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Let's talk about the existence of God. The OG internet debate culture war issue. Not about the ethical value of a Christian life, or the enduring influence of Christianity on the intellectual tradition of the West (although we also can't declare a priori that those considerations are irrelevant). But just, the simple question of God's existence.
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here. But we rarely address the issue directly. Possibly because both sides assume that these arguments and debates have been exhausted already, and both sides are intransigently locked into their current positions, so it's better for everyone to just maintain a quiet detente. But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on, we may increasingly find value in revisiting some of these questions.
Reasons for believing in God can be divided into roughly two camps, which I'll call the rational arguments and the extra-rational arguments:
The rational arguments are (purportedly) valid arguments such that, if you accept the truth of the premises, you are then compelled to believe in the existence of God under threat of irrationality. This includes many of the classic apologetic arguments: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, etc. Although apologetics and the philosophy of religion have historically paid a great deal of attention to arguments of this sort, I think it's pretty rare to find a religious believer who claims that their belief rests on the force of these arguments alone. Even if rational argumentation alone could get you a good deal of the way towards a fully Christian theological doctrine (e.g. via considerations like Lewis's trilemma), there seems to be a general sentiment that purely rational belief is missing something crucial if it's not backed up by personal faith and experience.
The extra-rational arguments include everything else: faith, either of the "garden" variety or of the "Kierkegaardian leap of faith" variety ("I believe because it is absurd to believe"), religious experience, either of a single life-defining event or in the more general sense of a sort of continuous and ongoing direct perception of God's existence, belief on pragmatic grounds (perhaps because you think you'll simply be happier if you believe, or it's better for the social order, or you believe because of Pascal's Wager style considerations, although maybe you could argue that Pascal's Wager blurs the lines between "rational" and "extra-rational" argumentation...)
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I get the impression that most Christian Mottizens are believers essentially due to some sort of personal experience or personal revelation (please correct me if I'm wrong). This makes me curious though: why do you think that you had this experience, or are perceptually attuned to this truth, etc, while so many other people (namely atheists) aren't? Why are some people capable of simply "seeing" or "realizing" this truth, but not others? (I'm assuming that there's something intrinsically inarticulable about your faith that makes it not amenable to rational argumentation). I'm not trying to do a "gotcha" here, I'm just throwing out some debate starters.
I am an atheist, although not a particularly ardent one. It would be cool if there were compelling reasons to believe, although I don't think that I have any sufficiently compelling ones right now, and I'm also aware that I have an intrinsic bias towards wanting to believe, which means I need to apply a certain level of heightened scrutiny in order to counteract that bias. I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that reality might actually just be that boring.
Religion advocates still don't have an even close to satisfactory answer for the two most basic playground arguments so personally it's hard to take discourse there seriously.
If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?
Why is your religion, most likely the one you were raised in, the correct one? Not just Christianity vs Islam vs Judaism, but also specific denominations? Statistically speaking the large large large large majority of religious believers are blasphemous in some way (not even counting the overwhelming number of people who clearly don't even follow their own belief's teachings), so why not you? And that's assuming that any of the mainstream religions are right to begin with and God isn't an Eldritch shadow beast who hides and laughs at our idiotic ideas or the ancient Greeks were right all along or the spaghetti monster or plenty of other possibilities. Religious belief doesn't seem to come from logic or first principles, but cultural indoctrination or else we wouldn't have this issue.
I've never seen a satisfying answer to these. I've seen attempts by religious people jerking each other off with a bunch of gobbledygook, but it's never been logically strong. And arguing back is easy, you can just paint a rock with their same exact logic "actually the Eldritch shadow beast spaghetti Zeus did that"
As far as why my religion— I always point out how closely the description of human nature matches the Bible over and against other religious books. Humanity has a sort of duel nature, one of which aspires to do good, but also an evil side that will take anything positive and twist it to do evil for their own advantage. I don’t see that in any other religion. Buddhism doesn’t say anything of the sort, nor does Hindu thought. Judaism and Christianity do.
And Islam, and the Yazidis and as others have pointed out the Zoroastrians. And then we get into what kind of Christianity anyway since plenty of denominations are mutually exclusive.
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Interesting enough, a book written by humans can also describe this same exact observation! Hell even space aliens if given opportunities to observe our species could come to the same conclusions.
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Have you looked into Zoroastrianism at all? It has the same (flawed and myopic, IMO) system of moralistic dualism, complete with an evil entity constantly manipulating humans to give into their dark and selfish predilections. All developed several centuries before Christ.
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That's not the argument, that's an oversimplification of the argument. It's not that "nothing comes from nothing" like they sang in the Sound of Music. It's that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Or another way of saying it is that everything that is contingent has a reason for being the way it is instead of all the millions of ways it is not.
