Religion vs. Science (and Wittgenstein)

[pood]

Is there a necessary conflict between religion and science (given that this is the name of the forum)?

Jerry Coyne thinks so. He wrote a book called Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.

The main title already contains an ambiguity. For surely not all faith-based claims are at variance with discoverable facts? Maybe he means faith as a process for uncovering truth is at variance with a fact-based approached for uncovering truth, but an ambiguity persists, because Coyne uses “fact” and “truth” fungibly — a mistake, I think, for the words are not precisely the same.

It’s said that the main conflict between science and religion occurs when religious believers make truth claims about the world that can be checked. So if a young-earth creationists claims that the world is some 6,000 years old, that claim can be scientifically checked — and our best science holds that the earth is some 4.6 billion years old.

But does it follow from this that ALL science is incompatible with ALL religion?

The Catholic church, for example, accepts an old earth and evolution — though the latter with the unevidenced proviso that at some point God “ensouled” newly evolved humans.

Many think the church’s stance on this results from its continuing embarrassment over the Galileo affair, though see here for a more nuanced treatment of that subject.

Many religious thinkers, though, deny that holy texts are making scientific or ontological claims at all —that bible, for example, has been described as a text “not about how the heavens go, but about how to go to heaven.”

On this account, biblical inerrantists have misconstrued a “mythos” account of biblical claim for literal ones, and thus have introduced a conflict where none need be.

And, of course, much of the bible and other religious texts deal with moral and ethical claims which largely (though perhaps not totally) lie outside science.

Ludwig Wittengenstein believed that claims about the world, whether religious, scientific, or otherwise, are invariably bound up in “language games” that are largely private among different communities who may be superficially speaking about the same thing but in two or more different ways. Thus when a religious person says “I believe in God,” he or she may not be making the same kind of ontological claim or commitment that scientists, employing their own language games, would insist must be tested against observation or evidence.

Wittgenstein said, “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”

He also famously said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

It seems he felt that religion was one of those things about which “one must be silent,” not because religious language games are false or meaningless, but because of their ineffability — too great or extreme to be described in words.

A useful discussion of Wittgenstein and religion is here. From that article:

Like Schopenhauer Wittgenstein understood that science cannot discuss or provide values: ultimate questions and the meaning of life were outside space and time and cannot be expressed in words. Schopenhauer’s idealism (‘world-as-idea’) had a strong effect on Wittgenstein’s idealism our experiences of the world and our mental representation (Vorstellung) of it with the world (‘The world and life are one’, TLP 5.621) (Schroeder, 2012)

And:

McGuinness (19960 explains that the mystical manifests itself in terms of moods ‘in which one has a sense of certainty and revelation’ which is difficult to express in words but exhibits four fundamental features:

first, there is typically a belief in an insight into reality, an insight which is superior to and quite different from sense and reason, an insight common to the mystic and the poet but far clearer in the former; second, the mystic believes that reality is one, containing no opposition or division; third, he holds or feels that time is unreal; and fourth, he thinks that evil is mere appearance, or perhaps that good and evil are both illusory (in any case, his ethic involves an acceptance of the world). (p. 306)

I recently started a thread on Kastrup’s analytic idealism, which holds that the entirety of the reality is phenomenal, and seems a modern update to the mysticism that has characterized religions both West and East (including the Abrahamic religions), a strain of religious experience that does not seem to figure in to modern debates over whether religion and science are compatible, because these days rivals on both sides of the debate seem to take religious claims literally. A phenomenal account of reality may have important implications. Kastrup writes in a Hermeneutic of the World:

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.

It seems the alleged incompatibility between science and religion may be much more thoughtfully examined than in the rigid dichotomy of Coyne or squabbles over hares and cud.

 

[Jarhyn]

I think that religion was always really chasing a different truth than science, anyway.

Throughout the history of time, religion appears to be focused primarily on understanding, directing, and controlling behavior of people.

This is largely different from science, which directs people in ways which encourage understanding, directing, and controlling "stuff", which we assumed most of history to be separate from "people".

