“Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom … Throw dung in her face to make her ugly.” Martin Luther
The people pushing this stuff aren’t all that stupid, and they have dealt with amateurs like barmaid. God could have created a naturally faithful and obedient creature, but instead created humans because we’re a lot more fun to kick around.
Your faith is meaningless unless it’s tested, so it’s important that what you believe in, is indefensible on its face. And on yours, regularly. Logic is provided to us for this purpose. We’re tools of shaitan.
This is actually perfectly sound thinking. The logic goes like this: We know, with absolute certainty, that we have truth and that we can win any logical argument with the unbelievers. [And indeed, when they argue with unbelievers they do in actual fact always win! Or at least, they always come up with arguments that they themselves find decisive. If the unbelievers disagree, well that’s just further evidence that unbelievers are either stupid or wicked]. However not all of our followers are as smart as we are, and if we allow them to argue with unbelievers at least some of them may be led astray and lose their souls forever. Therefore, for their own protection, we must not allow our followers to argue with unbelievers. They have nothing to gain, and everything to lose.
This is the logic of the Index of Forbidden Books, but isn’t it also the same logic that leads parents to try to prevent their children from talking to scuzzy strangers on the internet? Are you saying parents are wrong to do that?
@jb.
Also… One is supposed to believe unconditionally, without evidence, on faith alone. Using logical arguments to “prove” religion is a denial of faith – in some sense, heretical.
arbeyu — While some Christian sects teach salvation by faith alone, even those engage in logical argument to justify that teaching. E.g., Luther and Calvin wrote many books arguing for their interpretations of Christianity. Catholicism and Islam are emphatically not in the “faith alone” corner, and both have long histories of hair-splitting logical debate.
I was making a more general point though. The idea that people should be protected from dangerous ideas is not a silly idea, and if you are going to argue against it it needs to be done in context. I for one do believe that children should be protected from bad influences. Do you?
But normal theological disputation is posterior to the matters of faith, isn’t it? I mean, it never goes to “here’s a good reason to believe in Jesus, in case you were in doubt.”
It’s more like, “is this really Jesus’ body we’re snacking on here? or kind of more metaphorically but not really?” The basic belief system, either you have faith or you don’t.
@jb
Sure – you’ve got apologists like C.S. Lewis who argued that Jesus was either the Son of God, or Mad or Bad… And because the latter two options were untenable, the first must be true. I guess that’s what passes for a logical argument in those circles. Anselm’s Ontological Argument would be another example, equally as weak.
But it has to be said that these arguments are never going to persuade anyone who isn’t already a believer.
I agree with Donn Cave… The logical arguments in religion tend to be between co-religionists who wish to decide upon specifics of the faith. The actual faith isn’t up for grabs. “Just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”… Not “Are angels real?”
And how many times have you heard a religionist shut down a conversation by playing the “Faith” card? “Your rational arguments are pointless because it comes down to a matter of faith – either you believe or you don’t – and it’s not open for discussion.”
As for protecting children from bad influences… I guess that depends on what you think is a “bad influence”. Exposure to evolutionary science? Gender rights? Socialism? Of course religionists want to “protect” their children from paths to apostasy. It’s baked into religions’ memetics. Religions that don’t include this protection wouldn’t last a generation!
I recently had a conversation with a young adult I met on a train. He said he was a Christian and asked if I was religious. When I said I was not religious, he asked why not. I stated that I did not need a reason for disbelief, it was up to believers to justify their beliefs. He got off at the next stop but I hope he pondered on my remark.
Faith is beautiful with makeup and song. It will flatter you. It will call you special. All it asks is that you pay it – attention. But if things go badly enough, then Faith will leave you.
Whereas Doubt is plain and unadorned. It will criticize you. It will call you just like all the others. It demands your respect. And no matter how well or badly things go for you, Doubt will stick by you til death do you part.
And why? Because Faith is a whore, and Doubt is a wife.
SOG. Tis a long time since you last posted….hope you are well. The religious are indoctrinated betwixt the ages of 0-6 the children of our planet need to be protected from malign forces, and religion is the most poisonous of all ideas fed into young minds. It fosters division, third party hatred and the very dangerous mind control that makes people fearful of a Bacon butty that has to be a bad thing….
Alas, however, children are susceptible to it even if not instructed. I believe it’s well enough established for example that they naturally arrive at some concept of soul, a persistent identity that survives death and has some kind of awareness.
And then there’s a great deal of stuff a child can profit from that isn’t to be found in simple materialism.
I think what we really need is sun worship as a state religion. The state wouldn’t necessarily have much to do with it, directly, just say a consistent use of the sun emblem. The religion would teach respect and adoration for the sun and what it has bestowed upon our earth, all strictly factual and subject to revision on that basis. That’s a fairly sound basis for a religious philosophy that isn’t too different from most, you’d just have to finesse the afterlife thing.
As comfortable as it may be to think so, it simply isn’t true that all believers are stupid, or that they stand entirely on faith, or that all they ever do is bicker with each other over fine points of theology. Like it or not, the fact is that there are highly intelligent people out there who believe in God and do their best to find arguments that will convince nonbelievers to believe. (And it’s not like they always fail; there are and always have been plenty of cases of nonbelievers converting to one religion or another).
One example that immediately comes to mind — because I read his columns regularly and agree with much of what he has to say — is Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist for the New York Times. Ross has recently written a book that is entirely focused on convincing the nonbeliever to believe. I haven’t read the book, but Ross has used some of his columns to argue his case, and I have to say I respect him, because unlike so many blowhard pundits it’s clear he has carefully considered the arguments of his opponents and made a serious effort to address them. (As just one example, he thinks a multiverse is more implausible than God, and he explains why he thinks so). I don’t find his arguments convincing, but then there are a lot of smart people out there who make what I consider to be unconvincing arguments about a lot of things, and that doesn’t mean I don’t respect their intelligence. The idea that the people who disagree with you do so because they are dumb is a universal fallacy, one that can be found on all sides. Definitely including yours (whoever you are).
Also, arbeyu, are you really saying you don’t think there are bad influences on the internet that children genuinely need to be protected from? Maybe not evolution, but pedophiles? Neo-Nazis? Antisemites? The Manosphere? The people trying to convince your moody daughter that all her unhappiness stems from the fact that she is really a boy? Your list may not be the same as mine, but I’d be willing to bet that when it comes down to it you do have a list!
Douthat is turning into the C. S. Lewis for Generation X, someone who proffers superficially appealing but intellectually weak arguments simply to buttress the longings of those who want there to be a God.
This one from the book:
Of course, as a Christian, I don’t think [the Argument from Evil is] a good reason to choose against my own tradition, which brings me to the second challenge. . .
Well, point taken, we do see people presenting arguments in favor of their fundamental religious belief. But those who actually hold these faiths are, like Douthat, and me for that matter, completely impervious, and I have to wonder who really is converted by means like this. Or if it’s people who not only want to believe, but at some level already do.
And “already do” believe doesn’t need to mean they believe in Jehovah impregnating Mary and all that stuff, but they have bought into a fraemework that doesn’t work without it.
For example, it’s pretty common to believe there’s some objective moral truth, but our material world doesn’t support that, you need a God for a source. If you believe our real life morality rests on that, a godless world might seem like a horrible prospect.
@jb
Sure – there are otherwise intelligent people who believe in a god.
But any and all attempts to use logic, rationality and evidence to demonstrate the existence of that god – and especially any supposed attributes of that god – are doomed to failure. And that is because belief in gods is essentially irrational, pre-rational and not amenable to verifiable evidence. Anyone trying to do so is a fool in this respect, regardless of their otherwise demonstrable intelligence. What they say or write is effectively meaningless babble, totally unverifiable and completely indistinguishable from nonsense. I’ve said before that I’m broadly with A.J. Ayer on that one.
Sure, these people show great intellectual effort and erudition – more so that I can lay claim to. But – and it’s a big but – we would laugh at them if they were to devote that effort to proving the existence of fairies or invisible pink unicorns. But because they are wibbling on about “god”, we’re supposed to respect them? No!
Of course I think that children should be protected from “bad influences”. You mention paedophiles and antisemitism and a moody daughter being convinced by people that she is really a boy… Change that last one to a gay son being forced into “conversion therapy”… And we’ve got three examples of things that religions have been and continue to be guilty of. Religion is one extremely bad influence that I think all children should be protected from.
If you think that I’m being arrogant, then consider this…
Belief in a god is irrational: If it were rational – if there were reasons for believing in one – then all you’d need to do is tell people those reasons, and presto! Instant conversion!
The existence of god is beyond evidence. Again, if it weren’t, then all you’d need to do is show people the evidence, and biff-baff-boff! Instant conversion!
Moreover a god would be perfectly capable of showing actual evidence of its existence. But there is no such evidence. If we assume the existence of a god, then we have to assume that it does not want to show evidence of its existence – that it wants us to believe in it on faith alone. Of course, there is a far simpler answer!
Conversion doesn’t – can’t – use rational arguments. It relies on appeals to the emotions, on our fears of dying, on the hurts of this life with the promise of retribution or rewards in a future life.
Conversion is almost always from one belief system to another. Nobody comes to religion “cold”. Even people raised as atheists are exposed to the magical thinking of religion in films, books and TV, so a conversion from atheism isn’t necessarily from a state of pure disbelief: The memes of the religion will be present.
Not only have we all been raised with gods and angels flying around, as I mentioned above we’ve been raised with moral philosophies that are rooted in that framework.
What we can do for children is limited. We can’t really wall them off from it, but we can give them alternatives. Can you talk to a kid about the brights and darks of the real world, and reason about that meaning there is in it and why things work more often than they don’t? Simple materialism isn’t a substitute for religion.
If you need the comfort blanket of a God you are a Knob Sprocket. I can see the beauty in a garden without having to believe that there are fairies living in it…..end of…
Mr Cave, materialism usually leads to greed and greed to avarice and avarice to violence and hurt. Yes, that is the lot of the killer ape the ultimate intelligent apex preditor? But we don’t need religion to stoke the flames do we and all forms of woo-woo and sneck-headery will not save us from our instinctive self preservation will it?
I assume by “materialism” that DC means the naturalistic philosophy that holds that everything is explicable in terms of “material” (energy and matter). Mind and consciousness are the result of non-supernatural physical interactions.
As his posts touch upon, we materialists are in a bit of a pickle regarding moral philosophy. It’s impossible to define what “should be” from the standpoint of materialism. There’s no objective moral truth in our philosophy. Of course, there’s no objective moral truth in religions either, not really – but at least we don’t kid ourselves that there is.
That’s the thing, their objective moral truth is just another fairy tale, it just happens to be more widely accepted than the other religious ideas, even the soul.
When we talk about the conduct of real life, we really have a head start on the religious, because we don’t have this paradox between the received moral guidelines and the universal realities. Thou shalt not kill, for example. We could, but rarely do, develop an alternate idea that holds up better and works out better.
Donn Cave — Thanks for the Jerry Coyne link. His opinion of Douthat’s arguments is more or less the same as mine: lame efforts to justify beliefs held for other reasons. I brought him up solely as an example of an intelligent person who is religious and makes arguments directed at nonbelievers. I do in fact think he is a smart guy — certainly the equal of the other Times columnists, and often more interesting. The thing is, the world is full of smart people — often very smart — who believe all kinds of crazy things. Why should religion not be among those things?
arbeyu — What planet are you from where contentious, centuries old disputes are settled by one side being instantly converted by the rational arguments of the other? I’m not sure I’d want to live there, but I wouldn’t mind visiting! Here on Earth though there are always smart people with rational arguments on all sides of every dispute. Should taxes be higher or lower? Is Israel justified in Gaza? Do pineapple and ham belong on pizza? Each side has its own evidence, each side rejects the other side’s evidence, and everyone strives to come up with arguments to justify beliefs that they hold for other reasons. (If you think you never do this yourself, you aren’t paying enough attention to your own thought processes).
And it isn’t true that there is no evidence for religion. There is a lot of evidence! What might that evidence be you ask? Personal testimony! For millennia people have reported direct personal encounters with the supernatural. Miracles! Apparitions! Spirit journeys! Near-death experiences! Alien abductions! Like it or not, that is all evidence, in exactly the same way as it is when a witness is introduced in court and says “I saw that guy shoot that other guy”. Such reports may be lies or honest mistakes, but they are still entered into the record as evidence, and you can’t just wave them away because you don’t want to believe, you have to justify your rejection.
For myself, I point to the incoherent and contradictory nature of the reports, and argue that this counts as evidence that human beings are unreliable and make stuff up, and so I am justified in ignoring the wilder stories. Still, you could argue that the confused nature of the evidence is simply a consequence of an underlying supernatural reality that bubbles up in unpredictable ways, like a boiling stew, and I don’t really know what to do with that argument except to say it just strikes me as implausible, and now I’m the one relying on my own gut feeling. If I’m being honest, I have to acknowledge that there is no “2+2=4” certainty here. I have to acknowledge that I could be wrong…
Looking at the whole picture, of human religiosity, I think it’s a little more than a gut feeling. The diversity is a big clue. Here we are on our miniscule fraction of the universe, visited in different places and times by entirely different universal deities. Ha.
The more or less universal parts reflect simply what we would obviously want. A soul that survives physical death. A great mommy/daddy in the sky. Someone to tell us what’s right and wrong … or rather, someone to tell some priests, so they can tell us. Yeah, gut feeling tells me something about this — it’s all true! That is, there’s a more or less universal truth in here about humans.
@jb.
I try, as best as I can, to hold my beliefs for good reasons and on an evidentiary basis. I wish I lived on a planet where that was the norm.
If you can show me good reasons for believing X then I will, perhaps tentatively, accept X as being true. If you show me evidence that X must be true, then I will believe X – even if it flies in the face of what I’ve believed before. And, yes, I have changed my beliefs in the face of evidence that I was previously wrong.
We expect this sort of rationality in all sorts of matters such as politics. Should taxes be higher or lower? There are good arguments on both sides. There’s almost certainly not a simple, one-size-fits-all answer. If you argue one way or the other purely from ideology, then you are failing to be rational.
If a Christian apologist could give me good reasons for accepting the tenets of Christianity as true, I might become a Christian. Wouldn’t you? Or would you ignore rationality and continue to believe something that it had become irrational to do so? Of course, this isn’t going to happen because there ARE NO GOOD REASONS to believe that the tenets of any religion are true. And there are LOTS of good reasons to believe they are false.
If I claim that I saw a Citroen 2CV, you would not require that much evidence from me to believe my claim. You might even take it on trust. You might be more sceptical if I were to claim that I saw a 2CV being driven at 400mph. You might do a bit of research to see if someone has built a rocket-powered 2CV. You would require extraordinary evidence from me if I claimed that I saw a 2CV being driven at 400mph by the real Elvis with the real Loch Ness Monster in the passenger seat. Without that extraordinary evidence, the only rational thing to do is to ignore my testimony.
All personal testimony as “evidence for the truth of religion (or ghosts, or alien abductions, or near-death experiences)” can be ignored in the absence of extraordinary evidence to back up that testimony.
These are NOT “evidence” in the same way that eyewitness evidence of a crime is. A person has been shot. A witness testifies that they saw the shooter and identifies someone as that person. The witness may be mistaken – but the FACT that someone was shot by someone else is rarely in doubt. Anyway, most legal systems would require corroborating evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Why shouldn’t personal anecdotes about miracles and ghosts and such like not be held up to the same standard? After all, “the plural of anecdote is not data.”
As for Douthat, maybe he is a smart guy – but on the matter of religion, he’s a total dumbass.
If doubt-that was a smart guy, he would be able to work out that god is no more real than Harry Potter is…he aint smart he’s a dyed in the wool Gertrude Sucker and no mistaking…
Arbeyu, summed up when he outlines that if you replace the word god with any other mythical object name you would be ridiculed and made to wear a red nose snd face paint and unfeasibly large shoes….
Donn — I think arbeyu and I disagree on the definition of “evidence” though. Evidence doesn’t stop being evidence just because I, personally, don’t find it credible.
Well, but do you think believers are created by such evidence? You’ve more or less said they aren’t – it’s just to “justify beliefs they hold for other reasons.” When we’re down to whether it’s legitimately defined as evidence if it’s essentially weightless, I think there’s little room between pro and con.
Religion is about communal loyalty, not truth. If you doubt this, then consider the contradictions of all holy scriptures. In them you will find verses for war and verses for peace; for hate and for love; for freedom and for power. They have these contradictions so that their readers can find support for the impulses of the historical moment. A scripture is not a message; it is a language, suitable for sending any message. What someone quotes from a scripture says more about the quoter than the quotee.
Donn — I’m not sure how many believers are created by the evidence of testimony, but I’m pretty sure some are (although many of those may have been on the fence anyway). And many people have certainly had their faith fortified by such evidence — especially since there is selection bias: the stories they are most likely to hear are the ones that affirm the validity of their own faith community. I heard a few such stories of supernatural encounters myself growing up — not first hand, but second hand through my mother — and I’ll have to admit they made me nervous about my own growing skepticism. When you are a child and your own mother (an intelligent and sober person) tells you that your grandfather’s life was saved by a warning from an apparition it’s hard to disregard the story entirely! So no, I would not consider such evidence weightless.
As for other reasons, I’m a fan of this quote by the author John Derbyshire:
“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”
As luck would have it, the Portuguese JWs came by just now, and when I eventually mentioned that I didn’t really have any of that kind of faith, I was informed that it’s not something the just pops out of the air. It’s like a plant, you plant a little thing and then you cultivate it.
I let that pass without comment, but it seemed to kind of beg the question.
Anything that anyone chooses to say they have experienced, however silly, is not ‘evidence’ just because they said it. If that were the case we would never hear, “ the court would not accept as evidence… “.
Being abducted by an alien and forced to commit a crime used as an excuse would be considered not admissible as evidence for obvious reasons.
The claims of those with imaginary friends in the sky are no different and are not evidence just because they claim them to be true. There remains no ‘evidence’ for fairies, goblins, unicorns or trolls even so some people have gone so far as to produce pictures of them.
Choirboy — Some people, like Ross Douthat, really, really want to believe in God, and they use arguments that are contrived to take them where they want to go. Other people really, really want to be able to categorically assert that there is “no evidence” for supernatural phenomena, and they do the same.
You are making a circular argument. You say that reports of the supernatural don’t count as evidence because what they are reporting is “silly”. And how do you know that the supernatural is silly? Because there is “no evidence” for it! Well of course there isn’t — you’ve preemptively excluded it all!
Some evidence is stronger than others of course, and courts do need standards. I believe though that what courts most often exclude is not evidence, but theories. For example, lawyers for Bryan Kohberger, who was convicted of killing four college students in Idaho, wanted to present alternative theories of the case where other people had committed the crime, but the judge disallowed it because the defense had offered no evidence that those other people had any involvement. However there are plenty of instances where witnesses are allowed to make ridiculous statements on the stand (which can then be torn apart by the other side). I’m pretty sure that if a dozen respected members of the community wanted to testify that they had seen someone abducted by a flying saucer in broad daylight, most courts would at least allow them on the stand. Even if the jury didn’t believe them. their accounts would still be evidence. (I’ll note that among the vast number of reports of supernatural occurrences are many that claim multiple witnesses. E.g., the Miracle of Fátima).
I think if you were to examine your own thought processes more carefully, you would see that the reason you think sky fathers and fairies are silly is not because there is no evidence for them, but because your gut tells you they are silly. Fair enough; so does mine. But if you want to be rigorous, you need a stronger chain of reasoning than: “My gut tells me this is silly; therefore any evidence presented for it isn’t really evidence (because there can’t be evidence for a silly thing); therefore believing in it is silly (because there is no evidence for it)”. You’ll need to work harder than that!
It isn’t circular at all and nothing to do with a ‘gut feeling’, which you patronising assert. The belief that the supernatural does not exist is based firmly on the fact that no reliable evidence, scientifically verified, has ever been provided for it. James Randi’s offer of a million dollars for such proof remains, I believe, uncollected.
Agreeing to listen to someone asserting that something is evidence does not make their testimony valid just because they say it is.
Someone claiming to have been abducted by aliens is not evidence that aliens exist. It is simply evidence of their belief that they were. Your assertion that we cannot dismiss religion because there is lots of evidence of people saying there is a god is no different. It is simply evidence that they believe it.
Until there is reliable scientific evidence that fairies exist, beyond someone just saying they’ve spoken to a few, I reserve the right to say that such beliefs are silly.
You will have to work harder than that to turn simple , ‘because there is no evidence I don’t believe ‘ into a circular argument.
Choirboy — You are moving the goalposts. I’ll agree there is no scientific evidence for the supernatural, but I never said anything about scientific evidence. There are other kinds of evidence; not just personal testimony, which I’ve already talked about, but also circumstantial evidence. Neither is necessarily “scientific”, but both are admissible in court. Religion and the supernatural both have plenty of evidence in the form of personal testimony (circumstantial evidence, not so much), but you dismiss that evidence because you are convinced that if you, personally, think it’s silly, then it doesn’t count as evidence.
You moved the goalposts in another way when you brought up James Randi’s offer. I don’t think such offers are worth much — I could offer a million dollars for proof that the Earth isn’t flat, and then simply refuse to accept any proof I was given. But that’s not the problem here, the problem is that what we’ve been talking about isn’t proof, but evidence. Of course there is no proof of the supernatural. But neither is there any proof that God or the supernatural do not exist! (I’ll note here that, unlike the Flat Earth theory, the existence of the supernatural does not directly conflict with any scientific experiments or measurements. For that matter, neither do UFOs, which I think are probably just another manifestation of whatever it is we’re talking about when we talk about the supernatural).
To be clear, I do not believe in the supernatural and I am not arguing for it — my only complaint is this claim of “no evidence”, which I think is just wrong. What I’m arguing is that you can’t just dismiss evidence because you don’t like where it leads. If a friend of mine told me he was visited last night by a floating pink unicorn I’d tell him to get to a doctor as fast as possible. But if a hundred thousand people woke up on the same day with the same story that would be different! It would be intellectually irresponsible to just say “floating pink unicorns are silly, therefore there is no evidence, therefore nothing to see here, so go home”. The testimony itself would be evidence of something, and if I didn’t want to believe in the unicorns I would have to come up with an explanation for what else that something might be.
JB I refer you to ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’, Charles McKay.
The ad populum argument is meaningless. Something asserted as evidence with no proof does not magically become evidence when simply multiplied. A thousand times nothing is nothing. Probably millions of people globally at one time would have asserted that ‘Dallas’ was the best drama ever.
You are confusing evidence and proof again. Yes, a million people can be wrong, but that’s irrelevant here because we are not talking about whether they are right or wrong, we are talking about whether they have evidence. Proof requires evidence, but you can have evidence without proof (and in fact this situation is extremely common). You seem unwilling to acknowledge this; that false ideas may nevertheless have legitimate evidence in their favor. In fact your basic position seems to be “It isn’t evidence unless I say it’s evidence!” This is a version of the Argument From Incredulity. It will be rejected — and rightly so — by anyone who doesn’t already agree with you, and even by many who do.
You know, if you were to just say there is no scientific evidence for the supernatural I would be totally with you. But I’m not willing to disregard the personal testimony of millions of people because I don’t believe what they are saying can be true. Maybe I’m the one who is wrong! It would be arrogant to set myself up so high that I don’t even need to consider that possibility.
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April 27, 2022
“Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom … Throw dung in her face to make her ugly.” Martin Luther
I can see the wheels turning in Mo’s head.
The people pushing this stuff aren’t all that stupid, and they have dealt with amateurs like barmaid. God could have created a naturally faithful and obedient creature, but instead created humans because we’re a lot more fun to kick around.
Your faith is meaningless unless it’s tested, so it’s important that what you believe in, is indefensible on its face. And on yours, regularly. Logic is provided to us for this purpose. We’re tools of shaitan.
No blink 🙁
This is actually perfectly sound thinking. The logic goes like this: We know, with absolute certainty, that we have truth and that we can win any logical argument with the unbelievers. [And indeed, when they argue with unbelievers they do in actual fact always win! Or at least, they always come up with arguments that they themselves find decisive. If the unbelievers disagree, well that’s just further evidence that unbelievers are either stupid or wicked]. However not all of our followers are as smart as we are, and if we allow them to argue with unbelievers at least some of them may be led astray and lose their souls forever. Therefore, for their own protection, we must not allow our followers to argue with unbelievers. They have nothing to gain, and everything to lose.
This is the logic of the Index of Forbidden Books, but isn’t it also the same logic that leads parents to try to prevent their children from talking to scuzzy strangers on the internet? Are you saying parents are wrong to do that?
@jb, my mom says I shouldn’t talk to you.
I like scabby whore arguments…Martin Luther like all religious, pious geezers wasn’t getting any was he?
@jb.
Also… One is supposed to believe unconditionally, without evidence, on faith alone. Using logical arguments to “prove” religion is a denial of faith – in some sense, heretical.
arbeyu — While some Christian sects teach salvation by faith alone, even those engage in logical argument to justify that teaching. E.g., Luther and Calvin wrote many books arguing for their interpretations of Christianity. Catholicism and Islam are emphatically not in the “faith alone” corner, and both have long histories of hair-splitting logical debate.
I was making a more general point though. The idea that people should be protected from dangerous ideas is not a silly idea, and if you are going to argue against it it needs to be done in context. I for one do believe that children should be protected from bad influences. Do you?
But normal theological disputation is posterior to the matters of faith, isn’t it? I mean, it never goes to “here’s a good reason to believe in Jesus, in case you were in doubt.”
It’s more like, “is this really Jesus’ body we’re snacking on here? or kind of more metaphorically but not really?” The basic belief system, either you have faith or you don’t.
@jb
Sure – you’ve got apologists like C.S. Lewis who argued that Jesus was either the Son of God, or Mad or Bad… And because the latter two options were untenable, the first must be true. I guess that’s what passes for a logical argument in those circles. Anselm’s Ontological Argument would be another example, equally as weak.
But it has to be said that these arguments are never going to persuade anyone who isn’t already a believer.
I agree with Donn Cave… The logical arguments in religion tend to be between co-religionists who wish to decide upon specifics of the faith. The actual faith isn’t up for grabs. “Just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”… Not “Are angels real?”
And how many times have you heard a religionist shut down a conversation by playing the “Faith” card? “Your rational arguments are pointless because it comes down to a matter of faith – either you believe or you don’t – and it’s not open for discussion.”
As for protecting children from bad influences… I guess that depends on what you think is a “bad influence”. Exposure to evolutionary science? Gender rights? Socialism? Of course religionists want to “protect” their children from paths to apostasy. It’s baked into religions’ memetics. Religions that don’t include this protection wouldn’t last a generation!
I recently had a conversation with a young adult I met on a train. He said he was a Christian and asked if I was religious. When I said I was not religious, he asked why not. I stated that I did not need a reason for disbelief, it was up to believers to justify their beliefs. He got off at the next stop but I hope he pondered on my remark.
Faith is beautiful with makeup and song. It will flatter you. It will call you special. All it asks is that you pay it – attention. But if things go badly enough, then Faith will leave you.
Whereas Doubt is plain and unadorned. It will criticize you. It will call you just like all the others. It demands your respect. And no matter how well or badly things go for you, Doubt will stick by you til death do you part.
And why? Because Faith is a whore, and Doubt is a wife.
SOG. Tis a long time since you last posted….hope you are well. The religious are indoctrinated betwixt the ages of 0-6 the children of our planet need to be protected from malign forces, and religion is the most poisonous of all ideas fed into young minds. It fosters division, third party hatred and the very dangerous mind control that makes people fearful of a Bacon butty that has to be a bad thing….
Alas, however, children are susceptible to it even if not instructed. I believe it’s well enough established for example that they naturally arrive at some concept of soul, a persistent identity that survives death and has some kind of awareness.
And then there’s a great deal of stuff a child can profit from that isn’t to be found in simple materialism.
I think what we really need is sun worship as a state religion. The state wouldn’t necessarily have much to do with it, directly, just say a consistent use of the sun emblem. The religion would teach respect and adoration for the sun and what it has bestowed upon our earth, all strictly factual and subject to revision on that basis. That’s a fairly sound basis for a religious philosophy that isn’t too different from most, you’d just have to finesse the afterlife thing.
… As opposed to creating a new religion around Artificial Intelligence, which apparently has become a sort of thing in that field.
As comfortable as it may be to think so, it simply isn’t true that all believers are stupid, or that they stand entirely on faith, or that all they ever do is bicker with each other over fine points of theology. Like it or not, the fact is that there are highly intelligent people out there who believe in God and do their best to find arguments that will convince nonbelievers to believe. (And it’s not like they always fail; there are and always have been plenty of cases of nonbelievers converting to one religion or another).
One example that immediately comes to mind — because I read his columns regularly and agree with much of what he has to say — is Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist for the New York Times. Ross has recently written a book that is entirely focused on convincing the nonbeliever to believe. I haven’t read the book, but Ross has used some of his columns to argue his case, and I have to say I respect him, because unlike so many blowhard pundits it’s clear he has carefully considered the arguments of his opponents and made a serious effort to address them. (As just one example, he thinks a multiverse is more implausible than God, and he explains why he thinks so). I don’t find his arguments convincing, but then there are a lot of smart people out there who make what I consider to be unconvincing arguments about a lot of things, and that doesn’t mean I don’t respect their intelligence. The idea that the people who disagree with you do so because they are dumb is a universal fallacy, one that can be found on all sides. Definitely including yours (whoever you are).
Also, arbeyu, are you really saying you don’t think there are bad influences on the internet that children genuinely need to be protected from? Maybe not evolution, but pedophiles? Neo-Nazis? Antisemites? The Manosphere? The people trying to convince your moody daughter that all her unhappiness stems from the fact that she is really a boy? Your list may not be the same as mine, but I’d be willing to bet that when it comes down to it you do have a list!
Of course I haven’t read it either, but tired enough of hearing about it that I surfed out for something, and found an opposing view, Douthat on the best argument against God (too much evil), but he argues that God is evidenced also by too much GOOD.
This one from the book:
Well, point taken, we do see people presenting arguments in favor of their fundamental religious belief. But those who actually hold these faiths are, like Douthat, and me for that matter, completely impervious, and I have to wonder who really is converted by means like this. Or if it’s people who not only want to believe, but at some level already do.
And “already do” believe doesn’t need to mean they believe in Jehovah impregnating Mary and all that stuff, but they have bought into a fraemework that doesn’t work without it.
For example, it’s pretty common to believe there’s some objective moral truth, but our material world doesn’t support that, you need a God for a source. If you believe our real life morality rests on that, a godless world might seem like a horrible prospect.
@jb
Sure – there are otherwise intelligent people who believe in a god.
But any and all attempts to use logic, rationality and evidence to demonstrate the existence of that god – and especially any supposed attributes of that god – are doomed to failure. And that is because belief in gods is essentially irrational, pre-rational and not amenable to verifiable evidence. Anyone trying to do so is a fool in this respect, regardless of their otherwise demonstrable intelligence. What they say or write is effectively meaningless babble, totally unverifiable and completely indistinguishable from nonsense. I’ve said before that I’m broadly with A.J. Ayer on that one.
Sure, these people show great intellectual effort and erudition – more so that I can lay claim to. But – and it’s a big but – we would laugh at them if they were to devote that effort to proving the existence of fairies or invisible pink unicorns. But because they are wibbling on about “god”, we’re supposed to respect them? No!
Of course I think that children should be protected from “bad influences”. You mention paedophiles and antisemitism and a moody daughter being convinced by people that she is really a boy… Change that last one to a gay son being forced into “conversion therapy”… And we’ve got three examples of things that religions have been and continue to be guilty of. Religion is one extremely bad influence that I think all children should be protected from.
If you think that I’m being arrogant, then consider this…
Belief in a god is irrational: If it were rational – if there were reasons for believing in one – then all you’d need to do is tell people those reasons, and presto! Instant conversion!
The existence of god is beyond evidence. Again, if it weren’t, then all you’d need to do is show people the evidence, and biff-baff-boff! Instant conversion!
Moreover a god would be perfectly capable of showing actual evidence of its existence. But there is no such evidence. If we assume the existence of a god, then we have to assume that it does not want to show evidence of its existence – that it wants us to believe in it on faith alone. Of course, there is a far simpler answer!
Conversion doesn’t – can’t – use rational arguments. It relies on appeals to the emotions, on our fears of dying, on the hurts of this life with the promise of retribution or rewards in a future life.
Conversion is almost always from one belief system to another. Nobody comes to religion “cold”. Even people raised as atheists are exposed to the magical thinking of religion in films, books and TV, so a conversion from atheism isn’t necessarily from a state of pure disbelief: The memes of the religion will be present.
Not only have we all been raised with gods and angels flying around, as I mentioned above we’ve been raised with moral philosophies that are rooted in that framework.
What we can do for children is limited. We can’t really wall them off from it, but we can give them alternatives. Can you talk to a kid about the brights and darks of the real world, and reason about that meaning there is in it and why things work more often than they don’t? Simple materialism isn’t a substitute for religion.
If you need the comfort blanket of a God you are a Knob Sprocket. I can see the beauty in a garden without having to believe that there are fairies living in it…..end of…
Mr Cave, materialism usually leads to greed and greed to avarice and avarice to violence and hurt. Yes, that is the lot of the killer ape the ultimate intelligent apex preditor? But we don’t need religion to stoke the flames do we and all forms of woo-woo and sneck-headery will not save us from our instinctive self preservation will it?
I assume by “materialism” that DC means the naturalistic philosophy that holds that everything is explicable in terms of “material” (energy and matter). Mind and consciousness are the result of non-supernatural physical interactions.
As his posts touch upon, we materialists are in a bit of a pickle regarding moral philosophy. It’s impossible to define what “should be” from the standpoint of materialism. There’s no objective moral truth in our philosophy. Of course, there’s no objective moral truth in religions either, not really – but at least we don’t kid ourselves that there is.
That’s the thing, their objective moral truth is just another fairy tale, it just happens to be more widely accepted than the other religious ideas, even the soul.
When we talk about the conduct of real life, we really have a head start on the religious, because we don’t have this paradox between the received moral guidelines and the universal realities. Thou shalt not kill, for example. We could, but rarely do, develop an alternate idea that holds up better and works out better.
Donn Cave — Thanks for the Jerry Coyne link. His opinion of Douthat’s arguments is more or less the same as mine: lame efforts to justify beliefs held for other reasons. I brought him up solely as an example of an intelligent person who is religious and makes arguments directed at nonbelievers. I do in fact think he is a smart guy — certainly the equal of the other Times columnists, and often more interesting. The thing is, the world is full of smart people — often very smart — who believe all kinds of crazy things. Why should religion not be among those things?
arbeyu — What planet are you from where contentious, centuries old disputes are settled by one side being instantly converted by the rational arguments of the other? I’m not sure I’d want to live there, but I wouldn’t mind visiting! Here on Earth though there are always smart people with rational arguments on all sides of every dispute. Should taxes be higher or lower? Is Israel justified in Gaza? Do pineapple and ham belong on pizza? Each side has its own evidence, each side rejects the other side’s evidence, and everyone strives to come up with arguments to justify beliefs that they hold for other reasons. (If you think you never do this yourself, you aren’t paying enough attention to your own thought processes).
And it isn’t true that there is no evidence for religion. There is a lot of evidence! What might that evidence be you ask? Personal testimony! For millennia people have reported direct personal encounters with the supernatural. Miracles! Apparitions! Spirit journeys! Near-death experiences! Alien abductions! Like it or not, that is all evidence, in exactly the same way as it is when a witness is introduced in court and says “I saw that guy shoot that other guy”. Such reports may be lies or honest mistakes, but they are still entered into the record as evidence, and you can’t just wave them away because you don’t want to believe, you have to justify your rejection.
For myself, I point to the incoherent and contradictory nature of the reports, and argue that this counts as evidence that human beings are unreliable and make stuff up, and so I am justified in ignoring the wilder stories. Still, you could argue that the confused nature of the evidence is simply a consequence of an underlying supernatural reality that bubbles up in unpredictable ways, like a boiling stew, and I don’t really know what to do with that argument except to say it just strikes me as implausible, and now I’m the one relying on my own gut feeling. If I’m being honest, I have to acknowledge that there is no “2+2=4” certainty here. I have to acknowledge that I could be wrong…
Looking at the whole picture, of human religiosity, I think it’s a little more than a gut feeling. The diversity is a big clue. Here we are on our miniscule fraction of the universe, visited in different places and times by entirely different universal deities. Ha.
The more or less universal parts reflect simply what we would obviously want. A soul that survives physical death. A great mommy/daddy in the sky. Someone to tell us what’s right and wrong … or rather, someone to tell some priests, so they can tell us. Yeah, gut feeling tells me something about this — it’s all true! That is, there’s a more or less universal truth in here about humans.
@jb.
I try, as best as I can, to hold my beliefs for good reasons and on an evidentiary basis. I wish I lived on a planet where that was the norm.
If you can show me good reasons for believing X then I will, perhaps tentatively, accept X as being true. If you show me evidence that X must be true, then I will believe X – even if it flies in the face of what I’ve believed before. And, yes, I have changed my beliefs in the face of evidence that I was previously wrong.
We expect this sort of rationality in all sorts of matters such as politics. Should taxes be higher or lower? There are good arguments on both sides. There’s almost certainly not a simple, one-size-fits-all answer. If you argue one way or the other purely from ideology, then you are failing to be rational.
If a Christian apologist could give me good reasons for accepting the tenets of Christianity as true, I might become a Christian. Wouldn’t you? Or would you ignore rationality and continue to believe something that it had become irrational to do so? Of course, this isn’t going to happen because there ARE NO GOOD REASONS to believe that the tenets of any religion are true. And there are LOTS of good reasons to believe they are false.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
If I claim that I saw a Citroen 2CV, you would not require that much evidence from me to believe my claim. You might even take it on trust. You might be more sceptical if I were to claim that I saw a 2CV being driven at 400mph. You might do a bit of research to see if someone has built a rocket-powered 2CV. You would require extraordinary evidence from me if I claimed that I saw a 2CV being driven at 400mph by the real Elvis with the real Loch Ness Monster in the passenger seat. Without that extraordinary evidence, the only rational thing to do is to ignore my testimony.
All personal testimony as “evidence for the truth of religion (or ghosts, or alien abductions, or near-death experiences)” can be ignored in the absence of extraordinary evidence to back up that testimony.
These are NOT “evidence” in the same way that eyewitness evidence of a crime is. A person has been shot. A witness testifies that they saw the shooter and identifies someone as that person. The witness may be mistaken – but the FACT that someone was shot by someone else is rarely in doubt. Anyway, most legal systems would require corroborating evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Why shouldn’t personal anecdotes about miracles and ghosts and such like not be held up to the same standard? After all, “the plural of anecdote is not data.”
As for Douthat, maybe he is a smart guy – but on the matter of religion, he’s a total dumbass.
If doubt-that was a smart guy, he would be able to work out that god is no more real than Harry Potter is…he aint smart he’s a dyed in the wool Gertrude Sucker and no mistaking…
I think you two are “in violent agreement”, that religious faith isn’t typically founded on evidence and reason.
Arbeyu, summed up when he outlines that if you replace the word god with any other mythical object name you would be ridiculed and made to wear a red nose snd face paint and unfeasibly large shoes….
Donn — I think arbeyu and I disagree on the definition of “evidence” though. Evidence doesn’t stop being evidence just because I, personally, don’t find it credible.
Aye, thats why defence lawers are the scum of the Earth…
Well, but do you think believers are created by such evidence? You’ve more or less said they aren’t – it’s just to “justify beliefs they hold for other reasons.” When we’re down to whether it’s legitimately defined as evidence if it’s essentially weightless, I think there’s little room between pro and con.
I’m more interested in the other reasons, myself.
Religion is about communal loyalty, not truth. If you doubt this, then consider the contradictions of all holy scriptures. In them you will find verses for war and verses for peace; for hate and for love; for freedom and for power. They have these contradictions so that their readers can find support for the impulses of the historical moment. A scripture is not a message; it is a language, suitable for sending any message. What someone quotes from a scripture says more about the quoter than the quotee.
Donn — I’m not sure how many believers are created by the evidence of testimony, but I’m pretty sure some are (although many of those may have been on the fence anyway). And many people have certainly had their faith fortified by such evidence — especially since there is selection bias: the stories they are most likely to hear are the ones that affirm the validity of their own faith community. I heard a few such stories of supernatural encounters myself growing up — not first hand, but second hand through my mother — and I’ll have to admit they made me nervous about my own growing skepticism. When you are a child and your own mother (an intelligent and sober person) tells you that your grandfather’s life was saved by a warning from an apparition it’s hard to disregard the story entirely! So no, I would not consider such evidence weightless.
As for other reasons, I’m a fan of this quote by the author John Derbyshire:
“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”
As luck would have it, the Portuguese JWs came by just now, and when I eventually mentioned that I didn’t really have any of that kind of faith, I was informed that it’s not something the just pops out of the air. It’s like a plant, you plant a little thing and then you cultivate it.
I let that pass without comment, but it seemed to kind of beg the question.
Anything that anyone chooses to say they have experienced, however silly, is not ‘evidence’ just because they said it. If that were the case we would never hear, “ the court would not accept as evidence… “.
