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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:

Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.

On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.

Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.

Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.

Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...

In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.

Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.

If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.

The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.

We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:

So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.

The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.

And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.

Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.

But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?

As the Dreaded Jim famously said:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

And:

If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.

If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.

Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.

Among rationalists I think the simulation hypothesis is given greater probability of being true than transubstantiation being true.

Yet in a simulation it would be trivial for all objects to have a property that represents whether it is or is not the literal body of Christ.

I know that I sound like an absolute moron saying it, just a completely Reddit sentiment, but this unironically gives me some notion of the idea that I have previously failed to grasp. Sure, it still looks, smells, and tastes like bread, but it has the [Christ] tag whether you can see it on your HUD or not.

Transubstantiation is somewhat like the Theory of Evolution; a lot of people like to seize on the "theory" part to go "Aha! you admit this is only a theory, not proven fact!"

Transubstantiation is heavily based on Aristotelian logic/science and is an attempt to provide a logical explanation for the mystery, but it's not meant to be the definitive be-all and end-all of the mystery, and that it is a mystery of faith is the final word on the dogma. God does what God does, and it is beyond our understanding, this is the best guess our limited mortal reason can come up with. Because religion is not outside reason, even if reason alone does not encapsulate the totality.

We believe the theory of evolution and not other theories, because, the facts back it up, not in spite of those facts like Aristotelian metaphysics and transubstantiation. If the facts showed the theory of evolution was likely false I would believe in t was likely false. The Church just throws up it's hands and says it's a mystery don't think to hard. If transubstantiation was true it would be the greatest discovery in physics ever, even more important than a theory of quantum gravity; yet, people are fine just shrugging their shoulders and calling it a mystery.

If transubstantiation was true it would be the greatest discovery in physics ever, even more important than a theory of quantum gravity

Yes, it is.

yet, people are fine just shrugging their shoulders and calling it a mystery.

Because we're not talking about "how many tins of beans are on that shelf?" levels of being able to access measurements. Let science stick to counting tins of beans, I have no quibble with that.

God the unjustified attitude of superiority here is remarkable given all the scientific progress we’ve made in recent centuries and the complete lack of theological ones.

Let religion stick to counting angels on pinheads; I have no quibble with that.

My perspective, as a Christian:

  • There is knowledge/truth that cannot be discovered via purely rationalistic/logical means (as hinted at by Godel)
  • There is truth that is inherently unfalsifiable
  • Science/rationality is an incredibly useful tool, and is a subset of the tools/revelation that God has provided us to understand his world
  • Like all tools, this tool can (and due to our fallenness will inevitably) become unaligned with God's will/plan
  • Unless another tool is yet to be discovered (and I doubt such a tool will be), there is no way for humanity to ascertain unfalsifiable truth/knowledge without revelation (either general or specific).

I've been re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time since I was a kid. I'm not a huge fan of Lewis' children's books, but there are certain moments that stand out. Two that resonate with me:

From the Dawn Treader:

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."

From the Silver Chair:

"Hangeth from what, my lord?" asked the Witch; and then, while they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silver laughs: "You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children's story."

"Yes, I see now," said Jill in a heavy, hopeless tone. "It must be so." And while she said this, it seemed to her to be very good sense.

You're saying christianity forces us to believe dogmatic, but positivistically void claims like "the bread becomes flesh in an abstract manner". Progressivism, meanwhile, forces us to believe Jamaicans and Jews are equally fast at sprinting.

I guess that's true if you compare catholicism to wokeism, which is a fundamentalist branch of progressivism. But, as always, I'm not sure I agree with NRx that extreme blank slatism and communism were inevitable extrapolations of liberalism; that as soon Jefferson penned "all men are created equal", CRT and HAES were a matter of time. I think, if backed into a corner, progressives can reduce their claims to abstract, unfalsifiable ones, just as christians did.

Catholics believe man was created in God's image — this idea is safe, because scientists will never capture God in a dragnet for analysis. In the same way, early, non-fundamentalist liberals believed all men housed an ineffable equal dignity — this idea is also safe, because the human-rights-granting organ apparently can't be found via autopsy.

Evolution and HBD imply that catholics and liberals are wrong. But it's merely in the way that seeing a man living in a slum implies that he's poor; without seeing his bank account, one can come up with any number of excuses why he's actually a billionaire who chooses to live in a shack.

I'm not sure I agree with NRx that extreme blank slatism and communism were inevitable extrapolations of liberalism; that as soon Jefferson penned "all men are created equal", CRT and HAES were a matter of time.

To clarify the timeline, the Identicals have been preaching and attempting to enforce blank slatism, and the erasure of all distinctions whatever, for thousands of years before Jefferson was even born.

The identicals force us to believe that being is identical to nothing. That p = !p in the literal and metaphysical sense. Kabbalah did it, the gnostics and hermetics did it, Hegel ("Nothing is, therefore...altogether the same as, pure being.") said so, and so on. Blank slatism and HAES are just modern Identicals finding new domains in which they can enforce the belief that everything is really just the same as everything else. Fat is healthy. All people are equally capable of all things. p = !p.

Catholics believe man was created in God's image — this idea is safe, because scientists will never capture God in a dragnet for analysis.

Let's look at what it means that man is created in the image of God. At a tangent, John Wyndham has a good YA SF book, The Chrysalids where science and religion are mingled and the insistence is on an eugenic image of Man so 'mutants' (and this means even things like polydactyly) are exterminated whenever found. I've always thought this more a poke at the Science! crowd than the Fundie Christian crowd, and indeed after reading the quote from Pal Jim there, I'd extend it to the likes of that thinking: Man has five toes and five toes only! Six toes are blasphemy! Dark Enlightenment, save our souls! But then, I am only a weak and feeble woman, nothing at all on the same level as a Man.

