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Pellisworth posted:I would invite you and any other thread posters to read and consider the following before continuing (a famous essay by evolutionary biologist S. J. Gould): http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html Say what you want about Sam Harris, but he (among others) picks this apart pretty well. For Gould's argument to hold, "religion" would need to be qualitatively different than it is today.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:59
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Pellisworth posted:Could you link an article? I think it's in The Moral Landscape so I'll have to dig it out when I get home tonight. He in that book, and other determinists more generally, would also say that science can tell you whether or not it's "good" to feed starving people, and that such a question is not only the domain of non-scientific thinking, particularly because the more refined our understanding of neuroscience becomes, the more we'll be able to map ethical arguments onto quantifiable brain states.
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Mar 8, 2017 15:35
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Danger posted:Ironically enough, Harris’s definition of “science” necessarily includes things like astrology, phrenology, and even elements of religion for his tripe about morality to even be taken at face value. quote:The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture. Is the Shroud of Turin a medieval forgery? This is a question of history, of course, and of archaeology, but the techniques of radiocarbon dating make it a question of chemistry and physics as well. The real distinction we should care about—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones.
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Mar 8, 2017 17:53
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Danger posted:"When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically." is also not a useful definition of science that would differentiate it from any number of pseudosciences (which includes his own). Harris is at least good at being entertaining when he's being clowned on by people who actually know what they are talking about like that security engineer dude or Chomsky. By definition, pseudoscience is not well-known for its high standards of logic and evidence.
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Mar 8, 2017 19:57
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Danger posted:Astrology or phrenology is an effort to understand what is going on in this universe; for some it is their best effort. Moral philosophy is as well (which Harris's main contention why it falls to science to answer moral questions). The issue is none of those things are science. The definition is overly broad. He would not claim that moral philosophy is scientific; rather, that it has the potential to be such given advances in cognitive science.
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Mar 8, 2017 22:19
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Why would you ever ban a fundamentalist from a science program?  They'll effectively marginalize themselves if they use God as an explanation for everything. They're unlikely to ever rise to a position of power unless they keep their beliefs under wraps, and even then they'd have to produce good science along the way. You'd probably get closer to your desired outcome if you forced religious people to enroll in science classes.
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Mar 9, 2017 15:36
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TomViolence posted:Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards. God: You may live in one of two places, little consciousness. The first is a technologically advanced Western democracy with robust social safety nets, but it comes at the cost of existential guilt over your country's exploitation of the world's poor. The second is a postcolonial nation rife with corruption and riddled with crumbling infrastructure, but you will be possessed with a righteous indignation over your nation's treatment by the bourge-- Spirit: SWEDEN
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Mar 10, 2017 17:02
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Easy access to community and a simple ethical program. I don't think secular society really has anything comparable at the moment.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:24
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