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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.

I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs.

What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.

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“ They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.”

Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy.

One of the more interesting axioms or assertions is whether there exists free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity.

> Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy.

Which is totally fine, as long as people accept that God exists the same way math exists.

Yes, and ancient Christians asserted that God is love.

Many do accept that love exists in the same way math exists.

Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omnibenevolent.

Like the CAP theorem, you can only have two without substantial compromise.

Compromise depends on the understanding of the hierarchy.

When ancient texts list God as Love, they note that Love is an act of (free) will (free will being considered a supernatural entity, even today).

Free will is placed high on the hierarchy, which has interesting consequences. E.g. humans are free to do horrible things, and are free to choose not to love. If humans had no free will and were all instinct, there would be no love.

So you're saying there's evil and suffering in the world, but God can't prevent it because he created free will? Sounds like a limit on his omnipotence.

Your explanation makes it out that free will is inherently prone to evil and suffering. If so, that would make free will somewhat inherently evil even though it arises from God. Strikes at the heart of omnibenevolence.

Either there's a limit to his ability or a limit to his goodness. No amount of hand waving can remove that.

If He is all good but can create creatures that corrupt his good works… You see the logical conundrum there, right?

I would understand if you don't WANT to see it. It feels wrong to see it. But it's there if you're being honest. You can ignore it. Many do. It's still there despite any aversion to it.

> free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity

How so? I can think of at least one interesting definition by which free will is a perfectly good physical process going on in human brains, not supernatural at all.

Free will implies non determinism, that is the important part.

> Free will implies non determinism

Depends on which definition of free will you are using. Some definitions are compatible with determinism.

Also, even if we go with a non-deterministic definition of free will, "non-deterministic" is not the same as "supernatural". Quantum mechanics is not deterministic.

Thats not true for math / science.

Math is based on fundamental global laws which exist and can be checked from everyone and they can come up all with the same math.

We could isolate a baby and it could create the same math while it couldn't create the same religion.

Math is based on human chosen axioms. Actually, there are a lot of different sub fields of math that have different subsets of axioms to solve different types of problems. The axioms can never be proven though, they are just grounding.

Isolating a human is analogous to removing oxygen. Few would argue that someone brain dead could create anything.

I'm really not sure how you can missread my example to come up with 'isoalting a human is analogous to removing oxygen'.

My comparison is based on sciencse vs. fiction. 1+1 = 2 is a reality which works in german, africa, usa and everywhere else. There might be a difference on how those symbols (1, 2...) look like but the axiom is true and valid and is discoverable.

In religion its not.

Concept of god exists but it looks different depending on your believe. Multiply gods, one god, good god, bad god...

Even the stuff written down is based on someone who wrote it down and still people interpretate it totally different.

Never seen someone implying they are right that 1+1=3 if the interpretation of 3 is not 'next after one'.

1+1=2 is not really an axiom. There's a set of axioms that lead to that. They are even more primordial statements like "1 is a number" and "x=x" and "all numbers n have a successor number S(n) such that m=n if and only if S(m)=S(n)". Even if it seems clear (to most of us, at least) that these axioms represent some part of reality, they are still human-chosen -- and they have to be agreed upon. At some point, nearly everyone would have agreed that Euclid's 5th postulate was obviously true, and anyone alive could verify this for themself. Well, sometimes it's "true" and sometimes it isn't.

That said, the Peano axioms seem less nebulous that the varying axioms relating to the existence of god, as that concept can change so much from person to person.

That's a very shallow statement.

An isolated baby could derive simple math but also similarly deduce there is a greater entity out there.

Yes, but the stories and abilities regarding that greater entity will be as varied and inconsistent as those found all over the world. And most importantly will not be the same as any of them. How many wildly different stories are there regarding the creation of the world?

Whereas the axioms of math will be substantially similar to the point that any modern mathematician would recognize it. We see this on ancient tablets where folks were calculating the square root of 2. Or any of the cultures all around the world that had no significant contact with one another that deal with pi. Sure we'll see base-12 number systems as with the Babylonians or base-20 as with the Maya, but the underlying principles and lessons are largely IDENTICAL.

The worlds of math and the metaphysical could not be more different in that regard. Rather than being a very shallow statement, it is one of the most all-encompassing and profound in all of human history. It gave rise to the principles of the scientific method: humans are biased, so multiple people performing the same steps should come to the same results and predictions made based on those results should yield their own repeatable consistent results.