The argument then is not that God is an exception, but that God is not these things. God did not begin to exist, and God is not contingent, meaning He couldn't be anything other than what He is, or as the Philosophers call it, God is the/a Necessary Being - necessarily that which He is.
And why can "God just can exist without having to come into being to begin with" not apply to the universe itself? Why can't the universe just be without a beginning, but a supposed god can?
The god argument claims it's possible to just exist as apparently God does so but then also claims it's not possible and existence can only occur with something to bring it about. Every discussion here always goes round in the same circles. "The universe can't, god can" without any sort of proof or reasoning behind why they must differ.
The Universe could be without a beginning, but it is still contingent because it is composed of parts and has potentials. The universe doesn't have to be what it is now, in fact it is constantly changing. That makes it contingent, unlike the proposed God.
This is why the proposed God would be perfectly simple, composed of no parts, etc. Its existence would need to be identical to its essence. The universe does not match any of these criteria.
And what's the problem with it changing? The universe changing overtime does not necessitate a god.
It just means that it is not a thing without potential. The hypothesized God has no potential, the universe does.
I am just answering your question about why God isn't an "exception" to the cosmological argument but rather the cosmological argument describes what would make God different from that which we observe.
And "having potential" makes a difference how exactly?
A change means that something had a potential to be something else and that potential was actualized (brought into existence where before it did not exist.) It's the whole argument.
Once upon at time, a High School literature teacher was introducing his students to Shakespeare. One student skimmed through Hamlet and said, "This story sucks. It's boring and doesn't make sense."
The teacher rightly responded, "Hamlet is not on trial. You are."
If everyone who has ever made the cosmological argument says, "No, the universe is not an example of an uncaused cause, instead it's in the other category we refer to," then maybe you don't understand the argument at all and should avoid it until you do.
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Except that in the next microsecond, the universe will be different.
So would be any god worth caring about.
Some unchanging deistic "ultimate creator" who does not intercede in the workings of our universe is, by definition, pretty fucking pointless to care about.
And, of course, basically all religions don't have that kind of hands-off deity in mind.
An unchanging God is not the same as a "hands-off" God. Instead, a classical theistic God is at every moment the cause of the existence of everything.
Something that explains everything isn't much different that explaining nothing.
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WandererintheWilderness hit the last one well, so I'll hit the first one.
God isn't material in the way that the cosmos is material. There is a creator, and there is creation. God didn't come from nothing, he was everything. We, as the creation, are finite and restricted by the constraints that God put into the created cosmos. God has no such constraints.
And why did he change his mind?
By that I mean, for infinite (?) time God was there and there was no universe. Then he created the universe. But if God is perfect and there was no outside force acting on him (how could there be?) then what caused him to move from being content that there was no universe to desiring that there be a universe?
That intersection of a finite (maybe) universe and an infinite God always bothered me.
God is outside time. Time itself is created.
As for why he created, here is one of the first results in a Google search: https://ses.edu/why-did-god-create-anything/, which is a simplistic but cogent summary of the Christian perspective.
Yeah, that's really not a satisfying answer. I probably don't have the philophical jargon to state why exactly, but an explanation that says that God created time itself but which still involves him existing before the universe was created and after it was created seems verbally incoherent to me. Like a square circle.
Not "before", "outside".
Suppose we are living in a simulation. A lot of simulation theory bootstraps itself into plausibility by assuming that there are going to be many layers of simulation, and thus we are unlikely to be in baseline reality. The part people don't seem to pay much attention to is that, presuming we are in a simulation, our observation of our own simulations demonstrates that there is no necessary relation between a given simulation's rules and the nature of baseline reality. That is to say, if you do not have direct access to baseline reality (and entropy and consciousness are two strong empirical indicators within the materialist frame that we do not have such access), then you have no valid claim to insist that baseline reality conforms to your observations of the simulation's rules. It might or it might not, and other than observing it directly, you simply don't know.
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Whatever you want to call the Godly timeless equivalent of "time", it doesn't erase the simple logic here. If the universe hasn't existed since eternity, then it must have come about. If it came about, then there must have been a GodTimeEquivalent period where it didn't exist. If there is a GodTimeEquivalent period where the universe didn't exist, then why did he change his mind?
To be created, it must have not been. If it's always been then it wasn't "created" for it always was.
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The way it's usually explained is that being outside the concept of linear time, there is no real "before the creation of the Universe".
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And this immediately fails the "and why couldn't that apply to anything else like the universe itself?" question. But even if we presume a creator, it fails the "why this specific god?" and not say, a computer simulation.
Every single thing is answered equally by "the Matrix creators want to fuck with us".
I'm not understanding the thrust of your question. Are you suggesting the material world (or something in the material world) is eternal?
While I don't believe we are in a simulated universe, in this scenario the simulation's programmer would be, to us, indistinguishable from God.
