I’d say in this case history shows us what not to do. What reason do you have to suggest the Spanish Inquisition should be revisited?
Wouldn’t “knowledge” of atheists being wrong necessarily require undeniable proof of God’s existence? In that case, wouldn’t most atheists have to concede they were wrong, and thus not be atheists anymore? And wouldn’t God have to smite all the remaining stubborn atheists who denied him after being undeniable proof? Problem solved.
In this universe, I vote for trial by combat to settle out the different attributes and worship practices for whatever god does exist.
As per usual, we will anticipate his wishes on this and do the smiting for Him.
He can sort them out later.
If He so desires.
I think you’re taking a rather black and white approach to religion and it’s sort of missing the point. It is a search for truth that is not meaningfully able to be studied by science. So, sure, one could say that anyone who isn’t exactly right is wrong, but it’s more meaningful to try to determine the degree of truth.
Consider that, in this proposed universe, some deity absolutely exists. Even if that being isn’t necessarily omnipotent, that it is powerful enough to create that universe it is also likely to be something that is difficult or impossible for the human mind to grasp. As such, an absolute understanding of the truth of the nature of that being is a standard that just doesn’t make sense. Instead, it is a quest for the best comprehensible approximation. And, like any multidimensional optimization problem, it’s quite possible to have local maxima, or even if multiple people are climbing toward the global maximum, it’s entirely possible to approach it from different angles and thus have seemingly very different approximations, from a parameterized approach, and yet all be roughly equidistant from the global maximum.
For a simple one dimensional analogy, imagine that we are in the search for pi. To claim that anyone who cannot unequivocally name every decimal is wrong is missing the point. However, we can continually get better and better approximations of it. It is that latter quest that is meaningful, particularly since it is provable that we can never know every digit as it is an irrational number.
Specifically to the OP, there’s nothing that can be done. There are a number of things that are proven a hundred times over that still have people that don’t believe them. For instance, there are still people who believe the Earth is flat, granted there’s very, very few of them, but they are out there. Even if we can say that the existence of God is proven to that level of certainty, we can expect those sorts of results. But even still, I don’t believe it’s possible.
Imagine, for instance, that God came down, performed unexplained miracles directly in the the presence of every person on Earth in some way. The thing is, there’s no way to eliminate the possibility that it’s some sort of massive hoax, that there’s some supremely advanced aliens playing tricks on us silly Earthlings, or that any particular observer has gone completely mad and it’s all a delusion. Even in circumstances where those are extremely remote posibilities, if there’s even a one in a million chance that any of them is possible, over the seven billion people on this planet, we’ll still have a few thousand that don’t believe.
But what should be done, is nothing different than we are now. Again, as I tried to point out above, I don’t believe that it’s about being right or wrong, but about trying to discover that truth. To that end, forcing beliefs into the minds others can ultimately be destructive, especialy if they don’t align with their personal experiences. It will create cognitive dissonance and possibly result in stalling or even regression. That said, though I do believe that the absolute truth includes the existence of a creator, I don’t think progression toward that holding that belief is necessary to progress toward that truth from an arbitrary point. The dimensionality of that space is so massive that it’s simply impossible to make that sort of judgment.
That said, we should still try to learn and grow and we should share our ideas freely with eachother and hope that others can learn and grow from our experiences and that we can learn and grow from theirs. To react to their beliefs with aggression or coercion rather than in love, even when we have absolute certainty that they are wrong, will likely do more harm than good.
I find people who believe in “something” to be more annoying than people who believe in something specific.
“Yeah, I know we can’t seen any evidence that there is a God, but there might be something, and it is outside the universe so we can’t observe it. I don’t know what it does, or any of its characteristics, and I can’t tell you what would be different about the world if it didn’t exist, or how we would know if there were two of them, or a billion of them, but I know there is something.”
Really, what does that do for you?
You don’t have to name every decimal, but you have to at least be close. The guy that thinks Pi = 22/7 is on the right track. The guy that thinks Pi = 5 is not.
No, he is absolutely correct. As usual, religion gets a pass on logical analysis that no one would apply to investing. As mentioned, not knowing exactly what is correct is different from knowing what is incorrect - science works this way, since we don’t pretend to have the ultimate answer, but sure know what is wrong. There is nothing incompatible with both knowing that some god exists in some undefined way and knowing that his name isn’t Jehovah or Allah or Siva or Zeus.
To use your optimization analogy, theology is the practice of climbing up ones hill while totally ignoring the much higher mountain in the distance. Good optimization methods include ways of moving you to areas with possibly higher optima. Insisting that everyone on his or her hill is right is not the way of getting to the best solution.
What DerTrihs is saying is that if you have lots of hills, people on most of them aren’t heading for the best answer.