Funny enough we discuss in such religious discussions often being religious vs. not being and ignoring the huge difference of existing religons.

I had a discussion about this topic with a more hard core christian: I said 'look if it is a good god, it doesn't even matter if i worship her right?' and he said 'nope, its written that you have to worshop'.

So one believe doesn't equal to another believe.

Your underlying base changes based on your believe.

"An axiom, postulate or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments." this is not true for two religions being created independently from each other while this is very well true for science.

The case for the existence of free will can be analyzed from several bodies of evidence (it is a bias)

https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

The munchausen trilemma undermines the concept of “weighing the evidence”. Everything anybody believes to be true is either founded upon circular reasoning, a reasoning of infinite regression, or an arbitrary set of unprovable axioms. The consequence is that any level of belief in any truth can only be based upon faith. People who believe that their world view is based entirely upon facts and universal truths tend to have a very hard time accepting this. They will often say that scrutinizing something to that level is a pointless waste of time for things that are so obviously true, which is perhaps ironically the exact behaviour also exhibited by the most closed minded of the true believers that they often find themselves so frustrated by.

While your first statement is correct, you may want to acknowledge that "faith" in ideas can be seen as a continuum from completely subjective to mostly objective. For instance: believing in QAnon conspiracies isn't the same as believing in, say, climate change. Yes, both require your definition of "faith", but the former requires you to suspend your belief in reality while the latter is congruent with your observations of reality.

This isn’t true at all. I would characterize faith as being a belief in any truth that you cannot prove. There is no such thing as a truth that can be proven (or at least none has been discovered so far). All truths are equally non-probable.

Your stance seems to be that a set of unprovable axioms you prefer to have faith are somehow superior to some other set of unprovable axioms that some other people may choose to have faith in. You might have all sorts of perfectly reasonable justifications for the axioms you have faith in, but if you want to claim your beliefs transcend faith then you’ll have to present a logical proof that survives the munchausen trilemma.

I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.

> It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.

For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation.

However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.

> it's just that they have no practical impact at all,

That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.

Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.

> a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years

The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians does not mean that the particular religious beliefs I was talking about were the ones that kept the civilization together. In fact, as the example I gave of religious wars over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios" illustrates, those particular beliefs often caused problems that created huge rifts in the civilization.

> someone who has no idea how to keep any society together

If you are referring to me, I have no idea what you are talking about.

> Not only does the work of Aquinas have value

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that, at least as far as the particular beliefs I was referring to are concerned, since that's the particular work of Aquinas that I was discussing.

> no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100

Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested. I agree with you that many people today appear to have ethical systems that don't work well; we know that because they have bad practical consequences.

However, when you talk about keeping things going for 100 generations, we don't have any single ethical system that has done that. Ethical systems have changed many times over the course of human history.

>The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians //

It's somewhat orthogonal to your argument, but I'd doubt that most people in "Christian countries" (which is a heterodox notion) are/were Christians. Mostly people in the past seem to have followed a societal model, largely imposed as a firm of control.

Where I grew up in the UK the village vicar was not a Christian according to most definitions (they didn't believe in central tenets of the faith as espoused in all the main creeds).

Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity from basic things like having "special" people, to indulgences which are so contradictory to biblical teachings the only possibly way they were accepted is because most people were ignorant to Scripture. And of course those in power keenly maintained that ignorance.

> Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity

That's only true if you consider the Bible as the only source of revelation, which is not the case for Catholics, where Tradition is equally important.

Not only is it true for sola scriptura but also under prima scriptura (followed by Anglicans and Methodists amongst others) -- so under an "Anglican triad" this position is still valid.

Catholicism still has things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity, such as priesthood of all believers, even if you accept other sources of revelation those sources would still be contradictory.

https://www.catholic.com/tract/primer-on-indulgences

The powerful hoping to keep people ignorant seems like conspiracy/folklore.

Protest-ant publication of non-Latin Bible seems to disagree?

> Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested.

Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs.

The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in reality as Christian apologetics of Aquinas or Chesterton. The people holding these beliefs know this on some subconscious level and will viciously attack anyone who disagrees. It is only over time with many such "attacks" that a mass belief will die and be replaced by another one.

In fact, every one of these "ethical" religious beliefs came about the same way: it defeated another commonly agreed upon dogma.

This mechanism by the way is what runs civilization. One meme fighting another.

In my experience having been near many church splits I still feel this simply isn’t true. Churches operate like git forks and merges of ideas.

