a logical belief in gods
A blogging buddy, who enjoys science and has a penchant for strong alcoholic drinks, recently made the shocking statement that he is logically inclined to believe in the existence of a creator deity. I must declare that I almost choked on my false teeth. What an entirely odd thing to say! It got me to thinking about how logically there is no way to believe in any such deity. And I can prove this through History, Psychology and Science.
History
A quick glance at the history of humankind reveals a vast array of superstitious beliefs with no common threads. Even the ones that stole their roots from older religions were careful to state that their version of events is the absolute Truth and all else is False. History tells us that people are likely to believe whatever their parents believe, but if anything more appealing comes along they might change their minds. Every culture has evolved its own superstitious practices and beliefs but you’d have to be mad to think that one could be ‘correct’. This brings us neatly to psychology: why on earth do we bother?
Psychology
Basic developmental psychology will tell you that humans have evolved with an intense curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Children acquire language and understanding of the world around them by constantly exploring and questioning. This pre-programmed desire to understand doesn’t magically end when we turn Adult. Most of us are just bored, or less keen to demonstrate our ignorance by asking WHY every five minutes. Strange weather, birth, death and our very existence were unanswerable questions until recent generations – invisible superstitious entities were the only way to fill those gaps. This brings us neatly to science: what have we learned?
Science
Now that science can tell us why there are rainbows, what stars are, why crops fail and why people get ill, there is less room for the explanations religious systems around deities used to provide. Science can even tell us how the world came into existence. But what about the bits science can’t explain? Think about it this way – if science has up to this point been able to provide explanations for all the aforementioned mysteries that ‘gods’ used to provide, is it more reasonable to assume that what we don’t yet know was done by an invisible deity, or that science isn’t a fait accompli and we may know the answers in the future? Logic would dictate the latter.
Conclusion
What could possibly be logical about belief in a deity? History tells us that people will believe anything; Psychology tells us we are so desperate for answers we will invent them if they’re not forthcoming; and Science tells us there are answers for everything in the visible, physical reality we abide in. So, what’s left? A funny feeling that there must be more to life than this. Is that logical?
Hello,
Since all comments are welcome, I couldn’t resist responding to your claim that “logically there is no way to believe in any such deity.” I’ll stick to the three areas you mention. I’m a Christian and I claim to have a rational basis for my faith.
History – Christianity is founded on a historical event subject to historical investigation: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If these events didn’t happen, it is false. If they did, then it is based on truth. Anyone with a library card is free to investigate this for themselves (be sure to read books on both sides of the issue).
Psychology – If there is no God or gods, then presumably naturalism is true. If naturalism is true, then reality is exhausted by the physical world. What then of consciousness, first person perspective, intentionality, pain, etc…? All physics gives us is a third person perspective. Arguably none of these entities could exist if the world was purely physical. Spirituality is a better explanation for these psychological phenomena, i.e. the human is more than just an accidental collection of matter.
Science – Did the universe have a beginning? According to science it did. If the expansion of the universe were slightly faster or slightly slower, would life (or planets for that matter) exist? Science tells us it would not. So it seems that science points to a finely tuned universe with a beginning. Nothing within the universe can explain why this is so. An external cause outside of the universe appears to be required.
Perhaps this doesn’t prove that God exists, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. In any case, there is certainly evidence that God exists, evidence that deserves thoughtful consideration alongside any counter evidence.
All the best,
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Hi Ben, thanks for commenting! I’m delighted to have some Christian input into the discussion. In terms of your thoughts on the post, you have an interesting perspective.
When I say “History”, I mean the history of humankind in it’s entirety, not the historical events around one particular religion. I would suggest it’s irrelevant to the discussion if Jesus actually existed, in the same way it’s irrelevant if Mohammed or Buddha or Achilles existed. History has shown us an endless series of superstitions, some based on historical events or people, that have developed into modern-day religions or been consigned to the mythical history books or oblivion. They are all the same and, logically speaking, the existence of all them and the fact that people only believe a developed religion they have learned from someone else (or the new one they try to start up) would indicate that no clever and invisible deity is communicating any message to anyone.
I mentioned psychology in terms our naturally evolved predisposition to dream up superstitious beliefs to fill in the gaps of the unknown. Humankind in its ignorance attributed all manner of events to deities – do you think your god makes all the rainbows? Logically, as we are inclined to believe any old superstitious nonsense, any other kind of superstitious nonsense is more of the same. Your argument about spirituality is amusing. I don’t think humans are that special – I see nothing about our consciousness that can’t be explained in the physical world.
As for science, I think you completely missed the point. Science can explain what we know today – the bits that are left unanswered can’t logically put down to an invisible creator deity, but logically these are gaps that will be filled in the future by more … science.
You may suggest deities are a possibility, but it’s far from logical.
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Very good. Last time I stated some of my personal reasons. This time I’ll talk about yours.
History – You seem to claim that the history of world religions ought to lead to skepticism. People are wrong all the time (we can’t all be right) so there is little reason to trust the processes by which religious beliefs are formed. Whether it comes from our parents, from society, or we make it up, religious belief is unwarranted. Tell me if I misrepresent you on this.
The problem is, it does not follow that belief in God is untrue (one religion could be accidentally correct perhaps). At best, belief in God is unwarranted. There is no logical contradiction between one God existing yet there being a plurality of world religions. I offer evidence for Christianity—a falsifiable truth claim that can be examined historically. What could be more reasonable than that?
Psychology – You seem to claim that religious beliefs are the product of a psychological mechanism – call it “fill the gaps” syndrome. We tend to fill the gaps where we don’t understand something. Am I correct?
It does not follow from that that belief in God is false. Once again, you at best claim belief in God is unwarranted. It is logically possible that God created people with the “fill the gaps” mechanism in order to recognize him (I don’t believe this but its possible). In order for belief in God to be unwarranted, you would need to show that this mechanism is a) the cause of belief in God and b) leads to error. That’s frankly a lot of work. In any case, there is no logical contradiction between God existing and there being a “fill the gaps” mechanism. The truth of a belief cannot be decided based on how it was formed.
Science – You seem to claim that science has filled the gaps where there used to be gods. This trend is likely to continue. Bet on science over God. Correct?
Where does your optimism come from? My education is in physics and mathematics. I appreciate and enjoy science, but I can see the limits. There are certain places in science where the explanation has to come from outside science. The beginning of the universe is one of those places since all physical matter energy and spacetime itself originates there (consciousness in another). The cause of the universe must from metaphysics—unless of course, things are permitted to come into being uncaused. One could easily return your criticism. Why do you appeal to a “science of the metaphysical gaps”?
All the best, happy to talk.
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Hi Ben, if i may jump in here on one point. You claim to know Physics then you should also know your statement ‘science knows the universe has a beginning’ is categorically false. String and M-theories are well beyond that point of reasoning, and we already know quantum vacuums are very busy places with particles popping in and out of existence at whim, leaving energy in a zero-energy system…. That is to say, Something from Nothing. Now you also seem to dredge up the first cause argument for your god, which is terribly weak apologetics and leads me to believe you’re probably quite young, possibly still in school. Just because you can’t count to infinity isn’t reason to stop the count and simply insert “god.” Why? Because you want to? Like i said, very weak apologetics. To even begin to advance this argument you’d have to first demonstrate why there can’t be an infinite chain of cause and effect, and that is something no one has been able to achieve in the 2,500 years since this argument was first dreamt up.
I won’t even bother with your allusion to fine tuning because that’s an even weaker argument than first cause.
Peace
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Hi John,
Thanks for your comment. As is clear from this discussion, arguments for God’s existence tend to polarize rather than prove. That’s OK. I just hope to raise the “intellectual price tag” of atheism. So let’s stick to one argument.
1. If the universe began to exist, the universe has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist,
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.
As a Christian I have no problem with any of these premises. The atheist, however, needs to reject either 1 or 2 to avoid 3.
You say that 2 is false and appeal to the mystery of string theory. I’d like to refer you to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (http://arxiv.org/abs/grqc/0110012). They prove that any universe (or multiverse) that has been on average expanding cannot be past infinite. Time can’t go on forever in the past in such a spacetime. This commits you to believing that the universe has not been on average expanding. There are three broad options to avoid BGV a) cyclic universe models, b) past asymptotically static models, c) contracting models.
Needless to say, there is little evidence that BGV does not apply to us. But even if it doesn’t we would still have to face a beginning in each case respectively due to a) the second law of thermodynamics, b) quantum metastability issues, c) acausal fine-tuning.
(for details see Craig, William Lane, and James D. Sinclair. “The Kalam Cosmological Argument.” In The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, 101–201. edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.)
So I think I am entirely within my rights as a (mature) student of physics to agree that the universe has a physical beginning. What about 1? You say that particles come into being out of nothing and by nothing you mean a quantum vacuum. This is equivocation. Nothing is not a quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum is a thing. Nothing is not a thing.
Not convinced? That’s because as humans our volition plays an important role. We are not neutral observers. I know God exists from personal experience and confirm that through this argument. Presumably you don’t want God to exist (correct me if I’m wrong). In any case, all I’m trying to do is show that belief in God is intellectually respectable. Reasonable people can disagree. I find it more reasonable than not to affirm 1, 2, and 3.
Cheers.
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Hi again, Ben
You failed to advance the cosmological argument, which is not terribly surprising. The question is quite simple: why can’t there be an infinite chain of cause and effect? Now be careful, because as you’re using the cause and effect argument you can’t insert your god without an explanation as to how it’s an uncaused cause, or that will be violating the very premise of cause and effect.
I’ll await your answer.
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Hello,
There are lots of cosmological arguments. You were mixing two together so I chose one of them. I chose to present the kalam cosmological argument using physical evidence to support the premises. I’d rather focus on physical evidence (given my background) than quibble about infinities, which can become quite complicated. If you’d rather talk about infinite causal chains, I’ll need to present a different argument (which I could).
In the interests of clarity, let’s keep the scope narrow and focus on what I have presented. For my part, I’ve let your comments on fine-tuning go unanswered. This is not because I don’t have answers, it’s because you can’t get anywhere without focusing. Do you really have no response to the argument that I’ve just presented? If not, then please say so and I’ll present a different argument.
Enjoying our discussion!
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I understood it, just wanted to cut to the chase rather than labor through something I’ve discussed a thousand times. It’s actually a very boring argument so I was hoping you might have something new to add. Alas:
1. Everything that begins to exist must have a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause
since the cause must be extra-universal, only God qualifies as the cause.
