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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   953 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

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Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.

Yes….?

If your model of the US is one where most educated practicing and professing Catholics don’t really believe it, you’re very wrong. Now of course, you can give some side eye to politicians, but if your assumption is that we all are mostly just larping, no.

I don’t have theory of mind for an educated person in the 21st century who believes in the Garden of Eden. My reaction is like Dawkins to Mehdi Hasan when Mehdi says he thinks Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse and split the moon. I know there are people who believe it, but I’m incapable of understanding how. I don’t want to rehash New Atheism either. I am mostly skeptical of adult converts, especially former rationalists and new atheists. People born into it I actually understand somewhat. I’ve read apologetics too like mere Christianity, and I just don’t get it.

Model the Christian God as a superintelligence, and the physical universe as a simulation. Then drop the usual model that any reality below the observable one should be assumed to work the way the observable one works. Consider that, if there were a deeper substrate reality under this one, you know nothing about how that reality operates at all, and none of our assumptions about the function of the universe necessarily obtain.

I am able to drop the usual model that any reality below the observable works the way the observable one works. Humans are probably incapable of understanding how the universe truly works. I don't think that's a controversial way to model the universe.

But then why the Christian God? I can get to A, but I can't go from A to B.

I suppose the way I'd put it is that, in my view, He's got a good pitch. That is, I find the deeper claims of Christianity map well onto the world I observe: things like sin and its consequences, What it has to say about how humans work, what is necessary, which things remain constant over time, etc. It promises things that I want, and in my experience it delivers on those promises in tangible ways in the material world. The arc of my life diverged markedly for the worse when I became an Atheist, and diverged markedly for the better when I became a Christian again. I don't expect my personal experiences to be persuasive to people who are not me, but they are very persuasive to me.

But that merely provides evidence for the idea that Christianity has significant pragmatic value for ordinary people navigating their lives and for societies organizing themselves, something which even atheist thinkers have been freely acknowledging for a while now.

But to tie this to OP's original question, you'd have to somehow demonstrate how these benefits imply the truth of the various historical and metaphysical claims Christianity makes. This is IMO very hard to do, especially given that the same psychological benefits are often believably claimed to be enjoyed by the practitioners of other, mutually incompatible religions as well.

As with many other atheists/agnostics with a sympathy towards Christianity, my problem is that I see the wholesome effects of dedicated Christian practice on an individual and societal level, I can even fully entertain the idea that there is and will never be a secular project with the same effects, at least at scale, but when I get to the part where I try to believe in the whole religious complex of ideas I inevitably run into a brick wall made out of serious scholarship on the Bible, early Church history and the surrounding historical sources, the non-specific/non-Christian/universalist nature of the strongest philosophical/theological arguments for the existence of God, the weaknesses of the theological arguments for a specific/historical version of God, and the plethora of presented evidence of similar epistemological strength for other, completely different religions that I'd have little principled reason to reject if I were to start accepting the equivalent Christian arguments.

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