To clarify things i view myself as Agnostic, However i regularly Declare to be CofE. Hence i must have some form of belief even though it isn;t in an established god. I wouldn;t classify myself as a religious person either.

So after all this what is the clasification of a religios person. Is it someone that follows a religion. So is the strict muslim that will drink alachol a religious person as they willingly violate one of the tenants of faith.

Is a militant athiest not a religious person. They have their belief, they have their reasons behind it, they will try to convert others into their way of thinking. So how are they not religious. The lack of god doesn't anything as there are quite a few religions without a god.

So how do you define them?

I saw this a lot while I was in Venezuela. Many people would go to church on special days, they would say they believe in God and say they're Catholic, but they wouldn't read the bible or stand for moral lessons, they'd drink and party during their celebrations of solemn days of mourning, and they didn't do expend any energy trying to follow what Jesus said. They were Catholic in culture, but not in beliefs.

I think Tycho hit on this. We do have two definitions of religious; one is action, and the other is beliefs.

Am moving this discussion over here, since it's not really about the bible or questions of accuracy at this point.





I find that pretty fascinating.  I was a bit worried when I floated the idea that religious people would feel I wasn't representing them fairly, so seeing you agree with the concept makes me think there may well be something to it.

I also think your example of science/technology is an excellent illustration of the difference.  I view the purpose of science as very differently to how you describe it.  Technology is a pleasant side effect of scientific research, but I view it as largely secondary to the true point, which is simply to gain a better understanding of the universe.  So the statement "Science is something we do to achieve the benefits of technology" is not something I would agree with at all.  But the fact that you do see it that way is very interesting to me.

Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on things like the hubble telescope, the mars rovers, or putting people on the moon?  When you look at such things, do you think "hmm, are we really getting good value for money here?" or "OMG That's so awesome!"?  I'm firmly in the latter group, and sort of just assumed everyone was, I guess.

Last week I went to a science festival talk about 'body hacking', and trying to give ourselves senses or abilities that we don't naturally have.  One of the speakers had had small magnets implanted in his finger tips so that he'd be able to sense magnetic fields*.  One of the other speakers had known someone else who'd done the same thing, and said that that person had said 'when I tell people I've got magnets in my fingers to sense magnetic fields, I get two responses:  about half the people say "hmm, what can you do with that?" and the other half say "COOL!"'  At the time it didn't even cross my mind that there might be some correlation between those answers and the religious beliefs of the people making them, but now I wonder if there might be.

I went to another talk last night by the guy who runs Mars One, the company that wants to send people to live, permanently, on mars in the next decade or so.  It was fairly clear that some people 'got' why someone would ever want to take a one-way trip to mars, but others just thought 'why would anyone ever do that?'  I would be super curious now to know how people religious views correlated with such positions.


*full disclosure:  This sounded so awesome to me, I went online the next day and ordered some magnets, and as of this morning I have some super glued to my fingers.  I'm able to feel a slight tingle from the cord going into the toaster and kettle, which is pretty awesome, but I can't feel anything most of the electronics in the flat.  Am thinking that I should have got slightly larger magnets now.  The ones I have are 3mm diamter by .5m neodymium jobs, which are suprizingly strong for their size, but since they're so small not very strong.  Something about twice the size would maybe be better.  As an additional aside, while looking into magnets to order I learned about and saw videos of ferrofluids for the first time.  So awesome!

Wus. Go implant or go home. ;P

As yet I don't see how this topic relates to religion, but I don't mind discussing philosophy of science. I discuss many non-religious things :)

Basic science has value because you don't know what's going to be useful until after you know it. We don't know what the use of having a map of the background radiation of the universe is, but it could cause us to change our physics theories to account for it, which might enable us to better use physics even just within our own solar system.

Personally, working in space science (earth observing satellites for weather and climate), I think manned missions are currently a waste of money. We can learn (collect facts) much more from the same amount of money spent on a dozen years-long unmanned missions than on one weeks-long manned mission. Eventually we are going to have people living permanently in space and other planets, for practical reasons (population pressures, declining environment, not putting all our eggs in one basket), but our knowledge of ecology is not yet ready for it. To ready ourselves, we need to fund ground-based projects like biosphere, where animals or people live inside sealed spaces for years to measure the environmental degradation inside and make improvements for the next test. There are also questions of living long term in zero-g and outside the van allen belt. Long term animal testing at the ISS can help with the first, but I'm not sure to what extent it can help with the second. For all these reasons, I believe a permanent base on Mars is more than a decade away.

