Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
These days, you have to decide what to break: the Word, or the laws of reality. The blue tribers break the former and the conservatives break the latter, as you see with young earth creationists and various other sects of the right wing. I've seen some people on here go to religion lately, specifically Christianity; I'd like to poll them sometime and ask them how they did it. There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith. Unless they went a deist route or threw in with Blue Tribe. But at that point, you might as well not be basing your religion off the Bible at all.
You don’t need to believe it. You just need your kids to believe it, and religious schooling and so on can accomplish that with at least some degree of efficacy.
Secular society has no competent alternative to religious social engineering. All alternatives so far have failed.
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I think it should go without saying, but obviously people do not share your opinion that many parts of the Bible are objectively false. But without knowing what your specific points are it's hard to really say more.
I was raised with a fundamentalist view of the Bible. One relative of mine went on to grow even more fundamentalist, veering into hatred of the Jews (a severe misreading, if you ask me, and I thought downright heretical until I looked at the lines he was fixated on), but here's some of my grievances. I don't know my Bible very well, and I frankly hold little regard for it, so I will not read more.
If you take issue with these grievances, let me know, but like I said, the Word of God should probably be more eternal than to vary completely based on cultural attitudes and scientific research. I don't really see much room to wiggle away from these while still staying true to scripture. And God has let humanity's Christians splinter further and further over 2000 years without any further clarification. @FCfromSSC
First of all, thanks for writing all this out. I'm going to try to address all this as best I can, though I need to stress I'm very much not a theologian, or an apologist, or even a teacher in the church. I'm just a guy. My goal is to at least try to give you my view of these issues, so that even if you're not personally convinced (I'm not that good at rhetoric, I won't take it too hard lol) you at least will hopefully feel that what I've said is something a reasonable person can believe. I'm Catholic, so that's the perspective I'm bringing to this. Also @TheDag, @urquan and @FarNearEverywhere, please chime in if there is something I've missed or something I get wrong. I'm probably going to have more bullet points than you, as this is my third time writing this post (stupid website keeps eating it when I click on links) and I found that a lot of your points have sub-points. I don't really know how to order all that nicely within the constraints of the site, so bear with me.
First, it's important to note that the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of Christianity is not something all denominations share. From a Catholic perspective, those people are in pretty serious error in fact. So a lot of things I noticed you said like "why does the Bible say factually untrue thing x" are just not an issue for other traditions. Specifically, the Catholics (and others tbf) believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, not that it was directly written by God. That means that the core message about God and our salvation is infallible, but plenty of other things are fallible. For example, if the Bible says "King Bigwig was succeeded by his son Mightyface" in one book, and "King Bigwig was succeeded by his son Weaksauce" in another, the Catholic take on that is "maybe one of those authors got it wrong, shit happens". We're OK with that, because the detail of which king succeeded whom isn't really central to God's message to us (and so on for other minor details of course).
Furthermore, it's important to note that the Bible is not one cohesive book. The men who wrote it down were working in various literary styles and speaking to different social contexts. There are books of history yes, but also books of poetry, and books of raw moral teaching, and books of myths. So not only is it possible that each author is fallible, you have to interpret their words through the lens of cultural context and intended style. All of which makes it pretty challenging to interpret the Bible, but means that we very much do not believe that each and every sentence of the Bible is an eternal truth directly handed to us by God. Fundamentalists believe that yes, but by no means all Christians (or even most Christians, really).
I also wanted to note that it seemed like more than one of your arguments basically boiled down to "I think you can get around this, but then that's not consistent with the Bible". I think that yes, some of the hypothetical counterarguments you mentioned aren't consistent with the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of the Bible. But that is very much not the only interpretation (or the main interpretation) among Christians! You can't really expect people to hold to an interpretation of the Bible that they never professed to begin with, after all. So I think that significantly weakens your arguments in this area, since they are colored so much by a particular interpretation of the Bible that most Christians don't hold.
With those important overarching points out of the way, it's time for ye olde bulleted list.
Genesis (written by Moses iirc) is fundamentally a mythological book. Catholics don't generally believe it's meant to be taken literally, but that the author was using the myths of the ancient near East to try to teach those people about the origins of the world in terms they would understand (which of course doesn't remotely come close to our modern understanding of biology, geology and so on). The important takeaway from the creation story isn't "God made the world in seven days just like we understand days" (which wouldn't make sense in various ways), but "God is the supreme being who created everything, not like your gods who are either glorified mortals or forces of nature". Similarly, the story of Adam isn't generally understood as "there was a literal serpent who got Adam and Eve to eat a literal apple", but as a myth which seeks to illustrate how sin has perverted God's design for the world and placed us all in dire need of a savior.
