pedanterrific comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong

109 Post author: Yvain 19 March 2009 01:07AM

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Comment author: pedanterrific 13 December 2011 07:42:39AM 3 points [-]

My perception of you is that you see religion as an antiquated method for producing knowledge.

How is religion a "method for producing knowledge" at all?

Comment author: Boyi 13 December 2011 02:43:05PM -1 points [-]

Religion is the original norm for producing knowledge whether you like it or not. I am not saying it was a good method, but you cannot deny that it is embryologically the basis of knowledge and knowledge production. The first scholars were theologians and aristocrates, the first colleges were religous institutions. I am not saying that it is a correct methodology, but it is our history.

Early doctors healed people in ways we no longer condone, but we cannot deny the fact that they were the forefathers of modern medical knowledge.

Comment author: Nornagest 13 December 2011 06:18:35PM *  4 points [-]

Religion is the original norm for producing knowledge whether you like it or not. I am not saying it was a good method, but you cannot deny that it is embryologically the basis of knowledge and knowledge production.

That's just a more emphatic way of stating the premise, isn't it?

Religions are certainly models of the world, or at least of certain parts of it: fertility, cosmology, all those things with mysterious causes. And it's true that the lines between religion and philosophy (including natural philosophy) were awfully blurry in pre-modern thought; I'd actually put the watershed there relatively late, somewhere around Darwin or a little earlier. But calling religions methods of producing knowledge carries certain implications which don't necessarily follow from a conception of religion as a model of the numinous world: "knowledge" is a fairly strong word, much stronger than "thought" or "belief".

I'd say a more productive approach would be to call religions the first totalizing systems of belief: there are other and earlier paths to knowledge (nonhuman animals can learn from experience, but we don't observe worship among them), but before the Classical period all the Western attempts at organizing knowledge and belief into a comprehensive system of the world wound up looking pretty religious. When people start limiting themselves to talking about knowledge, you don't get religion, you get philosophy: often religious philosophy, yes, but that's a proper subset of all religious topics.

Comment author: dlthomas 13 December 2011 03:06:40PM 2 points [-]

Most knowledge is entirely orthogonal to religion. If Ugg wanted to know whether there was a fruit tree on the other side of that hill, he didn't pray about it - he looked. I understand that chimpanzees exhibit curiosity. I think it is certainly fair to say that religion was, in part, an early attempt at knowledge generation; it may well be fair to say that it was the original norm for producing cosmogonical knowledge (or, at least, attempting to).