Scientism's Creed

[MPSchneiderLC]

Dear CAF members, Pax Christi:

“We believe in no God,
No Father, No almighty; (Except maybe the inexplicable natural laws)
Creation came from nothing,
All that is seen and that is all.”

So begins the Creed of Scientism. Read the whole creed here:

catholic.net/index.php?option=dedestaca&id=5961&grupo=Prayers%20%20Devotions&canal=Faith

I wrote this a while back but it got buried. I think you might like it. Do you think it is as much of a hoot as I do?

God bless.

In Christ,
Br matthew, LC

 

[AntiTheist]

There’s no such thing as “scientism.” No one with a lick of intelligence believes any of those things as a creed.

People who are rational and look at the evidence simply do not see sufficient evidence that there is a god. We’ll be glad to change our minds when there is sufficient evidence presented.

No one claims that the universe came from “nothing” – in fact, no one knows where the universe came from. We do know that the universe began to assume its current shape approximately 13 billion years ago (an event called the “Big Bang”), but we don’t know anything about what the universe was like before then.

 

[Pieman333272]

There’s no such thing as “scientism.” No one with a lick of intelligence believes any of those things as a creed.

While the creed may not properly represent it, there most certainly is such thing as scientism. It is the position human knowledge can only be obtained via science - not philosophy or the humanities.

People who are rational and look at the evidence simply do not see sufficient evidence that there is a god. We’ll be glad to change our minds when there is sufficient evidence presented.

So everyone who believes in God is irrational, then? Nice thing to say on a CATHOLIC FORUM!

Anyway, to the OP:

Nice post. I enjoyed the creed very much. From some of the behavior of adherents to scientisim I’ve met, it fits the bill perfectly.

 

[ChristIsTheWay]

Now, that was funny! And yes, it does seem to fit with the scientism of some folks.

So everyone who believes in God is irrational, then? Nice thing to say on a CATHOLIC FORUM!

It is a common view. I usually view it as a big flashing neon warning sign that I’ll be wasting my time by continuing or participating in a discussion with an adherent of that view. But I digress…

 

[promethius]

While the creed may not properly represent it, there most certainly is such thing as scientism. It is the position human knowledge can only be obtained via science - not philosophy or the humanities.[/quotes]

That would reject the fact that philosophy and the humanities are scientific in nature, which would be a poor thing to do.

Science and religion are not separate. They are fundamentally tied together in expressing God’s truth.

So everyone who believes in God is irrational, then? Nice thing to say on a CATHOLIC FORUM!

 

[AntiTheist]

While the creed may not properly represent it, there most certainly is such thing as scientism. It is the position human knowledge can only be obtained via science - not philosophy or the humanities.

I’m highly skeptical that anyone subscribes to “scientism.” It’s obvious, for example, that there are other avenues to human knowledge than science.

To illustrate this point with something trivial, I don’t use science to gain knowledge of the fact that I’m hungy. All that’s required to verify that claim – since it’s a claim about my inner state – is my observation of my inner state.

It would, of course, be correct to say that evidence-based inquiry is the only consistently reliable method of determining truth that human beings have ever come up with, and science is indeed one form of evidence-based inquiry, but to say that science is the only way that knowledge can be obtained is just silly and is a position that no one who has thought through the issue actually advances.

So everyone who believes in God is irrational, then? Nice thing to say on a CATHOLIC FORUM!

Well, given the fact that I’m an atheist, obviously I think that no god claim is sufficiently supported by evidence (if I did think that, I wouldn’t be an atheist).

My mere expression of a contrary position should not be cause for others to take offense.

And as long as we’re on the subject, I didn’t say that “everyone who believes in God is irrational.” I do, indeed, think that accepting a belief without there being sufficient evidentiary support is irrational, but I don’t think that doing one irrational thing makes a person an “irrational person.”

 

[ChinoCoug]

Dear CAF members, Pax Christi:

“We believe in no God,
No Father, No almighty; (Except maybe the inexplicable natural laws)
Creation came from nothing,
All that is seen and that is all.”

So begins the Creed of Scientism. Read the whole creed here:

catholic.net/index.php?option=dedestaca&id=5961&grupo=Prayers%20%20Devotions&canal=Faith

I wrote this a while back but it got buried. I think you might like it. Do you think it is as much of a hoot as I do?

God bless.

In Christ,
Br matthew, LC

Check that.

“We believe in Richard Dawkins almighty.”

I swear, just as Communism and Fascism eventually led to the worship of Stalin, Kim Jong Il and Hitler, if atheist gets its prominence Dawkins will be worshipped.

They’re already licking his boots all over the internet.