The perception of God isn't eternal because we ourselves are not eternal. How could we have perfect knowledge of God in this life, imperfect as we are? It's like Paul says: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly...". It's not really fair to expect our understanding of God to not change over time. God himself doesn't change, of course, but human ideas of him do.
Why does God allow different interpretations of the Bible (at least some of which must be wrong)? Good question and I don't have an answer. I think you should be pretty skeptical of anyone who does. I'm content with the "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" verse on this one, but I can't fault you if you aren't. It's just not something that is an impediment to my faith because I trust God knows what he's doing.
It is true that a lot of the Old Testament comes down to divine dick measuring. But to me, this makes perfect sense in light of the "human authors are writing to the context they live in" interpretation. God revealed truths about himself to these writers, and they communicated those truths in the way they thought would make the most sense to their contemporary audience. For example, the book of Job. I think that this book is best understood as poetry, and meant in the same way good art is made today: it uses the imagery of the story to reveal something true to us. Specifically, that if we trust God then we will ultimately be rewarded (note that it may not be in this life, but we will still be rewarded). I don't know whether or not there was an actual man that Job was based on, but if there was I doubt that his life went exactly as depicted in the book. But that's OK, because the message of "trust God" is the important part.
I would not say that there is a consistent Christian view of hell. Even among Catholics there isn't unity as far as I know. That's primarily because the Bible just doesn't talk that much about hell to the best of my knowledge. As far as I'm aware Catholic doctrine on hell is that a) it exists, b) some people will end up there, c) it's an awful place to be. It's important to note here that the reason hell is awful isn't because God designed it as a punishment. It's because God is the source of everything good, and hell is separation from God. Therefore, there can be nothing good in hell (not even the sinful pleasures we can experience in this life), because the source of all goodness is not there. To the best of my knowledge, the imagery of a lake of fire where you get tormented by demons as a punishment is not something the Church teaches. Nor would I say it's something that there's broad agreement on.
I certainly don't think it's true that you have to believe in young earth creationism, or any of that other stuff, in order to avoid hell. There are a lot of ideas about hell, but I'm most convinced by CS Lewis' thoughts on this topic. The people in hell are there not because God sends them to eternal soul prison, but because they chose to be there. As Lewis said, the gates of hell are barred from the inside. I do not know if the Church has specific teaching on whether people could theoretically change their mind, so perhaps hell isn't eternal for those who wind up there. I don't know, and again I don't think there's any sort of broad Christian consensus on this topic.
I don't imagine that this will surprise you, but I don't think that God allowed the Catholics to twist the Bible for centuries. I think that is nonsense born more of hate than anything else. There's still a lot of bad blood between some Protestants and some Catholics, and it's horrible. But I think that the idea that God let the Catholic Church essentially damn people to hell for centuries through bad readings of scripture is just plain false.
So far as I'm aware, the Church does not teach that you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be saved. It simply teaches that all salvation is through him. For example, the Church teaches that all the Israelites who lived before Jesus' incarnation were saved by his sacrifice, even though it happened (from a mortal timeline's POV) after they lived. The Church also teaches that while its teachings and sacraments are a sure path to heaven, God isn't limited by such things and can save anyone he wants through any means he wants. Some believe that for those who die never having heard the message of Jesus Christ, God still gives them the grace to choose to follow the morals they were taught (and that by accepting that grace, they can still go to heaven through the power of Jesus' sacrifice even if they never knew about him in those terms). The Church very deliberately does not teach that any given person is in hell, because we simply cannot know this side of the grave. It does teach that certain people are in heaven, but that's another topic.
I know what you mean about people on the ground witnessing miracles having a leg up, but at the same time I'm not sure that's true. The Bible records that a lot of people who witnessed miracles chose to not persist in faith in God. The Old Testament is full of this (Exodus has the memorable examples where the people just watched God save them from Pharaoh's armies and then say "God has abandoned us" time and time again as they journey). The New Testament has it too. Judas personally saw Jesus, was one of his closest followers, and would have witnessed him do many miracles personally. He still chose to sell Jesus out. Not only that but he despaired at God's forgiveness even after all he saw (which is what many say was his true sin, not the selling out of Jesus). On this very forum, I've seen people say that if they saw a miracle they would think that they were having a hallucination or that there was a scientific explanation. I think that at some level, no matter what miracles you have seen or not, you have to make the choice to believe.
I don't think it's true that someone who pulls the trigger on a gun (I think you mean suicide here?) can't save themselves. I believe that God is not limited by time, and that he can even work in the past from our perspective. I think that it's possible (though we can't know until we get to heaven) that God gave people who committed suicide the chance to repent in the last instant of their life, and that some chose to accept his grace. Again, the Church doesn't say that this is necessarily true, but it is pretty consistent that the stuff the Bible says is a lifeline for our benefit, not a limitation of God. I choose to believe that he reaches even those people who us mortals think are beyond hope.
