I’m not much of a debater, but i do want to get some of the dopers’ inputs. Do any of you think that using “Religion is an invention” is an effective argument for not believing in a god or gods? Because if it is an invention, to you or not, do you think that it could be considered obsolete nowadays?
Calling anything “invented” makes it sound like somebody created something out of thin air that didn’t previously exist. In using that word you seem to be branding religion (which one, all of them?) as counterfeit because it was just fashioned by the minds of ordinary men. While I would agree with you if we are talking about L. Ron Hubbard, I might be less quick to agree if we’re talking about Hinduism, if only because the date of the “invention” is shrouded in the murky depths of the ages.
So, no it’s not much of an argument. Religion is difficult to debate using pure logic (not that many of us don’t try anyway) and probably best left to philosophers and other pontificators.
But hey, this is great debates. Why not try it and see what happens?
There is no effective argument for not believing in a deity if you’re talking to a religious person. Religion is not based on logic, but on faith.
Be that as it may, your statement that religion is an invention is entirely correct. Religion was created by man for several reasons. First, religion conveniently explains natural phenomenon, personal disaster and coincidence.
Secondly, man’s ego refuses to accept that death might be the end of a person’s existance. It is hard for some to think that a dead loved one is gone forever, or that they themselves will entirely cease to be once they draw their final breath: thus, the concept of an afterlife.
Third, it gives some a sense of purpose. For those with empty lives, religion can supply a sense of direction or the comfort of thinking that “God has a plan” and all one has to do is wait for it to be revealed. Also, bad experiences can be more easily endured if one believes that they will be rewarded if they respond to hardship properly.
Fourth, there is a comfort in believing one is being watched over and tenderly cared for by a deity who protects and guides his followers. “Giving it over to God” is very stress-relieving. If one believes that God will solve all of their problems, and all they have to do is submit to his will, there’s less worry.
Fifth, there is grim pleasure in believing that wrongdoers will be eventally punished, if not in this life, then the next. (And, according to the Christian Bible, those in heaven will be able to watch the torment of those who were bad.) Nothing is more frustrating than seeing the wicked flourish while the good suffer and struggle. Believing that the scales will eventually be balanced gives some a needed sense of justice.
Great post, Lissa!
Religious figures were involved in the discipline that became known as science. So is science an invention of an invention?
I don’t think so; even if religion is artificial (that is to say entirely the creation of humans, rather than having been handed down by [insert name of deity]), it could still be argued that religion is an invention created to describe the reality of [insert nature of spiritual beliefs], just like the terminology and symbology of mathematics is an invention created to describe the reality of numeric principles.
Depends entirely on your definition of obsolete - if you mean obsolete=‘no longer useful’, you might have the basis of an argument (although good luck convincing anyone), if you mean obsolete=‘no longer in use’, you’d simply be wrong.
Just out of interest, why are you searching for an effective argument for not believing in a god or gods? - surely if you don’t personally believe, you already are convinced of such an argument? Either that or the argument is not necessary.
I beg to differ.
Speaking of logic, you have just presented a false dichotomy. It is not the case that logic and faith are opposites, nor is it the case that logic and faith (if by faith, you mean revelation) are the only two epistemologies.
That is another logical fallacy, in this case equivocation. The sort of religion you are describing here is not even faith-based; it is derived from induction, which is one form of logic. People conclude, based upon empirical observation, that a phenomenon is supernatural because they cannot account for it naturally. That is not faith. It is merely the assignment of some unknown to a default classification. It is no different than a scientist speculating about the goings-on inside a singularity. By definition, a singularity has no knowable attributes, and therefore anything said about it is sheer wild guessing. Note that your equivocal use of the term religion does not even fit the standard common definition. You are describing something that is somewhere between “natural religion” (op. cit.) and superstition. Religion is a subjective moral discipline, as opposed to theology, which is an objective philosophy concerned with God’s ontology, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics.
That is an obvious non sequitur. If man’s ego were incapable of refusing to accept death as an end, then there would be no atheists. Besides, as Cecil himself has said, not every religion even believes in an afterlife.