Perhaps my last reply to katisara should have been posted in this thread :)

:)  Yeah, am still experimenting with it, and can't afford to have it don't professionally.  I read some rather unpleasant stories on the interweb about people who tried to do their own implants with a potato peeler, and didn't want to end up like them.

Yeah, I'm not sure it has anything to do with it either, yet.  The idea, though, is that maybe people who are "what does it do for me?" thinkers are more likely to be religious, whereas "how likely is it to be true" thinkers are less likely to be.  In the discussion so far, you've said you're in the "what's the benefit" camp, (and are religious), and Heath has made some arguments that sound to me like "what's the benefit" thinking, and is religious.  I'm not religious, and am a "how likely is it to be true" thinker.  Doulos' comments have made him sound like a "how likely is it to be true" thinker, and he's (recently become) non-religious.  Still too small a sample to draw any real conclusions, but that's where I'm going with this line of questions.


I can certainly agree with all this.  But on top of that, for me, there is an innate curiosity.  A sort of feeling that just wondering what's true simply for the sake of knowing.


I can largely agree with that.  Though at the same time, manned missions do have a sort of gut-level draw too.  I'm happy to swap out manned missions for unmanned ones, so I guess I'm more asking about how much you value pure science missions.


The Mars One guys want to put the first humans on mars (permanently) in 2023.  It's a very ambitious plan, but technically feasible.  I'd agree that the big question is whether humans can handle it or not.  It'll be a very unpleasant 7 month trip there, and lots of things could go wrong which could lead to catastrophic failures.  But if people are willing to take those risks (and they have already had tens of thousands of people wanting to go, even though they haven't asked for volunteers yet), it seems like it could quite possibly happen.

But anyway, what I'm trying to get at, is how much awe/wonder/curiosity do you feel when thinking about pure science stuff like this, and how much are do think things like "hmm...that would give us the technology to do X..."?

Again, it isn't about truth. Truth lies in facts; theories are all approximations.



Again, when doing pure science, you don't know what the practical effects will be. You can think about those afterwards.

Curiosity is certainly a good motivator. When you see a pattern, you want to know if something (or nothing) is causing it. And being human is all about searching for and/or inventing patterns.

There is also a thrill in figuring something out, and (unfortunately) for some a sense of power when controlling the institutions and/or process of science.

Yet science is a dispassionate human endeavor. Looking at it with too much awe or wonder can get in the way. It's not about what you want to demonstrate, but what you can demonstrate.

To get back to your original point of the distinction between believers and non-believers, is a lack of belief at least partially responsible for viewing an inherently dispassionate intellectual pursuit passionately? My passions are directed elsewhere, not towards science.

Yes and no.  Theories are approximations, yes.  But they're approximations to the truths, so to say it's "not about the truth" is an overstatement, in my view.  A desire to "know what's true" pushes us to find better and better approximations.  We may never be able to reach "the truth," but we can get closer and closer as our understanding increases.  And the desire to know the truth is what can motivate us to increase our understanding.

An analogy might be this:  You're in a room with a window that looks into another room.  You want to know what's in the other room, so you look through the window.  But the window is very dirty, so you can barely see through it.  So you scrub the window to get a better view.  It's still pretty dirty, but now you can see a bit better.  So you go get some better cleaning kit, and scrub harder.  Again, a better view, but it's still obscured.  And so on, and so on.  You're motivated by wanting to know what's in that other room.  You're forced to look through the window, so you'll never be able to get as good a view as you'd like but you can keep doing work to get a better view.  The fact that your view is never perfect doesn't mean that all you want is an approximation.  It really is about what's in that other room (ie, the truth), even if all you'll ever get is a view of it through an imperfect window (ie, a theory).





You figure them out afterwards, sure.  But the question is that what's motivating you?  The possibility of technological benefits that you currently can't predict?  Or is it just wanting to know?


Hmm, I'm not sure about this last bit.  You need to "do" science dispassionately, in a sense, but that doesn't mean its a dispassionate endeavor.  We do it because we want to know, and its possible to feel passionate about wanting to know.  I agree with you that it's what we can demonstrate, not what we want to demonstrate, but I think we may be talking about different issues here.  Wanting to know THAT X is true, and seeking to prove that it is isn't good science, and is the wrong way to go about things.  But wanting to IF X is true, and passionately pursuing that question (regardless of the answer) IS good science.  We should strive to be neutral with respect to the answer, but that doesn't mean we have to feel dispassionate about the question.


