Proving this would take at least a whole book, maybe more, but such books have been written many times in the past when science vs religion was more topical. Most people don't demand such a book because "science can tell you how to do it but not whether you should" is a pretty uncontroversial position that's been taken by scientists themselves many times, it's pretty much the starting point of the debate over whether Nagasaki should have been nuked for example.
Still, consider a sample moral problem: revenge. Christianity (to take a familiar example) has a very evolved take on revenge. It teaches that you shouldn't avenge wrongdoing (eye for an eye), instead you should "turn the other cheek". If everyone did this it has obvious advantages for stopping conflicts escalating into long term violence, but it denies people a sense of justice. So Christianity also has a whole lot of evolved stories about how that's OK because sinners will be judged in heaven by God and maybe sent to Hell if they've been bad, so you can turn the other cheek yet rest assured that justice will be done ... in the afterlife. Obviously all this is totally unfalsifiable, it doesn't attempt to be rational in any way but it's a really useful set of beliefs and stories for creating a more peaceful society.
If you take only science as a starting point, how do you derive this sort of moral code and - just as importantly - make it stick? How would you teach it to children? In fact you'd struggle even with the far more basic task of deriving a moral code that bans murder. You can't start with evolution because animals kill each other all the time; there's nothing unnatural about murder. It's the prohibition against it that's unnatural, but science is just the study of the natural world, so that's no help. See for yourself, try it. Come up with a rational first-principles explanation of why murder is bad without invoking religion, and which doesn't simply boil down to tautologies, circular reasoning, appeal to authority or other logical fallacies. I've tried - it's hard!
"if that were the definition of scientism then I wouldn't subscribe to scientism."
Right, but nobody explicitly subscribes to scientism. We don't even have such a word as "scientismist" because it's pretty much the defacto default religion of the modern population.
Scientism is perhaps the nastiest of all religions because it denies its own nature. Other religions accept what they are, but this one presents itself as pure rationalism even though it's not. It's very, very easy to accidentally become a follower of scientism which is why so many people are. All you have to do is use reasoning like this:
1. Science is a good way to determine what is true.
2. But I am busy and don't have time to do science. Therefore I will delegate it to professional scientists.
3. I don't have time to figure out who is applying the scientific method on a person-by-person basis, so I'll delegate that to scientific institutions (universities, governments, corporations etc).
3. I don't have time to verify that these institutions are actually using the scientific method. Actually I'm not even sure what the scientific method is, beyond the very basics. So I'll assume that if people are being referred to as scientists by other people who are also being called scientists, and the places they work have money, then they are scientific institutions.
4. I don't have time to actually read what these institutions write down in their holy books/journals, because a lot of it is written in Latin, but I am sure that it is Science and that The Word of Science is Truth, so whatever these institutions claim must be true.
5. I don't have time to actually find out what these institutions claim, but there's this noisy town crier in the middle of our village who says that the institutions claim X, and nobody seems to be objecting, so I have Faith that this must be The Word and therefore Truth.
5. I don't understand why these oddball heretics keep popping up who lack Faith in The Word as transcribed by the priests at the Institutions, because why would anyone doubt what is obviously and clearly True? Yes, scientists are merely men and may sometimes be unclear about the universal underlying Truth, which may even be unknowable to us mere mortals, but nonetheless it is important for community cohesion to have Faith and therefore we should banish these heretics as far outside the village as possible.
In other words, although people like to think they're rational, being rational is time consuming and difficult so most people delegate it. But - and this is where it becomes scientism - they don't recognize that this is what they've done. They conflate belief in a hierarchical Church-like system with rationality, and end up believing anything that people working at these institutions say even if it's obviously pseudo-scientific. And, they treat doubt in the sciencey-ness of the priestly class as terrible heresy; such heretics deserve to get their printing presses smashed up (cancelled).
> All I argue is that science doesn't give you one at all.
> Proving this would take at least a whole book, maybe more, but such books have been written many times in the past when science vs religion was more topical. Most people don't demand such a book because "science can tell you how to do it but not whether you should" is a pretty uncontroversial position that's been taken by scientists themselves many times, it's pretty much the starting point of the debate over whether Nagasaki should have been nuked for example.
You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked. That though would probably be a complex discussion but I can see a possibility that someone scientifically shows that there would have been better ways to solve the conflict.
> Obviously all this is totally unfalsifiable, it doesn't attempt to be rational in any way but it's a really useful set of beliefs and stories for creating a more peaceful society.
> If you take only science as a starting point, how do you derive this sort of moral code and - just as importantly - make it stick?
> In fact you'd struggle even with the far more basic task of deriving a moral code that bans murder. You can't start with evolution because animals kill each other all the time; there's nothing unnatural about murder. It's the prohibition against it that's unnatural, but science is just the study of the natural world, so that's no help. See for yourself, try it. Come up with a rational first-principles explanation of why murder is bad without invoking religion, and which doesn't simply boil down to tautologies, circular reasoning, appeal to authority or other logical fallacies. I've tried - it's hard!
> Right, but nobody explicitly subscribes to scientism. We don't even have such a word as "scientismist" because it's pretty much the defacto default religion of the modern population.
> Scientism is perhaps the nastiest of all religions because it denies its own nature. Other religions accept what they are, but this one presents itself as pure rationalism even though it's not. It's very, very easy to accidentally become a follower of scientism which is why so many people are. All you have to do is use reasoning like this:
We alreay agree that scientism (meaning religious corruption of science as you've shown) isn't good. Don't think we need to expand on that further.
"You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked"
I'm not really sure how. It would be interesting to see an attempt. Note that doing this without relying on ambient moral principles like "killing people is bad" is probably impossible but those moral principles don't come from science, as I point out, hence why I don't see how to do it.
"We have laws that prohibit harming others and they don't need religious justification."
Yes I thought you might go there. It doesn't work. Those laws are derived from religious codes originally. Also, the law is not a moral code, the law is supposed to implement moral codes. If you believe morality flows from law as the original source, you have to believe that lawmakers are inherently more morally capable than the people they rule. Moreover you cannot have such a thing as a tyrant because the moment they achieve power and change the law, whatever they do becomes axiomatically moral and therefore they are not a tyrant. Are you really going to argue that? No way are most people going to go anywhere near a claim like that, quite the opposite, it is often argued that lawmakers are less moral than regular people!
"Harming a member of society is against everyones interest because we are part of society and we optimize for a good quality of life of society as that optimizes our own"
This isn't a logical argument from first principles. Harming someone else can very much be in your interest in all sorts of situations. For it to be considered immoral, there must be some higher justification that states that your clear self-interest in harming an enemy is subservient to some other principle.
Claims like "we optimize for a good quality of life of society" don't mean anything concrete. It's just restating a belief that the original position is morally correct in different words. Every tyrant in history has always claimed to be acting for the betterment of society and how can you argue otherwise without some system deeper than "this is morally good because we say it's best for everyone therefore it is"?
That's what I mean by it being difficult. All the obvious answers just lead you in circles.
"Your claim that animals kill each other all the time: killing within their own group is rare. Take two random animals from the same species and put them together in a room and see if they will kill each other."
So by analogy it's OK to kill other races but not your own? That's certainly a moral code that has existed in the past, but it's not one that is accepted today.
But it's an odd argument because it's really common that animals will fight and injure each other within the same species, sometimes fatally. Usually fights over territory or mating dominance. Even in pack animals there are fights over who gets the mates. By coincidence I was at a zoo just two days ago and they had a few cages where there was only a single animal, with an explanation that they had to do this because if they put more than one animal of the same type in the same cage they would fight for dominance. It's normal e.g. the antlers on a deer are for fighting. One of them was a type of crane, and the explanation was that cranes pick a single mate for life and this one had picked "Man", so would fight with any other crane. Animal jealousy!
"You serious claim that the majority just blindly believes in science but wouldn't admit it?"
After what we saw in the last two years! Wow yes, absolutely I seriously claim that. The amount of pseudo-scientific garbage that the population swallowed about COVID is just incredible. Claims that fell apart the moment you read the papers or even just thought about them were routinely passed off and accepted by the population because they came from "experts". It is one of the major themes of our age.
> I don't quite see where you provided examples before this comment, sorry, could you repeat them? I looked through the thread and see you asserting we don't need religions anymore, but not where you give concrete worked examples of moral questions and how to resolve them with science.
> This isn't a logical argument from first principles. Harming someone else can very much be in your interest in all sorts of situations. For it to be considered immoral, there must be some higher justification that states that your clear self-interest in harming an enemy is subservient to some other principle.
The same logical fallacy has been shown in this HN discussion about a dozen times.
A general rule can be true even if in a specific case it does not apply. Killing someone in the general case is bad but in specific cases it can be good. Take for example a suicide bomber running into a crowd. That killing is bad in general can be argued for with logic and without resulting to religion. It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general. I can deduce that with my own brain and don't need a prophet to tell me. You can ask me to go the full chain of logic back to first principles but you know full well that's a lot to do. Can we see the desire to not get killed as something given not by religion?
For example: if you show that science can not explain a certain thing then that does not mean science can not explain anything at all.
If B follows A then NOT B does not follow NOT A.
A triangle is a geometric shape. It does not follow that if something is not a triangle then it's not a geometric shape.
