Religion is a universal human practice…but so are fist fights.
Maybe we non-religionists are as hopelessly optimistic in wanting to eliminate the one as we would be if we thought to eliminate the other… But we’d at least like to try to make the point that they are similarly useless to human advancement.
Sure, plenty of scientifically minded people are interested in memetics.
Believers can be proven to exist so we have a data set and therefore something to work with scientifically, even more so than a soft science like sociology. I remained fascinated by what will be discovered. Still, cutting foreskin off of baby penises can remain irrational nonsense and called out as such.
Impossible. Over 50% of people are religious. How is it possible to be 30x as likely as 50%?
It’s not. Please check your facts.
It was one of those Harper’s Index facts. I haven’t found it yet, but I found this:
Which, you’re right, still leaves the claim impossible. I’ll keep digging.
Astrology is also a universal human phenomenon (“universal” as in “pretty much all cultures have it”), but I still casually dismiss it as irrational nonsense. I suspect you do too.
Patheos digs up a figure of about 0.07% of inmates self-report as atheists, which seems like a bit of an outlier.
Townhall laments that non-believers are currently at around 23% (Pew), which of course would include agnostics.
Put these figures together and you have a likelihood of being an atheist in prison of over 300x lower than of being an atheist in society at large.
In that Friendly Atheist (Patheos) post, he got numbers himself, and 161 out of 218177 self-reported as atheists as you say, but an additional 7512 reported as “unknown” and 37139 reported as “no preference.”
Depending on how those unknown and no-preference tallies get counted, the percentage of atheists would be between 0.07% and 20.5%.
Look the fervent following of a sports team is irrational nonsense also (especially if you are a Cubs fan.) Sociologist studying sports fandom is not something that is particularly odd or out of the mainstream. Ditto people studying religion. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an atheist say that the study of religion as a social force is stupid. If a scientist applies for a grant to determine if the Cubs are the best team in baseball though (or any team) - not so good. Ditto about studying God. Hell, we can study Star Trek fandom without having to wonder if the program is factual.
I admit that the Emperor’s Robes can be elegant, complex and even beautiful at times…none of which addresses the point that the Emperor Himself still doesn’t seem to exist.
Actually scientists have lots of beliefs. But good scientists keep these beliefs provisional, and change them with the data. Anyone starting an experiment or a research project has to believe in a given outcome, because they need to set up an experiment around a given hypothesis, and doing it on a hypothesis you have no support for is a waste (unless you are trying to falsify the hypothesis of someone else.)
Here is the difference between science and religion. A religious person who believes against the evidence is said to have faith, and is respected. A scientist who believes against the evidence is a fool and is pitied - think Fred Hoyle.
But that’s the point that I was arguing against - religion is demonstrably not “useless to human advancement”. It clearly offers an adaptive benefit.
Of course, what you were getting at is that religion is useless - or harmful - to human ethical advancement. (Which is also debatable - religions have produced Osama bin Laden and Tomás de Torquemada, but they also produced the Dalai Lama and Dr. Martin Luther King.) But the salient point is that “evolutionarily advantageous” does not mean “ethically good”. Theft and rape are two other behaviors that can be adaptively beneficial, but are certainly ethically wrong.
Nevertheless, it’s simplistic to think religion is stoopid and assume that if people could just give it up, things would be so much better.* If we were all perfectly rational actors, we’d all use birth control, drive the speed limit, and McDonalds would be out of business. Unfortunately, we do have these instincts and drives that sometimes lead to harmful behavior.
Far better, I think, Is to look at how we can modify these drives to produce the behavior that we value. For example, since religion has such a strong effect on in-group bonding, it’s good then to use religion to widen the definition of the in-group - as Jesus did with the story of the Good Samaritan, and Gandhi when he told the Hindu man who was guilt-ridden about killing a Muslim to adopt an orphaned Muslim and raise him or her as his own child - and as a Muslim.
This is where I think science and religion can have a conversation - how do we deal with what is, to create what ought to be?
I do. Again, it’s our overactive agency-detector at work.
Irrational, yes. Cruel and unnecessary, yes. Unethical? I think so. Nonsense? Not from an evolutionary point of view. A circumcised penis is a mark of group identity and a badge of shared experience. Food taboos often work the same way.
Just for the record, I am myself a secular humanist and atheist. But one fascinated by human religious experience.
*(To be fair, I don’t know that you or Czarcasm or anyone actually has such an attitude. I could be warring on straw, here.)
Yet that very thing is at the core of most religions. God loves me and wants me to be rich. God hates me and needs to be appeased. God is indifferent toward me but he will make it rain if I send the right bribe. None of these are uncaring Gods.
As it stands, one of the biggest complaints about religion is its perceived dogmatic intransigence, or the pretzel-lengths that clerics and strong adherents will try to stretch to in order to make their religion workable in the shifting setting of scientific knowledge.
Ironically, this was almost certainly much less of a concern one or two hundred centuries ago, before much in the way of writing. In the old-old-olden days, if a new discovery appeared to be in conflict with the mythos, there were no scrolls to refer to, the shaman could simply revise the telling.
Scientific advancement, or even steady-state maintenance, is pretty darn dependent on writing stuff down. Those written word things have helped us immensely to drag ourselves out of the darkness, now they have become a practical problem for religion, especially when just anyone can examine the scriptures at their leisure and compare notes (cf Scientology’s “trade secrets”). Perhaps we have used religion as a stepping stone, now the whole highway is nicely paved and we no longer need that stepping stone.