 

[promethius]

Well, given the fact that I’m an atheist, obviously I think that no god claim is sufficiently supported by evidence (if I did think that, I wouldn’t be an atheist).

My mere expression of a contrary position should not be cause for others to take offense.

And as long as we’re on the subject, I didn’t say that “everyone who believes in God is irrational.” I do, indeed, think that accepting a belief without there being sufficient evidentiary support is irrational, but I don’t think that doing one irrational thing makes a person an “irrational person.”

Granted your first sentence and bouncing it off of your last sentence, did you perhaps mean to say that you’re an agnostic?

Science backs no claim that there is no God, and such a statement is empirically impossible to prove, so saying one is an atheist (believing there is no God) is, itself, a statement of belief which is not based on empirical reasoning.

 

[Hokomai]

There are certainly some people working or thinking in science who base their comments on beliefs rather than evidence. To that extent they are like religious believers, and the satire applies to them. But it does not apply to most of those scientists who do not believe in the existence of things outside the material world (of in spirits become material). To that extent the satire is simply wrongly applied. If you want to satirise people like me I suggest that you concerntrate on our actual failings, rather than making up failings (such as a pretence to omnipotence) that we don’t actually have. Try grumpiness, obsession, excessive concern with the fact that people refuse to follow our logic and taking ourselves absurdly seriously. You could also have a go at satirising our attempts to engage religion as if it were science, when it self-defines as being based on unknowable mysteries know through ‘faith’. So, OP, no I don’t think it is as funny as you do. Sorry we have upset you.

 

[AntiTheist]

Granted your first sentence and bouncing it off of your last sentence, did you perhaps mean to say that you’re an agnostic?

No, I’m an atheist. The roots of the word – without god(s) – are precisely what I mean by it: lacking a belief in god(s).

Science backs no claim that there is no God, and such a statement is empirically impossible to prove, so saying one is an atheist (believing there is no God) is, itself, a statement of belief which is not based on empirical reasoning.

Well, as I indicated above, the way I use the word atheist is in the sense of lacking a belief in a god(s). Atheism is defined primarily by the absence of a particular belief.

You are correct, of course, that it’s impossible to prove, absolutely, that no gods exist, but absolute proof isn’t at stake here. What’s at stake is belief.

Rationally, the default position on any claim is non-belief until the claim is demonstrated. When people tell me that pixies exist, for example, I don’t instantly start believing in pixies until someone can prove me wrong: I start out not accepting the claim that pixies exist, and I do not accept the claim until the pixie-believers can demonstrate their claim. And if they can’t demonstrate their claim, then I continue to not believe them until such time as they can produce sufficient evidence. It’s irrelevant that I can’t “prove absolutely that there are no pixies.” I simply don’t believe until there is good reason to. (And, obviously, I’m assuming that you’re bright enough to realize that I’m not comparing your god to pixies…I’m aware that the claims are different…I’m comparing standards of evidence in each case)

 

[stephe1987]

Clearly, “sufficient evidence” for one person is not sufficient for another. Fulfilled prophecies, miracles, being raised from the dead, etc. are all sufficient evidence for Christians. And more recently Catholics have Our Lady of Fatima where she accurately predicted events of the 20th century and the Miracle of the Sun (documented in secular newspapers as well) which are also good evidences for God. These aren’t even talking about scientific evidences, just historical events alone. I have to wonder what sort of evidence these people will accept and whether or not it is “rational” to sit there with your arms folded and only believe if given the evidence of your choice.

For example, some people want Jesus to appear to them… but if he did they would explain it away as a trick or a hallucination. They want God to show himself in their way instead of His way. But if you really build your expectations that high, it is a sign of pride and God will ignore your demands. After all, we are not God’s masters and have no right to tell him what he can and cannot do. It is only when we humble ourselves and allow God to show Himself in his time and in his way will he reveal himself.

Another common thing is “I will believe in God if an event that is predicted occurs” but there are many OT prophecies that have been fulfilled, as well as the more recent Marian events if you choose not to believe something that happened nearly 2,000 years ago. So their requirement has been met multiple times but they choose to not believe anyway.

It basically boils down to a choice… if you choose to demand God to show himself in your way in order to believe in him, God will choose to ignore you. If you choose to be open and patient (it can take several years, remember he is testing you, even Mother Teresa had to wait I think it was 20 years or something, but she was always faithful nonetheless… if he would reveal himself to anyone it would be someone like her and even she had to wait a long time), he will reveal himself.

 

[DavidFilmer]

[quoting the “creed”]
Creation came from nothing,

Actually, this bit is rather interesting.

The creation accounts of the Jews were unique in the fact that they taught God created the universe from “nothing.” All the other religions believed there was some primordial matter from which the god(s) formed everything. The Jews alone believed that everything came from “nothing.”