Problems:
1. Some phenomena at the quantum level happen unpredictably and may not have a cause. Further, something “beginning to exist” violates the conservation of energy principle. If that’s possible, then it could also be possible to violate the cause and effect principle.
2. Premise 2 is based on the Big Bang Theory, which only states that our universe (everything we can detect, as opposed to everything that can possibly exist) expanded from a single particle. The Big Bang Theory does NOT say that NOTHING (non-being) existed before this particle came into being. A particle coming into being out of nothing (quantum vacuum) happens all the time, without violating the conservation of energy.
3. It is plausible, but not necessary, that the universe has a cause. The Cosmological argument does not suggest or require that this cause cannot be natural. The cause need not be supernatural, because we have no information to refute the eternal existence of a quantum vacuum prior to the big bang, from which a particle can arise in ways we understand and which are fully compatible with the Big Bang Theory.
The conclusion therefore is that the Kalam Cosmological argument asserts (refutably) that a cause is required, and suggests (refutably) that only god qualifies. Further, it disqualifies itself as an argument for the existence of god by presuming the existence of god, and merely suggesting (refutably) that god is the only possible cause for the universe. Even if the entire argument was true, its only conclusion would be line 3 – “The universe had a cause”, saying nothing about what causes qualify or about the necessity of the theist god to be the only possible cause.
As you can see, I was simply trying to move your mind forward on to the inevitable contradiction/problem in your argument. That’s to say, your argument, as it stands, is simply saying: “Santa Claus exists because I want him to exist… and I’m not going to explain how or why”
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Hi John,
You bring up some interesting points.
First, the argument as I’ve stated it does not require that “Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.” Rather, I’ve claimed that “if the universe began to exist then the universe has a cause.” So I won’t quibble about virtual particles.
Second, you suggest that the big bang represents a transition from a quantum vacuum to the expanding universe that we see today. Presumably, the primordial quantum vacuum represents an extremely small universe that exists prior to the big bang. Classically it would contract to zero radius but via quantum tunneling, it begins to expand (cf. Craig and Sinclair p. 183). Such a quantum vacuum would not be nothing—it would be something.
Craig and Sinclair discuss this proposal (pp. 147-150). The main problem is that the primordial quantum vacuum needs to be stable for a past infinite amount of time to avoid the BGV theorem. But the fact that quantum tunneling causes the big bang indicates that this initial state is not past eternal. Given enough time, tunneling will occur. (talking about infinities now) It doesn’t make sense to say “…, -3, -2, -1, tunnel!” A quantum state can’t resist tunneling for an infinite amount of time as your proposal requires. So it would appear that for you its turtles all the way down. The quantum state must have a beginning (or another cause).
Third, your thoughts about conservation of energy are very interesting. Conservation laws are intimately related to space and time. They tell us that the worldlines of conserved particles do not abruptly end in spacetime. However, the BGV theorem tells us precisely that in any (on average) expanding universe, all timelike or null geodesics do come to an end at a point in the finite past. Conservation laws are true locally throughout spacetime, but in an expanding spacetime these worldlines meet an edge in the past. That’s just the way it works according to BGV. So your objection from conservation laws does not do what you hope it would.
I’d prefer to stick to 1 and 2. If you admit that the universe has a nonphysical cause, then I’ll talk about 3. Otherwise it will be too much on the table.
Sincerely,
Ben
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Oh dear, it appears you’re a William Lane Craig disciple: a lot of circular drivel, unsubstantiated claims of empirical “evidence,” but nothing new to add. I fear this is going nowhere, so to save everyone’s time I’ll simply refer you to the original question, which you keep ducking, just like Craig… Why can’t there be an infinite chain of cause and effect? Without answering this (logically) your arguments amount to nothing. You are simply inserting “god did it” without a rational explanation why, and no reasonable person will accept that as an answer.
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Not very classy John. I fail to see how ridiculing my sincere response contributes to the conversation. I hope to treat your thoughts with the respect they deserve.
To your question. You ask, “why can’t there be an infinite chain of cause and effect?” I don’t know. Perhaps there can be. What I have argued is rather that there can’t be an infinite “physical” chain of causes and effects. Why so? The physical universe has a finite past. Even on your quantum vacuum scenario, the quantum vacuum can only exist for a finite amount of time prior to tunneling. I truly fail to see how your view can accommodate a physically infinite past. I have in effect argued that the casual chain must have a non-physical link in the finite past.
I suspect that it is this non-physical cause that offends you most. For the sake of argument, I am not committed to this non-physical link being the last link (or even God). Maybe there’s a non-physical cause followed by a non-physical cause all the way down (remember the turtles). Either way, I think that science supports a physical beginning of the universe and that this has awkward implications for atheism. Without getting greedy, I claim that the physical universe is not a causally closed system. That’s all.
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Thanks Ben, I think you’re correct in summarising my thoughts but, for me, you’ve taken nothing logical from them.
“it does not follow that belief in God is untrue (one religion could be accidentally correct perhaps)” – isolating this one line of thought you’re correct that I can’t rule out the possibility one religion may be correct. But they can’t all be correct and chances are, especially if you’re following your culture’s default religion, you’re wrong.
“I offer evidence for Christianity—a falsifiable truth claim that can be examined historically. What could be more reasonable than that?” As reasonable as any other religion, and less convincing if it’s the religion dominant in your culture, that has evolved to appeal to people like you.
“It is logically possible that God created people with the “fill the gaps” mechanism in order to recognize him” Indeed. But knowing that there is a reasonable physical reason in natural evolution that makes us do this (and knowing that people believe all kinds of nonsense based on this) makes it illogical to conclude that because the feeling exists, there must be a god.
“I appreciate and enjoy science, but I can see the limits.” Seriously? And if you had lived in 1600, you may have said the same thing and believed heretics who claimed the world was flat should be burned at the stake. Can you not see how illogical and blinkered that kind of statement is? Imagine in 2313, looking back at a comment like that …
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Dear Aunty Violet…oooh,ooh,please…can, I? Can I? Ben seems such a lamb. Pretty please? Only if you give permission LOL!!
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He has lots of posts about evil. Lots… I wonder if his favorite song is Evil Woman?
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Really? I haven’t even popped over yet. I’m impressed by your restraint. But see how we can all have a mutually informative conversation without calling anyone unpleasant names? I hope this is learning process for you Ark, because you have a lot of pent-up negative emotion stirring within you. *said with all the patronising Christian love I can muster* 🙂
I think we’ve lost Ben already. He went down the well trodden path of ‘science’ with John, and ignored all my much more cleverer stuff.
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His blog is wonderful. Truly. You’ll love it. It is like reading William Lane Craig. After two or three posts I feel I am on an LSD trip and my finger keeps twitching and hovering over the capital ‘D’
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Wow, he’s really obsessed by ‘evil’. I often wonder what strange things are going through the head of people with such fixations. ‘The god God thought-police freaking another person out and thought-repression spirals out of control’ theory springs to mind. (I’m going to TM that)
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Told you. Nut job. You truly cannot discuss anything with this species. It is best to come back completely irreverent with something like, “I heard mercury in your fillings makes you think like this. Do you have mercury in your fillings?” (he probably will if he’s older than 25!
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I think he’s 20 or 21 so he’ll be mercury free in the tooth department. But maybe he eats lots of tuna.
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21! And brainwashed to this extent. Cor. Impressive!
So the teeth are probably out and I am not au fait with tuna, unless he is eating the tins as well.
No, hold on he said he’s working or training as a pilot or something. Can he qualify at such a young age?
Ah, let him be…if he is a pilot and he ferries passengers don’t want to upset him, do we?
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Sorry, didn’t mean to distract him 😦
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Don’t be silly! I just wanted to see if you lurk. Lurker! And I also wanted to write ‘my much more cleverer stuff’ for sheer self-amusement. 🙂
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Don’t worry, i wasn’t being sincere 🙂
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Damn you insincere Aussies! Still proved you’re a lurker.
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I’m learning for the Master!
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Which Master are you learning for?
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Oh, Ahh, i could try and cover that up by saying it was a typo, but i think you’re already onto me… so, yes, i’m here as part of a forward prepping party for the Great Lord Veles. So is Ark, or have you not noticed all his cake posts? He’s Vele’s caterer….
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Haha, impressive side-step. 🙂
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And my comments section is not weird!! Have a look at Ark’s, it thins into obscurity, and he puts new comments at the top because he’s too lazy to scroll down, thereby rendering all conversations senseless to the casual observer. That’s weird. Mine is a finely tuned logical masterpiece structure. In comparison.
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… which evidently decides (magically, i assume) when the conversation is at an end….
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(except for the ‘reply’ button in full public view)
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Not under Ben’s last comment to me… go look . Plus his comment didn’t even register on my thing that’s supposed to register new comments. Seems like you’ve released some sort of conversational Frankenstein. You foolish thing! Did you not see 2001? Did you not learn for our past A.I mistakes??
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Poor John. Ben’s last comment replied to me (addressing both of us) – that’s why you didn’t get your notification. I’ve replied to him using the reply button. And kindly directed him to your fumble with confusing technology. 🙂
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You’re too kind… but i am seriously bored with him already. Nothing new with this lad, just the same old rehash of a rather silly argument.
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I completely understand. But if you don’t look at my reply, you won’t see all the cheeky things I wrote for your benefit. 🙂
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You’re the sister i always wanted 😉
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Goddammit…. look, i wrote ‘for’ again instead of ‘from’. Stop it!
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That’s a supernatural punishment for ‘bad’ if ever I saw one!
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May Vele’s infest your hair, demon woman! 🙂
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Yes I have been distracted talking with John. I would like to reply to your comment. I’ll just need to think a bit before replying. About my blog, I’m trying to provide thoughtful responses to what I regard as the main threats to Christian beliefs – Incoherence, historical claims, the problem of evil, science, and pluralism. See the post “the elephant in the room” for an overview. I just got started a couple weeks ago, that’s why I’m in the middle of the problem of evil.
I appreciate the overall tone of your posts and do enjoy the thoughtful discussion.
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Looks interesting, I’ll have a proper read later on. Good to have you involved in the discussions. I don’t like posts to become long lists of people agreeing – makes it kind of pointless.
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I think you both bring up some very good points. I’ll try and regroup with greater clarity and precision, hopefully.
I’ve been arguing against the claim that belief in God is illogical, taken to mean logically contradictory by offering possible sources of evidence. However, from what I’ve gathered, you really intend to say that belief in God is unwarranted. Sure it could be true, but there’s no good reason to believe it. I notice the absence of positive reasons why God does not exist. You only offer reasons why belief in him is unjustified. Nothing wrong with that. It just means we’re talking about epistemology rather than metaphysics.
