Stamp out anti-science in US politics

[crazy canuck]

Marti what in your world is science?

[Oexmelin]

Today we (in the secular west) live in a society with greater happiness, peacefulness, social cohesion and wealth than any other society in history or geography. We do know from objective sources that the less likely your society is to draw it's morals and ethics from The Bible the greater the happiness, peacefulness, social cohesion and wealth your society is.

I do not *know* these things, and have a hard time figuring out how you know them, nor what these objective sources are. How should we define happiness? (Note that if we measure it by the number of suicide, ours is the worse society...) What is social cohesion? Is modern Western society really more cohesive than the society of the 14th c.? Is endemic tribal warfare resulting in the death of 5 people inherently worse than global warfare resulting in the death of 60M people? How can we measure the happiness of medieval people? How is it remotely comparable to the happiness of 18th c. people, or 21th c. people?

What we measure by doing so is simply our own satisfaction - or lack thereof - in our own world, and our distance to the past. That is not inherently bad: doing history effectuates such a realization, and provides test cases for our morals and ethics. If you wanted to disregard the Bible on those grounds - that it provides few guidelines for ethical problems of our days - that is what you would need to provide. You would neet to show how Wittgenstein is a better guide for action in the 21st c. than the Bible, based on its adequation. But your attempts to discuss the Bible's moral contents have taken a strange litteralist turn (casting the first stone, etc.), which did not go in your favour. When you were pointed out that meaning lies not in the simple succession of words (something which philosophical linguisitics might have helped you recognize...), you turned simultaneously to the vacuity of all interpretation and the bizarre chronological argument. You therefore have transformed the quest for meaning, and the existence of values into a process of accumulative knowledge. By that token, anything which is chronologically close to us is better, and anything which is remote is worse. Fascism and Nihilism is better than Liberal Democracy, and Feudalism better than Ancient Democracy. Yet humankind is not playing Sid Meier's Civilisation.

[Razgovory]

Marti what in your world is science?

It occurs to me Marty grew up in a different world then the rest of us.  In Communist bloc, philosophy (and history) was a science.

[Viking]

I am beginning to realize you have no idea what the Councils - there were more than one btw - discussed during that period in history.  Here is a hint - it had nothing to do with salvation of the soul.

From the Wiki article on the Council of Nicea

To most bishops, the teachings of Arius were heretical and dangerous to the salvation of souls.

We have almost 2000 years of the Catholic Universal Church using Councils to determine doctrine for the purpose of the salvation of souls. If you don't think the primary theological purpose of the Catholic Church for the past 2000 years was the salvation of the souls of all of humanity you really really really need to get a history book. The councils were always about heresy and thus always about the salvation of souls.

[Viking]

I have no idea what you just said.

What is an atheistic theory of science?

What does the Supreme Court of Canada have to do with this?

Why is it considered ridiculous that someone who interprets the Bible can also have a good scientific discussion.  The ridiculous statement would be that anyone who believes in God cannot also be a good scientist - lets just right off Enstein as being incapable of having a good scientific discussion shall we?

Shit like this pisses me off

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

Einstein used the word God for the universe. Spinoza's god, not the bible's. Einstein's god is science, to try to use him to support ANY form of theism is either uninformed, ignorant or mendacious.

[Viking]

Marty - Philosophy is not a science.  It can deal with science, but is not science itself.

WTF? You can do science without a white lab coat. Philosophy is (if anything) the systematization of the understanding of the nature of knowledge. It is the science of knowledge. I think you either have a fundamental misunderstanding of what either science or philosophy is.

[Razgovory]

Incidentally, I don't think Spinoza should really be considered an Athiest.  People accused him of that, but he didn't think of himself in that way.

[crazy canuck]

From the Wiki article on the Council of Nicea

As I thought, you really dont have an understanding what what going on there. 

[AnchorClanker]

Marty - Philosophy is not a science.  It can deal with science, but is not science itself.

WTF? You can do science without a white lab coat. Philosophy is (if anything) the systematization of the understanding of the nature of knowledge. It is the science of knowledge. I think you either have a fundamental misunderstanding of what either science or philosophy is.

Much of what philosophy deals with is not empirical evidence - SOME philosophy does, but not all.
I will agree that there is some overlap, but philosophy is NOT a science and does not always operate within scientific norms.

[crazy canuck]

Marty - Philosophy is not a science.  It can deal with science, but is not science itself.

WTF? You can do science without a white lab coat. Philosophy is (if anything) the systematization of the understanding of the nature of knowledge. It is the science of knowledge. I think you either have a fundamental misunderstanding of what either science or philosophy is.

Colour me suprised you and Marti have the same view of what science is.

[Malthus]

Incidentally, I don't think Spinoza should really be considered an Athiest.  People accused him of that, but he didn't think of himself in that way.

He was a pantheist.

[Viking]

Today we (in the secular west) live in a society with greater happiness, peacefulness, social cohesion and wealth than any other society in history or geography. We do know from objective sources that the less likely your society is to draw it's morals and ethics from The Bible the greater the happiness, peacefulness, social cohesion and wealth your society is.

