Quote from: AnneK on February 11, 2018, 02:57:01 PM
It's easy. I have often said I have no use for any such god and view religion as deliberate ignorance to explain the world/universe with fairy tales. Religion came about at a time when there was no such thing a science and everything had a spirit etc. There's no need to continue with it, when science and knowledge can show so much.
But why is your faith in scientific knowledge so absolute? We have not even scratched the surface of the surface's surface of existence, and 99% of what we do is guess work and assumptions based on observation. (Hume, who was an atheist in a time of devotion by the way, said that far better than I ever could, and I highly recommend his stuff on causation.) Even something as simple as table salt has undergone dramatic shifts in the view towards it in science over the course of the past few decades. Science on a regular basis is used to empirically assert many terrible, monstrous things. We make inferences and guesses, dressed in a sufficient technical jargon filled peer reviewed paper to make it seem valid to laymen. (Not to mention, it is often for profit. And I'm not talking about corporate scientists, everyone needs to get that grant money. How is that different from televangelists lining their pockets claiming salvation?)
Not sure if this particular video is any good, but seemed to hit the high points.
While Hume was a skeptic of his day, and focused primarily on questioning zealotry and assumptions of many philosophers of the day (who, remember,
were the scientists of the time), the important points are issues with causation and the flaws in inductive reasoning. I hold though that he did not take it far enough, at least in a modern day context, and as we have delved deeper into science that we don't truly understand the issue becomes less of day to day assumptions and more a fundamental flaw in the absolute belief in the scientific industry (make no mistake, it is an industry).
We assume B -> C, but what if the unobserved A -> B, C? Well, okay, slight adjustment. Except.. then what if it was really D -> B and A -> C and we never observed D or A, suddenly B -> has moved from a causal relationship to a potentially haphazard correlation. That is a very important distinction. Which is then an endless rabbit hole, because we simply do not the capability of processing the depths of true causation. Which returns me to the ultimate issue of much of science being guess work, even if reasonable guess work. Theories and models are disproven constantly, it is in fact a fundamental part of the scientific method to begin with, yet we are trained to maintain absolute faith in everything proffered to us regardless. And make no mistake, it is simple faith, every bit as much as any religion is. (At least for 99.9999% of people.) And indeed, Hume also said it would be impossible to live life without making assumptions of causation. (Ie: I'm not going to walk around worried that there might be goblins living in the center of the earth that control gravity with electromagnetic bongo drums are going to cause me to float off into space, and instead just go with the whole physics explanation.) Yet in discussions of rigor, if we are to hold one thing (religion) to a certain standard (disbelief due to lack of absolute evidence), we must hold other things (science) to the same standard.