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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   32406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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John Psmith reviewed "Believe, by Ross Douthat"

Imagine a prophet who tells you he has a special understanding of the universe and can predict a far-future eschatological event with certainty. This might be one of the many apocalyptic preachers of a conventionally religious sort, or it could be a different sort of prophecy like the believer in scientific Marxism who has deduced the laws of history, or the charismatic business leader explaining to investors why he will inevitably conquer the world of B2B SaaS.

...

I am speaking, of course, of the wrongest and worst prophets who ever lived: the last few centuries of atheists.

People really don’t like it when you point this out, but past generations of atheists made specific and detailed predictions about what would happen as religion loosened its grip on the mind, or what science would reveal about the nature of the universe. Those predictions have been uniformly awful. For example: Enlightenment-era skeptics acknowledged that there were a vast number of purported miracles, apparitions, and self-reported mystical experiences. They conjectured, reasonably enough, that some of the supposed miracles were “pious frauds,” and the rest were delusions brought on by religious superstition. They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population).

...

The fact that the atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything doesn’t actually have much bearing on whether God exists. Atheism has adapted. Today, instead of telling you that reports of miracles will inevitably decline, they will tell you (with equal confidence) that they will continue at the same rate forever because of…something to do with fMRI machines.2 And the eternal and unchanging universe is back, baby: it’s just the multiverse cosmology of eternal inflation now (which even takes care of the fine-tuning problem).3 There are about as many ways to be an atheist as there are to be religious, so why should we care that one particular set of guys from the 17th through early 20th centuries got repeatedly owned by events? It didn’t happen, but they deserve credit for making a specific prediction.

Ross Douthat cares, because he thinks that much of the intellectual and cultural power of modern secularism comes from a widespread but undeserved sense that the God-deniers have been proven right about stuff. Another way of putting it is that the default position for the intellectually serious has shifted from belief to unbelief. Among the educated class, at least, it used to be only the brave weirdos who were atheists, and now it’s only the brave weirdos who aren’t. Douthat quotes a Tom Stoppard play where a philosopher muses: “It is a tide which has turned only once in human history… there is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” And Douthat thinks that this shift of the default, this sense that maybe at one point in the past it was reasonable to believe, but that today it is not, is completely 100% made up and unearned, founded on a self-congratulatory retconning of history.

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:

In the Middle Ages, many miracles had the official sanction of the state, the universities, and all the other epistemic organs of society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many miracles were recorded. And as I said at the start of this review, secularists like David Hume assumed that as soon as the miraculous lost official sanction and encouragement, the flood of stories would dry up as people stopped claiming or pretending to experience them. But what actually happened was that disenchantment didn’t really happen on the ground. People still report miraculous healings, experiences of contact with a sublime Other, mystical visions, even really crazy stuff like levitation or bilocation. In this respect our society is a bit like a communist one, where the entire ruling class adheres strictly to a certain dogma and everybody else quietly pretends to believe it while actually disbelieving it, because it clashes profoundly with their direct experience of the world. Disenchantment is official but virtual. The official encouragement and recognition of miracles stopped, but the miracles kept pouring in. Douthat discusses many of them, some quite hard to dismiss as an individual’s hallucination or forgery because they were seen by many witnesses, others reported by committed materialists who recount them the way a religious believer might shamefully discuss almost losing their faith. Or as Chesterton once put it:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

But isn’t the very torrent of miracles itself a problem for believers? After all, one of the most noteworthy things about wondrous or uncanny or miraculous events is that they seem to happen worldwide, to people of every imaginable creed or culture, at roughly the same rate. Shouldn’t this count as evidence against most religions, which claim that their own doctrine is true and all others are false?9 Curiously enough, no. If you actually go and look at how even the most jealous and narrowminded faiths in history interpreted the miracles reported by heathens, you find that basically none of them deny their reality. Frequently they will interpret the miracles bestowed upon followers of rival religions as acts of diabolical rather than divine power, but only very rarely do you see them claiming that they are fake. Chesterton again:

No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

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:

All of this sound and fury and debate over who wrote the story has a way of distracting us from the story itself, and I’d like to end this review by encouraging you to read it even if you don’t believe it. The narrative of the Gospel has been the single biggest influence on the millennia-old civilization that you (probably) are a child of. But it isn’t just the story of that civilization, because it’s also somehow had an electrifying effect on just about every other culture that’s ever come into contact with it. Forget all your beliefs or disbeliefs or presuppositions, doesn’t that sound interesting? Isn’t that the sort of thing that an educated person in the year 2025 should have direct experience with?

So pick a Gospel, any Gospel (yes, they have some important disagreements on the details,12 but the overall story is the same), and try just reading it through from start to finish. Maybe next week would be an auspicious time. And as you read, try to forget all the associations you have with Christianity, positive or negative, and read the words. If you want, you can imagine yourself in the cultural frame of the first people to encounter the story, and who were much more shocked by it than you will be. But even you, who have spent your whole life subtly marinating in the moral and cultural world that this story built, will be a little bit shocked if you read the words. Because just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story.

It begins, like countless Indo-European myths, with the miraculous birth of a great hero, and a succession of dangers that befall him in childhood. This is classic perennialist stuff, maybe the biggest cliché ever, repeated in myths and legends all over the world. Maybe that should bother Christians, because it means our story is one myth among many others. Or maybe it shouldn’t, because if our story is true, then it is in a sense the story, and we should expect to find echoes of it in all times and places, like refractions in a funhouse mirror. The one thing that’s already strange about this story, though, is how insistent it is on its own specific historicity. All the other myths and legends of demigods and heroes tend to begin with something like: “long ago when the earth was young,” or “once upon in a strange and faraway land.” But this one has dates, and at the time it was written those dates were recent! It cites names of witnesses, and mentions specific people and places. That doesn’t make it true, of course, maybe they all made it up in a conspiracy of lies, but it does make it different from most legends of a great hero sent by the gods.

Anyway, the hero is born, survives his childhood trials, is officially recognized and charged with a mission by the gods, and then begins roaming the countryside: recruiting a fellowship, righting wrongs, and lifting up the sorrowful. Once again, we’re solidly in monomyth territory, this is the plot of like every adventure story ever. But wait a minute…look more closely and the details are all subtly wrong. Like, the “meeting the mentor” stage of the hero’s journey isn’t supposed to have the mentor immediately proclaiming the young hero as Lord. And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?

...

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?

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.

I think most of the miracles that people claim are happening quite frequently are things like:

  • Inexplicable healing
  • People understanding things in a foreign language
  • Ghosts
  • Unusual or prophetic dreams

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.

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.

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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