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John Psmith reviewed "Believe, by Ross Douthat"
The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism? We know they were wrong, because atheistic scholarship has deeply-flawed-but-integral self-correction mechanisms. What self-correction have religions done, in the last 100 years? Or is this an isolated demand for rigor, because the pro-belief case is simply that some religion is inerrant, even if we don't know which (if any!) presently-practiced religion is inerrant, therefore, no religion needs to self-correct?
There's also a section on miricles, which includes:
Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine? And why deny another religion's morals, if you don't deny its signs and wonders of other religions? And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?
The review ends by making a strange argument promoting Christianity:
The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.
Has anyone read this book? If so, does this review do a bad job relaying the book's thesis? Am I wrong to think that the thesis, as presented in the review, is unpersuasive? If I am wrong, how am I wrong?
Debate about religion is welcomed at any time, especially at time when the world looks it is going to catch fire.
It usually consist on debating three propositions.
1/ Factual claims of [religion] are true. Not "symbolically, mythically and lobsterifically true", but true as "this really happened".
2/ Belief in factual claims of [religion] is good for you personally.
3/ Widespread belief in factual claims of [religion] is good for "the society".
The problem is that these three propositions are unconnected to each other, and, unless we disentangle them at the beginning, fruitful discussion is unlikely to happen.
Is the "symbolically true" position (lobsterifically or otherwise) a separate thing from these or is it vacuous and not worth categorizing?
The idea that religion metaphors contain deep truth that cann't be said straightforwardly for whatever reason. Rhymes with that the purpose of fiction to tell deeper truths than reality. Something zen idk.
Peterson himself seems closer to a 3, when he's talking about "marxist assault on traditional modes of being"
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@gemmaem has a less self-satisfied review up, Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe
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I don't think this does a great job of relaying Douthat's thesis specifically, but I will say that it was delightful to read the second half, where he gives a fresh glance at the gospels.
One of the first pieces of advice I give to anybody interested in Christianity is to sit down and read a gospel, in one sitting. If possible, find a printing of the gospel without section headings or verse numbers, because those just confuse and aren't authentic to the original text anyway. Then read it. Hold all your questions until the end - jot them down if you like, but keep reading. Get through the whole thing in one sitting. And then see how it affects you.
Unfortunately even for churchgoers, one of the most frequent ways to experience the Bible is to hear it chopped up into tiny morsels, and then for each morsel to be surrounded by so much sugar and honey, in the forms of prayers and sermons and hymns, as to make them palatable. But how much scripture can you really get that way? Put all the extras aside, and have a full course meal of nothing but scripture.
Often, I find, when people do this they are shocked by what they find. Perhaps the story is much more dramatic than they thought, or it's much more bizarre and incomprehensible, or they find themselves drawn to or repulsed by characters they never thought about before, or they just realise that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that they had never registered. But it usually does something, and that something, whatever it is, is worth exploring.
I'm more likely to read a Gospel, now, than I was prior to reading the review.
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I think the sociological angle specifically (where the New Atheist types said that declining religion would make the world a better place and well that is not what happened) revealed that their religious opponents (who were often chided for the idea that "morality comes from religion") actually had a stronger grasp on reality than the New Atheist types did. In my opinion it does not slam-dunk prove anything about God one way or the other by itself.
But if two groups of people make predictions and one of them is better at the predictions, your priors should be that they understand reality better. I don't know that "religious people" are perfect scorers but against the New Atheists on the general question of whether (our) society would flourish without God...I think they've generally won.
Well yes, that's what Chesterton is suggesting, isn't it? That you sort out the diabolical from the divine?
This is another pet peeve of mine, but UFOs (much like, topically, the historicity of Christ) is another one of those "midwit meme" moments where both people who have studied the topic and people who just absorb what's on Ancient Aliens both take UFOs much more seriously than people who take the superficially informed view that there's nothing there.
I think it's incorrect to view this as trivially wrong. Imagine instead this was a purely scientific argument about a specific aspect of reality instead of a broader argument about the true nature of reality. Any would-be successor theory must explain why it is similar to and yet superior to alternative competing theories. Typically adherents of competing theories agree on the vast majority of the underlying facts, and so all theories will actually be quite similar, but the adherents of all of these theories must explain the distinctions in their theory from other theories, to show how it is the best theory.
If we threw out scientific theories on the basis that they were similar to (and therefore derivative of and thus incorrect) another similar theory we rejected, we would not be in a great place. Ultimately religion, too, is trying to explain reality as we know it, although on different terms.
And the reality is that materialism is unsatisfying, that people do have religious experiences and that those experiences sometimes conflict with each other.
I haven't, but noting the interest here in case I do.
Do atheists commit crime or otherwise contribute to social dysfunction at a greater rate than theists? Who gets credit, if the "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" leads to the moderately religious population falling below the critical mass necessary to socially constrain religious zealots?
Where does Chesterton suggest that we consider the possibility other religions are correct?
Yeah, I was hesitant to include UFOs, because the "U" tautologically includes real phenomena, but I couldn't think of a better "you know what I mean" example, off the top of my head. Perhaps "extra-terrestrials" would have been better.
If Jesus was unique, why would his story have any connection to the monomyth? And if his story is true, why would stories from unaffected cultures resemble his story?
Yes, at least in certain key aspects. Atheists are less likely to give to charity, for instance (I think that's the latest science), less likely to marry, and less likely to have children, all of which ultimately make society a less functional place.
