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In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
Seems simple enough right?
Whoops.
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'. Christian theology is a complete mess because they go in with the answer in mind and then come up with justifications. They just make up all kinds of nonsense about 'free will' requiring everyone to suffer because of a snake and an apple. Or there being a great plan that requires Christians to suffer and get wrecked by huge natural disasters beyond their ability to handle. Omnipotence and benevolence does not require there to be random earthquakes and tsunamis that destroy you, it's pure cope to think that there's a plan behind it all or that 'this is the best of all possible worlds'. Theologians have spent thousands if not millions of man-years justifying this stuff but still hard-lose to the Epicurean argument because there is no satisfactory answer.
OK, you can be perfectly happy as a Christian ignoring these abstract issues and have a decent life which is better than can be said for many modern ideologies. Thousands of years have been spent turning the silliness into metaphors and capitalizing on the strengths, rationalizing and streamlining the religion.
But all that is ironically enough built on a foundation of sand. Once people realize that the astronomy and history is all wrong, the philosophy is silly, the predictions are wrong, the blankslatism and universal equality of iron-age institution-building isn't so relevant given modern technologies and culture... they also move on from the good elements of Christianity, the prohibition on incest and the well-functioning family structures. The solution is not to return to Christianity but to move on and do the hard work of getting ideology that actually fits with reality. This is extremely difficult and dangerous work but necessary nonetheless.
This is definitely what it looks like in TheMotte and adjacent places. People lean hard on the coordination power and social stability aspects and steer well clear of trying to explain nature in religious terms and just shrug at the historical narratives in religious doctrine being very odd. Meanwhile religions keep losing smart and sincere people who start out taking this stuff at face value, realize it doesn't come together, and end up feeling betrayed and lied to. There doesn't seem to be much of a way back either, unless you end up fully convinced in the "it doesn't matter if it's true" mindset after a lifetime of figuring out what is true being important to you. This hasn't always been the case, the 19th century introduced the double whammy of the theory of evolution showing up and a consensus forming that the bible's historical narrative is mostly mythical. I keep wondering what this will do to the religions in the long term, since the process has really only been going for a century or two at this point. You keep losing people who are both smart and sincere, and who you're left with either isn't very smart or isn't very sincere.
I've leaned on its empiric benefit here because I question the receptiveness of this audience to moral condemnation.
It's the one-two, we of low agreeableness thinking we know better than the tradition civilization stands upon, and of simple rebelliousness at the idea of being judged and found unrighteous. I hate to invoke Pascal, but something runs parallel here. If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself. If you are wrong about the universe, you will have been wrong about the very nature of your soul. We can slap fight about whose personal investment functions as greater cognitive vulnerability, but it's not me, and I know I'm right.
At any rate, we live in a world of ideas so foolish only a smart person could believe them.
Shouldn't people try to hold themselves in the way they think is right no matter what their nature is?
What does it mean to hold yourself in what you think is the right way if there is an absolute standard for righteousness?
What does it mean to hold yourself in the right way if righteousness doesn't exist?
It means that you need to work hard to come up with an idea of right that is good and that you can hold yourself to, and to keep checking how it's actually working and get back to the drawing board if it looks like something is off.
I understood your
meaning that you feel like you have some internal sense of righteousness that's not completely outsourced to whatever is outside yourself out in the universe.
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Respectfully, this comment smacks of the kind of naïveté expressed by progressives worldwide at the turn of the 20th century. Mankind is perfectable, we can use science and reason to deduce optimal ideologies, organizing society is like a mathematical problem with a solution, etc. And that thought process produced fascism, communism, and the deadliest conflicts in world history. Difficult and dangerous work, indeed…
I used to put my trust in man, now I put my trust in God.
Change is dangerous, but the relevant part of the change has already happened and can't be undone. As Nietzsche said, "God is dead". Now the only choice is how to replace Him.
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Ok but then every other war ever is due to religious reasons?
If we had the same machinery during the Crusades, WWI & II would be barely a blip in the awe of massacre.
Tiny human tribes have been killing other tiny human tribes with the justification of religion since forever - you don’t get to point at the last century and say well look what you godless fucks have done!
You didn’t cuz you couldn’t! (Obviously not you or yours - just the palette of history)
I think you can almost make a purely secular argument for the Crusades, to be frank, and the same is true for a number of seemingly religious conflicts. Many states are inherently expansionist, the Seljuk Turks in particular as a faction made their name and wealth off of military expansionism to start with (their jihadist ideologies were certainly there too but we can't ignore the physical and practical), and who ended up answering the majority of the obviously self-interested call for aid? Not the immediate fellow Christian neighbors, no, it was mostly bored warrior castes from farther Western Europe (and some peasants and minor nobles too at first with other reasons to leave home). Yep, people fighting for money and a share of the spoils. I don't want to overstate the case, here, religion is still all over this, but it wasn't a conflict completely unique to religion. Honestly war happens with or without religion's help, is my view, and in some cases religious commonalities also prevent war, though that kind of thing doesn't explicitly show up in history without additional scholarship.
