Well, there is atheism and there is atheism. If, by atheism one means a simple understanding that there is no supreme being who (or that) has undertaken to create or dabble in the affairs of space and time as we recognize them, I would agree with you completely.
If, however, by atheism one means a particular evangelical need to impose one’s own world view that happens to exclude or preclude a belief in such a supreme being on others, then I think you might be mistaken.
Representatives of both traditions of atheisic thought have presented views in this thread.
A major misconception that seems to run through these threads is that non of these religions have the possibility of being true, which they do.
Being unfalsifiable does not make them false, it only makes them unscientific. Therefore one of these supposedly “mythical” views could be true, and they could have incouragible personal experience that leads them to believe this is the case.
Furthermore this whole thread is based on the view that Empricism is the way to knowledge, and I propose that knowledge cannot be know through the senses. There is no way to know if your perception is reality. If your perception is not reality then you must accept your perception as reality on the basis of faith.
For instance take the YEC, they would argue that the Earth is 6-10 thousand years old. You would say this view is contrary to the evidence that exists, they might try to argue (and fail to do so succesfully) that they are right given the evidence. But the TRUTH is they need no evidence, the Earth could be 6-10 thousand years old no matter how old it is perceived to be, due to the posibility of a false perception. I would argue that this person is just as rational, and that a YEC has the equal footing with you, especially if he has had a personal experience that has led him to this view.
Note to Der Trihs on the possible existance of the soul:
You argue that the soul does not exist because on the body exist, this is not an arguement that actually holds water, but is primarily one of circular reasoning.
First of all the mind being a function of the brain does nothing to prove the non existance of the soul, therefore your two sentences are non sequitors not one leading rationally to the next. You are labeling a term that you think doesnt exist and superstition, yet this superstition could exist, you have no proof that it does not exist, you will argue that the burden of proof is on the one who believes it exists, but this is only partially true, because we are argueing posibility not actual existence. Also if one has incouragible data that a soul exist through personal experience it would actually be irrational for him to believe that the soul does not exist. Your accusation of superstition does not cause the soul to not exist if in reality (even if it is not percieved by you) it does exist.-
Seems like some of us, perhaps most of us, are wired for it. As many have mentioned above, the rise of skeptical inquiry has hardly interfered with the concomitant rise of so-called “New Age” beliefs and pseudoscience like homeopathy or perpetual motion scams (see Dr. John Baez’s Crackpot Index for a good chuckle, or a cry, perhaps, when you ponder its necessity).
If all world religions vanished in an instant I’m convinced humanity would reinvent them in short order. One sort falls out of favor for whatever reason, another rises. We’re just primed for pattern recognition, and apophenia is the trade-off for that valuable skill, I suspect. I’m not sure it can be unlearned by those prone to it, and as they are many, there’s no reason to think the tendency will be bred out any time soon.
I have to disagree with this statement. Religion does not “provide simple happy answers.” Sometimes religious people people give out simple happy answers because that’s what they prefer (as do many, religious or not)–but quite often a serious religious faith will require difficult, hard searching that mostly reveals difficult answers. On the whole, serious religion requires constant work, thought, effort and change.
As for the OP, a favorite quote of mine: “…the great underlying principles of faith were brought into bolder relief when the clutter of false notions was removed from around them.” --Henry Eyring
(Though he is speaking of a specific historical event, it of course applies to all times.)
It’s easy to get distracted by people yelling about evolution or whatever, but those aren’t usually the great underlying principles of faith. Religion tries to answer the great metaphysical questions–not, generally, empirical ones–such as what reality truly is, what God wants of us, how do I need to live my life, what will make people virtuous/happy, how should we treat other people (also creatures and the world), what kind of society should we build to live in…and so on.
That depends on what you mean by “true.” Specific supernatural claims are treated with a great deal of skepticism (and rightly so) but I don’t think it’s true that most of the non-theistic posters on this board tend to aver categorically that there is no possibility that God can exist or that specific religions cannot possibly have any “truth” value in more abstract or less literal ways.
More than a few supernatural claims are falsifiable and have, in fact, been falsifed. Supernatural claims which are untestable don’t have to be scientifically falsified in order to be assumed impossible or at least so astronomically unlikely as to warrant no serious consideration. There are literally an infinite number of unfalsifiable “possibilities” and no rational basis for preferring one over another.
In other words, they believe it because they believe it. It’s self-confirmed, a priori and circular. While I have no doubt that these kinds of subjective and life-informing exoerience really do occur, I always have to wonder why they always occur only in a fashion that the believer would already expect. They occur in all cultures and all religions. People have subjectively persuasive, personal experiences of Hindu and African tribal deities just as often as they have experiences of Jesus. In ancient times, people had experiences of Zeus and Isis. I wonder why they never had experiences of Jesus if Christianity is really the true religion. Why is it that only people who have already heard of Jesus ever have Christian religious experiences?
