Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

[Gary Childress]

Free Will in the Courtroom
Your example about laws and moral responsibility is a social question, not a physical one. Determinism doesn’t mean people aren’t accountable; it means accountability must be reinterpreted. Laws and courts don’t exist to assign metaphysical blame—they exist to maintain order and prevent harm. A judge doesn’t need to believe in free will to punish theft; they only need to ensure the consequences discourage future thefts.

If our actions are determined, then how can future thefts be "discouraged"? It seems like you are smuggling in a notion of free will and agency here in your answer. Future thefts are already determined that they will happen. They cannot be but what they are going to be. It's completely useless to talk about anything with the assumption that we have the ability to change anything. That is basically what determinism is. It says that our actions are pre-determined. So when you say you need laws to "discourage" future thefts, you are in fact borrowing from the fallacy of there being the possibility of anything being otherwise. Why say anything at all?

[accelafine]

Free Will in the Courtroom
Your example about laws and moral responsibility is a social question, not a physical one. Determinism doesn’t mean people aren’t accountable; it means accountability must be reinterpreted. Laws and courts don’t exist to assign metaphysical blame—they exist to maintain order and prevent harm. A judge doesn’t need to believe in free will to punish theft; they only need to ensure the consequences discourage future thefts.

If our actions are determined, then how can future thefts be "discouraged"? It seems like you are smuggling in a notion of free will and agency here in your answer. Future thefts are already determined that they will happen. They cannot be but what they are going to be. It's completely useless to talk about anything with the assumption that we have the ability to change anything. That is basically what determinism is. It says that our actions are pre-determined. So when you say you need laws to "discourage" future thefts, you are in fact borrowing from the fallacy of there being the possibility of anything being otherwise. Why say anything at all?

Then it must have been 'predetermined' that there would be laws that punish people for being 'predetermined' to do crimes, and 'predetermined' that there would be humans one day who fretted over the question of 'free will'...

[accelafine]

.

[Gary Childress]

Maybe, however it doesn't seem accurate to say that penalties "discourage" anything. Everything happens according to pre-determined causes. At this time it has been predetermined that we have realized nothing we do is done freely. Let the anarchy begin, I guess?

[accelafine]

Maybe, however it doesn't seem accurate to say that penalties "discourage" anything. Everything happens according to pre-determined causes. At this time it has been predetermined that we have realized nothing we do is done freely. Let the anarchy begin, I guess?

Not necessarily. What if it's 'preordained' that most people would obey those 'preordained' laws?

Mind you, I really don't see why the universe should have bothered to plan from the beginning of time whether I 'decide' to have porridge or toast for breakfast

[accelafine]

And perhaps the only reason we are here to discuss this at all is because we were preordained to believe we had any say over anything.

What's with some people being predetermined to live full, magical lives, free of debilitating grief and trauma while others are doomed to die in the gutter, forgotten and unmissed, their lives a misery from beginning to end?

[accelafine]

Well, folks, I think it’s about that time. I’m going to make my graceful—or maybe not-so-graceful—exit. For good this time. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see. Let’s just say I’m reserving the right to pull a dramatic comeback if the stars align or if I can’t resist the urge to wade back into the chaos.

For now, though, I’m bowing out. It’s been… an experience. Enlightening? Occasionally. Entertaining? Sure, if you like philosophical food fights. Exhausting? Oh, absolutely. But hey, who doesn’t love a good intellectual tug-of-war now and then?

So, to those who kept the debates lively (and occasionally drove me up a wall), thanks for the memories. I’m off to recharge, regroup, and perhaps contemplate the mysteries of life in slightly less contentious surroundings. Take care, and remember: no matter how heated the argument, the laws of thermodynamics remain undefeated. Stay curious, my friends.

I'm seeing a mysterious masked man riding off into the sunset after vanquishing a rampaging horde of cretinous zombies. Who is he? From whence he came?

[Alexiev]

Your critique brings up valid concerns but also hinges on a conflation of materialism, determinism, and the reliability of knowledge. Let’s unpack this systematically.