As such, most religion concerns the tendencies of discrete members of "pantheons of the mind". It breaks the human psyche into domains controlled by "gods", the functioning and direction and wills of such being "mysterious".

The thing is, there's not much science behind the chaos of "whatever happens to work". It's a shit show behind that curtain, akin to arguments over whether left handedness or right handedness should be the default in a society, or whether people ought travel in the left or right lane. That's not science, it's arbitration.

And largely the selection of mental organizing principle is itself arbitrary, no matter how some religions tend to try to make a big deal of people picking their model.

Personally, I use my own model for my pantheon of the mind based on the organizing principle "it's arbitrary, do what seems to work well", and then scavenge whatever I can of useful mindfulness exercises and abilities from every book I read that suggests as much (after actually figuring out what it actually does).

Eventually, religious views around this will be subsumed by our understanding arising around computation, language, and how models arise and how our own brains tend to organize.

I think from this perspective that science and religion are compatible, so long as science spends the time to deconstruct said religion.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

The following of Wittgenstein's remarks from his Lecture on Ethics are also worthy of consideration:

You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance … by these words we don't mean nonsense … what we mean … is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical … expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly … that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value … That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. … Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.

 

[Jarhyn]

The following Wittgenstein's remarks from his Lecture on Ethics are also worthy of consideration:

You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance … by these words we don't mean nonsense … what we mean … is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical … expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly … that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value … That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. … Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.

I see ethics not as the pursuit of absolute good and value, but from an absolutely general strategy for pursuing any arbitrary goal.

In this way, ethics is tied to a utility, in finding and generalizing good advice for doing whatever you please, within the bounds of said advice to keep activities "compatible".

It is not about making it absolute so much as making a machine that you can drop your goal into, and it will either reject the goal entirely as incompatible with its functions entirely, or spit out your goal or instructions which, if followed, will allow you to reach it without blocking any other folks who have used this machine to render instructions to their goals.

I see the principal conflict of ethics to be between those who seek goals that the machine cannot render a clean path to, and those who have no conflict at the machine.

I just recognize that building the part of this machine that actually rejects such goals means that I need to begin this process by pointing it at myself and letting many of my own goals be shredded and kicked out as "misaligned".

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

I see ethics not as the pursuit of absolute good and value, but from an absolutely general strategy for pursuing any arbitrary goal.

Okay, but just to make clearer what Wittgenstein means when he speaks about ethics and the ethical, in the lecture he describes ethics as:

the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or… the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living.

 

[Jarhyn]

I see ethics not as the pursuit of absolute good and value, but from an absolutely general strategy for pursuing any arbitrary goal.

Okay, but just to make clearer what Wittgenstein means when he speaks about ethics and the ethical, in the lecture he describes ethics as:

the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or… the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living.

And so do I; it is impossible to describe one right and singular way of living, but it is not impossible to describe the general character of the population of all right ways of living.

To me, this is where the conflict arises, because some people hear "the right way of living" and think "exactly a white picket fence" or whatever, a single expression of a single equation to repeat everywhere homogenously, whereas others like me hear it and end up thinking of some extremely general rule like "don't do to others as you would not have done to you", a rule that doesn't prescribe exact specifics, even if it prescribes or allows for occasionally picking something arbitrary and specific at times and sticking with it.

In fact, my understanding of ethics drives me to seek the maximum possible variety of expression of such compatible ways of being; that "the right way to live" sees fulfillment i exploring the variety of expressions that can take. It diametrically opposes the homogenization of anything except when the environment requires it for any sort of function.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

some people hear "the right way of living" and think "exactly a white picket fence" or whatever, a single expression of a single equation to repeat everywhere homogenously

Yes, this is at the crux of the issue. When I get back in town, and depending on what direction the discussion takes in the meanwhile, this is one of the most important and interesting points. Some folks seem to think this necessitates relativism. That understanding would miss the heart of the matter.

 

[steve_bank]

The Quran translation I read dates back to the early 1900s, given to me by a Muslim I knew. Today we would call the Muslim translator a moderate. In his commentaries he said there is no conflict between science and religion, they deal with different things. Religion the spiritual aspect of us humans and science physical reality.

