In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?
So, I assume the reason you’re asking this is because you assume that belief in physics and mystical beliefs are incompatible. This is a false assumption.
Huh … I don’t see that assumption there at all.
The contrast I see Viliam_Bur making is between ideas that are constantly re-tested and those which are not.
In religion, what we see is that people have vastly different beliefs from each other … but this doesn’t really affect their effectiveness in the world all that much. For the most part, Christians in Christian culture function about as well as atheists in secular culture, or Hindus in Hindu culture … despite the fact that they have vastly different beliefs.
Whereas, if someone had beliefs about physics that were much different from the consensus ones, they’d be predicting things like “microwave ovens won’t work” and “airplanes should fall out of the sky”. They would be proven constantly wrong all the time; and the physics consensus proven constantly right. Technology works because we (socially) have really accurate beliefs about physics, chemistry, etc.; whereas there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as being “really accurate” about religion.
(There does seem to be such a thing as being “really obnoxious” about religion, e.g. religious terrorism or persecution.)
Physics beliefs get constantly tested and re-confirmed by the fact that we use them to make effective predictions about the world. People who get the idea that rocks fall up do not persist in this belief for very long because, well, rocks do not fall up. Religious beliefs don’t get tested in this way: people with belief X and people with contradictory belief Y do not have all that much difference in effectiveness.
Of course there are religious differences that do matter. Anyone whose religion tells them to kill people is going to be at great tension with most societies today. People who have a different religion from the surrounding society are going to be at some tension too, unless secular tolerance memes are quite strong in the area. But these matter because people disagree with each other, not because they disagree with reality.
My understanding was that he gave the example to show why there is a problem with all religion and mystical thinking—that it is less reasonable than how rationalists and scientists think.
If what Viliam said was true regarding all mystical thinking, then he would have been giving what would be more or less a proof of how rationalists are more reasonable in their thinking than religious people.
That’s why his comment was interesting.
The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false. My guess is that in truth, the vast majority of people with spiritual beliefs do believe int he laws of physics. I gave one concrete example to make my case.
Thus, he was only disproving an example of one particular type of belief, and not really saying much at all about all religious/mystically inclined people.
Thus, the point he was making is not very useful, in that disproving one person—be they mystic or rationalist, or one type specific type of mysticism is easy.
You missed that point initially and your comment is continuing to make the same mistake that Viliam initially made, in that you are writing based on your personal belief about what “religious people” think.
The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false.
Oh, I completely agree!
In fact, that was my point, which I took to be an elaboration or variation of Viliam’s.
It wasn’t about scientific people versus religious people. It was about the wide diversity of religious belief versus the relative unity of physical belief.
Christians, Hindus, and atheists may completely disagree on matters of theology or metaphysics, but may completely agree on matters of everyday physical reality. (I say “may” because of course there are exceptions, such as young-earth creationists.) The same is pretty much true for, say, elementary mathematics.
We are all more-or-less equally capable of getting on with the physical world, even if we believe things about gods or spirituality that completely contradict one another.
I suggest that this is precisely because we all interact with the same everyday physical reality, and our physical beliefs are constantly tested by that interaction. If we come up with a wrong belief about everyday physical reality, we will encounter contrary evidence. If we come up with a belief that implies that airplanes shouldn’t be able to fly, we can look up and notice that in fact they do.
The sorts of beliefs that we call exclusively religious (as opposed to, say, beliefs about psychology that we happen to have learned in religious terms) are pretty much those which are not tested by our interactions with everyday reality. That is why they are able to drift so far from one another, from person to person, or culture to culture.
If the likes and dislikes of the gods were as testable as the composition of rocks, then theology would have the degree of consensus that geology does.
I’m not really sure where you are going with this. For one thing, it sounds like we need Viliam to clarify what it is that he was trying to prove in his statement:
“In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?”
Regarding the rest, you’re making a lot of generalizations about religion and religious people, which I don’t personally find to be on the same topic that I was speaking about. That said, apparently I was nowhere near as clear as I thought I was in my writing, so I perhaps do not have room to judge about this.
