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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 think this is an interesting issue, but let me take a stab at why there might be less overt enthusiasm for grappling with this stuff these days, perhaps.
Many of us cut our teeth on internet New Atheism, and I suspect many of us also had a fairly religious background prior to that (I'm seen someone note that, from their time in the rationalist community, they were surprised how often people had previously had pretty religious backgrounds before turning into dogmatic atheists, though I've never verified that myself)
At the time, what we really had was something like American Fundamentalists (often Southern tinged), just after their numerical and political peak of the late 80s / early 90s, picking active fights on matters of material and scientific fact with New Atheists types, a disproportionate number of whom came from biology and evolutionary academic backgrounds. So that fight had very, very hard battle lines. And then Fundamentalists went into decline and lost confidence with the failures of the George W Bush years and the forward march of the internet, and New Atheism was absolutely wrecked (in extremely telling ways) by the rise of Wokeness in its own midst. And so that fight lost a lot of steam.
Fundamentalism was very, very anti-intellectual in many cases. Noted scholar of evangelicalism (and himself a Reformed evangelical Christian) Mark Noll was already writing, back in his 1994 book "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind", that the issue was that by that point there wasn't much mind to speak of. So it's not exactly a giant surprise that the most visible, most politically successful strain of American Christianity was leading with a glass jaw by that point, and I think it was especially vulnerable to exactly those academic fields where something like a strict totalizing materialist world view was the most successful, and that definitely included evolutionary biology...
...but, well, the opposite of being an idiot is not automatically being smart yourself. And the reality of most of the New Atheist thinkers is that they had the exact weakness that almost every academic I've ever known has had - there were a bunch of thinkers who were very, very smart when talking about ideas in their own narrow specialties, but the circle of their confidence vastly outstripped the circle of their actual expertise, and so as a practical matter, for a very wide range of very important human subjects, many of them were actually about as retarded as the Fundamentalists they so despised. But that was very, very easy to overlook when they were publicly tussling with the highly obnoxious, often very Southern, ignorant-and-pig-headed-and-very-low-social-status Fundamentalists who really did need to be taken down a peg.
A very interesting website is the amusingly acerbic History for Atheists website, https://historyforatheists.com/ . And one of the things that I especially love about it is that, well, it makes it pretty clear that the profound ignorance and ideological bias of many New Atheists activists when it comes to history is an almost perfect parallel of how Fundamentalists (and lazy Christian apologists) abuse history - the Founding Fathers were not, in fact, Fundamentalist Christians, but it's also the case that figures like Voltaire was absolutely full of crap about massive amounts of history, and many of us are still wading in the propaganda he and other French Philosophes spewed in the 18th century, and huge amounts of New Atheism was based on those kinds of anti-faith promoting stories that are absolutely trash as history. And part of what makes that website appealing is the author is an atheist who has no particular love for Christianity, but he has enough of a history background, and takes history seriously enough, to be deeply irritated by New Atheist history abuse.
And likewise, as I've been more recently digging through David Bentley Hart's "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" as well as Tim Keller's "Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical", one of the immediately apparent issues that crops up is that most of the public New Atheist figures were not just deeply ignorant (and indifferent) about history, they also tended to be deeply ignorant about philosophy and subfields of philosophy like ethics and epistomology, too, and especially of the ways that philosophy and theology intersect. Which is not to say that philosophers are immediately sympathetic to all the arguments in either of those Christians books, but it is to say that they tend to be deeply horrified by the deep philosophical ignorance in the intellectual foundations that New Atheists thinkers tended to just straight up assume (like a blind faith in hyper-reductive strict materialism), and they tend to recognize that at least some of the philosophical arguments that sophisticated theists wrestle with are, in fact, hard and credible and not easy to dismiss.
And so lurking in the background, one may well say that much of what gave so much heat and fire to the New Atheist / Fundamentalist online slap fight is that both sides agreed to be deeply ignorant about most complicated domains of human knowledge, and both sides glossed over the fact that much of what they wanted to fight about were basically regarded as something like category errors by many other important thinkers.
There is a irony here, too, which is that part of what made New Atheism so incredibly vulnerable to Wokism (with Atheism+, etc) was exactly this deep ignorance about history, philosophy, ethics, and so on, and misunderstanding that the older, much bigger history of Enlightenment Atheism (and Deism) and its role in things like the French Revolution, the rise of Communism, 20th Century Communist revolutions, and so on. Having lived through that late 90s era, you'd see this claim that was something like "God doesn't exist, there is no hell, now nothing has changed, so go live your life no different than you already were doing, and have a nice day". And... historically, that is not how people have responded, writ large, as they've let go of a theistic view of history, tradition, and associated human anthropologies. And this fact, the incredibly disruptive and radical nature of actual atheism as it works its way through society, is trivially obviously from engaging with actual history and philosophy. But none of this seems to have appeared obvious to evolutionary biologists who were annoyed at Fundamentalists.
All of which is to say, if you actually take the history and the philosophy and the theology seriously (which I've come around to thinking I should!) you can have a really rich conversation, but I suspect it's unlikely to look anything like the fireworks that were the hallmark of the early internet Fundamentalist vs Atheist fights.
I think that Tim O'Neill is actually a smug idiot and there's a lot of ideas that he's promulgating on that website that are worse than the new atheist positions he's trying to debunk, like the dark ages ages weren't dark, the date of christmas, the christianity of various traditions of christmas and easter, mythicism itself and even flat earth.
I think you are mistaking rejection for ignorance. I have a lot of sympathy for the position that philosophy is just as useless, if not more so, than religion.
If you actually read some of the history of atheism you will find that in the west there are actually two atheisms. You can conceptualize both as different forms of christian heresy, if you like. The first one is theological it says "we examined your theology and found it discordant with the evidence". The other one is moral, it says "we examined your theology and found we can be more pious without you" hence woke.
Those two types of atheism keep getting rediscovered throughout history and they are often allied but reached a breaking point now that religion has become almost completely irrelevant in the west and the ideological differences can come to the surface. For example:
etc etc
Oh, you wanna get into "When were the Dark Ages, what were the Dark Ages, and why did the Independent Free-Thinking Ain't Nobody Gonna Tell Me What To Believe set wholeheartedly and uncritically accept Protestant polemic propaganda?" Because let's fight about history while we're at it!
See, OP, why I think this was a bad idea? 😂😂😂
EDIT:
Throw in Easter and Hallowe'en while you're at it, this is more Protestant anti-Catholic stuff repurposed first for the Enlightenment Enlightened ("haw haw the Christians just took over existing pagan festivals in order to win over the masses and hold power over them") and then later for the Neopagan Wiccan lot ("excuse me, those are our celebrations which the persecutors stole and rebranded!")
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