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Okay, teleport back to the 1700s. You're a Christian. A high decoupler invites you to a talk about how to assess the historicity of the bible. Do you accept?
On the one hand, yeah, it's a trap to
convince you to be a non-denominational Deistdamn you to hell for eternity and expel you from polite society.On the other hand, the person's more right than they know, because the Christian God actually isn't real!
The ideologies and material practices of the next 50 years will be different from those of today, in ways that will necessarily not be emotionally 'coupled' in the way today's issues are. By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.
La-la-la, can't hear you.
Honestly, "Christian God not real!" and you know this how? Oh, Science, blah blah blah, let's argue this out with the same arguments for the past three hundred years.
That's not a good example - they were right for the wrong reasons? they were right but didn't know how right they were? they were right because I know they were right because I don't believe in Christian God?
I'm sure society will be very different in 50 years time. I've already seen huge changes in the society I grew up in, over the past 40 years. But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right; am I to 'emotionally uncouple' and go "well back when I was in my 30s it was generally frowned upon to rape 6 year olds, but hey today is a different era and let's not cover our ears as the world changes!"
Evolution by natural selection is easily the most important 'theological' thing to ever happen, it (together with history) explains every impulse that God is claimed to have given to man by independent choice. Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science - even today's Christians still claim various modern miracles (and if you investigate one of them deeply enough, it inevitably collapses). Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?
It means that some of them are in some parts right, and if you don't decouple you'll not be able to notice that
What's your stance on human free will?
A reasonable question, and an important one, but not one I really want to discuss right now tbh.
I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago. Whether there's something non-mechanistic going on with the universe - important, tied up in why people are so attracted to things like Christianity, but still doesn't prove Christianity true.
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
I agree there's a lot to think about there. But the materialist narrative isn't at all dishonest, I think it's clear how an honest and discerning person would come to believe that, even if wrong. It's very easy to be horrifically wrong without being dishonest.
...This is best demonstrated in words other than my own. From a link in the Cryonics discussion:
At one point, maybe in the late 1700s, it might be argued that the above was not a lie but only an untested theory. But then we tested it, at considerable length, and very thoroughly falsified it. Neither living things in general, nor man very much in particular, attain the status of "mechanisms: clockworks that can be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will", much less "usurping the role of God".
When such theories are falsified, and their proponents decline to update but rather ignore the evidence or begin stacking epicycles, that is dishonesty, or at least a level of foolishness indistinguishable from it. We all laugh at the Flat Earthers and the Sovereign Citizens who have rendered themselves impervious to evidence. But "I think, therefore I am": there is no evidence more immediate and more readily available than the existence of the Willful Self, which prominent Materialists consistently agree cannot exist as it evidently does.
You claim:
...But in fact the evidence you describe does not exist. We have significantly more and better evidence for a historical Jesus now than we did a thousand years ago, contrary to the predictions of the majority of a previous generation of materialists. We have exactly the same amount of evidence that he was the Son of God, that God exists, that people have souls that we did a thousand years ago. Depending on how one counts it, we have slightly more evidence that the souls of do-gooders are happy than we did a thousand years ago, at least from a strictly materialist frame, given that "religion is a plague to be cured" has largely given way to "we need to figure out how to generate the benefits of religion without the drawbacks". The old-school materialists didn't recognize any benefits to religion. The new-school materialists don't admit to how much of their edifice is built on falsified claims.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
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