Circa 13th century Moses Maimonides a Jewish rabbi-philosopher wrote when science and scripture conflict interpretation of scripture must change.

A cosmology text I read started with a review of the history of cosmology. Cosmology and origins always had to conform with the prevailing power politics.

A well known example is Galileo. The transcript of his religious trial is ionline.

There does not have to be a conflict between science and religion, but it exists.

Christian biblical literalness can not accept evolution, or anything but a god crenelating everything. It would invalidate the beliefs.

Some have entertained the idea that evolution may be part of ’god’s plan’.

Religion is not about facts and factual truths, it is about feelings and emotions.

I worked with creationist engineers who were very good. They compartmentalized science and religion.

Back in the 90s Larry King had a panel of scientists and theists. The science side argued logic and facts, the theists argued feelings and subjective perceptions..

 

[Jarhyn]

some people hear "the right way of living" and think "exactly a white picket fence" or whatever, a single expression of a single equation to repeat everywhere homogenously

Yes, this is at the crux of the issue. When I get back in town, and depending on what direction the discussion takes in the meanwhile, this is one of the most important and interesting points. Some folks seem to think this necessitates relativism. That understanding would miss the heart of the matter.

Yeah, it's not really relativism vs objective morality, it's more... Relativism/Specifism vs Generalism.

I reject homogeneity. Fie upon it. Homogeneity is the heart of fascism, and I think that both relativism and specifism are really just "faces of the same bad argument", much like Hard Determinism and Libertarianism vs Compatibilism, or Physicalism and Idealism vs 'process monism'. This particular one reduces to yet another methodology of slaking guilt: if one declares all ethics general, nobody can judge anyone, really; if it is absolute, one can declare their ethics absolutely right, and everyone who disagrees absolute wrong.

Either way seems to allow an excuse to make up the rules and not feel bad when someone fucks up, or to cover some other bad assumption that's really uncomfortable to contemplate (like machine consciousness).

The other problem is that there long tradition of conflict and thought around many such "bad arguments" that often misses the core fallacies and bad assumptions, and age of the argument is often taken as an excuse to accept it's validity and look away from those bad foundations.

I don't know what to do with any of this, though.

Nobody cares and the active egos of people who gain standing in society through those bad arguments are fierce and there are social barriers to that acceptance, especially when people just like the lie more than the truth.

People like anarchy vs fascism even if it's a false dichotomy.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

I reject homogeneity. Fie upon it.

I like the "homogeneity" word choice. Homogeneity is the antithesis of what is to be expected with ethics. But more on that when I have time after I return.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Is there a necessary conflict between religion and science (given that this is the name of the forum)?

Jerry Coyne thinks so. He wrote a book called Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.

The main title already contains an ambiguity. For surely not all faith-based claims are at variance with discoverable facts? Maybe he means faith as a process for uncovering truth is at variance with a fact-based approached for uncovering truth, but an ambiguity persists, because Coyne uses “fact” and “truth” fungibly — a mistake, I think, for the words are not precisely the same.

It’s said that the main conflict between science and religion occurs when religious believers make truth claims about the world that can be checked. So if a young-earth creationists claims that the world is some 6,000 years old, that claim can be scientifically checked — and our best science holds that the earth is some 4.6 billion years old.

But does it follow from this that ALL science is incompatible with ALL religion?

The Catholic church, for example, accepts an old earth and evolution — though the latter with the unevidenced proviso that at some point God “ensouled” newly evolved humans.

Many think the church’s stance on this results from its continuing embarrassment over the Galileo affair, though see here for a more nuanced treatment of that subject.

Many religious thinkers, though, deny that holy texts are making scientific or ontological claims at all —that bible, for example, has been described as a text “not about how the heavens go, but about how to go to heaven.”

On this account, biblical inerrantists have misconstrued a “mythos” account of biblical claim for literal ones, and thus have introduced a conflict where none need be.

