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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.
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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".
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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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