In fact much of humanity was still religious during WWII with the exact same weaponry... but honestly the track record isn't that bad overall in the last 100 years for religion. The major ones I can think of are like, India-Pakistan conflicts, obviously everything to do with Israel (though ethnicity also factors in too), maybe a few minor civil wars and a few revolutions? But not even that many.
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A considerable amount of the 20th century's murder didn't happen during wartime, and it's quite obvious that not all or even most previous wars were primarily or even significantly religiously motivated.
Rational Materialism was supposed to solve war and governance, and indeed the perils of human nature generally. That was the explicit claim of its adherents going into and for most of the 20th century. It instead resulted in some of the worst war and worst governance ever seen. The places where it delivered the best results were the places where it was given the strongest pushback from "irrational" Christianity, ie the anglosphere, which diverged markedly from continental philosophical and political trends.
Neither were Hitler or Stalin motivated by rational progress, in fact they were known to stifle scientists who were politically incorrect ("Jewish science", lysenkoism).
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Charitably, one could steelman the quote as referring to the development of ideologies that are merely more fit than traditional Christianity, as opposed to such that aim for utopia. Not that secular ideology is able to achieve perfection in any way, but only that it can outperform both Christianity and organic "modernity".
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I think you would find this claim very hard to square with even simply the Bible itself, much less the subsequent writings or even behaviour of Christians.
Christianity might be false - we may be, in Paul's words, of all people most to be pitied - but it is absolutely making truth claims, and those truth claims matter. They matter to Christians. The theology that you blithely dismiss can only exist because Christians care about this.
Subsequent writings are merely of the 'adding more epicycles' kind of truthseeking. First it was literally believing that men were created by God ex nihilo. Then Darwinism came around and showed this wasn't the case. So they just retreat back to 'OK fine evolution is real but God created all things and the individual soul is not produced by material forces'. There's no substantial change to the practical doctrine of blankslatism, they move on just as before with zero regard for skepticism or evidence.
The soul? You may as well go to Pakistan and pursue cutting edge research into the powers of djinn.
Likewise with the Epicurean argument. They created an entire discipline of theodicy to cope with it and still fail. Free will? Natural disasters have nothing to do with free will. And 'free will' itself is becoming more and more of an illusion, we are today capable of creating benign and malevolent digital beings. So too is God. God could've set the median level of aggression lower or altered incentives to produce more sympathy. There is no free will in front of an omnipotent who establishes the context, permits what genes come into existence or what genes even are.
Grand plan? Maybe Satan runs the world and has a grand evil-maxxing plan that tolerates good for greater evil... Or it's just outright incomprehensible. That works just as well.
Here's another one I found:
An omnipotent God can write the laws of Nature, Genesis describes this. The universe could run on the fuzzy principles of a human dream, not thermodynamics. You could have a physics of wishing or Daoist cultivation to immortality, Aristotelian physics or Harry Potter. All of that is simple for an omnipotent.
No matter what they try, the Epicurean trilemma still snuffs them out. And this is the key thing, the question of mindset I bring up at the start. They don't like the Epicurean Trilemma and so come up with some comforting story that fails if you look at it too closely, they never review their priors about the nature of God.
This is a nitpick, but I feel obligated to note that no, it wasn't. In Genesis 2:7, the first man is formed out of the dust of the ground. The Bible does not say that men were created ex nihilo, but in fact says the explicit opposite. I would gently suggest that if you want to seriously engage with Christian thought on a complex issue, you may wish to start by familiarising yourself with what Christian texts actually say.
Is this a nitpick? Is it not massively germane to your point? No, perhaps not, and if you want to look for all the ways in which Genesis 1-2 are not a scientifically accurate account of abiogenesis, you'll succeed. But then it is hardly the case that Christians, even long before Darwin, have understood it that way. Thinkers as older as Augustine, in 401, have understood that this narrative is not to be understood in that sense. Likewise Calvin, again prior to modern science, frankly writes "that nothing here is treated of but the visible form of the world" and adds "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere". As with astronomy, so with biology.
