> It's very nearly a religion.

I'd argue it is a religion. The word religion means to "bind back" or "yoke" [edited], i.e. to seek an understanding of the universe and our place in it.

That's what physicists and cosmologists do. These disciplines also fulfill the needs of scientists for meaning and community and ritual, not unlike Christianity or Islam or whatever.

Just because you might happen to believe something doesn't make it not a religion.

> The word religion means to "bind back" or "yolk",

No, it doesn't. Less importantly, you mean "yoke" and not "yolk", and more importantly you are confusing the definition of a the Latin word religare from which it is believed the Latin word religio may have been derived (from which, in turn, the Middle English "religion" meaning "life under monastic vows" may have been derived) with the definition of the Modern English word "religion".

The Modern English word religion doesn't mean the same thing as Latin religare, or even Latin religio, or even the original Middle English sense of religion.

> The Modern English word religion doesn't mean the same thing as Latin religare, or even Latin religio, or even the original Middle English sense of religion.

If you look at these lists of 'modern' definitions of religion, the plurality (if not the majority) of the ones from academia seem roughly aligned with the (disputed) etymology.

http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Definitions.htm

http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln101/defi...

E.g. the William James quote: "[Religion is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

That's basically another way of saying what I said, and I don't see any reason not to include scientists under that umbrella. I mean even the phrase from the paper "a quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space" sounds an awful lot like a conception of "the divine".

The etymology wasn't disputed. What was disputed is the way you are playing with etymology in order to get it to fit your desired narrative.

The word religion means to "bind back" or "yoke" [edited], i.e. to seek an understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Here you are retconing. The religio or bond/obligation refers to a monastic vow. It has nothing to do with seeking an understanding of the universe or our place in it. Therefore, the etymology of the word religion is completely irrelevant to the conversation.

> Here you are retconing. The religio or bond/obligation refers to a monastic vow.

I didn't realize the etymology was in dispute, so my bad. But regardless of whether religare or relegare is the etymological origin of religio, wouldn't either predate the concept of a monastic bond by centuries?

> E.g. the William James quote: "[Religion is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

I would say his quote refers to spirituality rather than religion.

Arguing based on etymology is a logical fallacy.

In this case, as I've documented, the way many modern religious studies people use the word is closely aligned with the etymology I gave. Whether that etymology is historically accurate has been disputed, but the fact that people use the word to mean basically the same thing as the purported etymology is not.

says who other than you?

Anyone with any knowledge of linguistics? Even when the etymologies are correct (and they rarely are) they're entirely orthogonal to what words actually mean in practice today because language is only defined by its use (and is highly contextual).

Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy.

Well if you look at the question of why religion is such a prominent trait of the human species, we seem to have an innate bias in favor of the idea that the universe was created to allow for our existence. And it requires a certain amount of mental effort to resist that bias.

There probably is some utility in the belief of an Inscrutable Creator. We are curious, rational beings and we like to understand causal chains. There is intrinsic value in this understanding, and also extrinsic value, as this sort of understanding is the basis for human innovation in society. God is a pleasant enough non-terminating terminus to all causal chains, and His Inscrutability allows us to not worry too much about difficult questions. Of course, the entire Universe is a single physical process moving through spacetime, an unchanging sculpture embedded in 4 dimensions.

Each of us are carving an eternal (if minuscule) shape during our lives. All we ever do, all we ever can do, is move atoms and electrons around (intentional motion of our body against the resisting world) yet we arise from moving atoms (unintentional motion of our body, e.g. at the cellular and atomic level).

BTW our self awareness has only one possible good purpose: to do what no other life could do, could ever do, which is escape the bonds of gravity, and spread life beyond earth. If that is not possible, then our species, and all life we know of, will perish on this planet, in the long run if we're smart, in the short run if we're stupid. But space travel, even trips that are very close, are incredibly difficult and expensive. The solar system is likely out of human reach. Interstellar travel is likely out of reach even for hardy, intelligent robots.

So you have to come back, once again, to the value of the Inscrutable First Cause, which is: relax. You're gonna die someday, your sculpture will be closed off, but your carving it every day, including right now. Enjoy it! Make fun shapes!

If you believe that the leaves were rustled by a predator and you're wrong, you only waste some energy.