And, of course, much of the bible and other religious texts deal with moral and ethical claims which largely (though perhaps not totally) lie outside science.

Ludwig Wittengenstein believed that claims about the world, whether religious, scientific, or otherwise, are invariably bound up in “language games” that are largely private among different communities who may be superficially speaking about the same thing but in two or more different ways. Thus when a religious person says “I believe in God,” he or she may not be making the same kind of ontological claim or commitment that scientists, employing their own language games, would insist must be tested against observation or evidence.

Wittgenstein said, “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”

He also famously said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

It seems he felt that religion was one of those things about which “one must be silent,” not because religious language games are false or meaningless, but because of their ineffability — too great or extreme to be described in words.

A useful discussion of Wittgenstein and religion is here. From that article:

Like Schopenhauer Wittgenstein understood that science cannot discuss or provide values: ultimate questions and the meaning of life were outside space and time and cannot be expressed in words. Schopenhauer’s idealism (‘world-as-idea’) had a strong effect on Wittgenstein’s idealism our experiences of the world and our mental representation (Vorstellung) of it with the world (‘The world and life are one’, TLP 5.621) (Schroeder, 2012)

And:

McGuinness (19960 explains that the mystical manifests itself in terms of moods ‘in which one has a sense of certainty and revelation’ which is difficult to express in words but exhibits four fundamental features:

first, there is typically a belief in an insight into reality, an insight which is superior to and quite different from sense and reason, an insight common to the mystic and the poet but far clearer in the former; second, the mystic believes that reality is one, containing no opposition or division; third, he holds or feels that time is unreal; and fourth, he thinks that evil is mere appearance, or perhaps that good and evil are both illusory (in any case, his ethic involves an acceptance of the world). (p. 306)

I recently started a thread on Kastrup’s analytic idealism, which holds that the entirety of the reality is phenomenal, and seems a modern update to the mysticism that has characterized religions both West and East (including the Abrahamic religions), a strain of religious experience that does not seem to figure in to modern debates over whether religion and science are compatible, because these days rivals on both sides of the debate seem to take religious claims literally. A phenomenal account of reality may have important implications. Kastrup writes in a Hermeneutic of the World:

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.

It seems the alleged incompatibility between science and religion may be much more thoughtfully examined than in the rigid dichotomy of Coyne or squabbles over hares and cud.

You’ve done a really impressive job weaving together multiple strands — from Coyne’s blunt incompatibility thesis, to Wittgenstein’s view of religious language, to Kastrup’s updated idealism. It’s the right move to challenge the often shallow science-vs-religion framing by asking whether they’re even playing the same game at all.

I think you’re right that if we treat religious language primarily as an attempt to express the ineffable — moods of certainty, revelation, unity, timelessness — then the apparent “conflicts” with science mostly dissolve. Science operates within the domain of what can be tested and shared intersubjectively; religion, when understood as mythos or mystical apprehension, aims at an entirely different dimension of experience, one which — by its nature — resists that kind of public verification. Wittgenstein’s point about language games cuts deeply here: asking whether “God exists” in a scientific sense could be like asking whether a poem’s beauty can be plotted on a graph. It’s a confusion of domains.

But still, I want to press this gently: even if we accept that not all religious language aims at empirical fact-claims, history shows that many believers have made exactly those kinds of claims — about creation, miracles, interventions in history — and still do. In those cases, science and religion do come into direct methodological and epistemological conflict. The Galileo affair, even in its nuanced reading, reminds us that authority over “truth about the world” was a real battleground, not merely a linguistic misunderstanding. Similarly today, the young-earth creationist is not simply expressing a “mood” or a “symbol” — they’re making a straightforward empirical claim about geology, biology, cosmology — and that claim collides head-on with the entire architecture of modern science.

So perhaps the real task is distinguishing which version of religion we are talking about at any given moment. A symbolic, mystical, interpretive religion — the religion of Eckhart, of Rumi, even of Wittgenstein’s unspoken certainties — poses no serious threat to science and is not threatened by it. But a literalist, doctrinal, empirical religion does, and is. And unfortunately, the latter form remains widespread, culturally and politically powerful.

