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I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent).

If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general.

If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...

One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.

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As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpret and peoples’ views aren’t really based on the data anyway. (Try talking with a gun control advocate. First note that homicides went down in Australia after gun buybacks. Note reaction. Then note that homicides were going down at the same rate before gun buybacks as after gun buybacks. Note reaction.)

And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.

I don't disagree really - there's still space for intuition and making a guess in places with limited information. I also agree most people are using evidence to drive motivated reasoning for a pre-existing conclusion rather than using it to try to struggle towards whatever the truth may be.

The god question is pretty old though, and most of the religious arguments are pretty clearly wrong/bad. They've lost most of their ground to actual experiments and the scientific method. I suspect this is why we see church attendance continuing to decline.

There is no strongly-held opinion anywhere in the world that you can't play that rhetorical trick on, which may be why there are whole papers that have been written about why it's almost never persuasive to deploy gotcha statistics that way.

is this a rebuttal or an agreement? I think the point of the example was that most people can't rigorously defend their strongly held opinions. they just throw gotchas at each other.

You know, I think you're right. Sorry about that! Just read my comment as an especially annoying yes-and.

> And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to...

I can't agree with either point: 1) basing your view on faith is equally as good as non-faith, or 2) expecting a world view based on any belief will reliably lead you to draw conclusions that won't be bad.

Both of these assume that beliefs are primary in shaping "your world view" and that that view is what shapes how you interact with the world. In fact, what's important isn't what you believe; what's important is how you choose to think. It's the questions you choose to ask. It's how willing you are to start without multiple choice answers and then go looking for a multitude of possible solutions. And it's whether you're willing to accept partial and interim solutions, and sometimes, [shudder] no answer at all.

I know it's not popular to look for answers and then be willing to say, "Nope. I can't answer this." But as you point out, sometimes it's impossible to answer a question with a definitive yes or no. Sometimes you have to gather more information. And the useful part of your world view is how you choose to go about becoming more informed.

If you don't look any further and just guess, or just trust someone else to tell you how to think (especially someone who won't explain their sources or their reasoning), then you will make a lot poor choices in your life, regardless of whether faith is part of that formula or not.

If instead you seek out others whom you know are better informed, and if you ask questions yourself and try to test those answers yourself, that will serve you far better than will any belief system. But most of all, if you are willing to stop your quest at some point and say, "I can't answer this question definitively" and accept that you have two choices: a) a tentative best answer that seeks to work around what you don't know, or b) that you simply refuse to answer now and accept that "I don't know", now THAT's enlightenment. In my opinion, that's a world view that will minimize error and make fewer mistakes. Beliefs be damned.

The problem is that for the most part all this asking questions and becoming informed doesn’t get your average person anywhere. I read a lot and know a bunch about a lot of things but at the end of the day I’m left with “the science” Lessing us without firm conclusions about pretty much everything I might care about.

And “I don’t know” isn’t really a practical answer. You have to raise your kids now, decide what to feed your kids now, vote now, not wait around for conclusive proof.

And people who say “beliefs be damned” don’t actually mean it. They embrace beliefs and value judgments all the time. Does scientific evidence tell us we’re all equal and created in God’s image? No, it’s something we choose to believe, and even people who aren’t religious believe a secular version of that as an article of faith. (Which is good!) Science says the average IQ of people in Bangladesh (where I’m from) is 82, a standard deviation lower than Americans. What do I choose to believe about Bangladeshis? Most decent Americans don’t say “well the best answer we have is Bangladeshis aren’t as smart as Americans.” They start from a belief about equality and work backward from there. The death penalty, how to treat murderers, criminal justice, civil rights. Science more or less doesn’t have the answers we need to these human problems.

The answer to "we don't have enough information," is not to reason less.

Many decisions aren't primarily based on reason/logic, but on priorities and preferences. Having more information rather than less is almost always a good thing, but it's a lot more useful when you already have some goal in mind.

I found a good articulation of this here: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-holy-church-of-christ-w...

