What do you do? How do you live your life your last three days?

One school of thought says, disregard the evidence. Assert, against it all, that the meteor is going to miss. Or if that's hard, decide to trust someone who asserts it (this is usually easier).

This is arguably rational. If you're wrong, it won't matter, and you'll probably feel less awful your last three days.

I think creationist's thinking is something like this:

1. If evolution is true, then God is not. 2 Without a creator's purpose, existence is meaningless. 3. If existence is meaningless, you might as well assume it has a meaning, (because that's no less meaningless than anything else!).

To argue against a creationist, it's probably best - or at least, most efficient - to argue against the first stage in that chain of reasoning. If you want to argue against all theists, you can argue against the second.

If you want to argue against all non-nihilists, I guess you can argue against the third, but that is ... literally pointless either way.

So the third point is a good thing to concede in arguments with creationists (and theists, if you insist).

Serious question - is this US-specific line of thinking? Because I was raised in Poland, which is ultra-religious and if you aren't a catholic you will be ostracized from your community, and yet evolution was NEVER questioned in my education, and I went to private catholic schools. It's widely accepted by everyone, I think even the pope supports it. Obviously, it's accepted in the line of "evolution is real, but God probably helped a bit along the way", but still, I don't know anyone crazy enough to say evolution is not real. And yet the assumption I always hear on HN and reddit is that if you are religious you don't believe in evolution - how come?

The problem in parts of the US is that some religious leaders decided, quite explicitly, to use evolution to drive a wedge between modern, 'materialist', scientific thinking and their followers. I think this is because they could forsee their congregations falling as more people became better informed and drifted away from religion. So they found a way to make it "us or them" and forge a new sort of unity through opposition. Unfortunately it took hold quite well and has been spread outside the US by US influenced churches and pastors.

Edit - this is part of it - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

But this is quite a new development. It's hard for us to appreciate it, but there are other conceptions of religion's role in life. In the US, many religious people believe that things in the Bible literally describe how stuff is, it's not just an allegory or metaphor to help people in their lives. (Or similarly in Islam, the religion is not separate from all other aspects of life, but an inseparable part, without which nothing else makes sense).

Indirectly. Creationism is really only a thing within certain subsets of baptist and evangelical branches of Christianity, and these branches haven't take a large hold in Europe, whereas in the US they've flourished. Catholics have never really gone for it, even in the US, as far as I'm aware.

Catholics haven't gone for it the way certain branches of Protestantism have because adhering to Young Earth creationism in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary is largely, in those branches of Protestantism, a defense of a particular extreme form of a sola scriptura (a Protestant doctrine which directly contrasts with Catholicisms dual role for scripture and tradition) with Biblical literalism (which is likewise not a Catholic doctrine.)

There are Young Earth Creationists in the Catholic Church, but its a matter of personal belief that is far removed from the core doctrine and identity of the Church.

I grew up in Italy. No comment needed, I suppose :-)

Still science is science, and religion is religion. They manage to live together in (enough) harmony. But idiot thesis like creationism are never given any more credit than a promise by a politician in the last days before an election.

I think there's a bigger problem with the religious version that you presented. Namely, for any religion/concept of God, you can imagine another one that wants you to do opposite things. How do you know which God's existence to assume? You're back to trying to find evidence for one God against another God. In practice, this would probably also provide evidence against the claim that "no Gods exist". It's hard to think of evidence of the form "If there's a God, it probably wants X as opposed to not X." that really needs that pre-condition.

So the religious person may just as well go back to trying to gather evidence for God against no-God, because they need to gather evidence for God against the God-that-desires-opposite-things anyway.

In some religions, the relation with God is a tangible and personal one. God "speaks to you" so to speak.

So you just "know" -- you're not starting from evaluating random entities against each other as if they're all equal.

If God "speaks to you", you already "know" he exists. This was precisely what I tried to point out in my previous comment. If you have a method to pick out a particular God out of all possible Gods, then this method (or something related) can also be used to reject atheism directly. There's no need for the elaborate argument that I responded to.