I think that addresses most of your points (hopefully all, but I might have missed something). Not necessarily in order of course, because some of your arguments are interconnected (for example I kind of touched on the "how is hell just" line of thinking while trying to address your third bullet point, even though it was part of your fourth bullet point). But again, just for emphasis: I'm not saying all of these things are arguments you will necessarily believe. My only goal is to highlight that one does not have to choose between the message of the Bible and the objective truth of the world.
It's taken me a long time to write all of this and it's late enough that I don't have time to do editing passes, but I hope that at least it gives you some food for thought. Again, thank you for the earnest and respectful discussion!
This post is good! Yes, that all makes sense. It doesn't really convince me to believe, but it's not totally at odds with reality, like how fundamentalists see it. I may have just talked to too many fundamentalists, but to be fair, that was my only perspective on the bible for pretty much all of my youth.
Catholics don't believe that scripture is infallible? Infallibility is a strong statement to make, and admitting that men wrote it is kind of conceding a lot of ground. I guess I don't know what you're supposed to base your belief on here, if men wrote it and it may not be accurate to what God actually wanted us to know. How would inspired word look any different from some random jackwagon writing whatever he wants?
To that end, is there anything solidifying your belief in day-to-day life? I asked a couple Christians if there is justice in this life, or if it's only reserved for the afterlife, and both of them seemed pretty stumped by what I thought was a simple question. To me, it seems pretty obvious that life is randomly cruel to everyone, Christian or not, a world of chaos, untamed and wild except for where men have tamed it. If someone created it, they're either not paying attention to it, as if they wound up a wind up doll and walked away from the table, or they never cared much about it in the first place, an apathetic god that lets the chips fall as they may. You probably disagree with that, and if you do, I'd like to hear it.
I have so many random theological questions (does the suffering of animals mean anything?), but maybe some other day. Or some other thread.
I am not a trained apologist either, but I think I can provide further background to your question about Scriptural Infallibility in a Catholic Context.
The Catholic Church would say that the Bible is infallible, but in a very narrow way. I don't want to quibble about words, so it makes sense to just say, the Bible isn't 100% infallible, in the way that word is commonly used today.
The Bible contains exactly what God wanted it to contain. It contains every spiritual revelation necessary for a person to be granted peace with God and know, love, and serve Him. That said, God didn't set out to give us a treatise on Natural Science.
Every Scriptural passage contains four meanings in it: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The fourfold senses of Scripture—the literal, allegorical,moral (tropological), and anagogic senses—were first proposed by John Cassian (ca. 360-435). By way of example, Cassian wrote, “The one Jerusalem can be understood in four different ways, in the historical sense as the city of the Jews, in allegory as the Church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all’ (Gal 4:26), in the tropological sense as the human soul.”
The allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses are infallible. The literal is infallible only as far as it points to an allegorical, tropological or anagogical meaning.
For example, Genesis is clearly begins with myths parodying Babylonian and other Near Eastern myths. The author of Genesis takes a Babylonian myth about a flood, and then says, "there's only one God, and He made humans out of love, so how would this myth play out if the true God was involved instead of these false gods." The writing style is mythic. I don't think there was ever an intention to deceive, their original audience knew the original myths that were being parodied. That's what made the parody so powerful.
Early Christian converts from Greco-Roman paganism took Genesis as allegorical from the start. They knew given the state of natural science at the time, that the world was created in one instant and the four elements were Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, but Genesis only refers to Water and Earth. So obviously Genesis left some important things out from a natural science perspective, but the moral and anagogical truths are still infallible.
The second half of Genesis moves to Folklore. Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree? I don't think so. Would I include that anecdote if I was writing down oral traditions for George Washington's biography? Probably. Because it portrays something important about his character with a conciseness that only a story can draw out. Did Abraham really pretend his wife was his sister twice? I don't know. The authors of Genesis thought that it conveyed something important about his character and his relationship with God though.
Meanwhile, the four Gospels are very clearly portraying themselves as Eye Witness accounts or collections of Eye Witness accounts of the strangest thing to have ever happened on Earth. Theistic and atheistic scholars recognize that the genre is Ancient Biography. Noted skeptic Bart Erhman calls them Greco-Roman biographies. The writers of the Gospels really do want their audience to believe the events described genuinely took place.
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I guess I would say my understanding is that scripture is a mixture of fallible bits and infallible bits. There are undeniable moments in the Bible where the human author is shown to be imperfect - I can't recall the exact verse, but there's a part in one of Paul's letters where he says that he forgot something or other. Clearly, God doesn't seem like he would be in the business of telling Paul "yeah say you forgot this bit". But the Catholic belief is that those things are fine because they aren't the essence of the message (which is infallible, cause that is the part God inspired).