"Suddenly we’ve got numerical infinities on that ethics spreadsheet, inputs that win out against any finite moral optimization. Where to put the infinities on the spreadsheet is of course the entire point of this metaphysical endeavor. We need the axiomatic moral imperatives, whether they be human life or free speech or something else, to which everything else loses in the moral calculus. The rest is mere arithmetic.

And this is precisely where the rationalist worldview grows mute: there’s simply no way to derive the absolute moral principles that should rule our lives from lab experiments, and any such proposal will necessarily require a faith-based leap--the ‘dignity’ of human life, the sanctity of private property, etc.—not very different than the tzelem Elohim or Imago Dei of Genesis. Science is absolutely mute here. There’s no such thing as a ‘scientific ethics’ or a ‘scientific foreign policy’, and the people who claim as much are precisely the same naifs who treat science as a body of knowledge rather than an epistemology, i.e., those who’ve never actually practiced it."

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad.

> being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness

Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.

The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things. This means even if most people most of the time are perfectly pleasant, they can get swept up in other stuff that gets out of hand and hurts people. If you can't persuade someone with evidence based reasoning because their position is based on 'faith' or belief in the face of contrary evidence I don't know what to do with that.

There are forms of religious people that dismiss all the 'crazy' things and just have some vague mysticism - which is probably the least harmful form, but is a little odd to me. People like to feel a part of something grand I suppose - but we already are. Existence is pretty amazing even without the human religious myths being true. Maybe one day the myths will be just a part of our collective history (as many older ones currently are).

> The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things

I don’t think that’s true at all, and possibly the opposite is true. Comparing Bangladesh, where I’m from, to America, people here are a lot less religious. But I wouldn’t say the net amount of “crazy” believes is different. People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion.

American culture around eating and fitness, and particularly the “clean food” stuff is a good example of this. It’s for the most part completely unscientific, but fervently believed.

> People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion.

How do you square this position with all the social media fueled mob lynchings/murders in Bangladesh?

One example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49102074

I’m not claiming the US is any better, we have mass shootings and all kinds of violence, but generally not lynch mobs (at least in the 21st century)

We have had social and mainstream media fueled riots across entire country last summer, based on a whole bunch of untrue crazy beliefs too.

Everyone is crazy in their own way. There is no rationality strong enough to remove the crazy from people, and smart people over time have formed their own craziness not bound by religion or mysticism.

This site for example is pooh-poohing religion now, but five minutes later will gush over LSD's power to give pseudo-spiritual epiphanies. It used to love stoicism, which was shopworn even in the Victorian age. Probably in a year from now some other retread of old belief system will be rediscovered, maybe EST or Theosophy, or something.

> The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things.

Some examples I can think of are Pol Pot, Stalin and the North Korean Kim dynasty.

My point is there is much rhetoric about religion being a historical scourge of society, but the same people making those assertions conveniently forget that atheistic ideologies had very negative consequences as well.

I'm not arguing based on whataboutism here. I'm saying that blaming religion for the ills of society while exalting atheism is fallacious.

There's an important distinction - the religious crimes are often done because of the underlying ideology. Stalin did terrible things, but it wasn't in the name of atheism.

Throwing away bad doctrine doesn't instantly make you good, but it helps not to have problematic ideology at the start.

If you're going to build a world, one that updates based on evidence is a good place to start. Seek out evidence that violates your confirmation bias, steelman arguments, change your mind when warranted.

> Stalin did terrible things, but it wasn't in the name of atheism.

USSR anti-religious campaign of 1928–1941:

"The campaign began in 1929, with the drafting of new legislation that severely prohibited religious activities and called for an education process on religion in order to further disseminate atheism and materialist philosophy. "

"The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church and Islam, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labour camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited.[1] More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone.[2] Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church's priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.[3]"

"Stalin called for an "atheist five year plan" from 1932–1937, led by the LMG, in order to completely eliminate all religious expression in the USSR.[43] It was declared that the concept of God would disappear from the Soviet Union.[43]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(...

Exactly. Fundamentalists miss the actual fundamentals.