Well, I dunno about that phrasing, I have not read Chesterton. But here's the quote:
In denying the doctrine of a religion you are (correctly or incorrectly) thereby sorting the diabolical from the divine, aren't you?
Well, first off, why (in your theory) do cultures unaffected by Christianity have stories resembling Christ!? Genuinely interested in your answer here!
From the Christian perspective, it's very clear that God, as revealed through Scripture, loves tropes (or memes) and Scripture plays with them repeatedly. It does not seem remotely odd from that perspective that similar ideas and tropes, echoing from the dawn of time and the Author of Man, would manifest in many separate cultures.
However if I put my Cranky Literalist hat on: I am actually very suspicious of the idea of the monomyth. I do think there are a number of tropes that are fairly common, perhaps to all mankind, possibly due to oral tradition but possibly also just due to human nature. (A separate POP SCIENCE tangent, but I am told there is evidence that oral traditions can persist up to 10,000 years, which is also, I am told, within "striking range" of humanity's most recent common ancestor, so presumably it's not crazy for cultures to share a monomyth by virtue of a common oral tradition). But from what I understand of the "monomyth" specifically, it derives from Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which, admittedly, I have not read. (One of my friends did read it, and gave me a very negative review, so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.) But I strongly suspect Campbell (who was influenced by Jung) constructed a Procrustean bed that anyone so inclined can torture nearly any notable person into a "monomyth."
Wikipedia quotes Campbell's formula as follows:
You could apply this to a historical figures like Julius Caesar pretty easily, it proves nothing about their historicity. (If I was a professional apologist I would have a better example, my understanding is that there are some really fun ones out there.) In fact from what I understand many primitive cultures have initiation ceremonies into adulthood which means that you could apply the monomyth neatly to...practically everyone!
Now, I should note that comparative mythology is outside of my area of expertise. But I suspect that people whose expertise it is tend to overfit it. I'm particularly more than a little suspicious of Campbell (and people like Lewis and Tolkien) because I don't trust them to do the work to show that the "monomyth" is actually the same worldwide instead of just, basically, Western.
In short, my suspicion is that while there will be parallels between Christ and various other (mythical and real) people, suggesting that the Christ story is part of a monomyth (when done by friend or foe) is more a literary exercise than anything, and that while the idea of a "monomyth" is interesting taking it literally and seriously is a mistake (not just theologically, but as a matter of history and literature.)
I'm open to contrary takes on this, though!
If I put my literary crank hat on, I am fucking sick of the monomyth. Yet another example of a measure becoming a target. Can I ask if you recall where you heard of an oral tradition lasting 10k years? That seems implausible and like it could only be supported by a society that treats oral traditions as evidence, aka a silly one.
My understanding is that indigenous Australians are speculated to have extremely long oral traditions because some of them seem to line up with astronomic/geological phenomena. Example press release with overview, linking to the actual research (which I have not read): https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2023/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives-in-the-world
ETA: also, thanks for connecting "the measure becoming the target" to the monomyth.
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Then by what definition of "diabolical" are other religions' miracles diabolical and how do we know they're diabolical? The review is very unclear about this.
In the case of prior myths and legends, I'd guess that the similarities are from blending common mythic elements with facts about the historical figure.
Sure, I agree the review is unclear about it, as it is a bit of a tangent. As I laid out in my longer comment, every hypothesis has to explain why it is different from every other hypothesis. In some cases this requires accepting opposed supernatural forces (actually in most cases, I think most, perhaps all, religious traditions teach that not all supernatural forces are aligned).
Yeah I mean, why are their common mythic elements? From what I understand Campbell was influenced by Jung, who had the psychological/mystical idea about some sort of collective unconscious (my apologies if I am butchering Jung, I have not read his work). But if you don't believe in the collective unconscious you have to do harder lifting.
From what I understand what e.g. Lewis does is says "isn't it odd that all stories have a Christ-figure-legend but none of the figures had historical backing until Christ shows up? That's very classic divine foreshadowing" which is an interesting take, but, well, I am not sure I buy the idea of a monomyth, at least in a very "tight" or specific sense.
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Western countries, including those in which the moderately religious population is boiled off more-or-less completely, do not seem to have problems with religious zealots. How much terrorism do the Dutch Calvinists or Laestadians do? Next to no one else goes to church in those countries.
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Yes, the review is not very rigorous. I became annoyed at the glaring rhetorical sleight-of-hand where a claim how some atheists were wrong about some things become "atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything" in the next sentence.
Taking as broad strokes as possible, I think the reality would be better described by delineating different domains of predictions. Many atheists were wrong in their sociological and psychological theories and predictions. Darwin remains ... approximately correct about biology. (Impressively correct, given nobody had a good idea how DNA works until a century later.)
Likewise, finding room for god in cosmology and physical constants is very much quite distant from the pre-Enlightenment Christianity, verily the OG goalpost shift. Many religious authorities and theologians have also been wrong about history and physics (ETA: inclding history and veracity of the scripture they supposedly knew). If you take religious philosopher who was successful with philosophical ideas --- my favorite is Francis Bacon, one of the kickstarters of Western scientific project --- it is difficult to argue that his contributions are intellectual victories of Christianity because they (his religious beliefs) are also easily attributable to widespread religious background baseline. He is rarely read as religious authority today.