You don’t need religion for that. Every stock market investor understands that risk and struggle can reap great rewards or punishments, and savvy investors are willing to undergo temporary setbacks because of an overall faith in the market’s resilience. There are atheists here at Straight Dope who have outright rejected the notion that they have no sense of purpose. Since a person may be comforted by innumerable things other than a plan of God, it makes no sense to single out faith as something invented for the purpose of comfort. Finally, any person of good character understands that a proper response to hardship will result in personal edification. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but it is a commonly stated sentiment nonetheless.
That’s nothing but a rehash of number three.
Are you saying that atheists are murderous barbarians who reject any need for a sense of justice? Incidentally, your interpretation of the scripture (which you failed to cite) is Neanderthal in its conception. It is not the story of someone who was “bad”, but of someone who by his own uncoerced volition chose an earthly life of wealth over eternal life with God. In what you call the “Christian Bible”, niether the Father (John 5:22) nor the Son (John 8:15) judge anyone at all. Rather, every man decides for himself whether he finds God’s objective standard acceptable (John 12:48). Freewill means freewill. God does not equivocate.
And God is not about genies who grant wishes or men behind curtains who make fire. God is about morality — an objective appreciation of the aesthetic called “goodness”. Love is the facilitation of that goodness, and sin is its obstruction. Love and sin are opposites. Whether a man dresses in religious garb or quotes scriptures or abstains from sex has nothing to do with whether he is good or bad. If a man feeds starving children just to glorify himself, then he is committing sin. And if a man sucks on a penis to express love, then he is doing a Godly act. Nor is God about the intellect, but rather about the heart (cf definitions 3a, 5a, 5b, and 9). An atheist who loves is close to God, while a theist who does not is far away from Him.
Great post, Liberal!
As Mangetout mentions, that “religion” is a cultural artifact, developed out of a sociological/psychological dynamic, just in and of itself says little about the existence or nonexistence of deities or a supernatural plane or The Transcendent. The way believers in a particular religion may denounce others as being “false religions”, you could have a situation in which all Religion-As-We-Know-It is “false”, but the “godhead” may be still out there awaiting for humanity to figure it out. This would probably entail that said godhead might as well be a philosophical-discussion place-holder, but yes you could philosophically hypothesize on the existence and nature of a transcendent plane even in the absence of RAWKI, and could not declare its existence absolutely disproven, but just lacking in evidence.
Liberal, good post. Sometimes people forget that religion, even as a sociocultural expression, need not be limited to (a) myths about how the universe came to be and works and (b) social-control codes of conduct (*). And sadly, some of the worst perpetrators of that simplification happen to be the religious themselves.
jrd
(*Oh, and of course, that there’s more to religion than only the three Abrahamic monotheisms)
The difference being that scientists try to prove and disprove theories and “guesses”. Religion tend to shy away from such tests. Whereas sceince is constanty refining itself, dismissing outdated or disproven ideas, religion clings to them in the face of contrary evidence. Spend some time arguing with a Creationist. In the end, it all has to boil down to their faith or beliefs because their views can have no other support.
I didn’t say that every single human being is the same. Some are more enlightened. Some are more bound by fears. Some find the concept of non-existance after death to be horrifying, while others find it comforting.
However, I stand by my assertion that the concept of an afterlife has roots in man’s belief that he is too special or important a being to completely vanish after death. Even the Eastern religions cited by Cecil have a concept of a “soul”, even if it has no specific individuality. I’d like to see a cite of a religion which believes, “you’re dead-- that’s it.” All religions seem to have something going on after death.
Yes, I understand that not every person is the same. I did not intend to imply that everyone is succeptible to the same fears and needs, if that’s how you read it.
It’s my opinion that this is one of the stupidest sentiments people toss around.
I’ve recently had a personal tragedy in my family, and I sure as shit don’t feel a bit “stronger” for it. I didn’t “learn” anything from it except that sometimes life really sucks. Personal edification . . . Christ almighty. What doesn’t kill us sometimes maims and scars us for life. Perhaps if I had religious faith to believe that I’d eventually be rewarded for remaining decent throughout this tragedy, I might feel a little better.
Not “any” sense of justice, just that they’re not counting on eternal justice to set things straight. Which means, of course, that one has to be able to accept that sometimes people do get away with murder.
