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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

Creationist, son of creationists here :-)

Although I guess there are creationists and there are creationists:

If you ask me about science I will answer with science. I did well in school, including biology and introduction to astrophysics.

If you hold a gun to my head and ask if I still belive this nonsense about the world being created I'd guess I'd say yes (if I can't get around to disarming you, I don't like armed people with strong ideological beliefs going around trying to convince people :-/ )

On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.

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My favorite explanation has been: science answers What/How, religion answers Why. It's when we start asking one a question for the other that we get into trouble.

Which is what I don't like about [some] creationism. It tries to use a Why tool to answer a How question.

And as long as you take Biblical stories to be metaphors and/or best-effort explanations from before we had the data that we have now, they're perfectly fine stories that make plenty of sense as an explanation.

Adam&Eve for instance. If all you know is that it takes a man and a woman to produce a baby, it stands to reason that at some point there had to have been the first pair.

The NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria argument/How vs. Why) position is useful to try to coexist peacefully while establishing a more solid rapport, but is not itself universally accepted[0]. For example, philosophy is also capable of answering "Why" questions with or without the help of religion, and neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology can explain a lot of the "How" that actually drives what we perceive as "Why".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Rec...

To display my ignorance: I'm not sure philosophy is that different from religion. At least much of philosophy that hasn't spun off into harder sciences.

Could religion not be considered a philosophical framework?

Thanks for showing me there's a name for why vs how. I had no idea.

I think the atrength of this distinction also varies between people. I know many religious atheists who believe in the value of religion, in its teachings and traditions, even in some hybrid concept of heaven and hell, possibly god, but who do not believe God exists as a factual entity or that anything from any religious text is fact rather than metaphor.

But I also come from a country that is 68% christian but only 32% of the population says they believe in there being some sort of god.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Apparently "Catholic Atheism" is a thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

No snark, but I guess white supremacists also find their model pretty useful. The obvious question is, does anything go, provided it makes some people feel good somehow?

I'm obviously biased but I feel the comparison is a bit weird.

> On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.

What useful model does creationism put forward?

Mostly not creationism specifically but my religion.

Useful perhaps, in that it makes you feel good. But like another poster pointed out, nazi ideology made its followers feel pretty good.

More useful though in that it made me stop hating and get control over my impulsiveness.

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