Sage, your OP is so full of flaws and half-baked thoughts about religion, I don’t even know where to begin.
Proud athiests or agnostics shouldn’t set out to belittle other people’s religious beliefs, as you have just done. It’s insulting, and quite frankly smacks of ignorance in the OP’s obvious limited knowledge of religion and theology.
I find this quite hubristic. And a claim that man has made countless times in history. Surely you’ve seen The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Lack of evidence for a thing is not proof of it’s converse. Read you’re own site, to which this applies and what I wrote does not.
So if I create a hoax showing that the U.S. has created a spaceship that has landed on another planet, that is proof that we’re unable to do so?
Not sure why you provided this, as it points to a fallacy I have not made:
My contention is that “X may be true because there is no proof that X is false.”
I also find it interesting that your pen analogy makes no allowance for the argument from quantum mechanics that the First Cause logical proof of a Creator God is wanting. I don’t think that to be the case, personally, but if you dispense with it we’re closer to logically proving his existence.
Proud religious believers aren’t so easily insulted. Other than the fact that he doesn’t believe in your religion, what did you find so offensive?
Firstly, I don’t see the logic of your claim. How does the fact that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world lead to Islam being the true religion?
Secondly, the fastest growing religion in the world is not Islam, but rather Christianity. According to a report in Christianity Today from last year, there were 30,360,000 new Christians in 2006, compared to 23,920,000 Muslims. While Islam has slightly higher percentage growth, Christianity has higher actual growth. Also, Islam grows entirely due to the high birth rates in Muslim areas, while Christianity grows mainly due to conversions.
Of course, now I’m mildly curious what evidence, if any, could demonstrate that a particular religion is the true one, assuming such a thing exists.
Why would you say that? Every source I’ve seen puts the percentage of world population that’s Christian at roughly one third, a substantial increase since the start of the twentieth century.
Debater “A” provides an aggregate statistic and debater “B” counters it with a personal anecdote?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Is there a name for this type of non-sequiter reply? It drives me nuts.
Debater A: “The data shows that 10% of the humans are left-handed.”
Debater B: “Well, I am right-handed, so I guess your statistic is not evidence of anything.”
Obviously no one took polls back then. We do know that Christianity spread across the empire, was present in all the major cities, and was enough of a presence that the Pagan Emperors spent enormous resources trying to stamp Christianity out.
According to a recent article in the Economist, there may be over 100,000,000 Christians in China. Christianity has also spread rapidly in Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Asian countries.
And what continents would those be? Certainly not Europe, as we’ve already established. Not the Americas or Australia; those continents are Christian because they were populated by Christian immigrants. Not Africa; Africa was colonized by Europeans but there weren’t any massive forced conversions, as far as I know. Christianity has actually expanded more rapidly since African independence early. And certainly not Asia. What’s left? Was Antarctica converted by the sword?
A much larger percentage percentage that 5% or 10% of converts to Christianity converted voluntarily. You started out by saying “Historically, religions generally either spread via the support of the government, or by simple conquest.” Why don’t you provide some proof of that?
Sage Rat said “People are taught by their parents to believe in a deity or lack thereof.” That was at the start of the thread, his first (and presumably best) piece of evidence against the existence of deities. I’m still waiting for an explanation of why this is evidence against the existence of deities. Parents teach their kids the alphabet. Does this mean the alphabet doesn’t exist? Parents teach their kids math. Does this mean that basic arithmetic is wrong? Parents teach their kids to eat certain foods. Does this mean food doesn’t exist?
In short, I just don’t think this argument was very well thought out.
There are many obvious objections to this one.
Firstly, one what grounds do you say that “it takes more effort”? There have been theories about non-divine origins of the universe, sure, but how are you measuring the effort that a theory requires.
Second, what determines “complex enough”? Why couldn’t the bar for sufficient complexity be set much lower? Should Einstein have said “Newtonian physics is already complex enough without adding relativity”? Would we be better of if he had?
Thirdly, why should we assume any relationship between whether something is complex and whether it’s true? Again take relativity as an example. It’s complex and also true.
The point isn’t that they don’t exist; it’s that they’re human constructions (not food, but the practice of eating certain foods in certain ways). And you are conveniently overlooking the substance of that item including that only 1% of children will join an entirely different religion than their parents. This suggests that the likelihood of one’s believing in a religion has nothing to do with whether it is true or presents a consistent view of the world, but rather is simply what was passed down from the parents.
In order to make such a claim, you first have to explain how you’re defining intelligence. If you define it by secular standards, you could probably prove that secular people are the most intelligent. On the other hand, if you define it by religious standards, you could probably prove that deeply religious people are the most intelligent.
