Written last night, during the posting problems, now submitted:
What I mean is, whenever atheists wax eloquent about how dumb theists are, never having questioned the religion they were indoctrinated in from birth, they cannot explain why anyone raised atheist would become religious. IME they simply do not know how to explain or process it. It doesn’t fit in the “they were raised that way” category, so it is often ignored, even though more and more church-goers are converts. The argument is becoming more irrelevant every year, and yet it keeps going, without any further thought.
Well, I don’t know a lot of Fundamentalists, myself. However, I was not referring to people raised in churches, who then went through a period of apathy. I was thinking of people who were never taken to church by their families and were raised in no faith whatsoever. I do not, for example, count my friend who was raised sort-of Catholic and who became evangelical in adulthood in that number. Her husband, raised atheist and whose family is still annoyed with him for his conversion (prior to meeting her), I do count. (He’s a very intelligent software engineer, btw.)
The usual method is to dismiss all adult converts as “stupid” or “illogical,” without counting the ones who are, say, intelligent and voracious readers, or who are standing up to tremendous personal pressure, or whatever. The characterizations I see rarely match the people I know, and so I wonder about that gap. All it comes down to is that “religion” = “automatically stupid,” which strikes me as a less than informed or nuanced view.
Atheists get tired of watching religion spread misery, ignorance, irrationality and death. Dawkins, of course is a scientist, something innately hostile to religion whether the scientist wants it to be or not, or is religious himself or not. He is also no doubt tired of the constant attacks by religion on evolution…
If faith has positive aspects, they are massively overshadowed by the negative one.
I think Dawkins goes wrong right at the beginning when he mis-defines "delusion:
I understand a “delusion” to be a mistaken belief due to faulty or deceptive evidence, not a total lack of evidence of any kind. (For what it’s worth, the Wikipedia article on delusion defines it thusly:
If a person is deluded, there’s someone or something doing the deluding, something leading them astray. If you’re going to claim that people who believe in religion are wrong to do so, you have to show why their evidence is faulty, not just claim that they have no evidence.
And let me say something about the word “evidence.” If you think of “evidence” as a scientist or a lawyer would—as something that will convince a skeptic of some truth within a particular formal system, in which both are playing by the same ground rules—then I’ll grant that there is a lack of such evidence for God. But there are other things that people believe, often for good reasons, because of evidence: things like, “My SO loves me,” or “This is a great work of art,” or “That politician is a scumbag,” or “That thing I remember from yesterday really happened; I wasn’t just dreaming or hallucinating it,” or “Honesty is the best policy,” or “Life is worth living.” I might have evidence that makes it reasonable for me to believe these things without having the kind of evidence that could prove them to a skeptic.
Sure we do. There are many reasons someone raised without religion (or with a different religion) could later take up the faith. Off the top of my head;
Like Diogenes said, they could just have fallen for the “scam” (I mean no disrespect, I just can’t think of an appropriate, less harsh word) of religion. And you don’t have to be stupid to fall for something.
People find religion gives them a sense of comfort; i’m sure it can be very helpful to believe in a god watching over you. It’s certainly understandable that people would prefer to believe in something that gives them something back.
It’s possible there’s some biological component; maybe the “religious experience” part of the brain is triggered due to age or some event you go through, starting the whole thing off.
And, of course, the obvious reason; they’re actually correct, and their religion is the true one.
I’d appreciate less of your condescension, though. “Athiests aren’t able to understand or even compute people going back to religion” does make us out to be pretty stupid (as well as open the door for a claim of "Athiests don’t believe in gods because they can’t understand them, a nasty suggestion).
I seem to recall somewhere in Dawkin’s book that he said “God cannot be disproven YET.” I believe he is leaving open the possibility that a god proof could move from the realm of philosophy into science, given enough progress.
Perhaps you are using the wrong senses. Using an appropriate technology, we can verify without a shadow of a doubt, in an experiment repeatable by anyone, that air exists.
I can’t detect light with my ears or sound with my eyes, either, but that’s because they are not designed to detect it.
I guess it depends on who you’re talking to, but I think many people who have no belief in the supernatural try not to assume anything in the absense of even the possibility of those assumptions being challenged on an evidential basis. In other words, we might simply deem arguments about the intent of the supernatural forces not so much wrong as without arguable content of any kind, and hence unfit for consideration except when imposed upon us. Of course, this opens up the epistemic can-o-worms, the “define evidence” argument, which I conclude is one of the greatest acts of philosophic obscurantism ever foisted on the human mind. If we can just, for once in this life, dispense with cryptoreligious sophistry, designed to deny human beings the privilege of exercising coherent and consistent thought by dynamically redefining “reality”, rather than having to confront the natural world as it is, and all that verifiably is; if we can just do that, you’ll see what I mean.