By the way, this is disputable. I'm not denying that idiots/creationists use this argument; I question the argument itself.

If evolution is true, a literary interpretation of the Bible is not. Still, evolution can be seen as a wonderful present from a "superior intelligence".

I also find the evidence for Christ's resurrection quite strong. "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel is a book that lays it out well (though I'm not a huge fan of the literary approach).

There's a tendency to write off creationists and theists as completely irrational and stupid, without giving any thought to their motivations.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

http://www.iep.utm.edu/pasc-wag/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

edit: I missed jahnu's post inmediately below, with a similar theme "That's the essence of Pascal's Wager"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12486377

edit2: and mcguire

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488731

So I guess I should say "me too"

I don't think it's like Pascal's wager, because there's no need for probability here, and you're not trying to avoid any bad outcome. I think it's more like how Pascal rejected the concern that he might be insane (if you ask yourself "how do I know I'm not crazy?" you're basically already assuming you're not crazy).

But, I haven't actually read all of Pascal's Pensees. What extracts I have read of it suggests to me that he's heavily straw-manned both by later philosophers and people writing about it today, so for all I know the "wager" was more like this, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

Hell is nowhere in this chain of argument. God arguably is, but that's in step 2. It's step 3 which may kinda, sorta remind you of Pascal's Wager, but it's only an argument against nihilism, not even for theism.

Yes, conceding step 3 leaves wide open the question of what to believe in instead of nihilism. Even conceding step 2 leaves open the question of "what sort of god are we talking about". But this is precisely the point. That means you can argue these things separately, while still acknowledging your opponent's ultimate concern.

You can even give your superego a face and think there is a big guy in the sky that loves you and cares about what you do.

Although you have to concede quite a lot. When you feel awe at the stars, or the exhilaration of love, or burning anger at injustice, you must tell yourself, "this feeling is just an adaptive delusion; there's nothing good about caring or wrong about rape and murder per se, I just happen not to like them because I'm That Sort of Mammal".

If you say "existence is meaningless, morality doesn't exist" and in the next breath say anything about what people should or shouldn't do, including whether they should believe in God, I respectfully submit that it's inconsistent to do so. (Not that you should mind inconsistency.) This is my beef with people like Dawkins: if he's right, everything he says is utterly pointless.

That said, I can concede a lot without pretending the universe somehow cares for me. I eat good food, and drink good wine, and just enjoy everything I have.

Even if you disagree with me, you may concede that for all practical means the universe is infinite and the human mind is finite. Since something finite can't contain the infinite, how foolish would I be if I pretend to understand the universe?

Not that I agree with the creationists, I would love to believe that I'm special because some big guy in the sky gave me life. It is a comforting idea, but in order to accept the concept of an anthropomorphic god you have to believe that humans are somehow special, and this is very pretentious. I'm living in this tiny little rock floating in space which existence is barely a drop in the ocean of time. I'm not special except in the minds of the few people that manage to like me.

But I will not pretend my own version of god is less made-up: the Tao we talk about is not the real Tao.

Which can be a very intelligent and rational thing to do. It all depends on the end goal ("discover how the world actually works" vs "calm your soul through belief in a higher power", etc.).

People can do very stupid things (dangerous to them, to the detriment of their health, social relations, etc) in pursuit of evidence. And very smart things based on faith.

Again, it depends on the end goal.

Ex falso quod libet.

That's actually patently false. I might have an irrational goal of driving a Ferrari while pouring ketchup on my head, but not all methods are equally capable of realising it.

And of course, if I break into a bank and steal money as the method to get the Ferrari I could be put to jail (either before or after realizing my dream) -- so the method absolutely does matter.

>Ex falso quod libet

That is about logical statements -- it says nothing about methods of realising a goal, except if your goal is to build correct logical propositions.