The inhabitants of post-apocalypse Labrador have vague knowledge of the "Old People", a technologically advanced civilization they believe was destroyed when God sent "Tribulation" to the world to punish their forebears' sins. The inhabitants practise a form of fundamentalist Christianity; they believe that to follow God's word and prevent another Tribulation, they must preserve absolute normality among the surviving humans, plants and animals, and therefore practice eugenics. Humans with even minor mutations are considered blasphemies and either killed or sterilized and banished to the Fringes, a lawless and untamed area rife with animal and plant mutations, and suggested to be contaminated with radiation.

So, in what does man's likeness to God consist? Bolding mine:

Since, as Damascene states (De Fide Orthod. ii. 12), man is said to be made to God's image, in so far as the image implies an intelligent being endowed with free-will and self-movement: now that we have treated of the exemplar, i.e., God, and of those things which came forth from the power of God in accordance with His will; it remains for us to treat of His image, i.e., man, inasmuch as he too is the principle of his actions, as having free-will and control of his actions.

More detailed parsing of the question here:

Article 1. Whether the image of God is in man? Objection 1. It would seem that the image of God is not in man. For it is written (Isaiah 40:18): "To whom have you likened God? or what image will you make for Him?"

Objection 2. Further, to be the image of God is the property of the First-Begotten, of Whom the Apostle says (Colossians 1:15): "Who is the image of the invisible God, the First-Born of every creature." Therefore the image of God is not to be found in man.

Objection 3. Further, Hilary says (De Synod., Super i can. Synod. Ancyr.) that "an image is of the same species as that which it represents"; and he also says that "an image is the undivided and united likeness of one thing adequately representing another." But there is no species common to both God and man; nor can there be a comparison of equality between God and man. Therefore there can be no image of God in man.

On the contrary, It is written (Genesis 1:26): "Let Us make man to Our own image and likeness."

I answer that, As Augustine says (QQ. 83, qu. 74): "Where an image exists, there forthwith is likeness; but where there is likeness, there is not necessarily an image." Hence it is clear that likeness is essential to an image; and that an image adds something to likeness—namely, that it is copied from something else. For an "image" is so called because it is produced as an imitation of something else; wherefore, for instance, an egg, however much like and equal to another egg, is not called an image of the other egg, because it is not copied from it.

But equality does not belong to the essence of an image; for as Augustine says (QQ. 83, qu. 74): "Where there is an image there is not necessarily equality," as we see in a person's image reflected in a glass. Yet this is of the essence of a perfect image; for in a perfect image nothing is wanting that is to be found in that of which it is a copy. Now it is manifest that in man there is some likeness to God, copied from God as from an exemplar; yet this likeness is not one of equality, for such an exemplar infinitely excels its copy. Therefore there is in man a likeness to God; not, indeed, a perfect likeness, but imperfect. And Scripture implies the same when it says that man was made "to" God's likeness; for the preposition "to" signifies a certain approach, as of something at a distance.

Reply to Objection 1. The Prophet speaks of bodily images made by man. Therefore he says pointedly: "What image will you make for Him?" But God made a spiritual image to Himself in man.

Reply to Objection 2. The First-Born of creatures is the perfect Image of God, reflecting perfectly that of which He is the Image, and so He is said to be the "Image," and never "to the image." But man is said to be both "image" by reason of the likeness; and "to the image" by reason of the imperfect likeness. And since the perfect likeness to God cannot be except in an identical nature, the Image of God exists in His first-born Son; as the image of the king is in his son, who is of the same nature as himself: whereas it exists in man as in an alien nature, as the image of the king is in a silver coin, as Augustine says explains in De decem Chordis (Serm. ix, al, xcvi, De Tempore).

Reply to Objection 3. As unity means absence of division, a species is said to be the same as far as it is one. Now a thing is said to be one not only numerically, specifically, or generically, but also according to a certain analogy or proportion. In this sense a creature is one with God, or like to Him; but when Hilary says "of a thing which adequately represents another," this is to be understood of a perfect image.

C. S. Lewis wrote about the relation of Christianity to the liberal idea of political equality in a few places. This passage is from his essay "Membership":

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen Filmer would be right, and patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of Father and Husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin) but because Fathers and Husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused.

...

By treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense ― if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining ― then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is Love. It may be that He loves all equally ― He certainly loved all to the death ― and I am not certain what the expression means. If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.

The atheist/religious believer inferential gap is always huge, and especially difficult to bridge in rationalist forums. As someone who went from a materialist to one of the faithful, let's see if I can explain why statements like:

Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.

tend to rub me the wrong way. More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.

What most rationalists (with the noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense. Many modern philosophers argue that any description of life itself can't be formulated via materialism means, without resorting to an appeal to some higher organizational, metaphysical structure.

Historically the scientific materialist worldview has of course revealed much about the natural world, primarily through demythologizing our place in it. Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.

While a ScientistTM may just scoff at the importance of meaning or purpose and say "Who cares, my science still gives me Truth," well, unfortunately that assertion is becoming more and more false by the day. L.P. Koch gives a decent summary in The Death of Science, but you can read about the phenomenon of our scientific apparatus falling apart all over the place. You've got the joke field of 'consciousness studies', the deep issues in quantum physics, the shocking revelation that our cosmic model is completely wrong via the James Webb space telescope, et cetera. Or just look at the fiasco of the Covid-19 response.

All of this to say, when people nowadays talk about religion having a comeback, what they often mean on a deeper level is that the Enlightenment myth, first posed by Descartes, is failing. Starting with the existentialists in the mid-20th century, this understanding is now percolated through to the masses with the help of the Internet and other mass communication technology. It's increasingly clear that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the 19th century, again while granting us great power, is a framework that only goes so far; crucially this framework does not and cannot touch on the deeper questions of human meaning, other than giving us a destructive, nihilistic hedonism.

