NS,
I'll try and cover the question on Weinberg along with this.
The problem is, as already raised, I am not sure what 'replacing religion' can mean for atheists. It is an outcome in most atheists views.
Well, just to clarify the question first I was thinking here of “religion” in the faith school sense – ie, teaching faith beliefs as if they were facts – rather than the RE sense of “this is what various denominations believe”. What replacing the former would mean for the atheist – as for anyone else – would simply be not teaching these things as if they were facts. I’d also suggest using the freed up time to teach scepticism, rational enquiry and the importance of uncertainty.
Looking at it as a cause of a type of behaviour, particularly when one cherry picks that it is the cause of one type of behaviour, evil, as opposed to all behaviour carried out it in it's name is both illogical and hypocritical.
It probably would be, yes. That’s not the argument though – after all, someone may have a faith belief that drives him to do entirely benign things, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day. Rather the argument is that, by privileging “faith” as a reliable guide to objective truths, religious teaching institutionalises a false validity which – on balance – will lead to more bad outcomes than to good ones. There are various reasons for that, but the most obvious perhaps is that faith beliefs involve
certainty – they cannot change and evolve in the way that, say, the findings of science can as new facts and ways of reasoning emerge.
It's not a software app, it's an action determined by other apps such as pattern recognition, empathy, altruism, self interest and tribal connection - though I'm using a coarse analogy here since describing those instincts as separate is incorrect.
I’m not sure where this is going, but yes – religious beliefs can involve all those things and more. That doesn’t though help the underlying problem of favouring faith over reason.
I am also not convinced that in any form of analysis religion and skepticism are in the same category here. It seems religion is a fairly clear description of what must in a straight deterministic or random and determinism combination be a some outcome. Skepticism might better be seen as a common description of a determined method of thought.
Well
faith and scepticism are the issues, and they’re in the same category in that they represent different approaches to the same thing: discerning the more probably true from the more probably not true. That is, faith too is a “method of thought” in that the thought is that it’s a better way of discerning truths than just guessing.
To link back to the Weinberg, it seems to me that given it effectively ignores certain types of 'motivation' (which I think are not motivations for the reasons above and earlier in thread), once you look at the wider picture you see clearly that this 'motivation' is merely a form of self jystification.
But why “merely”? “But that’s my faith”
is self-justification – unashamedly so – and that’s the problem we’re discussing. It’s used by suicide bombers and by vicars at garden fetes alike, so how should we argue against one but not against the other when each uses that rationale to justify and validate his beliefs?
As to whether you need to be certain to commit evil, that seems untrue. If we take the 'good' Germans helping support genocide, I find it unlikely that they were all convinced to the same extent which is what certainty would entail being an absolute.
I tend to the view that humankind is essentially altruistic (for good reasons of evolutionary advantage) – it’s instinctive, and so it takes a lot to override that. And if not for unquestioning, unchallengeable dogma what else would do it?
In addition this idea of 'good' people is a simplistic approach to morality. Even allowing for a sort of meaning as going against what they would normally do, it misses that a consequential might often do that since the 'normally' implies a form of analysis that doesn't fit with consequentialism.
You’ll need to clarify your meaning here please, but see above. By and large people basically
are “good” – that’s the default, and we probably wouldn’t have survived the last 200,000 or so years if it were not so. Pattern recognition, the efficacy of narrative etc though also I think can override that when we abandon reason for faith: “the story makes sense to me, therefore it’s unfalsifiably correct”.
Something like that anyway.
