[ExI] atheists declare religions as scams.

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2011-01-07 09:19, Sondre Bjellås wrote:
> No religion are sane. Religions are invalid as basis for morality, as
> the morality in all religions are not based upon realities in the world
> and doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny.

While the epistemic basis for religions is clearly bad, I doubt there is 
much science itself can say about the correctness of morality.

If you are a moral realist (moral claims can be true or false), it is 
not obvious that the truth of moral statements can be investigated 
through a scientific experiment. How do you measure the appropriateness 
of an action? How do you test if utilitarianism is correct? And if you 
are a moral noncognitivist (moral claims are not true or false, but like 
attitudes or emotions) or error theorist (moral claims are erroneous 
like religion) at most you can collect statistics and correlates of why 
people believe certain things. If you are a subjectivist (moral claims 
are about subjective human mental states; they may or may not be 
relative to the speaker or their culture) you might be able to 
investigate them somewhat, with the usual messiness of soft science.

Note that logic and philosophy can say a lot about the consistency of 
moral systems: it is pretty easy to show how many moral systems are 
self-contradictory or produce outcomes their proponents don't want, and 
it is sometimes even possible to prove more general theorems that show 
that certain approaches are in trouble (e.g. see 
http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/38 ) Philosophy has been doing 
this for ages, to the minor annoyance of believers.

Science is really good at undermining factually wrong claims (like the 
Earth being flat or that prayer has measurable positive effects on the 
weather). It might also be possible to use it to say things about 
properties of moral systems such as their computational complexity, 
evolutionary stability or how they tie in with the cognitive 
neuroscience and society of their believers. It is just that science is 
pretty bad at proving anything about the *correctness* of moral 
statements unless it is supplemented by a theory of what counts as 
correct, and that tends to come from the philosophy department (or, 
worse, the theology department...)


This was a PSA brought to you by the philosophy department. Better 
living through thinking.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University