Respectfully I'd say you've underscored my point. Your statement that "scientific worldview, which is diametrically opposed to religious culture" is itself a dogma, which is one of the features of religion you claim to have surpassed as a scientific person.
It is true that modern society contains pretty fundamentally opposed religious vs scientific factions. My point isn't to take sides but to point out that what you are calling religion is some kind of oppositional faction defined by rejecting scientific fact. It wasn't always the case. But you should judge the nature of religious culture objectively and scientifically, not by it's worst modern manifestations.
Religious reality was originally and for thousands of years the only reality, and it's proponents would have argued as strongly against any alternating philosophy, just at you proclaim that scientific realism is reality and reject any other.
My argument is that scientific culture resemblance to religious culture isn't coincidence, it's the nature of belief in social systems. Meanwhile science culture could learn worlds from religious culture which in my view was very much a science of authority and social unification. That's to say that religious cultural realism was more effective at generating belief and that's because it was a science of generating belief.
> Your statement that "scientific worldview, which is diametrically opposed to religious culture" is itself a dogma
No, it isn't, it's a description. I described what I mean by "scientific worldview" and by "religious culture". It should be evident from my descriptions that the two things I described are diametrically opposed. I think my descriptions have fairly captured the two world views in question. If you disagree, by all means make an argument; but just calling my descriptions "dogma" is not an argument.
> which is exactly the feature of religion you claim to have surpassed as a scientific person
I have made no such claim. I explicitly contrasted the scientific worldview with the behavior of individual persons. I also said nothing about "surpassing" anything.
> My point isn't to take sides but to point out that what you are calling religion is some kind of oppositional faction defined by rejecting scientific fact.
Again, if you disagree with my description of "religious culture", by all means make an argument for a different description. My description certainly does not describe all aspects of religion; but I think I have focused in on a key aspect that makes religious culture different from the scientific worldview.
> Religious reality was originally and for thousands of years the only reality
The level of historical ignorance in this statement is staggering. A true statement would be that humans have had religions for as far back as we have historical evidence. But that is a much, much weaker statement than your claim here.
> just at you proclaim that scientific realism is reality and reject any other
I have said no such thing. I have no idea what you are responding to, but it isn't anything I said.
> scientific culture resemblance to religious culture isn't coincidence
Before you start making claims about why such a resemblance exists, you first have to establish that it exists. You have not done that.
I don't mean to argue with you. If you say religion can't be fact based and aren't open to any alternate view that's scientific cultural dogma, in my opinion but also that's dogma by definition. If science can have dogma, then it has at least one similarity to religion which establishes a resemblance.
I'll give an alternate definition of religion that I think is compatible with a scientific world view rather than oppositional: religion is an ancient applied science of managing authority and consent in large groups of people. That's the reality it dealt with, just as modern science might deal with materials or biology.
I don't mean to give you a hard time. This topic is very difficult to talk about given the intense factions around it. But that's why it's important to talk about it even if it makes folks mad at you initial. Sorry if I irritated you.
I have said that science has a much better track record of generating true beliefs than religion does. That is not the same as saying religion never generates true beliefs or never looks at facts.
> religion is an ancient applied science of managing authority and consent in large groups of people
This is an interesting hypothesis, but note a key implication: that this "applied science" involves generating and propagating false beliefs. And given that, an easy alternate way of contrasting the religious worldview with the scientific worldview would be that the scientific worldview does not consider generating and propagating false beliefs to be a good thing. That's not to say science never does that, just that in science, it's considered a bug, whereas in religion, by your description, it's considered a feature.
Also, the term "applied science" implies that there is an actual scientific theory that is being applied. Religion does not have any theory at all about "managing authority and consent in large groups of people". It does that in practice, but it doesn't have any theory about it. So "applied science" is a misnomer in this case: a better term would be "art", as in "religion is an ancient art of managing authority and consent in large groups of people".
Well enjoy the discussion. I don't find it disagreeable.
I'd say that as a science of authority the theory is clear to those who seek to benefit from the cultural practice. A hypothesis such as "there is only one God" isn't powerful because it's true in the modern sense of having been through a rigorous scientfic process, it's powerful because it results in greater authority relative to other cultural symbolisms. Religion is a science that tests narratives and symbols and cultural signs for effective ability to leverage and maintain authority.
