We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

  > I don't quite see where you provided examples before this comment, sorry, could you repeat them? I looked through the thread and see you asserting we don't need religions anymore, but not where you give concrete worked examples of moral questions and how to resolve them with science.

I gave an example right in my comment to which you replied. Further explanation below. Another example was when al_mandi asked me to give an example how rape can be argued against.

  > This isn't a logical argument from first principles. Harming someone else can very much be in your interest in all sorts of situations. For it to be considered immoral, there must be some higher justification that states that your clear self-interest in harming an enemy is subservient to some other principle.

I think I see where your misunderstanding is. That you can find a specific situation where harming someone else can be in your interest does not invalidate the argument that says so in the grand scheme of things and in most situations. Nearly nothing is absolute.

The same logical fallacy has been shown in this HN discussion about a dozen times.

A general rule can be true even if in a specific case it does not apply. Killing someone in the general case is bad but in specific cases it can be good. Take for example a suicide bomber running into a crowd. That killing is bad in general can be argued for with logic and without resulting to religion. It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general. I can deduce that with my own brain and don't need a prophet to tell me. You can ask me to go the full chain of logic back to first principles but you know full well that's a lot to do. Can we see the desire to not get killed as something given not by religion?

For example: if you show that science can not explain a certain thing then that does not mean science can not explain anything at all.

If B follows A then NOT B does not follow NOT A.

A triangle is a geometric shape. It does not follow that if something is not a triangle then it's not a geometric shape.

  > I'm not really sure how. It would be interesting to see an attempt. Note that doing this without relying on ambient moral principles like "killing people is bad" is probably impossible but those moral principles don't come from science, as I point out, hence why I don't see how to do it.

The claim is that morals can only come from religion but I argued and showed that this is not the case.

Your claim is that something ALWAYS applies (e.g. ONLY religion can bring morals). If I can show a single counter example then I invalidate your claim. If I claim that something is true ON AVERAGE and you show one counter example then that does NOT invalidate my claim.

If you say that ONLY a 6 sided dice can throw a 4 and I have an 8 sided dice and throw a 4 then you lose. If I say on average you will roll at least a 2 with your dice then rolling a 1 does not prove me wrong.

  > Claims like "we optimize for a good quality of life of society" don't mean anything concrete. It's just restating a belief that the original position is morally correct in different words. Every tyrant in history has always claimed to be acting for the betterment of society and how can you argue otherwise without some system deeper than "this is morally good because we say it's best for everyone therefore it is"?

This is simple evolution. If we don't optimize for life in our society then we have a clear disadvantage compared to other societies that do so. Animals follow the same and they don't need religion for that.

  > So by analogy it's OK to kill other races but not your own?

No, you again fell into the same logical fallacy. You can see two races as individual members of a larger society. Put random animals from different species into a room and most of them will also not kill each other. That does not mean some of them will not kill the other. And the fact that some will kill the other does not mean they all will do so.

  > But it's an odd argument because it's really common that animals will fight and injure each other within the same species, sometimes fatally. Usually fights over territory or mating dominance. Even in pack animals there are fights over who gets the mates. By coincidence I was at a zoo just two days ago and they had a few cages where there was only a single animal, with an explanation that they had to do this because if they put more than one animal of the same type in the same cage they would fight for dominance. It's normal e.g. the antlers on a deer are for fighting. One of them was a type of crane, and the explanation was that cranes pick a single mate for life and this one had picked "Man", so would fight with any other crane. Animal jealousy!

Some and sometimes. As explained, that does not invalidate the argument. You can't claim that the majority of animals constantly fight within their species.

  > After what we saw in the last two years! Wow yes, absolutely I seriously claim that. The amount of pseudo-scientific garbage that the population swallowed about COVID is just incredible. Claims that fell apart the moment you read the papers or even just thought about them were routinely passed off and accepted by the population because they came from "experts". It is one of the major themes of our age. 

Yea the past two years have been... difficult in many respects. But again, same logical issue. It does not mean that they always blindly believe in all of science.

  > However, you play around with words the same question always remains what was before.
  > Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole?

These theories are just that - thought experiments to try to come up with possible explanations. They are not claimed as proven or facts.

There are a lot of open equestions. It is work in progress.

  > Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn. 

