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Let's talk about the existence of God. The OG internet debate culture war issue. Not about the ethical value of a Christian life, or the enduring influence of Christianity on the intellectual tradition of the West (although we also can't declare a priori that those considerations are irrelevant). But just, the simple question of God's existence.
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here. But we rarely address the issue directly. Possibly because both sides assume that these arguments and debates have been exhausted already, and both sides are intransigently locked into their current positions, so it's better for everyone to just maintain a quiet detente. But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on, we may increasingly find value in revisiting some of these questions.
Reasons for believing in God can be divided into roughly two camps, which I'll call the rational arguments and the extra-rational arguments:
The rational arguments are (purportedly) valid arguments such that, if you accept the truth of the premises, you are then compelled to believe in the existence of God under threat of irrationality. This includes many of the classic apologetic arguments: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, etc. Although apologetics and the philosophy of religion have historically paid a great deal of attention to arguments of this sort, I think it's pretty rare to find a religious believer who claims that their belief rests on the force of these arguments alone. Even if rational argumentation alone could get you a good deal of the way towards a fully Christian theological doctrine (e.g. via considerations like Lewis's trilemma), there seems to be a general sentiment that purely rational belief is missing something crucial if it's not backed up by personal faith and experience.
The extra-rational arguments include everything else: faith, either of the "garden" variety or of the "Kierkegaardian leap of faith" variety ("I believe because it is absurd to believe"), religious experience, either of a single life-defining event or in the more general sense of a sort of continuous and ongoing direct perception of God's existence, belief on pragmatic grounds (perhaps because you think you'll simply be happier if you believe, or it's better for the social order, or you believe because of Pascal's Wager style considerations, although maybe you could argue that Pascal's Wager blurs the lines between "rational" and "extra-rational" argumentation...)
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I get the impression that most Christian Mottizens are believers essentially due to some sort of personal experience or personal revelation (please correct me if I'm wrong). This makes me curious though: why do you think that you had this experience, or are perceptually attuned to this truth, etc, while so many other people (namely atheists) aren't? Why are some people capable of simply "seeing" or "realizing" this truth, but not others? (I'm assuming that there's something intrinsically inarticulable about your faith that makes it not amenable to rational argumentation). I'm not trying to do a "gotcha" here, I'm just throwing out some debate starters.
I am an atheist, although not a particularly ardent one. It would be cool if there were compelling reasons to believe, although I don't think that I have any sufficiently compelling ones right now, and I'm also aware that I have an intrinsic bias towards wanting to believe, which means I need to apply a certain level of heightened scrutiny in order to counteract that bias. I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that reality might actually just be that boring.
I feel like the current discourse advocating religion is pretty similar to the current discourse advocating wokeness. People probably know it's bullshit, but push it anyway because they think lying the right way will bring us a better world. A type of person thinks that sure, it's bullshit, but it's our good sort of bullshit that keeps the queers and the degenerates down instead of elevating them and will lead to prosperity and clean cities. Only you're still lying about important things, you know you are, and the same dynamics that broke down the consensus religion of previous generations will hit you as well.
What do you make of God not being a viable concept to appeal to in public discourse? We're living in a sort of mixed postmodern picture where everything is real and truths don't matter when it's about the dignity of religious people, but then if there is a global pandemic the alternative truth that microbes don't exist and sickness arises from peoples' chakras being spiritually misaligned will not be given equal hearing. Right now metaphysical beliefs from any religion seem to have no purchase in the sort of consensus reality discourse that says things like "our ongoing pandemic is caused by contagious microbes". If the place of religion in society is that the secular morlocks go "that's very nice dear, now go play in the corner, we've got three nuclear power plants to build and an mRNA vaccine to sequence against the latest pandemic", how does that look for religion's claimed capability to ascertain very important things about existence? People who like religions seem to want to generally to downplay this instead of honestly thinking what it entails. Fighting science hasn't gone very well, religious people enthusiastically tried, got trounced, and then developed sophisticated ideas about "separate magisteria" and coexisting with science. Coexisting with science is tricky as well, since science keeps moving. You can go "but consciousness!" today, but what if we get a broadly accepted scientific theory of consciousness in 2038? People who wanted to keep space for religion could go "but élan vital!" in 1910 but that one was doing significantly worse 50 years later. Doesn't stop people from still trying though.
The public discourse thing seems to not be just about the rise of science, it's also about the rise of cosmopolitanism. It's hard to ignore that there have been multiple very different world religions that all have had significant civilizations associated with them. "Why are you convinced it's specifically the religion you were raised in that's right" is a tough question. It's not a question asking you to tell you what you like specifically about your own religion. It's asking that if you think your own religion gets something specifically right that other religions don't, isn't it a bit suspicious it's mostly people who were raised in that religion who think so, and people who were raised with other world religions by and large happy there. If you take the consciousness and quantum physics thing seriously instead of just dishonestly dishing it out as apologetics for your pre-existing bottom line, this is a problem, because you're fishing for something that's the same in everyone's reality, not just a nice story of cultural tradition. Even if you think something like a first mover argument is convincing, it doesn't specify the God of Abraham who is particularly disgusted by the sight of human feces. If you take religions at face value, at most one can be right, but religious people who claim inner conviction of the truth of their own religion specifically seem to be happy with their own thing and there's no widespread movement of Sikhs, Shintoists, Catholics, Orthodox Zoroastrians and Jains going "so I looked into this American Mormonism thing and turns out my inner conviction of the truth of God now feels like the Mormons got a better picture of things than the thing I was raised with." So if there's one correct religion, religious people seem to not be very good at discovering it, and if you want to think that the religions all point to the same thing, then you run afoul with many religions themselves saying, nope, our specific picture is correct, people who think otherwise are damned heathens. If you think the first mover is valid but are agnostic about everything past that, you can't very honestly commit to an existing religion like Christianity that demands adherence to all sorts of specific things beyond that, and you lose the social cohesion angle. And if you want to stick with your one specific religion while ignoring this part, you've sunken pretty well into the woke-equivalent "we know it's bullshit but we'll lie to everyone that it's true to reap social benefits" thing again.
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One problem I see with trying to prove God is that it pushes Christians into reading a lot of theology in the hope of trying to finally find a satisfying answer. But this satisfaction never happens. And if it does happen, the God they have proved is so abstractualized that it doesn’t bear any resemblance to the personality of the Christian God. It also shames the sub-110iq or those without a lot of leisure time because they evidently do not really know God (you think God has emotions? Hah!).
My opinion has shifted and I think that this is fruitless. “Believing God” should just be a state you enter into through rituals and an environment of beneficent social contagion. God is spirit, in the non-philosophical understanding. This saves the most promising Christians several thousand hours of inquiry, speculation, and doubt.
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Not really. The Motte, child of Slate Star Codex and grandchild of Less Wrong, has strong rationalist roots. I do not recall anyone explicitly arguing here that MAGA is clearly whom God wants to you vote for and that you should not vote Democrats lest you are condemning yourself to hell in doing so. In practice, Trump is 100 times more divisive in terms of CW than God is.
This feels about as convincing as 'quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent'.
More seriously, it is not clear to me the consciousness hypothesis is making any falsifiable claim about the observable universe, which it curiously enough shares with the theism hypothesis. (Or at least the less silly version of the theism hypothesis. There are probably people who would claim that praying to god to cure your cancer or strike your enemies with lightning bolts will work outperform chemotherapy and cruise missiles, but their claims are already falsified.)
I will grant you that life is weird, and brains capable of introspection are extra weird. But I do not share the intuition that the material world can not give rise to weird stuff. Take Conway's Life. Cellular automata are dead simple compared to the material reality of atoms and black holes. And yet Life is already Turing complete. Any observable thing my brain can do, including claiming consciousness, a sufficiently large cellular automaton could also do.
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The other problem with rational arguments for god is that they treat { Abrahamic God, no gods } as a complete hypothesis space. This is silly. There are myriads of possible creators of the universe. Absolutely nothing privileges the Abrahamic God over the alternatives from other cultures. Why God and not Rod or dread Azathoth or Waheguru or a Demiurge or that ball of noodles?
In fact, I think that if the universe we inhabit can teach us anything about our creator, it seems to me that the state we find ourselves in seems incompatible with it being all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful. Like, He created a fine-tuned universe of a diameter of more than 14 Gigaparsecs to get a tiny rock on which us apes could evolve and thrive, and He did not bother to fine tune it a bit more to prevent cancer or kidney stones? Seems like something an asshole move.
More likely, a creator would be wholly indifferent towards life. Even supposing that He had created gamma ray bursts to keep life in check would be presuming too much. Probably He is less interested in humans than we are in the dust mites colonizing our bedrooms.
I am sure that if the kind of larvae which thrive in animal dung had higher cognitive capability, they would worship the cow which produced their cow pat as a omni-benevolent divine creator which produced their world so that the insects could thrive, and claim the bovines have really strong opinions about how a good insect should behave.
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My thought as a long-time atheist who came out of very fundamentalist christianity is that everyone is religious about something. We argue about metaphysics, but nobody really cares except about other people. In our own lives, we believe all sorts of ridiculous bullshit that supports our illogical worldviews and justifies our meaningless existences. Modern politics, psychology and academia are all part of a religious cult, a sort of extreme Protestant heresy. If you have an "education", have seen a therapist or have social media, you're in a church mon ami. You recite the doctrines and receive absolution from your priest, and are invested with the imprimatur of the church.
The "god shaped hole" of humanity is the simple reality that we are conscious, and consciousness hurts. We live in pain, and we seek not to justify life or death, but existence in pain.
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I'm an atheist, albeit a protheistic (or really pro-Christian) atheist. Clearly, secular modernity isn't working, given how miserable and childless we all are. I'd love to believe in God.
At the same time, I genuinely struggle to understand intelligent people who do believe in God. I know intellectually it's compartmentalisation, but I can't put myself in that position. The world is so obviously not a supernatural one, prayer does nothing, there is no evidence of God exerting his will at either the small scale or the large one. The world as we all see it is completely compatible with the non-existence of God and so clearly not compatible with anything but the weakest form of Deism. And I'm tempted to agree with Penn Jillette's 'hardcore atheism', which is I don't believe in God, and I don't really believe that believers do either. That's why nobody ever prays for falsifiable things that an omnipotent God could do (e.g. all the Russian guns in Ukraine stop working) and instead prays for psychological stuff (please give me resilience to endure) or stuff that would happen in a Godless world (my chemo-treated cancer goes into remission).
The closest I ever come to religious feeling is either when I'm feeling especially grateful for my life, or when I consider the question 'why is there something instead of nothing?' which genuinely does boggle the mind. But neither leads me to conclude that a jingoistic, jealous Caananite war god manifested as a pacifist peasant and then killed himself in order to forgive humanity for committing the sins he designed us to commit and knew we were going to commit when he created us.
That... is not actually obvious in the way you say it, and I think your struggle to understand said people is downstream from that. I'll concede that it seems obvious to you, fair enough. But it is not obvious to everyone, and there are people equally as intelligent as you to whom it seems perfectly obvious that we live in a supernatural world, that prayer is effective, and that God exerts his will on the small and large scale. It has nothing to do with compartmentalization as you are (kind of uncharitably) assuming. Those people simply disagree with you.
Are you religious? If so, could you give any examples of why you think these things are true?
Because the median religious person certainly doesn't act as if their faith is true. People still get sad when their relatives die and are still scared of death themselves, even though they (supposedly) believe in heaven. They claim that God answers prayers but then don't ask for anything that couldn't happen in a Godless world (e.g. God ends all war and cures all disease tomorrow) because it might ruin the spell when it doesn't happen. Even the Pope himself suddenly turns into an agnostic on the topic of hell in spite of Catholic doctrine.
The model of religion as 'belief in belief' is much more consistent with what we see.
Here we go again. We are required to believe that Hell exists. We are not required to believe that any one person is there, because only God knows for sure. Yep, that includes the worst monster in history you've ever heard of. Likelihood they're in Hell? Very damn high. Pronouncement of absolute certainty they're there? Nope, can't do it.
Let's go back to the 14th century, Hollander translation of Canto XIII, 'Paradiso', "The Divine Comedy" where Dante puts these words into the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas:
130 'Let the people, then, not be too certain
131 in their judgments, like those that harvest in their minds
132 corn still in the field before it ripens.
133 'For I have seen the briar first look dry and thorny
134 right through all the winter's cold,
135 then later wear the bloom of roses at its tip,
136 'and once I saw a ship, which had sailed straight
137 and swift upon the sea through all its voyage,
138 sinking at the end as it made its way to port.
139 'Let not Dame Bertha and Master Martin,
140 when they see one steal and another offer alms,
141 think that they behold them with God's wisdom,
142 for the first may still rise up, the other fall.'
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As a sidebar: you have misunderstood what Pope Francis said in the link you provided. He did not turn into an agnostic, nor go against Catholic doctrine. The Catholic church does not definitely say that anyone is in hell, nor does it prohibit the hope that all might be saved. What is prohibited is teaching that all will be saved. It is possible, but we do not know that it will be so, and the doctrine is that we must be open to the possibility that some might be in hell even as we hope for that to not be the case.
Don't you find it a little odd that an organisation that is extremely sure about the existence of God, creation, the resurrection and about how the church is the only source for salvation suddenly starts admitting its own fallability on a topic that might offend modern audiences? I doubt the medieval church was so unsure about something so profoundly fundamental. It smells an awful lot like Mormons getting sudden revalations that e.g. polygamy is no longer okay or that African Americans are now allowed in the priesthood.
I'd also add a thought that comes to me when I read theological discussions, it's all just words, words, words. If hell was real in the same way that the earth's molten core is real, people would look for evidence, run tests and experiments, apply lessons learned from similar fields. There would be a real answer. Instead we get an understanding of existence that is based purely on written and spoken words, and people can come to basically any conclusion they want.
