[ExI] No gods, no meaning?

[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 7:31 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> *In my view, both religion and science are about believing.*
>

Yes but a scientist's core beliefs are much more compact than his religious
counterpart, namely "some things work and some things don't, and the ones
that work are worth spending more of your time on than the ones that don't,
so learn the difference with observation and experiment".


> *> Again, this is highly dependent on the particular religion. [...] Take
> these words, from the son of the founder of the Bahai Faith: "If religion
> were contrary to logical reason then it would cease to be a religion and be
> merely a tradition".*
>

Taoism and Buddhism in the form originally taught by Buda (before his
followers turned him into a God after his death) are not really religions
at all because they say nothing about God and make very modest claims about
knowing the true nature of reality and leave that to science, rather they
are states of mind that they think, perhaps with some justification, will
make people happy. All true religions are stupid, but some are stupider
than others and Baha'i is in the less stupid end of the spectrum, but no
religion can harmonize a belief in a omnipotent benevolent God with
Darwinian Evolution.

At the other end of the spectrum well inside the very stupid area you
have Christian
young earth creationists who make it no secret that regardless of how much
scientific evidence is brought against it in the future they will continue
to believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis because it was written
by God and thus is the ultimate truth.

> *Interesting thought: Is Sagan's definition of science itself a static
> belief? How could it ever change?*
>

Basically all science says is keep following an idea to see where it leads
until it stops working and then abandon it and find a better idea; but you
wouldn't want to abandon science as long as it's working, and if the
scientific method stops working the only way you would know its not working
is by following the scientific method, although you're going to have one
hell of a time finding something better.

John K Clark
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