Ultimately the rationalist Enlightenment has been a Faustian bargain for humanity - we've gained unfathomable power over the natural world compared to our ancestors, but we have lost our souls in the process.

Yeah, I've seen this approach a lot and this type of thinking helped me draw closer to God. I think it's a good bridge for staunch rationalists and materialists. But at the end of the day, as @Amadan said, I don't buy it. It feels like telling people to delude themselves for positive utility.

I did try this approach over and over again, and it worked for a bit but kept falling apart due to the self-delusion issue. Then I got, as Vervaeke would say, some personal, 'experiential' evidence of God's existence. That changed my tune quite a bit, but I understand not everyone can be as lucky as I am. And I'm sure the rationalists will read this and say it's all brain chemicals or hallucinations or whatnot. They're entitled to their opinion, as are you. But I'm convinced that the universe is far more mysterious than we understand, and that we're not even close to unraveling the secrets of the inner self, and God.

As a side note, many Orthodox Christians have a somewhat similar interpretation while believing in a real God. Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox Bishop, writes that the way to pray and to find God is essentially to look deep inside yourself. That God is in creation outside us yes, but our deepest communion is found by encountering the spark of divinity and grace placed within each of our hearts.

At a certain point you have to wonder, which is more real? The psychological approach that tries to reduce everything to a 'scientific' understanding? Or perhaps, if the practices and effects seem to be real and work in your life, maybe the religious people were actually right all along?

EDIT: Also yes I tried the path of the mystic and shaman for many years. Ultimately the mental chaos was too much for me. And I firmly believe that without a society and religion that supports and understands the role of the shaman or mystic, it's practically impossible to get true wisdom out of that path. Sadly.

scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims."

Look I just want levels of evidence to match levels of claims.

If any belief system says “we have the power to meaningfully affect material reality” then let’s see the evidence.

For example, where’s the indisputable evidence faith healing works? Plenty of religions claim that one still today. Also the power of prayer to affect outcomes is very common.

Those are very testable propositions.

And yet.

Or, what exactly is a soul anyway? Not material, not energy, some strange third thing. Can’t quite measure it, but it’s definitely there because the scriptures tell us so.

How much of a given holy book is literal vs. figurative? How do we know? Who’s in charge anyway?

Not even the believers come to some strong consensus about the particulars of theology, let alone present sufficient evidence for an actual skeptic.

I’m not going to trust any ideology about “meaning and purpose” if it can’t address basic epistemological issues any small child should be able to point out. We can sort out our emotional issues without resorting to what sounds good.

I’ve been a devout believer and was told we had the Truth and that it could obviously withstand scrutiny. But really it relied upon strong emotions, group ties and peer pressure, motivated reasoning, and just so stories to protect faith from scrutiny.

If there is some higher power, it ought to have higher standards than the religions I’ve seen.

What’s really funny is plenty of Christians will take the opposite line you have and claim credit for the Enlightenment. And plenty of us will call secular ideologies we don’t like—say communism and wokeism—political religions.

it can’t address basic epistemological issues any small child should be able to point out

"Well, I can't see these alleged 'atoms' you claim that everything is made out of, so it's all hooey! If it were real, I could see them!"

"No, but look at this image produced by this machine in Switzerland - "

"Oh come off it, that's just adding on layers of claims! So I'm supposed to believe you that this machine can show me traces that indicate the presence of these 'atoms' but you can't pick up an atom and give it to me to hold in my hand. Yeah, does this machine work on pixie dust, too?"

"Well, I can't see these alleged 'atoms' you claim that everything is made out of, so it's all hooey! If it were real, I could see them!"

Back a decade ago when I was doing some freelance tutoring, I had a client who was an elderly man (~70 or so) taking an introductory physics course. In addition to his serious inability to grasp the concept of vectors, at one point he made a claim pretty much like this, except it was electrons whose existence he was skeptical of because "I've never seen one."

You presumably think you’re critiquing materialism when in fact this is just a generic mockery of solipsism; I agree with it.

You’re not helping your case by citing an example of using science to demonstrate the existence of something we can’t directly observe with our senses.

That’s exactly the process we’d accept for a religious phenomenon.

But what we actually observe is Sagan’s garage dragon and god of the gap excuses for why hard evidence doesn’t exist (that even believers find consistently compelling).

For example, where’s the indisputable evidence faith healing works?

I don't think there's indisputable evidence for much of anything, so that might be too high of a bar you're setting up. But the Catholic Church does require evidence that miracles were performed due to the intercession of a saint before that person is canonized. And sometimes, those miracles are the healing of a person which gets investigated and determined to be due to prayer.

I have no doubt that one can find cause to doubt that evidence. It's not indisputable (though like I said, I don't know that any evidence ever really is). But it does exist, so I would look there if I were you.

Better men than myself have gone up against the edifice of materialist science, spent whole careers showing strong effects and getting nowhere, like Rupert Sheldrake and plenty of others. I don't trust the scientific apparatus to test things like prayer in a valid way, and the replication crisis, Covid, and other issues, to my mind, have born out that skepticism.

I'll also leave a link to this article on angels and demons I quoted below.

If faith healing actually worked it would be easy to prove. That you would shy away from it confirms the weakness of your position.

Some religious people will even say things like god won’t respond to tests or took back the holy relic because otherwise we wouldn’t need faith.

Whining about the replication crisis getting in the way of proving the Power of God is such a funny cope that is classic Motte.

If religion were so potent then heretics like me should be getting blown out of the water with evidence and/or burned by heavenly fire, like back in the biblical days.

If faith healing actually worked it would be easy to prove.

Easier or harder than proving that masks were effective at reducing the spread of COVID?

I say this as someone who does not believe in faith healing, and who enjoys a prior that any claim of miraculous healing is almost certainly false.