Great question, because yeah once you open that door you now need to distinguish which parts are inspired by God, and which parts are not. Unfortunately the answer in my case is that I am just not well-versed in this stuff enough to know. I would bet that at least part of the answer is going to be rooted in what Catholics refer to as Sacred Tradition - basically, the idea is that not all of the teachings of the early church were written down as a modern audience would expect, but at least some were handed down orally. Those teachings are considered to be authoritative as well, and the Catholic justification for how we know which books of the Bible are canonical is basically "God gave men the grace to discern it and pass that down as part of Sacred Tradition". Given that the answer for which books are canonical is believed to be rooted in tradition, I imagine that so too is the answer to your question. But ultimately I don't know - sorry about that, because it is a totally fair question.
A couple of things. One thing (and basically the reason I came back to the faith after I left it in my 20s) is basically that my dad attests to having seen two genuine, cannot-mistake-it miraculous (or at least supernatural) events (I can give you more detail if you like, but I generally figure that "my dad said so" is not something which would convince anyone who doesn't know him, lol). Obviously I have a high degree of confidence that he wouldn't lie to me, and I have a high degree of confidence as well that he didn't just hallucinate the things he reports. So while that doesn't exactly prove that my faith is correct, that gives me a pretty strong nudge towards the faith my dad has (i.e. Christianity) being correct.
The second thing is the way in which I met my wife. It probably sounds trite, but it's true. I was single up until I was 30 - I couldn't even get a date, much less a girlfriend. I was pretty unhappy but couldn't really make any headway, and I would've bet you every last penny I owned that I was going to die alone. Eventually, I had a friend who had good success with online dating and I made an OKCupid profile basically just to earn the right to be bitter and mad at the world (kind of like how people will vote so they "have the right to complain about the result"). I wound up meeting my wife, who unknown to me also made a profile in more or less sheer desperation after she had been in a couple of bad relationships. Before she met me she was also going to give up on dating (for a long time if not forever), because it had just been so negative for her. To me... I just can't really believe that is coincidence. I know it's possible! But ultimately I really do think that the most likely explanation is that God brought us together at the right time when we both really needed each other. So that also solidifies my day to day belief.
I believe that sometimes we get justice in this life, but that ultimately justice is only guaranteed in the afterlife.
Yeah, I definitely feel the frustration of how messed up this world is and how it really seems like it's ripe for God to step in and correct things. Surely people deserve that from him, right? I have had the same thoughts myself more than once. Ultimately, the problem of evil is just really hard and I don't know that there's a perfect answer. But if I had to say what I think, it's probably something like this.
God is not exactly alien to us (like a Lovecraftian elder god or something), but he's not entirely comprehensible to us either. That means that having faith in God means I need to accept that sometimes, the way he chooses to handle things is going to seem really messed up in the short term but will pay off in the long term. Unfortunately, I think that sometimes "long term" here means "in the afterlife", which is really hard for us humans. But I do believe that God loves us, and that everything is ordered towards our ultimate good. I've had my own experience where I had something happen to me that I thought was catastrophic, but ultimately made me better, and I think of that whenever I think of all the horrible things God allows to happen in our world. I know that's cold comfort to those who suffer. I wish I had a better answer. But that's what I believe at least, and what I try to cling to whenever I find myself questioning "what the hell, God? Why would you allow this?"
For sure man. Feel free to ask, I'll at least do my best to answer. And I try to be honest when the answer is "I don't know", which it will probably be more often than not. ;) But I am always down to try to answer the questions.
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Maybe I misunderstand something here, but why would this be unfair? Aren't there a number of ideas that are unchanging or at least variable only in a narrow space of possibilities? Take something like the laws of logic for example, they are as far as anyone knows eternally true, and what's more they seem to be intuitively undeniable and, in a manner of speaking, to impose themselves on any rational mind and, failing that, at least the material reality of the irrational.
In other words, it does seem to be possible for God to put ideas into the minds of all humans that are relatively stable and undeniable by any serious thinker. Why did he not do that for belief in himself?
And yet, our understanding of those things has changed many times throughout history. The laws of logic and mathematics haven't changed, but over time we learn more about them. So clearly just because something is eternal and unchanging, our understanding of said thing is not precluded from changing.
The honest answer is "nobody knows for sure". Some people say that those ideas already exist. For example, some people believe that the majestic beauty of nature is proof that an intelligent creator must be behind it, and that anyone who says otherwise is a fool. Others believe that for God to do so would be limiting himself in some way. I personally would lean towards the idea (which I touched on in my earlier post) that people aren't actually as ready to accept these ideas as they think they would be. But that is just my best guess based on observing the human tendency to skepticism.
