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Let's talk about the existence of God. The OG internet debate culture war issue. Not about the ethical value of a Christian life, or the enduring influence of Christianity on the intellectual tradition of the West (although we also can't declare a priori that those considerations are irrelevant). But just, the simple question of God's existence.
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here. But we rarely address the issue directly. Possibly because both sides assume that these arguments and debates have been exhausted already, and both sides are intransigently locked into their current positions, so it's better for everyone to just maintain a quiet detente. But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on, we may increasingly find value in revisiting some of these questions.
Reasons for believing in God can be divided into roughly two camps, which I'll call the rational arguments and the extra-rational arguments:
The rational arguments are (purportedly) valid arguments such that, if you accept the truth of the premises, you are then compelled to believe in the existence of God under threat of irrationality. This includes many of the classic apologetic arguments: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, etc. Although apologetics and the philosophy of religion have historically paid a great deal of attention to arguments of this sort, I think it's pretty rare to find a religious believer who claims that their belief rests on the force of these arguments alone. Even if rational argumentation alone could get you a good deal of the way towards a fully Christian theological doctrine (e.g. via considerations like Lewis's trilemma), there seems to be a general sentiment that purely rational belief is missing something crucial if it's not backed up by personal faith and experience.
The extra-rational arguments include everything else: faith, either of the "garden" variety or of the "Kierkegaardian leap of faith" variety ("I believe because it is absurd to believe"), religious experience, either of a single life-defining event or in the more general sense of a sort of continuous and ongoing direct perception of God's existence, belief on pragmatic grounds (perhaps because you think you'll simply be happier if you believe, or it's better for the social order, or you believe because of Pascal's Wager style considerations, although maybe you could argue that Pascal's Wager blurs the lines between "rational" and "extra-rational" argumentation...)
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I get the impression that most Christian Mottizens are believers essentially due to some sort of personal experience or personal revelation (please correct me if I'm wrong). This makes me curious though: why do you think that you had this experience, or are perceptually attuned to this truth, etc, while so many other people (namely atheists) aren't? Why are some people capable of simply "seeing" or "realizing" this truth, but not others? (I'm assuming that there's something intrinsically inarticulable about your faith that makes it not amenable to rational argumentation). I'm not trying to do a "gotcha" here, I'm just throwing out some debate starters.
I am an atheist, although not a particularly ardent one. It would be cool if there were compelling reasons to believe, although I don't think that I have any sufficiently compelling ones right now, and I'm also aware that I have an intrinsic bias towards wanting to believe, which means I need to apply a certain level of heightened scrutiny in order to counteract that bias. I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that reality might actually just be that boring.
I 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.
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!
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Thank you for being honest.
My question to you would be: why is faith enough for you? Religious communities hold up faith as this wonderfully good thing, but all that faith means is that you believe something without evidence. You're giving in to wishful thinking. Granted, everybody (including me!) does that to some extent, but it's generally seen as a failure-mode of human cognition. Why admit that openly, and do nothing to try to resolve it?
Yea. I think right-leaning rationalists think to themselves, "If I can believe in Christianity or Islam or any of those, why not be a woke progressive? They too believe untrue things. And at least it's considered mostly normal in day to day life in the best places in the country to live, to boot."
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The truth is my thinking about it doesn’t even go that far. Most of the things we all do (including me) don’t involve evidentiary considerations except in deliberative decision making. To quote Saint Paul, “… we walk by faith, not by sight…” Yes I assume that for everything I do there’s an evidence structure to it lurking in the background somewhere amid all the unconscious processing of the brain, but that’s about it except in the most consequential or interesting matters to me; in which case I come prepared to argue. I can love mathematical proofs as much as I want but if those were the only statements I’d be willing to act on I’d be such a nerd. I’d never be able to communicate with another human being. I don’t expect people to be persuaded by this train of thought, it’s simply an honest description of the internal clockwork of my brain, if someone were to look inside of it.
Atheism has all the logical arguments, so far as I’m able to determine. I’m not a Catholic because I’m convinced of the intellectual truth of it but because I hope it’s true. Without it, I don’t think I’d be living a life much different than I am currently, trying to be moral and do good, so where’s the harm in being one? Yes there are inconveniences and adjustments to make but it’s highly worth the minor cost imposed on me to keep my commitment in check.