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Arguing from miracles is just... painfully bad. If you have strong evidence that could be tested and perhaps replicated of supernatural phenomena occurring on Earth, that would be one thing. But this is like debating Trumpian 2020 election skeptics, where they're full of reasons to sneer and hate their outgroup, but if you ask them to make a positive case for their own arguments, they wither and try to deflect. The best evidence I can think of to dismiss these people as a group is the fact they've failed to find a single good example to rally around (be it an example of election fraud that was widespread enough to make a difference, or a miracle that genuinely occurred). They all have their own little gish gallop of bad reasons that primarily rely on the audience not being familiar with the arguments, because any evenhanded analysis would show their points are bunk.
I don't think our philosophy of science has a good way to handle non-repeatable results. If you look at something like the Oh-My-God particle detected exactly once in 1991, I'm not sure how I'd distinguish from a miracle. Sure, a scientific instrument saw it, but those aren't immune to weird things, like the faster-than-light observed neutrinos a decade ago. As a one-off observation, it's a bit more believable than, say, a coherent message, but if we instead observed the alien equivalent of the Arecibo message (sent exactly once in 1974), we'd be talking about something that would look, to me at least, rather miraculous.
I sort of agree with this at a broad level, but people claim miracles are happening quite frequently, so you'd expect at least one case to have evidence that's genuinely decent instead of just testimony.
There’s not a shortage of miracles with better than witness evidence though- the tilma of Juan Diego and the various Eucharistic miracles, for example.
I don't know about the tilma of Juan Diego, but I've looked into Eucharistic miracles a long time ago. All claims of such miracles are either 1) fringe enough that nobody cares, 2) unfalsifiable in that there's no evidence to check against, or 3) rely on witnesses.
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I think most of the miracles that people claim are happening quite frequently are things like:
I'm not really sure how to get proof that any of these things occur - most of them happen or may only happen inside the mind of the experiencer.
I could be wrong but my guess is that inexplicable healing (which would be the one pretty trivially verifiable thing, one would think) is not even particularly uncommon and that you don't hear about it because, well, does someone inexplicably healing strike you as slam-dunk proof of a miracle?
Apparently people inexplicably recovering from conditions such as dementia shortly before death is so common as to have its own name ("terminal lucidity") so it seems to me trivially easy to prove the "inexplicable healing" is real, but proving that the inexplicable healing involved supernatural powers is pretty hard and I'm not really sure how one would go about doing this.
I do think there have been experiments to see if people who were prayed over recovered at better rates than people who did not, and my recollection is that there did not seem to be a statistically significant difference. But it's been years since I read about that and I don't know any of the internals of the study, so I have no real informed opinion of its validity. At any rate, though, even an airtight study of that nature would not be able to prove that miracles were not real.
From a Bayesian perspective, I'd say that the claim that "miracles happen, but only in ways that are conveniently impossibly difficult to scientifically corroborate" is pretty good evidence that we should discount them unless we really do get some solid proof. This is especially true given humans have a known habit of attributing unexplainable phenomena on the supernatural, but which have later been conclusively proven to have mundane origins (e.g. primitive humans thinking thunder and lightning were gods fighting each other).
Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.
Well, firstly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And as discussed, the evidence is (and your priors should be) that inexplicable things do happen, sometimes with enough frequency to be given a name. Which leads to goalpost shifting, because in the mind of many people, giving something a name explains it! But that's actually not so.
But secondly, that's very specifically not my claim. I am sure if we bothered to go around and look either of us could find instances of scientifically corroborated miracles, in the sense that
My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?
This all reminds me of the fact that scientists refused to accept the existence of meteorites for a very long period of time because they were one-off events.
But anyway, the claim here being made (by Voxel) is that miracles (or supernatural or if you prefer inexplicable events) aren't very uncommon or, shall you say, extraordinary.
Yes, it is.
"P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)P(¬E)" is a tautology, true for for any valid probabilities and conditional probabilities P with events E and M. Likewise for the identity "P(¬E)=1-P(E)". Combining the two gives
P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
To say that "E is evidence for M" is to assert "P(M|E) > P(M)", and if we use that (along with "P(E)>0") we can derive the inequality
P(M) > P(M)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
Subtract "P(M)P(E)" from both sides, then divide by 1-P(E) (using "P(E)<1"), and we get
P(M) > P(M|¬E)
which is to say that "absence of E is evidence against M".
The magnitude of the evidence depends greatly on the specifics, and can be negligible, but it's never zero.
Perhaps it is more accurate to my position to say that absence of admitted evidence is not evidence of absence. Because there's "evidence" for practically every insane position in the world. This leads people to want to exclude evidence on the basis of it not being high-quality enough. Now, a certain amount of this is admirable and good, because it keeps you sane!
But some people, even subconsciously, use this to simply exclude all the evidence they like, and then having excluded all the evidence they dislike, declare there to be no evidence to the contrary position.
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It's not conclusive evidence but it should certainly raise our suspicious given that 1) humans frequently and erroneously attribute mundane phenomena to the supernatural (it's an extremely common human logical fault), 2) with so many claims, you'd assume at least a few would have clear evidence of occurring and not having ready explanations. It's similar to UFO sightings, which were quite common a few decades ago. If they were real, the proliferation of smartphones with cameras should have led to a surge in evidence of their existence. Instead, the lack of such evidence is a good indication that it was bunk all along. That's not to say we should be completely closeminded on the issue if evidence does arise, but we should wait for that compelling evidence first.
Minor or even moderate healing is a bad metric since the human body is extremely complicated, so mundane phenomena could easily be confused for the supernatural. Moreover, health is something people are very emotional about, so they pray about it frequently. But if people were e.g. regularly doing crazy things like being able to walk on water or (as Jiro mentioned) regrowing lost limbs, then that would be a better starting point.