Your bringing in Kastrup is also fascinating, because it flips the standard materialist assumption. If consciousness, not matter, is fundamental, then perhaps what we call science and what we call religion are both partial, culturally filtered approaches to decoding a mental world. In that case, the real divide is not between science and religion, but between different models of mind — reductive, mechanistic models versus integrative, phenomenal ones. If the world is mental at base, then meaning is baked into it, not projected onto it — and religious experience becomes a genuine mode of disclosure, not a cognitive error.

But here too I want to ask: even if analytic idealism is true, does it validate specific religious traditions, or does it merely validate the experience that gave rise to them, in all their symbolic variety? Does it redeem the mystic’s intuition, but leave behind the theologies built up around it? If so, then maybe science and religion are compatible — but only once religion has been radically reinterpreted, stripped down to its phenomenological core.

In the end, you seem exactly right to say the alleged incompatibility between science and religion demands a far more thoughtful examination than Coyne or the standard “hares and cud” debates offer. But perhaps it’s also true that compatibility isn’t automatic — it has to be earned, by disentangling symbolic, moral, and mystical expressions of religion from empirical, testable claims. Where that disentangling happens, there’s space for real dialogue. Where it doesn’t, conflict remains inevitable.

Curious to hear your thoughts — especially about whether you think Kastrup’s framework could help not just “make room” for religious experience but actually ground it philosophically in a way that avoids both crude literalism and empty metaphor.

NHC

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

A phenomenal account of reality may have important implications. Kastrup writes in a Hermeneutic of the World:

Some notes-thoughts regarding the Kastrup reference.

Kastrup criticizes “physicalism” throughout his essay. Much of what he criticizes can be traced to reductionism - which is not to be confused for the situational analysis upon which genuine science oft relies. The reductionism for which Kastrup's critique holds amounts to the prioritizing of knowledge of the micro over that of the macro, the notion that more details results in improved knowledge. But more does not mean improved, nor does more guarantee improved.

The “utilitarian predictions” noted by Kastrup are a core scientific interest. In some sciences, greater weight is given to application than is given to mere prediction. In those sciences, knowledge is always tinged with importance; the importance is not (in) the knowledge itself; importance points to application, to utility beyond the knowledge. For these sciences,greater detail does not necessarily mean more important. For these sciences, invention supersedes knowledge in terms of importance.

Importance is extraneous to physicalism, especially physicalism of the reductionist variety.

Kastrup is targeting scientistic physicalism: the philosophical perspective that imagines itself as the exclusively necessitated way of thinking about the world in accord with the details science produces. Science, of course, has no need of physicalism even if the purview of science is restricted to the physical. Kastrup could recognize “physical” in the previous sentence as referring to a part of the world which had either been stripped of semantic value for the purpose of investigation or had been presumed to be inherently without semantic value.

Just as it can be said no minds, no truths, it seems likewise the case that for there to be even semantic value there must be some mind(s). The same holds for pointing at, pointing to, and pointing beyond – they all require mind(s) of some sort at some point. But this could just be Kastrup's device for emphasizing the need for thinking in terms of connections while de-prioritizing reductionism and its place of honor in science.

Whether there can be a science of semantic value, well, that ties in with the discussion about Wittgenstein saying that ethics can be no science.

Kastrup also notes that value within physicalism rests with the “literal fact”. This relates to the Wittgenstein point that ethics does not add to knowledge. Even so,science is not a knowledge bank. That is to say that the essence of science is other than as a storage facility for knowledge. That is because science is interested in knowledge – not for the sake of knowledge, but – for the beyond of knowledge, the beyond of what is known. In a sense, there is at least an inkling in science of the semantic value about which Kastrup speaks – at least in the case of those sciences more concerned with invention and the useful application of knowledge rather than mere theory.

The way Kastrup uses the Lee and Klimov references is not as forceful as Kastrup seems to want that part of his discussion to be. Nonetheless, it is a fact that reductionist science loses a lot of details, information, call it what you will.That loss leaves devoted reductionist physicalists forever in the in principle purgatory when it comes to the matter of being able to reconstitute the macrophysical which had been stripped of “semantic value” before being reduced.

