My grandfather Paul Tillich, the unbelieving theologian | Hacker News Reader

My grandfather Paul Tillich, the unbelieving theologian

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110 pointsrbanffy193 comments

> Among the most puzzling and paradoxical ideas in his Systematic Theology (1951) is his statement that ‘God does not exist’ and that ‘to argue that God exists is to deny him.’ Tillich goes on to state that the word ‘existence’ should never be used in conjunction with the word ‘God’.

By reading this, I am tempted to imagine the intellectual atmosphere that prompted the logical positivists to insist on what constitutes meaningful statements to the point of being themselves incoherent [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism#Cognitive_m...

It does bring that to mind, especially given the era he came out of. Likely, however, what he is trying to get at is the distinction between God/not God: existence is something a thing which is not God — a neutrino, a squirrel, a rock — is given, which makes speaking of God as having existence in the same way as those things a mistake, as if the highest thing is just one of those many things which could be enumerated that way. This helps maintain the distinction Tillich is likely aiming at, which is to avoid speaking of God as part of the universe, or in some panentheistic way.

I think this is on point, but does point to the limits/faults in his work. I recall being very energized by Tillich in my youth and at the very beginnings of my religious exploration, but was very surprised that the sort of "ambiguity" he was trying to parse was much more well laid out in classical theologians (Aquinas, etc), i.e. "to define God, the limitless being, is to inherently apply limit" which is why theologians have traditionally pursued God via "what He is Not" as we can certainly say that God is not limited, time bound, etc.

Tillich's "ambiguity" was very approachable in my youth, but today I find it extremely dangerous from a moral and philosophical perspective. There is truth in what is said, but unless you have the context in which it is said you can quickly spin it to your heart's delight. My primary takeaway as a youth was "this is great and very theological/intellectually stimulating while not morally demanding of me whatsoever, hooray!" which is why, as a stubborn young adult, certainly found it attractive.

FWIW, if anybody wants a great challenge that seeks to bridge classical theology with modern/personalist/subjective thought, you should read Man and Woman He Created Them by John Paul II. It is as rewarding as it is dense and gave me the bridge between "old" and "new" philosophy/theology that I find lacking in many moderns.

You raise a good point on how people like us enjoy leveraging ambiguous philosophy for our own amorality. If the philosopher fails to take a stand — something is good, something is bad, something is wrong, something is right — their ideas are easily repurposed for rationalizing, even absolving, immoral acts.

People like me want nice-sounding, undemanding ideas that makes them look good and feel good. We desire ideas that shift with words, ideas that lack solid form and the logical consistency that would ward off our own desires.

Like you said, it's dangerous because people think ambiguous philosophy as a vitamin, when really it's an intellectual candy. Tasty and sweet, but no nutrition for the soul, and certainly it gives no energy for its exercise.

Strong second for Man and Woman He Created Them. If you can get through it without coming to a deeper understanding of yourself (whether in agreement with its ideas or in opposition to them), you'll be the first person I've met who has.

> much more well laid out in classical theologians (Aquinas, etc)

And what's more, while God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens is a conclusion we can arrive at philosophically (and thus unaided reason with no appeals made to revealed knowledge), we also find Scriptural antecedents, such as Exodus 3:14 (where God gives his "name" to Moses as "I Am"; God is not this god, or that god, but is).

> It is as rewarding as it is dense and gave me the bridge between "old" and "new" philosophy/theology that I find lacking in many moderns.

You might find Betz's recent book[0] interesting.

[0] https://stpaulcenter.com/product/christ-the-logos-of-creatio...

Is there good reason to believe that this is what is really meant by "I am who I am" and isn't just Christians reading philosophical ideas back into the OT?

(I ask this actually because I remember Ratzinger raising this possible objection in Introduction to Christianity (some of which I read long ago, though I don't have the text with me anymore), presumably to rebut it, though I don't remember his rebuttal.)

> you can quickly spin it…

It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other.