Modern science is based on gathering information and forming ideas and hypotheses around it. The origins of matter and energy are an active area of investigation, not a guilty secret.

    <post class="devils-advocate"/>

"Guilty secret" is an uncharitable reading of the parent post, I'd say more out of the realm of scientific inquiry and more the philosophical. It's like asking "what was there before time existed?" - the scientific answer is null because that's a nonsense question - "before" implies the existence of a "time" to count it.

And yet, if the universe suddenly exists at T+0:00, it'll be impossible for science to understand the conditions at T-0:01 because that information does not exist given consensus understanding of time.

Still, we can comprehend the concept of "before time existed" on some abstract level, but the sciences cannot, absent some external source of information that a scientist must necessarily reject until it appears.

And potentially that pushes the question back further - so where did all that come from?

I took issue with the initial post because it sounded conspiratorial, and it also sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore. On the contrary - it's very interesting and it's no shame or revelation to say "we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will"

Yes, like that of the post which I was directing my response towards:

>As a lifelong believer in science...

Science is fundamentally hypothetical, not something to be sure of.

Believe: to accept (something) as true; feel sure the truth of.

"Believing in science" or "believing in creationism" are both opposed to your statement (which I agree with), because they do not leave room for doubt:

>we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will

It's one thing to go to a church (there even might be purely social reasons), and it's another thing to discard overwhelming scientific evidence and believe something based on the principle of not needing any evidence at all. I become especially sad when I think of the confused minds of the poor children of these people.

On the topic, I've found The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins a very enlightening read if one wishes to understand the arguments of religious people.

It is that, if you want to have any hope of bringing a creationist over to your side, you need to be able to understand and articulate both their arguments, and their point of view.

If you can establish that you understand them, they are going to be a lot more receptive to you asking the hard questions about their beliefs (this is best done by asking them to convince you to be a creationist, and then asking those hard questions).

Calling those people idiots does nothing other than give them a legitimate reason to dislike both you, and by extension, other people that "believe in evolution".

Somewhat related to that, creationists tend to be deeply religious, so books like The God Delusion -- which I very much enjoyed, by the way -- are almost guaranteed to turn off a creationist. It would be better to recommend books that explain evolution through a Christian world-view, as they will have a much easier time relating to the material.

Personally I think the God Delusion by Dawkins is as far from my perspective as could be possible, so I would not recommend it as a book for people to understand "religious people" (as if you could pigeon hole people like that!). Blanket stereotyping forgets about individuals.

You'd be surprised.

You can easily find creationists with higher IQ than you, that can out-solve problems in your field faster than you.

And the same for most categories one can dismiss as "idiots", except people with verifiable cognitive impairment.

This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. Not all forms of faith and belief require you to reject evidence, mind, but this one most certainly does.

But in other respects I'm at least a reasonably intelligent software engineer!

That stretches the definition of an idiot considerably.

>This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief.

That could be beneficial for one's emotional health (belief in higher power and all that) and thus the smart thing to do in some cases.

Who said "identifying reality correctly" is the smarter thing to do? Sometimes, not being too logical can have great benefits.

Here's an old argument for this:

>Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived. The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux". In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza -- with small edits in [] to make the excerpt clearer)

And here's a newer one:

>Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illus...

And personally, yeah, I think anyone that can't cope with reality as it is, that needs comforting fictions of higher powers, is de-facto weaker and worse off.

The scientific method has advanced our society immeasurably. Evolutionarily speaking our rationality and logical thought has given us such amazing success it's hard to see how that is supportable at all. It's also not clear what they mean by "tuned to fitness" there. He seems to consider that abstractions and shortcuts are the same as unreality, which appears orthogonal to this debate.

Where do hypothesis come from?

I'm not sure how that's a weakness?

Yes, an intelligent agent will do exactly what you suggested. And by the way, what you said was exactly a hypothesis. What exactly did you do to generate it? Where did that text/ideas come from?

When you come to the bottom of it you'll probably find something that you can't explain. You'll have to think about something and that will lead to something else and so on.