Newsflash: it ain't. Same way running consecrated wine through a mass spectrometer won't show you that this has turned into blood.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that materialists think everything has to be a stone they can kick or it doesn't exist.
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That doesn't even make sense as an argument. The Catholic Church is quite willing to hold firm on things that offend modern audiences a great deal more than hell. People aren't really that offended by hell, but they certainly are offended by the idea that no, gay people cannot legitimately marry, and no, a man cannot become a woman or vice versa, both of which the church stands firm on. Then there's the doctrine that women can't be priests, or the ban on contraception, which also offend modern audiences, though not nearly to the extent as the first two. Say what you will about the Catholic Church, but it isn't afraid to say "no, this is true" even if it's unpopular to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, exactly. What do you want people to do here? The spiritual is not, as a rule, something we can explore empirically via physical measurements. Nobody denies this. It sounds like you're saying "people don't do experiments to prove hell is real, so that proves they don't believe in hell", but that's silly. If that's not what you mean, then I don't follow you at all.
Pre-modern Christians absolutely did believe that hell was literally beneath the earth and that heaven was literally in the sky. As scientific understanding has advanced, Christianity (and other religions) have reduced their claims to make them unfalsifiable. It's not that the spiritual cannot be explored by physical measurements. It's that the results of those investigations were negative, so religions retreated to the motte of unmeasurability.
Of course, religous people still talk about stuff that physically happened as evidence of the divine (e.g. you meeting your wife), but experiments that actually test things like prayer and find them wanting get explained away, typically by saying that you can't test God (as if a normal prayer asking for stuff isn't doing exactly that).
Have you been there? Most people believe in things like Antarctica or Australia while never even having been there.
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I am, and I will. But first...
You are completely failing to understand people when you say stuff like this. People get sad when a relative dies because it hurts to not have them around now, even if you believe you'll see them again someday. People absolutely pray for an end to war and disease, it happens all the time. I personally pray for God to end wars at least once a week. You really, really do not understand the mindset of religious people based on what you've said here, and I strongly advise you to not draw inferences based on the very faulty premises you have laid out, because they will be completely invalid. Anyways, that aside...
I believe that the existence of a supernatural universe (not a specific deity) is pretty obvious based on simple logic. If we trace back the chain of events in our universe, at some point we must arrive at the thing that kicked it into motion - the uncaused cause, the prime mover, pick your term. There are two possible explanations for that: either the universe itself is eternal, having always existed, or else it was set in motion by something outside the universe which was eternal and has always existed. It seems obvious to me that the natural world itself cannot be supernatural, that would be ridiculous. Therefore, there must be a supernatural force which was the uncaused cause behind the chain of events that is our universe. Which is to say, it is obvious to me that we live in a supernatural universe. That is a limited insight - it doesn't tell us anything about what this supernatural force is like - but it does seem very clear to me that our reality is not materialistic.
I also believe in the existence of the Christian God not through logic, but through the personal experiences of a person whom I know very well. He's not lying, he's not hallucinating, the only possible explanation is that the things he experienced must have truly happened. I won't bother to relate them in detail because I know that "someone I know had supernatural experiences" isn't at all convincing. It wouldn't have convinced me if it wasn't someone I knew personally. But suffice it to say, I do believe it, though I think we have left the realm of the "I think it's obvious that..." behind.
I also believe that God intervenes in the world. Not always in the way we want him to, and not in ways that are undeniably divine intervention, but I do believe that it happens. I believe that I met my wife through such an occurrence. The circumstances in which we met were sufficiently improbable that I do not believe they could have occurred by random coincidence. Moreover, my wife has said that at the time she was praying to meet the man God intended for her, so I believe that our meeting was in answer to her prayer. Again, I don't think that this is something which would necessarily be obvious to anyone, but it seems very clear to me that this was the work of God in our lives.
All of which is to say: yes, intelligent people who are religious do in fact believe that God exists, that he answers prayers, and that he intervenes in the world. It isn't just compartmentalization and going along with the culture in which one grew up.
And God ignores your prayers, and the prayers of the billions of other Christians who have also prayed for this obviously good thing for centuries. Can you see how, to an outside observer, this might make it seem like you're not actually asking as if someone is listening? God looks down on, say, the mass murder of Christians by ISIS as part of his benevolent plan and doesn't intervene. But apparently he does intervene to help you meet your wife?
Would I be right to think that the latter came before the former? Because from my experience and reading, people turn to religion for emotional reasons, and then the apologetics come after to see off the logical doubts.
My model of it leans less on people going along with what they were raised in (although the statistics show that conversions are basically a rounding error, religions grow through the cradle), and more through motivated reasoning. That's what I mean by compartmentalisation. Applying wildly different standards to God that to the ones you apply to everyday life. I don't think any religious person believes in God in the same way that they believe that things fall down when you drop them or that the sun rises in the morning. But motivated reasoning, applying different standards to religious beliefs than normal beliefs, and positive mood affiliation leads to 'belief in belief'.
Not at all. Certainly, I can understand if you say "this makes it seem like there's no God". You wouldn't be the first, nor the last. But I can't see any good argument to be made that unanswered prayers (or at the very least not answered in the way we might want) somehow reflect on my own sincerity.
You would in fact be incorrect. The former preceded the latter by something like half a decade.
Again, your model is gravely mistaken. You would do well to abandon it and start fresh.
I have genuinely tried. I've read dozens of Christian blogs, about prayer specifically. I know it doesn't work, but the fact that some people do forms a mental itch I can't seem to scratch. What I've found is that there are a bunch of different excuses. One is that 'God isn't a vending machine that gives you what you want', which surely cannot apply to benevolent intercessory prayer. Another is that 'prayer is about building a relationship with God', as if one-directional begging is how relationships work. Another is that prayer is about 'understanding God's will', which suggests you shouldn't be asking for anything at all, because God's will is perfect and predetermined. Another is 'God answers prayers with yes, no or not now' which of course covers literally every possible outcome regardless of what it is.
This is not a model of the world, these are arguments as soldiers, pulled out defensively to explain the unexplainable on an ad-hoc basis. You see the same thing when it comes to the problem of evil or the problem of hiddenness. I would love to see a consistent, logical model of God that corresponds to the actual world. Of course, if you do that, what you get is Deism, which is just atheism while doing spooky hand gestures.
So I'm forced to come to the conclusion that the word 'belief' should not be applied to religion and to observations of the real world. Whatever it is religious people are doing, they don't believe in God in the same way that I believe in the existence of the sun.
Pretty clearly not, since you can see the sun and do engineering off its presence.
What's your understanding of traditional marriage vows?
"to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part"
Does such a vow make sense to you?
Would you take such a vow, and if you did, would you really mean it?
Would you agree that such a vow is best modelled as a bet, which resolves only on death? But what is the point of a bet that you can only "win" when you die?
What I'm trying to gesture at here is that there exists a class of decisions which humans make based on incomplete information, and about which one might uncharitably claim they are resistant to evidence-based assessment, but which nonetheless are meaningful and at least plausibly positive-sum. Belief in God, and prayer and other elements that go along with it, appear to me to be a member of this class.
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You can pray for a community of young people full of children (and a future) and God will lead you to the correct Church.
Or you can pray to the AI god and perhaps be rewarded with riches and the unparalleled thrill of pinning the weasel.
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To summarize my own viewpoint:
The existence of consciousness makes pure reductionist materialism/physicalism non-credible.
However, there is no good evidence for and no good argument in favor of any of the various conventional religions (Judaism, Christanity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any of the others).
It is possible that the nature of consciousness is in principle beyond the reach of any sort of rational or scientific investigation. And I consider it almost certain that it is beyond the reach of any sort of rational or scientific investigation that would seek to reduce it to a purely material/physical explanation.
To the extent that I am spiritual, it is because I perceive this mystery. I am more or less comfortable with, and find beauty in, the mystery as a mystery. Not because I would not like to know the answer. I would love to know. But it is not clear that it is possible to know. The various answers that people have tried to give over the course of human history are all, as far as I can tell, not credible. The existence of the mystery, on the other hand, is real. We do not know the answer, but we do know that there is a mystery. And that in itself is spiritual.
This I do not get. Why? Why can't I just be a pile of deluded neurochemistry?
Sure it'd be nice to think more highly of myself, but I don't see much that can't really be put down to reductionist materialism doing its thing.
"Consciousness is a delusion" seems to be an oxymoron to me. If it is, then who is being deceived?
The pile of neurochemistry, into modelling itself as something more extraordinary than it already is.
Well that's the idea - you can't be tricked into thinking you're thinking.
Anything more extraordinary than "I think" varies on a person by person basis.
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Your descriptive view on consciousness is identical to mine, but, rather than feeling spiritual wonder, any time I ponder it too long I feel like the protagonist of a Lovecraft novel: it is unnerving that something so subtly incongruous exists, and also, what are the odds (absent some anthropomorphic religious priors) that the true explanation of consciousness is also one that would leave me contented by it?
I now realize I have a depressive outlook.
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In between logical proofs and personal experience, don't neglect the category of publicly available evidence, of which historical evidence is one important species. ( @WandererintheWilderness gets into this a bit below.) If you are convinced by the evidence for Jesus' resurrection, you can get at the existance of God that way.
Separately, if you are trying to understand how people work through these things in practice, it is helpful to think about how and why people move in both directions: theist to atheist as well as vice-versa. There is extra-rational movement both ways.
Yeah, I think Ethan Muse is one of the more recent ones that began to believe in God due to investigating miracle claims.
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I wrote this three years ago, as a non-rigorous quasi-tongue-in-cheek argument for why I'm not an atheist. The TL;DR: the world I see is one that I would expect to see if God exists, which I consider (weak) Bayesian evidence for God.
Argument 1: Societal evolution and a stabilizing force
As societies evolve they adopt behaviors that benefit the society. Ideas that are destructive are either discarded or are adopted but with subsequent decline in that society, leading to internal or external takeover. Societal structures and frameworks arise from these behaviors and are likewise subject to the survivorship test. Every continent evolved a formal religious structure to promote societal cohesion and to provide society with an ethical or moral framework. The ubiquity of religion suggests that the instinct to religion is strongly embedded within the human psyche, and to remove the formality of religion is not to remove the instinct for religion. In the mid 1800s, Darwin, Marx, and Kierkegaard identified scientific, societal, and mental frameworks that removed the need for a God. For the first time atheism had rigorous answers to questions of existence, societal cohesion, and spirituality. Nietzsche summarized this nicely: "God is dead". But the psychological need for religion did not go away: it was merely replaced by classism, nationalism, communism, fascism, humanism, and many other "ism"s that were either spiritually unfulfilling for the adherents or physically destructive to both adherents and non-adherents. The brain is a physical part of the body and can evolve like any other physical part of the body. Attempting to remove a deeply embedded religious instinct is like trying to remove a hand: both the hand and the instinct evolved for a purpose.
Digression 1: definition of Religion 1
What is religion? It is a group of people gripped with singular purpose and convinced of their moral superiority. This definition is also the definition of a mob. In the Christian liturgical tradition, on Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter) the congregation participates in the reading of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and shouts "Hosanna!" The very next week the crowds in Jerusalem shouted "Crucify!" and in the reading the congregation participates in this cry as well; reminding the congregation that it was our sin that crucified Jesus. But it does two other things as well: it forces us to look inwardly and realize that we ourselves are capable of great atrocities. Probabilistically we would have been in the mob crucifying Jesus, convinced of our moral superiority. How easy and almost pleasant it is for us to read Anne Frank and identify with her fear and suffering. But if we were in Germany at the time it is far more likely that we would have been her tormentors. The second thing shouting "Crucify" does is lets us glimpse the power of a mob in a setting in which no mob can actually form, and is thus an annual warning of the danger and power of untethered collective moral action.
Organized religion is a countervailing force to the mob. It provides a structure and an outlet to the "religious instinct" without it devolving into mob brutality.
Conclusion to argument 1:
The above argument demonstrates the utility of organized religion but says nothing about the truth of organized religion. Certainly not all religions can all be true, since they mutually contradict. Can and should a society be built on a lie? Plato's Republic answers affirmatively, and philosophers have debated this ever since. I personally hold truth as a fundamental requirement for a "good" society; societal structures can only be as sound as its foundations. Thus argument 1 does not hold much weight for me. However, if the thrust of this argument is correct, the onus is on atheists to create a deep, meaningful, and sustainable philosophy that can replace organized religion.
Argument 2: The problem of evil and suffering
Few people would argue that suffering and evil exists in the world. If there is no God, then there is no basis or criteria for categorizing anything as good or bad. Our (almost universal) acknowledgement of injustice and suffering must then be an evolved mental condition which is either to be discarded (along with religion as a yoke of the past) or to be irrationally embraced (in which case why not also irrationally embrace religion!). As most people, including atheists, do believe in concepts such as suffering and injustice, they implicitly behave as if God exists. And thank God that they do! Despite the perversion of our mental and physical world as a result of humanity's fall/sin God's common grace has put a restraint on our depravity.
Discussion 2: definition of Religion 2
If atheism is the null hypothesis, then there is not enough evidence to reject the null. However, the above argument points to inconsistencies in atheist's behavior that would be accounted for if God exists. Likewise, if theism is the null hypothesis, there is not enough evidence to reject the null.
Every logical statement begins with a set of a-priori assumptions or axioms. Where do these axioms come from? Are they truly self-evident or is there an element of the arbitrary or even mystic about these axioms? Described in this manner, the set of axioms or principals by which we structure our reality can be considered, in some sense, a religious dogma. Religion, in this light, is the foundation on which every scientific, social, and physical structure is derived.
While this is an interesting thought experiment it is not all that convincing for my larger argument. There is no line of argument that goes from "postulates are religious" to "religion X is correct".
