Also, if you would know anything at all about religion (from context, I assume you mean Christianity), they don't believe that one book trumps all of human science at all -- taking the text literally is a relatively modern take done by very few branches of it, but Catholics were responsible for several huge discoveries in science and science is absolutely in line with the religion (the current Pope has a background in chemistry). The usual direction of religious dogmas is not based directly on the Bible, but on its "interpretation" by the Church, which is evolving.
> The Gnostic gospels were what made the most sense to me so they formed the basis of my belief. That search never stopped and eventually led me to found Cool Magdalene. A cult led by Miss Kitty Stryker. That project is partly an artistic statement, partly a for-profit religious life coaching company and partly an attempt to build diverse communities of respect and dignity based around family in all of its senses.
I don't know if this is what OP was strawmanning about with his "Santa Claus" quip, but I think it's fair to say "founding a for-profit self-described cult / art project" doesn't have quite the same rich tradition as Christianity or other mainstream religions, and might be more deserving of skepticism.
[1] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/explaining-google-c73caa0...
At least that was my upbringing. Wild stories told by dead mean trump science, in spite of any and all evidence to the contrary. It's fun stuff.
I can think of many things on the spot that have the same level of evidence as you have for your $GOD but such a conversation just doesn’t make sense to me. I prefer to spend my time otherwise.
It can be easily put the other way around: to a believer, if someone starts talking that we came into existence from nothingness, then they lose credibility to the former.
Point is, this is not the way to have a discussion.
Why?
Good point, agreed.
> But I have the feeling you’re not asking for an answer?
Why? :)
I believe people believing whatever they want is harmful. I believe you have no right to believe that the earth is flat. I'd love to know if there's a sensible option somewhere between "anyone is free to believe any untrue thing they want" and "thought police".
So perhaps a Christian could convince me, perhaps even a flat earther. It’s just extremely unlikely and they’d better hit me with a good argument in their first sentence because I heard and dismissed many many arguments before.
But you are right, false believes are not harmless, see [0]. But, much like we can either have good encryption OR backdoors, you either have freedom OR you don’t, nothing may be “in between”, criminals using Signal and people thinking wrong stuff is just something that needs to be dealt with differently. (Because we want private communications and we want freedom.)
But I’m about 10% convinced I’ll have changed my mind on this in 5 years.
i think that depends on two things - do you believe objective truths exist, and do you believe society should prefer objective truths over falsehoods? Or in a more abstract sense, should freedom of speech simply allow all speech (and by extension all beliefs) without question, or seek to discriminate truth from speech, as best it can?
"thought police" has a specific malevolent implication meant to equate the authoritative control of certain memes (in the original Dawkins sense) to fascistic thought control but does that implication apply to truth, or only minsinformation?
Again - because Hacker News loves this rabbithole - the assumption here is that truths exist and can be discovered. The infinite nihilistic regress of "but who decides what is is and who watches the watchers" is already discarded, if for no other reason than being uninteresting.
Maybe teaching people the earth is round isn't 'thought policing,' and if it is, maybe 'thought policing' isn't always harmful.
By all means demand falsifiability of any claims to truth, but don't insist that any one of us or all of us collectively are worthy arbiters of truth.
This comes off as hugely apologetic. I’m not sure whether Copernicus would agree with the sentiment.
That is absolutely not true. The 17th century was marked by the transition to the Age of Enlightenment, which carried an anti-anti-intellectual sentiment and thus found itself at odds with Christianity.
This shows your ignorance of History more than anything else.
And it would seem I was taught just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Tolosani
> Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, also says Copernicus was in good standing with the Church when he died. He notes that while heliocentric theory was controversial during Copernicus’ lifetime his work did not cause him any conflict with the Catholic Church.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-an...
The Catholic Church did not take action to ban Copernicus's book until long after he was dead (in 1616, more than 60 years after his death). The usual "Copernicus was fighting against the Church" narrative has no evidence at all.
As another commenter has said, many great scientific discoveries over history have been made by Christians. It would be wrong of me to deny that there is an anti-intellectual strain in Christianity but it is not the dominant trend that American media would like to espouse.
