Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-method-prizewinning-physicist-says/

by mathgenius • 7 years ago

14 21 7 years ago

scientificamerican.com

aurizon3• 7 years ago

LOL, as if anything at all from the mouths if the ilk of Templeton has any merit at all. We all know that religion is a false and coercive method of social control of people to get their money and wage your wars. Prove me wrong!

monochromatic• 7 years ago

Freeman Dyson won this prize too. Is he also now suspect?

__d• 7 years ago

He appears to be talking (in this article at least) more about spirituality than religion.

I think it's hard to dispute his basic point: you cannot prove a negative (or as he phrased it, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence").

I do find it kinda odd to hear those who profess to a spiritual belief ragging on those who profess a belief in the contrary though. Neither of them has evidence.

aurizon3• 7 years ago

spirituality flip religion. Both schemes to coerce people

rafaelvasco• 7 years ago

Problem is not with religion, the problem is with people. Yes, religion can be absurd, evil, coercive. But everything has its bright side. Being an atheist as a means to protest against religion is nothing but a short-sighted attitude. Yes, there is a God, I'm certain of that. But people are all wrong about the nature of God. The problem is that people are looking for proof. They'll never find it. The proof is in our minds. That is the gateway. The Matrix movie revealed it all almost 20 years ago. The signs are all about us. One must only open their minds.

aurizon3• 7 years ago

People conceive of ways to gain control of people's actions and funds = religion, pure and simple. The god concept is part of the control web

Stefan-H• 7 years ago

"Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that."

I view atheism as the null hypothesis, for which you don't need any evidence. It is the de-facto stance for when there is no evidence to suggest another hypothesis.

edit: "And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about."

Is this person also agnostic when it comes to Russell's teapot? I'm pretty sure that they would make the statement that there is not in fact a teapot circling the earth, just like there is not a god in heaven. His argument about the agnostic person not being able to make a final decision is a slide into solipsism.

m_mueller6• 7 years ago

I see it a bit differently, it's basically an undecidable problem (at least for now). Intelligent design == simulation hypothesis vs. pure accident and the anthropological principle. Which one of these is the null hypothesis is a matter of perspective / cultural background. What clearly does not hold are idiotic things like biblical literalism. But the big bang theory opens more questions than it answers.

gcommer2• 7 years ago

Not to repeat the the entire previous thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855) but this is just a semantic wordplay: on any other similar existence questions (is there a teapot orbiting the sun?) we'd gladly conflate "undecidable" with "false" as the difference between those cases is a negligible probability. But when you mix in such a culturally sensitive topic like religion, suddenly we have to carefully distinguish these two cases. It's an unfair inconsistency that is used to propagate religious thinking.

m_mueller6• 7 years ago

Re: Russell's teapot - this is just the classic Red Hering. If you argue for a bearded man in the sky you can put it as absurdum this way, but it has nothing to do with the intelligent design hypothesis, also called simulation hypothesis. Are we special because of the anthropological principle or is there some deeper underlying cause? Even finding intelligent alien life wouldn't fully answer the question - you can also apply it to the physical constants of our universe that are remarkably well chosen.

That's not to say that assuming natural processes as a principle doesn't have legs - so far Dr. Penrose's hypothesis of arbitrary scaled time convinces me most, which avoids any requirement of intelligent design, but so far there is not sufficient evidence to prove it, or any other origin theory, and as long as that is the case I think it is too quick to dispell intelligent design.

Grue3• 7 years ago

"Intelligent design" is silly because it doesn't answer the question of creation at all. Ok, it wasn't a bearded man in the sky but a bunch of lifeforms who created a simulation for people to live in. So, these lifeforms, and the world they live in - where did they come from? We know they're more advanced than humans because humans don't currently have the ability to simulate worlds of this scale. Now instead of the question of how relatively simple creatures like humans came to life, we have a question of how much more advanced lifeforms came to life. You just made the question more complicated for no reason whatsoever.

ramy_d• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

  Dawkins is known as an outspoken atheist. In interviews, he has called himself an agnostic about many matters of religious faith, instead endorsing reason.[citation needed] He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.

Why wasn't he awarded a Templeton prize?

pushcx• 7 years ago

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855

rendall• 7 years ago

Speaking as an atheistically-inclined agnostic, I think the New Atheists can be rather "motte & bailey"* with their arguments.

The atheist bailey is the assertion "there is no higher being, no after life, and no spirituality", which is a scientifically indefensible stance, as the article states. It could be true, but this assertion is a religious statement of faith. Atheist discourse is largely centered here.

The motte is the statement "Belief in a higher power or the after life is not supported by empirical evidence", which is scientifically defensible.

When critics of atheism point out that any assertion about something which cannot be invalidated is non-empirical, even religious (e.g. "There is no after life" or "God does not exist in any form"), (some) atheists respond "'No God' is simply the null hypothesis! We just don't see evidence for it!" When the challenge is gone, atheists go on to write essays about how religious ideas are wrong and "There is no God" is clearly correct, and anyone who holds any doubt about this whatsoever is irrational at best.

*I tried and failed to find a link to a discussion of the metaphor and fallacy of "motte & bailey" that was both concise, correct and politically neutral; suffice to say that it is a kind of strategic ambiguity. If it's new to you, I'll just quote the relevant passage from the Slate Star Codex blog:

"[In a] medieval castle…there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

"So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement."

binjo• 7 years ago

Booked this guy for Jesus because he's on the path to finding truth!

Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method

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