To answer the more pointed remark “why is faith enough for me,” I’m not sure it necessarily is. And I don’t know how to explain this sensation well to someone that doesn’t experience it. One thing that’s been adduced in cognitive psychology is the notion that “certainty” is an actual human emotion. Without a strong ideological touchstone, I (and I think most humans) get this sort of cognitive itch like they feel they can’t scratch. Or like a smoker going through withdrawal and feeling mentally constantly on edge like they’re searching for something to soothe the feeling that only another cigarette can satisfy. You could call it that “void” if you want that religious people often talk about, that desperately needs to be filled. Makes you feel very uneasy inside. There’s this need to mentally attach yourself to something “solid,” like an “anchor point.” Atheism and secular philosophy can’t provide something beyond the reality that “… we’re just atoms in some temporary arrangement…,” it’s that sense or feeling of impermanence and ideological quicksand that you can’t hold in your hand that fills the cognitive void that it can’t provide for you. In Buddhism they talk about this notion that they call “dependent arising.” Don’t attach yourself to phenomenon because it’s all in a state of transition and change. It isn’t permanent. And when conditions change, your emotional disposition changes along with it. They talk about how material phenomenon “has no independent existence” or “self-sufficiency.” This is the impulse that I think drives the religious attitude. Going home and hugging the Bible in my mind (metaphorically speaking) renegerates me and keeps that feeling at bay. The sense of transcendence and eternalism it imparts in me makes me feel that there’s a “there” there that that void can’t touch. And whenever it slowly encroaches back into my mind, I go back to the Bible. Secular people do this too, just without the same clarity of mind. I’ve known people who left religion and become slavishly attached to Libertarian philosophy and hug books like Man, State and Economy to death, as it provides them the same feeling the Bible does to believers. Or people who keep “pristine,” untouched hardcover copies of Dad Kapital on their bookshelf that provides all the answers that makes them feel good.
I’m not sure if that answer makes any sense to you; but that’s what it is to me.
This is... an interesting mindset. It seems like you're cognizant of its shortcomings and aren't really trying to proselytize it so I would never be too hostile towards it when the average person has so many dumb beliefs that they're obnoxiously overconfident in.
But as a former edgy atheist I feel compelled to push back at least a little bit. I think you should value truth more highly as an end in and of itself. Sure, people want the answers that religion provide, e.g. "where did we come from", and especially "what happens to us after we die!?!" It's nice to think there's a big "plan" and that we get a nice big reward after life in the form of "heaven" to go to. But it's just not true, and the questions that faith answers are in reality either unknowable, or have mundane answers that aren't very satisfying.
You’ve redescribed faith as existential nicotine. I understand the craving, but the fact that a cigarette calms withdrawal is not an argument that smoking is good. You also have what seems like a bit of a cognitive defense mechanism towards the end with the Das Kapital and Libertarian philosophy bits. To me, that reads like you think that if a person doesn't have religion then they'd just fall back on some secular philosophy and be religiously fanatical towards that instead. And since we all have our "religion", being Christian is hardly a vice even if it's not logically supported, right? But the real lesson to draw from that is not "therefore religious faith is fine." The lesson is "humans are prone to motivated belief and ideological addiction across the board, so we should be more suspicious of all such attachments."
I don’t really disagree with you at all. But to address the critical angle, I value the truth enormously. That’s why I believe all the scientific and logical knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years supports the atheist position. That said though, my religiosity is a testament to the fact that I’m still human and not a purely information processing machine. It’s a cognitive compartmentalization that I let out when it needs to be let out. Some people become so intoxicated by what it does for them it causes them to become overbearing on others and ironically if you seek to win converts to your side of the aisle, becoming an exemplar of the belief that demands people investigate you out of their own curiosity, gets them to open the door. Force is counter-productive in that it sparks resentment among people, despite the fact that that wasn’t how the faith spread so widely throughout the ages.
When people ask me questions of the variety you’re pitching, I don’t descend into my religious beliefs. I’m prepared to talk pure science with them. But first I often try to discern what flavor of an explanation they’re looking for. If they’re looking at the ultimate ends, I’ll go religion if they’re a seeker and I can even talk religious arguments with them, without tearing it down for the reasons I’m persuaded by (again, unless they ask me). I’m intellectually more of a light a torch so they can see the path and be a guide, but don’t tell them they have to travel down the road. In my own life people tend to respect me a lot for doing that. And I don’t demean other ideologies; and even invite criticism against my own.
I’ve explored all kinds of ideologies. I’ve read a ton of secular philosophy and religious philosophy. My general approach is that you can’t claim to understand a worldview without trying to sympathize with it to some degree. Marxian analysis of the commodity was spot on. The Labor Theory of Value he got from Adam Smith which he extended into a longer form has since been jettisoned, and the approach of the Physiocrats has been picked up again by heterodox economists trying to mathematically bring energy in as an input to production. “Free market” libertarian ideology can work very well in the short and medium term but lacks long-term effective planning and still needs to be managed across all scales. I’ve no particular axe to grind against them.
Any religion/ideology/worldview can be a vice, especially when you don’t learn when to put it away as you’re doing other work. And any worldview in general that lacks an update mechanism is inevitably going to drive you right off a cliff. Your only battle is with “time” at that point. I pretty much agree with what you say.
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