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I think you did a good job. One note:
The concept you're referring to here is Invincible Ignorance. And here's an official Church document explaining:
Thank you! I had heard the term before but totally forgot about it, so I appreciate the info.
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Yes. And? It's all of grace anyway, a gift that we utterly don't deserve, so I don't really see the issue. See also: Romans 9.
Ah, you misunderstand. Your sin is against the infinite majesty of God.
This isn't the reason that they're damned (or at least, certainly not all of it), they're damned for their sin in general.
Under any definition of the time when the Bible was being written, "day" did not mean "actually hundreds of millions of years". Anyone saying otherwise is coping. Genesis is literally supposed to be how the world came about, and people interpreted it this way and believed it for hundreds of years until the theory of evolution and uniformitarianism came about.
Is God supposed to be a loving God, as almost every Christian I see says it, or is he supposed to be literally the most wicked thing in existence, with Satan and every other false god paling in comparison both to the magnitude of cruelty he is capable of inflicting and the willingness to see it carried out? When you pick apples, you keep the good ones and toss the bad ones. You don't take the bad apples, smash them into bits, reconstitute them, and smash them again and keep repeating this same pattern. That doesn't make any sense. You know what would make it make sense? If humans came up with it to scare you into believing it.
Edit to add: The idea that you can handwave away the unfairness of that is kind of infuriating to me. You're telling me that a kid can be born in a nowhere town with no opportunity, grow up getting abused by his parents, reach ripe adulthood somewhere after 12, lose faith in God because nothing good is happening to him, and end up shooting himself, and he goes to Hell to be tormented forever. Not only was life unfair to him, but also the afterlife was even more unfair to him, somehow. There's no way to reconcile that fate with any of the rest of the New Testament claiming God to be extremely loving. That's pretty unequivocally horrible. God created every part of this situation -- a cruel world, the rules behind entry to Heaven and Hell, the ability to sin and feel pain. What majesty would do that?
Hell isn't unfair. We deserve it.
If anything, it's heaven that's unfair.
Why not?
Jesus dude. This is crazy talk, even by my low expectations regarding religious thinkers. I'm here if you want to message or talk to someone.
I think this is pretty mainstream, among some (large) segments of Christianity?
It follows pretty quickly that we deserve hell if you just take sin seriously. When all sin is in some respect against God's infinite majesty, that makes sin pretty bad, even if it's something that we might ordinarily think of as minor. (I could cite some passages of scripture, but I get that you might not care.)
This makes salvation more breathtaking.
If this is due to concern that I'm unwell, I'm not. I like to think I'm pretty well adjusted, I have friends, etc.
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How does anyone who isn't born a pathological misanthrope come to believe this?
Well, I don't think I was born a pathological misanthrope, nor am one, so…
By becoming convinced that sin is bad, actually. That we are guilty when we sin not only for the harms we inflict on others, but for the transgression against God's law, against his infinite majesty.
To quote Isaiah, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
This is not the only such passage.
"Sin is bad" is clearly not sufficient. Somehow you've also become convinced that [there is God and] God is a utility monster such that offending him makes one deserving of infinite suffering.
From what I see even most religious people aren't truly making that leap. This is why I don't believe that you mean it, or that you're normal for believing it.
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Origen:
Augustine:
Edit:
Also St. Augustine:
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But for all this ridiculousness, these seem to be the only way of maintaining key social technologies including fundamental prosocial memes, at least in the West.
Secular reactionaries can come up with countless legitimate reasons for many aspects of traditional morality, but it seems to mean nothing in the West without “you will go to the fire pit for eternity if you break the rules”.
“Why not have free love?”“Well, actually, you know various studies have shown that things like promiscuity can have deleterious effects on partner bonding with later partners, increasing the risk of blah blah blah…”
Secular justifications for traditional social technology just don’t work with normal people of average and below ability, and even with most above them. Yes it’s stupid, but it’s better for our children to believe it than not.
I don't really think that works in the end. Like @oats_son pointed out, sooner or later your kids are going to go "Hey Mom/Dad, you sure don't seem to believe all the stuff you taught us about God" and the whole edifice comes crumbling down. The way religion teaches us to live might be good, but I don't imagine that most people ever thought about it in terms of "which ideology teaches me the best way to live?". Rather, their way of living followed their belief in the truth claims of the religion. For people who are really good at decoupling concepts (like most people on this forum) you might be able to separate the two, but I am very skeptical that you could do so on a widespread scale.
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I don't at all disagree with the benefits of genuine belief. I feel I have been robbed of these for myself because I just thought about the issues too much. Are your children doomed to the same bitter realization decades down the line? You're just supposed to hope they're less good at critical thinking than yourself?