Maybe Kastrup just wants those philosophical reductionists to realize that the properties emergence perspective will not be enough to save reductionism from incoherence.Then again, emergence is the reconstitution which reductionists cannot accomplish; so, emergence itself points to the incoherence of reductionism – but Kastrup prefers to warn the reductionist scientistic physicalists that demonstration of microphysical properties at the macrophysical level only worsens their particular physicalist position.

That's fine, but epiphenomenalism and eliminativism to which physicalism can lead logically are as useless as solipsism.

The question then switches to the matter of whether or how Kastrup's approach via the intrinsic semantic or mental contributes to the learning which still has to be done/accomplished if the things of the world are all pointing beyond themselves.

How do humans learn? How do they learn to learn? How do they discover? How is the learning, thinking, and expressing beyond mimesis accomplished?

The pointing beyond ties in with the issue of ineffability which, in turn, relates to the matter of whether silence is the sole proper response to anything ineffable.Silence is not the necessary and proper response to the ineffable.

It is by attempting to express the always as yet inexpressible – such as by what Kastrup refers to as“symbolisms” - that the skill for “cognitive associations”gets stimulated and developed. In that regard, language serves as its own “symbolisms”.

But language alone is insufficient with regards to human cognition. Cognition is not restricted to occurring with or as language. This is likely why Kastrup emphasizes “cognitive associations” in terms of “emotions, insights and inner imagery”.

The worthwhileness of the visual arts and of music are extraneous to physicalism.

Words cannot capture being, and humanbeing is not to be restricted to what language can present.

Is Kastrup doing anything other than trying to give permission (even encouragement) to prioritize ways of thinking which do not comport with that of the desiccated (to the point of being meaningless) physicalist fundamentalism?

Could it be that from Kastrup's perspective, scientistic physicalism is inherently meaningless –veritably the philosophy of meaninglessness?

Is Kastrup trying to point the way to varieties of physicalism – possibly a broader sort of naturalism –to replace the philosophizing done on the basis of the currently predominant reductionism of physics fundamentalism?

But reductionism such as is found in physics is for the purpose of scientific investigation. It is not a philosophy. Or, is it? Well, in the form of scientistic physicalism,we find a philosophy that is not made necessary or demanded by science even if the proponents of that philosophy imagine it to be necessitated by science.

 

[steve_bank]

Reductionism in science and engineering as well comes down to causality and the Laws Of Thermodynamics. Nothing happens without a cause, something can not come from nothing, and something can not go to nothing. Conservation.

A philosophical argument is made that emergent properties of a system shows that total of a system is greater than than the sum of the individual parts. This is incorrect as applied to the physical parts of a system and how they interact, matter and energy.

Science is not a philosophy. Science is an occupation, skill, and a job. The skills and knowledge are learned as in any other occupation.

Is being a plumber a philosophy or a skill that requires technical knowledge and experience?

If someone has a better way to approach complex physical problems other than reductionism I am all ears.

Predetermined? Reductionism and other methods are used because they evolved over long periods of time, proven to be useful and effective.

A large part of the development of methodology is trial and error. An evolutionary process.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

And one of them, a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" And [Jesus] said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like unto it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 35-39)

The stories in which Jesus emphasizes the maximal importance of love have resonated with many people. Jesus did not, of course, invent love as a core virtue; as is to be expected, he spoke to an audience presumed to be sufficiently familiar with their own scriptures such that what Jesus spoke would not seem alien - even if his emphasis and insight did seem a bit out of the ordinary.

Is this love of neighbor about which Jesus spoke and which is essential to Godliness compatible with science? Is it science or scientism which explains away love by reducing love to a state generated by neuronal circuitry, hormones, and other physio-chemical factors? Is it science or scientism which insists that persons do not think since thoughts only happen to them? Is it science or scientism which insists that no one controls anything - including whether to love and how to love?