I don't dispute that modern science generates more factual reality, but I think there's a big question around the idea of truth and belief you raise. Truth and belief are difficult to quantify. I understand that you mean when you say "generate true belief", but it's a philosophically tough position to hold. If I claim that "God is love" you will have an impossible time proving that is not true, or that I don't believe it. You might say "the earth is a sphere" is the more true, scientfic statement, but until you have a lot of definitive context for each statement relative to the believer you don't really know how accurate either is.
I think the argument falls apart further in any attempt to evaluate the value of belief. If 90% of people believe in God but 60% reject climate change, does that make climate change less real? I would say no, but I'm the same token you would have to agree that scientfic speaking it is easier to believe in God than climate change. My question is, what makes God so easy to believe in? I would say one could produce a sound theory about why it's so easy to believe in God, and the folks who made him up were thoroughly versed in that theory. These were the scientific minds of their times.
As I understand it in the classical definition science is a branch of art as art is the more general term.
> until you have a lot of definitive context for each statement relative to the believer you don't really know how accurate either is
I'm not sure whether you are just historically ignorant or whether you are being deliberately obtuse. The proposition that the Earth is a sphere makes plenty of specific predictions which were confirmed observationally as long ago as ancient Greece.
> If 90% of people believe in God but 60% reject climate change, does that make climate change less real?
What percentage of people believe a proposition is irrelevant from the standpoint of science. The relevant criterion in science is whether a proposition can be tested against observation and experiment, whether, if so, it has been tested, and how the tests came out.
The reason "belief in God" is generally not considered a scientific proposition is that there is no way to test it against observation and experiment, because it makes no particular predictions about what we should observe or what the results of particular experiments should be. Whereas various beliefs about climate change do make such predictions and can be tested.
> what makes God so easy to believe in?
The fact that "belief in God" does not commit you to any specific predictions about what you should observe, so it's easy to adopt such a belief without having to disturb any of your other beliefs. Many scientists, for example, profess to believe in God, and don't seem to see any contradiction with what they do as scientists.
> in the classical definition science is a branch of art as art is the more general term
There is a sense of "art" in which science is one of the arts, yes. But that's not the sense in which I was using the term "art".
> religious cultural realism was more effective at generating belief
If "generating belief" allows the beliefs generated to be false, yes, I agree. Science is much more cautious about "generating belief" than religion is, so it generates fewer beliefs; but it also has a much better track record of generating true beliefs.
> that's because it was a science of generating belief.
You must be joking. Religion's way of "generating belief" is not informed by any kind of scientific study of how to "generate beliefs".
Religious methodology in building a belief generating technology was more organic than we like to think of science today, however it followed the same format as all scientific methodology: observation, question, hypothesis, experiment, modification and repeat. It also was recorded, often in aural memory but also in text, which I would say is the critical feature that differentiates modern science from more traditional scientific practices which we tend to dismiss as not science but which meet the criteria in strict methodological terms.
I don't think I'll be capable of convincing you or anyone who has built their idea of science on the rejection of mythology, however it's worth considering that religious believers made the same assumption about previous cultural realities: theirs was the only right reality.
> Religious methodology in building a belief generating technology...
You are making huge historical claims here that, as far as I know, have no basis in actual fact.
> anyone who has built their idea of science on the rejection of mythology
Where have I said that science rejects mythology?
Science acknowledges that mythology exists, that its ubiquity in human cultures is evidence that it meets some common human need, and that that human need itself is genuine even if many of the specific mythologies that have evolved to meet it include many false beliefs.
What science does not do is accept mythological claims at face value, any more than it accepts any other claims at face value.
> theirs was the only right reality
Science makes no such claim. Science does make particular claims about reality, when it has particular theories that have a strong track record of making correct predictions. But science makes no general claim whatever about its "reality" being "the only right reality". Science does not even make the weaker claim that the scientific method is the only possible way of gaining knowledge about "reality". Particular scientists might, but science as a worldview does not.
> however it's worth considering that religious believers made the same assumption about previous cultural realities: theirs was the only right reality.
