Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).
I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true
This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.
Well, that's not quite true. I'm an atheist, and I run a weekly Bible study (which has lately morphed into more of a general theological/philosophical study and discussion group) [1]. Religious traditions are worth studying even if you don't believe in them, if for no other reason, than as a way of better understanding the thought processes of people who do believe in them.
How do you know? Maybe if you studied the Bible you'd end up believing in it. :-)
It turns out that you actually can induce subjective experiences in yourself that I believe are similar to what religious people describe as "feeling the presence of God". It's an interesting and worthwhile exercise (though not what we do in my study group, that's a more academic format). But it's worth doing at least once in your life. It actually feels pretty good, not unlike taking certain psychoactive drugs.
Like a lot of atheists, I have studied the bible. My parents had me confirmed as an Anglican in my teens (ironically one of the first steps that took me from "I don't know if this is true" to "this particular religion is patently false").
It's impossible to understand western literature without a decent working knowledge of the bible (although choosing which one is problematic in itself), it's useful for that alone.
However, studying the bible made me less religious, not more.
After 20y of trying I'm done with mass hysteria, "you're holding it wrong", survivorship bias, and magical thinking. Give me consistently repeatable, experimental evidence.
Erm, the only way to know that is to put every effort you can into becoming a deist. "Every effort" is a lifetime of work, so you haven't done that, which makes your statement a statement of faith.
It sounds like you've already decided that you will never be a deist, and so you never will. How is that different from religious belief?
It's different because there is one less thing I have to invent. You might as well ask somebody to believe in a giant hamburger that circumnavigates the earth that only the truly faithful can see. I know you don't see the giant hamburger because you just haven't tried hard enough.
It started as an in-person meetup and moved on-line because covid. We now have more out-of-town members than in-town so it will probably be on-line forever. We may have the occasional in-person get-together, but I doubt it will ever go back to being regularly in-person.
> Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting.
This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
It is true that science is often self-correcting. The same is true of religion - you don't hear much about the Xhosa cattle-killing cult anymore.
> This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect. People believe in science because it produces results in the form of correct predictions and devices.
Just look at nutrition science as an example for why this isn't so.
Salt, fat, cholesterol, fructose, etc have each gone through several wild swings in good for you / bad for you. The science is entirely unsettled, yet forms the backbone of many doctors' recommendations.
Then, when the science gets taken in by mainline cultural space, it gets blown up into all sorts of utterly nonsensical, mystical woo-woo. Somehow moderation turns into paleo, vegan, fruitarian, or alkaline based diets.
People shoot wheatgrass or fast on lemon juice. All sorts of vaguely scientific sounding bullshit that isn't backed up by actual data.
You can't just pick and choose what is scientific and what isn't to try an conflate reason with religion. That is an argument in bad faith (ahem).
Further, using statements like "entirely unsettled" in reference to science is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It's not "settled" like religious arguments where everybody agrees to a particular interpretation of the holy book. Science either works and we make stuff with it, or it doesn't and it gets tossed away.
"making stuff with it" is not the entirety of the scientific method. I suspect you know this. What you are arguing here is nonsense. Science isn't perfect and doesn't claim to be, so pointing out some corner case and saying "here, this bit is wrong" can't be used to dismiss the entire scientific method.
If you want to argue in that fashion, I'd like to point out to you that praying doesn't always work, so all religions must therefore be bunk.
The word 'science' has been co-opted by con men. Yet it's basic tenants like the critical method and repeatable experiments have provided me with far more value than half a life filled with religious 'teaching'.
But people make no distinction between believing in science in the same area where it makes correct predictions, and believing in "science" in an area where it has nothing valid to say, because it makes correct predictions somewhere else.
To most people, science is just a word, and they support it because they know that that is the right thing to do.
> In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. The anthropologist Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler's Fallacy and lead them to expect that floods will be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second [...], Kantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year.
> Reducing the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, the Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures.
> The patterning of bird augury supports the view that this is a cultural adaptation. The system seems to have evolved and spread throughout this region since the seventeenth century when rice cultivation was introduced. This makes sense, since it is rice cultivation that is most positively influenced by randomizing garden locations.
> Whatever the process, within 400 years, the bird augury system had spread throughout the agricultural populations of this Borneo region. Yet it remains conspicuously missing or underdeveloped among local foraging groups and recent adopters of rice agriculture, as well as among populations in northern Borneo who rely on irrigation.
> This example makes a key point: not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
> not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
this is so wrong, it's "not even wrong".
It's always important to determine why something worked or didn't. If we did not do that, we would never be able to produce enough food to feed ourselves. Ignorance and blind adherence to nonsense is what creates famines in the first place.
Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).
I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true
This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.