People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity that is a few hundred years old for the church established by the apostles nearly 2000 years ago. That church was it which considered the weak as equally valuable as the strong, that insisted on helping the poor, that believed men and women both to be of the utmost value. That established hospitals to care for the sick. All of these things were not the norm. The weak were considered less valuable. Women were not worth as much as men. Sick people should be avoided. The poor aren’t worth helping.

People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.

> People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity...

Hell, people mistake American Evangelical Christianity with "true Christianity". Far too many allow themselves into being duped into thinking that the loudest, most odious, and most forceful are the most legitimate claimants to Christianity.

Barf.

To take a counter example, do you believe that the Catholic Church has had a pattern of covering up for pedophiles in its clergy? If so how far back does that pattern go? Why shouldn’t we assume it goes back hundreds of years, or the full 2000 year history of the church?

By the way, that same old church taught wives to obey their husbands and to this day does not allow them to be clergy. The notion that women are not worth as much as men was not recently introduced.

Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly. I am not going to pin this just on the Catholic Church. Other youth-serving organizations, like sports, other churches, YMCAs, etc. were all deficient.

I am a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America. Its market-leading and pioneering youth-protection programs are still examples to this day, and the vast majority of claims in its current bankruptcy process are from before these programs started. Society has changed, and youth are much better off for it.

Nice try with the 'whatabout-ism', but nearly by definition the non-religious groups are less sanctimonious.

"Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly."

This again? The existence of others committing the same crimes does not indemnify the Church.

Love the "Society has changed" argument. Clearly, recognizing that pedophilia is wrong by the Church is a product of changing times...not like they moved clergy from parish to parish to avoid them being caught.

I’d say the church from Rome has always had problems like any group of humans. Collectively the churches established by the apostles I’d say got the truth right. Though if I were to pick a date where they went seriously wrong and led to what you saw at the time of the reformation and today I’d say 1054 AD

As for women being treated poorly that is not something the church introduced, but has practically been done by men since time began. If you read early church history you’d probably realize that your moral basis itself is founded upon the work church did.

If you’re someone who is open minded you should try to hear good arguments from another perspective. I’d recommend Dominion by Tom Holland perhaps - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465093507/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm...

What I’ve found is people who actually don’t believe their opinions strongly avoid books challenging those opinions, while those who do are perfectly willing to be challenged, because they are confident their opinion is the right one.

For example a person who weakly believes in a free market will avoid reading Marx, a person who strongly believes it will. And vice versa for let’s say Ayn Rand.

If the whole point of an organization is morality, and the organization doesn't do any better in that arena than society at large, I don't see much point in the organization.

On the topic of the treatment of women, you'll note the original assertion was that this was something the church was especially good at, and I pointed out a sexist practice core to the church as currently practiced, not in the dustbin of history.

Well my guess is you haven’t been to many non evangelicals churches nor looked at how they act or behave. The church reveres a woman above all other humans save him who was both God and man. Orphanages were setup by churches. Hospitals, schools, homeless shelters. They do that explicitly because of their beliefs.

You can read the bible directly and see problems with fundamentals (I did).

It's just the 'no true scotsman' fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I contest that organized religion, particularly Christianity has done net positive to the world though. From the crusades til now, Christianity has always seemed to demonize other groups, and for people in those groups especially (non-Christians, gays, women), the church has not done any good for them whatsoever.

But even I accept your argument that they had, why is organized religion the only way to achieve that good? Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance? Why does the teachings of thousands of years old people have to do anything with it, even if we do cherry pick them and only listen to the parts that we as a modern society agree are good? When you draw your philosophy from a book that says at the end “don’t change this or you’re going to hell”, then it’s little surprise that extremists arise with what are actually fairly reasonable interpretations of the Bible.

See, but even your straw man is based on that post schism period. And the church is what taught us that even those traditionally “on the fringe” should be valued and not discarded. You’re taking up the position the church convinced the world of to argue against her. I really do think your beef (and a legitimate one) is with evangelical Christianity (and possibly Roman Catholics but probably less so). You should read up on where those traditions arose from.

The question really is did Jesus rise from the dead?