Wait aren't you a Christian? I am new to this whole thing but I figured most Christians believed in some forms of faith healing.

Maybe I've got your faith wrong though, if so, apologies.

Hell, I believed in faith healing as a Buddhist from reading so many accounts of yogis and other wise men healing others.

My understanding of "Faith Healing" is people claiming they can heal the sick or injured miraculously. I've seen a lot of people claim to be able to do that, and all the ones I've seen have been frauds. My understanding of miracles is that God used them in specific times for specific reasons, and those reasons no longer obtain. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I don't expect it anytime soon.

If your god can’t outperform masks what’s the point.

The medical interventions done in the Bible are not subtle.

Neither is the food replication.

But nowadays it’s just so hard to find a real miracle.

You are asking for the supernatural to be proven under a naturalist framework. I am asking you to demonstrate that the natural can be proven under a naturalist framework. This does not seem to be an unreasonable request to me.

And again, this is not an endorsement of supernatural claims. If someone tells me they have done or seen a miracle, I assume that they are mistaken or lying for what seems to me to be very solid reasons. What I am arguing against, what I will always argue against, is the idea that beliefs are a deterministic product of evidence. They are generally not, and ironically this belief is one of the few which can actually be proven pretty solidly with strong evidence, only it doesn't matter because beliefs are not formed by proof.

I don’t know what you mean by “demonstrate that the natural can be proven under a naturalist framework” when I’m asking for evidence of the mere existence of some claimed phenomenon. “Supernatural vs. natural” is a red herring because the claim is that there is an effect on the material world. Calling “can I see evidence of it” a “naturalist framework” is not even wrong. It’s just common sense to not merely take someone’s word for it.

We have used science to discover tiny things and invisible forces by extending our powers of observation. We’ve had theories make predictions that we can later observe to be true as technology improved. We may not have a full understanding of say quantum physics, but we have experiments that allow us to observe the effects.

If the supernatural touches the natural, we should be able to observe evidence of the interaction. Holy books are full of accounts of such interactions. People today often claim such interactions happen.

And yet, we just can’t quite seem to get good evidence such things happen.

I’m not sure if I’m parsing the meaning of your last paragraph correctly, but if it’s something along the lines of “people don’t form their beliefs logically” then, logically, I can’t change your mind. Obviously, humans are not consistently rational in their epistemology. Religious beliefs are sacred/anchor beliefs married to trapped priors and most people are immune to contradictory evidence. But not all.

Faith healing would only be easy to prove if it wasn't a miracle: as in, if it was a natural process that repeats itself given the necessary conditions. But nobody claims it's that: the claim is that God directly intervenes. Think about what would happen if you tried to test it: you watch as a faith healer prays to God to heal someone. If nothing happens the faith healer can always say that God chose not to heal her: and if she gets better, the skeptic can always say that she would have gotten better anyway! There are countless testimonies of miraculous healing out there. Even journal articles backed by medical evidence: but the skeptic can always say that something else must have caused it.

If God's interventions can be predicted to happen even slightly more often in some conditions than others, then we would be able to derive those conditions, isolate them, replicate them and see if there really is an intelligence behind those events that resists being tested. If it doesn't resist being tested, cool, more reliable miracle healings for us. One might wonder, of course, if perfectly predictable faith healings are "interventions", rather than being as much mundane facts of the world as things falling down.

If God intervenes completely randomly or in a way that's indistinguishable from being random, then we again run into the "why call it God" question.

The classic response here is “why does god hate amputees?”

“Miracle” is a red herring. Can an actual effect be observed even if the mechanism isn’t understood?

If a claimed effect can’t ever be separated out from other causes then it sounds made up.

“Testimonies” of a phenomenon are a starting point for investigation, not strong evidence by themselves. The paper you linked to is about one lady.

If the power of god via the laying on of hands or prayer is so unreliable that it can’t be distinguished from other causes then that’s normally something we would judge to be made up. Faith healers will go on TV and touch people but no one’s showing studies over time where say, inexplicably, those people have a 35% better chance of outcomes relative to average. Or say Christian hospitals consistently outperforming secular ones. Or Muslim surgeons outperforming secular ones.

Robust studies showing consistent effects would signal there was something going on, even if we couldn’t directly detect the mechanism.

If the power was real and as effective as adherents claim the evidence would not be so shy about being observed. Biblically, the power of god gets demonstrated quite strongly but we can’t seem to get that to happen nowadays. The simplest explanation consistent with human behavior and the laws of physics is that it was just made up.

“I do a wishful thinking and sometimes magic happens that can’t be measured/observed by others” is not a strong approach to reality regardless of whether it’s associated with religion or not.

The user above you cited a specific “miracle,” restoration of eyesight, and you cited a lack of a different category of miracle, regrowth of a removed limb. You wouldn’t claim Viagra doesn’t work because boners could have other causes but it doesn’t make bald people grow hair.

Even disregarding the categorical error, there’s another point to be made. Instead of claiming your null result negates and dismisses the documentation of a positive result as a single anecdote instead of data, come up with a different falsifiable hypothesis rather than jumping to the null hypothesis. If there is a fully material way to restore macular degeneration, the world needs to know it to relieve much suffering.

It seems that in the cited restoration of sight, the person knew they were being prayed for. We also know that yogis can perform incredible feats of biofeedback manipulation through meditative states and/or self-hypnosis. The accounts of Jesus at least once have Him saying, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Perhaps there is a method of hypnosis which can cure certain types of blindness. Come up with an experiment to falsify that hypothesis, changing no factors from the cited anecdote.

It’s not a categorical error to:

  1. Point out the claimed miracle is n=1 from decades ago.
  2. Being up the lack of miracle healing of lost limbs, because it’s telling. BS tends to hide where ambiguity gives it natural cover. There’s lots of ambiguity in health outcomes, but lost limbs are a clear cut (pun intended) situation, so nobody can play games there.