So why is belief in God unjustified/unwarranted (as opposed to false)? I’ve written a post on this question entitled “Is God a placebo?” I retraced Alvin Plantinga’s response in “Warranted Christian Belief” to Freud and Marx’s views on the origins of religious belief.
Put simply, the objection seems to be that
a) belief in God originates by means of belief formation process X,
b) X is not amenable to true belief formation in the case of God.
X can be either the process of religious evolution, the fill the gap psychological mechanism, or even poor scientific method such as God of the Gaps arguments. In order for the “unwarranted” objection to go through, both conditions must be met.
So here’s my challenge to the first condition. Are you certain that belief in God forms by means of religious evolution, fill in the gap mechanism, and God of the Gaps arguments? It is very common to simply tell a story about our history that includes those mechanisms, as you have done. Why think that story is non-fiction? Conceivably there are other possible ways to discover that God exists than those you describe in your blog post.
I may also challenge you on the second condition. Unless you know as a matter of fact that God does not exist, it is hard to prove that any given way of claiming to know him is misleading. Plantinga discusses wish-fulfillment. Yes wishful thinking doesn’t normally lead to true beliefs. But in the case of God, if he exists, perhaps it does. Perhaps God plants a desire for humans to know him in their cognitive make up.
The point is, I don’t think you’ve established that God does not exist. Neither do I think you proven that belief in God is unwarranted. Neither have I proven that he does exist or that belief in him is warranted. For an extended defense that belief in God is warranted I’d recommend Plantinga’s book (it’s free online).
You’ve made a bold claim, this is my modest criticism. All the best,
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Hi Ben, John’s replied at the bottom because he couldn’t find the very clearly positioned ‘reply’ button. I’ll reply here, where the reply button is positioned. I have a couple of observations. My point here was that you cannot logically present a case for the existence of any deities and I don’t see anything that you’ve presented has helped the case for the supernatural. The fact that you are arguing from the position of a specific named god God show’s you’re coming at it from an unusual angle that may inhibit your ability to use logic.
“Conceivably there are other possible ways to discover that God exists than those you describe in your blog post.” I expect there are. None of them logically. I wasn’t trying to discover the god God, I was clearly demonstrating why belief in any deity is illogical, given that every advance demonstrated by information gathering and science shows us another reason why the supernatural does not exist. It’s illogical to assume that supernatural powers are lurking in the areas yet uncovered – embarrassing even. As I have stated elsewhere in the comments section here: “I don’t believe that it’s possible to disprove with logic the existence of gods, because, as you state, the supernatural get-out clause is infinite. And I have no problem with that. All I can state with reasonable certainty is that given the historical, psychological and scientific factors that are in play, it’s illogical at this point in time to come to conclusion that invisible deities exist. I think it was logical based on the information available 500 years ago.”
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Hello again,
It seem that in our conversation so far the two things that keep coming up are “God of the gaps” and “why bother investigating Jesus”. I’ll write a blog post tonight about God of the gaps arguments. I don’t intend to offer logically fallacious arguments so I’ll take a closer look at what that means. I equally suspect, however, that the charge of “God of the Gaps” in this context simply amounts to straying outside the boundaries of methodological naturalism. I see no reason to apologise for that (as a Christian).
I can understand your skepticism towards Jesus in particular. You don’t see any good reason to even examine the evidence–might as well investigate UFO sightings perhaps. But I have looked at the evidence and it is quite good. I’ve written a little bit about it as well. You, however, simply dismiss my beliefs as illogical without examining the evidence yourself. You dismiss the evidence on principle. Naturally I’ll disagree. I’ve seen for myself. You haven’t.
All the best
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Ah..I see you reinstated at least one of my comments, Ben and for that you get a follow from The Ark.
Trust me , I only click that button for special blogs, and as I am currently under quota for ‘Mental’ this month you got lucky.
I am pleased you took note of a few of my suggestions to boost visitors to your blog.
I should seriously consider deleting all that drivel about evil and the Trinity. I can get all that from William Lane Craig.
Churn out something thoughtful and original, that shows you are really thinking and not merely regurgitating your seminary school homework assignment and I reckon you could have a loyal following of devout atheists in no time at all.
Best of Luck. May your god, God, go with you.
Le Ark
Back to you ,Violet, dear…;)
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Again, you’re talking specifically about Jesus and your god God. I’m not interested in proving that one specific type of supernatural being doesn’t exist. It’s not possible. I’m demonstrating that it’s illogical based on the evidence we have around us in the physical world to conclude that *any* religion could be correct. I don’t see why you even want to defend that, religion doesn’t have to be logical – it’s all about feeling your god, right? Once you’ve ‘felt’ your god, you can make a case for the rational aspects of its existence, as is possible for every religion. But, once more, that doesn’t make it logical that you believe in a supernatural force.
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I’m not interested in defending gods that don’t exist. I only claim that Jesus is God. You mention that “it’s all about feeling your god, right?” This is a good point. There is a strong existential element to Christian belief. Most Christians throughout history have not come to know that God exists by means of rational arguments and evidence. Rather, they have been confronted by the living God in a powerful way. As such, philosophers such as Paul Moser suggest that the evidence for God is more likely to be dynamic than static. The evidence for God ebbs and flows as a function of one’s willingness to meet him.
I know, wishful thinking! But when you think about it it makes sense. Why would God harden the hearts of those who hate him by forcing his existence on them? If God’s purpose is to draw stubborn humans into relationship with him non-coercively, then it is not surprising that he uses tact, i.e. no neon sign in the sky. So rather than asking, “why isn’t the existence of God obvious?” one might be better to ask, “why can’t I detect God’s existence myself?” Ask, “am I willing to meet him were he to exist?” If not, one is at a serious epistemic disadvantage.
I’ve written about this under “Why isn’t God obvious?”.
Moving the conversation forward, what precisely do you think has happened in the past 500 years to render belief in God illogical now but logical then?
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“….what precisely do you think has happened in the past 500 years to render belief in God illogical now but logical then?”
It was never logical. The belief/argument was simply proselytized; driven primarily by greed, ignorance and fear. But basically, what happened was, the Catholic Church got its first major arse whipping.
Furthermore, you derive the notion of your god from the bible. Without it, you are proverbially screwed.
You want to discuss anything about your god, the discussion should start there…otherwise, you are quite frankly, peeing in the wind, and every argument you try to present should be laughed at for the nonsense it truly is. It is still nonsense with the bible, but at least we can smile while you try to make your case…
Any time you’re ready , ”Sherlock”.
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Ark,
I wasn’t asking you. You never made that point. If you want to talk about the bible, join in with John’s discussion below. I suspect that’s where it’s heading. Here’s an idea. What are you’re top non-circular reasons for being an atheist?
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“what precisely do you think has happened in the past 500 years to render belief in God illogical now but logical then?” You’re joking, right? If I lived 500 years and had no sense of how the ‘clever’ human race arrived on this ‘beautiful’ planet, and had a ‘feeling’ that there was something more to life, it would be logical to assume a supernatural power was responsible. And I would without question assume the established ‘factual’ traditions of whatever culture I happened to live in (the only I would be likely to be exposed to) were correct. If you need that explained to you …
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Violetwisp, I tend to agree with your way of thinking though as proof I think it’s a little shaky. I have met many scientists who firmly believe in God and have no issue rhyming that with their even firmer belief in science and logic. Some, like your friend, are happy to accept that there is a deity beyond it all and since he, she or it is beyond it all, there is not a huge risk we’ll ever catch him, her or it out. Since science will never understand everything 100%, people like the other commenter, Ben, will tell you that God is in those cracks.Since you can’t disprove something that doesn’t exist, you lose. QED.
Other scientists use all your arguments in the reverse. Because science has uncovered so much complexity and because we have an innate need to believe in super powers, we create Gods to represent it all. God is all. Having defined God as that concept of all, he now exists – in an non-real metaphysical space – and as our human consciousness evolves, so does God. He is the rubber ducky that floats on the wave and goes up as the wave does.
For eons people around the world have created such theological frameworks in which God fits very snugly. From within the framework you can prove in one line that God exists. In a theist framework God has to exist. Outside that framework he disappears in a puff of smoke. In an atheist framework God cannot exist by definition. Therefore he doesn’t.
In my existential framework, there is no way for independent verification of any assertions of proof or counter proof regarding God. Therefore I cannot belief nor disbelief. God is simply a non-issue. QED 🙂
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I hope you don’t mind me cutting in, but have you ever seen Jerry Coyne on the compatibility of science and religion? I know it’s an 68-minute video but I would like to put the link in anyway…
It’s not that I think hearing his argument will change your mind. Or that there might be any need for that. 😉 But I do like what he says.
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Sorry, Violetwisp! I did not expect a video popping up. Please remove the comment if you’re not happy!
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68 minutes! No problem with the video but I can’t imagine I personally will find time to watch it all, haha. Any highlights?
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Jerry Coyne is a professor of biology mainly concerned with evolution. His point is that the resistance to the theory of evolution is mainly fuelled by theists. There would be no point in having objections otherwise. To Coyne, religion has to do with irrationality and science has to do with rationality and he goes as far as saying that you cannot be a scientist Monday to Friday and go to church on weekends. That’s why I thought it might add something to the discussion here. 🙂
I’m really very sorry about the whole video being inserted. I will be more careful in future. And I think there are some articles by Coyne to be found on the net as well. 😉
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Sounds interesting. I’ll try and find time. Don’t worry about the video, anything that adds to the discussion is welcome.
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Thanks geneticfractals, you make very good points. What I meant to ‘prove’ in a light-hearted way is that you cannot arrive at the conclusion using logic that a god exists. I don’t believe either that it’s possible to disprove with logic the existence of gods, because, as you state, the supernatural get-out clause is infinite. And I have no problem with that. All I can state with reasonable certainty is that given the historical, psychological and scientific factors that are in play, it’s illogical at this point in time to come to conclusion that invisible deities exist. I think it was logical based on the information available 500 years ago.
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Absolutely. If it wasn’t serious, it would be quite funny.
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How did I miss this?
Oh, it was posted in the last few hours. That’s how I missed it. Ah.
Looking forward to when I can get a chance to comment!
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I think you should jump in the conversation between John and Ben about boring science stuff (that isn’t relevant to the post). John’s got bored and Ben thinks he still has a point to make – what you think P&W??