Was Plato actually on to something when he said there were more “real” things which made our reality look like shadows.

The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus. There is no getting beyond that idea. Once you see it, there is no going back. So I’d be very careful reading old books if I were you.

Even quantum mechanics is starting to make us realize we might not understand what really constitutes reality. That at the deepest levels there is two eternally existing relationships.

> The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus.

Do Hindus agree? Do Muslims? Do Buddhists? If not, are they wrong? Why?

The statement you made is an opinion of a group, stated as a fact. There is nothing wrong with groups having opinions, but they shouldn't be pushed to others as facts. That's the source of many past and present conflicts.

Oh don’t get me wrong. I know this is my opinion. And I don’t think Hindus and Muslims don’t have very high symbols and good world views.

I’m just saying from what I’ve seen the symbol that Christ is it is very high and explains the world well. I’d love to have discussions over coffee with people with different cosmological explanations of the world.

The question why this isn’t something to be discarded is because a billion people share my opinion and we aren’t unreasonable for having it.

The idea that the most powerful king took up the side of the poor and needy, and aligned himself with them is an idea that I can’t see being defeated. The hero looking like he lost only to win once for all, to set the captives free is a story that is endlessly being recreated in books from people of all world views.

True though, to many, Christ is the symbol of what they’ve seen in American Evangelical Christianity and that symbol might just die out, but the one taught in the 1st century till now I can’t imagine ever dying out.

A lot of christians foolishly think there is not any truth beauty or goodness in other world views and refuse to learn from them. There is a lot a Christian can learn from Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, even Mormons, and probably a whole ton of other religious beliefs. They can learn from Greek myths, eastern myths and so on.

I actually just wish non christians would just at least take the story of Jesus as a myth or legend that they could still learn from like other enduring myths. That would at least give the idea behind it the respect it deserves given its huge influence. The story of Moses even if just fiction is still a powerful story. I mean have you never read a book like Les Mis or LOTR or something and not seen the power those stories have for good?

> The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus. There is no getting beyond that idea. Once you see it, there is no going back. So I’d be very careful reading old books if I were you.

Many countries in Europe have >50% of young people who identify as non-religious [1]

Don't the declining numbers of religious people in Europe contradict that statement? Younger generations in these traditionally Christian countries are very aware of the symbol and idea - and many are in full agreement with many of the values you mention, except they just don't believe the mystical part (and refuse many of the conservative stances from the church).

If this happened in countries that have had Christianity as their foundational identity for hundreds of years, why can't it happen elsewhere?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/21/christianity-n...

> Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance?

Because they weren't. That's the point. The culture at the time didn't care to support anyone but the most powerful.

Could a non-religious approach have fixed it? Maybe, but none emerged that did so. Not 2000 years ago, anyway.

So Christianity entered the scene at a time when no one was doing these good things, and gave people a reason to rally behind them.

Even today, statistically speaking, Muslims give far more of their income to charity than any other group, and if I'm not mistaken, Atheists ranked last. (Christians only marginally performed better, which says a lot about the state of modern Christianity.)

So why is that? I think it has to do with tribalism. You can't form a strong tribe around NOT believing stuff. Not believing in something isn't enough of a reason to form strong social bonds and take on major projects.

Does that mean you can't come up with a good secular belief that people can rally behind? Of course not. Liberalism was a secular idea that made massive changes. Same for democracy. But you need a flag to rally around.

"Disbelief" makes for a poor flag. It's not much of a rallying cry.

What's more, the rationalist/atheist community tends to be very strongly individualist. Individualism, almost by definition, isn't particularly interested in things like hospitals or caring for the poor.

> People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.

There's no "true and right" church. In fact the non-stop schism of the christian faith is evidence that the views espoused by christians are incredibly incoherent. One model to use is that the bible is a map and your interactions with actual people are the actual road. And you're trying to navigate your life with this map. You have a few options:

  - Trust the map no matter what (fundamentalists)
    - You end up also arguing about how the map *really* reads, because it's incoherent at its core! Denominations are started by people trying too hard to ascertain the "fundamentals."
  - Trust the road no matter what
    - Is your map even relevant then? What's the difference between this and being an atheist?
  - Trust the road when you can see it and can't argue with it, trust the map otherwise
    - This leads to shit like voting against progress because you are ignorant to the harm it does. Since the map is incoherent you still end up drawing incorrect conclusions in directions that are harmful.