E.g. quantum mechanics is arguably the least ambiguous theory ever devised, because it gives results of the most specific agreement with experiment. But nevertheless has an ever-increasing number of interpretations, none of which can be ruled out—to all appearances hopelessly ambiguous to what it actually means.

When it comes decisions you have to make, either individually or as a society, even the most verbose and specific moral codes suddenly seem to be ambiguous. Some examples:

1. Are we morally obliged to either support or oppose Obamacare?

2. Is a 50% tax rate moral or immoral? What is the exact tax rate which is “most moral”?

3. Is it Moral to support a president who boinked an intern? Or a president who payed hush money to hookers?

4. Should it be illegal to smoke? Or sell fruit-flavored vapes?

5. How old should somebody be before they are allowed to (fill in the blank here…vote, have sex, drive a car, drink, drop out of school?)

We certainly look to our cultural polestars—-religion, tradition, precident—to help us out with these sorts of questions, but by no means does any of them give us any definitive answers.

> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other.

"Virtual base classes are instantiated in the order specified by the depth-first, left-to-right traversal of the directed acyclic graph of all base classes." That is a very precise, unambiguous statement if you know what virtual base classes are. (The sentence went on to define what "left to right" meant in this context.) You don't even need to know what a directed acyclic graph is in a formal way to be able to clearly, unambiguously understand what that sentence is saying.

Compare that to, I don't know, the worst sentence from your CEO's quarterly yay-us message to the company. Or the worst sentence from a politician's campaign speech, or from a political debate where they're trying to dodge the other side's point.

Yes, statements can be less ambiguous than other statements. (Even in politics - compare George Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes" with the statements many politicians make.)

Well…Suppose I wrote an optimizer which could—-perhaps as some kind of return-value optimization, determine that we didn’t even need to construct such an object, but we instead could just pass along the values to the caller?

If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it?

We are so good at handling ambiguity that we don’t even notice its existence most of the time. But specs, especially specs which specify the semantics of an expression—are infinitely ambiguous as to how to that expression is actually calculated.

Ideally, the spec, for c++ or another language is deliberately made ambiguous, just because it leaves room for creative interpretations—-also known as “optimizations”.

> If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it?

Generally: no. Most such specs have a phrase along the lines of “externally observable effect”.

In other words, the compiler can do anything as long as the programmer or external systems can’t tell that anything is different.

Processors do this all the time, reordering instruction execution but then arranging things so that it’s impossible to tell that this occurred.

Yup. Its an interesting example of deliberate ambiguity, and how useful it can be.

This is why I don't like using "ambiguous" as a term of abuse. Ambiguity isn't inherently bad. Languages are ambiguous for a reason.

But this can be unambiguously defined! Externally observable effects can have specific meanings.

I didn't quite understand that point, can you rephrase? I mean, yeah, things like specs for computer languages do define a space for ambiguity, but that space is ambiguous just the same.

Let's say you wrote this code:

    a = 2 * b + c * d;
    writeToDisk(a)
    e = b + b - a;
    sendToNetwork(e)

Naively, you would expect the compiler to emit CPU instructions that perform the computations left-to-right, top-to-bottom. In pseudocode assembly:

    mul 2, b -> a
    mul c, d -> reg1
    add a, reg1 -> a
    push a 
    call writeToDisk
    mov b -> reg1
    add b, reg1 -> reg1
    sub a, reg -> e
    push e
    call sendToNetwork

The externally observable effects may be considered to be the function calls. If you're dealing with I/O devices then it would be some similar specific hardware event such as writing to a GPIO register.

It should be immediately obvious that the compiler can compute 2*b just once, cache it in a register, and use it to compute both 'a' and 'e', even though the formulas are different and interspersed with function calls. Similarly, it can noticed that e has a 2b-2b in its overall formula and hence eliminate some computations entirely.

As long as the inputs to the functions don't change and the order of their calls aren't modified, "all is fine" and the compiler is free to do this.