Science doesn’t make that assumption about Reality. In fact it makes a rather weak assumption: reality is only that which we can demonstrate and prove using the scientific method.
Science only lays down the principles by which scientific discovery might be made, and leaves the description of reality as whatever the outcome of that process might be. It’s something that rational human beings enjoy because it has offered great predictive power which has benefited humanity immensely, in addition to providing theories for how the world works.
The best thing about science is that it allows you to completely change the description of reality if a better theory comes up. This is one of the main reasons why this framework has been successful: it is adaptable and accepting of new realities.
> reality is only that which we can demonstrate and prove using the scientific method
I don't think science even makes this weaker claim. Science does not claim, for example, that my preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream is only valid if I can demonstrate it and prove it using the scientific method. (Science might claim that the scientific method can be used to gain understanding about how my body and brain work that would help to explain the processes in me that underlie my preference, but that's not the same thing.) Nor does science claim that nothing can be known about "reality" in domains, such as law or politics, where our ability to use the scientific method is extremely limited at best.
I'm teasing you and I'm sorry if it is offensive. But your are right that a characteristic of scientific culture is relative flexibility. What I'm saying attention to is where that famous ability to reflect and change fails, and nowhere is that more evident than in confronting the evidence that scientific culture behaves a lot more like religious culture than otherwise. And nowhere is that similarity more evident than in the piles of scientfic cultural proponents who attack anyone who dares to point out the commonality.
In fact, to me the most radical characteristic of science as a cultural reality (a religion) and the most clear proof of it is science's ability to deny that it produces cultural realism. I can sum it up:
Science is the god that claims to not exists.
So when I say something like "your science produces monsters", which is a mythological type language, a science proponent will often freak the fuck out and hide behind the fact that science is only a method. Yet science has birthed multiple technologies with the power to obliviate the planet, and mythology predicted it.
All I'm saying is that it's time to call science what it is: a god.
Asserting that scientific culture has some similarities to religion isn’t some deep insight. All human scholarly cultures have things in common. We don’t use that commonness to argue that they’re all the “same”, it’s not an assertion that provides much value.
Your other arguments about science zealots arguing doesn’t provide any novel insight either. There are zealots everywhere, using them as the focus for describing the culture seems like a rather silly thing to do.
Fair. And agreed it's a weak argument to pick on zealots. I like your argument that all cultures have things in common. I don't argue that are all the same as in not a simpleton. I say that to me there are more similarities than differences between secular and religious culture. I say that the similarities are critically instructive.
Some say there are no novel insights. But we still try. Here's one effort: suppose we hypothesize that fiction is more effective at building political consensus. When I say "fiction" I don't say falsehood. I say fiction to mean representation of reality that aim to be convincing rather than truthful. We all have seen this in action.
Suppose I say this is what religion looks like to me: the ancient study of social and political fiction.
I think modern science has lost its way. It has lost moral context. I think it looks a lot like the advanced institutions of the Roman Catholic Church near the time of the Reformation. Not exactly mind you, but in that it's existing to maintain itself rather than as a responsive, living language of healthy communal culture.
I think it's language that fascilitates rapid change in cultural realities. It's this form of religious realism that interests me in critique of modern science institution. That's not because I like to argue with people on the internet, but because I think there's a novel, applied approach that emerges in looking at the problem that way.
But I don't expect that to be clear, and while it's been interesting I'm not much for basic arguing!
It is true that modern society contains pretty fundamentally opposed religious vs scientific factions. My point isn't to take sides but to point out that what you are calling religion is some kind of oppositional faction defined by rejecting scientific fact. It wasn't always the case. But you should judge the nature of religious culture objectively and scientifically, not by it's worst modern manifestations.
Religious reality was originally and for thousands of years the only reality, and it's proponents would have argued as strongly against any alternating philosophy, just at you proclaim that scientific realism is reality and reject any other.
My argument is that scientific culture resemblance to religious culture isn't coincidence, it's the nature of belief in social systems. Meanwhile science culture could learn worlds from religious culture which in my view was very much a science of authority and social unification. That's to say that religious cultural realism was more effective at generating belief and that's because it was a science of generating belief.