These basically all suck and cause problems vs the strategy of "live in the world, and use some other map."

if you've ever talked to non-fundamentalists, usually they just regurgitate whatever the contemporary secular morality of the moment is with a mild religious gloss, and they suffer in membership much worse than the fundamentalists because it's obvious.

Fundamentalism is usually just taking the source material seriously at what it says; liberal Christianity tends to try and reinterpret the source material to fit contemporary mores. It's impossible to justify homosexuality in the scriptures for example; most progressive arguments end up just setting fire to the inspiration of the bible to do so, by saying "they weren't really speaking about homosexuality" or "why should we trust what Paul says about it?"

Fundamentalists are disliked, but they are a lot more logically and internally consistent than the mainline. Mainline is just the halfway stop to atheism, honestly.

> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness.

Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.

It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts.

[1] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [2] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...

> To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.

That's different from religiosity correlating with "being a good person" though, which I'm interpreting as "the ability to act both morally and independently".

It does seem that some people need religion to be a good person, because they lack the moral structure to do without (due to trauma or bad parenting or whatever). For those people, religion allows them to function in society with a set of business rules, but they still tend to lack a solid moral/ethical decision matrix to function on their own or act outside the contexts they have rules for.

You are assuming causality there. It could be that an individual’s mindset could lead to both less criminality and more religious participation. It’s not obvious that sending criminals to church would make them less criminal.

One of your sources is overtly Christian and the other is quite conservative[0]. Here is an academic survey of such studies; seems a lot more nuanced: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261834488_Religion_...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times

> Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity.

Religious people donate significantly more to their churches. Whether that's charity which actually goes on to help people is highly variable. You can say we haven't really figured out how to replace them, but to me it seems pretty clear. Replace a patchwork of "charities" with an actual support network which works for everyone and not just parishioners. Fund it through taxes. You know, the was every single other developed nation in the world handles things. The whole "charity is just as good as sound policy" thing has never panned out and is why we have so many medical bankruptcies as just one example.

Charity - religious people are more likely to donate to religious organisations. In fact roughly a third of all donation money in the US goes to supporting religion.

Large churches are quite astonishingly wealthy and also tax exempt, so it's not clear why they need the money more than any number of smaller charities and social programs.

Crime: There isn't any reliable evidence that religion reduces crime in general. It may make certain kinds of crime less likely, but it's very difficult to disentangle all of the influences - because of course religion also affects crime reporting, and defines which actions can even be considered crimes. This can be a huge problem for victims who live in the same religious community as perpetrators.

One textbook example is the history of child abuse in Catholicism. It didn't show up in crime figures for a very long time because the Church worked hard to cover it up. The truth didn't come out until the political power of the Church was reduced to a level where it could no longer do that.

Another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland

There's a good case for considering the possibility that religion actually encourages these kinds of abusive cultures - whether or not they're considered criminal at the time.

So there really isn't an argument that religion serves a beneficial role. It has some benefits, but it also causes a lot of social and political distortions, some of which are extreme and persistently harmful.

Does that include war?

Throughout history, religious leaders have very rarely opposed killing "the enemy". Likewise it's a rare soldier in a time of war who is insists on obeying, "Thou shalt not kill".

Yet if this is true, then how do you define religiosity if it overlooks willingly acting in contradiction to the most essential laws that a faith and its faithful claim to believe?

> Throughout history, religious leaders have very rarely opposed killing "the enemy".

The 20th century would like a word with you.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion.

The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme.

And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it.

I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake).

If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction.

Again, what's the solution? Heck if I know...

>If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Can you steelman what the basic thing is that religious people get wrong?