Being abducted by an alien and forced to commit a crime used as an excuse would be considered not admissible as evidence for obvious reasons.
The claims of those with imaginary friends in the sky are no different and are not evidence just because they claim them to be true. There remains no ‘evidence’ for fairies, goblins, unicorns or trolls even so some people have gone so far as to produce pictures of them.
Choirboy — Some people, like Ross Douthat, really, really want to believe in God, and they use arguments that are contrived to take them where they want to go. Other people really, really want to be able to categorically assert that there is “no evidence” for supernatural phenomena, and they do the same.
You are making a circular argument. You say that reports of the supernatural don’t count as evidence because what they are reporting is “silly”. And how do you know that the supernatural is silly? Because there is “no evidence” for it! Well of course there isn’t — you’ve preemptively excluded it all!
Some evidence is stronger than others of course, and courts do need standards. I believe though that what courts most often exclude is not evidence, but theories. For example, lawyers for Bryan Kohberger, who was convicted of killing four college students in Idaho, wanted to present alternative theories of the case where other people had committed the crime, but the judge disallowed it because the defense had offered no evidence that those other people had any involvement. However there are plenty of instances where witnesses are allowed to make ridiculous statements on the stand (which can then be torn apart by the other side). I’m pretty sure that if a dozen respected members of the community wanted to testify that they had seen someone abducted by a flying saucer in broad daylight, most courts would at least allow them on the stand. Even if the jury didn’t believe them. their accounts would still be evidence. (I’ll note that among the vast number of reports of supernatural occurrences are many that claim multiple witnesses. E.g., the Miracle of Fátima).
I think if you were to examine your own thought processes more carefully, you would see that the reason you think sky fathers and fairies are silly is not because there is no evidence for them, but because your gut tells you they are silly. Fair enough; so does mine. But if you want to be rigorous, you need a stronger chain of reasoning than: “My gut tells me this is silly; therefore any evidence presented for it isn’t really evidence (because there can’t be evidence for a silly thing); therefore believing in it is silly (because there is no evidence for it)”. You’ll need to work harder than that!
It isn’t circular at all and nothing to do with a ‘gut feeling’, which you patronising assert. The belief that the supernatural does not exist is based firmly on the fact that no reliable evidence, scientifically verified, has ever been provided for it. James Randi’s offer of a million dollars for such proof remains, I believe, uncollected.
Agreeing to listen to someone asserting that something is evidence does not make their testimony valid just because they say it is.
Someone claiming to have been abducted by aliens is not evidence that aliens exist. It is simply evidence of their belief that they were. Your assertion that we cannot dismiss religion because there is lots of evidence of people saying there is a god is no different. It is simply evidence that they believe it.
Until there is reliable scientific evidence that fairies exist, beyond someone just saying they’ve spoken to a few, I reserve the right to say that such beliefs are silly.
You will have to work harder than that to turn simple , ‘because there is no evidence I don’t believe ‘ into a circular argument.
Choirboy — You are moving the goalposts. I’ll agree there is no scientific evidence for the supernatural, but I never said anything about scientific evidence. There are other kinds of evidence; not just personal testimony, which I’ve already talked about, but also circumstantial evidence. Neither is necessarily “scientific”, but both are admissible in court. Religion and the supernatural both have plenty of evidence in the form of personal testimony (circumstantial evidence, not so much), but you dismiss that evidence because you are convinced that if you, personally, think it’s silly, then it doesn’t count as evidence.
You moved the goalposts in another way when you brought up James Randi’s offer. I don’t think such offers are worth much — I could offer a million dollars for proof that the Earth isn’t flat, and then simply refuse to accept any proof I was given. But that’s not the problem here, the problem is that what we’ve been talking about isn’t proof, but evidence. Of course there is no proof of the supernatural. But neither is there any proof that God or the supernatural do not exist! (I’ll note here that, unlike the Flat Earth theory, the existence of the supernatural does not directly conflict with any scientific experiments or measurements. For that matter, neither do UFOs, which I think are probably just another manifestation of whatever it is we’re talking about when we talk about the supernatural).
To be clear, I do not believe in the supernatural and I am not arguing for it — my only complaint is this claim of “no evidence”, which I think is just wrong. What I’m arguing is that you can’t just dismiss evidence because you don’t like where it leads. If a friend of mine told me he was visited last night by a floating pink unicorn I’d tell him to get to a doctor as fast as possible. But if a hundred thousand people woke up on the same day with the same story that would be different! It would be intellectually irresponsible to just say “floating pink unicorns are silly, therefore there is no evidence, therefore nothing to see here, so go home”. The testimony itself would be evidence of something, and if I didn’t want to believe in the unicorns I would have to come up with an explanation for what else that something might be.
JB I refer you to ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’, Charles McKay.
The ad populum argument is meaningless. Something asserted as evidence with no proof does not magically become evidence when simply multiplied. A thousand times nothing is nothing. Probably millions of people globally at one time would have asserted that ‘Dallas’ was the best drama ever.
“Something asserted as evidence with no proof…”
You are confusing evidence and proof again. Yes, a million people can be wrong, but that’s irrelevant here because we are not talking about whether they are right or wrong, we are talking about whether they have evidence. Proof requires evidence, but you can have evidence without proof (and in fact this situation is extremely common). You seem unwilling to acknowledge this; that false ideas may nevertheless have legitimate evidence in their favor. In fact your basic position seems to be “It isn’t evidence unless I say it’s evidence!” This is a version of the Argument From Incredulity. It will be rejected — and rightly so — by anyone who doesn’t already agree with you, and even by many who do.
You know, if you were to just say there is no scientific evidence for the supernatural I would be totally with you. But I’m not willing to disregard the personal testimony of millions of people because I don’t believe what they are saying can be true. Maybe I’m the one who is wrong! It would be arrogant to set myself up so high that I don’t even need to consider that possibility.
“But I’m not willing to disregard the personal testimony of millions of people because I don’t believe what they are saying can be true.
You were doing OK up to that point. It may be evidence of a sort, but there’s a quality issue you’re missing if you can’t disregard it.