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There’s not much I can offer. Ben is making the classic Kalam Cosmological argument, and doing a fairly good job with it. It’s not what I’d prefer, but it’s a decent approach to take.
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Oh well, has the post helped you realise it’s impossible to arrive at a belief in deities through logic? I’m confident it has. 🙂
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Hah! Writing now.
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So, thanks for writing this!
My original point was that my feelings are pulling me toward atheism while my reasoning is pulling me toward theism, which seems to be the reverse of how it usually is. I hadn’t anticipated that there’d be any significant surprise at the latter statement (after all, isn’t it generally assumed that people try to have reasons for the things they believe?), but rather that the norm-reversal would prove interesting.
Apparently, there was more shock at the latter statement alone than anything else. Who knew?
Anyway, I don’t want to make this terribly long or anything, but I’ll go over the specific examples you cited and explain where the logical push toward theism comes from. I don’t think you can “prove” that God exists with logic. But it’s reasoning that makes theism seem more probable.
History
You’re absolutely right: history is rife with superstitions and obviously farcical religious nonsense. Religion is a well-studied and well-understood phenomenon.
Religion is so well-understood, in fact, that we can make a lot of predictions about it. Even though different religions don’t have any common threads in the sense of independently convergent teachings about a particular god (for example, a single deity revealing itself identically and independently to people in completely different parts of the world), they do all seem to evolve in much the same way. They have the same structures, the same ideas, the same abuses. From history’s perspective, religion is a pretty predictable thing.
This alone ought to be enough to discredit religion in general. But more to the point, different religions make contradictory assertions, meaning that religion in general CAN’T be true; the only possibilities are that no religions are true or that only one body of religious tradition is true.
The consistent predictability of religion, however, leads us to an interesting point. We can characterize the evolution of an arbitrary religion, along with its component attributes, to a high degree of certainty. But because that degree of certainty is so high, deviations from this model become significant….surprising, in fact.
If there’s a religion or a system of religious belief that consistently deviates from the predicted norm, that evolved or came about in a unique way, that has a completely different progression of thought, and that repeatedly subverts expectations….well, it would be a good candidate for the One True Religion. At the very least, it bears investigation.
We end up with a very specific question: one that can be answered objectively, with logic and reasoning. Which model is a better fit: all religions being socially evolved constructs with this one anomalous religion being a very unique outlier, or this one religion being true and all other religions being a mix of social constructs and corruptions of the real one? So that’s where the reasoning begins.
Psychology and Science
I lumped these two together because the latter is an extension of the former. I wholeheartedly agree: any argument for God that starts with “But what about the bits science can’t explain” is dead before it even gets started. That’s ridiculous; the nature of science IS to find new “bits” to explain. Moreover, we live in a world without regular, observable divine intervention distinguishable from random chance; it’s cognitively dissonant to think that God is still “hiding” in the recesses of yet-unexplored quantum physics.
But showing the illogicity of the god-of-the-gaps argument doesn’t mean that belief in God is illogical, or that you can’t use reasoning to determine that theism is more probable than atheism. In fact, the very inanity of the god-of-the-gaps argument can function as another objective question. Religion has a tendency to attribute unexplained natural phenomena to the regular interventions of a deity (Zeus’s thunderbolts, anyone?). So if there’s a religion that DIDN’T do this….we find ourselves asking why.
Hope that helps….or at least gets something started!
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I replied below but don’t think I hit the right button …
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Not getting anything here….
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Enjoying your thoughts Violetwisp 🙂
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Thanks Holly!
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In terms of religion, I don’t know what you think this outlier could be. I think there is enough variation on religions that have developed to be unable to clump them all together, and still see one shining through as being different in a special way. The only thing I can see religions having in common is that they are an organised or collective form of expression regarding an alleged supernatural force – the rest is anyone’s guess. Did you have a special outlier in mind so I can trash it? 🙂 Tenuous starting point.
I separate psychology and science to distinguish between a natural, non-theistic reason for the urge to believe in the supernatural, and a natural, non-theistic reason for existence. The god God made pretty rainbows to remind us he wouldn’t wipe out the human race again in a fit of regret for it all turning out like he planned/already knew it would. Jesus ‘healed’ people and told people they could do any kind of magic trick they want if they have faith. So, either he was wrong or even more people are going to hell than the Christians think. My knowledge of other religions is patchy – where is the religion that didn’t fill the gaps?
Besides, my point isn’t that it’s impossible that a supernatural deity humans can’t understand is responsible for our existence. My point is that there is no logical route to arrive at this conclusion. And you didn’t even start to explain why you think there is. 🙂
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Ah, here it is. I’ll get on this.
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All right. **cracks knuckles**
“My point isn’t that it’s impossible that a supernatural deity humans can’t understand is responsible for our existence. My point is that there is no logical route to arrive at this conclusion.”
Sure, I understood that you weren’t arguing for the impossibility of theism. Not even Dawkins would do that.
While I understand and appreciate the cosmological arguments advanced by people like Ben, those aren’t really my first preference. Even if true, they only imply deism at best. While they certainly lend tenuous support to the notion that SOME religion is slightly more probable, it can’t be specific and so it’s really more trouble than it’s worth.
If there’s a creator and we can know him/her/it/them, the only logical route is special revelation. So we need to sort through the claims of special revelation, and see if any stand out.
The logical pathway begins with the following syllogism:
Any religion must either come from God(s) or from human beings.
If a religion comes from God, it is likely to be true.
∴ If a religion does not come from human beings, it is likely to be true.
This conclusion can be generalized into the following probabilistic principle:
The less probable it is that a religion came from human beings, the more probable it is to be true.
At this point, we come to a theory of socio-religious development: one with hypotheses and a prediction.
Hypothesis: Human-generated religion comes from the same consistent set of human psychological and social factors.
Hypothesis: Systems arising from the same set of factors typically have shared attributes forming a normal distribution.
Prediction: Religions generated by human beings will have attributes falling within a normal distribution.
As with any theoretical model, finding that the prediction is true will lend tenuous support to the hypotheses.
So….if it’s reasonable to suggest that most religions fall inside a normal distribution of attributes, then we can come up with a final logical pathway:
The farther any religion falls from the normal distribution of most religions, the more likely it is to be not of human origin and thus true.
Now, you may disagree with any of the premises along the way, or with my forthcoming analysis of the evidence, and so forth. Obviously, if the normal distribution of religiousness turns out to have an impossibly wide standard deviation, the whole theory is shot to pieces. But I hope you’d agree that this is a possible logical pathway.
“I think there is enough variation on religions that have developed to be unable to clump them all together.”
Here we come to the challenge. Is there a normal distribution?
I’m talking about the common evolutionary elements shared by the vast majority of religions. Worship of the sun, stars, rivers, or other natural elements, morphing into a pantheon of deities. These pantheons expanded as time went on and religious observance became more and more ostentatious and refined. New gods were added on a regular basis. The members of the divine pantheon had very human attributes, lives, and adventures.
With the excuse of promoting “morality”, these gods “commanded” particular observances and restricted particular practices, with a strict and clearly-defined give-and-take relationship. Weather patterns and seers and fortune-telling was a means of ascertaining the immediate opinion of whatever god was most applicable to the situation. Infighting and pitting one deity against another was common.
Religions also near-universally emphasize the differences between people. The holy is better than the unholy; the priest is better than the layman; men are better than women. It is used to place the religious in positions of power, to strengthen existing cultural mores, to keep people in their place.
In order to keep people in their place, there is an extremely specific system of rewards and punishments. Your value is directly determined by your adherence, past and future, to the code of the religion. Whether rewards are given in this life, or in a reincarnated life, or in an afterlife, they are directly proportional to the “good” you do. Trust-without-question in the teachings of the religious authorities is considered to be a “good” deed.
These are the commonalities shared more or less by virtually all religions. Would you agree?
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“The less probable it is that a religion came from human beings, the more probable it is to be true.” Are you converting to Scientology? Honestly, the more inventive the religion, the less likely it’s true. At least the idea of one supernatural force with different cultural expressions has an ounce of merit.
But I’ll agree with you to see where you’re going. 🙂
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Hmm. We should probably nail down this part before we go any further.
Let’s take hypothetical religions A and B. If A and B contradict each other in terms of their specific truth claims, but appear to have arisen under the same kinds of human psychological and social factors, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that A and B are both false?
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Let’s skip this – hypothetical A and B means NOTHING. I agree that the commonalities you state are shared more or less by virtually all religions. What’s next?
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Where does religion come from? Religion comes from humans using a mix of curiosity, superstition, social dynamics, and abuse of authority to produce a system of control. And so although we shouldn’t expect human-generated religions to have any of the specifics in common, we SHOULD expect them to all have the same evolutionary pathway and overall goals/motivations/effects. Would you agree?
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Yes!
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Replied at bottom.
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Ben, I have to answer you down here because Violets comments section is weird.
Now the only thing that offends me is simply inserting “god did it” for no reason other than because you can’t count to infinity. You have not shown the physical universe has a finite past. You are simply saying so without any verifiable explanation. Now, even if this is true, there is no logical reason to think this cause is not natural. Virtual particles appear out of quantum vacuum all the time, uncaused. It’s possible this universe is just that, or any other plausible explanation, including “god did it”. We don’t know. God is not a default explanation whenever (Craig thinks) no other explanations are available. In fact, god is no explanation at all unless you can explain what god is, to the same level of detail as we require of any natural scientific explanation.
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Hello John,
God of the gaps is your main issue. I’m writing a blog post on that tonight so hopefully things will be clearer tomorrow. If I’ve made a logically fallacious move, then I’m happy to be corrected.
Let’s focus on the beginning of the universe. Let me restate my case more carefully. Please tell precisely me where you think I’m wrong.
1. The Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem tells us that any universe that is on average expanding has a physical beginning (i.e. all worldlines end at a space time boundary).
2. (You propose) The big bang is a quantum tunneling event from the metastable primordial quantum vacuum to the expanding universe.
3. The quantum vacuum cannot be past eternal since it is susceptible to quantum tunneling (as demonstrated by the big bang) and will therefore tunnel after a finite period of time.
Furthermore,
4. In order to avoid BGV, your model requires a past eternal quantum vacuum (to bring the average expansion to zero).
5. Lacking a past eternal quantum vacuum, your model is subject to BGV.
6. By BGV, your model has a finite past.
I suspect you are suspicious of 3. Put simply, you envision an unstable quantum state failing to tunnel for an infinite amount of time. This is worse than balancing a marble on a knife-edge. Eventually it will tunnel. The longer you wait the more likely it will tunnel. Given an infinite amount of time, it will have tunnelled already.