Well
You don't know it's not.
Seems like wishful thinking to assume something must be eternal to begin with. It's always possible that we just end with complete nothingness and there is no universe or god at the end.
Now we're again at the question of which God and religion. A programmer simulation theory is essentially polytheistic (even if we are only interacted with by a single one of them) since a fair assumption here is that there might be, or at least might have been, multiple of the species doing the simulation. And their particular beliefs and the reason for why the world exists could be completely opposite ours.
We could exist as an advanced AI powered history simulation to fill in the gaps on our own past, or we're just animals in the zoo, a marvel that happened to exist in the simulation. Heck we might even be unimportant, maybe a few billion light years away the real point of the simulation is taking place and we just happen to be little specks of dust that evolved on a side planet due to the ultrarealism.
God died in the space wars and we're just running off the simulation that no one has bothered to turn off, powered by a super renewable energy source.
You don't know it is. This is, ultimately, a matter solely of belief and not knowable fact. Personally, I find the belief that the natural world is itself supernatural (by always having existed) to be ridiculous, therefore I believe that there must exist something outside of the universe which set it in motion. If you disagree with that, that's fine, but I do think you have to concede that nobody can know what the uncaused cause truly is.
I believe that @PyotrVerkhovensky was referring to the universe extending eternally backwards, not saying that it will have no end.
I don't need to know! I'm not making a positive assertion!
Well at least we can agree on that, there is not a knowable factual basis for such claims.
How is it supernatural to have always existed? And how is it more supernatural and weird for the universe to have existed, than for an outside supernatural being to have existed and created the universe.
If we have the two choices of Universe exists or Universe exists + God exists, then this seems pretty close to classic conjunction fallacy logic.
That is like, the default atheistic statement. It is the religious view that positively asserts there to not just be a creator, but also typically asserts it knows what and how things happened.
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I'm an atheist, but I think the Abrahamic faiths all have a reasonably cogent answer as these things go: "we know our religion is the correct one because, fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, God sent us prophets and/or a Messiah, who performed all sorts of miracles as tangible proof of the divine; and people wrote credible accounts of those events down for posterity".
e.g., I think there is genuinely something to the case that the Christian Gospels are probably more historical than not. I don't believe for a moment that they were directly written by the people they're attributed to, of course - but we have historical evidence that they were written shortly enough after the fact that, yeah, it's kind of bizarre to imagine people making too much of this stuff up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as fact. Mark's Gospel was probably written something like 40 years after Jesus's purported crucifixion - it could and would have been read by people who had personally met Jesus.
Indeed, it seems to be written in a way that assumes the audience has some prior knowledge about Jesus and the rumors that surrounded him, so that the Gospel's purpose is to theologically nail down
(or, as they case may be, nail up)who and what Jesus was. Mark is very concerned with telling his audience "no, Jesus wasn't John the Baptist resurrected, or the prophet Isaiah returning to Earth - and he was definitely an emanation of the Jewish God, not a different Gnostic God", not so much with persuading an audience who might think that Jesus was just some guy and all the supernatural claims about him are nonsense. This tells us that, at least within certain circles, "there was a guy called Jesus whose life story went roughly like this, and there was something supernatural going on with him" was a relatively uncontroversial starting point within a few decades of Jesus's death. How would we react if someone wrote a book which took it for granted that everyone knows that, IDK, Jimmy Swaggart routinely performed honest-to-goodness public miracles in the 80s - a book which seemed merely interested in telling us precisely what it was that empowered him to do so?As a materialist, I don't ultimately find this persuasive as evidence for divinity itself. The credibility of the Gospels as historical document is significant, but not significant enough to match up to the basic improbability of "the supernatural exists" as a root claim. But that's not the question you asked; you asked what makes Christians so sure that, even assuming there's a God, it's specifically the Christian God. And I think that once you take for granted that the supernatural exists, Christianity does start to look pretty well-supported.
The thing is belief in supernatural healing seems to have been commonplace at that time. John 5, for example, tells the story of Jesus healing a man who wasn't fast enough to access the existing supernatural healing method available, namely, jumping into a pool first when the water moved. The passage makes no attempt to dispute that this other supernatural healing method, which seems to bear no relation to Christ or his mission at all, totally works. In fact, it's seemingly assumed the reader would accept such a thing as normal.
To the skeptical reader, the passage is kind of revealing: you have a pool surrounded by blind and lame people who have to race to jump in at a specific time to get healed, and... well, I suppose there's a sampling bias towards not being blind and lame among those who are capable of jumping in first. Does this not sound completely plausible as a mean-spirited prank the lads would play on the blind and lame? Just jump in the pool and start shouting "I'm healed! Wow! Man, if only you were faster, you could have made it in before me, tee-hee." Yet the text makes no explicit attempt to entertain such a reading: it just flatly asserts that no, there actually was supernatural power here, you just had to be really fast and jump in first, but it really did work! I'd love to read a theologian's explanation of why exactly an angel behaving in this extremely troll-ish way is... well, still allowed to be considered an angel lol.
