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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).
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.
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.
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.
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