I did not “interpret” that story in any fashion. I merely stated that according to that scripture, those in heaven are able to watch the torment of those in hell. I did not say who would be sending them there, or whether or not the rich man deserved his punishment.
Your religious views are not shared by everyone. For some, Christianity is a religion of rules and God is extremely concerned with man’s compliance with every letter of the law.
I want to state that I am not ignorant of the Christian Bible’s teachings. I went to Christian school for five years, where the Bible was treated as a text book. I’ve read it many times, and can quote long passages from memory. The reason I felt compelled to say this is because I don’t want you to think that I’m an “outsider” who is criticizing what she does not understand.
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” — 1 John 4:1
But I’m not a Creationist (at least, not in the sense of your context), and yet I am a man of faith. It is a fallacy (hasty generalization) to assign to an entire set the attributes of elements of the set — and that is generously granting you that Creationists are a subset of the faithful. Finally, it is a factual misstatement to say that creationism itself boils down to faith. It isn’t a matter of good faith, but of bad reasoning. YE Creationists merely interpret the same data that we interpret in a different way.
I think that’s fair to say, and is applicable to atheists and theists alike.
So does nonreligion. In case you’ve been out of the loop, modern materialists (or as Sentient likes to call them, physicalists) hold that the universe is mystically eternal, and speak of time and space in vaguely ethereal terms, of multiple unobserved universes that are balanced on the backs of turtles called “membranes”. Stars become men and men become stars again. Entropy reverses and working energy is restored by physical means not yet known. The universe (or multiverse, or du-jour-verse) emerged from a magical singularity despite that there is no observed or logical mechanism by which something definable may emerge from something undefined. It is possible that that which is necessary does not exist. There is hardly a more mysterious philosophy in the history of mankind than atheism. Incidentally, Rastafarianism is one religion that believes in no afterlife.
I agree. But as I said, it isn’t Biblically based.
In my own rather renegade brand of Christianity, people get away with murder anyway. If murder is what they love, then that is what they will do for eternity. Even in the more staid and traditional Christian faiths, murderers are routinely forgiven. Jesus forgave His own murderers as He hung on the cross. It is Fred Phelps, and not God, who condemns people to hell.
Well, then what was the point? The guy in hell was observing heaven as well, and in fact was speaking directly to Abraham. The story was a rhetorical device called a “parable” that Jesus often used in His teachings. A parable is a sort of allegory in which important lessons are illustrated by metaphor. The reason metaphor works best is because of the metaphysical nature of God. As physical beings, it is difficult for us to perceive completely unfamiliar things — like the famous example of describing a blizzard to Amazonian natives. The point of that specific parable that you referenced had nothing to do with heaven or hell, except metaphorically. It was about belief, and what criteria people accept in order to believe.
Yes, I know. That’s why I said that religion is subjective.
Oh, I wouldn’t begrudge you your opinion even if you were an “outsider”. I just disagree with you is all. Still, commenting on your experience, it is a shame that they taught you the Bible as though it were a text book. It is in fact a love letter. 
And conveniently the test fails all non-spec beliefs and always passes all in=spec beliefs - unlike science, where there are surprises.
Surely you’ve read the ICR loyalty oath? Perhaps creationists claim that they interpret the data differently, but in practice creationism is unfalsifiable - the way they do it. It actually, of course, is very falsifiable - and has been falsified time and again. Creationists begin with faith, then twist science to meet the faith. They probably wouldn’t bother if it were not for the constitutional requirement not to teach religion in public schools.
Oh, and here is the definition of religion from Merriam Webster
So your contention above that ascribing supernatural causes to things is religion does not seem to meet this definition. It is the worship of the supernatural that is religion. Saying that the rattle of your windows is caused by ghosts does not create a religion of ghosts. This is relevant because I do not see how your “proof” of the existence of a deity leads to your belief of love, or any other religion for that matter. I am quite at a loss to know whether this deity wants me to love my neighbor, rob my neighbor, or whack my neighbor.