Conclusion to argument 2:
If I posit the existence of a just and moral God (and indeed, God would define justice and morality), and if I additionally posit that mankind is made in God's image, then I would predict that even in a fallen state that mankind would exhibit tendencies to morality and justice; albeit tainted and obscured by our separation from God. Indeed this is exactly what we see.
On the other hand, if there is no God I would predict that while there are certain evolved cooperative tendencies, that these evolved tendencies would be no stronger than that of "traditional" religion and could be just as easily cast aside. However, we do not see this.
In my experience, the atheistic approach to ethics, morality, and justice feel like a "turtles all the way down" argument. That said, I do acknowledge that just because a position is poorly defended does not make that position incorrect.
Argument 3: reductio ad absurdum
If I were an atheist, I would likely believe that we are living in a simulation. I believe that we ourselves may be capable (given another few hundred years) of creating an advanced simulation that could closely mirror our own; if we are capable what are the odds that we aren’t already in a simulation. There would be only one “reality” but millions of simulations. And that is only assuming that humans are all there are: it could easily be that just as our current video games have characters that are mere shadows of their human programmers, that we are mere shadows of a higher race that has created the simulation.
Someone (a programmer?) has created the simulation. The programmer has created the universe from nothing. The programmer has defined the physical rules and constraints of the simulation. In a very real sense, this programmer is god to the simulated universe. The programmer would want to track progress of the simulation by having the simulated “agents” communicate back. In our simulation we call this “prayer”. If the programmer reads the logs and sees that the simulation is giving some feedback, the programmer could intervene in the simulation to correct some of the parameters. It is also very possible that the programmer didn’t just set physical constraints but also gave instructions for how agents should engage with each other (religion). The programmer may also have added random amounts of “aberrant” behavior in each agent (sin). The aberrant behavior caused divergence from the original set of instructions and led to multiple religions.
Thus if I were an atheist, I would be forced to acknowledge the high likelihood of a god existing. I would need to divine the will of the programmer and would be forced to carefully assess the major religions for glimpses into the original instructions. In short, I would be very religious.
Isn't that evidence against any particular religion's factual truth? If every human culture creates its own myths, it takes a tremendous amount of parochialism to say 'the thousands of other religions that human societies have created are all superstitions, but the particular religion that I was born into is in fact objectively true'.
Doesn't it alternatively suggest that supernatural phenomena are real and universal?
That's something that many, perhaps most, religions would agree with (i.e. it doesn't invalidate or privilege any specific religion.)
The history of humanity is filled with superstitious beliefs, many of which have gone out of style, or are extremely niche.
People believing dumb things, religious or not, is a universal.
In contrast, no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works. Some religions believe their priests have the Power of God, but they can't seem to demonstrate it.
There's the same documentation problem for UFOs and Bigfoot: high resolution cameras are in everyone's pocket for a decade+ now and yet we don't see increasing evidence.
Can you link me to your past examination of medical investigations of alleged miracles demonstrating where they break down?
As I've pointed out to other people on here, we know that certain aircraft (like the NGAD demonstrator) have flown but have never had a high-resolution picture taken and publicized. Do you also disbelieve in the NGAD, or do you concede that it's possible for aircraft to fly without being detected by cell phone cameras? If the latter, why are you making this argument as pertains to UFOs? (I think it's a better argument as regards Bigfoot.)
You asking for me to provide debunkings of claimed medical miracles is an great example of backwards thinking on how to go about evaluating claims of supernatural occurrences.
Weird shit happens all the time, but that doesn't mean it's a miraculous event from the Power of God. No study has ever demonstrated miracle healings working. There's a million dollar prize by James Randi for a demonstration of any occult power under laboratory conditions. There are tons of religious hospitals, why don't they have a track record of better outcomes than the secular ones? Anyone who could actually demonstrate a new power of healing or prediction or weather control would become immensely famous and presumably very wealthy. And yet no one can pull it off under strict scientific standards. Telling.
People used to take pictures of UFOs. They weren't really aliens. People still claim to have alien encounters and see ghosts and all that kind of thing. Yet the evidence never seems to get better. The most recent brand of UFO hype is over military systems detecting strange objects, which often turn out to be balloons and artifacts of the cameras.
If aliens were such advanced fucking space creatures capable of spaceflight then presumably they'd be even more impossible to detect than NGAD if they so chose. (Also NGAD stuff purposely tries to avoid airspace where casual observation would occur and has never been known to try to abduct someone. Note that some portion of UFO claims were in fact US military aircraft, so it's really ironic you bring that up.)
Constant streams of major claims backed by shitty evidence is good evidence of shitty claims due to human foibles, not that there's really something there. If there were something really there, at some point we'd expect strong evidence to emerge. People are certainly highly motivated to look.
What I am actually asking for you to do is demonstrate that you've actually looked into the question at all. There's nothing wrong with not looking into miracles (I haven't, not really something I am all that invested in) and I certainly don't expect you to just to win an argument on the Internet, life's short. But "no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works" suggests that you speak from a position of personal knowledge. If what you meant was "I've never heard of any religious believer saying X, Y, Z," then that's a different claim, and that's fine. But if you've actually looked into the question extensively and documented your findings, I might be interested in reading your conclusions. If you haven't looked into the question, why are you making the argument? It seems to me that arguments from ignorance only incentivize not knowing anything, and while arguing about Nietzsche on Twitter is funny, it's not really an ideal epistemic environment.
I agree with this.
What exactly qualifies as "miraculous healings"? Do studies showing that prayer seems to expedite healing count? Spontaneous remission of cancer? Regrown arm?
No there is not, but you should also understand the difference between alleged miracles and occult power.
Are you unfamiliar with the research showing the positive connection between spirituality and good health outcomes?
Miracles are not the same thing as superpowers. The debunking of a claim to be able to work miracles cannot prove that miracles do not occur (and, similarly, proof of a miracle would not be evidence of superpowers.)
Yes, UFOs =! aliens. In fact, many of the leading "UFOlogists" think that UFOs aren't really aliens.
What's your objective metric for this claim?
Yes, I am aware. In fact a certain portion of the UFO phenomena may be cultivated by the US government precisely to hide advanced aircraft.
Then why did you make this argument at all?
This is also true of next-generation aircraft.
If you simply aim the level of epistemic rigor you have here at investigating claims of religion, the paranormal, aliens, or anything else supernatural you'll find I'm right.
I've looked into this question plenty. I was born into and raised in a religion that believed in the priesthood power, including healings and intercessory prayer.
None of it's true. If it were, we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation.
You can go read The Demon Haunted World for a thorough grounding in how to go about debunking this kind of thing.
The Catholics do try pretty hard to rigorously document miracles, but naturally non-Catholics don't tend to find them all that convincing.
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The steelman to this argument which, as an atheist, I find the closest to being actually compelling, is that this is not evidence that one's own religion is true, but it is evidence that the correct thing to do is to believe as if one's own religion is true. As someone who wants to be someone who believes things based on how true they are rather than how correct it is to believe something, I can't make the leap, but I can sorta see the sense in such an argument.
Daniel Dennett called this "belief in belief."
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I never understood this argument. Wouldn’t good or evil just be God’s subjective morality, which anyone could theoretically disagree with? It’s not like human ethics haven’t varied throughout history, or that moral philosophers have formed much of a consensus. Like, could God convince a vegan that eating meat is okay? “I put these animals on Earth for you to eat!” “What the fuck, why did you create living sentient beings that suffer and need to be killed for nutrients instead of I don’t know making bacon grow on trees like apples?”
I’m not even vegan, but it’s a pretty good example of how humans disagree on some fairly fundamental issues.
And God having created us doesn’t give him any special right, like your parents don’t get to decide your morality, and him being able to enforce his opinions doesn’t make it objective anymore than living in North Korea makes Kim Jong Un objectively right about everything. Or if I designed a simulation of intelligent beings, and said to them “if you don’t follow these rules I’ll put you in a special sub-simulation where you’ll be in pain forever” that doesn’t make me objectively right in that world; I could change my mind later, they could convince me that I’m actually evil, that some of the rules are nonsense, or they could outsmart me and escape from the simulation etc.
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My 2 cents: as much as it can be fun to talk about the existence of god in the abstract, it is actually useless. The word god has very little meaning divorced from a particular religion. Philosophers and theologians try to give it meaning, usually in the direction of some kind of neo-platonic thing a zero on some kind of axis (of change, of contingency, of morality, etc).
I don't find those arguments convincing but even if I conceded, it would change nothing in my life. And it wouldn't even make a difference in the life of the apologist, because it's just the first step in some grand apologetics project where every subsequent step is harder. And in a way it already happened, everyone (including me) is now convinced that the big bang happened. If you squint you'll find that there's basically no difference between the big bang and one of those neoplatonic gods.
Not for me, I find all discussion of consciusness increasingly repulsive. I'd have to go with the anthropic principle, altough the ontological alrgument can be made to be formally correct so it gets a special mention.
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I never understood this. Why the universe is thought to be more boring without god. I'm endlessly fascinated by perfectly worldly things, and contemplating otherworldly.
Reverse-parsimonially, I think the universe would necessarily be more complex with God or god or gods than without, and I think one could make the case that more complex means less boring. Even if you took the most interesting man in the world, he'd be more boring than his alternate universe version that was identical to him in every way except he did one other thing, no matter what that other thing was.
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Ooh! Coming straight out of the gate with the whip going already! 🤣
I don't get into that fight on here because I generally like you guys and it's not going anywhere. The STEM people are convinced that Science Explains It All, us religious types have been in this fight once too often before, and we end up talking past each other. There's not much room for debate when one side lays out "yeah but just because you felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, that is more easily explained by [launch into neurochemistry, neurobiology, and psychology explanation]" as their standard of proof. I mean, I've had the "St Paul was an epileptic, ackshully, which is why he fell off his horse and hallucinated Jeebus was talking to him" stuff already, I don't need more of it.
As I said, I like you guys and getting into what is sure to degenerate into name-calling and mutual insulting of intelligence and sanity isn't fruitful. There are lots of better theologians, philosophers, and apologists out there online. I'd prefer to keep my powder dry for the really important fights to come (like the third season of Rings of Power, dropping upon us like Fat Man on Nagasaki in November this year).
I've felt the Holy Spirit but I still don't believe. I used to but looking into other faiths it's clear a lot of people have sincere encounters with the divine. I don't think either Sufis or Pentecostals are lying when they felt that but there's legion of mutually exclusive religious experiences.
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There is a third category that I belong to: people who think that it is quite likely that science will never be able to be able to explain consciousness, and are thus not materialists/physicalists, yet who at the same time are not religious in the conventional sense of the word - that is, we believe that there likely is something beyond the material in existence, something that likely is in principle beyond the reach of science, but we do not believe in any of the established religious traditions and do not believe in some kind of divine creator-intelligence, unless that divine creator-intelligence is simply a synonym for "the universe".
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It's a cogent point, especially in the face of how you, as a Christian, surely view other religions. Did Joseph Smith really believe in the golden tablets, in Reformed Egyptian, in all that crap? He's objectively wrong in both of our eyes, so the explanation that's most flattering to him is that he was telling the truth from his perspective. The implications of that are obvious. But maybe there isn't much left to debate after that, anyway. The values difference to even pose the question must be substantial.
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You seem to be attacking straw New Atheists who mostly aren't actually here.
I have a lot of reasons to disbelieve in a Holy Spirit even while believing you and my mother are sincere (and not crazy) when you claim to have experienced it. I don't need a "scientific" explanation to debunk every single supposed miracle in the Bible. I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.
Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.
Feck it, and I said I wouldn't get into an argument.
But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.
I do accept that, but I think some people are very uncomfortable with the idea that one can be both, not either/or. A kind of Unitarian Universalist 'religious/spiritual' nice polite makes no demands of belief that will contradict Science Says? That's fine, but keep it in your pants, buster, when it comes to making real-world decisions.
Remember the furore over Francis Collins being an Evangelical and leader of the Human Genome Project, then director of the National Institutes for Health? Sam Harris remembers, as does P.Z. Myers:
Cool Buddhism-derived meditation for me, but not Bible-bashing literalism for thee:
Science doesn't "tell us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen." Science provides a methodology that tests the nature of observable reality.
If you tell me there is a God that exists that is outside any means of testing his existence, and you have spiritual experiences that no one who is not you can verify, science doesn't, strictly speaking, say "That's not real." It says "There is no way to verify that."
People can of course choose to believe in things that cannot be verified. I imagine if I had a spiritual experience that I was convinced was real, I would believe it was real regardless of whether it could be detected by anyone else.
Since I don't, however, and since such experiences fall outside anything explainable with what we know about the universe using observable and testable criteria, you can get offended that I disbelieve, but why should I believe?
I'm not saying you should believe. I'm saying people treat it not as "science says it's not verifiable" but "science says it's not real". And you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that".
Why should 'observable and testable criteria' be limited to what we currently have in our toolbox? This is the same "love is only oxytocin" reasoning that gets us tangled up in the same kinds of arguments about what is real/actual and why then it degenerates into "all that romance crap is stupid, Valentine's Day is only commercial opportunity, you don't love that woman, it's evolution acting on you to fuck her to spread your genes nothing more and certainly nothing special" kind of fighting.
I'm not offended, I'm just tired of the fight.
I'm not trying to fight! But what am I supposed to say to 'you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that"?
Let's say you say you saw an angel. I can:
It seems only (1) will not offend you. Problem: I don't believe in angels. You cannot convince me angels exist. What do you want from a non-believer that doesn't get your back up?
Love is at least a relatable experience. And we know humans experience emotions because even sociopaths do. Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.
But the reduction to "it's all just neurochemicals" does anger or hurt people who lay a very great emphasis on the importance of love (all kinds of love). "Yeah we could just shoot you with a syringe full of hormones to make you feel that way and it would be just the same as if you met the right person for you" is not what people want to hear, or would accept. And is that all that love is, in fact? I don't think it is, and I think a lot of humanity believes and has believed that it is not all that it is.
