Unless you are familiar with every religion in the world, you can´t logically make this claim. I don´t know every religion so I don´t know if it is false or true that all religions claim to be non-disprovable. I think that it would surely help to provide examples that can be proved to apply to all religions. It would give the article more of the credibility it deserves.
Even if it is true that all religions claim to be non-disprovable, and all the points in the article are valid, it is still a mistake to present this hypothesis using only one or two religions as an example. Especially when they are connected to each other.
(You don´t claim a scientific hypothesis to be true either, based on just one specific observation. You can´t pick one data and check if it is true and ignore all other data, however likely they are to also confirm the hypothesis. So even if Eliezer Yudkowksy is making perfectly sense, which I assume he is, it is still arrogant and unscientific to write an argumentative article this way. If nothing else, it is unnecessary.)
Will this article convince any non-abrahamic religious believer? Will a buddhist see the logic in the article? Will this article help to convince anyone at all, that is not an atheist and therefore already get it?
Will this article convince any non-abrahamic religious believer?
Does any non-Abrahamic religious believer need to be convinced that religious claims are still subject to ordinary principles of reasoning?
The claim that religion is nondisprovable is not usually used to defend, say, Buddhism. But when e.g. Catholics talk about it, they don’t usually say “Catholicism cannot be proven or disproven”, they say that religions in general, or spiritual matters, or the existence of god(s), or etc cannot be proven or disproven.
We could respond by pointing out reasons that their faith specifically ought to be falsifiable, but this makes it seem like that one faith is an exception to the general rule of religious unprovability, that it fails to qualify for the religious immunity by some technicality. Really, the whole rule is wrong to begin with.
So on the one hand, I agree that it’s kind of dishonest to present this as a mistake of religions in general. But on the other hand, the claim being argued against is a claim about religions in general, even though most proponents of the claim belong to a specific handful of religions.
Maybe my thought of ‘religion’ is different than yours, but I think of ‘religion’ as being a set of beliefs that claims to know some fact that is outside observable reality. By definition, this seems non-disprovable. If a belief system doesn’t have claim to some ‘extra-normal’ normal, I wouldn’t consider it a religion.
This may be the christian god’s rules on who goes to heaven, or Buddhism’s rules on what you come back as.
Unless you are familiar with every religion in the world, you can´t logically make this claim. I don´t know every religion so I don´t know if it is false or true that all religions claim to be non-disprovable. I think that it would surely help to provide examples that can be proved to apply to all religions. It would give the article more of the credibility it deserves.
Even if it is true that all religions claim to be non-disprovable, and all the points in the article are valid, it is still a mistake to present this hypothesis using only one or two religions as an example. Especially when they are connected to each other.
(You don´t claim a scientific hypothesis to be true either, based on just one specific observation. You can´t pick one data and check if it is true and ignore all other data, however likely they are to also confirm the hypothesis. So even if Eliezer Yudkowksy is making perfectly sense, which I assume he is, it is still arrogant and unscientific to write an argumentative article this way. If nothing else, it is unnecessary.)
Will this article convince any non-abrahamic religious believer? Will a buddhist see the logic in the article? Will this article help to convince anyone at all, that is not an atheist and therefore already get it?
Does any non-Abrahamic religious believer need to be convinced that religious claims are still subject to ordinary principles of reasoning?
The claim that religion is nondisprovable is not usually used to defend, say, Buddhism. But when e.g. Catholics talk about it, they don’t usually say “Catholicism cannot be proven or disproven”, they say that religions in general, or spiritual matters, or the existence of god(s), or etc cannot be proven or disproven.
We could respond by pointing out reasons that their faith specifically ought to be falsifiable, but this makes it seem like that one faith is an exception to the general rule of religious unprovability, that it fails to qualify for the religious immunity by some technicality. Really, the whole rule is wrong to begin with.
So on the one hand, I agree that it’s kind of dishonest to present this as a mistake of religions in general. But on the other hand, the claim being argued against is a claim about religions in general, even though most proponents of the claim belong to a specific handful of religions.
Maybe my thought of ‘religion’ is different than yours, but I think of ‘religion’ as being a set of beliefs that claims to know some fact that is outside observable reality. By definition, this seems non-disprovable. If a belief system doesn’t have claim to some ‘extra-normal’ normal, I wouldn’t consider it a religion.
This may be the christian god’s rules on who goes to heaven, or Buddhism’s rules on what you come back as.