Which deity and which tradition? Jesus Christ did not tell his followers that they were more likely to prosper if they followed him. He said the opposite. As for happiness, that’s an immensely complicated topic. Speaking broadly, the Christian message does promise happiness, but not in ways that worldly people would automatically identify or accept.
You seem to have a habit of quoting a person’s text and replying in a way that has nothing to do with the quoted text. Your reply has not addressed at all the illogical connection between aggregate statistics vs personal anecdotes. I assume that since you quoted my entire comment, this concept has whizzed right by you. I’m not taking either side in this debate but just pointing out that your anecdote reply to a statistic is amateurish and undermines your argument.
Strictly nitpicking, you are correct. That particular sentence does not disprove a deity. But then again, I’m not sure a billion monkeys banging on typewriters for a billion years would be able to construct any sentence that proves/disproves the existence of God. The last 2000 years has left us with sophisticated arguments for God (St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, etc) and against God (Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, etc). It doesn’t seem like we’ve made progress either way (“progress” as defined as “proof by language text.”)
Here’s something interesting that Jesus of Palestine is portrayed in Gospel #1 as saying:
17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
What does “least commandments” mean to you? There are, IIRC, 613 commandments including the Decalogue. Now, you can say that this is in the context of the Beatitudes, but “jot or tittle” refers specifically to the Hebrew Scriptures.
Here is a segment from the Law, (Lev 21:16-23):
The LORD said to Moses, '“Say to Aaron: 'For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. 18 No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is hunchbacked or dwarfed, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the offerings made to the LORD by fire. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God. He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary. I am the LORD, who makes them holy.” (NIV)
What do you think of the preceding? What do you suppose Jesus of Palestine thought of it?
It’s not evidence against the existence of deities. The best evidence against the existence of deities is the complete lack of objective evidence supporting their existence to begin with.
You’re missing the OP’s point on this one. When he says “it takes more effort to explain the creation of the universe and its format in terms of spirits and deities…” that means it takes more leaps of logic and reason. The same goes for his use of “complex”. Our scientific explanations of the workings of the universe are “complex enough”, because they rely on provable science. There is no need to introduce supernatural explanations, because what we know about the universe is explainable without them.
For Sage Rat’s argument to work you have to combine three things
[ol]
[li]Taught to the new generation[/li][li]Subject matter varies with different traditions, especially if traditions are geographically concentrated[/li][li]Traditions claim a monopoly on truth[/li][/ol]
Any one of these, or any combination of two, is not that bad. For example, the alphabet or foods eaten would combine 1 and 2, but exclude 3. Arithmatic would combine 1 and 3, but everyone agrees on what 7+9 is. I can’t think of an example of 2 and 3 but not 1. Combine all three and you have trouble.
Now, i believe that Sage Rat is saying that anything which is described by 1 and 2 should not lay claim to 3, and we should be skeptical of any that do.
Exactly. I was showing up the fallacy of your own attempt to argue that your imagined explosive growth of Christianity in the first few centuries had any relevance as evidence to the truth of its historical or metaphysical claims.
According to CNN, Islam is still the fastest growing religion in the world. My point, though, was that popularity means nothing, so there’s no reason to waste our time with your unsupported assertions that Christianity had some kind of amazingly rapid growth from the time of its inception. Until Constantine made it the state religion of the Roman Empire, there is no good evidence that it was exceptionally popular or widespread. Ironically, Constantine himself seems to have never fully bought into it, and probably only adopted it officially to please his crazy mother.
I mentioned by personal experiences in order to explain why, to me, that line of attack is not convincing. Of course my personal experiences do not prove the statistics wrong. However, there’s nothing illegitimate about mentioning my personal experiences. I endeavor to learn as much as possible from as many sources as possible. My personal experiences are one possible source. As a source, they have the disadvantage that the sample size is one, but they also have the advantage that I know more details about my experiences than I know about anyone else’s.
Okay, I can accept your explication of what Sage Rat is trying to say. Let’s look at how the argument holds up on those terms.
The laws of physics are laws that, to the best of our knowledge, apply at all times throughout the universe. However, we do not have an explanation of where they come from. If we say that “all objects attract each other with force proportional to the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance”, that describes what happens in our universe. It does not explain. Even if we eventually managed to squeeze that particular theory into a grand unified theory, the grand unified theory would still only describe.
Religious or atheist, we all have to accept some “leaps of logic”. No one can answer the old question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”
I disagree.
Not currently, we can’t. But that doesn’t matter. Just because we currently can’t explain something, doesn’t mean that there is a supernatural cause behind it.