Possibly.  My gut feeling is that the causation is the other way, but right now we're still gathering data, so I don't know that we can say one way or the other.  I suppose if we have a finite store of 'passion', and believers 'use this up' on religious beliefs, then only non-believers would have enough 'left over' to care about science.  But that sort of doesn't feel right to me as an explanation.  I've known believers who are passionate about other things (family, sports, fitness, art, hobbies, etc.).  It would seem somewhat odd to me that "wondering what's true about the world we live in" would be the automatic last-in-line for passion-expenditure to me.

On the other hand, if it's really true that there are some people who ask "is that likely to be true?" and other people who as "what's the cost or benefit of believing that?",  it would seem to explain both religious views, and differences in how one looks at pure science.  This makes it seem a bit more parsimonious of an explanation to me.

In all honesty I suspect that while the primary motivator for many people might be curiosity, the natural response to the results of that curiosity would be to change behavior according to the results (if it was warranted).  So a bit of both.

I wasn't so much thinking of passion as a resource that people use up. I was thinking of it as 'everyone needs some outlet for passion.'

But how would this explain a lack of passion for one thing or another?

Dunno. But I do know I lack a passion for science that you have, and you lack a passion for religion that I have.

Perhaps we're both looking at it from our own perspectives, that our side is the one that's "normal", and the other is displacing their "natural" passion to something else?

Probably, though, I'm trying to come up with an explanation that's sort of neutral in that respect.  It's not that one is "natural" and the other is "displaced," but rather that both flow naturally from the type of people we are (curiosity vs. benefit driven*).  If a person cares more about the consequences of belief, than religion would seem like a more natural thing to get passionate about (since it deals much more with the importance of beliefs), wheres if a person cares more about how likely something is to be true, science seems like a more natural fit, since it is, at its heart, an process for attempting to figure out what's true about reality.

As an aside, I read an article the other day by a report who had interviewed members of the Westboro Baptist Church (not representative of christians or religious people by any stretch, I know), and one of the things I found interesting in light of this conversation we're having, is that the interviewer had asked 3 members of the church what had led to their conversions, and all three said something along the lines of: "I was lying in bed one night and just realized I was going to hell, and I got really, really scared.  In fact, I'm still scared!  I don't want to go to hell!"  For all three of them, it was fear of hell that drove their religious beliefs.  None of them mentioned "I learned this new thing, and it suddenly seemed more likely," but rather a "if this is true, it'll be really, really bad for me if I'm not on the right side" type thinking.  Then later in the article, the author talked about a movie about two people's "journey" through religious life, and at some point one of them looses their faith, and tells the other something along the lines of "I can't believe that just because I want it to be true."  Again, just a handful of data points, and not very representative ones (one's even from a movie!), but they all seem to fit with the hypothesis I've come up with here.



*By the by, anyone have better names for these two hypothesized styles of thought?  "Curiosity" or something similar seems to fit for the "is this likely to be true?" mode of thought (at least if it correlates with the passion for simply knowing what's true), but I haven't come up with anything that's both accurate and not-too-many-words-long for the "what are the costs and benefits of accepting this as true?" mode of thought.

I would add a third item, which contributes to either group; that of identity. As someone who was born and raised Catholic, and born and raised in an engineering-heavy family, both of these were just parts of who I "am". I don't totally care if my catechism is totally true, or if God is an old man on a cloud, because that's of less value than first communion and Christmas.

Not sure I entirely follow you here, katisara.  Each part seems to make sense to me on it's own (at least partly), but less so when they're all together.


Okay, can you elaborate on that a bit?  It sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean by it.


This sort of sounds like you're saying you're in both camps, as it were.  Which is fair enough, and would tend to counter my strict dichotomy idea (though I imagine a spectrum is probably closer to the truth anyway).


But here you sound firmly in the "costs and benefits" camp, rather than the "is it true" camp, so I'm a bit confused.


Re-reading what you wrote a few times, let me ask if this is what you mean:
You're saying being a Catholic is more an identity than a belief for you.  It's less an issue of what you think is or isn't true, but rather just something you are (or something you do?).  To the extent that you decide to "be" catholic, your motivation comes more from the benefits of being one, rather than from a "are the beliefs involved true or not" point of view?

Hmm...If that's what you're saying, it seems like it may fit in with my hypothesis, but I may be focusing too much on the belief aspect of things.  Being a "what's the benefit" thinker could just as easily effect your actions even if it doesn't necessarily change your beliefs?

hmm...what about this idea:  Some people view the truth to have intrinsic value, independent of any benefits it may provide.  Others do not, and view the benefits (or costs) of an action or belief as the only thing that matters.  People who put an intrinsic value on the truth will be more likely to form beliefs based on what they think is most likely to be true, while those who do not will be more likely to focus on the potential benefits (or costs) of holding one belief or another.  Similar for actions, or identities:  people who put an intrinsic value on truth will be less likely do or be something they view as likely to be 'untrue', even they could gain benefits (or avoid costs) by doing so, whereas those who don't will more readily take actions or take on identities that provide them benefits, even if they're not necessarily convinced of the truth of the assumptions upon which those actions/identities are based.  Those who put an intrinsic value upon truth will be more likely to feel a sense of awe/wonder/curiosity when hearing about explorations into the unknown, whereas those who don't will be more motivated or interested in the potential benefits the discoveries might provide (such as new technology).