Yeah if you're smart, at all, you figure out it is all make believe bullshit when you learn that Santa or the Tooth Fairy aren't real. For everyone else...I mean if they can't get out of the simple indoctrination, maybe they were going to be ideologically captured by something worse down the line? That is my steel man.
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I'm your huckleberry.
The popular understanding of Materialism is obviously bogus, and is protected from a rapid descent into absurdity by nothing more than irrational social consensus effects. It is exactly as ridiculous as flat-earth or young-earth creationism, for exactly the same reasons.
Note that the above does not apply to Materialism itself, which is an entirely reasonable position, but is considerably less attractive and persuasive. The difference between the two is that the popular version derives its force from a circular argument about the nature of epistemology, evidence and belief. The popular formulation holds that belief in Materialism is derived strictly from an impartial assessment of the evidence, and also evidence against Materialism can't possibly exist, so if evidence against Materialism appears to exist, it can be discarded without explanation.
Without this circular argument, Materialism is merely another faith-based argument that has retreated into the gaps of unfalsifiability. With this circular argument, of course, Materialism is obviously true by definition, and anyone who disagrees has volunteered for mockery. As long as people don't twig to the circular nature of the argument, the social effect is self-reinforcing. The many legitimate benefits Materialism claims to encourage, by contrast, are in fact equally available to non-Materialists, whose faith generally does not prevent them from designing rockets and microchips in any way.
"Objectively false" is an interesting phrase. I'm not aware of anything in the Bible that is "objectively false". On the other hand, I'm pretty sure everything Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is in fact objectively false, and yet people bought it entirely for a hundred years, and many people believe it to this very day. It seems obvious to me that Determinism is as close to "objectively false" as you can get, and many people here still believe it. It seems to me that belief in "objectively false" things is actually pretty common, and examining the phenomenon can teach you a lot about how human reason actually works and what its limits are.
The short version is that belief is not driven by evidence, but by acts of individual will. All significant beliefs are chosen. This is as "obviously true" as anything can be, but choosing not to believe it makes it easier to choose certain other beliefs that some consider desirable, and so those people generally do that. This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
Interestingly I think it is the exact opposite. We don't choose out beliefs about reality by act of will, they emerge from our sub-conscious (our "true" self) and then rationalized thereafter. I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs. I simply realized that I believed X, or didn't believe Y (sometimes after someone made a point and I argued against only to realize weeks later, that my belief had changed). I don't know how I would even go about choosing through an act of will to just believe something to be true.
I might also go so far as to say that almost by very definition beliefs cannot be under our conscious control. I cannot choose to believe in God, and I should know because I spent a lot of time trying so that I would fit in. I just could not do it, no matter how I tried.
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to
assumeinfer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
Again, you don't choose to accept it or not. You just do. Or at least I do. So possible inferential distance here. Someone tells me something and I FEEL whether I believe it or not instinctually. Way before I would try to work through why I do. And then wouldn't you know it, my rationalizations always support what i felt to be true. Quite the coincidence huh?
I didn't choose to not believe in God. One day I did and the next I did not. Suddenly all the contradictions and holes loomed large. The day before they did not. I didn't make a wilful choice. Now maybe somewhere in my subconscious evidence was being weighed but I don't seem to have access to that process.
Most people aren't rational from what I can tell, and what we believe isn't either. We build our beliefs off what feels true, not from rationally evaluating them. I am pretty sure this is how it works for myself and somewhat confident this is how it works for most other "normies". And acting as if this is true turns out to predict peoples actions better than not.
And indeed I think some of what you are saying actually supports my position. Why do people when weighing evidence weigh some more and discard some or going looking for more? So that the evidence supports the position they already hold, the position they already believed, before they started examining it "objectively". And the same for axioms, they pick those which support their pre-existing conclusion. Which is why people can hold beliefs that are contradictory, because the critical thought is downstream of belief. And why when confronted with contradictory believes they do no simply evaluate and change their axioms. They waffle, they prevaricate, they deflect. What they don't fo generally is willfully decide they are wrong and change their beliefs.
Indeed if they did, I would suggest there would be little need for the rationalist project at all.
There's definately significant inferential distance here. I have flat-out, explicitly, in-a specific-moment decided to change my beliefs twice: once to stop believing in God, and then about a decade later, to resume believing in God. In both cases, the choice was made for purely willful reasons, because I wanted to, not because of any conviction or certainty. In both cases the decision was made against a backdrop of personal crisis; the first time, I perceived myself to be a terrible Christian and this made me miserable, so I decided to just stop believing in it any more. Ten years and a great deal of drama and personal ruin later, I concluded that not believing in God hadn't actually made me any less miserable, and if I was going to be miserable either way I'd rather be miserable with God than without him, and so decided to begin believing again. Life has been much better since.