I’m reminded of the review of the fellow’s work: “The parts that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.” Yes, religion can be used to benefit society…but the parts that are beneficial aren’t actually the “religious” parts, only the secular social tools, such as ministering, offering charity, coming together as a congregation, and so on. The parts that are formally religious are not beneficial, and, in a great many cases, they are actively harmful, for misleading people into bad actions. (Faith healing, for instance, actually kills people.)
The good parts of religion could every bit as easily be accomplished by a club meeting at a clubhouse. It could be a quilting club, or a glee club, or a motorcycle club. Tacking on the element of religious faith adds nothing useful to the functioning of the group, and in too many cases, it detracts.
Fine, there is subjective knowledge and then there is transmittable/verifiable knowledge. We could add common subjective knowledge. These religionists think they have Knowledge because of their personal, subjective experiences, which includes but is not limited to faith. If one can diagnose these beliefs as rooted in a mental illness, that goes a long way towards undermining their objective credibility. But we often observe them in seemingly sane, functional people, too. What do you make of that? The POTUS is apparently rather religious, and I would be proud to be half as successful as that guy.
I hoped you would post a link to the chapter rather than the wiki on epistemology. But I agree, it is a legitimate field of inquiry. Lemme cut to the chase: in the field of dieties, they really do surpasseth understanding. Let me explain: you want me to explain this or that deity in words. Understand that the step from non-language to words renders impossible the task of expressing any deity accurately. Lemme cut to the chase again: the Taoists are more right than anybody. There is a non-duality experience occupying the space that a god would/could occupy, it isn’t Jehovah or any god but it isn’t precisely not-god either; it can’t be explained.
Language requires differentiation. You automatically don’t get it the moment you resort to language, because non-duality. That’s why any tome of religious writing is prima facie absurd, literally viewed. Same with “a discussion of science and religion with intelligence from both sides”.
I have several very dear friends who hold personal conversations with God, and have a personal relationship with Jesus. I can’t possibly call them “mentally ill” for this. I would, instead, model it as a fairly ordinary self-delusion, a kind of self-sustaining story that they tell themselves, and then believe because they, themselves, have attested to it.
It’s more like a superstition than a serious mental illness.
To me, the dead giveaway is that God and Jesus never tell them anything concrete. Jesus can tell them, “I love you, and died for you to be saved,” but he can’t say, “Your stockbroker is charging too much overhead” or “Don’t take the freeway today, because there will be a crash that blocks traffic.”
My friends accept that Jesus cannot pass a “scientific” test of this sort. He can’t tell them anything independently verifiable. To them, this isn’t even an issue.
To me, it’s a complete show-stopper. An entity that cannot be differentiated from one’s own imagination is of remarkably little interest. To go on to claim that this entity has infinite power and wisdom just makes the mockery that much more hollow. “Hi, I know everything…but I won’t tell you jack squat.”
Some God…
One of the really nerve-grating arguments proposed by the ‘neutral’ ones (i.e. skeptics, agnostics and ‘spiritualists’) is the whole ‘unknowable’ thing. They constantly repeat that our knowledge, senses and faculties are too limited to decisively make up that there is no god.
The thing here, though, is that there are established, examined and proved physical rules that govern the universe. Anything that goes against evidence-based science that has already been proved is simply incorrect, and I do not need to ‘open my mind’ to any number of new ideas and arguments with the premise of expanding my horizons. If electricity works for charging my computer and telephone, then that’s that, and I claim to have the sufficient knowledge in this case to say that electricity is what it is, and what it has been proved to do.
Now, I know for a fact that a human being cannot survive inside a whale, a global flood isn’t possible, a staff cannot turn into a snake, illiterates can’t read, people don’t come back from the dead, and many other fallacies endorsed by every religion.
And since that is the case, and since all of these fallacies are endorsed by these religions as miracles, and bearing in mind the direct and straightforward contradiction of these fallacies with proved and established science and knowledge, I can wholeheartedly state that there is no god, and there can be no god.
Now some wise ass from the neutral school may come up and say that there could be a different version of god (as has been repeatedly debated on this board), and that we cannot rule out god’s existence, but my answer is that the word ‘god’ with all its definitions is inherent to Earth, and that is what we are discussing here. I’m not ruling out that there might be an overwhelmingly powerful cluster of stars out there in the universe influencing its surroundings by means of gravitational pull, but that wouldn’t be a god, with all the various definitions and interpretations of what a god is.
So yeah. A god is as knowable and non-existent as a ghost or the Cottingley fairies are, and for the same reasons.
Here is an interesting link to all the branches of science a person must ignore before they believe in Creationism:
Also, this is a shout out in support of SenorBeef for how he debunked all the propositions for balance made by many on this board.
I’ve had that conversation with a liberal Catholic friend who doesn’t believe in the literal Bible, but still believes it’s inspired, but not necessarily so.
I asked which parts are inspired and how to tell, which he didn’t have a good answer for.
I think this is a poor reason to discount the existence of god. The whole concept of God involves the ability to transcend normal physical laws, which is why these events are considered Miracles instead of just that normal everyday thing that happened yesterday.
Of course, there’s no way to distinguish an official Miracle story from any non-miraculous fictional story, so I don’t give Miracle stories any particular weight.
I don’t think a debate between science and religion could change my current belief that religion is a load of bunk.
However, I must acknowledge that lurking in message board discussions about science vs. Christianity played a huge role in my detachment from the belief system of my youth and adolescence. I was in my mid-20s when I gradually accepted to myself that the Christians’ arguments lacked substance and reason and that for all those years I’d been suckered by a collective delusion.
I suppose if there was a discussion where members of a particular religion showed up to the debate armed with some hard evidence, I might at least give them a fair hearing–though I’d be quite skeptical. But if it is a religion that relies on faith and faith alone, then no.