth is 6000 years old, you have to discard a lot of paleontological evidence. To deny evolution, or any other established scientific model, you pretty much have to make the conscious decision to ignore data. The way this works is usually by some invocation of all-powerfulness: my deity is all-powerful, so due to that it not only faked all the evidence, it also made itself invisible and undetectable.

I agree though that it's not possible to disprove arbitrary fantasies on their own terms. All we can do is measure and model things within reasonable limits. Far, far outside these reasonable limits, everything is theoretically possible, it's just not compatible with reality in any meaningful way.

From the perspective of a person on the outside looking into this religiously contaminated world, the most upsetting and depressing thing is that people know their beliefs are completely made up on a whim, and in full knowledge of how that process works, they still believe all this crap without an ounce of skepticism.