The null hypothesis is that lots of health outcomes happen for reasons we don’t understand the murky details of, because the human body is simultaneously wondrous and a dumpster fire, and there’s no reason to go claiming miracles from god when a positive outcome happens. That’s just picking hits and ignoring misses.

If faith healing happened commonly, as many claim it does, then there ought to be a way to show that systematically. Not one offs.

noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense.

Without meaning any offense, this kind of weasel logic makes me so angry. No! The ordinary, “materialist” colloquial conception of physical reality is no modern invention. A millennia ago, people of countless cultures and civilization knew what it was to combine yeast, water and flour to make bread. Medieval alchemists mostly knew that their experiments were unsuccessful in creating real gold, and those who employed them were well aware that declaring that lead was gold did not make it so. Our lay understanding of physical reality has been broadly materialist, with limited exceptions, for the entire history of the human race, such that we can’t even conceive of an existence in which this wasn’t the case.

Transubstantiation isn’t primarily a rejection of materialism but a test of faith. And - to be clear - many early Catholics (certainly lay peasant ones) may well have believed that wine or something that looked a lot like wine ran through Christ’s veins, although modern research suggests transubstantiation was a rearguard action in philosophical defense against upstart groups in the 10th and 11th centuries.

Liberalism’s spiritual and practical void, its failure at building happy societies, doesn’t stem from its conception of material reality. It stems from its founding myth, its central void, namely that of the equality or progress of man, from which is derived the Hegelian narrative. Liberalism isn’t primarily an embrace of a flawed ‘scientific method’ but an absolute rejection of material reality in a way no previous spiritual language dared, made possible by various technological and cultural developments.

Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.

Or, to put it another way, we realized that we’re animals and, the wool having fallen from our eyes, understand the mechanistic nature of our minds isn’t connected to something greater, isn’t part of some grander system of reincarnation or heaven in which our lives will persist beyond the brief time we have on earth. We understand that life is brutish, nasty and short. We understand - now, increasingly - that the brain is just a Large Language Model trained on the multimodal input of our senses, and that all of our philosophy is simply a product of this banal pattern recognition and prediction.

Like Chomsky desperately trying to salvage universal grammar one can twist words and definitions until some esoteric and easily toppled spiritual existence retains the thinnest veneer of credibility. I’m in favor of that, too. But let’s be clear: if the choice is ‘cope or rope’, let us admit that we are ‘coping’.

Or, to put it another way, we realized that we’re animals and, the wool having fallen from our eyes, understand the mechanistic nature of our minds isn’t connected to something greater, isn’t part of some grander system of reincarnation or heaven in which our lives will persist beyond the brief time we have on earth. We understand that life is brutish, nasty and short. We understand - now, increasingly - that the brain is just a Large Language Model trained on the multimodal input of our senses, and that all of our philosophy is simply a product of this banal pattern recognition and prediction.

I feel like you deserve a reply, although your nihilism is so scathing it burns my heart. I just disagree with this, fundamentally.

I don't think that we are coping, I think there's a reason these religious traditions have survived and in many cases have flourished despite this narrative you're packing, which has a TON of power. I mean modern nihilistic materialism is the most extremely powerful framework for understanding the world ever. The more miraculous thing to me is that there are still so many people who believe in God.

Then I started to open myself up to the idea that maybe I was wrong, and well, I began to get undeniable personal evidence. 'Religious experience' as you would probably call it. I know it's not convenient or testable in a lab, but it's real nonetheless. That's the best explanation and response I can give you at the moment, though I'm sure you'll find it wanting.

More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.

It's not the most insulting thing I've heard about religion, so 🤷‍♀️, particularly when it's on the topic of Catholicism and transubstantiation; at least there are no calls for "send me a consecrated Host so I can defile it because I am Big Brain Science Atheist" showing-off.

Okay, but let's say I agree that meaning is "important" to human beings and necessary for human happiness and flourishing.

It does not follow that religion, any religion, is true. It just means that religious belief might make people happier.

This is not dissimilar to the argument some people have made here, that religion is good for society and therefore we should promote it regardless of whether it's true. We'd be better off if everyone was Christian, so go to church even if you don't actually believe in God.

That might work for some people, but it would not work for me. I won't claim I couldn't or wouldn't pretend if my life or livelihood depended on it, but otherwise, I just don't believe in God, I don't believe in supernatural or metaphysical explanations for anything, and therefore I am not going to subscribe to your newsletter (metaphorically speaking).

Will humanity be sadder and find less meaning if religion goes away? Maybe so! But your argument still looks a lot like "Therefore we should all pretend to believe even if we don't, because we'll be better off that way."

I think the most compelling and scariest element of H.P. Lovecraft's supernatural yet profoundly atheistic mythos was not the unspeakable Elder Gods (who were not really "gods"), but that the underlying theme of all his works was that humans are an accident and the universe fundamentally does not care about us. We have no higher purpose or meaning, and if we all got wiped out in an asteroid strike tomorrow, no one would notice or care.

This is (minus the Elder Gods) basically what I believe. And I acknowledge that for some people, that can seem pretty scary and nihilistic. For me, it just is, and I find plenty of meaning in my life while acknowledging that I'm just an infinitesimal blip in the here and now. Sure, it would be nice to believe there is an omnipotent deity who loves each one of us individually and promises an eternal afterlife, but I can't force myself to believe this because it would be nice. Maybe instrumentally we should try to convince the proles to believe this, but to me, that seems awfully cynical and more likely to just end up in the same bad place religion often does.

