site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16364 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ubiquity of religion suggests that the instinct to religion is strongly embedded within the human psyche

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 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.

If there is no God, then there is no basis or criteria for categorizing anything as good or bad.

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.

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.

Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling

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.

I would rather the universe not be a boring place.

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.

But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on

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).

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 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".

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.

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.

I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.

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.

Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.

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:

Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”

Cool Buddhism-derived meditation for me, but not Bible-bashing literalism for thee:

In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, in which he claims to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and Evangelical Christianity. Let it be known that “consistency” and “harmony” can be in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, to read The Language of God is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet, polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health.

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.

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:

  1. Believe you.
  2. Assume you're lying or delusional.
  3. More charitably, assume you experienced something that you can't explain or prove but which you believe was an angel.

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.

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.

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.

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:

  1. Believe you.
  2. Assume you're lying or delusional.
  3. More charitably, assume you experienced a vision of an angel which you can't accept or deny but which you believe was a natural phenomenon.

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.

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.

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.

Again, I'm not saying you have to believe that a spiritual experience is real,

Okay well that's where my interest begins and ends.

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.

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.

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.

the third season of Rings of Power

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.

How did you feel about Battlestar Galatica, which was the same kind of thing but not polluting a beloved IP?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

And here we go already: you don't really believe what you say you believe, you're only cosplaying.

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.

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!

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.

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?

You're already presuming that those of us who say "yes we do believe in the superstitions" are lying.

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.

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?)

Lol. 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!

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."

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.

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.

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...

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.

A very interesting website is the amusingly acerbic History for Atheists website, https://historyforatheists.com/ .

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.

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

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.

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

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:

  • On immigration. Theological atheism: "can we make it work?", moral: "love your neighbour"
  • On rape. Theological: "is this rape accusation real?", moral: "believe the victim"
  • On transrights. Theological: "you don't have a woman's soul because you don't have a soul", moral: "you are literally killing them by questioning it"

etc etc

like the dark ages ages weren't dark

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:

the date of christmas

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!")

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.

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.

someone who simply wants to vanquish nincompoops who think Hebrew mythology can be successfully validated by science

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:

Bartolo Longo (b. 1841) was a young student training to be a lawyer in Naples when he fell under the influence first of rationalists, then occultists.

A natural progression, one might say? 🤣

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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").

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.

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.

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.

But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.

This is a better argument against it. The fine tuning argument talks about probabilities but really is more about aesthetics.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Old Testament has the Israelites turning away from God time and time again, despite all the miraculous things they saw.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Supposedly, they get to make an informed decision about whether to serve God or not.

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!

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.

  1. If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?

  2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

Rather like the helpers at the baths in Lourdes.

that particular guy

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.

"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".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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'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.

The classic God of the gaps argument seems different: it was about "missing links" in evolution

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)

no one, as far as I'm concerned, has a convincing materialist theory of consciousness, or even a sketch of the beginnings of one.

I am partial to Global Workspace Theory as a materialist explanation, but you may find that either unconvincing or too light on details.

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.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats