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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.
Ooh! Coming straight out of the gate with the whip going already! 🤣
I don't get into that fight on here because I generally like you guys and it's not going anywhere. The STEM people are convinced that Science Explains It All, us religious types have been in this fight once too often before, and we end up talking past each other. There's not much room for debate when one side lays out "yeah but just because you felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, that is more easily explained by [launch into neurochemistry, neurobiology, and psychology explanation]" as their standard of proof. I mean, I've had the "St Paul was an epileptic, ackshully, which is why he fell off his horse and hallucinated Jeebus was talking to him" stuff already, I don't need more of it.
As I said, I like you guys and getting into what is sure to degenerate into name-calling and mutual insulting of intelligence and sanity isn't fruitful. There are lots of better theologians, philosophers, and apologists out there online. I'd prefer to keep my powder dry for the really important fights to come (like the third season of Rings of Power, dropping upon us like Fat Man on Nagasaki in November this year).
I've felt the Holy Spirit but I still don't believe. I used to but looking into other faiths it's clear a lot of people have sincere encounters with the divine. I don't think either Sufis or Pentecostals are lying when they felt that but there's legion of mutually exclusive religious experiences.
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There is a third category that I belong to: people who think that it is quite likely that science will never be able to be able to explain consciousness, and are thus not materialists/physicalists, yet who at the same time are not religious in the conventional sense of the word - that is, we believe that there likely is something beyond the material in existence, something that likely is in principle beyond the reach of science, but we do not believe in any of the established religious traditions and do not believe in some kind of divine creator-intelligence, unless that divine creator-intelligence is simply a synonym for "the universe".
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It's a cogent point, especially in the face of how you, as a Christian, surely view other religions. Did Joseph Smith really believe in the golden tablets, in Reformed Egyptian, in all that crap? He's objectively wrong in both of our eyes, so the explanation that's most flattering to him is that he was telling the truth from his perspective. The implications of that are obvious. But maybe there isn't much left to debate after that, anyway. The values difference to even pose the question must be substantial.
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You seem to be attacking straw New Atheists who mostly aren't actually here.
I have a lot of reasons to disbelieve in a Holy Spirit even while believing you and my mother are sincere (and not crazy) when you claim to have experienced it. I don't need a "scientific" explanation to debunk every single supposed miracle in the Bible. I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.
Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.
Feck it, and I said I wouldn't get into an argument.
But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.
I do accept that, but I think some people are very uncomfortable with the idea that one can be both, not either/or. A kind of Unitarian Universalist 'religious/spiritual' nice polite makes no demands of belief that will contradict Science Says? That's fine, but keep it in your pants, buster, when it comes to making real-world decisions.
Remember the furore over Francis Collins being an Evangelical and leader of the Human Genome Project, then director of the National Institutes for Health? Sam Harris remembers, as does P.Z. Myers:
Cool Buddhism-derived meditation for me, but not Bible-bashing literalism for thee:
Science doesn't "tell us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen." Science provides a methodology that tests the nature of observable reality.
If you tell me there is a God that exists that is outside any means of testing his existence, and you have spiritual experiences that no one who is not you can verify, science doesn't, strictly speaking, say "That's not real." It says "There is no way to verify that."
People can of course choose to believe in things that cannot be verified. I imagine if I had a spiritual experience that I was convinced was real, I would believe it was real regardless of whether it could be detected by anyone else.
Since I don't, however, and since such experiences fall outside anything explainable with what we know about the universe using observable and testable criteria, you can get offended that I disbelieve, but why should I believe?
I'm not saying you should believe. I'm saying people treat it not as "science says it's not verifiable" but "science says it's not real". And you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that".
Why should 'observable and testable criteria' be limited to what we currently have in our toolbox? This is the same "love is only oxytocin" reasoning that gets us tangled up in the same kinds of arguments about what is real/actual and why then it degenerates into "all that romance crap is stupid, Valentine's Day is only commercial opportunity, you don't love that woman, it's evolution acting on you to fuck her to spread your genes nothing more and certainly nothing special" kind of fighting.
I'm not offended, I'm just tired of the fight.
I'm not trying to fight! But what am I supposed to say to 'you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that"?
Let's say you say you saw an angel. I can:
It seems only (1) will not offend you. Problem: I don't believe in angels. You cannot convince me angels exist. What do you want from a non-believer that doesn't get your back up?
Love is at least a relatable experience. And we know humans experience emotions because even sociopaths do. Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.
But the reduction to "it's all just neurochemicals" does anger or hurt people who lay a very great emphasis on the importance of love (all kinds of love). "Yeah we could just shoot you with a syringe full of hormones to make you feel that way and it would be just the same as if you met the right person for you" is not what people want to hear, or would accept. And is that all that love is, in fact? I don't think it is, and I think a lot of humanity believes and has believed that it is not all that it is.
The neurochemicals are just the causal mechanism behind love. There has to be one; what would it mean for there not to be? Your brain just started wanting to be with another person for literally no reason? But any other casual mechanism could be just as easily dismissed.
I am reminded of the argument that it is immoral to hold someone accountable for their low intelligence because intelligence is genetic and they didn't choose to get bad genes, and all I can think is, as opposed to what? If intelligence is instead caused by the environment, nobody chooses how they are raised. And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies. And so on. The objection is not to genes, but to any casual mechanism which can be understood.
Falling in love was the single most important experience of my life, though it was 20 years ago. Knowing that the feeling was triggered by neurochemicals in my brain does not change that. Nor does knowing that my brain was executing an adaptation that was selected for in the ancestral environment because it made my ancestors pair-bond and therefore more likely to successfully raise offspring who would survive in turn to have offspring of their own. Chemicals and evolution explain love; they do not explain it away.
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Okay. This is no different than your being offended that I don't believe in angels. Sure, a lot of people might be upset to hear love described as nothing more than a physiological process.
So what? It's true or it's not true. If it's not true, then it does you no harm that I believe it. If it is true, it's true whether or not that upsets you.
Believing love is just a product of evolution doesn't make it not important or real.
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Sure, but two out of your three options are based on "angels not real" and that's the position you're starting from, so we have nothing to discuss. This is not like "which recipe for roast chicken is best, let's test these three out", it's "there is no such thing as a chicken but I'll be nice and pretend I believe you can cook an imaginary bird".
Again, it's not about offence. It's about this is not an impartial, let's start from positions of neutrality so neither of us hold a strong opinion pro or con the premise "is the supernatural real?" exchange. You don't believe it is, I do believe it is, we're not having a good faith discussion of "we don't know for sure so let's lay out the arguments and see what gives us that delicious flavour of crispy skin and moist meatiness".
EDIT: Imagine that I respond to you with "uh-huh, now I'm not trying to trigger your over-sensitive, fragile little ego here, but come on now, how can you expect me to believe there are no angels? I can give you three options when you say you never saw an angel:
Do you think that is me being neutral on the topic of "do angels exist (the answer is self-evidently yes)"?
I am not sure where you got the idea I was claiming to be neutral on the existence of angels. I am not neutral. I do not believe in angels. Of course that is going to be my baseline.
So if we talk about angels and you tell me angels exist, what do you want me to say? The most respectful and charitable thing I can say is "I believe you believe." I mean, sure, I might be interested in why you believe. I would listen with what I think is an open mind. But open minded doesn't mean I'm starting with the premise that maybe they exist and maybe they don't. What else would you ask of me? I
I did not say anything like"I'm going to trigger your over-sensitive fragile little ego.' If you took that approach towards me, well, I'd assume you weren't really trying to discuss anything.
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So people don't value your personal subjective feelings enough and insist on invoking relevant fields of study. Wow. This whole post sounds an awful lot like you lost an argument that you're trying to pass off as a draw.
I'm not claiming to have had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit, but your response is precisely why this discussion will go nowhere. "Imma right and you wrong!" on both sides.
If you think someone describing their subjective internal experience of anything counts as evidence that anyone else who isn't already sympathetic can afford to care about then I don't know what to tell you, apparently everything is true, even mutually contradictory things.
Would you accept someone's internal subjective experience of emotional suffering or just shrug it off as "not someone I need to care about so I don't accept their experience as real"?
Again, I'm not saying you have to believe that a spiritual experience is real, anymore than you have to accept that your fifteen year old child's first experience of heartbreak is the big deal they think it is, but it would be a cold parent who would just ignore them or tell them nobody cares.
Okay well that's where my interest begins and ends.
I'm not your parent and I don't care.
If you were the parent of any future children, God help them with an attitude like that.
It was an analogy, not a request that you be my ersatz parent holding my hand while I sobbed into my pillow.
Okay well if that magical feeling doesn't count as evidence of anything and nobody needs a hug over it either, then what exactly do you want? Seriously this whole subthread is some deeply female-coded shit in the worst possible way, complaining that those gosh darned debates are too focused on who's right and wrong and don't respect feelings enough.
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Yeah I should have found a different way to phrase that. By "pre-modern" all I really meant was "prior to about 1600", not "backwards and unsophisticated" or anything like that. There's a mild revival of interest in Platonism too, for example.
There is nothing new under the sun, as the fella said.
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On the topic of great tv :P you mentioned on The Other Place loathing all the modern Star Trek including DS9. How did you feel about Battlestar Galatica, which was the same kind of thing but not polluting a beloved IP? I watched the whole thing back in 2010 and although the last seasons dropped off and it's very much an artifact of its time, I thought it was gripping television.
Excuse me, but I was a big fan of the original series. That said, I didn't mind the direction they took with the reboot, but I did miss the thinly veiled Mormon theology from the original.
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I didn't loathe Deep Space Nine, to be clear about that. I found it a interesting change from the setting until then, not on a starship going from planet to planet but a fixed location like a space station. Strangely enough, before ever it came along, I had wondered about if any show would do an episode like 'a day in the life of a station commander' where he deals with a set of minor crises that could become major ones, making for a very exciting episode before at the end we see a starship docking for crew shore leave, resupplies, and the rest of it, and two of the ship crew making some comments about how peaceful it all was but yeah they could never handle the boredom of it all.
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Ah, I remember the OG Galactica and its sequel Galactica 1980, which was cheesy late 70s/early 80s fun! It had Dirk Benedict, who went on to play Face in The A-Team, as Starbuck for one. Finding out that it was based on oddball ancient astronaut type notions (or at least someone involved in producing it had those) was also funny. I was in my mid-teens when it aired so that probably helped.
I never bothered with the reboot because I was not that interested at all and the idea of taking it seriously enough to give it the full Babylon 5 treatment just wasn't in my bailiwick. It would have been like deciding to reboot Disney and do a show about the travails of one Michael Mouse, a late 20s to early 30s office worker (but up-and-coming, junior exec type not just a cubicle drone) in the Big City (east or west coast of your choice) and his friends, romantic interests, pet, etc. And of course Michael was not a mouse, that would have been silly for A Serious Show.
I much preferred the chrome toasters Cylons.
The series creator, Glen Larson, was Mormon (as am I). He also made Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., and a bunch of other famous series, but Galactica was the only one where he gave it a bit of a Mormon twist (that I'm aware of). Mormons don't actually believe in weird Ancient Aliens stuff, but it meshed pretty well with the Galactica setting.
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Fair enough. As A Serious Show, I think it was really good though, in no small part due to the performance of James Callis as Dr. Gaius Baltar, accidental betrayer of humanity. There's a really excellent bit where one of the engineers on the Galactica confronts President Roslin with the fact that the expediencies of being a fleet on the run means that people are stuck doing whatever they were told to do when the fleet started running and after a year this is already settling into heritable castes. The President points out that that's awful and all but they're all a bit preoccupied with not dying at the moment and there's a limit to what she can do. So he goes to see Baltar, who will take on basically any cause du jour for attention, respect and power: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OOJrPRruU94&t=175
The acting is magnificent IMO. It doesn't hit quite the same if you haven't spent three seasons watching him be an arrogant, self-centred prat, but it's still good.
This is flippant, but remembering the discussion around the reboot, a lot of it was more "mmm, smexy Cylon ladies!" and not so much "Big Moral Ethical Philosophical Issues" 😁
The 'heritable castes in a year' sounds a leeetle quick off the mark, I imagine they were trying to retcon the original "all the Twelve Colonies of Kobol that these people come from were the origins of the zodiac signs on Earth, and all the Taurans do X and all the Librans do Y and all the Cancerians do Z" typing.
Speaking of theology, Glen Larson (the show creator) was a Mormon and put in Mormon themes into the show, it seems!
There were definitely smexy Cylon ladies, sometimes 12 clones at a time. But seriously, it's a great show. They really commit to the premise of, "we're trying to preserve our society and our humanity, but we're in circumstances that pretty much demand a military dictatorship" and all sorts of stuff naturally falls out of that. What do you do when there's not enough food and water to keep the fighting soldiers going and everyone else? What do you do with criminals when keeping them in prison is a massive and dangerous waste of resources? The heritable castes thing comes because one of the main characters is a deckhand and he's training his younger son (who was supposed to be going to go off to the big city) to help because they're desperately overworked and there's nobody else, and everyone around him is doing the same. Lots of people don't like the way society is being run, and some of them are well-meaning and some of them are deluded troublemakers and some of them are con artists, and how can you be sure you're being honest with yourself about the difference when you're suppressing the latter two to keep your society from collapsing around you?
Boomer is a brainwashed Cylon infiltrator in disguise and doesn't know it (but we do). Baltar is a genuinely brilliant egotist desperately trying to cover up that his foolishness was responsible for the death of their society. The Admiral and the President are doing the awkward dance you do when the military is the most important element of your society and the line between 'civil-military cooperation' and 'well-meaning military dictatorship' is looking thinner by the day.
It's a great show, and they act their hearts out.
That's not really establishing a caste system, though, that's "we're desperately undermanned and since I'm a deckhand that is what I know and what I can teach you to do".
Sure, give it four or five generations and it becomes a caste system, but it's a bit too on the nose for "right now I am drowning, please throw me that life belt" situation they got going on. God knows, Original Trek engaged in some anvil-to-the-head moral lessons as well, but that is a little too much nudging in the ribs about inequality and the state of society today.
Okay, it's pulled out a bit for that episode, but this is after a year of going and he's not presented as being in the right. He's nervous about the future, and understandably so. It's not preachy at all - the President's position of look, this just isn't the time is treated very sympathetically and pretty much wins out, with some fig leaves. This was in the early 2000s when anvil-to-the-head moral lessons were out of fashion and hard choices were in. Pretty much all the characters get to be sympathetic.
Sorry, I'm surprisingly enthusiastic about it for something I haven't watched in 15 years.
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