I think this attitude probably above all proves the basic fact that the Enlightenment effort failed. This failure was despite the fact of the promulgation of the ability to manipulate our environment with its ideals, as in, we as human beings were made one with the environment that we were supposed to study (the ‘phenomenological’ world, as Kant would express) and hence the idea of conscious experience (the ‘noumenon’ representing qualitative experience, the ‘self’) was somehow shifted into the categories of the empirical world; we began to see our conscious-experience as just another ‘thing’ we should study with the mind instead of it being a top-down observer which had to enter into that world of materiality to understand it.

And consequently, as we were skeptical of that empirical, phenomenological world, we were skeptical of our own conceptions of uniqueness—we began to collapse that luster of what experience really meant as a liberated agentic ‘force’ which could impact reality as mere dumb things couldn’t, we made the sharpness of the edges of the conscious mind in comparison to the dullness of the mundane things around us analogous to those mundane things, just with added processes hitherto unknown that were compossible with those mundane things, and were probably just another mundane thing that we hadn’t categorized yet. Hence we stopped thinking of people as having ‘souls’, but just being flesh-automatons piloted by electricity. Lovecraft, or other fictional views of the world in this stead, just espouse the same basic idea of life inherently having no pattern, no uniqueness, that if we were all swept away tomorrow it wouldn’t matter—and yet this was seen as something that should be accepted unflinchingly! As just an extrapolation of the inevitable axiom of the Enlightenment project, to seek truth wherever it was, even as this truth hurt to look at.

And yet that ignores the fact that the methodology of this conclusion might be faulty on its own terms, for if we are to assume human flourishing as related to social norms is also a fact of life, a fact as true as the fact that we have evolved from single-celled organisms billions of years ago, then we aren’t to flinch from that, either. If we are to assume that the idea of the pursuit of truth is worthwhile because it pursues some ‘good’, with this good being expressed in terms of human flourishing (since the idea of ‘there’s no pattern in this world, we are alone’ would be antithetical to the idea of formulating the pursuit of truth in any way beyond a utilitarian mode), then that also would carry for those social norms being good for the same goal. For if we are to abstract truths from their ‘metaphysical’ qualities as the materialist extrapolation of the Enlightenment project says we should do, then there is no difference between these two facts after all, and if one (the pursuit of flourishing) even supersedes the fact of pursuing truth that could diminish the flourishing of the first, then we must necessarily choose the former—since, as said, the only motivation towards pursuing truth whatsoever would be to maximize the pursuit of flourishing to begin with. The latter is embedded in the former, not the other way around.

And yet, again, this is only something brought up if the Enlightenment project’s conclusions are bought on their own terms for the sake of argument. There are reasons to even reject the conclusion that materialism is well-founded, especially from the skepticism that regarded us as believing in materialism in the first place (due to being skepticism of our own skepticism, for instance—a ‘critique of pure reason’, if you will). Not to mention the fact that if the truths of this reality and the evolution of our subsequent conscious minds would be based on the materialistic framework, then accepting the naturalistic model of the world because our conscious minds (operating on a process of materialistic accidents) would similarly be irrational. Our conscious minds in totality, as a thing-in-itself, should be ‘beyond’ the phenomenology expressed and filtered through that consciously-reflected sense experience; to attempt to understand our conscious minds through that world would be an instance of relative self-reference, which could cause loads of paradoxes due to circularity and things like that.

But can you really justify your belief in truth when it comes to our social purpose in life, our social feeling in the world, our emotional health and our deepest evolutionary nature?

I sense that you are a “truth terminalist”: you believe that truth is our terminal value. It’s easy to come to this view because of the vast utilitarian benefit of truth. When we use truth instrumentally, we can make life easier and more pleasant: better food, less disease, better mental health treatment, etc. But the instrumental use of truth is not truth valued unto itself. In fact there are wildly different terminal values at root here.

Truth valued unto itself would mean that it’s as good an idea to teach a toddler about the horrors of rabies infections and typhus, as it is to teach a toddler to be loved. Truth valued unto itself would mean that a life where everyone memorizes facts despite deep emotional anguish is better than a life with less trivia but perfect emotional health. Truth valued unto itself means that suicide and murder can be done without guilt, because humans no longer have any rational reason to listen to the voice in their head that has hitherto introduced guilt. “There is no rational reason not to murder, only a social-evolutionary reason that I can ignore if I really desire to,” says the truth terminalist. Truth terminalism means that we should sacrifice untold human life if it means the acquisition of a single factoid. It would mean that the scientist who counts blades of grass repeatedly is as valuable as the scientist finding a cure for cancer.

Truth terminalism is, in actual fact, not really subscribed by any living being on earth. Instead, they subscribe to some shade of “pleasure/good terminalism” in either a stoic or epicurean or ontological sense. Now if what I’ve written is true, this means you actually need a utilitarian reason based on the good/pleasant to justify your lack of participation in non-factual social movements which produce preferable emotional states and communities. “It’s not true” is not a rational justification here.

(An ancillary argument: religions create in the heart of the adherent a practical knowledge of love, devotion, and community. This knowledge is true in the sense that there are actually true social facts being collected. In what way is this information less true than the movement of the stars? Some angelic being observing earth would see no difference in truth value between social information and the movement of the stars.)

“It’s not true” is not a rational justification here.

I think you are abusing "rationalist" here. I do not consider myself a pure rationalist in the way this forum usually uses the term. I do, however, try to use rational reasoning, and while I wouldn't consider myself a "truth terminalist" exactly, I do consider truth to be a higher value than, say, pleasure or comfort. Of course that does not, as you imply, mean going around like some autistic robot spouting random true-but-horrible facts at random children.

So I find your argument that people who place a higher value on truth than whatever your justification is for accepting religion to be valuing truth only for its utilitarian value weak. And even if you could prove I am merely utilitarian in valuing truth, it still gives me no reason to believe in things I have no reason to believe in except they would make me feel better.

Of course that does not, as you imply, mean going around like some autistic robot spouting random true-but-horrible facts at random children.