The neurochemicals are just the causal mechanism behind love. There has to be one; what would it mean for there not to be? Your brain just started wanting to be with another person for literally no reason? But any other casual mechanism could be just as easily dismissed.
I am reminded of the argument that it is immoral to hold someone accountable for their low intelligence because intelligence is genetic and they didn't choose to get bad genes, and all I can think is, as opposed to what? If intelligence is instead caused by the environment, nobody chooses how they are raised. And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies. And so on. The objection is not to genes, but to any casual mechanism which can be understood.
Falling in love was the single most important experience of my life, though it was 20 years ago. Knowing that the feeling was triggered by neurochemicals in my brain does not change that. Nor does knowing that my brain was executing an adaptation that was selected for in the ancestral environment because it made my ancestors pair-bond and therefore more likely to successfully raise offspring who would survive in turn to have offspring of their own. Chemicals and evolution explain love; they do not explain it away.
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Okay. This is no different than your being offended that I don't believe in angels. Sure, a lot of people might be upset to hear love described as nothing more than a physiological process.
So what? It's true or it's not true. If it's not true, then it does you no harm that I believe it. If it is true, it's true whether or not that upsets you.
Believing love is just a product of evolution doesn't make it not important or real.
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Sure, but two out of your three options are based on "angels not real" and that's the position you're starting from, so we have nothing to discuss. This is not like "which recipe for roast chicken is best, let's test these three out", it's "there is no such thing as a chicken but I'll be nice and pretend I believe you can cook an imaginary bird".
Again, it's not about offence. It's about this is not an impartial, let's start from positions of neutrality so neither of us hold a strong opinion pro or con the premise "is the supernatural real?" exchange. You don't believe it is, I do believe it is, we're not having a good faith discussion of "we don't know for sure so let's lay out the arguments and see what gives us that delicious flavour of crispy skin and moist meatiness".
EDIT: Imagine that I respond to you with "uh-huh, now I'm not trying to trigger your over-sensitive, fragile little ego here, but come on now, how can you expect me to believe there are no angels? I can give you three options when you say you never saw an angel:
Do you think that is me being neutral on the topic of "do angels exist (the answer is self-evidently yes)"?
I am not sure where you got the idea I was claiming to be neutral on the existence of angels. I am not neutral. I do not believe in angels. Of course that is going to be my baseline.
So if we talk about angels and you tell me angels exist, what do you want me to say? The most respectful and charitable thing I can say is "I believe you believe." I mean, sure, I might be interested in why you believe. I would listen with what I think is an open mind. But open minded doesn't mean I'm starting with the premise that maybe they exist and maybe they don't. What else would you ask of me? I
I did not say anything like"I'm going to trigger your over-sensitive fragile little ego.' If you took that approach towards me, well, I'd assume you weren't really trying to discuss anything.
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So people don't value your personal subjective feelings enough and insist on invoking relevant fields of study. Wow. This whole post sounds an awful lot like you lost an argument that you're trying to pass off as a draw.
I'm not claiming to have had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit, but your response is precisely why this discussion will go nowhere. "Imma right and you wrong!" on both sides.
If you think someone describing their subjective internal experience of anything counts as evidence that anyone else who isn't already sympathetic can afford to care about then I don't know what to tell you, apparently everything is true, even mutually contradictory things.
Would you accept someone's internal subjective experience of emotional suffering or just shrug it off as "not someone I need to care about so I don't accept their experience as real"?
Again, I'm not saying you have to believe that a spiritual experience is real, anymore than you have to accept that your fifteen year old child's first experience of heartbreak is the big deal they think it is, but it would be a cold parent who would just ignore them or tell them nobody cares.
Okay well that's where my interest begins and ends.
I'm not your parent and I don't care.
If you were the parent of any future children, God help them with an attitude like that.
It was an analogy, not a request that you be my ersatz parent holding my hand while I sobbed into my pillow.
Okay well if that magical feeling doesn't count as evidence of anything and nobody needs a hug over it either, then what exactly do you want? Seriously this whole subthread is some deeply female-coded shit in the worst possible way, complaining that those gosh darned debates are too focused on who's right and wrong and don't respect feelings enough.
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Yeah I should have found a different way to phrase that. By "pre-modern" all I really meant was "prior to about 1600", not "backwards and unsophisticated" or anything like that. There's a mild revival of interest in Platonism too, for example.
There is nothing new under the sun, as the fella said.
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On the topic of great tv :P you mentioned on The Other Place loathing all the modern Star Trek including DS9. How did you feel about Battlestar Galatica, which was the same kind of thing but not polluting a beloved IP? I watched the whole thing back in 2010 and although the last seasons dropped off and it's very much an artifact of its time, I thought it was gripping television.
Excuse me, but I was a big fan of the original series. That said, I didn't mind the direction they took with the reboot, but I did miss the thinly veiled Mormon theology from the original.
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I didn't loathe Deep Space Nine, to be clear about that. I found it a interesting change from the setting until then, not on a starship going from planet to planet but a fixed location like a space station. Strangely enough, before ever it came along, I had wondered about if any show would do an episode like 'a day in the life of a station commander' where he deals with a set of minor crises that could become major ones, making for a very exciting episode before at the end we see a starship docking for crew shore leave, resupplies, and the rest of it, and two of the ship crew making some comments about how peaceful it all was but yeah they could never handle the boredom of it all.
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Ah, I remember the OG Galactica and its sequel Galactica 1980, which was cheesy late 70s/early 80s fun! It had Dirk Benedict, who went on to play Face in The A-Team, as Starbuck for one. Finding out that it was based on oddball ancient astronaut type notions (or at least someone involved in producing it had those) was also funny. I was in my mid-teens when it aired so that probably helped.
I never bothered with the reboot because I was not that interested at all and the idea of taking it seriously enough to give it the full Babylon 5 treatment just wasn't in my bailiwick. It would have been like deciding to reboot Disney and do a show about the travails of one Michael Mouse, a late 20s to early 30s office worker (but up-and-coming, junior exec type not just a cubicle drone) in the Big City (east or west coast of your choice) and his friends, romantic interests, pet, etc. And of course Michael was not a mouse, that would have been silly for A Serious Show.
I much preferred the chrome toasters Cylons.
The series creator, Glen Larson, was Mormon (as am I). He also made Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., and a bunch of other famous series, but Galactica was the only one where he gave it a bit of a Mormon twist (that I'm aware of). Mormons don't actually believe in weird Ancient Aliens stuff, but it meshed pretty well with the Galactica setting.
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Fair enough. As A Serious Show, I think it was really good though, in no small part due to the performance of James Callis as Dr. Gaius Baltar, accidental betrayer of humanity. There's a really excellent bit where one of the engineers on the Galactica confronts President Roslin with the fact that the expediencies of being a fleet on the run means that people are stuck doing whatever they were told to do when the fleet started running and after a year this is already settling into heritable castes. The President points out that that's awful and all but they're all a bit preoccupied with not dying at the moment and there's a limit to what she can do. So he goes to see Baltar, who will take on basically any cause du jour for attention, respect and power: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OOJrPRruU94&t=175
The acting is magnificent IMO. It doesn't hit quite the same if you haven't spent three seasons watching him be an arrogant, self-centred prat, but it's still good.
This is flippant, but remembering the discussion around the reboot, a lot of it was more "mmm, smexy Cylon ladies!" and not so much "Big Moral Ethical Philosophical Issues" 😁
The 'heritable castes in a year' sounds a leeetle quick off the mark, I imagine they were trying to retcon the original "all the Twelve Colonies of Kobol that these people come from were the origins of the zodiac signs on Earth, and all the Taurans do X and all the Librans do Y and all the Cancerians do Z" typing.
Speaking of theology, Glen Larson (the show creator) was a Mormon and put in Mormon themes into the show, it seems!
There were definitely smexy Cylon ladies, sometimes 12 clones at a time. But seriously, it's a great show. They really commit to the premise of, "we're trying to preserve our society and our humanity, but we're in circumstances that pretty much demand a military dictatorship" and all sorts of stuff naturally falls out of that. What do you do when there's not enough food and water to keep the fighting soldiers going and everyone else? What do you do with criminals when keeping them in prison is a massive and dangerous waste of resources? The heritable castes thing comes because one of the main characters is a deckhand and he's training his younger son (who was supposed to be going to go off to the big city) to help because they're desperately overworked and there's nobody else, and everyone around him is doing the same. Lots of people don't like the way society is being run, and some of them are well-meaning and some of them are deluded troublemakers and some of them are con artists, and how can you be sure you're being honest with yourself about the difference when you're suppressing the latter two to keep your society from collapsing around you?
Boomer is a brainwashed Cylon infiltrator in disguise and doesn't know it (but we do). Baltar is a genuinely brilliant egotist desperately trying to cover up that his foolishness was responsible for the death of their society. The Admiral and the President are doing the awkward dance you do when the military is the most important element of your society and the line between 'civil-military cooperation' and 'well-meaning military dictatorship' is looking thinner by the day.
It's a great show, and they act their hearts out.
That's not really establishing a caste system, though, that's "we're desperately undermanned and since I'm a deckhand that is what I know and what I can teach you to do".
Sure, give it four or five generations and it becomes a caste system, but it's a bit too on the nose for "right now I am drowning, please throw me that life belt" situation they got going on. God knows, Original Trek engaged in some anvil-to-the-head moral lessons as well, but that is a little too much nudging in the ribs about inequality and the state of society today.
Okay, it's pulled out a bit for that episode, but this is after a year of going and he's not presented as being in the right. He's nervous about the future, and understandably so. It's not preachy at all - the President's position of look, this just isn't the time is treated very sympathetically and pretty much wins out, with some fig leaves. This was in the early 2000s when anvil-to-the-head moral lessons were out of fashion and hard choices were in. Pretty much all the characters get to be sympathetic.
Sorry, I'm surprisingly enthusiastic about it for something I haven't watched in 15 years.
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I kind of doubt we have many true-believer Christians on the forum. There's plenty of cultural Christians, i.e. people who don't really believe in the superstitions but nevertheless have their arguments cosplay some hollow Christian aesthetics as a mostly futile attempt to craft a broader right-wing worldview. And I bet we have an even bigger swathe of people who don't believe in that, but see cultural Christians as "fellow travelers" in the fight against the Left, and so they give them a free pass.
When I've tried to debate some actual true-believers on here, it's always gone badly since they mostly trend towards metaphysics, which in terms of debating bears a very close resemblance to conspiracy theorists in that it's very jargon-heavy, highly specific to the individual, and ultimately unfalsifiable.
And here we go already: you don't really believe what you say you believe, you're only cosplaying.
Yeah, this is going to lead to greater understanding and mutual respect, ain't it?
Kinda? I remember someone asking to help him choose a new church after a cross-country move. People were helpfully talking about the music and the community vibe of various denominations, and I was confused by the whole idea. Surely these denominations are different not because they like different music, but because they disagree on some fundamental theological question! Surely you should join the church you believe is right about God, no matter what their stance on music or sitting or whether the local pastor is a dick or not! And if you think this theological question isn't important, then are you a true believer?
@self_made_human wrote recently that he had more respect for religious extremists than for wishy-washy cultural believers, because they took the scripture seriously and literally. That's more or less the same sentiment.
I agree there. But I'm not an American Protestant who grew up with church hopping if your conscience can't agree with the local church being a normal thing.
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Well yes, if one were to hold themselves up as a "Christian", but didn't actually believe in (supernatural) God, then I'd qualify that as pretty hollow belief. And the term "cosplaying" would not be inaccurate.
You're already presuming that those of us who say "yes we do believe in the superstitions" are lying.
What is your model of someone who does believe the superstitions, and how does it not include somebody on The Motte?
This is not my presumption. If you tell me that you believe in (supernatural) God and Jesus, I'll trust that's your genuine belief.
Yes, and thank you.
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I wouldn’t suggest I’m insincere though as a Catholic I could be a more observant one than I currently am; and indeed am trying to be.
All the arguments I’ve come across for God’s existence I regard as either fallacious or unconvincing. You could argue as the Reform tradition does that all the arguments stand as a cumulative case for theism, which is to say collectively they all add up to the existence of God. I don’t find this convincing either, but there’s assuredly no “one” argument I’ve ever come across that makes the case either. Aquinas shouldn’t be taken seriously in light of contemporary science; though his observations were adequate to the period in which he lived.
I take the faith as an article of faith and live it as such. It’s not a distant afterthought in my daily life, but I do find the intellectual justification wanting.
(1) You're One Of Us? Hey, bro! (or sis, depending)!
(2) You disrespect my boy Tommy A? Fight me!
😁
Are you following me around in the comments? Lol.
I swear I'm not (she said, face pressed against your window, scratching gently at the door, and what is that shadow under the bed?)
I woke up this morning with like 10 notifications from you. I was confused; o.O
Golly. I had no idea I was being so prolific, no wonder you felt twitchy. Apologies!
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Thank you for being honest.
My question to you would be: why is faith enough for you? Religious communities hold up faith as this wonderfully good thing, but all that faith means is that you believe something without evidence. You're giving in to wishful thinking. Granted, everybody (including me!) does that to some extent, but it's generally seen as a failure-mode of human cognition. Why admit that openly, and do nothing to try to resolve it?
Yea. I think right-leaning rationalists think to themselves, "If I can believe in Christianity or Islam or any of those, why not be a woke progressive? They too believe untrue things. And at least it's considered mostly normal in day to day life in the best places in the country to live, to boot."
