In similar situations I usually think about Dr. Semmelweis, whose theories were dismissed as incorrect (and yes, they were incorrect in some minor technical details), and not enough attention was paid to the fact that they saved lives anyway.
Analogically, religion may be doing some right things for the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t copy its reasoning blindly, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the whole area without exploring it.
Even if all the insights would turn out to be something unimpressive-in-hindsight like “singing together increases group cohesion”, it is still a body of knowledge that is good to have. (Specifically for a community that is known by its “inability to cooperate”.)
Analogically, religion may be doing some right things for the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t copy its reasoning blindly, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the whole area without exploring it.
Following newspaper horoscopes may also produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Listening to advice from a 5 year old may produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Opening an encyclopedia to a random page and reading whatever paragraph you point to as a solution to your problem may produce the right results for the wrong reasons.
Producing the right results for the wrong reasons is uninteresting unless it produces them often—at least more often than a nonreligious person using basic educated guesses.
Just to gently point out that you both, seems to me, haven’t actually checked the work I created this post about in the first place. It is not a matter of right results for the wrong reasons. It is about the right results, for the right reasons, in a different approach than the scientific one, but one that is part of human culture even today. It explains the function of ritual, myth and religion in the development of human thought tracing it through thousands of years of cultural development in humans and linking it even further down to biological structures through evolutionary time. With scientific evidence.
You are still having the old religion debate where rationality and science won. This is the new one.
In similar situations I usually think about Dr. Semmelweis, whose theories were dismissed as incorrect (and yes, they were incorrect in some minor technical details), and not enough attention was paid to the fact that they saved lives anyway.
Analogically, religion may be doing some right things for the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t copy its reasoning blindly, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the whole area without exploring it.
Even if all the insights would turn out to be something unimpressive-in-hindsight like “singing together increases group cohesion”, it is still a body of knowledge that is good to have. (Specifically for a community that is known by its “inability to cooperate”.)
Following newspaper horoscopes may also produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Listening to advice from a 5 year old may produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Opening an encyclopedia to a random page and reading whatever paragraph you point to as a solution to your problem may produce the right results for the wrong reasons.
Producing the right results for the wrong reasons is uninteresting unless it produces them often—at least more often than a nonreligious person using basic educated guesses.
Just to gently point out that you both, seems to me, haven’t actually checked the work I created this post about in the first place. It is not a matter of right results for the wrong reasons. It is about the right results, for the right reasons, in a different approach than the scientific one, but one that is part of human culture even today. It explains the function of ritual, myth and religion in the development of human thought tracing it through thousands of years of cultural development in humans and linking it even further down to biological structures through evolutionary time. With scientific evidence.
You are still having the old religion debate where rationality and science won. This is the new one.