Oh, please. This strawman is wrong on two counts. First, the “vaguely ethereal” terms are a result of the difficulty of translating the math into English. My math isn’t good enough to understand this, but I’ve had the same problem in other areas, and what comes out looks blurry. Second, the big difference is that branes and everything else are provisional, as opposed to religion which seems to claim truth. The Big Bang theory, and additions such as inflation, are not ideas mandated by scientific clergy, but are accepted because they have made predictions which have panned out. While we don’t have the mechanism, current thinking is that net energy of the universe is 0, so the Big Bang does not violate observed natural laws.
And I hardly see how atheism is a mysterious philosophy, in fact I don’t see how it is a philosophy at all. It is simply the lack of belief. People who are atheists can believe in all sorts of contradictory things, they just can’t have a belief in any god (by definition, not prescription). Mind telling me what your understanding of the philosophy of atheism is?
Well you have a non-sked theology, as Lenny Bruce would have called it., but if there is a hell, god made it. Though the architect and builder of a death chamber can claim to be against the death penalty, we can have our doubts. So Fred can’t send anyone anywhere if there is no there there.
No argument here. As for the OP, I think it is good to remember that just about any religion (except maybe Scientology and maybe LDS) was not invented whole, but built up out of an incremental series of inventions over time. So while religion = invention might be true, it is misleading, and it is true whether god exists or not - since even believers must agree that many (most? all but one?) religions are invented as much as the atheist does.
Unfortunately, even in cases where there are specific people that folks can point to and verify their synthesis of various impulses into a new religious practice, there will be people who insist that they didn’t actually create the thing. That instead it came down from antiquity, or that some god handed down the forms exactly as they are, or what have you. It’s harder when there aren’t individual people one can point at, which is generally the case if one goes far enough back.
I’d agree with you that most believers who actually think about these things will acknowledge that religion is a creation of humans in order to interpret or systematise their experiences, but ‘who actually think about these things’ is a pretty strong restriction.
I could probably do a decent job of tracing my religion’s creation, including some specific names of critical individuals if I wanted to. It’s not relevant to whether it works, but it’s marginally interesting history to those folks who care about such things.
Since you raise serendipity as an issue, you must show two things: (1) how it validates science as an epistemology over revelation — I mean, I am discovering surprising new things all the time about my faith and about God; and (2) how it ties back to the original goalpost, defined by Lissa, of faith being somehow opposed to logic, because science is not about the formulations and truth-bearers of logic, but about the falsification by repeatable experiments on observable events. In other words, your remark is not only inaccurate but irrelevant unless you can connect the dots.
But you’re agreeing with me. As I said, it isn’t good faith; it is bad reasoning. Superstitions about untestable cosmological origins have nothing to do with faith, as I explained already in quite some detail, but with induction from the particular to the general with respect to the inability to account for observed phenomena naturally. That’s both bad faith and bad logic. As you know from reading my post, I wasn’t defending Creationists, but in fact dissassociating myself from them. That’s what I meant by “I am not a Creationist”. The problem with Lissa’s argument was, as I said, a hasty generalization fallacy — in other words, the same fallacy as that which the Creationists are guilty of. That is the point I made, and the one you need to address (assuming you intend to address my point at all).
Yes, I know. I cited it myself. 
But that is quite the opposite of what my contention was. Therefore, your statement is nonsense. In fact, I told Lissa that she was not describing religion at all, but rather “something that is somewhere between “natural religion” (op. cit.) and superstition.” And I gave cites.
What? Are you talking about the MOP? Your post is just amazingly desultory.
It isn’t a straw man at all. She attacked religion on a specific ground, and I showed that its opposite was subject to the same attack. A straw man is the construction of an ersatz argument for the purpose of responding to it, rather than to the argument made. What I did was point out her ad hoc fallacy. She had made the claim that one identifying characteristic of religion is that it always has something going on after death. Not only did I provide her a counter-example (Rastafarianism), but I showed that her characterization of things going on after death applies as well to modern materialism. With respect to the mathematics, there is nothing more complicated than division by zero. A singularity is nothing more than an equation or function whose solution is undefined.
