Difference between revisions of "Humanity reboot"

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Revision as of 16:19, 19 November 2018

File:World Reboot.svg
Restarting history should yield similar scientific results, but not similar religious results.

World reboot is a thought experiment which attempts to demonstrate a fundamental difference between evidence-based beliefs, and other forms of belief.

Imagine rebooting the world as though it were a computer. We reset everything back to the dawn of humanity, before any technology, before any religions, before any culture, and then we let history replay itself.

Without any intervention, it's reasonable to believe that humans will once again make stone tools, tame fire, create the wheel, being writing, discover mathematics and logic, invent microscopes and telescopes, and once again understand relativity and quantum mechanics. Science and technology will progress and develop more or less the same as it is now, because science and technology are based on the objective fundamental laws of the universe.

However, the same can not be said for religion. People might once again go through a stage where they will believe lightning bolts are hurled to the ground by a god in the sky, but they won't name their god Zeus, they won't think he lives on a specific mountain in Greece, or believe he sometimes descends in the form of a swan to impregnate young maidens. There will most likely be a belief that a wonderful afterlife can be obtained by following a specific religion, but it probably won't be a specific Middle Eastern man who was executed to appease a vengeful god who is also the slain man's father, and both of them hate gay sex. Religions are not based on laws of the universe, but are cultural constructs, and, barring supernatural intervention, they will won't repeat.

However, there are some forms of world views that probably will repeat. For example, throughout history, many people have independently come to the conclusion that we should behave as though the natural world is all there is, and that this life is our own, so we should try to make things better for everyone in the here and now, a belief known as secular humanism. Compare this to the conclusion that following the tenets of the Southern Baptist Convention is the proper way to view the world are the people who created the Southern Baptist Convention and the people who they indoctrinate. Nobody has ever independently constructed a belief system that was very similar to the Southern Baptist Convention.