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The truth is my thinking about it doesn’t even go that far. Most of the things we all do (including me) don’t involve evidentiary considerations except in deliberative decision making. To quote Saint Paul, “… we walk by faith, not by sight…” Yes I assume that for everything I do there’s an evidence structure to it lurking in the background somewhere amid all the unconscious processing of the brain, but that’s about it except in the most consequential or interesting matters to me; in which case I come prepared to argue. I can love mathematical proofs as much as I want but if those were the only statements I’d be willing to act on I’d be such a nerd. I’d never be able to communicate with another human being. I don’t expect people to be persuaded by this train of thought, it’s simply an honest description of the internal clockwork of my brain, if someone were to look inside of it.
Atheism has all the logical arguments, so far as I’m able to determine. I’m not a Catholic because I’m convinced of the intellectual truth of it but because I hope it’s true. Without it, I don’t think I’d be living a life much different than I am currently, trying to be moral and do good, so where’s the harm in being one? Yes there are inconveniences and adjustments to make but it’s highly worth the minor cost imposed on me to keep my commitment in check.
To answer the more pointed remark “why is faith enough for me,” I’m not sure it necessarily is. And I don’t know how to explain this sensation well to someone that doesn’t experience it. One thing that’s been adduced in cognitive psychology is the notion that “certainty” is an actual human emotion. Without a strong ideological touchstone, I (and I think most humans) get this sort of cognitive itch like they feel they can’t scratch. Or like a smoker going through withdrawal and feeling mentally constantly on edge like they’re searching for something to soothe the feeling that only another cigarette can satisfy. You could call it that “void” if you want that religious people often talk about, that desperately needs to be filled. Makes you feel very uneasy inside. There’s this need to mentally attach yourself to something “solid,” like an “anchor point.” Atheism and secular philosophy can’t provide something beyond the reality that “… we’re just atoms in some temporary arrangement…,” it’s that sense or feeling of impermanence and ideological quicksand that you can’t hold in your hand that fills the cognitive void that it can’t provide for you. In Buddhism they talk about this notion that they call “dependent arising.” Don’t attach yourself to phenomenon because it’s all in a state of transition and change. It isn’t permanent. And when conditions change, your emotional disposition changes along with it. They talk about how material phenomenon “has no independent existence” or “self-sufficiency.” This is the impulse that I think drives the religious attitude. Going home and hugging the Bible in my mind (metaphorically speaking) renegerates me and keeps that feeling at bay. The sense of transcendence and eternalism it imparts in me makes me feel that there’s a “there” there that that void can’t touch. And whenever it slowly encroaches back into my mind, I go back to the Bible. Secular people do this too, just without the same clarity of mind. I’ve known people who left religion and become slavishly attached to Libertarian philosophy and hug books like Man, State and Economy to death, as it provides them the same feeling the Bible does to believers. Or people who keep “pristine,” untouched hardcover copies of Dad Kapital on their bookshelf that provides all the answers that makes them feel good.
I’m not sure if that answer makes any sense to you; but that’s what it is to me.
This is... an interesting mindset. It seems like you're cognizant of its shortcomings and aren't really trying to proselytize it so I would never be too hostile towards it when the average person has so many dumb beliefs that they're obnoxiously overconfident in.
But as a former edgy atheist I feel compelled to push back at least a little bit. I think you should value truth more highly as an end in and of itself. Sure, people want the answers that religion provide, e.g. "where did we come from", and especially "what happens to us after we die!?!" It's nice to think there's a big "plan" and that we get a nice big reward after life in the form of "heaven" to go to. But it's just not true, and the questions that faith answers are in reality either unknowable, or have mundane answers that aren't very satisfying.
You’ve redescribed faith as existential nicotine. I understand the craving, but the fact that a cigarette calms withdrawal is not an argument that smoking is good. You also have what seems like a bit of a cognitive defense mechanism towards the end with the Das Kapital and Libertarian philosophy bits. To me, that reads like you think that if a person doesn't have religion then they'd just fall back on some secular philosophy and be religiously fanatical towards that instead. And since we all have our "religion", being Christian is hardly a vice even if it's not logically supported, right? But the real lesson to draw from that is not "therefore religious faith is fine." The lesson is "humans are prone to motivated belief and ideological addiction across the board, so we should be more suspicious of all such attachments."
I don’t really disagree with you at all. But to address the critical angle, I value the truth enormously. That’s why I believe all the scientific and logical knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years supports the atheist position. That said though, my religiosity is a testament to the fact that I’m still human and not a purely information processing machine. It’s a cognitive compartmentalization that I let out when it needs to be let out. Some people become so intoxicated by what it does for them it causes them to become overbearing on others and ironically if you seek to win converts to your side of the aisle, becoming an exemplar of the belief that demands people investigate you out of their own curiosity, gets them to open the door. Force is counter-productive in that it sparks resentment among people, despite the fact that that wasn’t how the faith spread so widely throughout the ages.
When people ask me questions of the variety you’re pitching, I don’t descend into my religious beliefs. I’m prepared to talk pure science with them. But first I often try to discern what flavor of an explanation they’re looking for. If they’re looking at the ultimate ends, I’ll go religion if they’re a seeker and I can even talk religious arguments with them, without tearing it down for the reasons I’m persuaded by (again, unless they ask me). I’m intellectually more of a light a torch so they can see the path and be a guide, but don’t tell them they have to travel down the road. In my own life people tend to respect me a lot for doing that. And I don’t demean other ideologies; and even invite criticism against my own.
I’ve explored all kinds of ideologies. I’ve read a ton of secular philosophy and religious philosophy. My general approach is that you can’t claim to understand a worldview without trying to sympathize with it to some degree. Marxian analysis of the commodity was spot on. The Labor Theory of Value he got from Adam Smith which he extended into a longer form has since been jettisoned, and the approach of the Physiocrats has been picked up again by heterodox economists trying to mathematically bring energy in as an input to production. “Free market” libertarian ideology can work very well in the short and medium term but lacks long-term effective planning and still needs to be managed across all scales. I’ve no particular axe to grind against them.
Any religion/ideology/worldview can be a vice, especially when you don’t learn when to put it away as you’re doing other work. And any worldview in general that lacks an update mechanism is inevitably going to drive you right off a cliff. Your only battle is with “time” at that point. I pretty much agree with what you say.
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I think this is an interesting issue, but let me take a stab at why there might be less overt enthusiasm for grappling with this stuff these days, perhaps.
Many of us cut our teeth on internet New Atheism, and I suspect many of us also had a fairly religious background prior to that (I'm seen someone note that, from their time in the rationalist community, they were surprised how often people had previously had pretty religious backgrounds before turning into dogmatic atheists, though I've never verified that myself)
At the time, what we really had was something like American Fundamentalists (often Southern tinged), just after their numerical and political peak of the late 80s / early 90s, picking active fights on matters of material and scientific fact with New Atheists types, a disproportionate number of whom came from biology and evolutionary academic backgrounds. So that fight had very, very hard battle lines. And then Fundamentalists went into decline and lost confidence with the failures of the George W Bush years and the forward march of the internet, and New Atheism was absolutely wrecked (in extremely telling ways) by the rise of Wokeness in its own midst. And so that fight lost a lot of steam.
Fundamentalism was very, very anti-intellectual in many cases. Noted scholar of evangelicalism (and himself a Reformed evangelical Christian) Mark Noll was already writing, back in his 1994 book "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind", that the issue was that by that point there wasn't much mind to speak of. So it's not exactly a giant surprise that the most visible, most politically successful strain of American Christianity was leading with a glass jaw by that point, and I think it was especially vulnerable to exactly those academic fields where something like a strict totalizing materialist world view was the most successful, and that definitely included evolutionary biology...
...but, well, the opposite of being an idiot is not automatically being smart yourself. And the reality of most of the New Atheist thinkers is that they had the exact weakness that almost every academic I've ever known has had - there were a bunch of thinkers who were very, very smart when talking about ideas in their own narrow specialties, but the circle of their confidence vastly outstripped the circle of their actual expertise, and so as a practical matter, for a very wide range of very important human subjects, many of them were actually about as retarded as the Fundamentalists they so despised. But that was very, very easy to overlook when they were publicly tussling with the highly obnoxious, often very Southern, ignorant-and-pig-headed-and-very-low-social-status Fundamentalists who really did need to be taken down a peg.
A very interesting website is the amusingly acerbic History for Atheists website, https://historyforatheists.com/ . And one of the things that I especially love about it is that, well, it makes it pretty clear that the profound ignorance and ideological bias of many New Atheists activists when it comes to history is an almost perfect parallel of how Fundamentalists (and lazy Christian apologists) abuse history - the Founding Fathers were not, in fact, Fundamentalist Christians, but it's also the case that figures like Voltaire was absolutely full of crap about massive amounts of history, and many of us are still wading in the propaganda he and other French Philosophes spewed in the 18th century, and huge amounts of New Atheism was based on those kinds of anti-faith promoting stories that are absolutely trash as history. And part of what makes that website appealing is the author is an atheist who has no particular love for Christianity, but he has enough of a history background, and takes history seriously enough, to be deeply irritated by New Atheist history abuse.
And likewise, as I've been more recently digging through David Bentley Hart's "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" as well as Tim Keller's "Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical", one of the immediately apparent issues that crops up is that most of the public New Atheist figures were not just deeply ignorant (and indifferent) about history, they also tended to be deeply ignorant about philosophy and subfields of philosophy like ethics and epistomology, too, and especially of the ways that philosophy and theology intersect. Which is not to say that philosophers are immediately sympathetic to all the arguments in either of those Christians books, but it is to say that they tend to be deeply horrified by the deep philosophical ignorance in the intellectual foundations that New Atheists thinkers tended to just straight up assume (like a blind faith in hyper-reductive strict materialism), and they tend to recognize that at least some of the philosophical arguments that sophisticated theists wrestle with are, in fact, hard and credible and not easy to dismiss.
And so lurking in the background, one may well say that much of what gave so much heat and fire to the New Atheist / Fundamentalist online slap fight is that both sides agreed to be deeply ignorant about most complicated domains of human knowledge, and both sides glossed over the fact that much of what they wanted to fight about were basically regarded as something like category errors by many other important thinkers.
There is a irony here, too, which is that part of what made New Atheism so incredibly vulnerable to Wokism (with Atheism+, etc) was exactly this deep ignorance about history, philosophy, ethics, and so on, and misunderstanding that the older, much bigger history of Enlightenment Atheism (and Deism) and its role in things like the French Revolution, the rise of Communism, 20th Century Communist revolutions, and so on. Having lived through that late 90s era, you'd see this claim that was something like "God doesn't exist, there is no hell, now nothing has changed, so go live your life no different than you already were doing, and have a nice day". And... historically, that is not how people have responded, writ large, as they've let go of a theistic view of history, tradition, and associated human anthropologies. And this fact, the incredibly disruptive and radical nature of actual atheism as it works its way through society, is trivially obviously from engaging with actual history and philosophy. But none of this seems to have appeared obvious to evolutionary biologists who were annoyed at Fundamentalists.
All of which is to say, if you actually take the history and the philosophy and the theology seriously (which I've come around to thinking I should!) you can have a really rich conversation, but I suspect it's unlikely to look anything like the fireworks that were the hallmark of the early internet Fundamentalist vs Atheist fights.
I don’t see this as a failure of all Christianity. Most fundamentalist and evangelical Christians really have a very shallow understanding of the faith as compared to some older Christian traditions. It’s basically boiled down to the 5 solas, and that’s it. It’s basically like if all you knew of physics was the very simple equations of classical mechanics and you start arguing with someone who doesn’t believe in materialism because of some interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s not that materialism is wrong, it’s that the argument for physics and materialism is being made by someone with a grade school understanding of the subject. For lots of historical reasons having to do with the Great Revivals and Tent Revivals and the American frontier, Theres never been a big emphasis on understanding how things work in Christianity. Theology and sacraments and apologetics and biblical history and biblical philosophy are not taught as often as they might in higher church denominations. The lack of understanding makes it harder to defend what they believe simply because for the most part they don’t understand what they believe or why they believe it. Jesus loves Me is a cute kids song. It’s just that it’s an inch deep as compared to what Christian thought was about for the first 500-1000 years.
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What made New Atheism vulnerable to Atheism+ was that it already had a strong left-leaning majority and so progressives could try a takeover. This general trend affected basically every left-leaning space during the Great Awokening.
Many of the most prominent New Atheists went on to be antiwoke, notably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.
So you can pretend it was that New Atheists had a "deep ignorance" but I think you're making most of that up. The average New Atheist knew/knows a lot more about the topics you list than the typical believer. I'm pretty sure whatever his failures, Daniel Dennett did not lack for a lack of philosophical understanding...
At the end of the day, no religion has managed to prove itself true to other religious folks. Atheists are merely considered impolite for recognizing the consistent lack of proof.
Frankly, I find most annoying the "sophisticated" believers who can't quite truly believe, but look down on both the atheists and the true believers.
Also, it's always funny to see someone ostensibly defending religious faith by accusing materialists of "blind faith."
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I think that Tim O'Neill is actually a smug idiot and there's a lot of ideas that he's promulgating on that website that are worse than the new atheist positions he's trying to debunk, like the dark ages ages weren't dark, the date of christmas, the christianity of various traditions of christmas and easter, mythicism itself and even flat earth.
I think you are mistaking rejection for ignorance. I have a lot of sympathy for the position that philosophy is just as useless, if not more so, than religion.
If you actually read some of the history of atheism you will find that in the west there are actually two atheisms. You can conceptualize both as different forms of christian heresy, if you like. The first one is theological it says "we examined your theology and found it discordant with the evidence". The other one is moral, it says "we examined your theology and found we can be more pious without you" hence woke.
Those two types of atheism keep getting rediscovered throughout history and they are often allied but reached a breaking point now that religion has become almost completely irrelevant in the west and the ideological differences can come to the surface. For example:
etc etc
Oh, you wanna get into "When were the Dark Ages, what were the Dark Ages, and why did the Independent Free-Thinking Ain't Nobody Gonna Tell Me What To Believe set wholeheartedly and uncritically accept Protestant polemic propaganda?" Because let's fight about history while we're at it!