This story should raise your opinion of science, not lower it. Rocks falling from the sky would seem like superstitions in the early enlightenment, but Jean-Baptiste Biot collected evidence it actually occurred and science was persuaded relatively quickly. Miracles should be held to the same standard.
Claims of miracles aren't uncommon, I'm sure. But that just proves that humans are fallible fools in their explanations.
I mean, my superficial understanding is that there are supposedly such instances (for instance my understanding is that the Catholic church investigates claims of miraculous healing fairly regularly, and I think that they use e.g. relevant medical professionals to investigate these claims as part of the canonization process).
Were you familiar with this? Sadly I know little about the topic specifically, so I feel under-equipped to make very specific arguments based on specific cases. If you are familiar with it, I would be very interested in your analysis. If you aren't, then perhaps we're being a bit presumptive to assume there aren't at least a few with clear evidence of occurring and no handy ready explanations?
I know more about this topic. I find that particular XKCD to be extremely facile (have you tried using a cell phone for aviation photography?), but I suppose it serves a socially useful purpose inasmuch as it prevents people from actually doing any research into the topic, which periodically ruins people's lives. I will just link to my earlier analysis of this position.
Yes, and I think healing is one of the easiest to use a scientific test on. (I think the bar the Catholic church uses for canonization is supposed to be higher for this reason).
Well, and this is part of my point, if people regularly regrew lost limbs (as they might with future technology) then it would not be considered miraculous, would it? I doubt you consider terminal lucidity miraculous, even though there apparently is clear evidence of it occurring and relatively scant evidence of good explanations. (I could be wrong about this, though, it's not my area of expertise).
This is the thing, though, is that the "humans are fallible fools" position extends to scientists and doctors. Which means that it provides a very convenient "out" for disbelieving in anything, no matter how reasonable belief in that thing is. There's no inherent limit on how many times you could say "humans are fallible fools" - if I were to bring you a hundred cases where doctors attested to a miracle, it would remain just as true the first time as the last.
And I don't even fully disagree! Humans are fallible fools! But ultimately I think that a lot of people, if they were being honest, they would refuse to believe in miracles unless they saw them personally, or, if they were particularly hardcore, even if they experienced them personally (this is the case with Michael Shermer, as I recall). The problem, though, is that if held in isolation it essentially lets people comfortably avoid updating their priors and lets them drift along with what is socially acceptable to believe instead of what is true. Anything upsetting can be dismissed as people being stupid.
Look, I apologize if I am coming across as a little testy. My very first comment on here was in response to someone saying "well if other countries had UFO programs, I would take them seriously." I provided some of the specific evidence he was ostensibly interested in, but my perception, based on his response, was that he was more interested in shifting the goalposts so that he didn't have to take UFOs seriously. (No offense to said user, and I hope I am wrong!)
Now, what I mind isn't people who are skeptical of miracles, or UFOs. I think measured skepticism is good and necessary. But I want some sort of framework to that skepticism, not merely a blank check to dismiss anything that is slightly out of step with the dogma of the day. Things that, in limited doses, might be true and helpful - things like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" or "humans are gullible fools" still have a tremendous potential to become thought-terminating cliches.
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I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.
If you are asking "couldn't they have healed normally?" that's TA's point: "miracles" happen in ways that are hard to scientifically corroborate. It's always healing something that naturally heals in 10% of patients or otherwise could happen, not regrowing a limb. Then yes, the CAT scan doesn't prove it's miraculous, but that's not because it never could for any miracle, that's because the miracles are conveniently hard to corroborate.
If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.
If you mean "how do we tell between a miracle and aliens shooting their heal ray at us, or some other explanation that's weird but doesn't involve God", the answer is that saying "it's either a miracle or aliens" is a really good start and drastically increases the credibility of religion, even if aliens can't be ruled out yet. Once that happens, we can proceed from there.
Except of course, it doesn't happen.
See, this is a catch-22. If things "don't just happen" then we know they aren't real. If things that shouldn't happen happen (such as dementia patients recovering their cognizance) than it's just a random mystery of the universe, but not a miracle. If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!"
Which I don't even think is necessarily a bad attitude - in my opinion there needs to be a nonzero amount of healthy skepticism in the world. I can think of plausible materialistic mechanisms for terminal lucidity. I'm sure with ten minutes of research I could do the same for the regrowth of limbs. Shoot, I can also think of plausible scientific mechanisms for pretty much any miracle you can think of, including regrown limbs, if you posit Sufficiently Advanced Science (which was Clark points out is indistinguishable from magic). If you posit a world where entities indistinguishable from angels were scientifically verified to exist, a nonzero number of people would just be like "woah its The Entities up to their advanced science again" instead of becoming religious converts (and in fact this describes a lot of the UFO community, particularly the more "out there" parts).
I'm sorry, I guess I am rambling. My point is that I don't think there's a single standard from skeptics at large here, as a general rule, just some very mobile goalposts. If you disagree, and want to post the specific evidence you'd need to believe in something miraculous, as well as what you would define "miraculous" as, maybe we could investigate whether your criteria have been fulfilled.
One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud. And in fact this is what happens, there are plenty of allegedly scientific attempts to probe paranormal topics and the accusation hurled at the experimenters is always that they are frauds or that their study designs suck. Which is probably true! Probably most study designs suck! So any time you bring up a study or a "medically verified miracle" it is very easy to dismiss it on the basis of "fraudulence and/or incompetence."