Whether you think Christianity is sensible or not, if someone has made it to Google then they must possess at least some level of intelligence. To change your perspective on that based on previously unknown information about that person highlights a prejudice.
Given that Christianity was the social norm in Europe and many European colonies for centuries, this statement is nearly equivalent to saying that many great scientific discoveries were made by Europeans. It's true, but only slightly interesting.
If this is not intuitive, consider the hypothetical world where no serious scientific contributions were made by christian europeans at all: would we then be free to dismiss that fact as uninteresting as well?
My point is that for most of recorded European history, professing Christian beliefs was the default. Straying too far from Christian ways would have required considerable intellectual effort and have been socially and economically costly. So there should be little wonder that many great European scientists were Christians.
But I don't think the historical facts can be used to draw strong conclusions about scientific or anti-scientific thinking in the population of Christians living in modern secular democracies, as the context is very different.
To make it clear: sometimes I tend to suspect (not believe) that there are some parts of math that we can’t reach, yet or at all, and it has effects which break or create higher-level symmetries and create everything as an imminent result. Think of a monster group as a cute little example of it. That still doesn’t make me think that I’ll be salvaged into paradise if I don’t mastrubate.
Also, I’m not a historian, but wasn’t Christianity the only way to access education back then? That would explain something.
The person you're replying to never equated Santa Claus with any kind god. It was just a question. Would you take an adult insisting Santa Claus is real seriously? Do you think people are entitled to their beliefs, whatever they may be?
No, I wouldn’t take an adult believing in Santa Claus seriously. They’re entitled to their beliefs and if they do their job well then I have no reason to have an issue with them.
The issue I take is with the equivocation they have made. Believing in Santa Claus and believing in a divine entity are two drastically different things.
Or is there a stop? And then what? Your stance creates more questions than it answers while introducing extra, unnecessary parameters.
Why? The only major difference I can see is that Santa Claus is explicitly understood as a made-up story, whereas Gods are believed in by others.
So there's social proof on the side of God, but in terms of tangible evidence they don't seem any different.
Moreover, what is stopping me from defining Santa Claus as a Devine being?
Show me evidence that Santa Clause sent a message to us.
To be pedantic, Santa sends me messages every year through Coco Cola commercials. But I'm going to assume you mean older messages.
Why not?
No. There are stupid people at Google too. It's a company and the hiring bar is high but it's also very specific. You can be an idiot in most things but still be very good at one. I've know a few. At Google.
There have also been hires that were "good demographics." (That's a quote from one of my senior leadership at the time I worked there.) Sometimes you can be rejected by all the interviewers and still make it.
For those who don't believe in religious doctrine, it is the same as believing in fairy tails. They come with equivalent amounts of proof and stand up to the same level of scrutiny.
If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no.
Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.
This doesn't mean it's the right one, but other explanations are inferior. Especially those provided by religions.
The inferior tier is one where an explanation can be proven false with the limited tools of the 2022 version of humanity. Perhaps some religions' explanations fall into this category, but not all.
The major monotheistic religions state that God created and initiated our universe, which does not contradict that a Big Bang happened.
In any case, saying "The Universe always was." or "Time did not exist before the Universe so 'before' is only a term that makes sense inside the Universe, after its creation, and we cannot fathom what is beyond these limits.", is a more satisfying stance for looking at the Universe than first requiring a seemingly infinitely complex being that then created this universe to look like the being is not even required, according to Occam's razor. And it leaves some nice things to be discovered for us too.
I mean, why would I imagine a god building the Himalayas when I have plate tectonics to explain it? Plate tectonics explain it well, and it explains other phenomena, and we can experimentally verify the process. The god hypothesis just leads to infinity more questions, and as such is scientifically unsatisfying.
The god hypothesis generates a huge amount of un-testable hypotheses and suggests that we can simply give up our search for explanations whenever we can use god to explain things. Religion as such demotivates scientific inquiry, and I think it is not far fetched to assume that that was its original intention. Just read some Yuval Noah Harari, we began the scientific revolution when we no longer accepted what the priests told us.
