Saturday, April 19 2008: Rebuttal
>Certainly people are predisposed towards religious beliefs, seeking answers beyond them. The big >question is why. Ockham's razor insists that the simplest answer is usually the right one.
Occam's razor is a general principle or heuristic for choosing between two theories with equal explanatory power. Theism, as such, does not have any explanatory power because it wraps up our current ignorance in a box labeled "god". It is often misused by theists who seem to find "god did it" a simpler answer than a complex scientific answer or ignorance. In the matter of the Big Bang, the truth is we don't know why the singularity began to expand, however, there is no reason to postulate any gods to explain it. In fact, by postulating a god, the theist has pushed the question back one step further because now we are left having to answer the question of where the god came from. The standard theist answer is some special pleading about how god wasn't created. Fortunately, since theism has zero explanatory power Occam's razor doesn't apply and we don't have to waste our time wading through the excuses.
>The simplest reason why we are hard wired to believe in God is because there is a God and He created >us.
Not really. The simplest explanation has to do with what we already know about human minds. The human mind is devastatingly good at finding patterns, so much so that we often see patterns that are not there (optical illusions, dreams, the man in the moon, dog-shaped clouds, etc). Second, the human mind is also good at attributing motive (a necessary skill for a social animal), so much so that we anthropomorphize things that aren't even conscious entities (fire, electricity, rivers, diseases, evolution). The interaction of these two features of our mind (and probably along with others) almost guarantees the propensity for a belief in gods as an unintended side effect of the way our minds work. No actual gods necessary.
>That is also the simplest answer to why the universe exists in the first place, because it is created. >Crystal and I had a conversation like this last week. The Big Bang theory is almost senseless without >some kind of intelligence setting it off. Why else would a sigularity explode, since singularities do not >make a habit of exploding in our physical universe?
I think we can stipulate that universes coming into being would be a rare event inside the confines of a universe whether there's a god or not, can't we?
>Religion provides the most sensible and rational answers to the biggest questions we have.
No it doesn't. Religions tend to get just about everything wrong that they try to explain. But ignoring that for the sake of argument, there is no consensus whatsoever among religions about what the right answers are to these big questions. How does one [get to heaven/enter Paradise/attain nirvana]*? Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus do not agree on the answer to this question. For Christ's sake, Christians don't agree with other Christians on the answer to this question (some say you have to be a member of the holy catholic church, others that you don't; some say you must be elected by god to be saved, others say salvation is an act of free will; some say all humanity will make it to heaven eventually, others say that some portion of humanity will be excluded from heaven; some say those excluded will be tortured forever and others say those excluded from heaven will be annihilated; some say those that are excluded from heaven will be tortured in a lake of fire and others say they will be tortured in "outer darkness" and they all have Scripture to back up their beliefs).
*Did you notice that we can't even get consensus on what the big question is?
>The overwhelming majority of humanity believes in some kind of religion.
It is fallacious to suggest something is true just because lots of people believe it. I can insert any number of absurd ideas that had numerical support (heliocentric universe, flat earth, inferiority of the non-white races, etc.). The masses are rarely on the side of truth.
>Most people agree on the basic ideas and disagree on the details.
The things that humans agree (and it is fairly well documented that there are some number of universal moral dictums) are easily explained as being those traits which benefit us in a close-knit social environment such as the one where our hominid ancestors evolved. They include things like: don't murder people in your tribe, don't fuck your sister, don't eat shit, be sure to murder people in tribes other than your own.
>Even the cargo cult's strange manifestations are only details in comparison to the fact that they place >their faith in God.
Cargo cults, Scientology, and Mormonism by virtue of their recent genesis highlight the absurdity at the root of religion, but it is a truism that the same sort of absurdity lies at the heart of all religions. It is worth noting that the cargo cultists do not have faith in god, either. They have faith in American servicemen (such as the legendary John Frum) and their planes which deliver cargo. To suggest an affinity between their beliefs and Christianity is to massively misunderstand both cargo cults and Christianity.
>Religion is God's message adapted to the human experience, for better or worse. The Christian faith >has it right because it is one of the few that understands that God's message is pure, but the religion >itself, the human manifestation, can be corrupted, abused, or misunderstood. Dante imagined some >wonderful penalties for souls that misused the Christian faith. That is the whole point when the Bible >discusses St. Peter at the same time being the human leader of the faith, yet denying Christ three >times to save his own skin. Even good people can screw up and anyone who screws up can be >redeemed if they want.
Christianity is not alone in making this claim. Don't you recall the American Muslims that fell all over themselves to say that Osama bin Laden was not a true follower of Islam because he interpreted the Koran differently than they did? In fact, there isn't a single trait that marks any of the hundreds of variants of Christianity as being special when compared to any other religion.
>I question people. I don't question God. God's message is objectively unquestionable. The people who >preach that message to us are subject to scrutiny.
I would suggest that you've never heard from god. It is well documented that the bible: a) is not infallible and b) was authored hundreds of years after the fact by people that were not eyewitnesses to the events recounted and c) was redacted over time to edit or remove parts that were deemed unorthodox.