I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a good perspective on their methodology (and miracles are not really my jam anyway, so I don't good sources or really strong opinions on the famously reported ones) but my understanding is that the Catholic church actually does scientifically investigate miracles as part of their canonization process. Maybe some other Mottizens can point out some specific compelling cases. But I doubt anyone who is not already sympathetic will find them persuasive since "well they are motivated to find miracles," which again goes to a catch-22, since few people who are not so motivated bother to go looking for them.
The long and short of it is, though, as I understand it, is that there have been scientific investigations of miracles, they do convince some people, and other people remain unconvinced.
Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent
magican invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them. But I don't particularly think this increases the credibility of religion, it just decreases the credibility of scientists. Which is much the same reaction skeptics of "woo" have when research that seems to validate "woo" comes out.More options
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The claim is quite specifically that Bayesianism is incapable of handling certain truths. It is entirely possible for something to be absolutely true and immensely unlikely.
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Here's a quick look at the methodology of several studies. One of the largest studies, which famously reported a negative result, included people from many religions but barely any Protestant Christians.
Thanks, interesting!
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Most of my (Christian) circles have been tepid on "Believe," largely because making a general argument for believing something isn't very strong without making an argument for a specific happening. It's not clear that there is a category that can be called "Religion and Spirituality" which can be generalized, that includes various world cultural practices, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc. Arguing for Athiesm vs Religion in the general doesn't work out super well.
I'm inclined to agree here - Psmith goes off more in his own direction, but I think Douthat's work is somewhat problematic from the perspective of Christianity itself, and I would presume from the perspective of most great 'religions'.
Probably the most valuable advice Douthat gives is that interested, open-minded seekers ought to genuinely consider the great world religions and immerse themselves in those traditions - the centuries or millennia of practice and meditation and speculation that they hold are not to be dismissed.
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No, they don't.
If there was even one example of an honest-to-god miracle for which uncontrovertable evidence existed, that alone would be sufficient to prove God (or, at least, the supernatural). Of course, such evidence does not exist.
Hahahaha was this written in 2013, a mere two years before the first story came out about the UFO that caught on FLIR and radar, which was then recycled into the New York Times, pretty much forcing an avalanche of "okay so UFOs are real" confessions from .gov types? Impeccable timing.
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There's the rub, right? Miracles tend to be one-off historical events, not laws of nature you can subject to experiment, so you end up having to rely on witnesses. And witnesses are easily dismissed as liars or suffering from delusions.
Though even the kinds of miracles that can be literally put under a microscope seem not uncontrovertable. Take Eucharistic miracles for which there are consistent findings that the material being examined is human heart tissue, that had been subjected to great stress, was very recently alive, of blood type AB, and with DNA that can't be sequenced. Some of the folks that investigate these even contracted with secular labs to do sample processing to avoid the appearance of bias.
What about all those sites, like the grave of Padre Pio where pilgrims regularly report miraculous cures? Or the spring waters at Lourdes? The latter has 70 recognized miracles by the Catholic church, with OOMs more claimed over 150 years. I'm pretty sure if that if it kept up the pace, we could dispense with hospitals for all expenses paid tours.
Sadly, lying and delusions are the only sensible responses when it comes to such poorly documented incidents which conveniently avoid cameras and MRIs. Funny how that works, and even funnier that people take them seriously despite this.
It's a funny deity that throws fire and brimstone about in front of crowds of hundreds or thousands, yet shies away from electronic media or even film.
My textbooks must have skipped over findings of such magnitude. I'd love to see evidence for these claims. It would have to be a great deal of evidence to overcome the inherent tallness of the tale.
I hate to respond with “read this sizable book” but I am curious how a skeptical medical doctor like yourself would respond to it.
I was intrigued by these miracles and so read A Cardiologist Examines Jesus by Dr. Franco Serafini. I came away with the impression that this would be too hard a hoax to coordinate and the odds of congruence are between miracles are very small, and so there’s very likely something to them.
He comes to the subject with a faithful but also rigorous attitude and dismisses at least one of the miracles he investigates.
It’s a fairly easy read, matter of fact and right to the point.
After reading it I searched for refutations and found nothing convincing. These are extraordinary claims, but it seems they don’t get serious consideration on account of that alone, not on the details being incorrect.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateACatholic/comments/1gjnkac/concerns_regarding_the_historicity_and_the/
This has a substantial rebuttal. The core claims are hilariously overblown for anyone with even a passing familiarity with medicine or lab work.
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But never video footage.
You're talking about literal transubstantiation? hang on, how do they know it's human heart tissue if they can't sequence the DNA? what does it even mean to not be able to sequence the DNA? Like, the machine broke?
Hoaxes are a known source of Christian relics. Apparently there are over 30 holy nails in various european curches and cathederals today! there were probably enough holy nails and pieces of the true cross floating around 15th century europe to fill a warehouse.
Realized I didn’t address your first question: video does exist, but suffers the same problem that it can be dismissed out of hand as a hoax.
Here’s video of a spontaneously bleeding and pulsing host contained in a monstrance: https://aleteia.org/2019/06/17/this-eucharistic-host-was-filmed-bleeding-and-pulsating-like-a-heart-on-fire
And video of an apparently beating host: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251891/a-new-eucharistic-miracle-in-mexico
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There are human specific proteins that can be identified independent of DNA sequencing.
Grok suggests that it’s likely a failure to replicate the DNA via PCR that is at fault, with the report on the Buenos Aires miracle citing this explicitly, with other reports being more vague about failures to sequence.
My conversation with Grok also reminded me that the Eucharistic miracle blood type of AB is also the same observed in the Shroud of Turin.
