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What is the problem with religion?
(self.atheism)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Appeals to authority have rarely been good for humanity.
The scientific method has been such an amazing engine for driving our understanding of the universe around us.
I would argue it doesn’t really require faith, at least not faith in an authority. It starts with a simple setup, any person in any place can propose a hypothesis and back it with evidence. Any other person is welcome to think “that’s not right” and devise an experiment to disprove it.
You only need to have faith that such a setup that incentivizes people disproving untrue things will work to disprove them. And I can look at the history of such a setup, see that historically even well established and respected ideas put forth by experts have been corrected when shown faulty to think “well it seems to work”
And because I don’t have an unwavering faith in the scientific method, some belief that is inarguably true, it allows me to actually look at how that system fails. I don’t need to feel bad about the reproducibility crisis as though it’s some moral failing, instead I can use it to contextualize my understanding of scientific discoveries and others can work on ways to adapt the system to prevent such failures.
There’s the related concept of trust. When the doctor tells me I should take a medicine or do some kind of treatment, I defer to their judgment. Should I blindly submit and obey, if the condition gets worse or if I disagree with their course of action, I needn’t follow it. I can always “trust but verify” and go ask another doctor their opinion.
I find there’s been very little time when people submitting and obeying to an authority simply because they are an authority has been a net good for humanity. Authorities with expertise don't need to make such appeals, and authorities that fall back on “do it because I said so” are often the ones you should obey the least.
But few actually use the scientific method. Most just treat science as another authority.
I think that authoritarianism is biological. For good and ill. And few ever overcome that.
Your attitude towards authority sounds identical to mine.
Also, I think the knowing-urge might be the bigger hazard. I mean, bigger than the authoritarianism urge.
FYI I’m not downvoting you, I’ve been enjoying the conversation.
I think the “few actually use the scientific method” statement might misunderstand my point.
If someone is saying “here’s a new scientific theory” no one has to take that on faith. If it’s not true then there is an incentive for other scientists to disprove it. I think most scientists are following the scientific method and not really making the case that your average layperson should be reproducing the paper.
Now I do think a lot of science news and laypeople are too willing to accept a single paper that no one has reproduced as some major breakthrough.
I tend to agree with you about human nature. Humans are tribal, we want authority figures, we are lazy. The freeing thing though is that if you don’t judge these things moralistically but just accept them as facts of the species you can account for them.
I’m not the biggest fan of capitalism, I think it’s kinda shit. But the reason it endures is because instead of building a system for our aspirations, it builds a system about reality. It doesn’t propose a system that would function if everyone just isn’t too greedy, instead it says “people are greedy shitheads, that’s fine, the system works in the presence of greedy fucks”. Doesn’t seem like they put enough effort into figuring out what happens when a few greedy fucks get everything, but we are all getting to find out first hand together.
If you know that people are inclined to be tribalistic, to look for authority figures, to be lazy, to fill in some other trait we would normally condemn then you can build systems that operate in the presence of that reality.