I once had a very special, very young colleague, who would always question everything, but was never willing to change his own mind. And of course, he believed the Bible was 100% verbatim correct and scientists were lying.
Well, one day he exclaimed, “Scientists don’t know everything for certain either!”.
So, I responded, “Yeah…? They don’t claim to…?”.
And that left him absolutely confused. I don’t know how much propaganda his parents fed him, but I guess, at the very least he never considered that a possibility.
So, I told him that it’s not called a “scientific theory” for nothing. And that literally everything in science will be abolished, if you can disprove it.
After that quick shock, he was already back to not wanting to believe anything that sounded logical, but his last response was something along the lines of “That doesn’t make any sense. How can you live by something and not know for certain that it’s correct?”.
Which, like, I get it. It’s scary to not have certain answers. But it makes no sense to just pick one answer and decide that this one is certain.
But yeah, that is the mindset he grew up in.
I belive religions and gods came from people not wanting to admit they “don’t know” certain things. They ask for stuff like how can you prove that god does not exist while there is no evidence that god exist either. Its like saying “show me the evidence that thing with no evidence does not exist”
Honestly, I don’t even think, it was necessarily that someone didn’t want to admit missing knowledge.
In my experience, us humans still love our false gods.
For example, how was the universe created? Well, there was the Big Bang, end of story. Most people just accept a big explosion as an explanation.
In reality, not only is the Big Bang not actually an explosion (nor finished), things happened before it, too. And we have a hard time seeing what happened before it, so we actually do not know that the universe was created. The theory with the least assumptions would be that it was not created, just spatially a lot smaller.
Of course, religion was itself involved in spreading the theory that the universe was created, but you’ve still got theoretically intelligent people not questioning how the void just kind of exploded for no reason and suddenly everything existed.
Another absolute classic of modern false gods: AI.
In most contexts, when a computer scientist says “AI”, you can mentally replace that with “magic” and it’s similarly meaningful. It’s basically just a code word for them to not need to explain further.
The theory was there was no time before the big bang and it means there was no “before” at all. But yes its also questionable and we actually don’t know what it is. I don’t think theoretically intelligent people does not question such things. Thoose people are still trying to find evidence to prove or disprove existing notions. I think religious people are the ones act like they know it
It takes a lot of those moments to experience a paradigm shift. Unfortunately a person usually won’t encounter enough of them to see clearly unless they’re actively searching for answers. That’s why churches discourage asking a lot of questions, or reading secular material. When my walls started crumbling it was a legitimately uncomfortable experience. Realizing that you’ve been living by a bunch of preconceptions that aren’t universal truths, and understanding for the first time how another group perceives something differently than your entire core group does, is really confusing and difficult. Most people get scared when they hit that point and retreat back to their core belief system. It’s very uncomfortable to keep pushing through for answers.
I once had a very special, very young colleague, who would always question everything, but was never willing to change his own mind. And of course, he believed the Bible was 100% verbatim correct and scientists were lying.
Well, one day he exclaimed, “Scientists don’t know everything for certain either!”.
So, I responded, “Yeah…? They don’t claim to…?”.
And that left him absolutely confused. I don’t know how much propaganda his parents fed him, but I guess, at the very least he never considered that a possibility.
So, I told him that it’s not called a “scientific theory” for nothing. And that literally everything in science will be abolished, if you can disprove it.
After that quick shock, he was already back to not wanting to believe anything that sounded logical, but his last response was something along the lines of “That doesn’t make any sense. How can you live by something and not know for certain that it’s correct?”.
Which, like, I get it. It’s scary to not have certain answers. But it makes no sense to just pick one answer and decide that this one is certain.
But yeah, that is the mindset he grew up in.
I belive religions and gods came from people not wanting to admit they “don’t know” certain things. They ask for stuff like how can you prove that god does not exist while there is no evidence that god exist either. Its like saying “show me the evidence that thing with no evidence does not exist”
Honestly, I don’t even think, it was necessarily that someone didn’t want to admit missing knowledge.
In my experience, us humans still love our false gods.
For example, how was the universe created? Well, there was the Big Bang, end of story. Most people just accept a big explosion as an explanation.
In reality, not only is the Big Bang not actually an explosion (nor finished), things happened before it, too. And we have a hard time seeing what happened before it, so we actually do not know that the universe was created. The theory with the least assumptions would be that it was not created, just spatially a lot smaller.
Of course, religion was itself involved in spreading the theory that the universe was created, but you’ve still got theoretically intelligent people not questioning how the void just kind of exploded for no reason and suddenly everything existed.
Another absolute classic of modern false gods: AI.
In most contexts, when a computer scientist says “AI”, you can mentally replace that with “magic” and it’s similarly meaningful. It’s basically just a code word for them to not need to explain further.
The theory was there was no time before the big bang and it means there was no “before” at all. But yes its also questionable and we actually don’t know what it is. I don’t think theoretically intelligent people does not question such things. Thoose people are still trying to find evidence to prove or disprove existing notions. I think religious people are the ones act like they know it
It takes a lot of those moments to experience a paradigm shift. Unfortunately a person usually won’t encounter enough of them to see clearly unless they’re actively searching for answers. That’s why churches discourage asking a lot of questions, or reading secular material. When my walls started crumbling it was a legitimately uncomfortable experience. Realizing that you’ve been living by a bunch of preconceptions that aren’t universal truths, and understanding for the first time how another group perceives something differently than your entire core group does, is really confusing and difficult. Most people get scared when they hit that point and retreat back to their core belief system. It’s very uncomfortable to keep pushing through for answers.