See, OP, why I think this was a bad idea? 😂😂😂
EDIT:
Throw in Easter and Hallowe'en while you're at it, this is more Protestant anti-Catholic stuff repurposed first for the Enlightenment Enlightened ("haw haw the Christians just took over existing pagan festivals in order to win over the masses and hold power over them") and then later for the Neopagan Wiccan lot ("excuse me, those are our celebrations which the persecutors stole and rebranded!")
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-dark-ages https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2024584895847121066 https://x.com/GuthmannR/status/1741216526760374312 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
The dark ages are real, the name is merited and who came up with it first doesn't matter.
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
Yes, the Dark Ages were real. They were not "and this lasted up to the 14th/16th century until 18th century Enlightenment/19th century Rationalism/20th century mass Atheism came along to liberate us!"
It does matter who invents the name and the concept, or do you indeed agree with this stunning example of fact-based representation?
Yes, original invented by Christians Easter. It is based around the Jewish festival of Passover, or are you going to argue the Jews stole this from the Anglo-Saxons, too? In nearly every European language, the term for Easter is derived from ecclesiastical Latin or church Greek "Pascha", derived ultimately from Pesach, for Passover. See the Irish word Cáisc or, indeed, the English term Paschal (and the name derived from that, Pascal, as Noel and Noelle from Christmas).
We even had rows in the early Church about the date of Easter being too near to Passover!
Now, where the pop culture "Easter is a pagan feast them dirty Christians stole!" depends on two legs:
(1) Many cultures have spring festivals. Easter is a spring festival, therefore The Dirty Christians stole it from pre-existing European spring festivals.
To which I reply, the only people with a legitimate right to complain about us appropriating pre-existing religious feast of the time are the Jews with Passover, and if we're gonna blame The Dirty Christians then we also have to blame Da Joos for ripping-off Passover from some Canaanite or Mesopotamian spring festival. It's turtles all the way down!
(2) There totes was a goddess Eostre and she was the same as Istara/Inanna. Here we get the divergence and, ironically, the recombination of anti-Catholic Protestant polemic (the good old Two Babylons type) and the neopagan movement. The anti-Catholics were (and still are?) very big on "There used to be Pure Gospel Christianity, but at an early date corruption crept in, thanks to the emperor Constantine, and the Roman Catholic Church was born, and this was chock-full of pagans only pretending to be Christian, and they carried over or cynically adopted popular festivals so the masses could keep on worshipping the old gods under the pretence of celebrating new Christian saints and what-not". Then the neopagans hopped on this with "ours is a Genuine Ancient Tradition not invented out of whole cloth in the late 19th up to mid-20th century, we have rights to the big popular cultural events like Christmas and Easter because they belong to us" (often, as I say ironically, quoting the anti-Catholic stuff for evidence).
To which I reply, the big foundation stone for this is one (1) reference, by a Christian saint St Bede (formerly known as the Venerable Bede before his long-delayed canonisation) in a book on working out the dates of major Church feast days like Easter, The Reckoning of Time. (See above where I mentioned about controversies over dating Easter). He mentions that the Anglo-Saxon name for the period where Easter is celebrated is (what now corresponds to our month of April in modern dating) named after a goddess Eostre:
(If these calendar names are stirring vague sensations of "haven't I heard something like these before?", yes, Tolkien used these as basis for month names in The Shire, e.g. 'Winterfilth in the muddy Shire').
Now, this was catnip in the late 18th to early 19th century folklorists and antiquarians, particularly when we started getting European nationalist movements (think of the revivals of 'this is our native language and literature, these are our historic traditions, we are indeed a separate culture of our own and not mere helots of the dominant empire'). It had an entire name of its own, Romantic Nationalism. We get composers like Smetana and Sibelius writing works based on local folklore and myths, the Celtic Revival in Ireland, the search for and creation of national epics.
And discovering Big Important Pre-Christian Influences was a huge part of this. Eostre is probably linked to dawn goddesses and there were deities like that in Europe, heck we might as well invoke Ushas and Eos here as well. But those had fallen into obscurity, until the new scholarship seized upon Bede's mention to reconstruct an almost entirely imaginary goddess. We don't have any details of her worship, nature, etc. because Bede is the only surviving reference we have. But that didn't stop the Romantic Nationalists from giving her a slew of attributes and bigging her up in importance.
And so here we get to today, where it is taken as Gospel that hares, eggs, chocolate, and the rest of it are all derived from Eostre, the goddess cruelly displaced by the wicked Christians from her own feast.
But no, children, Easter is Christian. The name in the English-speaking world may be derived from Anglo-Saxon but the feast itself has been there from the foundation of Christianity.
Eh, on some metrics it did last until the 14/15 hundreds. Some of the graphs do look shockingly similar to the "hole" meme, tbh. The "enlightenment came to liberate us" part however is much more complicated.
That meme has a lot of problems but who invented it is not one of them.
Well, there you go. Original much like sonichu.
Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby
Well, okay. If you get your history off the pop culture shelf, who am I to stop you? 🤣 What, are the Carolingians nothing to you?
And who did the Jews copy Pesach from, tell me? Enquiring minds want to know!
I will refer you to my previous messages.
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O'Neill's point is not really as much "the collapse following the loss of Roman power in the West didn't exist at all" but rather that the concept of Dark Ages is overextended to basically claim the entire period from the end of the classical era to the beginning of the Renaissance as a "Dark Age", use this as a stick for beating Christianity (which didn't cause the Western Roman collapse in any case), and when this point is challenged the anti-Christian polemicists will resort to motte and baileying.
The Easter is obviously a continuation the Jewish Passover with the death-and-resurrection-of-the-Christ thematic superseding it yet still being symbolically in many was a part of the Passover, no Christian (or O'Neill) would deny this. The Easter myths that O'Neill criticizes are the spurious claims of pagan origin, such as the idea of an obscure British goddess that might or might not have been celebrated around this period having anything to do with the greater global Christian concept of Easter/Pascha.
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I don't know about "figures" but as a rank-and-file Internet Atheist Board Warrior of the era, I can say that these subjects are just plain deeply uninteresting to someone who simply wants to vanquish nincompoops who think Hebrew mythology can be successfully validated by science. Philosophy bros with unfalsifiable takes existed but went mostly ignored by both sides.
The name-calling started earlier than I expected.
To keep my end up in contributions, here's something about an Italian saint from the 19th century (but not canonised until 2025) who ended up promoting the rosary:
A natural progression, one might say? 🤣
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God is quantum gravity or dark matter. We have looked up the gravity well to the galaxies and there is no god. We have looked downwards is chemistry quantum mechanics and there is no god. So only two places for him to exist are in the interaction of those those two yet irreconcilable theories or that mysterious thing that is 5 time more than all baryonic matter.
So some vast entangled conscious network spanning the whole galaxy - why not. The case for human consciousness being related to quantum effects is getting stronger - that would explain quite well some weird stuff going on. And as a bonus - due to Heisenberg principle free will does exist.
Not even close. This has been thoroughly debunked several times. In no way does consciousness or quantum mechanics lead you in the direction of the kind of thing you find in New Age spiritualism. The Copenhagen Interpretation is bunk and has been known to be for a long time. It’s informally specified, it’s discontinuous, acausal, it’s believed to be fundamentally mental (what you’re talking about); but it’s recognized to be pseudoscientific.
The wave function is ontologically real and there is no “collapse of the wave function.” All that happens is each component of the state vector splits off (which is exactly the same thing you find at the lowest level that’s been observed in the laboratory; the same mathematical formalism applies at every level). The only mystery left to QM is where the Born probabilities come from.
The Uncertainty Principle is also horribly mislabeled. But even if people thought it was what they thought it was, so what? The particles in a fully functional wrist watch also obey the same laws as QM; that doesn’t mean a wrist watch has free will.
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I'm not sure this is all that compelling; it makes some psychological sense that you would pinpoint consciousness as the strongest argument here, given your prior statement about finding no phenomenon "to be as interesting as other people". But it's unclear why this has to imply the existence of a God, just because something isn't yet understood and possesses weird properties does not mean you have to invoke a deity to explain its existence. As an atheist myself I think the strongest argument in favour of theism is some sort of cosmological fine-tuning argument pointing to aspects of the universe that seem extremely improbable, but without which human life would not be possible (you seem to have mentioned this as a theist argument, but for some reason appear to have deprioritised it relative to the argument from consciousness).
A big example of this is the triple-alpha process, which is how carbon gets formed in stars - it begins when two helium-4 nuclei (alpha particles) fuse to produce beryllium-8, which is highly unstable and decays with a half life of 8.19×10−17 seconds, but sometimes a third alpha particle enters the fray and produces something called the Hoyle state, which is a "resonance state" of carbon-12. This resonance state also almost always decays back into three alpha particles, but sometimes it settles into a stable form of carbon-12 that then eventually gets dispersed into the interstellar medium in the latter half of a stellar lifecycle. There are many apparent coincidences in every step of this process - probably the most mentioned one is that the resonance state has to occur at a very specific range of energies for sufficient carbon to be produced. It occurs at 7.656 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and the triple-alpha process is very sensitive to this value. Vary it by 0.1 MeV and the reaction will slow, producing less carbon, and a change of more than 0.3 MeV will halt carbon production altogether. There are also other constants here where, if they were even slightly different, would mean that most carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
There are also other examples of this, like the strong nuclear force's specific value seeming almost perfectly calibrated for stable atomic nuclei and stellar nucleosynthesis, and where a change of even ~2% in its value pretty much destroys all life. And these aren't rare to find, there are so many fine-tuned elements of the universe you can point to if you want to strengthen the argument. The emergence of life at all seems to have been an exceptionally low-probability (read: downright infinitesimal) event based on a constellation of fundamental physical constants, all of which basically had to be balanced on a knife's edge in order for it to appear. Almost as if it was intelligently designed.
Now you can explain all this through some form of anthropic argument invoking an infinity of hypothetical universes (for example), but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God. You could speculate that hypothetically different sets of physical fundamentals could result in different sets of lifeforms we aren't familiar with, but actually many of the other parameters result in the universe degrading into some high-entropy or low-energy state that doesn't permit the existence of sufficiently complex structures, and in any case that's just guessing again. Cosmological fine-tuning doesn't prove God, but it's at least a clear absurdity that deserves explanation, and this time God is actually a relatively plausible and intuitive explanation for the observed phenomenon since all our possible answers are also just unfalsifiable bad guesses.
Damn you actually remembered that...
That still holds true! Although I don't think it's actually that relevant to the issue here. You can simply introspect on your own consciousness and realize how mysterious it is and how difficult it is to explain in material terms. No need to bring in the consciousness of other people.
There are multiple strategies for making the argument more precise. The paper I linked to argues from concordances between physical states and states of consciousness, for example (a bit analogous to the fine-tuning argument actually; they argue that conscious experience is "finely tuned").
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The fine-tuning argument is one of the best counter-apologetical arguments against God’s existence because a God has no need of anything of the things you’ve described.
The first problem is that it begs the question by assuming the ‘luck’ of a finely tuned universe is somehow worse than the luck of a God lurking in the background. There’s also no data by which we can establish these premises. We don’t even know what “can be” finely tuned. In fact even Christian philosophers like Lydia McGrew don’t think fine-tuning is a good argument because as far as we know, the range of life permitting universes is infinite. But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.
Both you and @JustGottaDoot have raised this objection, and sure, we just have a sample of n=1 and as such we don't have any frequency data through which to ground the idea that the free parameters of our universe are determined in an RNG-like way and are as such extremely low probability.
This is just where noninformative priors come in, where absent any available frequency distribution your first assumption should be the simplest one, say, that the probability of every given outcome is 1/n (n being the number of values a parameter can take). Bayesian reasoning about prior probabilities like those are very useful heuristics to build off and show up in a good number of applications, including in theoretical physics. A lot of scientific investigation could simply not work without specifying initial beliefs about an uncertain parameter, there's a reason why the maximum entropy principle is so common.
In other words, I think this objection proves too much, and throws out the core idea backing many useful Bayesian inferences. That doesn't mean I think the explanation is "God" (it is funny that I'm the atheist arguing for fine-tuning and you're the Catholic arguing against it though), but it does appear to me that there is something there worth explaining.
There's just no good reason to look at life that has evolved through iteration under a given set of rules, then turn around and act like the outcome was always set in stone and it's a big mystery how the rules ended up "fine-tuned" toward it. It all just completely fails to launch.
It should be quite obvious that this is the case too…
Our universe is 99.99999% composed of a lethal, radiation-filled vacuum (inhospitable to life), and said percentage of all the material in the universe comprises stars and black holes on which no life of any kind can live, and the same percent of all other material in the universe (planets, moons, clouds, asteroids, etc.) is barren of life. Even what extremely tiny and inconsequential bits of it are at all hospitable are extremely inefficient at producing life at all and in any form, but far more so intelligent life. If the knife edge proves it’s a designer then it’s a pretty dumb ass designer.
If God existed, then we’d have pretty much something like what Aristotle or the Bible imagined; a fully inhabited cosmos, top to bottom, no larger or older than it needed to be, everything in existence and working together right out of the gate, from the very beginning. Genesis would have been confirmed to be literally true by now. Space would be a breathable, habitable area, that’s empty of radiation and other dangerous things. People would already live there, as they will have done, like us down here, since the first instant of creation. The world would work exactly as needed simply by God’s will alone. There’d be no need of gravity. Things would just fall where he wanted. There would be no complex nuclear physics. Substances would just have the properties he wanted. There would be no electromagnetism. Light would just shine where He wanted, matter would just form as He wanted, and if He still wanted magnets, he’d just will them into existence and to work as he pleased. That would be a theologically driven cosmology.
