In my own experience having debates and discussions in this day and age, there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point. This isn’t necessarily bad, per se, but it does mean people are offloading reasoning about a problem to letting some citation’s abstract make the point for them. There is a massive replicability crisis in academia and we know that the publish or perish culture means null results put careers into jeopardy. It is also heavily biased towards studying things that can be measured empirically.

So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.

Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036

This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.

How is your example specific to secular values? I'm sure there are many doctors who are religious.

> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point

Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.

>” I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.”

I never said people shouldn’t need facts to back up their statements. I am trying to say that there are other ways to make assertions without having to cite peer reviewed studies.

And, that when people get stuck in a mindset of dismissing any idea that doesn’t have a citation to justify it, when subjects come up that aren’t easily studied empirically you end up with a blind spot. In my example the blind spot was infant pain. In my mind, any rational person would look at a crying baby and come to the conclusion that the little baby feels pain. But, if you demanded I bring a fact to back that assertion up, for the longest time I couldn’t provide you with one.

Yet again, your complaint about people asking for citations for doubtful claims doesn't seem to have any relation to secularism or its lack thereof. You might want to reconsider whether you are forcefully bringing religion into things where it doesn't belong just to make an argument against secularism for the sake of it.

Intuition can be secular. It is possible to conclude that the crying baby is feeling pain, or make many other types of hypotheses, without providing citations or using a religious framework.

That isn't intuition. That's a learned response.

I thought learned responses were tied to some form of conditioning.

https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-response

Anyway, my point is that a religious framework isn't needed to have a gut feeling about something.

Yes, which isn't intuition. Intuition is when you have a correct feeling about something even though you have no knowledge of the situation.

That's too strict of a definition, in my opinion, and I don't understand how conditioning is related to the crying baby example. Intuition can produce incorrect judgments and doesn't need the person to be clueless. Here's a dictionary definition:

> (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intui...

No, it really isn't, not unless you have alternative definitions for "understand" or "know."

It's trivial to find examples of intuition being incorrect. The APA has a cover story on this:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/misfires

I view the emphasis on the scientific method and empiricism as the legitimate means of determining truth to be a major component of secular values. And for what it’s worth it’s a really valuable mindset for most real world phenomena, but not all.

I know plenty of religious people also like the scientific method and empiricism, but probably only as much as where it won’t conflict with their beliefs. I’m sure a pious doctor would easily dismiss a paper refuting the efficacy of prayer. So to me, at least, this kind of scientific worldview is not really a feature of religious thinking, but the two can coexist up to a point.

We used to believe that diseases were the result of bad smells and physicians used to go from cutting up corpses to delivering babies without substantial sanitary measures. The difference isn't lack of irrationality. To err is human after all. The difference is how science and religion move forward in response to new data.

I’m skeptical of this last sentence; I’m not sure that science is so responsive to new data either. After the myriad papers published on the replicability crisis, citation rings and the like, academic institutions have failed to change substantially with regards to either structure or process.

Science is done by humans and we're not very good at changing our opinions, in particular at institutional levels. However there is a difference between a priori stating that your dogma is infallible like religions typically do, and at least trying to follow the scientific process.

Religions hold that their positions are that of the immortal and infallible creator of the universe and hold them sometimes on pain of executing nonbelievers thousands of years later. These lies created from nothing are so resilient because its difficult to amend what you held to be divine truth.

Scientific theories carry with them the premise that they are merely the best theory so far and are subject to revision as new data comes to light. Some may jealously guard the fruits of their labor against newer better understanding and people both lie and fail to do the proper due diligence but the process though flawed because it is carried out by flawed humans is fundamentally different and better.

I'm interested in knowing, how exactly would you suggest institutions go about fixing the replicability crisis? With how things are as of now, I can't think of any way the scientific community can easily fix this problem.

Contemporary academic philosophy has some rather crazy ideas in it. David Lewis claimed that every possible parallel universe exists (modal realism), and is just as real as this one – our universe is the "real" or "actual" one only because it is ours. Takashi Yagisawa takes that one further, and argues that possibility is simply another dimension like space and time (extended modal realism), and that my existence includes not just who I am in this world, but extends to equally include my existence in other possible worlds, and even impossible worlds (logically contradictory universes).

Daniel Kolak claims that only one person actually exists (open individualism), and everyone is the same person, it is just that most of us haven't realised this fact yet. Graham Priest rejects the law of non-contradiction, and argues that it is possible for a proposition to be equally true and false, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way (dialetheism), and has even suggested that these true contradictions may exist in the real physical world, not just in abstract thought about paradoxes. Nick Bostrom argues that we may be living in a computer simulation, and if we are not, that's bad news, it is evidence that humanity is doomed, or at least that our prospects as a species are not as bright as many hope (the simulation argument). David Chalmers argues that conscious awareness is a property not just of humans and (higher?) animals, but rather that everything in the universe is conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks, stars, planets, galaxies, even cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles (panpsychism).

Are these ideas "irrational"? Rationality is in the eye of the beholder. But they are just as much "out there" as those of many of the great religious philosophers–whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc.

The entire "self-help" genre.