I also responded to your conservation law objection as intelligently as I could. Did you find that response reasonable? Do you have any feedback on that? Have you heard my response to that objection before?
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Sorry to jump in here. While I respect the importance of attempting to understand all this, it’s irrelevant in a discussion about the existence of supernatural forces. Let me demonstrate:
– If you believe supernatural forces exist, you will look for a place to fit your supernatural being within our current limits of understanding.
– If you don’t believe supernatural forces exist, you will apply your understanding of what has happened with *every single other oddity* in the history of human understanding, and logically conclude that the answer lies in the physical world, and that science is likely to be able to explain it at some point.
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Oh look, a Reply option! 😉
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One thing that bears mentioning here is that Ben isn’t trying to “fit” his God in some “beyond the limits of our understanding” place. Rather, he’s identifying something that we DO know — that quantum tunneling from a metastable vacuum cannot mathematically arise from an infinitely pre-existing primordial quanta — and using it as a basis for building a hypothesis.
This isn’t an instance of taking an unexplained phenomenon and inserting God in lieu of scientific inquiry. This is taking a well-understood and fully predictable phenomenon — quantum tunneling — and using our knowledge of it to construct a model.
A classic “god of the gaps” argument works against scientific progress. It says “We can’t explain this; therefore God, therefore stop trying to figure it out.” Case in point, Bill O’Reilly’s “Tide goes in, tide goes out….you can’t explain that.” Idiotic.
That’s not what’s happening here. There’s no “punt to divine intervention” because Ben’s not saying we SHOULDN’T investigate further. Of course, it’s not an argument I would use….but I can see where he’s coming from.
But, given your assessment, violet: that theists will look for places to “fit” God, and atheists will actively try to exclude God….what’s the metric for producing a neutral stance?
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Thanks.
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Thanks PeW, a very clear explanation. I don’t see how it changes my point though – it’s still arguing that supernatural is likely to be responsible for something when the logical thing to do is assume there’s an answer in the physical world. I would argue that if an omniscient supernatural being did create everything, it’s not going to leave a single physical clue – and I find it embarrassing for Christians when they attempt to find one. They have no need to look for their god’s work in the physical world.
To your question, I don’t think atheists actively try to exclude a deity – they are working from the logical assumption that everything has a reason within the natural physical realm – and I think religious scientists should do the same too, for the reason I give above.
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“It’s still arguing that supernatural is likely to be responsible for something when the logical thing to do is assume there’s an answer in the physical world.”
Sure, that’s perfectly logical. But what if — and this is just an if, mind you — the study of the physical world leads to the conclusion that physical reality cannot explain itself? Do you maintain a commitment to the “logic” of metaphysical naturalism even if the evidence points away from naturalism?
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I’m sorry, I don’t get how that’s possible. I understand it may be impossible for humans to be able to reach a complete understanding of physical reality, but that is entirely different to physical reality being unable to ‘explain itself’ – what an odd thought. I’m not saying that the existence of supernatural forces is impossible, I’m saying that it can never be a logical conclusion – based on experience, human inability to explain is always the logical conclusion.
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Hmmmm, how to come up with an analogy….
It’s not about gaps or the inability to explain. It’s about an observed or hypothesized event which is not permitted by the rules of the system in which it occurs.
Take the transmutation of elements. It was originally believed that the chemical elements were immutable and unchangeable; that atoms were the smallest possible division of matter. But observations at the turn of the 20th century, like radiation, began challenging this view. Chemical interactions could not explain radiation. In 1901, Rutherford and Soddy discovered that thorium was releasing alpha-particle radiation and turning into radium…something that by definition was completely outside the realm of possible chemical interactions. To explain this phenomenon, scientists were forced to step outside the realm of chemistry by stepping inside the atom, thus entering the nuclear age.
Now, my point is not to say that this was something they couldn’t figure out, and therefore God. That would have been wrong, obviously; no one suspected even for a minute that God was turning thorium into radium and giving off alpha particles while he did so. My point is to say that certain disciplines….in this case, chemistry….are not sufficient to explain everything that makes them up. Radioactive decay is not chemistry. It involves chemicals and it’s observed using chemistry, but it happens outside of chemistry.
Let’s apply this analogy. Is it possible that science cannot explain the physical reality by definition? Certainly. Just like chemical interactions are governed by the rules of chemistry (which include the immutability of the elements), so the physical reality is governed by the observed physical rules identified through scientific inquiry. We know what the physical reality does and doesn’t allow (just like chemical interactions don’t allow nuclear transmutation).
If we make observations about physical reality that are inconsistent with what the physical reality can allow, and we have a very high degree of certainty concerning both our observations and our knowledge of what the physical reality can allow, then it’s reasonable to conclude that these events come from outside the physical reality.
It’s important not to jump the gun, though. Such a conclusion does not prove that God exists; it is perfectly satisfied by any number of speculative hypothesis. For example, the idea that the universe is a simulation would completely explain this.
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But, going on our experience in history so far: “human inability to explain is always the logical conclusion.” Not the supernatural or a simulation. These are fun possibilities that can be played with but not taken seriously. Again, not saying they’re impossible, just that based on the entire experience of the human race, we jump to them naturally but have never needed them (and they are therefore illogical).
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The possibility of a simulated universe is actually taken quite seriously.
I’m afraid you’re still missing what I’m trying to say. It’s not “We can’t explain this; therefore God.” It’s “We understand how these things work, and this is working in a contradictory way, therefore something bigger.”
Rutherford didn’t try to explain radiation and nuclear transmutation by altering or refining chemistry. Chemistry was fine just the way it was. Nuclear physics is not an addendum to chemistry; chemistry is a subset of nuclear physics.
If and when we obtain an explanation for the genesis of the universe, we will not have created an addendum to physics. We will have discovered that physics is a subset of something bigger than physics.
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I’m sorry, but what is ‘we understand how this works’? It’s only that humans have a way of expressing things that up to that point make sense. Nothing more. It doesn’t mean it’s ‘correct’. Know what I mean?
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Back to the analogy. We DO understand how chemical interactions work. Nuclear transmutation is not a chemical interaction.
Similarly (this is Ben’s argument), we DO understand how physical interactions work. The genesis of a universe is not a physical reaction.
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Yes, you think you do, and that’s fine. You have a way of expressing it that appears infallible. That’s doesn’t mean it is. “We know the sun is a big ball of fire but the only explanation for it being there is that God made it!” Someone in 1534
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Considering that this isn’t actually my argument, I’m loathe to continue it further, but I’ll try one more time.
Punting to “goddidit” is lazy. But that’s not what’s going on here. When Rutherford realized that nuclear transmutation was outside of the realm of chemical interactions, he wasn’t punting.
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Is part of the problem here that you’re assuming I’m following this ‘god of the gaps’ theory? I’d never heard of it before this discussion. I think you’re arguing against that, not what I’m actually saying. I don’t believe there is any point you can logically conclude that because something doesn’t fit with human explanations that it would point to the existence of a deity. Human theories can be wrong (I don’t care what science says at this point in time) and there is a greater possibility that we are simply unable to understand something, than that a supernatural force exists. (I stil naturally incline towards supernatural explanations, as is my instinct, but I know when I reflect with logic, there’s no need for this – ghosts, curses, simulations, you name it! My head loves it.)
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There’s no place here that anyone is saying something “doesn’t fit with human explanations.”
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Let me quote Deitrich Bonhoeffer on this one:
“How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”
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Hi Ben. You, like Craig, love to throw out Vilenkin’s name, but you, like Craig, also ignore that Vilenkin has said repeatedly that Craig is wrong and there is no reason to conclude there was an “absolute” beginning and that no cause is required for tunneling. All he says is the mathematics breaks down as we approach the theorized singularity, and from this one can conclude there’s an origin to inflation, NOT the universe. Even Guth (who theists love to quote) contradicts you and Craig, which you also seem to be ignoring. “Conceivably EVERYTHING can be created from nothing… in the context of inflationary cosmology it is fair to say the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”
You, like Craig, are trying to argue infinities don’t exist (your entire premise rides on this), but your entire argument presupposes that your god is, rather awkwardly, infinite. As you can see, you, like Craig, are going absolutely nowhere with this angle. It’s illogical, and I think you already know that.
To avoid spinning the tires and boring me senseless what I’d suggest you do is try to define your god. Define how/why it is exempt from the causal relation requirement which you’re actually using in the first instance to assert its existence. Do that and you might be able to advance the argument you’re trying to make.
Best of luck!
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I see that you don’t trust William Craig. That’s OK. Do you understand the BGV theorem? I’m not just dropping names. It actually makes sense. Here is an intuitive description of it by Stephen Barr in the Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity,
“If one follows the trajectory of an object moving ‘freely’ through an expanding universe, one finds that it appears to move ever more slowly (with respect objects that are ‘comoving’ with the cosmic expansion) – this effect is called ‘the red-shift of velocity.’ Consequently, if one looks back in time, such a freely moving object will appear to move faster and faster the farther back one looks. But since nothing can move faster than light, there is a limit to how far back in time one can trace the history of a freely moving object. Thus, a universe that has always been expanding cannot have expanded forever”(p.181).
Reading BGV’s paper myself, they indeed claim that “Our argument shows that null and time-
like geodesics are, in general, past-incomplete in inflationary models, whether or not energy conditions hold, provided only that the averaged expansion condition H[av] > 0 holds along these past-directed geodesics.”(p.3) A geodesic is a free falling worldline. They show that expanding universes cannot have worldlines with an infinite past, as advertised.
“What can lie beyond this boundary? Several possibilities have been discussed, one being that the boundary of the inflating region corresponds to the beginning of the Universe in a quantum nucleation event. The boundary is then a closed spacelike hypersurface which
can be determined from the appropriate instanton…some new physics is necessary in order
to determine the correct conditions at the boundary”(p.4) This seems to be what you’ve been suggesting. Wordlines all begin at a quantum event.
That’s enough to digest right now. My point is, please don’t group me with Craig as if that were relevant to the credibility of what I’m saying. I think that BGV needs to be reckoned with and can’t be hand-waved away. The real issue between us, I think, is what to make of this past space-time boundary? What is on the other side? I need to justify a supernatural influence and you need to justify a natural one. So its God of the Gaps vs. methodological naturalism. Until next time…
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Craig can be hand-waved away because he takes far too many liberties to be taken seriously. I’m not dismissing you, rather pointing out where you should direct your attention if you truly want to advance your god argument: define your god.
