Great question! I was quite surprised to read this, and think it’s quite the valid reply. In pondering it… my answer would come in a couple of ways.
1) There’s nothing intrinsically different. If someone says “I believe in big bang cosmology” and has no trackable fact/reasoning path back to “why,” they are unjustified in believing in big bang cosmology. Now, perhaps it will track back to “everyone talks as if the big bang is legit” or “I always see these articles that talk about the big bang and so I guess I figured it was real.” Fair enough; belief based on authority/word-of-mouth alone isn’t the greatest reason for belief, but they could track it to something at least.
2) The [probably not unique] term, “epistemic baggage” occurred to me as I thought about this. For example, what comes along with or is implied based on believing that the big bang happened? The universe exists? Entropy won’t decrease on its own? Something happened and that’s why we’re here? I don’t see a ton of practical implications from believing the big bang, at least for the layman.
Similarly, from a survey of the landscape… science has tended to converge about the big bang.
What about religion? 2000 years (or ~1400 years post-Islam (or ~150 years post-Mormonism (or ~50 years post-Scientology))) has not brought a convergence of religious truth. It could be, as you say, that we just don’t have the theories and methods of analyzing the landscape well enough yet to judge between them.
In any case (answering my second point first), religions have not converged. At a time when there were many competing cosmologies, I think it would have been equally odd to take a stand for big bang cosmology because some minority said it was true. Now, knowing the field and then comparing competing ideas would allow one to be justified in professing belief in cosmology—they have surveyed the landscape and made the best call they could (even better would be to believe with some sort of confidence interval).
This is where we are with religion, yet billions of believers are professing near 100% confidence in their beliefs without having surveyed anything at all—apologetics, other religions, other holy texts, etc. And we are not living in the religious analog to big bang scientific consensus in order for that to allow hiding behind.
Lastly, there is far more practical (well, theoretically, but I’ll get to that) baggage with religion. To profess belief isn’t to accept simple things like “I’m here, and the big bang implies how I got here” (you already know your here—how does the method it came about affect your life?). It’s to profess things like bread turning into the flesh of a man, the state of an immortal soul, that the mind isn’t what the brain does, and that we can know what god wants us to do with our lives by asking him to speak to us, and that we fell from a more perfect state by “sinning” among other things. There’s waaay more baggage associate with professing religious belief compared to whatever you think led to our universe.
I said above practical yet theoretical because the above are technically what doctrine is supposed to require of its believers, but I doubt most of them think about these things to any degree. Thus, it’s mostly going through the motions, social bonding/comfort/security, and feeling good by doing good deeds that will please the god they think is watching.
Great question! I was quite surprised to read this, and think it’s quite the valid reply. In pondering it… my answer would come in a couple of ways.
1) There’s nothing intrinsically different. If someone says “I believe in big bang cosmology” and has no trackable fact/reasoning path back to “why,” they are unjustified in believing in big bang cosmology. Now, perhaps it will track back to “everyone talks as if the big bang is legit” or “I always see these articles that talk about the big bang and so I guess I figured it was real.” Fair enough; belief based on authority/word-of-mouth alone isn’t the greatest reason for belief, but they could track it to something at least.
2) The [probably not unique] term, “epistemic baggage” occurred to me as I thought about this. For example, what comes along with or is implied based on believing that the big bang happened? The universe exists? Entropy won’t decrease on its own? Something happened and that’s why we’re here? I don’t see a ton of practical implications from believing the big bang, at least for the layman.
Similarly, from a survey of the landscape… science has tended to converge about the big bang.
What about religion? 2000 years (or ~1400 years post-Islam (or ~150 years post-Mormonism (or ~50 years post-Scientology))) has not brought a convergence of religious truth. It could be, as you say, that we just don’t have the theories and methods of analyzing the landscape well enough yet to judge between them.
Or it could be that they offer nothing objectively testable or predictive and thus beliefs can co-exist without clashing (there’s never going to be a showdown where we get rid of all these silly heresies).
In any case (answering my second point first), religions have not converged. At a time when there were many competing cosmologies, I think it would have been equally odd to take a stand for big bang cosmology because some minority said it was true. Now, knowing the field and then comparing competing ideas would allow one to be justified in professing belief in cosmology—they have surveyed the landscape and made the best call they could (even better would be to believe with some sort of confidence interval).
This is where we are with religion, yet billions of believers are professing near 100% confidence in their beliefs without having surveyed anything at all—apologetics, other religions, other holy texts, etc. And we are not living in the religious analog to big bang scientific consensus in order for that to allow hiding behind.
Lastly, there is far more practical (well, theoretically, but I’ll get to that) baggage with religion. To profess belief isn’t to accept simple things like “I’m here, and the big bang implies how I got here” (you already know your here—how does the method it came about affect your life?). It’s to profess things like bread turning into the flesh of a man, the state of an immortal soul, that the mind isn’t what the brain does, and that we can know what god wants us to do with our lives by asking him to speak to us, and that we fell from a more perfect state by “sinning” among other things. There’s waaay more baggage associate with professing religious belief compared to whatever you think led to our universe.
I said above practical yet theoretical because the above are technically what doctrine is supposed to require of its believers, but I doubt most of them think about these things to any degree. Thus, it’s mostly going through the motions, social bonding/comfort/security, and feeling good by doing good deeds that will please the god they think is watching.