Your point is taken, though, that much religious conviction is definitely shaped by the “religious experience,” no matter how culturally shaped those experiences may be.
Your premise is false. Empiricism is not presumed to be “the way to knowledge” in an absolute sense. It’s simply a method for discovering what can be known empirically.
This is true as far as it pertains to their own beliefs.
No. This person has not arrived at his belief by any rational method. He has been persuaded by factors that do not pertain to reason. To say that it’s rational to believe one’s own self-generated, internal “experiences” even when they are contrary to concrete, observable reality is to render the words “rational” and “reality” meaningless.
“Souls” are superfluous and illogical concepts. It is a demonstrable fact that all consciousness, sensory perceptions, memory, emotions and even religious experiences are provably physiological phenomena. None of those things can continue to exist outside of the brain any more than the light of a lightbulb can continue to exist after the bulb is broken. The “mind” is created by the brain. No living brain = no “mind.” You might try to argue that the “soul” contains all those properties as well, but my question in that case would be why do we need a brain then?
There is also the question of how a “soul” can exist without any material substance. What is it made of? Where is it located in the body? How does it move and perceive and think outside of the body? How do you know you don’t have 20 souls in your body instead of one? Can you prove that you don’t? Can you prove that you’re not in the Matrix? “You can’t prove it’s NOT true” is simply not a very persuasive line of argument. There are an infinite number of things which can’t be disproven. I think your post does a good job of answering the OP, though. As the saying goes, you can’t reason people out of beliefs they were never reasoned into.
You’d think so, but I know young (19-year-old) Christians who tell anecdotes about having seen possession and Godly intervention. Their stories are ridiculous, but they keep straight faces. They really believe it happened, and they regularly interpret neutral stimuli as having religious meaning. What I find sad is the way they use their belief system to give credit for every poignant thought, question, statement or belief to God and deprive the individual of the credit they’re due. One in particular is always talking about how God “spoke through” someone who was asking him if he was sure he really wanted to smoke pot. No, dude, that guy asked you if you were sure because he wanted to know that he wasn’t unintentionally pressuring you into doing something you don’t want to do.
“Possible” in the sense it’s possible I’m actually a 3 headed dragon in fantasy universe hallucinating I’m a human in a technological one, yes.
Occam’s Razor; it’s the simplest explanation for the consistancy of the world.
If perception is not reality then perception isn’t reality, faith or no faith.
You can argue that, but you’d be wrong.
No, it’s based on the principle that it’s the logical burden of believers to prove something exists, not me to prove a negative.
It proves that the soul is unnecessary; there’s no rational reason to believe in one.
You may be, I’m not.
Except that “personal experience” is unreliable by your own admission. It’s not evidence of anything objective. And what’s “incouragible” supposed to mean ?
Obviously.
A self bestowed title that makes me rather doubt you have a clue about reality.
My answer to the OP is that people tend to preserve their religious beliefs in the face of empirical challenges in one of two ways:
They find a way to incorporate this new data into their belief system in a fashion which does not interfere with core conviction. Evolution would be a perfect example of this. If Biblical literalism or adherence to a literal belief in any other myth about the origin of humans is not central to their core beliefs then evolution presents no problem. There are lots of myths which can be adapted as allegorical, metaphorical or parabolic without threatening central convictions about the existence of God, etc. This is a method which works just fine and can even strengthen faith. There are lots of people who view evolution itself as a work of God (which isn’t to say that they necessarily believe that evolution is “guided,” only that God at least set it motion knowing where it would lead).
They deny it. They retreat into emotionally defensive and hostile positions and states of mind. They blame the messengers for news they don’t want to hear. They may believe that Satan is trying to trick them. They try to persuade others to take their side, oftentimes even if they have to lie to do it. Again, evolution is the perfect example of this. I think that this kind of response comes about when a core belief (like Biblical literalism) is threatened. If they are emotionally invested in the perceived authority of a written book, and that perceived authority is threatened, they begin to feel groundless and unprotected and so react with anger, denial, etc. I don’t this kind of response is successful for very long. It may last awhile but eventually, over successive generations, reality becomes accepted. It occurs to me that the process might even be similar to the so-called “seven stages of grief.” First comes shock, then denial, then…let me check…hey, the third stage is bargaining. I think a case could be made for the ID movement fitting that stage. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t want to get too up my ass with this analogy. I’m just tired.