I've had this exact experience going both directions. When I decided not to believe any more, I have a strong memory of watching all the valences flip, and the same happened the other way when I decided to believe again. In both cases, it was absurdly obvious how good the new arguments were, and how ridiculous all my old commitments had been. It's definately not an experience one forgets.
More generally, thought, I observe that most of my belief-choices aren't a snap decision, but rather a process. There's one political topic in particular that I had very, very strong feelings, opinions, values, etc about. Because I cared a lot about it, I consumed a lot of news and analysis about the topic. After some years of this, I did some self-reflection, and noted that this topic appeared to be a self-licking ice cream cone: I cared about it because I was constantly reading news about it, and I was constantly reading news about it because I cared about it, but in fact none of the news was ever actually surprising, just endless repetitions of the same basic themes over and over ad nauseum. Consuming content on this topic was pointless, and caring about it had long-since become pointless emotional masturbation. So I took a lot of my cached thoughts and feelings about the subject, made a conscious decision to label them "compromised", decided that I would no longer have an opinion on the topic, stopped consuming all content on the subject, and pre-committed to no longer grant emotional valiance to any further material on the subject I was exposed to. This did not make the strong feelings, opinions, values and so on go away on the spot, but any time they popped up, I did my best to trample them right down again, and over the next few years, the feelings, opinions, values and so on shifted quite significantly.
Deciding to believe in God didn't make me Christian on the spot, and my current faith has been constructed by a large number of decisions of how to spend my time and attention, who I talk to and about what, whose opinions I give weight to, and so on. In the aggregate, these choices massively shape how I experience life and how I think about those experiences, and they have led to very significant changes in values, desires, and even personality over time. And to me, the connection between willful choice and results is obvious.
I've seen this a fair bit in my marriage, and now that I'm a father. I love my wife; she's by far the best thing that's ever happened to me, hands down, not even close. I am confident that the case for her excellence could be made objectively, but I don't actually care: things happen, and sometimes I get annoyed or frustrated with her, and when that happens I actively work to grant that frustration and annoyance as little space in my mind as possible. My goal is to love her more perfectly, and I make an effort to actively encourage thoughts and behaviors conducive to this goal, and actively prune thoughts and behaviors that impede this goal. Likewise with my children; I may not be able to control my emotional reactions to a situation, but I can certainly control how I feed or starve those reactions, allowing or denying them self-reinforcement.
Not only evidence, but status, competing desires, and a variety of other motives. Maybe it's a genuine difference in how our brains work, or maybe it's a skill you didn't learn, or an illusion I've bought into, but...
Have you ever lied to yourself? Like, you think "I want to do this thing, but it's bad and I shouldn't." and then you think "I'm going to anyway", and then you think something that isn't really words, but more a deliberate pointing of your consciousness in some direction other than "I have just decided to do something bad." If you do it right, the very real moment of decision doesn't really enter long-term memory, and in retrospect you doing the bad thing just sort of... happens. It's the internal monologue version of passive voice, and if you make a habit of it the moment of choice gets smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish completely, and you get a reflexive habit. From experience, it seems pretty easy to just not look too hard at that process, or at a lot of other processes within the mind, and average it all out to "things just happen, I don't know how."
I'm pretty skeptical that my own introspection is unusually strong; it might be typical-minding, but my guess is that most peoples' brains work pretty much like mine, one way or another.
...from your previous comment:
Dump your entire current social network, and surround yourself exclusively with Christians. Actively cultivate deep, meaningful relationships with them. Adopt the axiom that Christianity is correct, and apparent incorrectness is a problem with your perspective or assessment. Consume high-quality Christian arguments, actively work to adopt Christian perspectives, seek status from fellow Christians, focus on all of Christianity's good points and on all of non-Christianity's worst features. Actively work to contemplate your life and experiences through a Christian lens, and actively work to develop an understanding of Christianity that fits with your understanding of life and the world. Do this all day every day for several years, and see what happens. My guess is that if you did so, at the end of those years you'd be a whole lot more Christian than you are now. Do you think otherwise?
...And of course, you could swap Christianity out for Hinduism or Veganism or Objectivism or Communism or any other coherent worldview/value set. Those feelings about what is true and what isn't are totally real, but given that we observe them changing, and given that we can observe them being influenced by things like media consumption and social status, how they change over time can't be all that great a mystery, can they?
I have observed my own feelings of what is true shifting significantly based on media consumption and social desirability, among other influences.
If people have no control and beliefs simply self-reinforce, how do people change their minds about a thing? More generally, have you not observed yourself choosing between available reactions to a disruptive event? Have you not observed yourself choosing to adopt one attitude over another in response to a given situation?