But why not? If truth is indeed a higher value than comfort, or equanimity, or peace of mind, or any other potential terminus, then it would be more important that we fill every animal with facts rather than wellbeing. That would be for their greater good, because knowledge of truth is the greatest good. We would desire to raise non-functioning children who play a very mean game of jeopardy, even if they have poor wellbeing.

it still gives me no reason to believe in things I have no reason to believe in except they would make me feel better

This is kind of circular in the way it is phrased. If a belief is conducive to greater personal and social happiness, and if our terminus value is something like “greatest happiness and human flourishment”, then it intuitively makes sense that we believe the thing which maximizes our most important value. There would be no reason to cling to non-beneficial truth, because we already established that goodness is a superseding value over truth and truth is merely instrumental to goodness. The “reason” for a happiness-optimizing belief is that it optimizes happiness. There is no “reason” to believe something that is true-but-useless, as it doesn’t bring us closer to what is most important.

But why not?

Valuing truth more than comfort or equanimity does not mean that its value is infinite relative to comfort or equanimity. Nor does it mean "filling every animal with facts rather than wellbeing."

I do not believe that you are in good faith failing to understand this. I think you think that playing "gotcha" with ridiculous straw men is some sort of winning debate move.

then it intuitively makes sense that we believe the thing which maximizes our most important value

Maybe you can simply choose to believe whatever is most instrumentally beneficial to you, but I can't.

Okay, but let's say I agree that meaning is "important" to human beings and necessary for human happiness and flourishing.

It does not follow that religion, any religion, is true. It just means that religious belief might make people happier.

I agree it doesn't follow that a religion is true, necessarily. However my main claim is not that meaning is important, but that materialism is ultimately false. You haven't addressed that here.

This is not dissimilar to the argument some people have made here, that religion is good for society and therefore we should promote it regardless of whether it's true. We'd be better off if everyone was Christian, so go to church even if you don't actually believe in God.

Perhaps I haven't fleshed out my argument enough, but my stance is in fact quite dissimilar from that argument. I do believe in God, and supernatural beings such as angels and demons. I think the whole 'psychological' argument from pro-religion types, while pointing to important considerations, is sadly quite flawed and does lead to self delusion.

However a related argument, the one that convinced me, is learning to trust experiential evidence or knowledge. Due to our upbringing in Enlightenment rationalism, we are trained to only trust a sort of consensus, 'objective' view. Or in other words we've learned to distrust and disbelieve any of our own experiential, or dare I say empirical, qualia in favor of only believing things that can be confirmed via repeated scientific experiments, or the consensus making machines of our society.

My point is that this 'objective' reality is, once truly dug into, false. The scientific materialist worldview is full of misconceptions and outright lies.

To put forth a bit more of an argument in favor of the supernatural, I'll quote from this article on angels and demons which, while a bit out there, makes an excellent point here:

Dumb matter, a ball rolling down a hill or a set of chemicals reacting in a vial, is going to behave the same way every time, no matter when or where you ask it to perform. You can set up an experiment in Chicago and expect to get the same results you got from the same experiment in a lab in Tennessee. The Conservation of Momentum, Acceleration Due to Gravity, The Second Law of Thermodynamics… these things just happen, and the matter involved in the experiment doesn’t have any mind or will to resist them and to act otherwise. There’s no intelligence in the ball to be able to say, “Hey, you know what? Not feeling it today. I’m tired of the whole F = ma thing. I don’t feel like rolling. Maybe tomorrow.”

The difference of course in our case is that the entire premise of the supernatural is that we are dealing with other sentient minds. Beings who can choose whether they’d like to act or not. By its very nature, The Supernatural needs to be approached more like Anthropology or Zoology instead of Physics or Chemistry. Just as you cannot count on a lion to react the same way to each and every passing zebra, so too are spirits likewise entities with personalities whose behavior is always non-formulaic. When you understand that, you see that the entire basis for the dismissal of such things from The Mainstream has no legs. For, in point of fact, “paranormal” things, just like zoological or anthropological things are reproducible.

They’re just not reproducible on demand.

Big difference.

Anyway, hope this clarifies things a bit. And I genuinely am happy you seem to be able to live with and find meaning in a nihilistic framework. I don't doubt that some, or even many people, can. That still doesn't mean that framework is true.

However my main claim is not that meaning is important, but that materialism is ultimately false. You haven't addressed that here.

I am not trying to defend materialism, as while I am a materialist, I could be convinced it's false if I ever witness a shred of evidence to contradict it. You will not convince me I should philosophically "reason" myself into believing God is real or that angels or demons exist even if there is no evidence for them, though.

Scientific materialism is dominant because even the religious use it instrumentally to figure things out.

You could prove materialism false with one good demon.

“Not reproducible on demand” ah well so it’s not quite like a lion I can go observe in 30 minutes at the local zoo if I wanted to is it?

It’s more like Sagan’s garage dragon I guess. So real, so very hard to detect. Very reproducible, but very shy about observation.

You could prove materialism false with one good demon.

The rejoinder to that, which I have seen on various places including SSC, is "If I saw God/an angel/a demon, I would prefer to believe I was hallucinating, or going crazy, or it was a trick or hoax, or some kind of material phenomenon, or even aliens, but I would not believe in the supernatural".

Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'

The rejoinder to that,

The rejoinder to that is religious people putting words in the mouths of nonreligious people and imagining that they would say something convenient for the religious people.

If you showed me a demon, it wouldn't prove the existence of the supernatural, but it would be evidence, and the weight of evidence could convince me like it would for anything else. If you showed me one demon for a minute and took it away before I could take a photo, ask someone else to look at it, or otherwise rule out mundane explanations, I wouldn't believe, but that's because your evidence is pretty bad, not because nonbelievers always ignore the evidence.

