[ExI] No gods, no meaning?

Fri Apr 24 18:23:16 UTC 2020

I agree with Jason. Religion is not going away. It will just evolve into diverse and complex forms. I think that religion and other social institutions are like cultural chromosomes. A collection of memes that mutually reinforce one another and provide a common cultural basis for a given tribe or demographic subculture. What you call "worship" might operate as a memetic greenbeard effect. Similar to Dawkin's greenbeard gene. As such it would be a social display that would be unlikely to be mistaken for "ordinary" behavior. It would serve no rational purpose other than to signal to one another that they belong to the same tribe. Prayer on the other hand might be like the "close door" button in an elevator. It just give someone something to do while they wait for the doors to close or some other desired event, over which they have little control. 

Science does not need to get "get together" with religion in order to coexist and evolve side by side with it. Although as a scientist I must say that scientific epiphanies are every bit as spiritually fulfilling as the religious sort. I will never forget the first time I precipitated DNA out of solution and a mass long white threads seemed to appear out of nowhere or the rush I felt when I first understood orbital mechanics. Those experiences were far more moving for me than getting baptized. Perhaps as I scientist, I can be said to worship truth by approximation.

Stuart LaForge

On Friday, April 24, 2020, 09:39:00 AM PDT, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: 

One thing about religion that may be incompatible with science is worship.  Where does a need to worship come from?  Why do people get together and say how God is great?  Sing hymns to God.  Doesn't God know that?  So that's irrelevant.  Can you see anyone in science worshipping Darwin or Galileo?  Tons of respect, all earned - yes.  Worship - no.  Atheism cannot offer people for people to worship.  

How about prayer? I think that a study of prayer would show that it just doesn't work on any basis reliable enough to stand up to scientific standards.  But some people love to pray , so that's another thing science cannot offer the religious person.

And I don't see how science can get along with metaphysics.  Science cannot deal with anything unobservable.  It's going to take a lot for me to swallow any idea that science and religion can get together somehow.  Different epistemologies, as I said.

bill w

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 10:10 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thursday, April 23, 2020, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>  
>>  
>>  Dammit, done it again!
>> 
>> Reposted, with correct Subject line :(
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 23/04/2020 00:18, Adrian Tymes wrote:
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>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
>>> On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 3:51 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  
>>>> On 22/04/2020 18:39, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>>>>> agnosticism is a lack of belief in gods.  Atheism is a belief in the 
>>>>> lack of gods.
>>>> 
>>>> This is patently false. Agnosticism has nothing at all to say about 
>>>> belief, it's about knowledge (from the greek, 'Gnosis', meaning 
>>>> knowledge). Agnosticism is the position that you don't/can't know.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> And thus, a lack of belief.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> Not necessarily.
>> Many religious people will freely admit they have no definite knowledge about their particular god, but still choose to believe in it. I know that's a logically contradictory position, but belief knows no logic. In fact it rejects logic.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>>  
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>>>> Atheism, in it's most common form, is the lack of belief in gods. Some 
>>>> people define a 'strong', or 'hard' form of atheism that is an assertion 
>>>> that no gods exist, but that is a minority view.
>>>> 
>>>> These things are easy to look up.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism  
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> "Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities.  Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist.  In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities."
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>>> I guess both meanings are in use.
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>>> 
>> 
>> Yes. And one is overwhelmingly more common than the other.
>> 
>> When I say I'm an atheist, I don't want people to assume I subscribe to a minority interpretation of the term (mainly because, to me, it's not so much the non-existence of gods that is the important thing, but the not believing in things ('believing' as in accepting things as true without a shred of evidence, and even in the face of contradictory evidence).
>> 
>> The narrowest sense is the one that needs qualification, not the broadest one. This is true of job titles and many other things, not just world-views.
>> 
>> 
> 
> They're also definitions of God held by different religions or different believers which are scientifically consistent.
> 
> For example, God as the creator (consistent with the simulation hypothesis), or God as the "world soul" -- the collection of all conscious brings (consistent with open individualism), or God as Truth/Reality (consistent with mathematical realism).
> 
> It's easy to forget that there's any different religions and God's out there, as well as varying levels sophistications of belief, even within those religions.
> 
> There's no reason I see that religious ideas cannot be extended and grow together with advances in scientific understanding. To assume otherwise and say religious ideas must stagnate perverts and restricts not only religion but science as well.
> 
> Jason
> 
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