This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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).
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link