There is a definite incompatibility at issue here. With regards to the matter of love, is it science or scientism (or both) with which the religious perspective is incompatible?

 

[bilby]

Meh. People always forget that their neuroendocrine systems have an endocrine component, and then imagine that the endocrine influences on their thinking are somehow external to themselves.

Love is entirely compatible with science; It's just incompatible with our belief that we are fundamentally rational thinkers, or that we are even capable of constant rationality.

The brain is a very adept liar, and constantly invents rationalisations for behaviours over which it doesn't actually have any control - even if those rationalisations are nonsensical when we try to examine them. We call these nonsensical rationalisations "spirituality", but they have nothing to do with the stupid and debunked concept of substance dualism to which that word refers.

 

[Jarhyn]

Is this love of neighbor about which Jesus spoke... compatible with science?

I think it is, but not in quite the way most Christians understand it or science.

Here's one of my bigger rabbit holes and probably one of my earliest forrays into deep "compatibilistic" thought, though I didn't call it that at that point.

I have long since thought that the love of neighbor comes from a certain combination of the factors that drive that desire for non-homogenity that I talked about before.

This ultimately goes all the way to mechanisms available for evolution to a population.

There's this big thing I keep seeing in boundary points between systems of individuals and populations which compose individuals in evolution, and it comes down to communication and common interest developing the contents of a store of information which may be reproduced, and is far more general and broad than mere Darwinism.

In Darwinistic systems, it's pretty broadly apparent that data hoarding and secrecy creates what Dawkins, for all he is a heel, discussed in The Selfish Gene. That part is well understood... But much of human existence is driven from stores of reproducible information (often reproducible in the substrate of humans, with respect to oral tradition) that exist entirely parallel to the DNA, for all the DNA creates a process for generating the models that handle information in that way.

We have models today that don't use DNA at all in the handling and processing of information in the way humans communicate it between ourselves.

Love (radical love, like Jesus preached) enters into all this because lateral transfer breaks the tyranny of selfishness of DNA over the survival of the "system".

Intelligent use of this, getting to that point requires a huge magic trick, namely the ability to test for interest in radical love, but the message itself gets poisoned perennially by the selfishness bleeding from our Darwinistic origins.

The fact is that we have come so far along this path of lateral transfer and storage of information in books and language that this model completely came to store how this process of information storage can subsume and encode all the previous models that exist in nature, all the way down to modeling the physical primitive in an "implementation independent" sort of way.

That's originally why I thought radical love had a radical sort of value: if we go all the way towards the limit of information sharing and not focusing on the DNA and the specific implementation, and instead focus on the idea of yourself, the things and ideas you fight to keep existing in the universe, and help each other all do that collectively, together, then selfishness has no real purpose or value for any particular unit.

Instead, the focus would be to become, in whatever way best preserves the unique traits of the individual, a system as capable as any other. Along the way, the prestige of this is honored as a result of sharing the method used to become so.

If one were to consider the concept of DNA as being like a library private to a biological population, the extinction of a species like the burning of the final copy of the books that library contains, then it would, in extending the concept upward, reveals the danger I see in burning books; it is killing the last vestige of whole people of our past and the artifacts of how they thought and approached the world, of the very artifacts of radical love, of sharing information even with one's "enemies".

To me, though, radical love is then best expressed in building large libraries and teaching all the material from them in ways best organized to create strong knowledge and effective learning.

To me all of this is compatible with science because it IS science, and academics in general, directed in service of the betterment of everyone.

Which is why I think Christians are straight tripping in what they consider radical love to be.

 

[NoHolyCows]

The stories in which Jesus emphasizes the maximal importance of love have resonated with many people. Jesus did not, of course, invent love as a core virtue; as is to be expected, he spoke to an audience presumed to be sufficiently familiar with their own scriptures such that what Jesus spoke would not seem alien - even if his emphasis and insight did seem a bit out of the ordinary.