I was talking about the concepts of what you choose personally regarding beliefs/faith/perspectives/point of view. I was not advocating any organizations religious or not, or even speaking much about them. Only personal choices.
Religion is the connection people make when you use the word faith, but I was actually trying to draw different connections, and advocating a deep level of personal understanding rather than accepting anything on faith—be it a religious notion or an atheist one.
Personally I find the more modern things going on in the spiritual communities a lot more interesting than what has been going on in the past few hundred years.
I find that individuals seeking truth get much farther than organizations. Organizations are collections of people, and I find that the multiplication of bias with the interactions of multiple people tends to outweigh the multiplication of the positive attributes of brain capacity. I don’t think this will always be true in the future, but I think has been true in most cases to this point.
Anyone who believes in miracles doesn’t believe the laws of physics are entirely reliable. This is most but not all religious people.
On the other hand, it’s probably more important to find out how often, in what way, and under what circumstances someone believes the laws of physics break down rather than whether they believe the laws of physics are absolutely true all the time.
Anyone who believes in miracles doesn’t believe the laws of physics are entirely reliable.
Yeah, but they may have the concept (not necessarily explicit) of separate magisteria… so they may believe that the laws of physics are entirely reliable when constructing a microwave oven and similar stuff, but unreliable when God purposefully decides to break them.
In other words, if you believe we live in the Matrix, but you also believe that the Lords of Matrix don’t micromanage most of the stuff, you can still scientifically research the (default) rules of the Matrix.
Even with a ToE, a remnant of doubt always must remain, as required by the ToE being in principle open to being falsified / contradicted by future evidence.
However, that inherent lingering unreliability cannot be twisted into believing some “favorite miracle” to be more likely, e.g. unicorns.
Keep in mind that we live in a country with “One nation under God” written on the money supply—we’re in a religious country, even though there is for the most part separation of church and state. Physics is taught in high schools in the same country, so odds are that the majority believe both in God and Physics.
The other two commenters who beat me to it named the most common logic I hear from people who believe in miracles. I have never heard anyone attribute it to the laws of physics being incorrect.
Huh … I don’t see that assumption there at all.
The contrast I see Viliam_Bur making is between ideas that are constantly re-tested and those which are not.
In religion, what we see is that people have vastly different beliefs from each other … but this doesn’t really affect their effectiveness in the world all that much. For the most part, Christians in Christian culture function about as well as atheists in secular culture, or Hindus in Hindu culture … despite the fact that they have vastly different beliefs.
Whereas, if someone had beliefs about physics that were much different from the consensus ones, they’d be predicting things like “microwave ovens won’t work” and “airplanes should fall out of the sky”. They would be proven constantly wrong all the time; and the physics consensus proven constantly right. Technology works because we (socially) have really accurate beliefs about physics, chemistry, etc.; whereas there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as being “really accurate” about religion.
(There does seem to be such a thing as being “really obnoxious” about religion, e.g. religious terrorism or persecution.)
Physics beliefs get constantly tested and re-confirmed by the fact that we use them to make effective predictions about the world. People who get the idea that rocks fall up do not persist in this belief for very long because, well, rocks do not fall up. Religious beliefs don’t get tested in this way: people with belief X and people with contradictory belief Y do not have all that much difference in effectiveness.
Of course there are religious differences that do matter. Anyone whose religion tells them to kill people is going to be at great tension with most societies today. People who have a different religion from the surrounding society are going to be at some tension too, unless secular tolerance memes are quite strong in the area. But these matter because people disagree with each other, not because they disagree with reality.
What he said about microwaves is noteworthy.
My understanding was that he gave the example to show why there is a problem with all religion and mystical thinking—that it is less reasonable than how rationalists and scientists think.
If what Viliam said was true regarding all mystical thinking, then he would have been giving what would be more or less a proof of how rationalists are more reasonable in their thinking than religious people.
That’s why his comment was interesting.
The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false. My guess is that in truth, the vast majority of people with spiritual beliefs do believe int he laws of physics. I gave one concrete example to make my case.
Thus, he was only disproving an example of one particular type of belief, and not really saying much at all about all religious/mystically inclined people.