How does that slight refinement sound to people?

There are plenty of religious people who are also scientific people, so I don't imagine there is a hard dichotomy.



I suppose you could categorize that, that if I don't maintain these understandings, I cannot participate in family activities and discussions. Just like some families focus on sports, because once a year everyone gathers for the big sportsball game. If you don't follow the sport, you can't really participate.

Related, if I identify these things with my family, not keeping up with them distances me from those people I love. So there is a pretty clear motive, although I'm not sure it's really a pure translation. There's no big end-of-life payout, unlike Pascal's Wager.



To a large degree. Of course, that's not the whole story. But for instance, changing over to say the LDS Church would be a more costly option than just being a really bad Catholic, because of the impacts it would have with my family. (Nothing against the LDS Church, just it's not the newsletter we're subscribed to.)

And as a reminder, this doesn't just apply to religion; it applies to politics (where either I need to agree with my family, or I need to know more than they do in order to be able to support my beliefs), science, math, and so on. There are a number of activities I participate in in order to be able to participate with my community and extended family.



Again, I don't think it's a spectrum. In fact, I think they're two totally different metrics. I consider myself to be very curious, and very interested in truth, but I'm also very pragmatic. If I can categorize my herb garden as a family-run farm and get a tax break for it because I meet the legal definition, I will do that, even though it isn't "in truth" a farm. I think most people would engage in a behavior that gave clear profits, even if that behavior has no bearing on expanding their knowledge of the universe.

And I think the behavior/thought issue is two separate categories as well. I participate in behaviors because I know they will profit me. I would be hard pressed to BELIEVE in something because I consciously thought it would profit me to sell my beliefs. I tend to try and educate my beliefs so they are the most accurate version of the universe I can manage (within reason, especially given cost constraints). But I may act in a way contrary to what I believe to be Truth in order to get a profit (for example, the tax item above, or working for an ultra-liberal organization to get a paycheck while I don't believe in their mission, etc.)

I resonate with this. For me I go to church on Sunday with my family and a few other events (even though I no longer believe any of it) and the "profit" is a have a great relationship with my wife and kids.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:56, Tue 09 Apr 2013.

Tycho,

Could we call them the "theoretical" and "practical" camps?

I am a curious person, elsewise how could I be a professional scientist? I look for patterns and look for causes of those patterns. I also believe in the value of truth, which is why I find this place refreshing because people are willing to honestly discuss issues rather than engage in the cheap point-scoring debates I've seen elsewhere (debate is never about finding the truth).

Yet I only fall into the practical camp for science. Religiously, I don't expect to earn a reward from God from my behavior. One could say good behavior is its own reward: in a stoic or confucian sense, it makes you a better, happier person. Rather than practical value from religion, I hope for truth, but I expect to not know that truth as long as I'm alive.

Yes, I'd agree with this.


That's a pretty interesting description to me.  On the one hand, I can related to the idea of "doing the church stuff" to maintain good family connections, not rock the boat, avoid offending people, etc.  On the other hand, the "Nothing against the LDS Church, just it's not the newsletter we're subscribed to," bit seems a bit odd to me.  If I were to think a religion were 'true', I think I'd go to it regardless of what other people, family included, thought of it or me.
y.


I'd agree with that.  I'm not saying a person can only have one of these traits or the other, but rather one is more of an influence in one's beliefs (and actions in the last post, but you've done a good job of convincing me that's not a useful addition, so I think I'll drop that part of the hypothesis for now).


Yeah, you've convinced me on that, so I'll cut back to the hypothesis to just the beliefs aspect again.


Oh, certainly!  Despite what people here tell me over and over, I'm still convinced we can't consciously choose our beliefs.  On the other hand, different people consider things when weighing up whether they believe something or not, and find different things more convincing as well.  What my hypothesizing is that some people find arguments about the evidence in favor of something to be more important in changing their beliefs, and others find arguments about the potential benefits (or costs) more convincing.