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In my humble opinion, video footage alone is actually not super good evidence. If it was, you (and everyone else) would believe in Bigfoot and UFOs, which you can see by the dozens on YouTube.
Well, yes, it often isn't super good evidence. They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially, and statistically you would expect some of those captures to be high quality, but this does not happen. The fact that this does not happen is strong evidence against such phenomenon being real. Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.
On the subject of UFOs, both here and in your other comments you are fudging definitions pretty hard in order to conflate unlike things.
UFOs - meaning flying objects that are unidentified - certainly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and appear to perform incredible maneuvers - plausibly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and actually do perform incredible maneuvers - probably do not exist, but I would place low probability on some weak versions of this being true. The fact that these tic-tacs apparently like to hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets provides a convenient out to the 'why so little footage from 2010 onward?' question.
Flying Saucers - meaning alien spaceships that abduct folk from Arkansas and anally probe them and/or take them on whistle stop tours of the solar system - certainly do not exist, for the same reason that Bigfoot does not exist. The XKCD comic uses the term 'Flying Saucer' not 'UFO'. I expect this is deliberate.
Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.
There are some pretty decent videos of Bigfoot, but I have no strong opinion on their veracity. I think it would be fairly easy to fake something like that. Which goes to my point: video evidence by itself is not great evidence.
First off, I think we should all just acknowledge that cell phone cameras are not good at taking nighttime photographs at any real distance. I don't own the latest and greatest, so maybe they stole a march on me. But if hypothetically I had an encounter with a real Bigfoot (or an ape or, heck, a deer) at night and took a photo of it I would expect it would look low quality.
But secondly, by this argument, there are no weird (but perfectly mundane) things flying out of Dreamland, but there are. They just don't want to be seen, so they hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets. In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public. (There are always one or two photos of "weird stuff in the sky" that circulate, so maybe one of them was a NGAD demonstrator).
If the position of XKCD is that an intelligence [including potentially our own] that can engineer a craft superior in performance (as reported by US defense officials) to conventional aircraft cannot keep a low profile in a way similar to that of our own bloated inefficient corrupt government bureaucracy can then, well, that position is very silly! Particularly when you realize that there are a couple of ways, such as lens detection or emissions detection, that would allow you to steer clear of would-be photographers, so if the 2024 iPhone - which is not an ideal platform for aviation photography - is really the threat vector you want to defend against you probably have options there, especially if you have advanced technology at your fingertips.
And indeed it turns out that if you read the actual US government reports on UFOs you'll note the term "signature management" is used. In fact one might certainly wonder why hypothetical UFOnauts would get caught on camera (or radar) at all, and if UFOs were real and preferred not to get caught on camera, one might expect that high-powered military sensors would be disproportionately likely to capture compelling evidence. And interestingly from what I recall the F/A-18s started picking up UAP on their radar regularly after receiving an upgraded AESA, which could be indica of a mundane sensor issue but also could be a sign that that a hypothetical UFO designer's signature management model was not up to the task of deceiving latest-gen hardware.
That's certainly begging the question.
The US didn't want its test flights to be seen by the public, and so tried to conceal them. Religious believers don't claim that God is deliberately concealing miracles from scientists.
I actually suspect there's a diversity of thought on this among religious believers.
But again, my understanding is that Catholics do apply something like the scientific method to miracles, so they would probably say that you are correct, and that scientists can in fact find evidence of them.
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Of course. If Bigfoot and UFOs were both real and capturable on camera, I'd hear about it from CNN and the like, not no-name Youtube channels.
This still leaves the "it's faked from one level above them" out, as you've noted.
No offense, but I'm not sure you would, since UFOs have been captured on camera (military targeting systems no less!) and it's been covered many many times in outlets like the New York Times and, yes, CNN.
Here's a video of the then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe (merely on Fox News, but still) pointedly telling the audience that US spy satellites and other sensors catch UFOs from time to time. (And although I don't think this made the news, here's relevant documents from the NRO about a possible UAP image capture and discussion of a "UAP model" as part of their SENTIENT AI image intelligence program.)
Yes, there's been definition fuzziness/creep between "a UFO is, literally, a Flying Thing we, the general public, are Not Sure What It Is" and "a UFO is an alien encounter".
Sure. I am not convinced they are aliens (but the cutting-edge UFO Believers/Enthusiasts/Fanatics often don't think this either). But (imho) that doesn't make them mundane and certainly not a good example of something that's obviously not real.
They are a pretty good example of something "science" has a hard time dealing with since you can't snap your fingers and reproduce them in a test tube. In that sense at least they are miraculous.
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I haven't read the book, but read the review. I definitely find it unpersuasive, focusing on miracles and cosmology feels like a bad approach if you're trying to convince atheists.
Like yes, atheists in the past (and present!) have made incorrect predictions about how people would behave without religious guidance. That's more a failure of their understanding of people, not of the core question of god's existence. And anyways, the modern world's technology, which works perfectly well when designed and operated by atheists and the religious alike, has produced common, everyday wonders that in previous eras been absolutely godlike.
Likewise trying to argue that religious views offer better views of cosmology, or that QM is weird in a way that can be described as "metaphysical"? Like sure, some scientists have found QM weird, or had preconceived notions of what the nature of the universe is. But I'd argue they've gotten a lot closer than religious though ever has.
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C. S. Lewis laid out the central "similarity to monomyth argument" in more detail in his essay "Religion Without Dogmas" He's a key quote:
"If you start from a naturalistic philosophy, then something like the view of Euhemerus or the view of Frazer is likely to result. But I am not a naturalist. I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief."
