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Notes -
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
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.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
And:
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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