My memory is that the disabled had people there to help them, and that particular guy was disadvantaged by being there on his own, so he had nobody to keep a space for him or tell him when the waters were disturbed or help him get into the pool:
Rather like the helpers at the baths in Lourdes.
Well, it doesn't say anyone else had help. Just that he would need help to get there first.
Anyway, it's a very odd story, because it sounds like something straight out of local folklore. As I mentioned in my first comment, it barely sounds like Christian theology at all, modulo the hardcoded fact that it's in the New Testament. It sounds more like a story from pagan mythology, where supernatural entities aren't cleanly divided into good and evil, and entities like djinn or fairies often just troll humans for fun. Like it's specifically the blind and lame that are mentioned, being summed by a signal they either cannot see or cannot respond to if they do see it. There's no way that's an accidental detail. And it's very difficult to perform the mental gymnastics for why a member of the traditional Christian angelic hierarchy would engage in trolling the disabled.
It would make a lot more sense if the text said, "But it turns out, this was a fool's hope, and jumping into a pool of water before someone else does not, in fact, heal illness. It wasn't until the man turned away from this false hope and toward Christ he was healed." But it definitely does not say that.
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This doesn't solve anything, there isn't even a majority religion just a plurality one of Christianity (and that's again dismissing the significant differences between various denominations all asserting to truly know God's will) so you are still most likely wrong even if there is a god of some sort.
Who is the last true prophet? Is it Mohammad? Christ? Joseph Smith? Malachi? Sun Myung Moon? Maybe L Ron Hubbard? Li Hongzhi of Falun Gong claims to be capable of miracles right now and he has millions and millions of followers. Tons of people vouch for the supernatural powers that Falun Gong brings them. Well there you go, a large number of people vouching that he is the newest spiritual leader and performs miracles in front of them. Many have even personally seen into the other dimensions themselves. I guess that is the true religion.
And why does it even have to be an Abrahamic one, the people who believe in stuff like Hinduism and Buddhism seem pretty confident too.
If we grab a random person off the planet and ask them, most likely they'd be wrong given that no religion is in the majority and therefore even the correct belief system is not believed by >50% of people. More people should be reflecting on themselves and wondering about that right?
"I believe in what I was told to believe as a kid because religion is culturally indoctrinated and I want to feel like a special part of a bigger whole" is a great explainer for why the large majority of people have to be wrong.
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Jesus was one of many holy miracle men. He isn't even unique among second-temple Jews (see Honi the circle drawer and Hanina ben Dosa). It was taken for granted back then that certain humans were uniquely empowered by God(s) to do cool shit.
See also: John the baptist, who the evangelists spent considerable time deprioritizing.
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I'm sorry, but trying to de-emphasis Jesus's special status by bringing up literally whos isn't doing you any favors. Like who are these people?
Second temple Jews who performed miracles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanina_ben_Dosa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_HaMe%27agel
Obviously they did not manage to attain as much notoriety as the most famous person to ever live.
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That’s the whole point: that these men weren’t “literally whos” in their day. That people who knew them testified to their miraculous abilities with the same sincerity that Christ’s followers attributed to Him. One logical extrapolation being that we only take the claims about Christ’s miracles as seriously as we do today because of contingent factors that caused Christianity to be adopted and spread by European political elites, and not because of any especially unique or compelling evidence of Christ’s miracles specifically.
European elites who only became relevant millenia after Jesus's death? Also, Christianity was spread bottom up not top down in Europe.
Also, is it not the more logical and simpler explanation that the reason we know of Jesus and not the other guys is because Jesus's story was actuallly true? Why are undefined "contingent factors" a more valid explanation than just believing in the veracity of Jesus?
You’re claiming that Greece and Rome only became relevant millennia after Christ’s death? That would certainly be news to Christ and his followers.
Untrue. In most of Northern Europe, Christianity was spread at the point of the sword; Charlemagne, for example, fought a series of bloody wars against the pagan Saxons, who represented a genuine populist resistance against a foreign faith being spread by an expansionist power. Similarly, the pagans of the Baltic states were Christianized via a brutal crusade by much richer powers at the behest of Rome. Yes, there were plenty of sincere Christian conversions by individuals in Europe, but that was in no way sufficient to make it the majority religion.
How is this not an equally valid argument for the divinity of Mohammed, or of Buddha, or of Joseph Smith? If you disbelieve the veracity of their claims, despite the sincere and fervent testimony of their millions of modern adherents, why do you believe that the veracity of Jesus’ divinity is bolstered by his religion’s relative popularity and longevity?
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