> All I argue is that science doesn't give you one at all.

But I have given you examples of arriving at moral rules through arguments that are not based on religious thought.

> Proving this would take at least a whole book, maybe more, but such books have been written many times in the past when science vs religion was more topical. Most people don't demand such a book because "science can tell you how to do it but not whether you should" is a pretty uncontroversial position that's been taken by scientists themselves many times, it's pretty much the starting point of the debate over whether Nagasaki should have been nuked for example.

Why would it take a book? I just gave counter examples and have disproven your claim already. That you can find examples where science can not explain something does not mean it cannot explain anything in terms of "why". The whole point of science is to explain the "why". Why it happened, why it is that way and why it will happen.

You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked. That though would probably be a complex discussion but I can see a possibility that someone scientifically shows that there would have been better ways to solve the conflict.

> Obviously all this is totally unfalsifiable, it doesn't attempt to be rational in any way but it's a really useful set of beliefs and stories for creating a more peaceful society.

Only under the assumption that everyone in the society strictly follows the rule. As soon as one guy just turns into a tyrrant or if another group comes in order to suppress them the framework collapses and so it is unworkable in the real world where there are real threats.

> If you take only science as a starting point, how do you derive this sort of moral code and - just as importantly - make it stick?

We have laws that prohibit harming others and they don't need religious justification. Harming a member of society is against everyones interest because we are part of society and we optimize for a good quality of life of society as that optimizes our own. Take Sweden as an example. Very secular country. Are you claiming their society has weak morals? Are they full of revenge killings?

> In fact you'd struggle even with the far more basic task of deriving a moral code that bans murder. You can't start with evolution because animals kill each other all the time; there's nothing unnatural about murder. It's the prohibition against it that's unnatural, but science is just the study of the natural world, so that's no help. See for yourself, try it. Come up with a rational first-principles explanation of why murder is bad without invoking religion, and which doesn't simply boil down to tautologies, circular reasoning, appeal to authority or other logical fallacies. I've tried - it's hard!

I did it in other comments but here we go again: it's easy to argue that since we optimize the survival of our society we should not kill each other. A species that is happy to just randomly kill each other has real disadvantages that should be obvious. Your claim that animals kill each other all the time: killing within their own group is rare. Take two random animals from the same species and put them together in a room and see if they will kill each other. Do this with enough animals and different species. The vast majority will not kill each other. How come?

> Right, but nobody explicitly subscribes to scientism. We don't even have such a word as "scientismist" because it's pretty much the defacto default religion of the modern population.

I don't agree with that. You seriously claim that the majority just blindly believes in science but wouldn't admit it? Or is it maybe because people started to trust a system which they can at least partially verify and that can explain a lot of the real world?

> Scientism is perhaps the nastiest of all religions because it denies its own nature. Other religions accept what they are, but this one presents itself as pure rationalism even though it's not. It's very, very easy to accidentally become a follower of scientism which is why so many people are. All you have to do is use reasoning like this:

Blind belief is always bad. Which one is the worst is not a particularly interesting conversation to me.

We alreay agree that scientism (meaning religious corruption of science as you've shown) isn't good. Don't think we need to expand on that further.