First, the “overwhelming explanatory power of physical causation” resides in its track record of providing consistent, testable, and predictive models for understanding phenomena in the natural world. Has it helped us understand the human psyche? Absolutely. Neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science have made remarkable strides in explaining thought processes, emotions, and behaviors by exploring the brain’s physical mechanisms. Are these explanations complete? No, but incompleteness doesn’t invalidate the framework; it simply highlights the frontier of inquiry.

Perhaps art, love, ambition, literature and culture may one day bee "reduced" to physics. But we aren't there yet -- or even close.
We must muddle through as best we can, given our limitations. We study literature by looking at motifs, trends, in (you guessed it!) literature. We study human behavior and culture not by looking at neurons (although that might occasionally be helpful), but by studying history and culture. Science (one hopes, rather vainly given your pronouncements) is a practical discipline, If we can guess the future more accurately by looking at history than by looking at neurons let's have a go in that direction, shan't we?

Regarding materialism and knowledge, you suggest that if thought arises from mechanical brain processes, we have no reason to trust it. But this skepticism undermines itself. If our evolved cognition were entirely detached from reality, it wouldn’t have enabled survival in a complex environment. The alignment of sensory input, memory, and reasoning with objective reality is what allowed humans to outcompete other species. Science is a refinement of these cognitive abilities, structured to minimize error through systematic observation, hypothesis testing, and peer review.

Now you're making this up. Isn't it more than a trifle "unscientific" to posit what would and would not "enable survival in a complex environment". Ants seem to have done a pretty good job of it (judging by my pantry), and I don't assume their rationality or ability to use reason to contemplate the universe. Maybe I'm wrong.

Your point about trusting sources is interesting but ultimately flawed in its equivalence. Trust in science rests on evidence-based, reproducible results—not on unverified narratives. The claim that Barry Bonds hit more home runs than anyone is supported by extensive, documented statistics. In contrast, claims like Jesus rising from the dead rely on unverifiable, non-reproducible accounts. These aren’t equally credible just because both are written down.

Finally, logic and math are indeed non-empirical, but they complement science rather than contradicting it. They provide the frameworks through which scientific theories are formulated and tested. Their abstract nature doesn’t make them incompatible with materialism; it simply means they operate at a different level of description. The materialist view isn’t undermined by the existence of logic and math—it is enriched by them.

In sum, while reductionism and materialism aren’t panaceas, they are indispensable tools for unraveling the complexities of the universe. To dismiss their contributions is to ignore the vast body of evidence they’ve produced and the progress they’ve enabled. Science’s success lies precisely in its adaptability and ability to integrate diverse methodologies, including those that explore culture and language as emergent phenomena.

Of course. But history is non-scientific. It's not repeatable. Nor (actually) are any scientific experiments. Each is a unique, historical event, described in the "scientific literature". Are you suggesting we can learn more about human behavior by studying neurons, instead of human behavior? History is the study of the past -- but it is not scientific. Are you claiming it is not worthy of our time or interest?

My point about trusting sources is simply this: the religious and the scientific world view are less distinct than you may imagine. Of course you think your sources are trustworthy. So do religious people. Religion is more akin to history than to science (as are Barry Bonds' home run records, although, being modern, they are more credible). The Old Testament and the Gospels are a history (and in the case of the Gospels read more like biography,, if we are to be persnickety about literary forms). All myths are oral histories. Whether they are accurate is, of course, debatable. But there is as much "evidence" in their support as there is to support historical "facts" we never doubt. So it's not the "evidence" that is important. it's our preconceptions and prejudices about how the world works. (My prejudices are pretty much the same as yours when it comes to a scientific world view, although I think the most elucidating way to study art is to study art, not physics.

The problem, of course, is that those areas for which reductionism provides little insight are the ones we care most about. Love, friendship, literature, politics, art. The astronomer who "lectured to much applause" about the charts, graphs and diagrams missed the importance of the stars. I posted the Whitman poem earlier, but it's worth another look.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

[godelian]

Perhaps art, love, ambition, literature and culture may one day bee "reduced" to physics. But we aren't there yet -- or even close.

The truth, i.e. the correspondence between two well-chosen pieces of information, is ultimately always a Platonic abstraction. You will never come -- even remotely -- close to the truth just by staring at its shadows in the physical world. That is why physicalism is such a poor worldview.