You may condemn Augustine and Calvin as adding epicycles, but I would say, rather, that the burden of proof lies with your assumption that the only reasonable way to understand Genesis is as a historico-scientific account of the origin of the universe. It seems to me that as Christians have taken other approaches, even many centuries before modern science, it is by no means obvious that that's the natural reading of it. My view, actually, is that the automatic reading of Genesis as scientific is itself a kind of modern debasement, an error characteristic of post-Enlightenment thinkers.
Now to the rest...
I actually don't find the Riddle of Epicurus particularly overwhelming here, not least because the Riddle predates Christianity by many centuries, and in fact the Problem of Evil is itself voiced with great eloquence and force in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Confronting the earliest Christians with the fact of evil, in the face of God's omnipotence, would not surprise or challenge them in the slightest, and the difficulty that humans have understanding evil was as familiar to them as it is to us.
What I would say is that Christian faith does, in a sense, require the belief that there is some kind of answer to the Problem of Evil, even if we do not know it. And that in itself is not absurd. If we have good reason to believe that God exists and is benevolent, and yet we observe evil, it would seem to follow that there must be some kind of reason for evil. We need not be able to articulate that reason in order to believe that there must be one. The question has an answer, even if we do not know it. Christianity does not declare that there are no mysteries.
Thus, say, Peter van Inwagen's response to the Problem of Evil is what he calls a 'defense' rather than an 'theodicy'. He writes:
This much, I think, may be required of the Christian - not that they prove that this-or-that theodicy is true, but merely to prove that it is conceivably possible that evil may, for now, exist in a universe created and governed by a benevolent God. The bar required is reasonable doubt.
It seems to me that my justifications for understanding God to exist are sufficiently strong, and the possible explanations for evil's existence sufficiently many, that Epicurus' Riddle does not snuff out my bright candle.
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I think logical arguments are a dismal way to look at metaphysics. If you agree that it doesn't have to make sense, why do you expect it to make sense? Should an omnipotent being not also have the power to sustain contradiction?
Or, as the Babel fish joke goes:
If I recall correctly the old BBC show animated that joke with a bogus math formula how color pigments mixed together gives a black painting color, but all color lights mixed together is a white light.
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I always thought that was a remarkable passage from a self-described "radical atheist".
Why? It's riffing off religious arguments about faith, where the reason there isn't proof of God is that he's testing our faith or whatever. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” and all that, so even though God wants us to believe in him and created the world he deliberately made it look like a world created by unthinking natural processes and restricted his miracles to unverifiable anecdotes. This is an argument that exists precisely because God isn't real so there's a demand for backwards logic where the lack of evidence to believe in God is itself a reason to believe in God. He humorously inverts this into an argument where, if there was actually proof of God's existence, it would be proof of God's nonexistence. This is then compared to proving that black is white. In real life, of course, he didn't think that the lack of evidence for God is a reason to believe in God (or that there is evidence of God which means we shouldn't believe in God). He thought that the lack of evidence that God exists means that God actually doesn't exist.
The universe, our solar system, our planet and all life are the consequences of the Big Bang and the laws of physics. These events happened, cosmological and Earth's natural history, but they are simply and solely what happened. They neither support nor repudiate the Genesis account. The skeptic takes the Genesis account as expressly literal and says "but history." In this they err, but understandably so as the American skeptic particularly will have been exposed so much to Protestants who hold to Young-Earth creationism. The apologist in turn errs in accepting the skeptic's framing as they concede the point of natural history as supporting the naturalist paradigm. This is true for the YEC, whose first error is that belief, it is also true for the OEC/believer in Theistic Evolution who accept it as having explanatory power.
But the apologist is correct in the importance of faith, the point is ubiquitous. I assume you are familiar enough to know the recurrence of "The Jews fall to apostasy and ruin, God personally delivers them, and yet they fall once more." They knew, still they fell, again and again. It's never been about what you know, it's about what you hold in faith. That we see no glaring gap in natural history is not because if there were we would have no choice but to believe. We see contiguous natural history because that is what happened. Faith is for why.
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It's a good joke, but the bit about "without faith I am nothing" is classical atheism: gods depend on believers and cannot exist without them, if you demonstrate that belief is false then gods cease to exist.
That works great if you're an atheist: oh we used to believe in phlogiston, now we know that's not true. But for religion, it's putting the cart before the horse. If you're Christian, God existed ever before humans, so who were the believers who brought God into being? Faith is for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of God.
That's not the remarkable part. That's totally normal, as you say. The remarkable part is:
What does belief in God have to do with belief that black is not white and that you should look before crossing the street? It can't be that those things depend on your belief in them.
I read it as more like, sophistry may be employed against inconsequential or subjective matters like religion freely, as there's no harm to it; but if you try to argue with reality, reality is gonna win.
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