Frankly, if hard evidence for a particular deity is presented, atheists who rely on evidence will adjust to the situation much better than all those religionists who rely on blind faith that guessed wrong.
It is an overly simplistic example, but that’s sort of my point, particularly that “close”, and thus correctness, is defined by the approach. An estimation of 22/7 for pi is good for most everyday examples, but it isn’t very useful for high precision engineering applications. Similarly, pi = 5 is terrible even for most every day applications, but it’s relatively better than than someone else who might insist that it’s 67 or -158 or something else utterly ridiculous.
But that is in direct contrast to the sort of approach that Der Trihs and a lot of other atheists take, who assert that if you aren’t completely right, you’re still wrong. And, while that’s true, it’s misrepresenting the point that many (I think most even) religious people recognize that they don’t know the whole truth and don’t expect that they can. That there’s an assertion that if you’re not completely right about it, you don’t understand it or you’re just flat wrong is missing the point.
Again, using the pi example, to make that assertion is like arguing that if you don’t know pi to some arbitrarily high precision, you don’t know or understand it. But like you argue, chances are that if you use 22/7 or 3.14 or whatever, you probably still know what it is and how it’s used. But where we’ll all draw the line beyond that is pretty much arbitrary. In the same way, that search for the absolute truth and for the nature of god, even in a universe where it’s a given that he exists, it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone, or possibly even anyone, can be arbitrarily close to that understanding, particularly given that that search space is massively higher in dimensionality and complexity than something like pi, where we regularly allow some reasonable amount of error.
As such, arguments like “most or all varieties of theists are also still wrong” simply doesn’t make sense, because it isn’t a matter of black and white, but a continuum of distance from that absolute truth. Some may be closer or farther, but any line that determines right or wrong is either relative to the specific circumstances or completely arbitrary. And, moreso, to that end, I also think that, even in a universe where god necessarily exists, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that one person could believe he exists but be so much farther from the truth in so many other important areas, that he’s relatively more wrong than someone who doesn’t believe in God, but is closer in those other areas. For example, assuming that WBC or terrorists still exist in this proposed universe, while they’re correct on the existence of God issue, I think they’d still be farther from the absolute truth than a moral atheist.
So you expect me to stop believing in reason, and start believing in something that’s irrational, incomprehensible and unprovable. How do you intend to do that? You’re not allowed to reason with me, because you’ve already come out against reason. So are you just going to continue to call me “wrong”? Is that all you’ve got?
The OP really needs to clarify which religion is hypothetically correct and whether hard evidence is used to determine this.
It is possible that all religions are wrong, and that there is a Supreme Being/ Deity anyway. If it is proven that there is a deity, what types of experiments could we perform to determine whether it needs, wants, is indifferent to or is annoyed by “worship?”
So some God shows himself in such a way that the evidence is clear to anyone willing to see it. As in, one could test this evidence in a repeatable way and it would always show us that this God really does exist. Try as they might, the skeptics, secularists, scientist and any other “s” words will not be able to refute the evidence. Do I understand the scenario correctly?
Those who refuse to accept that evidence has having anything meaningful to say about religion will be the ones with a problem in this scenario.
Atheists: smacks head “Well, fuck me. Rothnarge the 3 header serpent God really does exist! Better pick up a serpent headdress at the store today.”
Theists: “No, your evidence is wrong, the Bible says so. I have some pamphlets here from Jack Chick that explain what will happen to you if you continue with your evil ways.”
Not really necessary for this scenario, but it might make a good thread topic on it’s own.
Throughout most of history it was an absolute given that some kind of god or gods existed, and atheists were considered wrong. And evidence is no difference, because they also thought they had all the evidence they needed, just by looking at the sun and the planets and so forth.
The only way I can reasonably postulate the hypothetical of this thread is that god suddenly decides to stop purposely making the universe look exactly as if it’s 100 percent natural, and simply enters the fact of its existence into our heads. Assuming an omnipotent god that would not make mistakes doing this, an atheist would be a person who denies a fact he or she knows is true.
These people would simply be treated as liars or as insane.
I agree wholeheartedly. It must be that a person has seen the evidence and logic that proves there is no god as described in today’s religion, but some part of the mind simply cannot let go of the concept completely.
They are all equally worthless because by that point they’re all just blind guesses. Blindly guessing something a little closer to the truth doesn’t make your beliefs any less worthless, because there is no mechanism with which to distinguish a “good” blind guess from a “bad” blind guess that can’t just do the job itself.
Now for my own analogy: imagine the million monkeys with a million typewriters. Even if, eventually, they produced Hamlet, they are still useless. Why? Because to sift through those millions of millions of pages of text to find Hamlet, you need a machine advanced enough that it could just write Hamlet and cut the monkeys out of the loop entirely.
Oh great. Now we have a million unemployed monkeys. THIS is why we need Unions!
atheist vs theist are not really the only options available.