In his autobiography he discussed the "difference from monomyth" argument:
"I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not “a religion”, nor “a philosophy”. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."
I fail to understand why the similarity of the gospels to myth, whether for, or against, or both(?) has relevance to whether or not god exists.
Like "humans tend to tell similar sorts of stories, with some differences" is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to these kinds of arguments.
You're thinking of God's existence as an empirical question whereas Lewis is not thinking about it in those terms and considers it a spiritual question, wherein truth takes a more directional form as the nature of things is considered ineffable.
Humans tell similar stories because those stories are true. And they tend to be true insofar as they are similar.
You can't refute the virtue of heroism, that's a category error. There's no evidence that's going to come in and convince the nature of the human experience of the universe to be different from what it is fundamentally.
"God exists" really means "the universe has intentional meaning". Is it more right (in a axiological sense) to believe in this proposition or not? That's essentially what religion is about. Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven.
You can arrive at some rationalistic explanation for this through some evolutionary model and arrive at some model of values that way, but it's eventually going to become homomorphic to religion and natural law insofar as one is willing to have the humility to provide for being inside what's being modeled.
I think this take would have been considered blasphemous in most religious societies.
Religions have both exoteric and esoteric meaning, and it is usually forbidden to mix them in public, that is correct.
I don't recommend evaluating the content of a philosophy by what random people off the street tolerate.
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The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.
What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.
The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.
I find the concern with one's corporeal life instead of the symbolic meaning thereof to be the cthonic position here actually.
Souls aren't material objects.
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I don't think so. Orthodox Christian theology indicates that God does not exist in any sense that we could comprehend as existence. To say that God exists would be considered inaccurate, as the notion of 'existence' we're (capable of) using does not apply here. But it would also be wrong to say that God does not exist, as our idea of that is wrong too. God is beyond existence and nonexistence.
How do you explain pre-Christian Judaism, in which major schools of thought denied an afterlife and most of the major ones said 'idk' at best? Personally, while I like my (wrong) notions of what eternal existence will be, I'm much more concerned about what we might call ultimate consequence. Meaning, if you will. I don't need personal eternal existence to live a meaningful life.
Or, you know, any pagan religion which doesn't posit an afterlife, or indicates that the afterlife is fairly uniformly terrible.
I'd take being sure of that in a heartbeat.
This narrative just doesn't ring true to me at all, not least for the reasons above.
To this comment I'll append some words by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory.
Did not expect to see a reference to Fr. Thomas Hopko here… he baptized me as an infant.
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This reads like modern neogender theory.
Yeschad.jpg
Liberalism is rebellion incarnate, and rebellion incarnate works only by self-deification. Neogender theory is describing the self as God.
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I'm always frustrated when these topics come up because people with totally different vocabularies of the same words just talk past each other because the cogs don't roll the same way.
What's a miracle to you?
If your mother falls deathly ill of an incurable illness, you piously pray every day while doing everything in your power to sate her and she makes an unexpected recovery, did a miracle occur?
Did the laws of physics get suspended to make this happen or is your mother just so extremely lucky? Is there a functional difference between these two statements?
One of the main innovations of Abrahamism is the metaphysical claim that fortune or fate isn't separate from the intentional will behind the existence of the universe. This is usually called Providence.
Insofar as miracles make sense as a concept within this framework, one has to distinguish between the general form that upholds the natural order and the special form where God (the breath behind the universe) intervenes more directly in the lives of people.
Positions on this latter category vary of course. But it doesn't seem to me that this general metaphysical principle is a testable claim.
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You are right to feel underwhelmed, because Lewis wasn't so much putting forward an argument in favor of Christianity there but responding to one of the current significant arguments against Christianity of his day: that because Christianity is similar to other myths, it must not be true. As Lewis wrote,
In other words, yes, "people tend to tell the same kind of stories" is a perfectly reasonable explanation of the phenomenon. But its not a good positive argument against Christianity being true, which is what atheists were claiming at the time.
*Meaning, begging the question.
Hm, thanks for that explanation, I see what he's going for and why he'd make both kinds of arguments. Kind of agree with him that similarity to other religions is not really the best angle to go for if you're trying to refute Christianity. (I guess I think there's a bit of an angle here -> it's weak evidence that Christianity is the result of the same process that makes humans tell pagan myths, but not really enough on it's own)
Lewis would agree, but would say that the process that makes humans tell pagan myths could be the fact that there is a God, so it's not good evidence either way.
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No. This implies that everyone has evidence for miracles, and only by faith can they be denied. This is just plain false. Likewise, many who believe in miracles have only books to go on. This feels like a slightly less awful version of the "how can you not believe, when God is clearly pumping divine sensation into your system?" argument.
Evidence and proof are different things. The Eucharistic miracles, the healings given by the saints, the holy tilma, etc- these are individually weak arguments for the truth of the Catholic faith(and even non-Catholic Christians retreat to the evidence for the Catholic faith to try to prove the Christian religion in general). But when you combine them they become a pattern.
The 'it's just witnesses' argument is also spurious because this is how we know about every other historical event. Some of them had too many witnesses, some of them skeptical, to just be made up. And no, people in 1917 couldn't have faked the miracle of the sun. Nor could Joseph of Cupertino have caused himself to levitate using stage magic. Padre Pio couldn't have caused a woman's eyes to regrow. Legions of incorrupt saints come before modern embalming techniques.
This does not mean, of course, that every purported miracle is miraculous- the Roman Catholic Church itself regularly dismisses them as fake.