In short, we indeed have no need for the god hypothesis. At least we never have so far, it has never been the simplest explanation for phenomena. God is simply placed into gaps in our knowledge until we fill the gaps (and answer questions), like: "Why lightning?" or "An Eye can never evolve [is irreducibly complex]." or "Why is earth at the center of the universe?". I therefor prefer to extrapolate the solved to the unsolved and believe that questions like "What is consciousness exactly?" and "Can a machine be conscious as we can be?" will also be answerable without invoking any god.
Simple answer: this is a logically contradictory question to ask. It's basically the same as saying: someone baked this piece of bread, then, who baked the baker?
The universe did not always exist, and provably so. The Creator exists outside the realm of His creation, and as such, our laws do not apply to Him.
The very fact that we're having this discussion is proof that God, The Creator, exists.
Secondly, God has sent us many messengers, and provably so. This means that "we have no need for God" assumption is meaningless.
The baker evolved through mutation and natural selection. You envoke an answer outside the provable realm. By doing that you release all bounds. There is no limit to what you can place in that realm.
"The universe did not always exist, and provably so."
Then you are not agreeing with the best of our combined knowledge in knowing for a fact what happened at the very start of the Big Bang? I though we were uncertain up until 10^-38 seconds or so. Did the Big Bang occur in this universe or did it form the Universe? I don't know. Does anyone at this point? Is there any outcome that you would consider an argument against a god? I would not accept the prove of the universe not always existing as proof FOR a god anyway.
"The very fact that we're having this discussion is proof that God, The Creator, exists."
When I look at our DNA, and compare it to every other organism on earth, I see a tree of life, dependencies, common ancestors between species. No proof that a creator exists. I any case, simply stating that anything is proof a creator exist is a bit simplistic right?
"God has sent us many messengers, and provably so."
Could you point me to this proof? Is it a reproducible experiment? Can I do said experiment at home and come to appreciate your point of view?
Could you suggest any experiment that could help me accept that there is a god?
Best available is not proof. The sun rotating around the Earth was also the best explanation for a long time in Human history. Traditional physics theory was the best until we started to observe things at the atomic level. Certitudes in Science don't age well, and should teach humility more than absurd dogma.
One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence. Or prove useful to human existence. The Abrahamic God is a father who shot his wad, abandoned the child, but still demands tribute.
> One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence
Which religions? All of them? Did you study each and every one in detail to be able to make such a claim?
> Or prove useful to human existence
Same question.
> abandoned the child
According to Christianity, but not to Islam or Judaism.
A very common fallacy I see by atheists or secularists when these discussions come up is how they group all belief and faith systems into one thing called "religion", then cast the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, not realizing how easily falsifiable some of their claims are, or how they generalize across that which must not be generalized. You don't have to be an expert about "religions", but don't pretend you're one by the implications you're making.
1. Politically useful sects which demand followers and everyone else accept certitudes based on pure authority.
2. Politically useless to troublesome sects that don't.
The overton window is set such that the second group can't be acknowledged.
Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time.
Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T.
Well, you do the latter of course. So do the events at t0 need to occur for you to observe state T?
Without evidence, that's why it's called faith. There are thousands of unfalsifiable possible starting points, the Judeo-Christian one is laughable.
No one said faith should be based on blind belief. You can most certainly have faith based in evidence. It's not a dichotomy.
The "Abrahamic" faiths have demonstrated themselves, but only one remains uncorrupted: Islam. You can check out provingislam.com for some hard proofs.
The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma.
You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence behind that theory. It is more arrogant to reject the past 100 years of work on cosmology by thousands of scientists.
Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters.
Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.
He is just how we are able to articulate in our language. We are limited, and He chose to reveal Himself using He, so who are we to question?
> or that it has any involvement after creation
Provably false.
We have hard evidence for our belief and faith. Here's a good starting point: www.provingislam.com
That doesn't disprove what it can prove. We know the universe used to be very hot and dense and expanded and cooled.