Speaking of straw men, I didn’t say anything about the Big Bang or inflation. But you have observed nothing with respect to M-theory and its predictions because there aren’t any. It isn’t predictive, but descriptive in nature. Its purpose is to tie together existing theories into a unified whole. I spelled out some of the things that I thought were mysterious about materialism. If you care to address those, feel free.
Mind doing your own philosophical research? That’s rather like saying, “Hey, that existentialism stuff is news to me. Could you give me a quick rundown?”. Philosophical treatments of atheism go back to Anaxagoras, through Leibnitz and Nietzsche, and to the modern branches of atheist philosophy, like positive atheism by Gora of India. This “just a lack of belief” business is quite modern, and so far as I can tell, originated on Usenet, along with the “you can’t prove a negative” nonsense.
I Googled “non-sked lenny bruce” and got nothing. Will you please to explain? In any event, what is your point about God making hell (or not) supposed to address?
I was not referring to serendipity, which is not all that common, and only works when a mind is prepared to see the anomaly. The type of surprise I was referring to is an experiment which falsifies what “everyone” knows. We’ve had the conversation about how falsifiability is necessary but not sufficient for a good scientific theory before. A major difference between science and religion is the reaction when a tenet is falsified. Given sufficient confirmation, science scraps the falsified theory or hypothesis and moves on. Religion tends to accrete a protective shell around the irritation, which is what the old natural philosophers did to some extent - think epicycles.
As an example, Christianity is based to a large extent on Adam’s sin, since that provides a reason for our sinful nature that does not involve god prewiring us to be sinful. How has mainstream Christianity handled the revelation that Adam never existed? Has there been an upheaval similar to that in early 20th Century physics? I’m not singling out Christianity, Judaism hasn’t reacted any better to the revelation that there was no Exodus, but I don’t think this is quite as deeply engrained.
Well, I certainly agree it is bad reasoning. I am not a good judge of faith, so I don’t know what good faith is. But is it faith when the evidence is with you? I wouldn’t say I have faith in evolution. Is it faith when there is no data? Isn’t faith stronger when things look bleak? For creationists, by their own admission, they begin with the faith that the Bible is inerrant, and any evidence to the contrary is mistaken. I think their faith is strong, if misplaced.
What I don’t think you’re getting is that I’m not saying that superstitions arise out of faith, but rather they are preserved out of faith. Faith provides the strength for the creationist to reject the evidence of his or her senses. And the event for which the supernatural explanation provided is not enough - there must be a framework that provides support for the rejection of arguments against the supernatural or irrational explanation. God belief is not the only example of this - the Communist who kept coming up with reasons explaining why Stalin’s five year plans did not lead to plenty is just as guilty.
You said that Lissa’s claim that religion was invented to explain things was not true, and that that form of religion was based on induction of supernatural events. My guess at what you mean by this is that this type of religion forms automatically from inexplicable things that a culture wishes to explain. If this were true, I think you’d see more similarities between religions. Perhaps it was true at the very beginning of religion, but there is far more creativity in modern religions today than can be explained by this. A religion (to be successful) must explain seemingly supernatural or unpleasant things, but it is more than just this explanation. That’s where the invention comes in. Religions also promise things, beyond explaining them. Western religions explain death through Adam’s sin, but Christianity also promises salvation. That does not arise from simple induction.
It is a bit hard to distinguish between what you are claiming and what you say Lissa is claiming.
MOP? I was referring to your love theology. which I don’t think anyone has found any consistency in or justification for. I understand (even if I don’t agree with) your moving from basic principles to the existence of a deity. Going beyond that you totally lose me.
I interpreted your response as being that modern cosmologists have these views. If you meant those who misread cosmology as some sort of Zen koan, I agree with you. However that does not address her point. If not, then you don’t understand the position of those hypothesizing branes. No one says that strings form a theory right now. They are but a hypothesis, which for the moment can only be tested mathematically. Putting that in the same standing as the trinity for Catholics is just silly. I have no clue as to what you mean by “stars become men” except that elements formed in supernovae make up our bodies - which is hardly either a spiritual concept or one open to dispute.
As for life after death, her contention is correct within the bounds of experimental error. Yes, a few relgions may not cover this (what do cargo cultists think?) but it is a predominant theme in most.