A lot of the creationist arguments stem from "irreducible complexity" or a misunderstanding of natural selection (the "eye just formed itself somehow"). Both of these things sound reasonable when explained in isolation to someone who grew up with religion, but natural selection is much stronger (light sensing cells benefit survival way before they're an entire eye) etc.

It's the 'watchmaker' argument - things must have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist. This always ignores the natural follow up - who created god then? There is no good answer for this (and it just creates an infinite regress).

Religious steelmans are weird, because the arguments out front are not the real objections or even the real debate (which makes things confusing). The real debate is more about belief in belief, tribal affiliation, perceived morality, and identity. The arguments out front are mostly rationalizations to try and explain away contrary evidence.

Religious people are arguing from a position entirely driven by motivated reasoning. They're not trying to uncover the truth, they're trying to defend what they already know to be true.

You see this occasionally on the atheist side too (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as...) the difference though, is the evidence is there if you care to look.

If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.

Indeed, I've known a lot of religious people like the ones you speak of. And I've known and read from many other "religious"/deist people who think those types of people are silly.

>If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.

How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?

> ""How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?

- "I'm a psychic and can tell what's in these containers without looking"

- "I can detect water with magic rods"

- "I can heal you with the power of god"

It's worth watching An Honest Liar about the life of the Amazing Randi.

What's interesting is even when Randi shows people how they're being tricked they refuse to believe it.

The above examples are pretty easy to test (and people do), but believers just ignore the results or make up reasons why results don't matter or can't be tested.

Those are of course easy strawman examples of charlatans trying to make money.

This Carl Sagan quote is relevant:

>An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Sure - technically every atheist should be agnostic in the sense that you can never know anything with 100% confidence, but pragmatically you live as if you're an atheist. In the strict sense I'm "almost certain there is no god", but no one can be truly certain given the nature of the things Sagan points out.

Just because something is hard to prove with certainty doesn't mean the probability is equally likely. You can't really be a strict atheist about magic sea fairies either, but you probably are (in the sense you that you think they don't exist). Priors matter for things.

While many of those people were charlatans, many of them are also earnest. The water rods people really believe they can detect water with the sticks and have stories about how they helped a friend with a leak and such.

Many astrology people really believe they can make personality predictions (they can't unless they're vague enough to be predictive of nothing). It's not all conartists.

Maybe I'm just being snarky or missing the real meaning of the term, but I think of "supernatural" as something that is beyond any capacity to test or prove. Anything that can be proven would fall under my definition of "natural", even if it's beyond my capacity to explain or understand.

By definition, I'd consider any sort of gods, demons, ghosts, or whatever to be either nonexistent or something that exists (which would imply that it's something natural and operates in some currently unknown way).

>I think of "supernatural" as something that is beyond any capacity to test or prove.

I agree. It's worth noting that the fundamental nature of our consciousness could fall into that realm, judging by how it is scientifically impossible to isolate and control for, and is thus seemingly indefineable.

Free will is supernatural. That is why leading atheists posit that it doesn’t exist.

> things most have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist.

This isn't the "watchmaker" argument, this is the "principle of sufficient reason" argument applied to existence. The principle of sufficient reason is "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it". Things exist _right now_, but (so goes the argument) they didn't always exist (that is they are not things-which-must-by-their-very-nature-exist). Therefore, the fact that they exist _right now_ needs a cause that operates right now. The causal chain of why-does-this-contingent-thing-exist-right-now cannot be infinite. Therefore, the causal chain must terminate in some being that must by its very nature exist.

This argument was not made by Christian theists, but by Aristotle over 300 years before Christianity came into existence. It was rediscovered by Christian theists a millenium and a half later (in the 1200s) and accepted because it matched what God said of Himself to Moses 1200 years before Aristotle (Exodus 3:14)

https://biblehub.com/exodus/3-14.htm

Thanks - I think this does a better job clarifying that bit better than I did (which notably doesn't address the infinite regress issue).

The watchmaker argument is more narrowly the creationist 'eye can't have just formed itself' argument (basically the eye must have been made by some sophisticated watchmaker: god).

When you say "which notably doesn't address the infinite regress issue" are you talking about what you said or what I did? (Just trying to understand if I wasn't clear enough in my explanations).