Indeed it is, but that would not prevent the belief from being downstream of the will, would it?
My prediction isn't that people, when confronted by an opposing argument, decide to change their mind and adopt their opposite's position. My argument is that people have considerable control over the trajectory of their minds over the long-term, and they steer that trajectory through choices, some acute, some chronic, through exercise of their own will, decided by their own internal deliberations and competing desires and values. Those desires and values they choose to feed grow stronger, those they starve grow weaker, and through this process their mind changes as a consequence of their choices. How could it be otherwise?
I agree with that, except, it wasn't something I made a conscious decision on, but it was very much an overnight thing. Thing that had made sense no longer did and things that did not, now did.
I also agree here, while I don't think we (I'll use we for myself and may other's here, but not everyone clearly) can control our feelings or beliefs, we can control how we act on them. I get angry at my wife or my kids, and I think you can choose not to actively dwell on them, or to go do something else with that time and energy.
I do think otherwise, yes, because I was in that position, and that didn't stop my belief set changing and then I stayed in that network for years after with no sign of it switching back. I visited pretty much every church I could get my hands on (well except Catholic, back in those days in Northern Ireland, that would still have been an issue), from Quakers to The brethren, from Methodist to Pentecostals. I devoured Christian apologetics, talked to my parents (both Sunday School teachers), to vicars and deacons. None of it made a difference to my belief set. Things i had believed now appeared silly and superstitious. Arguments that made sense now had holes big enough to drive lorries through. And I don't think I am alone in that. When I moved to America I dated an ex-Jehovah's witness who recounted similar struggles to the extent she was shunned by her family after leaving the church, and how she had struggled and prayed and fought to, in her words "stay in the light" and that was within an insular community where she was immersed even more than I was back in the day.
I would agree that media consumption and social desirability can have an impact on my beliefs of what is true, but I have not been able to observe it happening in real time, I have just seen it happen in other's so it seems arrogant to assume it doesn't happen to me.
To an extent I think most people's mind is changed for them. Not by an outside force but by their own inner workings. for example I had an online argument a long time ago, where I argued point A and someone else argued B. Some weeks later I realized B to be true and no longer A. I didn't choose to change my mind, but presumably below the level of conscious thought my mind was still churning away on that argument and was convinced. I can certainly choose my actions, by managing my emotional state, but that doesn't mean I can control what emotions I feel in the first place.
Some of this I certainly agree with, and to be clear I am not advocating that people do not have responsibility for their beliefs still. The sub-conscious is still part of us, and who we are as a person, no-one else can be responsible for our actions based upon our beliefs whether or not we chose what to believe consciously or not. IRA bombers still chose to kill people even if they didn't consciously choose their belief system.
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Just an anecdote that I think is a good little microcosm of your point (with which I agree): I had a friend who once said that he could choose not to be angry about anything if it made sense to him. He argued that if the situation made sense, he would simply not be angry about it. He also, generally speaking, postured his entire life as if he had made only logical decisions, and held logical positions. He considered himself so immune to illogical positions that he began to block anyone who ever disagreed with him, even in passing. So much so that he broke reddit's block list.
Such a logical creature, naturally, regularly threw his controller across the room playing video games, or shattered his keyboard in rage. He would start out mad about something and then start an argument to explain why you were wrong. He was good at avoiding name-calling, and his brinksmanship over any accusation of him acting irrationally (his logic was that it was just going "u mad bro?") caused an extreme chilling effect on anyone actually taking him to task over being so vitriolic about what were either pet peeves or flavor-of-the-day political grievances.
I am no longer friends with this person, but my point in bringing him up is that he's the perfect exaggerated example of what you're talking about. I don't think he was so atypical mentally that he had an entirely different way of processing information and making decisions - he just built an elaborate justification around his instinctive reactions. For someone who claimed to control every aspect of his life so much, it is remarkable how little in control of himself he was. But then, that's how we all are. We're products of our environments and genetics. I consider myself to be well-regulated emotionally, but I owe the vast majority of my developed qualities to growing up in a supportive household, with parenting, education, and friends that nurtured such qualities in me. My development was quite literally determined by these things. I, as you say, react to stimuli in a very naturalistic way, before I've given it any deep thought. And very rarely will such deep thought contradict my initial decisions (unless we're talking about dietary choices!), which implies to me that my decision making is a streamlined biological process to which I do not have access. It's just patterns mapped onto my neurons over the course of my life, even if they're logical ones. I find it hard to believe some essence of logic, some soul lives separate from this and makes decisions contrary to the animal decisions I make on a much more numerous and much quicker scale. One would think they'd differ more.
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