Uh huh, now step aside, every other religion in the world is in line behind you waiting to give the same speech.
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Chesterton argues (quite rightly) that everyone does have evidence for miracles: the evidence of testimony. People have been writing about miracles and testifying to having witnessed miracles since as far back in history as we have records for. People report the supernatural and miraculous all the time. Chesterton's point is that theists can take each miracle claim and accept it based on the evidence: is this person a reliable reporter, how likely are there to be natural explanations, how probable is it that it was a trick, etc. But the atheist must begin by dismissing the possibility that the miracle could have happened at all, because the atheist is committed to the "doctrine" that miracles do not happen. Even if the evidence was very strong that a miracle occurred, the atheist would alternative explanations to be more probable from the get go, since he "knows" that miracles do not happen.
Here's the full quote, which captures the nuances a bit better:
Democracy is a system of government, not a scientific method.
In the book the quote is from (Orthodoxy) Chesterton uses the word "democracy" to generally mean the liberal idea that ordinary people should have a vote, as opposed to aristocracy where only the elite have a say in things (which was a live issue at the time in Britain). Here's where he defines his use of the term:
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Sure the atheist is more sure that miracles don't exist, but that's kind of the definition of an atheist. They've seen less evidence that miracles are true, and no direct evidence, only testimony. And testimony is weak evidence, especially for questions core to people's identity and upbringing, where even if the person can be trusted, there's also clearly incentive avoid skepticism.
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Religion is hardly a static target here, nor is it a unified concept like "science" (although maybe science is more fragmented than advertised: ask some physicists if they "trust the science" in a random economics or psychology paper). There are huge religious changes in the last century, often to the point of causing minor schisms or schism-like breaks. Vatican II, a whole bunch of discourse on the role of the church around moral issues from WWII to Vietnam, rules on who can be church leadership (women, gays), and so forth. And some have disagreed with these changes being "self-corrections".
Somewhat uncharitably, I'd ask the physicists how they feel about the replication crisis, and then use that questionable inerrancy to decide that the entire edifice of science should be thrown out with the bathwater. Analogously, I think religion can bring decent value to how humans behave and interact that isn't dependent on its absolute inerrancy.
Ask them how they feel about "dark matter"
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Are there spiritual or philosophical domains for which Religion A's clerics say "That's not my area of expertise - go ask Religion B's clerics?"
What does "religion can bring decent value to how humans behave and interact" have to do with belief?
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True if big, but is it big? I am really interested to see comprehensible statistics of miracles per capita.
The historian Dr. Keener researched how common miracle claims are both currently and throughout history and published his results in two big ol' books. Unfortunately I don't own those two tomes so I don't have the hard data to throw at you, but based on reviews and interviews it seems that Keener has collected data on millions of miracle claims all over the world and finds that such claims are still pretty common.
For some statistics, according to Pew Research 29% of Americans claim that they had an experience of being in touch with the dead, 18% claim to have seen a ghost. In a more global study they found that among Christians (sadly they didn't study everyone, but given that 1/3rd of people are Christians it still covers a lot of ground) in the U.S. 29% claim to have witnessed divine healings, 39% say so in Brazil, 26% in Chile, 56% in Guatemala, 71% in Kenya, 62% in Nigeria, 38% in South Africa, 44% in India, 38% in the Philippines, and 10% in South Korea. That's a lot of miracle claims! It's certainly not uncommon.
EDIT: Also don't forget that the 2020 SSC Survey asked people if they ever had a spiritual experience or a religious experience. 21.6% said they had a spiritual experience, with 18.7% saying they might have had one, and 8.2% said they had a religious experience with 8.9% saying they might have. And this was a survey in which over 60% of the respondents were atheists, a very different sample from the general public (which, in the US, is about 4% atheist).
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I haven't read the book (though you've piqued my interest) but I have this to add: in my time as a missionary in the Czech Republic (one of the most atheistic countries on earth) I'd estimate that a majority of the atheists I met there still believed in all sorts of new age mysticism and general woo.
This may be openness-to-experience bias in the sample of people who are likely to interact with a missionary.
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But in other countries most of these people would be ‘not very religious’(a sign of crossing the road to avoid black cats) and not atheist.
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Here come bad news for both atheistic and religious talking points. Czechia (together with former East Germany) is indeed one of world's most atheistic countries.
Atheists would predict it would be earthly paradise of science, logic and reason, theists would predict it would be hell of earth, charnel house of ceaseless rape and murder.
In reality, it is ordinary small European country, not much different from neigboring heavily religious Poland. Maybe the real black pill is that religion (or lack of it) is really not much important.
Large effects deserve large treatments. I'm not sure that the way most modern religions are actually practiced would cause significant impacts on people's lives.
Islam being an exception, but probably not as big as some people think.
A median Christian believer is attending church a few times a year and has mostly segregated that set of beliefs from everything else they do.
A median Muslim in the US is going through the motions of praying a few times a day, and going to a mosque pretty often. But probably not making a pilgrimage to mecca, probably cheating during Ramadan, definitely not wanting anything to do with the extremist parts of their religion, and occasionally having alcohol.
Well, what Douthat means by "everyone shall be religious"? "Everyone should be regularly weekly attending church/synagogue/mosque", or "Everyone should follow the holy book of his faith to the letter"
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Poland actually had weekly mass attendance at a majority level less than ten years ago.
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Or, maybe, the other similar experiences that those two countries have gone through over the last hundred years, plus the common christian heritage for roughly a millennium before that, outweigh the last generation or two's habits when it comes to organized religion.
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