[BigMike]

No Free Will

[Age]

So, the topic title here is just 'bait'.

What you really wanted to say is,
There is no free will.

And, that there is absolutely nothing in the whole Universe that could change your BELIEF here, right?

[Alexis Jacobi]

If we step back — now that Big Mike has revealed his intellectual orientation in an essay of developed thought (his book) — from his platform and his assertion, which he made every effort to explain, we will in my view be best served by seeing it as “giving us the opportunity of considering modes of meaning carried to their revealing limits”.(I.A. Richards).

In his thought we discover, perhaps, one of the more pernicious tendencies of thought in operation today, and seemingly everywhere: tendentiousness. That is, fractional perspectives that attempt to establish themselves as renewed and revised absolutisms in a general atmosphere of collapsed “meta-narratives”.

Big Mike’s “religiousness” was noted, and when one disagreed or offered countervailing opinions one was put on ignore. Oddly, Big Mike’s spiel was to mimic the rôle assumed by Galileo in challenging the Paduan professor to take a look through that revolution-producing telescope. But the weird thing is that, actually, the critique that he received amounts to a “lens” revealing levels of meaning too difficult to contemplate and to assimilate into his reductive theory. So he cannot and will not look. No looking, no seeing.

The question, I feel it is a good one, is to ask ourselves: What mode of meaning operates in myself at that most fundamental level? Even, or especially, when I have never stated it to myself? (Or am aware of it only as a shadow).

Thomas Carlyle:

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is.

[FlashDangerpants]

Big Mike’s “religiousness” was noted, and when one disagreed or offered countervailing opinions one was put on ignore.

Life is strange sometimes, but you have to admire Big Mike, he's probably only the second person to be so bad at philosophy that they are aligned against you, me, IC, Atla, Henry and Skepdick all at once. That's an improbable coalition by any standard and aside form VA I don't think anybody else is capable of producing work so massively flawed that all those people can see the same problem with it.

He is misusing science as inspiration for unfalsifiable mystical claims rather than using science for what is usefully does, which is to answer actual scientific questions. His cart is ahead of horse.

He's kind of lucky that Willy B didn't spot him write "Science Doesn’t Need Axioms—That’s Why It Works", pretty sure that would have added another to the list of improbables.

[BigMike]

Big Mike’s “religiousness” was noted, and when one disagreed or offered countervailing opinions one was put on ignore.

Life is strange sometimes, but you have to admire Big Mike, he's probably only the second person to be so bad at philosophy that they are aligned against you, me, IC, Atla, Henry and Skepdick all at once. That's an improbable coalition by any standard and aside form VA I don't think anybody else is capable of producing work so massively flawed that all those people can see the same problem with it.

He is misusing science as inspiration for unfalsifiable mystical claims rather than using science for what is usefully does, which is to answer actual scientific questions. His cart is ahead of horse.

He's kind of lucky that Willy B didn't spot him write "Science Doesn’t Need Axioms—That’s Why It Works", pretty sure that would have added another to the list of improbables.

I'm honestly at a loss for words right now. It's not just surprising—it's genuinely shocking, terrifying, and deeply concerning—to realize that every single person here seems either completely unwilling or unable to grasp even the most basic scientific principles, like the conservation laws. These aren't advanced concepts; they're the bedrock of how the universe functions. I was prepared to encounter some level of misunderstanding or denial, but every single person? It's staggering. I knew there was a fair share of ignorance in the world, but I never imagined it was this pervasive. How do we even begin to address such a profound lack of understanding?

That question, by the way, is entirely rhetorical. I don't expect an answer because, frankly, I doubt there's a single response that could adequately address the depth of the issue we're dealing with here. In fact, I don't even want an answer, because any attempt to justify or explain away this glaring lack of understanding would likely just underscore my point even further. Sometimes silence speaks louder than words, and in this case, it's probably better to let the overwhelming absence of insight stand on its own. Anything else would just be noise.

[FlashDangerpants]

I doubt there's a single response that could adequately address the depth of the issue we're dealing with here.

Given that the task seems to be to explain this to you, I'm afraid that you have stumbled upon an accurate description of the problem there, much as the stopped clock is right twice per day.