If you believe that the leaves were rustled by something inanimate and you're wrong, you get eaten by the predator.

There's an evolutionary advantage in expecting agency where there is none. Whether it's rustling leaves, the weather, celestial bodies or life itself.

To put it another way: if you see Jesus in your soup doesn't mean there's some divine truth in soup, it's just an artifact of your brain having evolved to recognise faces in a way that encourages false positives over false negatives.

Understand the fallibility of every aspect of yourself and a lot of supernaturalist arguments go out of the window.

Yup. Science has become somewhat like a religion for those who like to think logically. In the end, they can no more step out of their logical thinking than the zealots can step out of their faith based thinking. Both become dogmatic and a crutch...

This is wrong, very wrong. There is a big fundamental difference between science and religion: Scientist can invent new theories and change their mind when new evidence is discovered. Religious people stick to their beliefs no matter what.

Both are not inherently true. Just commonly the case. In my experience (with Eastern polytheistic religions) a lot of "religious" people are perfectly fine with science, while conversely many people who swear by science and logic seem viscerally contemptuous of anything not falling within the bounds of their worldview. No doubt religion by and large is detrimental (at least at this point in human evolution) and it has a huge amount of blood on its hands, but the spiritual/mystical core of most religions (admittedly almost completely ignored by the vast majority of its adherents since it is obtuse, ethereal and hard to pursue; not as easy as following orders and conforming) seems to be just as much a way of seeking after the ultimately nature of reality as is science. Just because it is not testable and repeateable like the scientific method doesn't mean it is false, since we still don't know the ultimate nature of reality. So it is good if both sides keep an open mind.

But, limiting debates to the observable, testable (falsifiable) and repeatable subset has helped us improve our understanding of the nature of physical reality.

Wouldn't you agree?

But it's not very helpful in understanding the nature of ourselves, which is where science remains a weak tool.

It's a mistake to conclude science is a weak tool just because it produces less certain results in the social sciences. "Weak" is a relative measure, so science is only a weak tool if you can actually demonstrate the existence of a much better tool.

It may be a weak tool, but it's the only tool that we know actually works.

Also, as science helps us advance technology it becomes a continuously stronger tool.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Max Planck himself said:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." [1]

[1] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

As a human institution, science won't ever be perfect. The fundamental notions of science (reduction, documentation, reproducibility, etc) are drastically different from the fundamental notions of religion.

I think the word "science" is too general for this discussion. You're talking about the scientific method, which is a rigorous process for building consistent models of our shared experience. Godel's theorem suggests that we might never be able to complete any of these models, but the method has still lead to amazing new ways of understanding the universe.

If we're talking about the hand-wavey mysticism of Michio Kaku or Deepak Chopra, or researchers who have decided to believe a particular unfalsifiable interpretation of QM, and will not be convinced otherwise, that stuff is closer to what I would call religion.

In that reduced way science becomes a study of theory within theory, derived logical connections. Once you assume a logical framework you're out of the hypothesis/test routine completely. I don't think that's a fair thing to do in comparison. Where things start out matters.

I might not understand your point, but are you basically saying that not all science requires math? To be fair, I've been thinking of physics in particular here.

Science isn't a religion but scientists can be zealots. The scientific principle is the antithesis of religion but scientists can be irrational like any other human.

The good thing about the modern era is that even when institutional biases may momentarily prevent a theory from gaining mainstream recognition at least it will be preserved as part of the body of scientific knowledge so future generations can rediscover it.

> Science isn't a religion

Science might not be, but there are plenty of Scientismists out there.

Scientism is just a catchy phrase for blind faith.

Most "scientism" I see in the wild is just people who were already indoctrinated into magical thinking treating "science" the same way they previously treated religious dogma.

It's irrelevant to science the same way astrology is irrelevant to astronomy. It's cargo cult "science"-iness.

Science becomes religion when scientists ignore empirical evidence in front of them because their textbooks or theories point out that that evidence cannot possibly exist, and then proceed to call those presenting that evidence as unscientific or irreligious.

I wonder, why so you think so? Why do you call an endeavor that seeks to provide an explanation and a model of reality consistent with empirical observatkons a religion, when it's precisely the opposite? Just because we are reaching strange and difficult conclusions that you may not like, that's no reason to dismiss it as zealotry.