Oddly enough, modern physics largely agrees. There was a singularity (a zero-dimensional thingie) that somehow exploded and became the universe (this event is sometimes called the “Big Bang”). In our understanding of time and space, a zero-dimensional thingie cannot exist (it is a “nothing” as far as we can tell). No physicist has ever said what this thingie is (we think we are good to go at about 0.8 seconds after the Big Bang, when our understanding of math and gravity and thermodynamics and such starts to make sense, but we have no idea about anything before that, where everything we know and accept about our physical universe breaks down).

 

[MPSchneiderLC]

No one claims that the universe came from “nothing” – in fact, no one knows where the universe came from. We do know that the universe began to assume its current shape approximately 13 billion years ago (an event called the “Big Bang”), but we don’t know anything about what the universe was like before then.

May I qoute Stephen Hawking, it came “from the fluctuation of nothing.” Besides the fact that nothing can’t fluctuate (it’s not anything) this disproves your whole argument.

p.s. I personally agree that the universe is probably billions of years old but something or someone had to start it. (It may be God directly or through secondary causality, I don’t know.)

In Christ,
Br Matthew, LC

 

[AntiTheist]

Clearly, “sufficient evidence” for one person is not sufficient for another.

Clearly different people have different standards of evidence. The hobo on the street corner raving about the upcoming alien invasion clearly thinks he has “sufficient” evidence for his belief, and I imagine that I, if presented with his evidence, would probably find it lacking.

The whole point of having a discussion about these sorts of subjects is so that we can talk about it – so that I could explain, for example, why “prophecies” (either vague postdictions or one part of an ancient story matching another part of a different ancient story) aren’t convincing, why there’s no good reason to think that anyone was “raised from the dead,” and why so-called “miracles” don’t even come close to fitting the label.

It’s not that I’m sitting around with my arms folded stubbornly refusing to accept your evidence – it’s that the “evidence” that you’ve accepted is abysmally poor and doesn’t come anywhere close demonstrating that anything supernatural exists at all…let alone your particular supernatural belief!

It basically boils down to a choice

It really doesn’t. Things that are real are real. When it comes to the existence of real things – say, like electrons – you don’t have to “want” to believe in them before you can detect them (or, in the case of this specific example, perform an experiment that demonstrates to any impartial observer that they manifest). There’s no choice involved: either we have the evidence to think that something exists or we don’t.

 

[AntiTheist]

May I qoute Stephen Hawking

No, you may not. Hawking is speculating, just as all theorists are speculating – no one actually knows what came before the Big Bang.

Some people – Hawking among them – think it’s possible that the stuff that preceded the Big Bang arose from “nothing,” though to be fair to him, quantum physicists mean something different by the word “nothing” than the rest of us do. That’s why they can say things like “nothing can fluctuate,” which doesn’t make sense under the definition of “nothing” that the rest of us use, but does make sense under their definition.

At any rate, all of it is highly speculative. No one knows.

Besides the fact that nothing can’t fluctuate (it’s not anything) this disproves your whole argument.

I addressed the first part of this above; and no, it doesn’t “disprove [my] whole argument” – at best, it qualifies one of my more minor points. To get hung up on this one point is to miss the forest for the trees.

 

[Pieman333272]

I’m highly skeptical that anyone subscribes to “scientism.” It’s obvious, for example, that there are other avenues to human knowledge than science.

To illustrate this point with something trivial, I don’t use science to gain knowledge of the fact that I’m hungy. All that’s required to verify that claim – since it’s a claim about my inner state – is my observation of my inner state.

It would, of course, be correct to say that evidence-based inquiry is the only consistently reliable method of determining truth that human beings have ever come up with, and science is indeed one form of evidence-based inquiry, but to say that science is the only way that knowledge can be obtained is just silly and is a position that no one who has thought through the issue actually advances.

Well, maybe I’ll just ask you “the question” that more or less determines what scientism is:

**Do you think the only source for human knowledge and reason are the sciences, or does philosophy, amongst others, contribute as well?
**

 

[ChristIsTheWay]

IIt would, of course, be correct to say that evidence-based inquiry is the only consistently reliable method of determining truth that human beings have ever come up with, and science is indeed one form of evidence-based inquiry,

So you are advancing empiricism or verificationism?

Clearly different people have different standards of evidence.

Which raises for me an interesting question. How do we decide, objectively with some kind of empirical verification, which standard of evidence is the appropriate one for this question? Different standards are used for different things, as you’ve just shown. Which, in your opinion, is best for this question? Why? Should the rest of us accept it, too?