What part of “we don’t know yet” don’t you understand? it is a legitimate part of science to make guesses, as long as you clearly identify the guesses as guesses, and do experiments that have the ability to falsify them, when that becomes possible. (And working out the math counts as an experiment, since if it leads to infinities your hypothesis has a problem.) Science, unlike religion, does not see the need of explaining everything right now. It is true that some advance hypotheses at the top of their lungs, or even on PBS, but if you read the fine print they’ll admit that it is a hypothesis. Those who keep on supporting a dead hypothesis, like Fred Hoyle, are viewed with pity.
But, tell me about the men into stars bit again?
“Can’t prove a negative” is shorthand for “can’t prove an existential negative.” As it stands it is clearly nonsense, as anyone who has taken an elementary math course knows.
A quick google revealed several hits on Christian existentialism - which I was sure I had heard of. I’d define an atheistic philosophy as one that grows out of atheism, not one in which atheism is a spinoff. All pure materialists are atheists, I’d guess, but not all atheists are pure materialists.
I think the confusion about strong and weak atheism comes in great measure from the fact that even weak atheists are strong atheists wrt Christianity. (Or at least certain flavors of it.)
In the late '50s early '60s charter airlines were called non-scheduled, as opposed to the scheduled ones like PanAm and TWA. They were considered a bit wild and fly-by-night. A non scheduled theology is to mainstream Christianity and Judaism as a non-sked airline was to Pan Am. I believe he used the term in Religion Inc. I only own the Carnegie Hall Concert 
so I’d have to see if there are transcripts of his bits around. The relevance is that your theology seems a bit non-sked - it goes where it wants to, which is not a bad thing. I respect someone who invents a new theology more than someone who just accepts that a just god throws people into hell.
I think that’s the rule. The priests who wrote the Torah attributed it to Moses, those who wrote the books of the NT attributed them to disciples, and Joseph Smith attributed the Book of Mormon to an angel. Lots of secular books were attributed to people from the past too, as having more credibility than the actual author.
Wasn’t it about 300 years ago that people figured out that Moses couldn’t have really written the Bible? Tom Paine knew, anyhow. I don’t think you have to worry about who actually wrote it, but rather who didn’t. For instance we know that Moses didn’t write Genesis, since Abraham had camels, and they weren’t domesticated until long after the supposed Moses was dead, if he ever existed. We’d have a much harder time if these guys wrote hard historical fiction. The way they wrote it, though, is as if someone wrote a novel about the Revolution where Washington called Jefferson on a cell phone.
Not even zero point energy?
It’s perfectly understandable if one takes the view that the universe had to either exist or not exist. (That’s an oversimplification, because it implies time, etc. and there was no time before the Big Bang.) It just so happens that it exists. Nothing vague or mysterious about that.
What do branes, multiverses, and people <==> stars have to do with whether or not there is a god?
My initial post was about the roots and origin of religion in general. Modern religions are quite different-- they have evolved into faiths which are sometimes quite different than the one from which they sprang.
I make no claim to be an expert in modern religions. (Hell, I’m not much of an expert in anything, to tell you the truth.) However, I have studied human behavior patterns and history, and I based my initial post on what I have learned about humankind and its weaknesses.
It’s difficult to phrase this next comment in a way which you won’t find insulting. Believe me, that is not my intention, because I respect the amount of reflection and thought you seem to have put into examining your faith. Few religious people have such well-thought-out views. I may not agree with them, but I certainly can appreciate that you’re an intelligent individual who does not simply follow a religion’s dictates blindly.
However, it has always seemed mind-boggling to me that intelligent people can believe in a god. Occam’s Razor comes to mind here. Which is more likely: that there’s an invisible deity who has left us no evidence of his existance, or that man invented God to calm his fears, and enforce social order? I believe that it’s the latter.
There are many reasons for man to invent God, but few reasons for God to invent man.
Just heading towards a first cause argument, and attempting to tar science with the lack of logic that religion shows.
Nothing, of course, because that isn’t what we were discussing. Once again, the point Lissa made was that religionists believe that there is something after death, and I pointed out that so do modern materialists. If I may make a suggestion, I often find it helpful to read both sides of a discussion.