This is actually a really good analogy that applies to some other argument, but not the one I was trying to make :)

Git forks and merges still share a common ancestral history and are basically an evolution of the same idea. This is true of a real Git repo (it's one software project after all) and the kind of churches you are likely talking about (it's all just a theist religion after all). Christianity is a branch in the same repo as the ancient Roman gods. The Saturnalia feature is even there still :)

I was thinking more about ideas like: - can people be property? - is it a good thing to kill "infidels"? - can women vote? - can a 10 year old get married?

These are "religious" questions because there is no objective truth to the answer either way. It's all based on beliefs and consensus.

Before you downvote me into oblivion: the answers to all of these have historically been different than they are today. People in both times (past and present) would attack you if you disagreed with the status quo (there was even a certain civil war fought about the people=property one). I am not actually disagreeing with the status quo on any of the above.

However, it would be naive to think that we do not presently collectively believe some things that would be appalling to a future human. A good heuristic for these is: would I get attacked or mocked for questioning this?

Indeed ethical systems have changed throughout the lifespan of a religion. Religions are not set in stone and change more than what most religious people are willing to admit.

For example, people used to believe the Book of Genesis literally, and now (I believe) most denominations take it allegorically. I wonder how many similar stories like that will we have in the future.

For me, it always felt like the interpretation of the Holy Books are changing through time as we understand science more and more. And it feels ironic to me.

That's true. But even leaving science aside, and focusing only on non-falsifiable aspects of human ethics, there are many examples such as slavery where Christianity for example has changed over time quite radically (and not even linearly)

I asked about slavery in Reddit's DebateAChristian forum. Most Christians say that those part of the Bible needs to be understood in the context of those times where debt slavery was quite common and not considered evil. So we can't apply today's morality there. Well, at least these were the most common answers I got. There were also a person who told me that what "moral"/"good" means is _completely_ subjective (which is true to some extent), so I should not judge Exodus 21.

FWIW, slavery in antiquity was rarely purely a "racial" thing. You became slave because of losing a war, which often was waged in response to some a refusal to just pay some reason indecent amount of taxes or whatever one side insisted was "due".

Surely all christians today believe that tricking somebody with dubious pretexts into debt-based slavery (as often happens with human trafficking of sex workers, where women have to formally pay up their debts and incurring the costs that they captors incur in hosting them in sub-human conditions).

Religious people asking others to judge the Word Of God by whatever standards humans happened to have at the time the books were written is an implicit acceptance that their religion is completely made up. What happened, God Changed their mind in the meantime?

Jewish Old Testament scholars haven’t taken Genesis literally for more than 2 millennia.

Literal interpretation of Genesis is a fairly recent phenomenon. Fundamentalism is a modern religion.

> Literal interpretation of Genesis is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Um, no, it isn't. It's how Genesis was interpreted by most people of the Jewish and Christian religions throughout most of the time since it was written. What is a fairly recent phenomenon is people of those religions not interpreting Genesis (and the Bible in general) literally.

Indeed they change more than their zealous detractors, whose rigid mindsets cannot update priors despite abundant evidence contradicting their sacred beliefs, namely that the pious and meek are to be looked down upon, either pitied or scorned.

Good old "the world is going to shit".

The simple reality is that it's always been this way and will likely be this way for a long time.

I've been fascinated listening to a podcast on the History of Rome (highly recommend). Rome wasn't built in a day, but also the fall of the empire was a period of about 300 years during which Rome itself was still called the "eternal city".

Not saying this as proof that the world is definitely going to shit, the point is that it I don't think we've achieved some new level of eternal civilisation that couldn't possibly fail. Every civilisation believed that right up until the point it stopped being true, so we should be on the look out for threats and not assume it will all end up OK.

> That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.

Value changes with time. Horse whips had a lot of value at one time. Now, not so much.

Religion is prevalent in many societies, and it isn't the same religion. This talk of the value of aquinas ignores the fact that all his reasoning only really applied to christian religions. Yet other religions without deities or with many of them provided the same social structures christianity has.

Consider, for example, China. Just as old and grand as European civilization with a religion mostly focused on the mandate of heaven given to their leaders.

Now consider modern China, which is an atheist state that's been thriving. Certainly, not without problems, but it's hard to argue their civilization hasn't become a major world power.

This shows you lack understanding of the fundamental philosophical system by which his arguments are built, espcially Aristotle. Dispute what many think, Aristotle did a lot of experimentation. He was not an arm chair philosopher. St Thomas' arguments are anything but circular.

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