You cab do all that and more. You can burn it and take it into contituant parts. Do that with god. Dawkins isnt new but our highjacked religions being used for violence and war ,should make proponents question the idea of faith. It is demeaning and destructive. Religion has no redeeming factors.It keeps people stupid and incurious.If it wasnt dangerous ,it would be a joke.
Ah, but even if that’s true (which I don’t think it is, btw) that’s not what you said your objection was. You said: “All good so long as they all accept the rules of secular plurulistic society, and do not impose their particular belief or non-belief down others’ throats. And in this regard Dawkins seems nearly as annoying as a Christian Evangilst.” So, what rules of a pluralistic society does he not accept and how is he trying to cram something down other peoples’ throats? He writes books and gives lectures, so don’t buy his books and don’t go to his lectures.
I have no intention of being condescending; I’ve simply been describing something I’ve seen over and over again on these boards. This thread is the first time anyone has even tried to answer the question when I’ve asked it. Usually I get “I can’t explain that one.” It’s just a gap I’ve noticed, and every so often wondered why.
And, I don’t suppose atheists can understand gods, but then, neither can anyone else, so I guess I don’t see why that would even be a point of discussion. Isn’t part of the idea of a god that it would be something so much larger and more intelligent/present/overwhelming than ourselves that we could not comprehend its entire nature?
If you take Occam’s Razor literally, religion has a simpler explanation of the world around us than science does. It’s a lot easier to explain gravity as the will of God than to prove how it works scientifically, for example.
Oh, I know what you mean. But the argument about the nature of reality are what this debate is all about. Thinking logically requires a person to first chuck their religion out the window, the very definition of begging the question.
I totally agree about the intent of the supernatural not having arguable content; religion and science should not mix. But because they operate by totally seperate rules, they’re really invulnerable to each other.
You completely misread it. If I have two models that describe a system with equal ability, and one is simpler, then the simpler one is to be favored. That’s the Razor, in a nutshell. The key to the Razor’s applicability is the “all else being equal” component, which can hardly be said of a comparison between your typical mythical cosmololgy and General Relativity. Just because something is, at first blush, anyway, easier to understand (and the relative ease of comprehension is likely to vary wildly from individual to individual) has precisely zero bearing on its ability to accurately describe or explain. If one places no value in accuracy, of course, which appears to be how your defining the argument, I think the Razor is just as irrelevant, as it’s only a rule of thumb potentially useful to those who are winnowing the list of accurate descriptions.
Here’s an at home experiment for you; week one, exclude god from your life, week two exclude this so called ‘air’ from your life. Report back with the results…
People have honestly said “I can’t explain that one”? I always assumed the people who post in GD have too large an ego to admit to not knowing something (myself included).
Well, that’s the problem. The argument that says “Athiests just don’t understand God” works just as well for theists as it does for athiests; we’re all human, after all, and are subject to roughly the same errors. Anyway, since you seem to have accepted that athiests (at least me, anyway) can think about reasons for becoming religious, it’s a moot point.
You’re right to some extent, in that if you said “inventing an entirely new theory about mass and so forth is much less simple that just saying “A god did it””, you’d be right. But the theory of gravity now has so much evidence, and a considerable lack of evidence for any other theory explaining it, that it is now a simpler reason. Add to that that you’re not saying “a god”, but “God”, and thus you’re bringing in all the complex reasoning for and against that specific deity. So now it’s more of a question of “Which is more simple; a theory with an abundance of clear evidence for it, based on observable facts, or the idea that the Christian God exists and has chosen to impose gravity on us” - and out of those two, i’d say Occam’s Razor would lead us to the first choice.
“Goddidit” actually introduces a much more complex component than the universe itself which would require far more explanation than the universe itself. “Magic” is not a simpler answer just because it’s quicker to say. Unecessary magical sky gods fail the Razor miserably.
Yes, except IIRC it was in IMHO and the Pit. Twice that I can specifically recall; other times it’s just been ignored.
I’ve never heard the argument “atheists just don’t understand God.” It seems a dumb one to me. Of course I think that atheists can think about reasons for becoming religious; it just seems to me that they often do not. There’s this automatic definition of “religious” as “indoctrinated from the cradle and unthinking” which is brought out all the time (both by Dawkins, and by Dopers), but which does not take certain realities into account. I only want to ask why that might be.
