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Comment by sarabad2021 | Hacker News Reader

sarabad2021

I see no issues with Christianity from a philosophical standpoint. It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. I'm curious what you mean in your statement, please unpack your claim.

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It depends what philosophical questions you want an answer to.

If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table.

If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible.

If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)

> It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world.

(1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world?

(2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?

"Naturalism" posits that natural laws are the only rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural world.

So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically.

The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.

Well, if the resurrection happened I'd actually class it, and its instigator, as part of the natural world.

So far we have not yet seen a single phenomenon that cannot be explained in the natural system, but can be explained in an alternative system.

(No, "god did it" isn't an explanation.)

If this is all that 1000++ y.o. religions can muster, I say good riddance, laughable attempts at explaining the world.

I would advise you to head down to your local university and take a religious studies course covering a bit of the Bible. It's usually split into OT/NT.

What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts.

So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.

What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).

> What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).

If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies?

I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).

For me it raises more questions than it answers.

The parent is referring to the (actually, legitimately, really bad) philosophy that you can find in the most puffed-up theology books. It comes from the same process of domain envy that makes some philosophers put the worst math ever in their papers, except it started several hundred years earlier. To cut one slice through it, I can point you to a page of 100% fallacious arguments[0] that only survived as long as they did because they had a popular conclusion.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

The very page you link lists a logically sound ontological argument[1]. It appears to me that you're judging the argument fallacious because you don't like the conclusion.

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#Go...

The fallacy in that one is thinking that accepting those axioms is any different than directly accepting the conclusion. :) Stating a bunch of axioms and deriving something doesn't prove what you derived, except in a technical sense of the word "prove," not in a useful sense related to determining the truth. Even if we accept that Godel's logic was sound, there is plainly no more reason to believe in his starting point than there is to directly believe in the end.

What? You contradict yourself several times. Does accepting the axioms obligate you to accept the conclusion or not? First you say it does, then you say it doesn't. And proving something is of course quite literally "determining the truth", you can't just dribble it away like that. This comment looks like word salad intended to let the reader believe whatever they want.

Proving that some axioms imply a conclusion does not prove the truth of the conclusion, when the axioms themselves remain unproven. For example:

Axiom 1) All comments by whatshisface are right.

Theorem 1) This comment is right.

Proof: Whatshisface wrote this comment.

That's a proof in the mathematical sense and there's nothing wrong with it in that way, but that it has nothing to do with the truth of the theorem.

Axioms are not something you ever prove, as in, they're not provable even in principle. I would not call this an axiom, this is simply a premise. It can be determined. You'd trace this premise back up a chain of premise-based arguments, and if all are valid, you eventually reach some of the 5-10 (I forgot) core axioms that underlie all of logic. And those are not provable, but you'd generally be considered mad not to accept them.

I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.

Claiming that Anselm's ontological argument "survived" for centuries is rather misleading. Being known as a thing did not mean it was viewed as a viable argument. It was subjected to some harsh criticism literally as soon as it appeared, and whenever it was brought up in later centuries (and not very often, because it was something of a curiosity) it was treated more critically than reverently.

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