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Very well, a topic change it is. I’d prefer to define God using the same tools that were used at the time of Jesus. Richard Bauckham (in his book Jesus and the God of Israel) argues that first century Palestinian Jews distinguished God from the remainder of reality as follows:
1. “God is the sole creator of all things.”
2. “God is the sole sovereign Ruler over all things.”
3. God is known through his acts in history (i.e. with the people of Israel)
4. God is the one who will achieve his rule in the long run when he is acknowledged as God by all creatures.
5. “The name YHWH names God in his unique identity”
6. “God alone may and must be worshipped.”
7. “God alone is fully eternal”, i.e. without beginning or end.
Using these features, I can distinguish God from the remainder of reality (and indeed from the other concepts of God).
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1. “God is the sole creator of all things”…. Evolution proves that incorrect
2. “God is the sole sovereign Ruler over all things”… Including evil? Free will?
3. God is known through his acts in history (i.e. with the people of Israel)… Evidence, please.
4. God is the one who will achieve his rule in the long run when he is acknowledged as God by all creatures….. So it’s not omnipotent?
5. “The name YHWH names God in his unique identity”… the name YHYW comes from the Ugaritic speaking Shasu Bedouins, the Shasu of YHW, not the Hebrews who plagiarized it 17 generations after first being mentioned by Amenhotep III. Your Christian god is in fact a polytheistic patchwork deity who went by the name of Elohim, El, Shaddai, Elyon, Adonai, and Tseboath were all names used instead of or in conjunction with the tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh) throughout the five books of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) . El, for instance, was the head of the Canaanite pantheon, Tseboath the Canaanite god of armies, and Shaddai (the Destroyer) originates from the Sumerian pantheon and would have influenced the Hebrew elite greatly after the Babylonians routed Judah and relocated many from the educated classes back east for a few hundred years until freed by the Zoroastrian, Cyrus II. The six-part Judaic creation story, the cardinal couple Mashya and Mashyana (Adam and Eve), the duality of the universe, the human condition, the concept of Free Will, and even the End Times prophecies with a Saoshyant – a saviour figure – were all lifted in their entirety from the far older Zoroastrianism; a religion that would have been well-known to the biblical Abraham before he (a moniker presumably for a tribe) packed up his bags and migrated west from Ur, Mesopotamia, around 1,700 B.C.E.
6. “God alone may and must be worshipped”… and yet your god challenges OTHER gods (Isaiah 41: 21-24)
7. “God alone is fully eternal”… What caused your god? (given you’re using casual-association to prove your god)
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Very good.
1. Evolution does not prove this incorrect. Evolution is compatible with God creating (the means used perhaps).
2. You refer to the problem of evil. See my blog for recent posts on this.
3. You want evidence that God has acted in history. See my blog regarding the resurrection of Jesus.
4. You suggest that God’s long term plan indicates a lack of omnipotence. I never said he was omnipotent. Nevertheless, you are once again referring to the problem of evil. See my blog for post on this.
5. God is named YHWH. You offer a complex conspiracy theory. I’m not qualified to respond to that. If you have an academic article presenting your theory, please send it to me and I’ll gladly take a look.
6. God alone may and must be worshiped does not entail that there are no other competing entities. Monolatry is fully compatible with the existence of other supernatural entities. However, no other god satisfies 1-7.
7. What caused God? How should I know? May I instead ask you what ultimately cause the universe? I don’t think you really want to digress into another cosmological argument (tell me if I’m wrong). In any case, my God and your universe seem to be in the same explanatory boat with respect to self-origination.
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“complex conspiracy theory” ? B’wahahaaaaa!
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For all I know, the authors of your proposal are assuming naturalism, in which case I would have little reason to adopt their findings as the cold hard truth.
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Ben, with due respect, perhaps you should learn some history as to the origins of your religion.
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Educate me. I already have a history of my religion. Why is your proposal correct and not question begging? What is the best book you’ve read on this? I’d love to interact on this. Perhaps you want to talk about historical biblical criticism?
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I’m quite sure you’re capable of doing your own research. Just remember that honest research is unbiased.
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Disappointing. Give me one leading proponent of your view. Seriously? What book did you get this from? Otherwise why should I waste time researching atheist folklore. A story developed whilst attempting to rule out gods. I too can provide narratives.
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You’re boring me, Ben
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That whole thing DOES smack of a conspiratorial ad-hoc construction. Just saying.
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Amenhotep III? Someone talking about my dad? And those stupid christians never once wonder when they say ”Amen”, do they?
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You’re kidding, right, Whisk? Read the OT, research the Shasu, learn the gods of the pantheons…. it’s pretty easy stuff.
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I have. It strikes me as very cobbled-together and ad hoc. Only a little more refined than the “Jesus was Horus repackaged” trope memes that circulate on Facebook.
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. ”You want evidence that God has acted in history. See my blog regarding the resurrection of Jesus.”
Call it quits, John. You must know by now you are dealing with a crazy person. Remember, he has a pilot’s license?
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Irrelevant. Just answering questions in good faith.
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John’s mistake, as with many who enter the ring with the religiously frontal-lobe challenged, is not to change gears and drop their IQ level down to their apologist debate opponent.
It is best to know where someone such as yourself is coming from.
So, firstly, do you, like Craig, believe in a literal reading/understanding of the bible?
To make this even simpler. Do you believe dead people rose from their graves during/after the Crucifixion and wandered around Jerusalem? Long drawn out answers will be summarily ignored.
Yes or no will suffice. Thank you.
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More irrelevant ridicule. You ask several questions and want one word.
No.
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Excellent!
So we are dealing with a cherry picker. Good to know.
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I’m curious what you would say to a yes. False dilemma.
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Smile.The reply would have begun with a ‘D’. Ask Violet. I am not allowed to use it …..yet.
So, you want to tell us which other parts of Mark ( I can’t be bothered discussing the others for now) you summarily dismiss?
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I’m sympathetic to Richard Bauckham’s view in “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, briefly summarized in his “Jesus: A very short introduction.” It’s complicated and I don’t detect a sincere conversation partner. Prove me wrong on that and I’d be happy to elaborate.
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Ah…consecension so early on. We hardly know each other. and already we have begun the Theological Two Step.
I however, am not John.
Specifics, please. I reiterate, which other parts of Mark’s Gospel narrative do you summarily dismiss in the same fashion as you dismiss the dead rising from the graves at the time of the Crucifixion?
I am okay if you elaborate, and I don’t need everything, but I would like you to list specifics.
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Bad first impression I suppose. But you can’t really blame me for that.
I do not accept your all or nothing approach to the Bible. I simply do not have to choose between biblical inerrancy and zero knowledge about Jesus. There are at least two other possibilities – the transmission model (broken telephone) and Richard Bauckham’s eyewitness testimony model.
You can check out my studied views on both non-literal approaches on my blog under “Baby names, Witness protection, and the real Jesus” and “Broken telephone, the Bible and finding the real Jesus.”
All the best,
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”I do not accept your all or nothing approach to the Bible. ”
We haven’t arrived at that point yet, and might not, so stop making assumptions so early on.
I reiterate. You stated you do not believe in the risen dead during the Crucifixion so please list the other parts/incidents or events of Mark’s gospel that you summarily dismiss.
If it is easier, for you, start with two other examples, then we can take it from there.
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That was fast. I take it you didn’t check my blog. Disappointing since it doesn’t help your credibility as a sincere conversation partner. Furthermore, I will not submit to cross examination. I suspect you wouldn’t either.
To be a Christian, all I need to really believe is that God raised Jesus from the dead. The zombie apocalypse in Mark that you refer to is not an article of faith. I can disagree with fellow Christians about it. I have varying degrees of confidence in different parts of the new testament on the basis of the historical evidence (see my two blog posts on this). I think there is a good case for the resurrection (another post). There is no good case for the zombie apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean I disbelieve it either. I am “agnostic” so to speak about passages that are not crucial to the foundation of Christianity. So I will not list passages that I strongly disbelieve as you request.
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Ah, we are getting somewhere.
No, I did not whizz off to your blog. Apologetics tend to drive too much of a circuitous route for my taste, like politics.
This is not cross-examination. If you feel threatened then it brings into question the confidence of your own standpoint.
You wish to establish your credibility and I wish to know where you stand.
I can walk away, if you prefer, no problem.
However….
I am fully aware of the core of the Nicene creed etc so you don;t have to worry about educating me on the basic tenets of Christianity,but it is important for me to know that if I bring up a particular subject where you stand before we discuss.
Do you accept the truncated version of Mark’s gospel?
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If you are referring to the long ending in mark, I’m willing to let that go. Indeed the New International Version 2011 puts a disclaimer below it. So that’s easy to let go.
If I may direct the conversation. Why don’t you just go for the kill? Show that Jesus did not rise from the dead. If you can establish that, then your work is done (1 Cor 15:17-19).
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I actually wasn’t going to sat that at all. Why would you think that?
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I unfortunately have to go. I’ll pick this up later today time permitting. I thought that was what you were referring to. What did you mean by truncated version?
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The short version, obviously, and the Christian interpolation that was added.
I have no intention of discussing the Resurrection.
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Ok. Don’t want to talk about the resurrection? That’s too bad since it’s probably my best argument for God. Admittedly, it is somewhat complicated.
Cheers
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No, it isn’t. It’s actually very straightforward, only apologists like to complicate it.
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Oh dear. I think I’ll try and read this. How you think it can be historically proven that a completely dead person came back to life, 2000 years after the alleged event, is worth a peek. But why you think this would point to the existence of a deity who wants people to cleanse themselves in his eyes because of their inevitable ‘bad’ behaviour, and that sacrificing himself to himself in the form of his son as a god on earth, would do this, really piques my curiosity.
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Be prepared for a william lane craig onslaught. Best of luck.
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Starting a new thread….
Me: “Religion comes from humans using a mix of curiosity, superstition, social dynamics, and abuse of authority to produce a system of control. And so although we shouldn’t expect human-generated religions to have any of the specifics in common, we SHOULD expect them to all have the same evolutionary pathway and overall goals/motivations/effects. Would you agree?”
Violet: “Yes!”
Awesome.
So, if we can identify the common pathways, goals, and motivations underlying religion in general (like I’ve done above), then we can say with a high degree of certainty that the more closely a religion fits with these common causal elements, the more likely it is to be purely human invention. Would you agree with this?
If so, would you agree with a probability inversion of this statement: that the less closely a religion fits with these common causal elements, the less likely it is to be purely human invention?