What I don't buy is that because we don't understand something -- like what came before the big bang -- that it necessarily implies the existence of some old white bearded cishet white male who cares about our day to day lives.
I'm perfectly happy with having absolute uncertainty about what came before the big bang. There doesn't need to be any explanation, and there certainly doesn't need to be a religious explanation.
And there's the straw man. I don't think anyone is arguing for the existence of such.
It seems you have some misguided (and caricaturic) presumptions, but those should not blur your thinking
The fact that we exist necessarily implies a Creator. Just because you're happy putting your head in the sand does not mean that reality will disappear when you do.
I wonder if the person to whom I was originally responding finds your dogmatism as objectionable as dogmatism of a traditionally religious nature.
Science also refers to the theory of gravity, which I would suspect we can agree exists.
The understanding of gravity had a tectonic shift about a century ago. Imagine if scientists declared that Newton's model of gravity was the final word, and that it was heretical to question it. These things are called theories, not facts, for a reason.
Such things happen all the time in the history of science. As another example, think about the phrase "subatomic particle" and the sequence of mistakes that must have occurred to arrive at such wording.
Paradoxically, instead of the history of science inspiring humility, it seems to encourage arrogance among some. Is the ego a friend or enemy of scientific advancement?
Lot of stuff happens, it appears that divine right+monotheism is better than polytheism for population control (reason why and how Islamic faith spread amongst the ruling class of adjacent countries).
The fact that monotheism "is better than polytheism for population control" is a completely orthogonal topic to the truth of the monotheistic claim. This in fact, is a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy.
Your last statement is also a genetic fallacy.
The oldest recorded religion is hinduism. Polytheistic. The second oldest is zoroastrism and is duotheistic. The first monotheistic religion is athenism, based of the egyptian polytheistic faith, then Judaism, which probably is a mix of athenism (in the rites) and a mix of caanism and zoroastrism in the myth (lucifer story especially).
My point wasn't that monotheism is false because its better for population control, my point was it was adopted against polytheist faith and ancestor's cults faith across the word by the local ruling class because it was better at population control. I'm saying nothing about the truth of this particular faith
And i don't understand why my last statement is a genetic fallacy. I find people believing in 100% of the gods (or a deist) more interesting than those believing in one specific god.
I'm going on a tangent here but I will make a bold statement: I think one unfortunate side effect of the sciences, is the acceleration of the demise of other domains of humans knowledge, specifically philosophy.
After all, why bother reading the works of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther or Dietrich Bonhoeffer and compare their arguments against the likes of Nietzsche, Kant and Jean Paul Sartre when we know about Evolution ? Those old ancient texts and discussions are silly and passe.. It is clear that these poor uneducated people were busy arguing over the existence of Santa Clause.
The 21st century has regrettably produced some of the most illiterate minds in _this_ area. We have incredibly bright people who can build complex systems, think logically and excel at sciences, yet they fail at expanding their minds slightly above the materialistic universe; This is where arts, philosophy and theology reside. We call it the realm of transcendence.
The side effect of such phenomena is that bleeds into today's thought process and prevents nuanced discussions regarding any topic (whether it's equality, religion, freedom, justice,..). We have completely forgotten how to form coherent arguments and this thread itself is a great example; The basis of modern discussions boils down to: I can shout the loudest, therefore I am right. The lack of humility is rampant, especially on social media and everything is black and white.
I don't care if you are an Atheist, a Theist, an Agnostic or a Marxist, but if you have the urge to start a discussion with "You think Santa Clause is real", I plead you to think twice before posting it and go read any pages of Francis Shaffer or Soren Kierkeggard and then come here and assert that these people had completely surrendered all thought and reason.
I mean I get that you believe that one book trumps all of human science because you were raised that way but when you grow up your critical thinking skills should kick in. If they don’t, it’s very difficult to keep taking an adult that believes in all kinds of unprovable stuff serious, because where does that end?
When is weird weird enough to be allowed to be publicly rejected every time it’s brought up, according to you?