I think you clarified where the 'something can't come from nothing' argument originates from (and that it's separate from the watchmaker one).

My point was just that as an argument the answer being 'god' isn't very compelling when it then just moves the question to 'where did god come from', nothing is actually explained by this.

In my experience with religious people you get unsatisfactory answers to that, so adding massive complexity (god) as an answer doesn't really help when it can't answer the underlying question (it just introduces a new and more complex one). This is ignoring all the other problems with the god hypothesis which don't hold up either.

This line of reasoning is totally unconvincing to pure naturalists like me.

I simply believe that the universe exists, and that we'll likely never know anything beyond that, as the big bang appears to be the limit of what evidence is possible to measure.

What I don't see is anything that necessitates turning the fact that the universe exists into a principle that the ultimate "cause" must be a being that frankly behaves like a abusive patriarch while threatening humanity with eternal torture.

I'd recommend Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe which goes into some of the more modern theories beyond The Big Bang (Inflation Theory, MWI of QM) - I thought it was pretty interesting and didn't know about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

My interpretation of the comment you replied to wasn't that they were trying to justify the argument, but just clarify what the argument specifically was (and where it came from).

What you may not see is that everything is incredibly intelligible.

Of course it is: it's a work of human writing, by people who were quite serious thinkers of their era.

But you can't use the content of the bible to prove the existence of the supernatural any more than you could use Beowufl to do the same.

Agreed, I don’t think one should try to prove the supernatural starting from the Bible.

One first has to define supernatural :)

My general thought is that at the deepest possible metaphysical level, everyone has a foundational framework that realize on untestable axioms. (Eg. we have free will)

Identifying those is an interesting exercise, but then at some point I realize that at all levels of natural depth, the universe has extreme order and intelligibility. Eg. The simulation argument is a reframing of the creation arguments.

From that point, one can surmise that some creator would be intelligible, and would likely communicate with beings that have free will. Eg. humans are a cloud of hydrocarbon atoms that contemplate their own existence.

The rest then follows, and so on

"That the universe exists" isn't a sufficient explanation since we know that it doesn't exist of necessity (since it is composed of parts). The argument doesn't say anything about what this "First mover" is like, only that it must be sufficient to explain the effects it produces (which includes being-a-person since that's qualitatively different than not-being-one). It's only when you come to the realization that to-be is the same as to-be-beautiful is the same as to-be-true that things start to look vaguely like the God of the burning bush and the problem of pain starts to raise its head (and then you have to meet the cross and either break on it or be saved by it).

As a religious person, I don't see how the issues you describe are any lesser in non-religious populations. You're misplacing your blame; society would still have these problems without religion, and it'd arguably be worse, too.

Irreducible complexity is a somewhat compelling argument to me (a life-long atheist).

I understand natural selection. I've taken graduate course in genomics with top grades. Still, the concept that random point changes to a several billion base pair sequence could produce advantageous new genes goes against everything I know about complexity and combinatorics.

But I admit natural selection is still a far better explanation than anything else we have, so I continue to accept it grudgingly.

I understand why scientists don't want to give religious leaders a foothold to sow doubt and push their nonsense, but I wish the scientific community was more open to criticisms of evolution that are presented rigorously. For example, a model of evolution where proteins first evolve in microorganisms before being integrated into larger organisms (for example through viral vectors) makes a lot more sense to me than SNP-driven natural selection.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is often quoted as the fundamental tenet of Christianity.

> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Donald Knuth is a devout Christian and he has been right about lots of very complicated things.

> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Compartmentalization.

I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing?

Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders).

If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.

I find your example is more strongly of the corruption of fundamentalism on the person rather than of compartmentalization.

I’d prefer my scientists to be less confident in their understanding of the world, and more humble about their knowledge. Maybe reading Kuhn does that for most people today, but there’s a long tradition of religion fulfilling a similar function, allowing “mystery” back in, emphasizing the imperfection of man. Religion should instill an attitude of “I don’t know, but I want to know.” That’s the right attitude for discovery.