There are actually theories that black holes can form spontaneously. This is because particles are theorized to be able to spontaneously form and under the right circumstances they'd form a black hole. They would most likely though evaporate nearly instantly. But again that is not proven.

  > I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code.

I am sorry if I misunderstoo your position or possibly mixed it up with what al_mandi said. He was the one who stated it is only religion that can give us morals and without it we'd be a barbaric society and living like animals.

  > - Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!

I would agree with this. Science uses rational thought to build knowledge about reality.

  > - Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.

I would also agree here that building a moral code from axioms is a lot of work and hard. And it has to be because there is a huge amount of situations in life for which the moral code would need to be queried for guidance. But wouldn't it provide an immense value if we did all that work and it turned out to be workable? The problems you listed exist just as well in moral code derived from religious axioms.

  > You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded

No, I would not say that all of the moral code provided by the various religions are completely irrational and should be discarded. There is a lot of guidelines that I would probably agree with. I just reject some of the axioms like the existance of god. I can agree with a conclusion even if I disagree with how they arrived at said conclusion. Note that I do not claim there is no god. I am not an atheist. But I see no proof for it and we just don't know if there is one or not. It is not proven and it seems not falsifiable.

  > If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward.

I don't accept these axioms.

  >  And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it.

Sure, it might sorta mostly work but at that point we could also have just come up with random moral rules and tried them all over a long time and stuck with the set that sorta mostly works. We would not need to justify them with religious axioms. I think you will agree with me here because you also said religion is not the only way that can provide a moral code.

  > We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths,

I don't think the soviet era was following the core spirit of science though. It had a lot more in common with religious doctrine. That they pushed to erase religion was rather a play in order to remove any competing power systems that could endanger them.

  > The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.

I have actually already addressed this. Your argument overlooks that the two groups belong to a bigger group which again needs to optimize for survival. If one part of a species kills another part of the same species then the species has weakend itself. This goes all the way up to all living things. It is an often held misconception that survival of the fittest means it has to be a contest where the winner is the last man standing. If we killed every living being that might be a threat to us no matter how remote then that would actually harm ourselves because it destroys large parts of a working ecosystem and would create all kinds of unforseeable, possibly fatal problems. Religion might arrive at a similar view by proclaiming god has declared life sacred because it was his creation. To me, this while being a useful thought can create a lot more issues because it is intellectually lazier and when people don't understand or are even allowed to question "why" then they have a higher chance of applying the rule in a destructive way. One has to be concious that no rule in a moral code must be assumed 100% correct in all situations.

  > Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing. 

My previous paragraph gave some more explanation on my point of view. To specifically address your example: you killing me for arbitrary reasons poses a risk to you. Society will see your behaviour as destructive to itself and will try to prevent it or punish you for it. This does not mean that killing is always bad. Killing someone that is about to kill other people for no reason would be justified.

Animals don't have the same cognitive capabilities that we have. Nonetheless nature has baked into them traits that are common and result in a lot of behavior that one could reasonably argue that they must have some kind of moral code as well. Human morals are more sophisticated but there are similarities. Now, we are surely not the be-all end-all of evolution which means our cognitive capabilities are also limited. Maybe in a million years our ancestors will look back and pity us for our limited understanding and poor morals :)

At this point I'd like to thank you for a much more intellectually interesting conversation. I was a bit exhausted after the one with al_mandi.

IMHO it is equally hard to wrap our head around the concept of inifity (has always been there) versus there being a start or end to time and space.

It's a bit weird because if we try to think about the end of space our brain immediately asks "well what is beyond the end?" and so implicitly expects there to be more and more - ad infinitum.

But on the other hand if we think about something being infinite then our brain immediately tells us "hold on! that seems fishy, I've never experienced something infinite, it has to start somehow" and so implicitly expects there to be a limit to everything.

> "Honest news" is hearsay. I can't go and verify any of it. I cannot logically explain any of it even. You are asking me to just believe it is true what someone a millenia ago said, something (miracles) that goes against any real life obvervation I can do. Sorry, not happening.

Look up the Islamic Isnad system.

Furthermore, if that's how you're going to view the world, then you can't accept any news about history. Obviously that is not wise or rational.

> I did so using basic logic and understanding of statistics. Can you tell me where exactly I was wrong?

By assuming there were many "tries" before the current universe came into existence. Who was behind those tries? When was the first try? Those are all metaphysical claims.