> I'm not really sure how. It would be interesting to see an attempt. Note that doing this without relying on ambient moral principles like "killing people is bad" is probably impossible but those moral principles don't come from science, as I point out, hence why I don't see how to do it.
Your claim is that something ALWAYS applies (e.g. ONLY religion can bring morals). If I can show a single counter example then I invalidate your claim. If I claim that something is true ON AVERAGE and you show one counter example then that does NOT invalidate my claim.
If you say that ONLY a 6 sided dice can throw a 4 and I have an 8 sided dice and throw a 4 then you lose. If I say on average you will roll at least a 2 with your dice then rolling a 1 does not prove me wrong.
> Claims like "we optimize for a good quality of life of society" don't mean anything concrete. It's just restating a belief that the original position is morally correct in different words. Every tyrant in history has always claimed to be acting for the betterment of society and how can you argue otherwise without some system deeper than "this is morally good because we say it's best for everyone therefore it is"?
> So by analogy it's OK to kill other races but not your own?
> But it's an odd argument because it's really common that animals will fight and injure each other within the same species, sometimes fatally. Usually fights over territory or mating dominance. Even in pack animals there are fights over who gets the mates. By coincidence I was at a zoo just two days ago and they had a few cages where there was only a single animal, with an explanation that they had to do this because if they put more than one animal of the same type in the same cage they would fight for dominance. It's normal e.g. the antlers on a deer are for fighting. One of them was a type of crane, and the explanation was that cranes pick a single mate for life and this one had picked "Man", so would fight with any other crane. Animal jealousy!
> After what we saw in the last two years! Wow yes, absolutely I seriously claim that. The amount of pseudo-scientific garbage that the population swallowed about COVID is just incredible. Claims that fell apart the moment you read the papers or even just thought about them were routinely passed off and accepted by the population because they came from "experts". It is one of the major themes of our age.
I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code. I don't think I've stated that anywhere. To try and clarify, what I'm claiming is:
- Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!
- Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.
You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded. I'm not actually religious but find myself in the Nietzschian camp, thinking that is risky and has to be refined a bit. If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward. And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it. We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths, which is why a common American insult to the Soviets in the 20th century was to call them "godless". This is what Nietzsche predicted in "The Will To Power".
"It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general ... This is simple evolution. If we don't optimize for life in our society then we have a clear disadvantage compared to other societies that do so."
OK, now we're getting somewhere. This is a Darwinian argument: that which leads to successful reproduction is moral.
The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.
"Put random animals from different species into a room and most of them will also not kill each other. That does not mean some of them will not kill the other"
Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing.
> I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code.
> - Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!
> - Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.
> You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded
> If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward.
> And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it.
> We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths,
> The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.
> Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing.
Animals don't have the same cognitive capabilities that we have. Nonetheless nature has baked into them traits that are common and result in a lot of behavior that one could reasonably argue that they must have some kind of moral code as well. Human morals are more sophisticated but there are similarities. Now, we are surely not the be-all end-all of evolution which means our cognitive capabilities are also limited. Maybe in a million years our ancestors will look back and pity us for our limited understanding and poor morals :)
At this point I'd like to thank you for a much more intellectually interesting conversation. I was a bit exhausted after the one with al_mandi.
I'm not religious and I also don't accept the axioms that the Bible is the word of God, that anything God says is true, etc. We share the goal / ideal of a moral code that is based on simpler, tighter axioms and sound reasoning. Some years ago I thought it would be easy to develop such a code. Nowadays I fear that it's very difficult, perhaps too difficult right now, and we are perhaps to evolved religion what Da Vinci was when he tried to build a mechanical bird i.e. far further away from being able to match the evolved system than he realized, and for many reasons he couldn't have understood.
"I don't think the soviet era was following the core spirit of science though. It had a lot more in common with religious doctrine."
I think this was one of the core criticisms of communism, made both by philosophers in the 19th century and more everyday folk in the 20th. Marx liked to claim that his ideas were scientific, but actually nothing about Marxism is scientific. His critics contended that to be religious, to want to believe in or even to worship something, is a core part of human nature, and that if you simply abolish evolved religions then new pseudo-religions would immediately emerge (but they'd be worse).
We can see that this happened repeatedly in all communist countries: the population was quickly "converted" to new religions which involved worshipping and deifying both the abstract concepts of man, progress and communist ideology, along with also the less abstract leaders. Hence all the "cults of personality" i.e. religions that viewed Lenin, Stalin, Mao etc as quasi-prophets of the coming utopia.