It’s not that I’m sitting around with my arms folded stubbornly refusing to accept your evidence – it’s that the “evidence” that you’ve accepted is abysmally poor and doesn’t come anywhere close demonstrating that anything supernatural exists at all…let alone your particular supernatural belief!

That’s the question I am getting at. What is the definition of evidence, what standard of acceptability and “proof” do you subject it to, and are others (rationally, morally, or whatever) obligated to accept it?

 

[AntiTheist]

So you are advancing empiricism or verificationism?

I don’t like to bog down my ideas in jargon or -isms when unnecessary. I meant what I said: that evidence-based inquiry is the only consistently reliable method of human inquiry.

Which raises for me an interesting question. How do we decide, objectively with some kind of empirical verification, which standard of evidence is the appropriate one for this question?

We rationally determine – on the basis of our past experience of the universe – the kind of evidence that would convince us of the claim, that is to say, the kind of evidence we would expect to see if the claim were true.

For example, the evidence of my past experience demonstrates to me that entities that exist outside of the human mind can be detected by any impartial observer, regardless of that observer’s desires (in some cases, certain tools might be necessary to perceive the entities, but in those cases, every impartial observer who uses the tools is capable of detecting the entities).

As a result, if you intend to convince me that an entity outside of the human mind exists, you’re going to have to demonstrate that this entity can be detected by any impartial observer. You don’t need to conduct a scientific experiment here or anything – as I noted, the vast majority of what I know doesn’t come from any kind of formal science: it comes from evidence observed in the day-to-day world.

Now if you tell me that this entity “exists” yet does not manifest in the world in a detectable way, then this entity is indistinguishable from an imaginary entity.

 

[MPSchneiderLC]

Dear Atheist, Peace:

I apologize if you were offended, the point of the creed was to express a certain belief using a formula that would be known by the intended readers (Catholics).

The basic problem I see with “scientistism” which you seem to share (at least in part) is that you exclude all non-material, non-quantifiable evidence. However this involves a contradiction as nothing from such evidence says that the other evidence is not true. You need some kind of evidence beyond the material and quantifiable to say that it is all the evidence.

Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say I want to study fish so I go out with a boat and a net, I spend 10 years with this boat and net and catch 10,000 sea creatures, I will come to some pretty interesting conclusions:

1. All sea creatures have gills
2. All sea creatures are between 3 inches and 3 feet long
   I think we would all agree that there are microscopic sea creatures and blue whales that don’t fit into those two categories, they just don’t fit in my net. Likewise if we restrict knowledge to the purely material, we deny, in principle, the possibility of knowledge of God. However, to deny this knowledge we must go outside it.

p.s. regarding Hawking, your previous whole argument was that the whole point of this article was nonsensical as nobody believed what I wrote, however Hawking seems to believe it (even if only as the best theory he can think up and using nothing in a unusual sense). My point is that whether the universe had a beginning in time or is cyclical, it needs a cause. Now this cause may or may not be God, some theoretical physicists now speculate that our universe is one of 10^10^77 (yes that is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 77) universes. If this be true, ours probably wasn’t the first. However, as nothing can cause itself, all the existing physical matter, taken as a whole, needs a cause, and this is what we call God. (Sorry id this is an overly abreviated argument.)

I will pray that God will bless you even though you don’t believe in him.

In Christ,
Br Matthew, LC

 

[AntiTheist]

Dear Atheist, Peace:

I apologize if you were offended

I wasn’t. The name is AntiTheist, by the way.

The basic problem I see with “scientistism” which you seem to share (at least in part) is that you exclude all non-material, non-quantifiable evidence. However this involves a contradiction as nothing from such evidence says that the other evidence is not true. You need some kind of evidence beyond the material and quantifiable to say that it is all the evidence.

I don’t exclude “non-material, non-quantifiable evidence” at all. For example, if I believe that my brother’s friend is a jerk, I support that claim with evidence that I’ve observed (“He has a mean personality, and he’s boorish and stupid!”). These qualities are all non-material and non-quantifiable, but they exist, they are detectable, and they form the basis of the claim in this case.

I’m saying that your religion doesn’t have any evidence going for it and that the things claimed as “evidence” don’t come anywhere close to demonstrating that its claims are true.

I think we would all agree that there are microscopic sea creatures and blue whales that don’t fit into those two categories, they just don’t fit in my net.

And do you know how we know that those other creatures exist? We have ways of detecting them so that any impartial observer – with the correct tools, in some cases – can observe them. In every single case, an observer can detect these creatures.

You claim that non-material entities and minds exist – or, at least, I assume you do since you are a Christian and that is what Christians almost always claim. What’s your basis for believing this?

I will pray that God will bless you even though you don’t believe in him.

I’d rather you didn’t, but there’s an old saying: “You pray for me, and I’ll think for you.”