If you want to argue something is a religion, you need to define “religion”. Often it is defined vaguely enough that anything can be called a religion. But if the word can be applied to everything it is meningless.
Wittgenstein famously argued that the word "game" cannot be given an intensional definition – you cannot produce a list of features that all games have and which only games have. For, he argued, "game" is not a category defined in terms of singular essence, rather it is a collection of things which all have a lot in common but there is no one thing which they all have in common. Like members of a family, which all resemble each other, but all in different ways – hence he called this family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit in German).
Well, I would say the exact same thing is true of "religion" – just like "game", the word can't be defined, because there is no one thing all "religions" have in common.
But, our inability to clearly define "game" doesn't make the concept useless, and isn't an inherent obstacle to using the concept. Well, the same is true of "religion".
If you are going to call something a "religion" which isn't widely considered to be one, you need to identify which particular features you think it shares with those phenomena which are widely considered to be "religions". And I think Grothendieck has done that here.
He's just arguing that the way science is treated by the general public has many specific negative features, and that many of these are held in common with religion. And he's quite clear about what those aspects here.
I mean a carpenter knows more about carpentry than a random person - how is that controversial or problematic? But lets call carpenters high priests thereby implying carpentry expertise is somehow suspect. If you try to lecture a seasoned carpenter about carpentry they would probably also call you an idiot in more or less polite words. I guess that just proves how carpenters are like high priests jaleously guarding their status?
The whole essay is just riddled with falacies and strawmen. For example the fact that someone have tried to study war scientifically apparently means this makes war acceptable. How does that follow? Never mind this completely ignores the history of war and justifications of war which is much older than science.
A criticims of scientism and its derived pseudo-religions like nlp, scientology, transhumanism, the singularity, simulation etc would be very welcome, but the analysis need to be coherent, otherwise it is no better.
been chewing on that one for a while now.
For example, "the sun is an egg of the great pillbug that created the universe" is a religious belief, but it would be quite a stretch to call it a religion.
I think the distinction is particularly important because it underlies how a lot of people talk past each other when it comes to atheism, since "zero gods have ever existed" is also a religious belief without being a religion.
But by what criteria is “zero gods exist” a religious belief compared to say “phlogiston does not exist”?
For almost any positive statement about religious topics or implications, the negated version remains also about religious topics or implications.
"Bread doesn't exist" is still a belief about the concept of bread.
age of the universe, creator or not, teleology, interpretations of probability, primacy of logic (are we allowing for the law of excluding middle or not)
Science doesn't do these things but scientism does.