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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26333 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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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:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

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.

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.

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:

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

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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