As long as there are mysteries in life their will be sciences of epistemology. And whether you would care to admit it, religion is a science. It offers answers, but more than that, a methodology in areas that science refuses to address. Science will answer the mundane, religion will always answer the mystery. They are really complementary. This constant suppression of the flip side of the coin around here is frankly disheartening. They both are useful and attend man.
Not even close. Religion is based on faith and irrationality, science on facts and logic.
It offers wild guesses and delusions, in areas that either have no knowable answers, or no meaningful ones.
In other words, religion just makes things up. There’s no evidence anything but the “mundane” even exists.
No they are opposites. Religion is ignorance/madness/stupidity/corruption; science is knowledge/rationality/intelligence/growth.
Ah, how typical. No matter how much power they have, the religious are always oppressed. Have the mods been banning religious posters, or does Cecil just send thugs over to break the believer’s kneecaps ?
9-11, the Crusades, anti-semitism, the oppression of women, witch burnings, burkhas; yup, lots of useful things from religion - if you’re a masochist.
Greetings, Evolutionary Sceptic, and welcome to the Straight Dope. That’s a rather ambiguous username you have chosen there - I assume that you are skeptical about Darwinism rather than a skeptic who is also a Darwinist. I’m sure we and Talk Origins can help you with your [symbol]Skepsis[/symbol] (skepsis - “inquiry”).
You can go right ahead and draw such an equal footing of rationality, but note that all kinds of things then demand an equal footing also: the schizophrenic who perceives God literally speaking the words “Kill her. Kill her. Do it.”; the Flat Earther; the solipsist; even the Holocaust Denier. If Young Earthism is rational because of the possibility of false perception, so are all these, agreed?
I think that this a philosophical dead end. Of course it’s possible to debate whether each person’s experiences represent “true” reality, or to deny that we can ever find “true” reality, but to deny the evidence of our senses is, ah, nonsensical. They are the only method we have of perceiving the world (even so-called mystical methods of experience, such as out-of-body experiences, are invariably perceived in ways that are analagous to sensory perception), and to claim that they do not offer a way to find truth is not, I think, realistic. What other method of perception would you suggest we use to find truth; if it is anything based on receiving information of any kind, it must work through the senses.
Which means science can’t really address the issue at all. It can only deal with the physical body. That makes your post not only wrong but irrelevant to the post you responded to. The truth is some folks believe in an after life and some don’t, and we can’t prove it one way or the other. We’ll know when we get there, or we’ll just cease to exist and it won’t matter.
Because the world is made up of a wide variety of people who each must make their own journey and their own choices about what they believe and when they change their beliefs. There are a lot of emotional forces at work that move people to cling to certain things.
The open exchange of ideas and information is one way to move things along. That means respectfully allowing the individual to choose once the exchange is through rather than making it some kind of contest.
We have to make some judgement call on what we consider reasonable in our quest for the truth about our world and who we are, who God is, if God is, etc.
People cling to religious beliefs for emotional reasons more than they do spiritual experiences or insight {myself included} Part of our search for the truth means being able to see those emotional reasons and let go of them. It isn’t always easy or pleasant. Arguing that the world is only 6000 years old is not rational IMHO. The spiritual principles that are important in Christianity have nothing to do with how old the earth is. It’s reasonable to be skeptical of what science says and that’s reasonable but to pull a number from someones interpretation of an old book and argue it as fact is missing the point of the spiritual journey. It’s not about the physical.
The novel Oryx and Crake explores precisely this hypothesis. A mad scientist genetically engineers human DNA into an entire race of intelligent humanoids. He designed them with all kinds of genetic modifications to improve what he saw as the flaws in humanity.
He had found the gene that causes religion, so he carefully spliced it out of the new human race. He designed them to never think of anything religious. Then when they escaped into the wild, they made friends with a regular human. They knew he was not like them, he had much more knowledge about everything in the world. He went away on a trip for a few weeks. When he returned, they’d made an effigy of him because they missed him and wanted to get him back. They were carrying out rituals in front of his effigy.
Atwood was saying religion is something too deep in humans to eradicate even with genetic engineering.
So the unfounded assertions you have been making throughout this thread are, then, religious in nature rather than scientific?
I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss rationally whether “the supernatural” has any place in a modern understanding of That Which Is (hang whatever term you wish on it), and whether myth and ritual have significant parts to play in life.
What I’m getting is dogmatic assertions that religious beliefs are claptrap because they posit entities and phenomena that don’t fit into the worldview of Materialist Rationalism. To me this sounds suspiciously like fundamentalist theology rejecting the evidence for the Big Bang, chemical evolution, and modern evolutionary theory because they fail to fit into the doctrinal picture they have created and cling to.
Dogmatic assertions have no place in a rational discussion, except as something to be examined for their (in)validity. On either side.