I do not *know* these things, and have a hard time figuring out how you know them, nor what these objective sources are. How should we define happiness? (Note that if we measure it by the number of suicide, ours is the worse society...) What is social cohesion? Is modern Western society really more cohesive than the society of the 14th c.? Is endemic tribal warfare resulting in the death of 5 people inherently worse than global warfare resulting in the death of 60M people? How can we measure the happiness of medieval people? How is it remotely comparable to the happiness of 18th c. people, or 21th c. people?

What we measure by doing so is simply our own satisfaction - or lack thereof - in our own world, and our distance to the past. That is not inherently bad: doing history effectuates such a realization, and provides test cases for our morals and ethics. If you wanted to disregard the Bible on those grounds - that it provides few guidelines for ethical problems of our days - that is what you would need to provide. You would neet to show how Wittgenstein is a better guide for action in the 21st c. than the Bible, based on its adequation. But your attempts to discuss the Bible's moral contents have taken a strange litteralist turn (casting the first stone, etc.), which did not go in your favour. When you were pointed out that meaning lies not in the simple succession of words (something which philosophical linguisitics might have helped you recognize...), you turned simultaneously to the vacuity of all interpretation and the bizarre chronological argument. You therefore have transformed the quest for meaning, and the existence of values into a process of accumulative knowledge. By that token, anything which is chronologically close to us is better, and anything which is remote is worse. Fascism and Nihilism is better than Liberal Democracy, and Feudalism better than Ancient Democracy. Yet humankind is not playing Sid Meier's Civilisation.

We know these things because every single objective test shows us this. We can take any sensible definition of happiness, peacefulness, social cohesion and wealth and find out that de-linking society from revealed religion promotes all of these things. You are obfuscating, but to deal with your examples.

Suicide, apples or oranges. Explicit moral prohibitions will skew an comparison between secular and non-secular societies simply because the issue is not the act of suicide but the anguish that leads to it.

Social cohesion, yes we are more cohesive since discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, marital status, societal status etc.etc.

The 20th century modern societies have a much much lower mortality rate due to violence than any previous societies in history. Facts are stubborn things. We have one big war, they have one small one every week. Mortality rates are what matter, not size of fatal clashes.

The way we can compare happiness of primitive societies to modern ones is to give people the choice of which they choose to inhabit. As long as Mexicans and Algerians will risk their lives to move to California and France this historical experiment will continue to show the happiness difference.

Regarding Wittgenstein as a moral example or guide, I don't see him as such at all. I don't think he would have done so either. A repressed rejected and periodically suicidal homosexual that hit school children as a moral example? I named Kant, Stuart Mill and Dewey as better sources of morality than The Bible. I will however assert Wittgenstein is better on the nature of knowledge and logic than either Plato or Aristotle or both.

As to this misunderstanding that newer means better. I am not asserting that new ideas are better by virtue of being newer. Thats just as stupid as asserting that moral lessons are better by virtue of being from the Bible. Any improvement on any idea is almost certainly going to be newer, either by reviving an older better idea or by inventing a new better idea. In systems where ideas can be objectively tested then the newest remaining tested idea is almost certainly the best. The problem with revealed religion here is that none of the ideas are permitted to be tested and if they are found wanting they are redefined as symbolic passages rather than litteral. Bad morality in the bible is ignored or re-invented, not tested and improved upon.

As for the vacuity of interpretation. If text requires interpretation then it's meaning is brought by the interpreter not the author. Words have meaning independent of the interpreter by means of consensus. These words have consequences. The case I have been making here is that if words have meaning the bible is monstrous and false and if interpretation matters the the bible has no purpose and any text will do and better texts are to be preferred.

[Viking]

Marty - Philosophy is not a science.  It can deal with science, but is not science itself.

WTF? You can do science without a white lab coat. Philosophy is (if anything) the systematization of the understanding of the nature of knowledge. It is the science of knowledge. I think you either have a fundamental misunderstanding of what either science or philosophy is.

Much of what philosophy deals with is not empirical evidence - SOME philosophy does, but not all.
I will agree that there is some overlap, but philosophy is NOT a science and does not always operate within scientific norms.

Theoretical Physics and anything done using the Qualitative Method are specifically non-empirical branches within science. You do not have to be Quantitative and Empirical to do a systematic inquiry into the nature of something.

I'll agree that some branches of what is called philosophy is not philosophy (as the critique of Derrida goes). Philosophy, as long as it strives to understand the nature of knowledge and it's place in the world, is a science.  Since Heidegger we have had men who call themselves philosophers who actively seek to obfuscate meaning and this destroy knowledge by suggesting experience corrupts and thus all knowledge is subjective and all communication misleading.

[Viking]

Incidentally, I don't think Spinoza should really be considered an Athiest.  People accused him of that, but he didn't think of himself in that way.

He was a pantheist.

Which means that he did not believe in any spiritual non-material god. For him the Universe itself was God and we were part of it. Which makes him almost identical to Carl Sagan in his view of the nature of the Universe.

Remember, Deism, Pantheism, Unitarianism etc. are not religions with gods and commands. To them the universe is the holy book itself. Galileo called it the Book of Nature. Spinoza was a strict materialist like myself and Wittgenstein.

[Razgovory]

Spinoza did not believe that God and Nature were the same thing.

"as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".