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Oh, my word, what an effing brilliant proposition. And you truly expect Violet to walk into that?
Yes, I really think you hope she will,donlt you?
Even watching from the sidelines at the tete a tete between you and her I take exception that you would treat her with such disrespect, that you would truly demean her intelligence with a bait and switch of this nature.
For your god’s sake go back to the bosom of the church. Your are disgraceful.
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Oh, quit wining.
The secondary statement is an inverse, not a contrapositive. I stipulate that. It’s up to her whether she wants to accept it or not.
Contrary to what you apparently believe, I have no desire for anyone to “walk into” anything. She’s interested in learning what my process is; I’m explaining it. She doesn’t need you to chivalrously sweep in and “save” her; she’s quite capable on her own, thanks.
And your second-person singular simple present tense copulative verb (is) disgraceful as well.
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Oh, we all know what your ‘process’ is. We all worked that out AGES ago.
Chivalrous? No, I just don’t like to see the tone of the neighborhood go to the dogs.
You just makes it painful to read. Like your ‘buddy’ up top.
”And your second-person singular simple present tense copulative verb (is) disgraceful as well.”
Phew…that was…something. I am truly stumped for a reply.
I’ll just go with, fuck you too. That’s marginally more intelligent than the level of riposte of your original comment.
Evens Stevens, hotshot.
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Oh, come now. Surely you can handle a little snark without blowing your top.
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Leave him be. He’s clearly worried you’re going to saw something that will shake his faith in atheism. Keep going. 🙂
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My dear fellow, I haven’t even begun to blow my top.
I don’t honestly believe you are capable of raising any steam from any of those you attempt to interact with.
It has to do with honesty, and while you quite clearly continue to harbor an ulterior motive every time you venture out into blogland you will be treated with the contempt that this deserves.
We are not handing out the Smarmy Git Awards ’til next week, but don’t worry, you will definitely make the short list.
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Looking forward to it.
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(If you’ve been watching from the sidelines, you’ll see I gave up trying to get him to make sense, and instead am interested to see if he’s a Scientologist. Sssh, let’s see what happens.)
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Didn’t mean to lose you along the way. Where did I make too big a jump?
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What on earth was your problem with exercise? Stop picking on PeW. Was he not spending enough time on your blog and you were missing him? 🙂
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Definitely!
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The less closely a religion fits with these common causal elements, the less likely it is to be purely human invention. FACT
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**blinks**
Hadn’t expected it to go down that easily. But if it makes sense to you, then good. Makes sense to me.
If a particular religion or religious subsect defies the normal causal elements, evolutionary pathways, and underlying motivations that characterize religion as we know it, then logic would dictate that this religion is either completely and uniquely anomalous in its origins, or didn’t come about by human invention.
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Clearly what logic would tell us.
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>.<
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That’s it? You’re not going anywhere else?
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You asked to know what the logical process is. There you have it. Do you think it’s a valid approach?
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Of course not! How can you possibly say, if a religion is X, it wasn’t invented by humans? Ridiculous. There seems to be trend of converting sentences into letters and numbers and pretending we can come to conclusions based on the letters and numbers … rather than the actual words making sense and having a meaning that relates to reality. You’re the third religious type I’ve come across today doing that, and you’re all NUTS! Silly people, some might say.
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Converting sentences….into numbers? I’m afraid I don’t follow.
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None of it made any sense. You said, if X then Y. I know you asked me to agree with you in order to move on to the next stage – but it’s meaningless. The only way it would have any grounding in reality is if you presented a religion that you feel fits into these categories and analysed what the causal elements might be, and why it would appeal to humans. There are no bounds on imagination and stupidity.
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Ah, I see. I thought you were interested in learning about the logical pathway apart from any specific example. My mistake.
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So you have a specific example?
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Sure. I’ll start over at the too as soon as I get a chance. 🙂
Sorry for being confusing!
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(And I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am that you’re not a Scientologist coming out, or revealing you think you’ve discovered the brand new ‘correct’ religion (although I suspect this is still a possibility.))
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Heh, Scientology.
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Initially, I had thought you were looking for an explanation of the logical process, rather than an actual example. We could agree on the validity of the process regardless of whether we agreed on any given example, so it seemed like a good approach. But since you’ve clarified, I feel quite silly. I’ll give you the specifics.
Though my feelings and intuition push me toward atheism, I don’t think rejecting Christianity is logical. At its roots, the Christianity I know doesn’t seem to be the product of human invention, since it consistently defies the archetypes and tropes that characterize religious fictions. I don’t hold to any silly superstitious notions of “inerrancy”, but the core tenets of Christianity as I know it seem entirely consistent with reality. I don’t think Christianity would look anything like it does if it weren’t true. In other words, the best explanation for Christianity’s existence—as far as I can tell—is that it’s actually true.
How’s that?
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”I don’t think rejecting Christianity is logical.”
Absolute crap. And we had to wait til now for you to spew this tripe?
You wouldn’t have a god if it weren’t for the Old Testament which is as barbaric and heinous a representation of a deity as you will find. Fortunately every sane individual acknowledges it is nothing but make believe.
Only a complete dickhead would even try to rationalize any part of it.
And you just pushed the envelope and went out the other end…
How you expect to garner any further respect is impossible to fathom at this stage. Your standpoint is beneath contempt.
At least we realise what Ben is.
You.. you are what the character Jesus despised..
You should of walked away when Violet used the term,
Silly Person.
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*should have
The rest of the diatribe wasn’t worth correcting, I’m afraid.
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“Only a complete dickhead would even try to rationalize any part of it.” Ark, as you grew up with a loose faith in the very loose Church of England, you are perhaps at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding just how long it can take for someone to climb out from the shackled pit of religion (nice metaphor, no?). Don’t be such a judgemental twat and leave PeW some breathing space to express the perfectly inoffensive beliefs he holds at the this point in his life. His standpoint in well above contempt and your silly rant is offensive.
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Actually, all he is doing is using clever argumentation in an attempt to obfuscate something, that he tends to only hint at ,and this is usually a few words tagged on to the end of a final sentence of a prolonged and tedious block of dialogue.
The core tenet of Christianity is that the character Yashua is the christian god, God. Everything else is just padding.
Can you imagine having him teach a theology class?
The man is a hypocrite and deserves to be judged as a fraud.
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This is all very interesting.
My question to the true antibelievers out there is this. If God were to exist, what specifically would you expect to be different about the world we observe? Think hypothetically. What is missing in our world that you would expect given God’s existence?
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Falsifiability. +1
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Are you saying that if God were to exist, you would expect his existence to be falsifiable? However you also believe that it is not falsifiable in the actual world?
If so, that’s a good point worth pondering.
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I was referring to atheism being falsifiable as your argument provides.
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Are you talking about your god God? Or any supernatural force? A book that’s inspired by something vaguely resembling an omnipotent, omniscience and benevolent deity (or even something resembling one of those characteristics) would be useful for your religion specifically. Evidence of supernatural occurrences in general to justify the belief in anything supernatural e.g. mountains moving, water parting, trees dying as they’re cursed.
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I’ll settle for any supernatural force (up to and including The Force). Your comments are helpful.
First, I’d ask you, why think that a deity would write a book at all? Why is that a prerequisite for a deity being evident? The god of the philosophers (Omni-cubed I’ll call it) seems unlikely to write a book. Neither would any of the plethora of African tribal deities should they exist.
Second, you “ask for a sign”. How would you be sure that your sign wasn’t just a natural event? Given the loose use of the term “God of the gaps” around here, I rather doubt that you’d recognize a genuine miracle if one presented itself. You’ll need criteria to discern between the natural and the supernatural. So far the only criteria I’ve seen in this long discussion is that all phenomena are natural by definition.
Just questioning whether you are indeed a qualified observer to recognize evidence of divinity.
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Thanks for explaining it. I’m mystified how you arrive at that conclusion, given your description of obvious superstitious beliefs. Perhaps its just a stage in your journey out of belief. After all, you grew up in total belief and all your neurons will have difficulty firing down different routes, even if the logic you don’t admit to is firing down new routes. It’s really difficult to extract yourself from beliefs held from childhood and it can be quite a long process.
If you think about how Christianity has developed and the different angles that have appealed to different people over time, you’ll realise that the breadth of interpretation that can be applied to the Bible is the main reason it’s spread so far. You summed Christianity up beautifully when you said, “using a mix of curiosity, superstition, social dynamics, and abuse of authority to produce a system of control.”. You have the standard ‘interpretation illness’ that visits all Christians, where they think they have the correct one, and everyone else went adrift. At least you’ve chosen a nice one. 🙂
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I’m glad we could agree on a good description of religion at large. It’ll help me to explain why I don’t think Christianity fits the classic religious-fiction archetypes, and why I think it defies the religious norm.
But first, there’s one thing I’d like to address:
“…the breadth of interpretation that can be applied to the Bible is the main reason it’s spread so far.”
We all know what quote-mining is. Creationists are famous for it. Even Richard Dawkins himself has been quote-mined to make it seem like he supports panspermia and (by reference) Intelligent Design. That’s not “interpretation” of Dawkins; that’s pure ridiculousness.
I think quote-mining gets a free pass as “interpretation” when it comes to religious text, simply because the original author is no longer around to point out how asinine it is. But I also think it’s entirely possible to identify quote-mining and distinguish it from areas where there’s genuine ambiguity. It’s not terribly difficult. The Bible is a huge book written by a lot of different authors; of course there will be numerous opportunities for quote-mining.
But the existence of quote-mining only demonstrates that people can be creative in their disingenuities; it doesn’t imply the absence of concrete meaning. Unless you believe the Bible arrived by fax from heaven, then at some point, every passage was written down by an actual human being. Learning each author’s intended meaning is a fairly simple matter of historical and grammatical textual criticism, and there’s pretty broad consensus in most places.
So I’d like to suggest, just for the sake of discussion, that it might be possible to objectively nail down Christianity to a single skeleton of belief without quote-mining. Is that a fair possibility?
If you don’t think so, I’d be interested to know why. If you agree, then we can move on to the specifics of why I think Christianity is—at its core—not a human invention.