Thus, the point he was making is not very useful, in that disproving one person—be they mystic or rationalist, or one type specific type of mysticism is easy.
You missed that point initially and your comment is continuing to make the same mistake that Viliam initially made, in that you are writing based on your personal belief about what “religious people” think.
Oh, I completely agree!
In fact, that was my point, which I took to be an elaboration or variation of Viliam’s.
It wasn’t about scientific people versus religious people. It was about the wide diversity of religious belief versus the relative unity of physical belief.
Christians, Hindus, and atheists may completely disagree on matters of theology or metaphysics, but may completely agree on matters of everyday physical reality. (I say “may” because of course there are exceptions, such as young-earth creationists.) The same is pretty much true for, say, elementary mathematics.
We are all more-or-less equally capable of getting on with the physical world, even if we believe things about gods or spirituality that completely contradict one another.
I suggest that this is precisely because we all interact with the same everyday physical reality, and our physical beliefs are constantly tested by that interaction. If we come up with a wrong belief about everyday physical reality, we will encounter contrary evidence. If we come up with a belief that implies that airplanes shouldn’t be able to fly, we can look up and notice that in fact they do.
The sorts of beliefs that we call exclusively religious (as opposed to, say, beliefs about psychology that we happen to have learned in religious terms) are pretty much those which are not tested by our interactions with everyday reality. That is why they are able to drift so far from one another, from person to person, or culture to culture.
If the likes and dislikes of the gods were as testable as the composition of rocks, then theology would have the degree of consensus that geology does.
I’m not really sure where you are going with this. For one thing, it sounds like we need Viliam to clarify what it is that he was trying to prove in his statement:
“In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?”
Regarding the rest, you’re making a lot of generalizations about religion and religious people, which I don’t personally find to be on the same topic that I was speaking about. That said, apparently I was nowhere near as clear as I thought I was in my writing, so I perhaps do not have room to judge about this.
I was talking about the concepts of what you choose personally regarding beliefs/faith/perspectives/point of view. I was not advocating any organizations religious or not, or even speaking much about them. Only personal choices.
Religion is the connection people make when you use the word faith, but I was actually trying to draw different connections, and advocating a deep level of personal understanding rather than accepting anything on faith—be it a religious notion or an atheist one.
Personally I find the more modern things going on in the spiritual communities a lot more interesting than what has been going on in the past few hundred years.
I find that individuals seeking truth get much farther than organizations. Organizations are collections of people, and I find that the multiplication of bias with the interactions of multiple people tends to outweigh the multiplication of the positive attributes of brain capacity. I don’t think this will always be true in the future, but I think has been true in most cases to this point.
Anyone who believes in miracles doesn’t believe the laws of physics are entirely reliable. This is most but not all religious people.
On the other hand, it’s probably more important to find out how often, in what way, and under what circumstances someone believes the laws of physics break down rather than whether they believe the laws of physics are absolutely true all the time.
Anyone who believes the laws of physics as currently understood are entirely reliable believes in miracles.
Yeah, but they may have the concept (not necessarily explicit) of separate magisteria… so they may believe that the laws of physics are entirely reliable when constructing a microwave oven and similar stuff, but unreliable when God purposefully decides to break them.
In other words, if you believe we live in the Matrix, but you also believe that the Lords of Matrix don’t micromanage most of the stuff, you can still scientifically research the (default) rules of the Matrix.
I also think the vast majority of religious people think large miracles are something that used to happen, but can’t reasonably be expected any more.
Unless and until a ToE is found, nobody should believe the “laws of physics are entirely reliable”.
Even with a ToE, a remnant of doubt always must remain, as required by the ToE being in principle open to being falsified / contradicted by future evidence.
However, that inherent lingering unreliability cannot be twisted into believing some “favorite miracle” to be more likely, e.g. unicorns.
Keep in mind that we live in a country with “One nation under God” written on the money supply—we’re in a religious country, even though there is for the most part separation of church and state. Physics is taught in high schools in the same country, so odds are that the majority believe both in God and Physics.
The other two commenters who beat me to it named the most common logic I hear from people who believe in miracles. I have never heard anyone attribute it to the laws of physics being incorrect.