Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

> “An end to all apologetics!” cried the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and for once, I agree with him. There was no reason, in his opinion, to harmonize faith and science.

On the contrary, I think we must rediscover the relationship between metaphysical philosophy and observation-based reasoning. For whatever reason the current culture pulls communities apart and forces hate and conflict where, in my opinion, fighting over the tension between "science" and "religion" is unneeded and unhealthy.

The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of those axioms. To hate, confuse, and fight over the implications of that is such a waste.

View on HN

> The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of those axioms.

I'm genuinely struggling with this. In what way are the axioms of science (by which I think you mean rationality) a subset of the axioms of (all?) religion?

"We can learn truths about the universe through observation of matter and reason."

I'm sure some collaboration and editing are due on that particular phrasing, but that's the general premise behind science. And, perhaps with fringe exceptions, religious people are fine with that axiom. Exhibit A is all the religious scientists throughout history and up to right now.

Which directly contradicts some of the basic tenets of most religions which state that god is the sole source of truth and HE is unfathomable...

I’m not sure what you mean by “sole source of truth”. But from my point of view (a believer), if God placed us in a material universe and he gave us senses, it’s not only our right but our obligation to use these senses and learn about our enviroment. Yes I believe he is the source of truth, he poses all the knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I’ll learn to program a computer by reading the Bible or by praying. And about God being unfathomable, well a finite entity is incapable of containing the infinite, that doesn’t mean we are not able to tend to infinite.

I dispute that the basic tenets of most religions include rejecting information about heritability gained from cultivating plants in a garden.

Semantics. Religions largely don't reject all that much, people in them do and the fact is an awful lot of religious people reject evolution and the principle of natural selection on the grounds of their religion.

http://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-inte...

Well, yeah, the conflict is poor understanding of semantics.

I think most of the contention is people talking past each other, and I think we're at risk of that happening here, too. I'll try to be careful.

How old the universe is and whether there is a creator are theological and metaphysical questions. Whether species change over time in response to changes in their environments is an empirical question. You can't disprove a theological axiom with empirical observation. The universe could have been created in the middle of my typing this post up. There's no scientific way to prove that an omnipotent being didn't set it up that way.

So the fundamentalists need to accept that a creator could have created a universe with evolution in it. And anti-fundamentalists need to acknowledge that they can only prove that the universe looks really old when we extrapolate backwards from existing evidence.

One metaphysical question is "Could an omnipotent creator create a universe with evolution?" I think the answer is clearly "yes". The people who object at this point usually object to the "Why would a creator do that?" That's an entirely different theological question, one that doesn't affect science a single bit.

This is a similar issue to that posed by Descartes’ Demon, which continuously creates the illusion of a universe around you. How do you know whether you live in a real world or an illusion?

The best solution I know is that you must proceed on he basis that what you perceive is accurate, otherwise you might as well give up as the alternative is that nothing is knowable or has any value. There is a congruent theological principle that a good god would not so deceive it’s creation.

Doesn't this line of thinking break down from the fact that you can replace the religious concepts with litteraly anything else you can dream up, as you don't really demand any evidence or even a cogent argument from the answers to these metaphysical questions?

> "We can learn truths about the universe through observation of matter and reason."

I'd strongly disagree that this is the general premise - many scientists would already cut you off at "We can learn truths".

And yes, in this case the particular phrasing is essential.

Well, I left room for wordsmithing. Replace "truths" with "stuff", "facts", or what-have-you.

But see, that's the point of my last sentence. You're going for axioms - there's just no room for wordsmithing. When you leave the essential terms of your statement without a clear definition, the axiom is meaningless.

EDIT: In this particular case, the choice of using "truth" or "fact" completely changes the premise. (And even then, I've already made a boatload of assumptions here on the exact definition of each word.)

I have the impression that almost every philosophical discussion is actually a discussion about definitions. Tomes have been written about "truth" and "fact" and their differences and similarities. I don't think we can reasonably hold a discussion in an Internet forum where each comment is only a couple of sentences long to the precision standards expected from philosophical discourse in an academic context.

To be polemic: So, what, we shouldn't even try?

Of course there's a limit to precision in a forum discussion, but yes, definitions are damn important in this context and it's perfectly possible to at least trying to aim at a basic level of precision.

To stay at this example: (natural) sciences are generally accepted to actually not be about learning (absolute, verified) truths - and that is a cornerstone of nat. science and one of the main properties distinguishing it from religion.

We can learn about singular facts and use reason to make generalizations and predictions from those facts that we can try to validate through experiment, thus leading to theories. But scientific theories are never true, they are valid. They are a model, an approximation of what we think of reality, only validated through repeated, but ultimately finite testing, and we can never be 100% sure that they aren't...hm, wrong. (I freely admit though, that it's at this point here where it starts to get hairy in the sense of your post, especially for a non-native speaker. :) )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com