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“…..we can move on to the specifics of why I think Christianity is—at its core—not a human invention”.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/2012/06/18-reasons-why-christianity-is-man-made.html
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Excellent link! Thank you Ark. You’re the best blogger in blogland. (stroke, stroke)
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This is my favourite – one I’ve not heard people bring up much:
“The obvious human endeavor to determine which books belonged in the Bible. They had to choose out of hundreds of books which one was god inspired. They was a long period of dispute and then once settled the command went out to destroy those books not in the canon. There is nothing awe inspiring about that process. This was done under the Roman Catholic reign, which many Protestants would not be happy about. Interestingly enough the gospels were unnamed for years until someone decided to give them a church leader’s name (e.g. apostle) to provide clout. This was typical in ancient times. Additionally in comparing manuscripts of the New Testament there were thousands of errors, omissions and even additions so much so the author of Revelation gave a stern warning against the practice. A perfect god could have been more hands on.”
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Ah, now we’re getting down to specifics. 🙂
In re your linked list:
Patently and absurdly false: 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Completely irrelevant or simply fallacious: 1, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
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What’s wrong with 12? How was the NT selected and how did the body of Christianity choose which bits of Judaism to leave out?
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Are you now, at last, understanding why he is such a dick, and why, even if Jesus himself were to enter the fray, your little friend, PW, would make it his sole mission to destroy his credibility, even if he knew that he was the Real Deal.
Have you truly not worked out the nature of the beast?
He is beneath contempt.
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Indeed! Beneath contempt. Now that you’ve shown me the Light, you can stop telling me. And leave PeW to do his chatting. 🙂
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He’s all yours. Don;t get engaged of anything…
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The OP’s whole statement here looks like it was lifted out of a Dan Brown novel. It’s rife with inaccuracies and historical gaffes.
First, any discussions of canon would have predated the Protestant-Catholic division by over 1000 years. For that matter, Roman Catholicism didn’t even exist yet; the Roman-Orthodox division wouldn’t be for another seven centuries. This guy is just adding in whatever sounds good to him, with no regard to whether it’s grounded in real history.
More importantly, there was no argument over canon. There was no controversy in which hundreds of books were passed over for inclusion. The church fathers in the early second century were already referencing the gospels as we know them. The “canon controversy” is an outright fiction.
There was never an order to destroy these “non-canon” gospels. The only such order centered on the writings of Arius and his followers after a consensus declaration in 325 that Arianism was false. There was absolutely no discussion of canon at the Council of Nicaea, because it had already been understood to be settled centuries earlier.
These “thousands of errors and additions” in the manuscripts we have are readily identifiable because modern textual phylogenetics provides us with a reconstruction of the original texts to 99.95% accuracy. This guy is talking out of his ass, plain and simple.
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“So I’d like to suggest, just for the sake of discussion, that it might be possible to objectively nail down Christianity to a single skeleton of belief without quote-mining. Is that a fair possibility?” I’d like to move on to the next bit. But I couldn’t possibly agree with this, it’s ridiculous. I think you know that the Bible is a cobbled together set of texts written by men with no coherence, other than references to other parts of the big jumble.
The only consistency I see is: a male creator god who treats humans as a bad parent would treat a child, and any irrationally jealous person would treat their partner. The message is: humans are innately bad, the god wants payment for the badness, and because the god is so nice he came to earth and got himself killed and believes this settles the debt with himself. The style of death wasn’t extraordinary, given the level of suffering many other people endure in their lives, but apparently it was worse because this man-god didn’t do anything bad (although willful destruction of property in a fit of rage, and a petty strop at fruit-bearing trees involving the pagan black art of ‘cursing’ snuck into the benevolent, carefully chosen tales). Is your skeleton belief in here somewhere?
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Nope.
Maybe I overreached. How about this: I’d like to suggest that it’s theoretically possible to figure out the authorial intent of any given passage (i.e., the non-quote-mined version). Can we start there?
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Don’t … be … ridiculous! You’re being … ridiculous. If this were the case, someone in the last 2000 years would have produced an interpretation *everyone* could agree with it. It’s words. Everyone brings their own understanding to words, and more so, in a huge book of contradictions. It’s ‘quote-mined’ because it’s doesn’t make sense, and it’s the only way to use it.
Are you saying if you can’t get past this, it’s a human invention? I think it’s safe to say that’s what’s happening. But if you want to move on, perhaps there’s something in your argument that will change my mind.
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Well there’s broad scholarly consensus as to the authorial intent of most passages. The chosen application of various passages is wildly divergent, made even moreso by quote-mining.
But obviously each passage has an original authorial intent, no?
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Think about it PeW, even if the consensus is ‘broad’, it’s impossible to say that was the authorial intent. Even by studying every document and shred of evidence still in existence to try and understand the culture the words came from, we are massively separated from the people who wrote the words, by both time and culture. And finally, who knows what’s going on the mind of someone when they put pen to paper (to write down oral traditions, no less). I make a lot of sweeping statements for my own amusement that no-one else could possible get my ‘authorial intent’ from.
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Well obviously nothing is ever 100% sure. That’s not the goal. But we can have varying degrees of certainty, no?
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We apply textual criticism to other historical documents (religious or not) to increase our knowledge of the period and locale. Why is the Bible different?
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In other words, forget inspiration: are we allowed to treat the Bible like any other historical text?
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Not at all! Christian’s claim it is divinely inspired and want to use it as an unchanging rule book for life. It has nothing in common with your average historical text.
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How certain Christians choose to treat it is none of my concern. I’m not trying to say it should be used as a literally-interpreted rule book. Why can’t we treat it like a historical text and leave it at that?
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Okay, let’s do that. It’s possible to make a best guess at authorial intent.
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Awesome. With that in mind, let’s get down to specifics.
Remember that list of evolutionary elements and factors shared by the majority of religions? Here’s why I think Christianity—as I understand it—consistently subverts those tropes.
Christianity never even hints at the worship of nature or elements of the natural world. The god presented in the OT and NT is consistently transcendent; there is no slowly-developed move from nature worship up to polytheism and on to monotheism.
In Christianity, the pantheon of deities does not continually expand. Granted, Jesus’s declaration of himself and the Spirit as subsets of the godhead is a sort of increase, but even it subverts the norm. The three members of the Christian godhead are not in conflict, do not have deceptively human lives and adventures in their celestial plane, and don’t represent different facets of nature. Moreover, prescribed religious practice becomes less rigid and ostentatious as time goes by, moving progressively and consistently away from ritual toward a relational approach.
Subverting the “oracle” trope, the Christian god does not provide direction for personal and business practices through the consultation of priests and the examination of dove entrails. There are no patron deities of one type of undertaking or another. And the number of “commandments” shrinks over time, rather than growing as would be expected.
With surprising and pervasive consistency, the core teachings of Christianity work to break down barriers between people, rather than emphasize and strengthen them as is expected of religion. In the OT, the priests were not permitted to own land, thus keeping them from gaining too much power. Religious and political roles were kept distinct to prevent abuses; kings couldn’t be high priests and vice versa. In the OT, laws were instituted to curb the premodern society’s tendency to subjugate and control others, introducing rights for women like protection from rape and sale and divorce, rights for slaves like amnesty and Jubilee and protection from sale or mistreatment, and more. As society developed, the NT stayed ahead of the curve, breaking down social mores and pushing for equal rights and declaring the equality of all people. The NT did away with a separate priesthood altogether (something the Roman Catholics completely missed, but that’s another issue altogether). It didn’t play into existing cultural prejudices and abuses; it fought them.
As Christianity was progressively revealed, your value as a human person was divorced from adherence to ritual. A person’s value was asserted to be inherent in their relationship with God and their treatment of other people, not in their observances (again, something the Roman Catholics went crazy wrong with, but again, beside the point). The threat of punishment for sinful actions, a bulwark of religion, was done away with completely for Christians. The set of requirements was removed. While praising faith inasmuch as it pertains to trust in providence, the NT encourages critical reasoning and skepticism….again, a complete reversal of the typical trope. It says Christians will be taught by God, rather than being dependent on religion as a mediator. Totally contrary to what a human religious system would design.
The NT successfully removes performance pride (see the Pharisee and the tax collector) while retaining personal responsibility. Without guilt. This is totally foreign to religion as generated by human beings. Humans use guilt and pride to motivate; the NT says that guilt is gone, that no one has grounds to boast because of the good they do, and that our responsibility to good works comes from our position as representatives of Christ, not a threat of punishment. The human element is excised at every turn.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, really….but it’s a start.
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We can just continue this over at your place. This page is too long and confusing. Besides, getting your post was the point of it, so objective achieved! http://scienceandotherdrugs.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/what-makes-you-different/
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That was brilliant physics and whiskey.
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Good morning,
Counter-example. The United States constitution is thought to have on objective meaning. Nevertheless there is endless attempts to “objectively” interpret and re-interpret it. Difficulty interpreting does not undercut the reality of an objective meaning.
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Excellent example to show how lost you are. The US Constitution is a live document open to Amendments (see Amendments). Because most people realise that culture and ideas can move and change, as society and information availability change. The Bible doesn’t.
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The Rolling Stones song, One Hit to the Body, immediately springs to mind.
“Ooof” Uncle Ben is on the canvas, and we are counting. “One…er…Two..er….
Violet is already blowing the smoke snaking out her metaphorical gun barrel
The Ark cheers from ringside.
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In any case, there are plenty of professional biblical scholars, a large proportion of whom are effectively atheists, who make a living trying to do the hard work of finding out what sections of the bible mean. It is fairly radical (postmodern) to say that we can never know what the author intended.
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Oh, dear, you mean to say Yahweh inspired them and forgot to tell them he meant?
Oops. Silly, Yahweh. However, this shouldn’t be such a big deal for the god, God, should it?
Maybe he…oops…He could have a word in your ear, Ben?
I mean, if you told me you were inspired by God to initiate a few biblical amendments, I would believe you. Honest!
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I’m just going to let this one go. Pay attention to PeW down below.
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http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/2013/01/god-big-picture.html#links
I think the common sense approach is eminently more worthy that having to wade through endless waffle from a person such as P^W .
Go watch Sam Harris in this video and learn some moral integrity. And why not take your chum, Ben along as well?
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You talking to me or PeW? Moral integrity is the other post. Keep up, old man!
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Of course I am talking to PW.
Any post where ‘God’ is the centre of attention can be considered part of moral integrity.
The video will negate the need to wade through all the BS PW is shoveling. It really is beginning to pong around here.
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I think it’s really useful and interesting to learn why people continue with Christian beliefs on the way out. I know it’s pattern thinking, but I want to know what the assumed logic is, at least in one case. PeW has a very clear way of thinking, and although you call is BS, I can see why it makes sense to him.
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That is merely a result of inculcation. It can be seen in any “Jesus Freak”, only in his case it sounds more reasonable because he is educated…to a point.
Peel the onion….
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