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But some basic twiddling with these free parameters results in universes with barely any chemistry at all. Consider the cosmological constant: a seemingly small increase leads to a universe with no structure whatsoever, and a small decrease (to negative values) leads to no universe whatsoever. If you decrease the mass of the down quark by 8 percent you end up with no atoms. The vast majority of these proposed universes are so simple that there is nowhere for alternative life forms to hide.
By basic twiddling you mean your absolutely wild and seemingly totally unexamined belief that the laws of physics are arbitrary and were determined by RNG at the Big Bang. And anyway, there's definitionally no such thing as a universe where life is impossible and anyone is around to notice it.
There's no such thing as a universe where anyone notices that things aren't "tuned right" so your observation that the universe seemingly is "fine-tuned" doesn't mean anything. There are no proposed, hypothetical, or possible realities inconsistent with the observation, so it conveys no meaningful information.
If you're willing to throw out any ability to make any basic Bayesian inferences sure that argument holds water.
Yes, I see you're cycling through all the stock criticisms that have been levelled ad nauseam. I have always thought this usage of anthropic reasoning was completely flawed. Facts that we deduce from our existence do not explain why we exist at all. The conditional statement "if physical observers then an observer-permitting universe" does not answer the question "why observers?" The anthropic argument explains why we don’t observe a life-prohibiting universe, but it doesn’t explain why a life-permitting one exists.
If it's possible at all for it to exist, why wouldn't it exist at some point in nonspace-nontime? It is infinitely improbable to choose a random point on an infinite plane and hit the point (0; 0) exactly, yet that point exists.
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Facts that do not in the slightest contradict anyone's position do not meaningfully move the needle on those positions. They just definitionally do not. You're just incredulous at your own existence in kind of a lottery-brained way, running naked and free across the landscape telling us what alternate universes must or must not be like, all the while preemptively scolding everyone else that they shouldn't engage in any wild speculation.
I say lottery-brained because it's like someone wins the lottery, looks at how low their odds of winning were, and decides god is on their side. If the form of the universe isn't predetermined then of course whatever actually results will be in itself incredibly unlikely in direct proportion to the possibility space. If there are an infinite number of tickets then the odds of any individual slob winning are virtually zero, yet win someone must.
Then there's the fact that we don't even know how many drawings there have been. Since we're talking about the literally unfathomable depths of existence, let me sling a little bullshit too: What happens when the universe reaches its ultimate post heat death state, to the point that time ceases to be a meaningful concept? I kind of have an unjustifiable suspicion that everything just starts over in some form. For basically no reason, because quantum something fluctuation something and the fact that over an infinite amount of time any event with a greater probability than a total existential zero is guaranteed to occur.
Or maybe a magic man does it every time, while pixie dust sparkles and he strokes his beard. That doesn't actually help anything though, because even if it were the case, then I'd just want to know where the hell he came from and what was going on before that.
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You are presupposing an omnipotent god because you are thinking about this as if it was an argument for the christian god. But if you think more in general, it works a lot better as an argument for a more limited kind of god that is specifically interested in creating matter.
This is a better argument against it. The fine tuning argument talks about probabilities but really is more about aesthetics.
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I would not expect a universe to contain lifeforms unsuited to it under any circumstances, so there's nothing to explain. Like apparently it's fine to just sort of assume the laws of physics were determined by RNG, but speculating that different life might exist under different rules is wild meaningless guessing... why exactly?
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The main difference in my mind is whether God is personal or not.
An infinite, impersonal multiverse is about as complex as God, but it is still not a person you can pray to, or who will intervene in your life.
The main difference in my mind isn't about complexity or whether God is personal, the distinction for me is whether the process that created us had sapience involved in it somewhere. An infinite, impersonal multiverse might be very complex, but it doesn't have thoughts or an agenda, it just is. God would be an agent that acts intentionally, whether it makes sense to pray to said God or expect divine intervention on your behalf is another matter entirely.
To be honest if that fine-tuning version of God exists I have some very strong words prepared. Imagine if a mad scientist created a simulation where millions of sapient suffering beings compete with each other to maximise inclusive genetic fitness and then let it run unchecked. What the fuck.
The sapience/agency thing is a lot of what I was trying to gesture at with "personal." Obviously, God could be personal and non-interventionist, like the God of the deists, or the gods of the Epicureans.
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The rational arguments for the existence of god are first steps towards atheism. Admitting the need for rational arguments obviates the need for faith. Christian debate bros are in the middle of the bell curve meme with "I just have faith" being on both extremities.
I do remember feeling jealous in my younger years of the characters in the Bible who got to test their God against the other gods in a battle of miracles. Burning soaked wood was one of the challenges in the Old Testament, I believe. YHWH won. How much faith do you need to believe in that? Similarly, witnessing the lame man walk, or the blind man see, after being touched by Jesus wouldn't require much faith at all.
That is contradicted by the Bible in many different places. The Old Testament has the Israelites turning away from God time and time again, despite all the miraculous things they saw. The Gospels tell us that plenty of people (most notably Judas) doubted Jesus despite having seen him do miracles. So if the Bible is to be believed at all, even seeing miracles happen is not enough for everyone to believe.
Isn’t this because originally Judaism was a polytheistic religion that then became based around monolatry, then monotheism? Turning away from Yahweh would have originally been like some Greeks turning away from Zeus to worship Poseidon.
I couldn't begin to tell you; I know nothing about secular accounts of history in the ancient near East. My point was more that, if you accept the Bible's accounts of those miracles as true, then you shouldn't necessarily envy the ancients for having been present for them. Because those accounts also talk about how even those who saw the miracles weren't necessarily convinced.
The Pharaoh had magicians that could do cool supernatural things; YHWH's feats were simply superior. The Tanakh implicitly accepts the existence of other gods.
Another example is the prohibition on sacrificing to Moloch. Presumably this would not have been necessary unless people were actually being tempted to do such a thing. Why? Because it worked! (See 2 Kings 3)
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Those things exist as rhetorical devices. See these people were shown miracles and still doubted, how foolish of them, what retards. The people around you who don't believe? Retarded like them. Don't pay attention to the trick and it works.
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That depends on what we mean by "believe"; I don't think Judas is suggested to have become an atheist. When the Israelites turn away from God, they turn to foreign cults and superstitions - they become opportunistic henotheists instead of monotheists - but they do not disbelieve in the supernatural itself. Indeed, I don't think they stop believing in Yahweh's existence, just in whether the clearly-real supernatural entity they'd pledged themselves to really is the omnipotent creator of everything. Biblical characters inhabit a very different epistemic landscape from us.
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Oh, it's much worse than that. I've always been jealous of the angels.
Supposedly, they get to make an informed decision about whether to serve God or not. Even if you say humans have it better because they can be forgiven and reconciled to God while angels never can, I prefer to make a single informed choice for all eternity over the fuzzy uninformed choice most Christian churches implicitly claim I must make.
Well, it's a sticky point. On one reading of it, angels don't have free will because they are not able not to believe in God and make a choice. Humans are free in that sense, and most pop culture when it depicts humans faced with the undeniable existence of God have them choosing to go the non serviam route because we're big enough and old enough to make our own decisions and our own destiny, dang it! We don't need no gods!
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Religion advocates still don't have an even close to satisfactory answer for the two most basic playground arguments so personally it's hard to take discourse there seriously.
If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?
Why is your religion, most likely the one you were raised in, the correct one? Not just Christianity vs Islam vs Judaism, but also specific denominations? Statistically speaking the large large large large majority of religious believers are blasphemous in some way (not even counting the overwhelming number of people who clearly don't even follow their own belief's teachings), so why not you? And that's assuming that any of the mainstream religions are right to begin with and God isn't an Eldritch shadow beast who hides and laughs at our idiotic ideas or the ancient Greeks were right all along or the spaghetti monster or plenty of other possibilities. Religious belief doesn't seem to come from logic or first principles, but cultural indoctrination or else we wouldn't have this issue.
I've never seen a satisfying answer to these. I've seen attempts by religious people jerking each other off with a bunch of gobbledygook, but it's never been logically strong. And arguing back is easy, you can just paint a rock with their same exact logic "actually the Eldritch shadow beast spaghetti Zeus did that"
As far as why my religion— I always point out how closely the description of human nature matches the Bible over and against other religious books. Humanity has a sort of duel nature, one of which aspires to do good, but also an evil side that will take anything positive and twist it to do evil for their own advantage. I don’t see that in any other religion. Buddhism doesn’t say anything of the sort, nor does Hindu thought. Judaism and Christianity do.
And Islam, and the Yazidis and as others have pointed out the Zoroastrians. And then we get into what kind of Christianity anyway since plenty of denominations are mutually exclusive.
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Interesting enough, a book written by humans can also describe this same exact observation! Hell even space aliens if given opportunities to observe our species could come to the same conclusions.
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Have you looked into Zoroastrianism at all? It has the same (flawed and myopic, IMO) system of moralistic dualism, complete with an evil entity constantly manipulating humans to give into their dark and selfish predilections. All developed several centuries before Christ.
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That's not the argument, that's an oversimplification of the argument. It's not that "nothing comes from nothing" like they sang in the Sound of Music. It's that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Or another way of saying it is that everything that is contingent has a reason for being the way it is instead of all the millions of ways it is not.
The argument then is not that God is an exception, but that God is not these things. God did not begin to exist, and God is not contingent, meaning He couldn't be anything other than what He is, or as the Philosophers call it, God is the/a Necessary Being - necessarily that which He is.
And why can "God just can exist without having to come into being to begin with" not apply to the universe itself? Why can't the universe just be without a beginning, but a supposed god can?
The god argument claims it's possible to just exist as apparently God does so but then also claims it's not possible and existence can only occur with something to bring it about. Every discussion here always goes round in the same circles. "The universe can't, god can" without any sort of proof or reasoning behind why they must differ.
The Universe could be without a beginning, but it is still contingent because it is composed of parts and has potentials. The universe doesn't have to be what it is now, in fact it is constantly changing. That makes it contingent, unlike the proposed God.
This is why the proposed God would be perfectly simple, composed of no parts, etc. Its existence would need to be identical to its essence. The universe does not match any of these criteria.
And what's the problem with it changing? The universe changing overtime does not necessitate a god.
It just means that it is not a thing without potential. The hypothesized God has no potential, the universe does.
I am just answering your question about why God isn't an "exception" to the cosmological argument but rather the cosmological argument describes what would make God different from that which we observe.
And "having potential" makes a difference how exactly?
A change means that something had a potential to be something else and that potential was actualized (brought into existence where before it did not exist.) It's the whole argument.
Once upon at time, a High School literature teacher was introducing his students to Shakespeare. One student skimmed through Hamlet and said, "This story sucks. It's boring and doesn't make sense."
The teacher rightly responded, "Hamlet is not on trial. You are."
If everyone who has ever made the cosmological argument says, "No, the universe is not an example of an uncaused cause, instead it's in the other category we refer to," then maybe you don't understand the argument at all and should avoid it until you do.
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Except that in the next microsecond, the universe will be different.
So would be any god worth caring about.
Some unchanging deistic "ultimate creator" who does not intercede in the workings of our universe is, by definition, pretty fucking pointless to care about.
And, of course, basically all religions don't have that kind of hands-off deity in mind.
An unchanging God is not the same as a "hands-off" God. Instead, a classical theistic God is at every moment the cause of the existence of everything.
Something that explains everything isn't much different that explaining nothing.
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WandererintheWilderness hit the last one well, so I'll hit the first one.
God isn't material in the way that the cosmos is material. There is a creator, and there is creation. God didn't come from nothing, he was everything. We, as the creation, are finite and restricted by the constraints that God put into the created cosmos. God has no such constraints.
And why did he change his mind?
By that I mean, for infinite (?) time God was there and there was no universe. Then he created the universe. But if God is perfect and there was no outside force acting on him (how could there be?) then what caused him to move from being content that there was no universe to desiring that there be a universe?
That intersection of a finite (maybe) universe and an infinite God always bothered me.
God is outside time. Time itself is created.
As for why he created, here is one of the first results in a Google search: https://ses.edu/why-did-god-create-anything/, which is a simplistic but cogent summary of the Christian perspective.
Yeah, that's really not a satisfying answer. I probably don't have the philophical jargon to state why exactly, but an explanation that says that God created time itself but which still involves him existing before the universe was created and after it was created seems verbally incoherent to me. Like a square circle.
Not "before", "outside".
Suppose we are living in a simulation. A lot of simulation theory bootstraps itself into plausibility by assuming that there are going to be many layers of simulation, and thus we are unlikely to be in baseline reality. The part people don't seem to pay much attention to is that, presuming we are in a simulation, our observation of our own simulations demonstrates that there is no necessary relation between a given simulation's rules and the nature of baseline reality. That is to say, if you do not have direct access to baseline reality (and entropy and consciousness are two strong empirical indicators within the materialist frame that we do not have such access), then you have no valid claim to insist that baseline reality conforms to your observations of the simulation's rules. It might or it might not, and other than observing it directly, you simply don't know.
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Whatever you want to call the Godly timeless equivalent of "time", it doesn't erase the simple logic here. If the universe hasn't existed since eternity, then it must have come about. If it came about, then there must have been a GodTimeEquivalent period where it didn't exist. If there is a GodTimeEquivalent period where the universe didn't exist, then why did he change his mind?
To be created, it must have not been. If it's always been then it wasn't "created" for it always was.
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The way it's usually explained is that being outside the concept of linear time, there is no real "before the creation of the Universe".
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And this immediately fails the "and why couldn't that apply to anything else like the universe itself?" question. But even if we presume a creator, it fails the "why this specific god?" and not say, a computer simulation.
Every single thing is answered equally by "the Matrix creators want to fuck with us".
I'm not understanding the thrust of your question. Are you suggesting the material world (or something in the material world) is eternal?
