This is a tangent from the “atheist president” thread. I initially titled it “…whether God exists” but I didn’t want to get into issues of a deist God who sets the clockwork in motion and then withdraws.
So I’m talking about the kind of religion the majority of Americans believe in. I think by a reasonable evidentiary standard, there is no evidence for their metaphysical claims; and at the same time, compelling anthropological and psychological explanations for why Judeo-Christian mythology came into being and became so pervasively adopted into Americans’ worldviews.
To be right means you’re creating the best understanding of an issue or thing that one can have based on the information we have available about that thing. Any specific flavor of god is clearly not the best understanding we have for reality nor is it based on the best information, so you can toss aside the “can’t prove a negative” nonsense and pretty clearly say that they’re not right. If they were right, it would have to be the weirdest coincidence ever.
Those Christians who are educated and wise hold a system of belief that isn’t falsifiable. They have moved past their less sophisticated brethren who still hold to a 6,000 year old earth. (Not to mention the Flat-Earthers who still exist.)
A system based solely on faith, which does not make appeals to the physical universe, is going to be “impossible to settle.” Is God “one” or is God “three?” Nobody knows. Nobody can know. You get to believe whatever you want, and nobody can say otherwise.
A system based on faith, but which makes appeals to the physical universe, is at risk of being demonstrated wrong. “For behold! I can juggle rattlesnakes, and not get bitten! …Ouch!”
I recall one of Carl Sagan’s books, I think it was The Demon-Haunted World, where he had a conversation with the Dalai Lama, a very open-minded fellow, and got him to concede that if reincarnation were ever disproved, then, yes, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change.
“But,” he added, chuckling, “it will be very hard to disprove reincarnation.”
I hold that Senor Beef is right, and “you can toss aside the ‘can’t prove a negative’ nonsense”. Otherwise, one might as well say that it’s reasonable to believe that Tolkien’s Middle-Earth exists somewhere. You can’t prove it doesn’t!
But okay, then, how about we lay it out Rahmbo style. Never mind the endless parsing of what constitutes “proof”: to believe it does exist, given the full portfolio of evidence available to an educated denizen of the 21st century, is on some level “fucking retarded”, no matter how much intelligence and good judgement an individual may display in a wide array of other areas.
We observe what happens in the natural world and formulate explanations for them. Is the explanation specific to the thing we’re trying to explain? Is all we know congruent with that explanation? Has the explanation made predictions about the behavior or nature of that thing? Is the explanation consistent with things we know about the universe?
Explanations should not be arbitrary. If you can replace an explanation with an equally arbitrary explanation and still have the same level of merit, then the explanation lacks explanatory power. If one person says that thunder is caused by god being angry and roaring, and another says that thunder is caused by the battle clashes of giants under the surface of the earth during storms - both of those are explanations with equal merit. There’s no reason to pick one over the other. So they have poor explanatory power.
Any particular religion is in the same boat. It’s an arbitrary explanation that could be altered without changing the merit of the explanation, and therefore it lacks explanatory power. If it’s correct, it’s essentially by sheer coincidence. It can be dismissed as an explanation because it has no more explanatory power than any other.
Whether that means it’s “right” or “wrong” can get caught up in a stupid semantics battle - and religious people love stupid semantic battles since they can’t argue on merits - but practically speaking, “this is God and here’s his story and here are his rules” has equal merit with “a wizard did it”, and it can safely be discarded as a useless explanation as it lacks explanatory power.
This is true, but unfortunately the possibility of “magic” is inherent in the issue. TO deny it from teh start is to beg the question.
So, yeah, short of having God appear in person and smiting all the atheists and believers in other religions, it is impossible to settle this at an epistemological level. As a pragmatic judgement, though, I think we can fairly say that it does not seem worthwhile to believe, and there is certainly no compelling (or even persuasive) evidence for Christianity’s truth. These days (as opposed to times when science had not advanced nearly so far) it is an extravagant and unnecessary hypothesis.
I think we can quite reasonably say that, taken literally, the Bible is wrong on the majority of issues it attempts to be an authority on. We can also say fundamentalist Christians are more or less wrong.
But, as has been mentioned, some forms of Christianity evolve (or retreat) to ensure they don’t make claims that can be easily disproved. Personally, I think that if you evolve/retreat far enough that your beliefs are compatible with science, you’re not a Christian in any meaningful sense. But that has been contested in this very forum.
So it depends on what form of Christianity you’re talking about, and what you accept as Christianity in the first place.
I see a time, not anytime soon though, when supernatural beliefs of any kind will be considered the fringe, and Christianity will be as much “settled” as worship of Quetzalcoatl or the Zucchini Lord Of Armpitland.
Since you put it in quotes, I assume that you are quoting Rambo or some other great thinker. Insofar as you are making this description of believers your own, might I suggest that adults do not refer to those who think differently from them as “fucking retarded”? You are of course entitled to think whatever you like about me and my ilk, but please don’t drag people with cognitive disabilities into it.
The question you seem to have offered for debate is “aren’t people who believe in God stupid?” This seems less like posing a question for discussion than an invitation for others to agree with you (and is hardly a new and fascinating subject for this board), so I will leave it to them.
That seems to be the liberal Christians greatest strength (if you can call it that). The less they say, the more vague they say it, and the more they keep their specific beliefs and revelations “personal” the better they can avoid criticism.
It is easy to settle if Christians are right - all Jesus has to do is descend as promised.
Since he is unwilling or unable to do so (being dead) we need to use the standard methods, which is looking for predictions of Christianity and seeing if they are falsified. We find that most of the verifiable ones are either pending or disproved. Not only did Jesus not return, the writer of Matthew based a significant fact on a mistranslation from the Hebrew.
I understand that moderate Christians reinterpret the Bible as new data comes in. But Vader killed Luke’s father too. And there are often scientists who resist the facts based on their preconceptions (like Fred Hoyle) and they don’t even have a church behind them.
Yeah, but what about that picture of Jesus on the piece of toast, or that image of Mary in the drainage water by that interstate overpass? Huh?? How is that not proof??
Not long ago there was another thread in which the OP made a virtually identical claim, though he claimed that it applied to all religions. I asked what specific evidence from anthropology, psychology, etc… he was referring to and didn’t get an answer. Perhaps you’ll have one.
Is that your way of acknowledging that you don’t actually have any of the “compelling anthropological and psychological explanations” that you claimed to have in the OP?
There have been hundreds or more religions that have been followed in human history, most of them are contradictory with one another. So practically only one can be right. And yet all those other wrong religions were followed by people who lived their lives by their creed, spent their lives worshipping those gods, constructing great works to them, and everything else that people do when they follow a religion. People have dedicated their entire lives to those religions, which, even a religious person would acknowledge are baseless.
Clearly forming religions is part of the psychological nature of humanity.