If this claim of a deep need for religion/belief is true, and as I get older I see more and more evidence that maybe it is, then trying to create a moral code based purely on logic derived from a set of sound core axioms might be naive or backfire - sort of like trying to convert the world to speaking Esperanto would. But of course it's very difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Perhaps the apparent "need" for religion is in reality mostly a need for a comprehensive moral code, and as communism didn't provide one, it instead turned into a stunted and disfigured substitute for one.
One obvious way in which an artificial moral code might be lacking is in the story telling aspects. Religions have the advantage (?) that they're easy to teach to children because children ask "why" a lot but can't understand complicated answers. If you had to explain every rule via reference to a long chain of cause/effect logic, it might be difficult to impart the urgency of morality to children and this could lead to problems later. But arguably we have this issue already.
"If we killed every living being that might be a threat to us no matter how remote then that would actually harm ourselves because it destroys large parts of a working ecosystem and would create all kinds of unforseeable, possibly fatal problems"
Yes, so the code we're patching together here is a kind of mix of Darwinian evolution combined with a kind of Gaia style planet/social ecology philosophy. It can work for some things. A concern that arises is that this would appear to be ultimately a form of New Age collectivism - everyone is linked to everyone else. In such a code, do individual rights have any meaning or is everything subservient to the greater whole and if so, how does that not lead in a great circle back to communism?
I find the COVID vaccine mandates to be a good test case for some of these issues. Putting aside for a moment the widely accepted yet pseudo-scientific justification for them (without stopping transmission there is no possible argument in favor), this is ultimately a question of individual rights and risks vs collective outcomes. A "for the betterment of the species" moral code requires some ability to make collective vs individual moral tradeoffs, but in practice such decisions must always be mediated by the state. As we've seen, modern states seem unable to maintain even the most basic levels of rationality about some topics.
> I'm not religious and I also don't accept the axioms that the Bible is the word of God, that anything God says is true, etc. We share the goal / ideal of a moral code that is based on simpler, tighter axioms and sound reasoning. Some years ago I thought it would be easy to develop such a code. Nowadays I fear that it's very difficult, perhaps too difficult right now, and we are perhaps to evolved religion what Da Vinci was when he tried to build a mechanical bird i.e. far further away from being able to match the evolved system than he realized, and for many reasons he couldn't have understood.
> I think this was one of the core criticisms of communism, made both by philosophers in the 19th century and more everyday folk in the 20th. Marx liked to claim that his ideas were scientific, but actually nothing about Marxism is scientific. His critics contended that to be religious, to want to believe in or even to worship something, is a core part of human nature, and that if you simply abolish evolved religions then new pseudo-religions would immediately emerge (but they'd be worse).
> We can see that this happened repeatedly in all communist countries: the population was quickly "converted" to new religions which involved worshipping and deifying both the abstract concepts of man, progress and communist ideology, along with also the less abstract leaders. Hence all the "cults of personality" i.e. religions that viewed Lenin, Stalin, Mao etc as quasi-prophets of the coming utopia.
> If this claim of a deep need for religion/belief is true, and as I get older I see more and more evidence that maybe it is, then trying to create a moral code based purely on logic derived from a set of sound core axioms might be naive or backfire - sort of like trying to convert the world to speaking Esperanto would. But of course it's very difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Perhaps the apparent "need" for religion is in reality mostly a need for a comprehensive moral code, and as communism didn't provide one, it instead turned into a stunted and disfigured substitute for one.
Religions are undergoing also an evolutionary process in my opinion. They often base themselves upon the previous one and alter it trying to improve it.
> One obvious way in which an artificial moral code might be lacking is in the story telling aspects. Religions have the advantage (?) that they're easy to teach to children because children ask "why" a lot but can't understand complicated answers. If you had to explain every rule via reference to a long chain of cause/effect logic, it might be difficult to impart the urgency of morality to children and this could lead to problems later. But arguably we have this issue already.
> Yes, so the code we're patching together here is a kind of mix of Darwinian evolution combined with a kind of Gaia style planet/social ecology philosophy. It can work for some things. A concern that arises is that this would appear to be ultimately a form of New Age collectivism - everyone is linked to everyone else. In such a code, do individual rights have any meaning or is everything subservient to the greater whole and if so, how does that not lead in a great circle back to communism?
Many times a right or freedom for some part of society is a removal of a right or freedom of another part. It always boils down to a balancing act. And yes, a justice system is required to mediate that. Though we should not assume that it will be perfect, as long as it is based on humans which are imperfect it will be imperfect as well but it should be possible to build a really good one. We have a few that I would describe as "not too bad" but there is a lot of room for improvement.
Even if something is difficult, it does not mean that I instead resort to making up some stories and declare that's the right moral code.
Well if that were the definition of scientism then I wouldn't subscribe to scientism. That would sound pretty much like the opposite of science and an attempt to subvert and abuse it.