Occam's razor is a general principle or heuristic for choosing between two theories with equal explanatory power. Theism, as such, does not have any explanatory power because it wraps up our current ignorance in a box labeled "god". It is often misused by theists who seem to find "god did it" a simpler answer than a complex scientific answer or ignorance. In the matter of the Big Bang, the truth is we don't know why the singularity began to expand, however, there is no reason to postulate any gods to explain it. In fact, by postulating a god, the theist has pushed the question back one step further because now we are left having to answer the question of where the god came from. The standard theist answer is some special pleading about how god wasn't created. Fortunately, since theism has zero explanatory power Occam's razor doesn't apply and we don't have to waste our time wading through the excuses.
>The simplest reason why we are hard wired to believe in God is because there is a God and He created >us.
Not really. The simplest explanation has to do with what we already know about human minds. The human mind is devastatingly good at finding patterns, so much so that we often see patterns that are not there (optical illusions, dreams, the man in the moon, dog-shaped clouds, etc). Second, the human mind is also good at attributing motive (a necessary skill for a social animal), so much so that we anthropomorphize things that aren't even conscious entities (fire, electricity, rivers, diseases, evolution). The interaction of these two features of our mind (and probably along with others) almost guarantees the propensity for a belief in gods as an unintended side effect of the way our minds work. No actual gods necessary.
>That is also the simplest answer to why the universe exists in the first place, because it is created. >Crystal and I had a conversation like this last week. The Big Bang theory is almost senseless without >some kind of intelligence setting it off. Why else would a sigularity explode, since singularities do not >make a habit of exploding in our physical universe?
I think we can stipulate that universes coming into being would be a rare event inside the confines of a universe whether there's a god or not, can't we?
>Religion provides the most sensible and rational answers to the biggest questions we have.
No it doesn't. Religions tend to get just about everything wrong that they try to explain. But ignoring that for the sake of argument, there is no consensus whatsoever among religions about what the right answers are to these big questions. How does one [get to heaven/enter Paradise/attain nirvana]*? Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus do not agree on the answer to this question. For Christ's sake, Christians don't agree with other Christians on the answer to this question (some say you have to be a member of the holy catholic church, others that you don't; some say you must be elected by god to be saved, others say salvation is an act of free will; some say all humanity will make it to heaven eventually, others say that some portion of humanity will be excluded from heaven; some say those excluded will be tortured forever and others say those excluded from heaven will be annihilated; some say those that are excluded from heaven will be tortured in a lake of fire and others say they will be tortured in "outer darkness" and they all have Scripture to back up their beliefs).
*Did you notice that we can't even get consensus on what the big question is?
>The overwhelming majority of humanity believes in some kind of religion.
It is fallacious to suggest something is true just because lots of people believe it. I can insert any number of absurd ideas that had numerical support (heliocentric universe, flat earth, inferiority of the non-white races, etc.). The masses are rarely on the side of truth.
>Most people agree on the basic ideas and disagree on the details.
The things that humans agree (and it is fairly well documented that there are some number of universal moral dictums) are easily explained as being those traits which benefit us in a close-knit social environment such as the one where our hominid ancestors evolved. They include things like: don't murder people in your tribe, don't fuck your sister, don't eat shit, be sure to murder people in tribes other than your own.
>Even the cargo cult's strange manifestations are only details in comparison to the fact that they place >their faith in God.
Cargo cults, Scientology, and Mormonism by virtue of their recent genesis highlight the absurdity at the root of religion, but it is a truism that the same sort of absurdity lies at the heart of all religions. It is worth noting that the cargo cultists do not have faith in god, either. They have faith in American servicemen (such as the legendary John Frum) and their planes which deliver cargo. To suggest an affinity between their beliefs and Christianity is to massively misunderstand both cargo cults and Christianity.
>Religion is God's message adapted to the human experience, for better or worse. The Christian faith >has it right because it is one of the few that understands that God's message is pure, but the religion >itself, the human manifestation, can be corrupted, abused, or misunderstood. Dante imagined some >wonderful penalties for souls that misused the Christian faith. That is the whole point when the Bible >discusses St. Peter at the same time being the human leader of the faith, yet denying Christ three >times to save his own skin. Even good people can screw up and anyone who screws up can be >redeemed if they want.
Christianity is not alone in making this claim. Don't you recall the American Muslims that fell all over themselves to say that Osama bin Laden was not a true follower of Islam because he interpreted the Koran differently than they did? In fact, there isn't a single trait that marks any of the hundreds of variants of Christianity as being special when compared to any other religion.
>I question people. I don't question God. God's message is objectively unquestionable. The people who >preach that message to us are subject to scrutiny.
I would suggest that you've never heard from god. It is well documented that the bible: a) is not infallible and b) was authored hundreds of years after the fact by people that were not eyewitnesses to the events recounted and c) was redacted over time to edit or remove parts that were deemed unorthodox.