While I don't believe we are in a simulated universe, in this scenario the simulation's programmer would be, to us, indistinguishable from God.
Well
You don't know it's not.
Seems like wishful thinking to assume something must be eternal to begin with. It's always possible that we just end with complete nothingness and there is no universe or god at the end.
Now we're again at the question of which God and religion. A programmer simulation theory is essentially polytheistic (even if we are only interacted with by a single one of them) since a fair assumption here is that there might be, or at least might have been, multiple of the species doing the simulation. And their particular beliefs and the reason for why the world exists could be completely opposite ours.
We could exist as an advanced AI powered history simulation to fill in the gaps on our own past, or we're just animals in the zoo, a marvel that happened to exist in the simulation. Heck we might even be unimportant, maybe a few billion light years away the real point of the simulation is taking place and we just happen to be little specks of dust that evolved on a side planet due to the ultrarealism.
God died in the space wars and we're just running off the simulation that no one has bothered to turn off, powered by a super renewable energy source.
You don't know it is. This is, ultimately, a matter solely of belief and not knowable fact. Personally, I find the belief that the natural world is itself supernatural (by always having existed) to be ridiculous, therefore I believe that there must exist something outside of the universe which set it in motion. If you disagree with that, that's fine, but I do think you have to concede that nobody can know what the uncaused cause truly is.
I believe that @PyotrVerkhovensky was referring to the universe extending eternally backwards, not saying that it will have no end.
I don't need to know! I'm not making a positive assertion!
Well at least we can agree on that, there is not a knowable factual basis for such claims.
How is it supernatural to have always existed? And how is it more supernatural and weird for the universe to have existed, than for an outside supernatural being to have existed and created the universe.
If we have the two choices of Universe exists or Universe exists + God exists, then this seems pretty close to classic conjunction fallacy logic.
That is like, the default atheistic statement. It is the religious view that positively asserts there to not just be a creator, but also typically asserts it knows what and how things happened.
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I'm an atheist, but I think the Abrahamic faiths all have a reasonably cogent answer as these things go: "we know our religion is the correct one because, fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, God sent us prophets and/or a Messiah, who performed all sorts of miracles as tangible proof of the divine; and people wrote credible accounts of those events down for posterity".
e.g., I think there is genuinely something to the case that the Christian Gospels are probably more historical than not. I don't believe for a moment that they were directly written by the people they're attributed to, of course - but we have historical evidence that they were written shortly enough after the fact that, yeah, it's kind of bizarre to imagine people making too much of this stuff up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as fact. Mark's Gospel was probably written something like 40 years after Jesus's purported crucifixion - it could and would have been read by people who had personally met Jesus.
Indeed, it seems to be written in a way that assumes the audience has some prior knowledge about Jesus and the rumors that surrounded him, so that the Gospel's purpose is to theologically nail down
(or, as they case may be, nail up)who and what Jesus was. Mark is very concerned with telling his audience "no, Jesus wasn't John the Baptist resurrected, or the prophet Isaiah returning to Earth - and he was definitely an emanation of the Jewish God, not a different Gnostic God", not so much with persuading an audience who might think that Jesus was just some guy and all the supernatural claims about him are nonsense. This tells us that, at least within certain circles, "there was a guy called Jesus whose life story went roughly like this, and there was something supernatural going on with him" was a relatively uncontroversial starting point within a few decades of Jesus's death. How would we react if someone wrote a book which took it for granted that everyone knows that, IDK, Jimmy Swaggart routinely performed honest-to-goodness public miracles in the 80s - a book which seemed merely interested in telling us precisely what it was that empowered him to do so?As a materialist, I don't ultimately find this persuasive as evidence for divinity itself. The credibility of the Gospels as historical document is significant, but not significant enough to match up to the basic improbability of "the supernatural exists" as a root claim. But that's not the question you asked; you asked what makes Christians so sure that, even assuming there's a God, it's specifically the Christian God. And I think that once you take for granted that the supernatural exists, Christianity does start to look pretty well-supported.
The thing is belief in supernatural healing seems to have been commonplace at that time. John 5, for example, tells the story of Jesus healing a man who wasn't fast enough to access the existing supernatural healing method available, namely, jumping into a pool first when the water moved. The passage makes no attempt to dispute that this other supernatural healing method, which seems to bear no relation to Christ or his mission at all, totally works. In fact, it's seemingly assumed the reader would accept such a thing as normal.
To the skeptical reader, the passage is kind of revealing: you have a pool surrounded by blind and lame people who have to race to jump in at a specific time to get healed, and... well, I suppose there's a sampling bias towards not being blind and lame among those who are capable of jumping in first. Does this not sound completely plausible as a mean-spirited prank the lads would play on the blind and lame? Just jump in the pool and start shouting "I'm healed! Wow! Man, if only you were faster, you could have made it in before me, tee-hee." Yet the text makes no explicit attempt to entertain such a reading: it just flatly asserts that no, there actually was supernatural power here, you just had to be really fast and jump in first, but it really did work! I'd love to read a theologian's explanation of why exactly an angel behaving in this extremely troll-ish way is... well, still allowed to be considered an angel lol.
My memory is that the disabled had people there to help them, and that particular guy was disadvantaged by being there on his own, so he had nobody to keep a space for him or tell him when the waters were disturbed or help him get into the pool:
Rather like the helpers at the baths in Lourdes.
Well, it doesn't say anyone else had help. Just that he would need help to get there first.
Anyway, it's a very odd story, because it sounds like something straight out of local folklore. As I mentioned in my first comment, it barely sounds like Christian theology at all, modulo the hardcoded fact that it's in the New Testament. It sounds more like a story from pagan mythology, where supernatural entities aren't cleanly divided into good and evil, and entities like djinn or fairies often just troll humans for fun. Like it's specifically the blind and lame that are mentioned, being summed by a signal they either cannot see or cannot respond to if they do see it. There's no way that's an accidental detail. And it's very difficult to perform the mental gymnastics for why a member of the traditional Christian angelic hierarchy would engage in trolling the disabled.
It would make a lot more sense if the text said, "But it turns out, this was a fool's hope, and jumping into a pool of water before someone else does not, in fact, heal illness. It wasn't until the man turned away from this false hope and toward Christ he was healed." But it definitely does not say that.
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This doesn't solve anything, there isn't even a majority religion just a plurality one of Christianity (and that's again dismissing the significant differences between various denominations all asserting to truly know God's will) so you are still most likely wrong even if there is a god of some sort.
Who is the last true prophet? Is it Mohammad? Christ? Joseph Smith? Malachi? Sun Myung Moon? Maybe L Ron Hubbard? Li Hongzhi of Falun Gong claims to be capable of miracles right now and he has millions and millions of followers. Tons of people vouch for the supernatural powers that Falun Gong brings them. Well there you go, a large number of people vouching that he is the newest spiritual leader and performs miracles in front of them. Many have even personally seen into the other dimensions themselves. I guess that is the true religion.
And why does it even have to be an Abrahamic one, the people who believe in stuff like Hinduism and Buddhism seem pretty confident too.
If we grab a random person off the planet and ask them, most likely they'd be wrong given that no religion is in the majority and therefore even the correct belief system is not believed by >50% of people. More people should be reflecting on themselves and wondering about that right?
"I believe in what I was told to believe as a kid because religion is culturally indoctrinated and I want to feel like a special part of a bigger whole" is a great explainer for why the large majority of people have to be wrong.
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Jesus was one of many holy miracle men. He isn't even unique among second-temple Jews (see Honi the circle drawer and Hanina ben Dosa). It was taken for granted back then that certain humans were uniquely empowered by God(s) to do cool shit.
See also: John the baptist, who the evangelists spent considerable time deprioritizing.
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I'm sorry, but trying to de-emphasis Jesus's special status by bringing up literally whos isn't doing you any favors. Like who are these people?
Second temple Jews who performed miracles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanina_ben_Dosa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_HaMe%27agel
Obviously they did not manage to attain as much notoriety as the most famous person to ever live.
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That’s the whole point: that these men weren’t “literally whos” in their day. That people who knew them testified to their miraculous abilities with the same sincerity that Christ’s followers attributed to Him. One logical extrapolation being that we only take the claims about Christ’s miracles as seriously as we do today because of contingent factors that caused Christianity to be adopted and spread by European political elites, and not because of any especially unique or compelling evidence of Christ’s miracles specifically.
European elites who only became relevant millenia after Jesus's death? Also, Christianity was spread bottom up not top down in Europe.
Also, is it not the more logical and simpler explanation that the reason we know of Jesus and not the other guys is because Jesus's story was actuallly true? Why are undefined "contingent factors" a more valid explanation than just believing in the veracity of Jesus?
You’re claiming that Greece and Rome only became relevant millennia after Christ’s death? That would certainly be news to Christ and his followers.
Untrue. In most of Northern Europe, Christianity was spread at the point of the sword; Charlemagne, for example, fought a series of bloody wars against the pagan Saxons, who represented a genuine populist resistance against a foreign faith being spread by an expansionist power. Similarly, the pagans of the Baltic states were Christianized via a brutal crusade by much richer powers at the behest of Rome. Yes, there were plenty of sincere Christian conversions by individuals in Europe, but that was in no way sufficient to make it the majority religion.
How is this not an equally valid argument for the divinity of Mohammed, or of Buddha, or of Joseph Smith? If you disbelieve the veracity of their claims, despite the sincere and fervent testimony of their millions of modern adherents, why do you believe that the veracity of Jesus’ divinity is bolstered by his religion’s relative popularity and longevity?
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The issue I think is that everything that can be studied and figured out ends up falling into the purview of materialism, no? The kinds of stuff you consider boring, repetitive materialism today would have seemed spooky and magical to people 200 years ago. Special and general relativity, quantum physics, bizarre cosmological phenomena like black holes, neutron stars, quasars, supernova, the scale of some stars. Or here on Earth, human’s engineering prowess is anything but boring, just look at your phone or your computer, or at the progress in machine learning right now.
If you find the current word lacking in magic, mystery and wonder, that’s on you. If suddenly we found proof of angels or spirits or some other supernatural phenomenon, who’s to say you wouldn’t end up finding it boring as well? We’d study it, it would stop being supernatural, and people would start complaining when the ritual takes too long to start or the connection to the spirit world starts lagging for 2 seconds.
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Like a lot of you here, I came of age during the height of internet atheism, and I think that movement could be credited with me losing my faith. I got off the train before new atheism turned into wokeism, thankfully, but I do think it's hard to justify why, other than that my spidey-sense was tingling. But maybe it should have been tingling for new atheism too?
It's not like new atheism won in the end; it more just fizzled out after Bush left, and I think that's a good hint for why atheism seemed so relevant in those times. It was just the way to counter-signal the conservative president and the culture that got him elected. This observation makes me think a little differently about my experience back then, comparing it now to the hysteria of that past decade against Trump. Perhaps if Trump were actually religious, atheism would have made a comeback. But, then again, if he were religious, he probably wouldn't have gotten elected.
I would say it did. Sure, people don't spend much time arguing on the internet about the existence of God any more, but that's because atheism won so decisively there wasn't much left to argue against. Only about 5% of Americans attend church every week. In the UK, only about 1% of the population attends Church of England services weekly.
I would agree that, narrowly, atheism has won against religion (and really just Christianity at that), but the broader vision of the future that new atheism had in its day hasn't come to fruition.
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I had a similar experience, and it was always obvious to me why, and I'm actually surprised to read that someone who followed a similar trajectory would be confused as to why for themselves. It's because new atheism was built on things like evidence, science, rationality, and such, but the wokeism stuff were pretty plainly and openly anti-evidence, -science, -rationality, and -such, in favor of personal revelation (i.e. "lived experience") and just faith. New atheism prioritized using logic and reasoning to convince, while wokeism was, again, plainly and openly, against logical argumentation and for bullying and shaming in order to get people to believe/do things.
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I'm actually curious why you think they're compelling. Saying Phenomenon A is mysterious, so to explain it I will invoke Phenomenon B - an infinitely powerful, personal, creator deity seems like a nonsense step to me. I think the problem is going to be, God is essentially infinitely complex, so the step jump to God is always going to be almost impossible as a way to rationally explain our mysterious phenomenon. It would literally be categorically easier to invoke some unknown but finitely complex and finitely powerful natural process to explain consciousness, than to invoke God in this context.
It is also a classic God of the gaps argument.
The classic God of the gaps argument seems different: it was about "missing links" in evolution. Materialism has ways to answer that: find the missing link.
Consciousness might be a gap in knowledge, but it's something materialism doesn't seem likely to be able to explain ever; no one, as far as I'm concerned, has a convincing materialist theory of consciousness, or even a sketch of the beginnings of one.
Even gods or ghosts seem more amenable to materialist understanding: if real, they would require a distinct, radical change in what laws govern the material world to something far more complex than what seems to, but they could still be made a part of the material.
My complaint about consciousness as an argument for God is that consciousness is mysterious enough that I don't see how a God helps explain it either, though.
No, that's not what it refers to. "God of the gaps" refers to the fact that supernatural power is invoked to explain things we can't easily explain naturally, and that as we learn to explain more and more, well... God just becomes less and less necessary (or at least, contorted into increasingly-suspicious gap-in-current-human-understanding like shapes)
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I am partial to Global Workspace Theory as a materialist explanation, but you may find that either unconvincing or too light on details.
I mean, you could have a naturalistic explanation that isn't materialist.
You could just hypothesize that there are motes of mindstuff that come together and produce consciousness, but which are governed by natural laws like everything else in the universe.
I just think this is on the level of the old theories of elan vital (the special "stuff" that supposedly makes life possible.) We got rid of theories of elan vital after we discovered the mechanics of biochemistry.
My intuition is that just as science rendered the superlunary sphere and life into ordinary matter, we will someday do the same to consciousness.
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