Also, not all supernatural things are equal. If you showed me a demon, I'd believe in powerful beings that can do weird things. I might still wonder if they're demons or aliens, and I wouldn't believe in transsubstantiation.

Bayesian priors lean strongly towards some mental quirk, yes.

That’s why it’s important to have a good demon evidence for more than just say me to witness one time. Same goes for say Bigfoot or UFOs.

The bible is chock full of miraculous deeds to wow the crowd so don’t get cute by citing one verse. And that verse sounds pretty ironic based on the whole bit where Jesus did rise from the dead.

Religion claims more than "there are beings one cannot reliably detect or explain using the mainstream framework". It claims absolute metaphysical significance. Not merely that 0,1% of experiences that seem to fall out of the materialistic framework do really fall ouside its jurisdiction, but also that they are 99,9-100% of what really matters.

The audacity of such claims is why my prior would be "aliens" or "I'm crazy", not "Lord God Almighty". Granted, if I get multiple people to confirm that someone within my circle of acquaintances really came back from the dead, I'll probably act as if that did happen (while acknowledging that no one will believe us).

Well no, not quite like a lion. They are beings of spirit, fundamentally different from us physical beings. And by many accounts much older and wilier.

Besides, there are plenty of people who have personal evidence of demons active in their lives. There are plenty of recordings of ghosts and strange phenomenon if yo know where to look. Again, the point is that scientific evidence requires reproducibility on demand.

Not actually true. We study things we are not able to reproduce all the time. Scientific experiments should be reproducible, but science is not only limited to experiments. Observational science and experimental science are both subsets of science and both can produce scientific evidence.

If astrophysicists detect some kind of pulse from deep space, that is evidence of some kind of phenomenon even if we can't reproduce it. They may look for other such incidences and may keep looking where it came from to see if it happens again, and certainly that will help gather information, but the initial incident and whatever recordings and so on were taken is still scientific evidence. It might not be enough to work out what caused it, but that isn't the same thing.

Recordings of ghosts are scientific evidence, for example. But just like with the pulse from deep space, one of the things the recording might be evidence for is equipment malfunction, or a hoax, or a poorly built camera or antenna, or yes, actual ghosts, or space aliens. That's why you then study the various proposed theories and try to gather more evidence (which does not have to be the same type of evidence), to discard or strengthen theories.

Even once we had a full understanding of ghosts, or black holes then we might be able to reproduce them, using some kind of technology but it certainly isn't a requirement. The power demands to reproduce a black hole might simply be too much for humanity to ever manage, even if we understood the mechanism 100% perfectly.

Reproducible experimental evidence is strong, because it shows that something works the same way under the same conditions, and then you can alter the conditions and see what changes, which gives you more accessible information, but it certainly isn't a requirement for science itself.

What you're missing is that observations are weak scientific evidence and have to be weighed. If you look outside and see the sun, and everyone else in your town can do the same, then even though blind people cannot see the sun, that is good evidence the sun exists as an observable entity. But if 99.99999% of people looked up and did not see the sun, then the observational evidence of the remaining tiny percentage has to be weighed against that. Is it a hallucination? Are they lying? Is it that they are mutants who can see a wavelength of light everyone else cannot? The fact that most people do not see the sun is ALSO scientific evidence.

<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>

Sure, sure. Conceded.

What is “spirit”? How does it interact with the physical world?

Jesus healed the sick by casting out demons. Or forgiving them for some sin.

Now we try mood stabilizers and antibiotics.

People having personal evidence in their own head is just not remotely convincing because there’s no check on BS or delusion.

“Scientific” as a modifier for “evidence” is a red herring. If there were actually good evidence via say a record of paranormal activity that’s a Nobel prize waiting to happen.

What is “spirit”? How does it interact with the physical world?

Not exactly sure but basically it's associated with the heavens, with mind, with immaterial or supermaterial forces.

Also, it's hard to have a discussion and honestly explain things I believe to you when you keep calling my beliefs BS. Just a note. Also your name is referencing a Catholic monk, just FYI ;)

The fact that you don’t know (and nobody else does either) is kind of the whole problem.

History is full of great thinkers who were incredibly devout. Mostly because nearly everyone was religious and academic work and institutions were often formally associated with a church.

Which makes it all the more striking that we never quite got any good evidence for the god stuff (or alchemy, despite Newton’s best efforts).

I was raised religious. It was extremely emotionally difficult to honestly investigate the evidence for and against my beliefs. But that was the actually the hardest part, because once you don’t privilege the hypothesis the evidence points strongly away from religious factual claims.

There’s no polite way in most societies to indicate even indirectly that someone’s religion is obviously BS. It has a privileged position. Now there are exceptions like Christians criticizing Islam, or Mormonism being judged extra kooky, but overall religious people in the US are used to having thin skin about their sacred beliefs. We “militant” atheists even get lambasted by other nonbelievers for being unsophisticated and uncouth.

It’s actually the exact same dynamic as poking holes in the Santa story for kids—socially it’s unthinkable to puncture the collective myth. Don’t take that away from them! It’s a fun belief (used by parents to incentivize good behavior when they can’t observe behavior and without it being direct bribery).

Religious people tend to find that comparison extremely offensive, but that very reaction is the proof of the dynamic.

A spade is a spade. If your beliefs had strong evidence you could simply relish blasting apart my skepticism, same as any other internet discussion.

Me telling you your belief system is almost certainly BS due to a lack of evidence is me treating you like an adult who can employ reason and cares about having true beliefs. Anything else is the polite bigotry of low expectations.

I think classical liberalism was a pretty good compromise. It’s not like the Founding Fathers literally believed “all men are created equal.”

Equal rights under the law is a compromise.

So this Jim fellow might have some good criticisms of equity and leftism but he’s willfully misreading the Founding Fathers.

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