Obviously everyone wants to believe what's true.  No one thinks their beliefs are false, otherwise they wouldn't hold them.  And people of each type can enjoy educating themselves about their beliefs as well (a fundamentalist Christian is likely to study the bible, for example).  Again, it's more an issue of what has bigger impacts on your beliefs: evidence for/against their truth, or the impact that holding that belief has on you?

Hmm, not bad.  My only hesitation is that calling one "practical" could be taken to imply that the other is "impractical," but it's still an improvement on what I was using, so I'll use those for the time being.


Well, just based off what you say, it sounds to me like you value science for the technology it produces.  It's curiosity, but not for curiosity's sake, as it were.  From what you've described of yourself, it sounds like you value knowledge about reality, but in the sense that it's a means to an end, rather than an end unto itself.  Does that sound like a fair description?


Hmm, why don't you feel debate is about finding the truth?  While I don't expect we'll make any huge strides towards enlightenment here, I do think letting other people pick apart our ideas is a useful test for flaws in them that might indicate their lack of truth.  It's also a good way to get new perspective which might lead us down a direction we might have otherwise missed.  I guess if I thought there was no hope of every learning anything 'true' here (or at least of finding out if any of my views were 'false'), I wouldn't bother putting the effort into it.


Hmm, here you seem to be explaining that you're not interested in the benefits of religion, but then go on to describe some benefits.  You say you don't expect to know if your religion is true while you're alive.  Which makes me ask, "why would you follow it in that case, as opposed to some other religion, or not religion at all?"  And it sounds to me like your reply would be "because following the religion makes you a better, happier person," which is a 'practical camp' style position.  As a 'theoretical camp' person, such an argument doesn't sit well with me at all.  I just keep thinking, "but, but...if you're not convinced it's true...gah!"  You seem to be in the "doesn't really matter if it's true, it works!" frame of mind, which I could see for actions, but not for beliefs I guess.  If going to church made me happier, I could go and not worry about it.  But if believing in God made me happier, I couldn't really do it just because of that.  My brain would keep saying, "yeah, I know it makes us feel good, but look at the evidence!  It's just not actually true!"  The "doing X gets you Y" argument I can accept, but the "believing X causes you to do Y which gets you Z" argument doesn't.  I instantly think, "well fine, but is X actually true?"  I need to be convinced that it is to accept it, even if I can accept that believing it would provide me some benefit.  Its sort of sounding like that convincing is less important to you; that you're happy to "not know that truth as long as you're alive" and just accept it on the basis that doing so provides a benefit.  Am I misreading your words here, or is this really a pretty fundamental difference between us?

By debate, I mean a battle where each side tries to defeat the other. The players in a debate don't even have to believe in the truth of the position they're arguing for. They just want to win.

This forum doesn't seem to be about that. I'm seeing a lot more discussion, compromise, and communication here.

I think you're looking at this paragraph too deeply. It's probably my fault for including the second non-religious sentence in between two religious sentences.

You'll note I didn't link "better, happier person" to religion or belief. I only linked it to good behavior. It's a practical argument for good behavior that's unrelated to religion (which is why I mentioned two non-religions that promoted it).

I do not know if my beliefs are true. That's why they're called beliefs instead of knowledge. Just because they are not demonstrated is no reason to reject them and all belief. It matters to me what is true, but I accept that there are both non-demonstrable truths and truths that will not be known in my lifetime. In these cases, I must muddle through with my best guesses.

Ah, gotcha.  I can totally see what you mean in that case.


I can agree with all that.  But, I guess, the question is why is your 'best guess' that your religious beliefs are true, whereas my 'best guess' is that they are not?  Is it just that we have seen different evidence, or more that we're moved by different types of evidence?  Why does Heath, for example, consider the stories about Jesus appearing to 500 people to be "very strong evidence," whereas I don't consider that nearly strong enough evidence to believe the story?  We're both rational, thinking human beings, but we come to different conclusions, and even view the strength of the evidence very differently.  Why is that?  That's basically what I'm digging for here.  I totally agree that we all have to make due with our best guesses as to what's true, and that we may never find out if we're right or not.  But it's interesting to me that people can come to such widely different 'best guesses', even when examining similar evidence.

Of course, if God came down and told me "Joseph Smith was right, get ye to the LDS Temple", that's what I'd do (after a psychological examination). But rarely are things so cut and dry. So if I say "the LDS Church has a more effective structure, and is perhaps more true in its doctrines", that would be a pressure countered by "all my family goes to Catholic Church, and some of them give Mormons funny looks". Which of those forces are stronger would determine which way I fall. But yes, funny enough, I could probably find it easier to become Buddhist than Mormon (and let's not even get started on Unitarians).



Hate to say it, but science is frequently impractical :P