This is correct in part—Jesus did not invent love as a moral value. The idea that love of neighbor is central to ethical life appears clearly in Leviticus 19:18, centuries before Jesus. Moreover, teachings emphasizing compassion and love existed in multiple traditions—Buddhism, Confucianism, Greek Stoicism—long before or independently of Jesus. So while his framing may have resonated with his audience, it wasn’t a novel revelation. It was part of a broader, already well-established moral framework.

Is this love of neighbor about which Jesus spoke and which is essential to Godliness compatible with science?

Yes, it is. There is no incompatibility between the principle of loving others and the scientific worldview. Science does not and cannot refute moral values—it describes how things work, not what people ought to do. Neuroscience and evolutionary biology can explain how empathy, bonding, and altruism develop in human beings—but that doesn’t undermine their value. If anything, scientific insight can deepen our understanding of why moral behaviors like love evolved and why they matter in a social species.

Is it science or scientism which explains away love by reducing love to a state generated by neuronal circuitry, hormones, and other physio-chemical factors?

This is a false dichotomy. Science does not “explain away” love; it explains how love arises. Describing love in terms of brain activity, hormones like oxytocin, and evolved psychological mechanisms is not a dismissal—it’s an explanation rooted in observable evidence. We don’t consider music or beauty meaningless just because they have neurological or cultural components. Love remains profound and meaningful even if we understand its biological basis. That’s not “scientism”—it’s clarity.

Is it science or scientism which insists that persons do not think since thoughts only happen to them?

This is a misrepresentation of both science and philosophy. Science does not assert that people “do not think.” What you’re referencing is a specific philosophical argument rooted in hard determinism, which is debated, not settled. Moreover, many philosophers—particularly compatibilists—argue that determinism and meaningful thought are entirely compatible. The fact that mental processes have causes doesn’t mean agency is an illusion. No credible scientific discipline claims that consciousness or thought is passive or meaningless.

Is it science or scientism which insists that no one controls anything - including whether to love and how to love?

Again, this is not a position held by science as a whole. Some philosophical interpretations of determinism may question the traditional notion of free will, but that doesn’t mean people have no control. The more accurate view is that our choices are influenced, not negated, by biology and environment. You are still the agent choosing to love, even if that capacity is shaped by prior causes. Framing it otherwise distorts the actual discussion within philosophy of mind and mischaracterizes science’s role.

There is a definite incompatibility at issue here. With regards to the matter of love, is it science or scientism (or both) with which the religious perspective is incompatible?

There’s no incompatibility between love and science. The incompatibility lies in how religion sometimes insists love must be supernatural to be real, whereas science demonstrates that love is natural and human—biologically rooted, socially developed, and psychologically powerful. If your religious framework demands that love only counts if it originates from divine command, then it’s religion—not science—that imposes unnecessary constraints on a universal human experience. Science can explain love without invalidating it. Religion can offer meaning without monopolizing it. But one should not distort the other.

NHC

 

[steve_bank]

Buddhism and universal compassion for all liivng things predates Christianity by about 300 years.

Or Confucius and his idea of the morally superior man, 600years before Christ.

In Confucian thought, the "superior man," or junzi (君子), represents the ideal individual, embodying moral excellence and a deep understanding of the principles of right conduct. Confucius emphasized that the junzi is driven by virtue, not by material gain, and strives for self-cultivation and harmonious relationships. They are characterized by a commitment to learning, self-discipline, and a dedication to the well-being of society.

There are different reasons ti be moral ion the western liberal sense..

1. Enlightened self interest, if I am nice to people they will be nice to me.
2, Fear, I do do it because god will punish me if I do not,.
3. A subjective belief that it is the right thing to do.


Compared to Confucianism and Buddhism the morality of the OT and NT gospel Jesus is crude.

Considering what we do know of ancient Jews and the situation 2000 years ago in Palestine I doubt a Jewish rabbi would be preaching universal love of all mankind, he would have been speaking to and about his fellow Jews.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Logically yes, but people are not necessarily logical, and they can successfully pretend there isn't one.

 

[DBT]

To state the obvious, that in order to be 'saved' you need to believe in Jesus, believe in Jesus and be rewarded, failing that you face eternal torment or destruction, is the theology of fear.