This is a precursory investigation into some beliefs, using logic instead of emotion: https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22

" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time "

Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion.

Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point.

Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.

'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind.

Science is a tool, not a Truth.

> that would be missing the point.

Which is?

> Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.

It can be, for some people. Not all. My personal relationship to the greater good has more to do with reasoned arguments rather than spirituality.

> 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Would you agree it's a highly important tool?

Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.

In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.

In order to even accept the very notion of 'reason' you have to accept some kind of higher truth.

In addition you have to accept that there is 'a reasoner'.

You can't avoid taking a metaphysical posture - this is the anti-rational position that a lot of knee-jerk opposition to religion is founded upon.

There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' - the Church founded all the best/most Universities in the world, and every other university is modelled after that.

The Motto of the Ivy Leagues are: 'Truth' or 'Truth and Light' or 'Light' etc. i.e. metaphysical aspirations.

Religion is the contemplation of higher order truths, mixed in with a bunch of applied social stuff.

Therefore: "Preferring Reasoning to Religion" is to misunderstand religion (i.e. Apples to Oranges), although to be fair, a lot of religious adherents do have a problem with that as well.

> Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.

No, it doesn't. (Scientific materialism posits rules, it concludes (or models with) randomness only where the best efforts to model rules without randomness fail.

> In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.

False. There's not teleological purpose, if that's what you mean by “reason”, which is a heavily overloaded term, but all the others (including reason in its causal sense) are compatible with scientific materialism.

> There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason'

That depends on the Church; and recently the ones which don't have a fundamental conflict with reason have been losing people to irreligion, while those which do have such a conflict have had all the growth. So, over time, the religion that exists progressively has more of a conflict with reason.

Religion is just a tool too. It's just not wielded by the flock, but rather by someone that wants to control the actions of the flock.

Spirituality can be something else altogether, but usually just boils down to magical thinking.

Religion is a social organization and embodiment of a Spiritual practice.

Technically, not necessary, but that would be like saying, technically, humans do not need 'each other' or need 'education' In reality, we do, immensely. When we don't have it wee seek it out learning ans religion, couched in different terms.

A good example is 'Yoga'. Yoga is 100% a religious practice, it's Hatha Yoga, a subdomain of Hinduism. Yoga exists to help prepare the body to be enlightened, specifically via the Kundalini Fire.

By removing the direct, religious language from Yoga, it's promulgators hoped to make it more amenable and acceptable to Westerners and it has been. (I do Yoga myself).

But merely changing the words to make them 'not seem religious' doesn't really change the underlying religious practice.

Isn't Spirituality also a tool, that enables you to understand and improve your relationship to the greater good?

All tools have value, in some context or another

You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share.

Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4].

More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan 4: https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ 5: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-...

I don't mean to imply that a religious person can't be outlier smart in other ways (Knuth being a great example but there are many others), but that doesn't mean something isn't broken with their world view. People are wildly inconsistent by default (myself included) and it takes great effort to try and recognize these kinds of failures in order to correct them.

In fact, the smarter the person is - the more complex their rationalizations typically are.

As far as finding major religions support a rational world view, it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything so I won't do that here. I'll just say that while I'd like that to be true, I think that it's not.

Your comment does directly imply that you don't trust their overall decision making and/or rationality based on your personal worldview. I believe that's bordering on a vary narrow and limiting view of human rationality, culture, and worldviews. Though yes I would agree with you to an extent as overly dogmatic religious beliefs leave little for other viewpoints or venues of thought as well.

> it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything

Certainly it's easy to cherry pick religious texts -- though there is some serious non-religious scholarly works in these areas as well but it's an area fraught with assumptions. The point being that it's not completely unreasonable to argue that (some) major world religions do promote aspects of rational worldviews (those being an orderly universe governed by knowable discernible rules). Perhaps your rationalistic or atheistic worldview is more correct but as with the view that certain religions promote rationality, that argument is fraught with challenges as well. That's my primary point.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

That is pretty ridiculous. It’s like saying if there is bad science the scientific theory is broken.

>If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."

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