> If you want to argue something is a religion, you need to define “religion”.

Wittgenstein famously argued that the word "game" cannot be given an intensional definition – you cannot produce a list of features that all games have and which only games have. For, he argued, "game" is not a category defined in terms of singular essence, rather it is a collection of things which all have a lot in common but there is no one thing which they all have in common. Like members of a family, which all resemble each other, but all in different ways – hence he called this family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit in German).

Well, I would say the exact same thing is true of "religion" – just like "game", the word can't be defined, because there is no one thing all "religions" have in common.

But, our inability to clearly define "game" doesn't make the concept useless, and isn't an inherent obstacle to using the concept. Well, the same is true of "religion".

If you are going to call something a "religion" which isn't widely considered to be one, you need to identify which particular features you think it shares with those phenomena which are widely considered to be "religions". And I think Grothendieck has done that here.

This is not an essay about whether science "is" a religion, or how "religiony" it is.

He's just arguing that the way science is treated by the general public has many specific negative features, and that many of these are held in common with religion. And he's quite clear about what those aspects here.

He literally calls science a religion and scientist high priests. He doesn’t just draw parallels and analogies.

It's poetic language, and arguably unnecessarily inflammatory, but it's not the main thesis of the essay. Specifically: If you identified a key distinction between religion and scientism that we all agreed was "required" by any good definition of religion but wasn't found in scientism (say, an afterlife, or a story for why bad things happen to good people), that wouldn't much affect the validity of the essay.

If you remove the analogy to religion I don’t see how any substance remains. For example the essay present subject experts as problematic through the analogy to high priests. But if you remove this analogy it is just common sense that someone who have studied a subject knows more than someone who hasn’t.

I mean a carpenter knows more about carpentry than a random person - how is that controversial or problematic? But lets call carpenters high priests thereby implying carpentry expertise is somehow suspect. If you try to lecture a seasoned carpenter about carpentry they would probably also call you an idiot in more or less polite words. I guess that just proves how carpenters are like high priests jaleously guarding their status?

The whole essay is just riddled with falacies and strawmen. For example the fact that someone have tried to study war scientifically apparently means this makes war acceptable. How does that follow? Never mind this completely ignores the history of war and justifications of war which is much older than science.

A criticims of scientism and its derived pseudo-religions like nlp, scientology, transhumanism, the singularity, simulation etc would be very welcome, but the analysis need to be coherent, otherwise it is no better.

I strongly disagree with your reading of this essay.

Derrida gave the most succinct definition i’ve heard, in i believe The gift of death : “religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all.”

been chewing on that one for a while now.

There's also an overlooked distinction between a religion versus a religious belief.

For example, "the sun is an egg of the great pillbug that created the universe" is a religious belief, but it would be quite a stretch to call it a religion.

I think the distinction is particularly important because it underlies how a lot of people talk past each other when it comes to atheism, since "zero gods have ever existed" is also a religious belief without being a religion.

I agree religion is much more than beliefs. Rituals, community, traditions etc is at least as signifiant as beliefs.

But by what criteria is “zero gods exist” a religious belief compared to say “phlogiston does not exist”?

Well, flip it around, by what criteria was the positive "phlogiston exists" a religious belief to start with?

For almost any positive statement about religious topics or implications, the negated version remains also about religious topics or implications.

"Bread doesn't exist" is still a belief about the concept of bread.

So if some religion claims sunspots does not exist, it would make the existence of sunspots a religious belief?

something that makes metaphysical claims. Like the age of the universe, and a universal telos or lack thereof.

That just moves the problem to the definition of “metaphysical”. If a scientific theory is falsifiable, by what definition can it be considered metaphysical?

when a theory makes claims about events that fall outside of the physical system they become metaphysical:

age of the universe, creator or not, teleology, interpretations of probability, primacy of logic (are we allowing for the law of excluding middle or not)

Science doesn't do these things but scientism does.

Cosmology certainly have theories about the age of the universe.