The scientific method is just a means of communicating ideas to other people. But, can you use scientific method on itself? That is, can you communicate a scientific method to generate scientific methods (basically only the hypothesis) for a particular subject? What about "hunches"? Can I have them?

If you can, you hit jackpot. But if you don't, then you might want to think more about discarding the unexplainable.

Go beyond that and try to imagine an 4d or 5d space. Then extrapolate and do a bijection from that to understanding what God is. Why do you think that you can do that? What does this prove about all this thing?

You seem to be trying to say that the use of hunches and soft knowledge to form the basis of inquiry and test somehow contradicts or weakens the idea that the world around us can be best understood by the scientific method.

"Hypothesis" is not knowledge, nor are such generated by magic, and they only become knowledge when tested (or contradicted).

As for the last bit, sorry you've degenerated into talking nonsense.

I'm asking: how can I generate hypothesis? Are you in possession of a scientific method for generating hypothesis? Can you share it?

Scientific method can do so much but I guess you have made up your mind already.

Hypothesis is not knowledge until tested.

Since you can't use scientific method to bootstrap itself - as far as anyone can tell - this is enough to question scientific method's ability to resolve _all_ issues and declare any result on things not applicable to it.

Is this important? You tell me. You may find it useful not to apply unsuitable methods to all situations.

Scientific method likely cannot resolve all possible categories of question, no. Empiricism is a fundamental assumption, that things are repeatable and hold true under investigation.

However this is a very different sort of assumption to the rejection of evidence based on faith that is implicit to creationism. One is our best effort to understand the world around us, the other is wilful ignorance.

Because a thing which you believe and yet is not defined by the scientific method (or rather, empiricism) is known as "faith", a concept which you and the rest of this thread has spent a good deal of energy attacking.

In other words, it has no empirical base. It's an idea. A thought, held in the belief that some future action by you or others may prove it correct.

That variable certainly exists - it's why we have blind-controlled trials as the gold standard of research.

As compared to a hypothesis - here is an idea that should be tested by investigation, I make no prior judgement to its truth

I don't think a true null hypothesis exists as long as humans are involved in concocting them, the person could want, consciously or subconsciously, any output from any experiment.

Maybe one outcome leads to more research that's a major paint to secure funding for and one is much easier? Maybe the outfit funding the study clearly wants one particular result?

Which goes right back to what I'm saying: humans are not purely logical, true null hypotheses don't exist, and the only difference between a "hypothesis" and a "belief" by what you just described is the degree to which the person with the idea wants a specific outcome - a variable which is completely unrelated to the eventual truthiness or falsity of the output.

As such it doesn't matter where it comes from so long as it is tested before acceptance. Which is why I struggle to understand the bootstrapping problem that the other poster talks about.

--edit-- To put it as simply as I can muster - why does the origin of the idea to test matter, when it is the testing that's the important part?

But not all things can be tested - think about dual slit experiment. You can't reproduce the experiment in the sense that you'll know which slit will be taken.

The point I was trying to make is that the origin of a hypothesis is not really important, just that before it is accepted as true or false it is tested.

--edit-- this wasn't actually an edit so much as a reply. Oops!

Quoting Hamming: "A man was fishing with a net in the sea. He concluded that there is no smaller fish in the sea than what he caught". (s/fishing net/scientific method)

(1)Empiricism modulo quantum effects - and here we go again.

I.E. how is it possible to choose fiction as fact in the knowledge it is fiction?

I don't really understand the mindset...

That's just the moment of choice though. Given enough conditioning and getting used to it yourself, it can become as convincing (to your own self) as any reality.

Besides, don't people chose convenient truths over reality all the time, creationists or not?

Even the belief in science, which usually is a belief in fiction (an ideal of how it should be conducted) as opposed to how it's practiced and what interests and motivations are in play (from corporate tampering to "I'll review this peer reviewed paper favourably, because that guy is a friend of a friend, or they might help with my grants, etc." -- which can even function at a subconscious level, e.g. instinctively being more positively predisposed to papers by people you know or can help your career).

Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no. People that choose inquiry over ignorance are the ones thay actually make stridea out of the darkness and got us where we are today.

"Belief" in science is the wrong way to think about it. Understanding that the scientific method has flaws but is still far superior as a tool to discover what is, rather than proclaim it without evidence or shy away into comforting fictions, seems the best way to approach knowledge.

That's a convenient fiction to believe, but I haven't found it to be true in anybody.

Whether they end up doing so is less important, they choose not to whenever the choice is apparent.

I've known wonderful artists and creative persons who absolutely could not give a flying duck for the "reality".

Was the person here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/ worth knowing?

There is also the argument that if you yourself do not accept evidence that creationists do, that does not mean that evidence is not there.

You might also want to read/see Hamming about science and how mathematics is not exactly free from presuppositions.

And there is also the Goldbach conjecture where you find that a system generates facts about itself that can be demonstrated only by going outside the system - ad infinitum.

I did not read the paper you mentioned but God does not exactly work like people regularly assume, that is "you pray and God will do you good".

The idiot argument is convenient but weak. It just gives a quick way to dismiss counter arguments

That would be The Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel - not Goldbach

Although I guess there are creationists and there are creationists:

If you ask me about science I will answer with science. I did well in school, including biology and introduction to astrophysics.

If you hold a gun to my head and ask if I still belive this nonsense about the world being created I'd guess I'd say yes (if I can't get around to disarming you, I don't like armed people with strong ideological beliefs going around trying to convince people :-/ )

On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.

Which is what I don't like about [some] creationism. It tries to use a Why tool to answer a How question.

And as long as you take Biblical stories to be metaphors and/or best-effort explanations from before we had the data that we have now, they're perfectly fine stories that make plenty of sense as an explanation.

Adam&Eve for instance. If all you know is that it takes a man and a woman to produce a baby, it stands to reason that at some point there had to have been the first pair.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Rec...

Could religion not be considered a philosophical framework?

Thanks for showing me there's a name for why vs how. I had no idea.

I think the atrength of this distinction also varies between people. I know many religious atheists who believe in the value of religion, in its teachings and traditions, even in some hybrid concept of heaven and hell, possibly god, but who do not believe God exists as a factual entity or that anything from any religious text is fact rather than metaphor.

But I also come from a country that is 68% christian but only 32% of the population says they believe in there being some sort of god.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Apparently "Catholic Atheism" is a thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

What useful model does creationism put forward?

I've met creationists that believed in micro evolution: microbe can evolve to get certain resistance. But not the macro one, that is natural selection can result in human as we are right now. I was absolutely not able to justify the probability that it can happen.

Is that an argument for the current state of the marbles being created from nothing?

A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that.

At least we can see how the stars begin, change and die.

No. Just some creators.

We just don't have a handle on how common those conditions are. And many other subsequent conditions, for cellular life, for multicellular, for tissues and organs. Finally, for intelligence and sapience.

The 'best result' (assuming we're itching to disprove God) would be to show an origin of life is plausible. But even that doesn't prove where life on Earth actually came from.

At that point they aren't arguing against evolution so much as they are cosmology, geology, physics etc. The only difference between micro/macro evolution is the timescales involved and the timescale is what they don't accept.

Succinctly, if miracles exist, they violate natural laws. Claiming that natural laws and observations (carbon dating, say) do not allow for miracles is begging the question.

But alsetmusic's fact-finding mission could still be useful! Right now he doesn't even know where to start on how to construct an argument, because he doesn't know what creationists have been told.

There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science, that we're still looking to fill. He'd be able to acknowledge certain fossil gaps and irregularities, while describing how they still fit into the great scientific theory.

From what I've seen the arguments aren't that sophisticated, they start with an outright rejection of most branches of science. Amusingly, evolution is the one they criticize the least.