I mean, scientifically this is a hypothesis that there is no way of proving. It’s theoretically possible there is a god or gods that whispered in someone’s ear to set up a particular religion and would do the same again if all the religions are wiped out. Competing religions doesn’t disprove that, it would just mean those people didn’t hear the whisper (or maybe misunderstood it). This statement is literally impossible to prove or disprove (without lots of genocide and record destroying).
If we’re gonna base ourselves on science, we should actually follow its rules.
The same science has happened in two places at once before. Lots of people rush to publish to avoid getting scooped.
Religion is just fiction, so this has not happened there. Heck, Joseph Smith couldn't even invent his religion twice without messing things up.
Maybe not precisely the same as the quote, but it's pretty similar. If there was a true religion, you'd expect it to have happened many times identically all over the world.
There are disagreements about details, but there are no disagreements about the basics. For instance although Newton is replaced by Relativity, but Newton is still good enough for 99.99% of gravitational computations.
Christians want biologists to seem in disagreement about evolution, because they think that makes their creation nonsense more plausible.
But in reality 90% of biologists agree on 90% of how evolution works. Compare that to religions, where you don't have anything similar, even within the same religion. The new pope doesn't even agree with the old pope, on how many children a priest is allowed to molest, before going to the police.
If you've ever watched his show Bullshit! You'd see many libertarian views with arguments which don't hold up to scrutiny. I recall listening to a podcast (I want to say midish 2000, 2007ish?) where he said that the good ideals were rich people supporting the social services (food banks etc) and that would be good. Which we all know don't hold up. That said, I do still enjoy his Bullshit! series (also that more recent one Fool Us is fun), him and Teller are very entertaining, though not who I'd quote for supporting ideals to give a better support to said argument. That said I believe Hitchens was on his episode about religion and he seems like a better person to use for said argument.
A lot of people who were in the libertarian atheist crowd saw the light, at least partially after trump was elected. Seems like Penn change his tune a bit too according to Wikipedia:
In 2020, Jillette distanced himself from aspects of libertarianism, particularly surrounding COVID-19. In an interview with Big Think, he stated, "[A] lot of the illusions that I held dear, rugged individualism, individual freedoms, are coming back to bite us in the ass." He went on to elaborate, "[I]t seems like getting rid of the gatekeepers gave us Trump as president, and in the same breath, in the same wind, gave us not wearing masks, and maybe gave us a huge unpleasant amount of overt racism."[53]
In the 2020 United States presidential election, Jillette endorsed Andrew Yang in the Democratic primary.[54] In an op-ed for CNN after that year's general election, he stated that he "used to identify as Libertarian", but voted for Joe Biden.[55]
I think a lot of that crowd outgrows it as they get older, and realize how impractical it is, but if you get rich while in that phase it seems to make you stick to it as you become out of touch with reality. It's easy to believe in libertarian principals when you're rich and privileged.
I'm saying that they believe that the rich would willingly give the money to support the poor rather than have government tax people and create programs. The Libertarian way. At least that was what he was saying on the old podcast. I realize I didn't explain it well, but the whole Libertarian view that they don't like taxes was meant to be implied. The clash being if they don't like taxes how would their paying directly match what is done now?
Bit of a tangent and not saying it's necessarily the case here, but it annoys me when people don't capitalise God despite it being a proper noun. It's confusing.
Zeus is a god. Zeus is not God. God is a god and God is God.
In this context, it's ambiguous if Penn is saying that God (Christians' god) doesn't exist, or if he's saying that no gods exist, exactly because people don't capitalise properly and consistently.
On a similar note, people who don't capitalise church properly when it's used as a proper noun and referring to the Church.
The church hid paedophiles = paedophiles were hiding in a church building. The Church hid paedophiles = the Catholic/Anglican Church hid paedophiles.
If you go on a site like wikipedia, you'll notice they also capitalise Mormon Church for exactly this reason.
If you're discussing the Jehovah's witnesses, you'd also capitalise accordingly.
Eg. A former Jehovah's witness has taken on the Church over sex abuse that occured in the church on 110th Street.
The capital helps you differentiate between a church building and the institution. A member of the Church is taking on the Church for something that happened in a church. A church that belongs to the Church.
I think it depends on what you mean by "science." I thought of this post as referring to the scientific method, a process by which we can determine truth within the limits of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and other bounds on what can actually be known.
Science meaning the generally agreed upon scientific positions is somewhat of a social phenomenon too. For example, the perception of the negative health effects of sugar within the scientific community was affected by how it was funded by vendors of sugary drinks.
I chose to interpret it as the scientific method because otherwise, the meme wouldn't make sense.
Your definition of science would certainly fit within my own, and I agree with your sentiment - if it does not go far enough. The scientific method is also a construct. The concepts that make what science is are constructs.
Humans make what science is, so it will always be mediated by human language and culture.