[ExI] atheists declare religions as scams.

Sondre Bjellås sondre-list at bjellas.com
Fri Jan 7 14:30:47 UTC 2011


Good feedback Anders and thanks!

What I was referring too was not to apply science, but the tools of science
(scientific method) as a means to verify the validity of morality. Those
tools are amongst others empirical evidence and logic. There are no other
rational means to understand what is true. Many people do not have a
rational basis for their moral beliefs, and their moral easily crumbles
under any philosophical and logical investigation.

- Sondre

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> 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
>
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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>



-- 
 Sondre Bjellås | Senior Solutions Architect | Steria
http://www.sondreb.com/
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