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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.
Not really. The Motte, child of Slate Star Codex and grandchild of Less Wrong, has strong rationalist roots. I do not recall anyone explicitly arguing here that MAGA is clearly whom God wants to you vote for and that you should not vote Democrats lest you are condemning yourself to hell in doing so. In practice, Trump is 100 times more divisive in terms of CW than God is.
This feels about as convincing as 'quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent'.
More seriously, it is not clear to me the consciousness hypothesis is making any falsifiable claim about the observable universe, which it curiously enough shares with the theism hypothesis. (Or at least the less silly version of the theism hypothesis. There are probably people who would claim that praying to god to cure your cancer or strike your enemies with lightning bolts will work outperform chemotherapy and cruise missiles, but their claims are already falsified.)
I will grant you that life is weird, and brains capable of introspection are extra weird. But I do not share the intuition that the material world can not give rise to weird stuff. Take Conway's Life. Cellular automata are dead simple compared to the material reality of atoms and black holes. And yet Life is already Turing complete. Any observable thing my brain can do, including claiming consciousness, a sufficiently large cellular automaton could also do.
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The other problem with rational arguments for god is that they treat { Abrahamic God, no gods } as a complete hypothesis space. This is silly. There are myriads of possible creators of the universe. Absolutely nothing privileges the Abrahamic God over the alternatives from other cultures. Why God and not Rod or dread Azathoth or Waheguru or a Demiurge or that ball of noodles?
In fact, I think that if the universe we inhabit can teach us anything about our creator, it seems to me that the state we find ourselves in seems incompatible with it being all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful. Like, He created a fine-tuned universe of a diameter of more than 14 Gigaparsecs to get a tiny rock on which us apes could evolve and thrive, and He did not bother to fine tune it a bit more to prevent cancer or kidney stones? Seems like something an asshole move.
More likely, a creator would be wholly indifferent towards life. Even supposing that He had created gamma ray bursts to keep life in check would be presuming too much. Probably He is less interested in humans than we are in the dust mites colonizing our bedrooms.
I am sure that if the kind of larvae which thrive in animal dung had higher cognitive capability, they would worship the cow which produced their cow pat as a omni-benevolent divine creator which produced their world so that the insects could thrive, and claim the bovines have really strong opinions about how a good insect should behave.
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