In fact, modern compilers can completely eliminate function calls, inlining them if they perform pure computations or have no side-effects! This is done to such a point that it makes benchmarking challenging: merely timing some computations will often take 0 time unless the result of the computation is written to the console or some similarly externally-visible destination.

Compilers are allowed to this even for abstractions like virtual functions or interfaces. The JVM does this regularly. If it notices there's only a single implementation of an interface, it'll inline it, possibly eliminating the call entirely if it turns out to be a no-op.

Ok, thanks for clarifying. But again, we are so used to dealing with ambiguity that we don't even notice it. It looks like the inputs/outputs are really nailed down....but still, it is ambiguous in countless ways.

For example, you can type the input/output to these functions in any font or size you want. You don't have to use ASCII. The results on the screen can be glowing green phosphorus, red phosphorus, or a glorious retina display.

etc etc. Wherever the specs end, the ambiguity begins.

For your latter point I find branch prediction to be even more egregious (from a computational ambiguity perspective). The processor is executing code just in case it discovers that it needs to have executed it.

> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other.

The logical positivists (and analytic philosophers in general) were very concerned about this.

The original ones like Carnap thought it was a problem because of fascists, who are, you know, pathological liars. So the problem wasn't ambiguity, moreso that they were propagandizing and he hoped to defeat this by showing that it wasn't true. As it turns out, this didn't work, so they had to give up on it.

Analytic philosophers do it because they're mad at obscurantist French people like Derrida. Which is also a noble goal if a smaller problem.

And in that sense Tillich isn't that far from, say, Aquinas, who is consistent about asserting that existence is not a "real" predicate and that God's existence is outside of the world and outside of space and time.

You don't even need to squint that hard to see a commonality between Tillich's notion of discussing God symbolically and Aquinas's notion of doing so analogically, not to mention the contrast between finite humans and an infinite God who is beyond understanding. And not to mention that apophaticism – the idea that positive knowledge about God is impossible – has been a feature of Christian theology since the beginning.

So much of this can be taken in ways that not only aren't outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, but also align with more sophisticated Christian philosophical understandings of God.

That much, of course, is not why Tillich is controversial!

So… God is mathematics?

Don't know where you got that from.

I'm guessing a sloppy equivalence due to the idea of "existence is outside of the world and outside of space and time" showing up in descriptions (e.g. "a platonist might assert that the number pi exists outside of space and time" from https://iep.utm.edu/mathplat/).

Yes!

To be more specific: if the Universe (existence itself) can be described by mathematics, and mathematics is timeless (beyond mere physical existence), then essentially the physical Universe is inevitable and in some sense "created by" mathematics. In this view of creation, mathematics plays the role of God.

It's also worth bearing in mind that much theology is an attempt to explain what the experience of God is like. The experience of God is not (for Tillich, nor perhaps for very many moderns) about finding a literal place and time in which God-the-being can be directly observed. To seek God and expect to find a being who exists in the same manner as a tree or a building is to set oneself up for failure.

When Tillich says "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt" he is describing the psychological process the seeker undergoes. In his case, he identifies God with the open, reflective cast of mind in which one engages with the unknowable, ineffable, combinatorally-explosive possibilities that are found at the horizons of our understanding. The "state of being grasped by an ultimate concern" is one in which we are trying - and necessarily failing - to see beyond the horizon. And yet, something sustains us in the effort, which is faith in God.

Doubtless this really is a very different kind of faith than other self-described Christians might have, whose faith might be rooted in a different mode of being and engagement with the world. And, to be clear, Tillich's description is very much "what it's like" to have his variety of faith, and not a metaphysical claim about the workings of the universe. A different Christian might hold much stronger claims about God's precise nature and existence, but for Tillich those beliefs were unsustainable.

> To seek God and expect to find a being who exists in the same manner as a tree or a building is to set oneself up for failure.

But isn’t that the whole point of Christianity, that Jesus was God in human flesh and actually existed like you or I exist while also being fully God?

Existed like you or I exist, yes, but existed merely as you or I exist, or merely as a tree or building exists, no.

It is a peculiar thing to say about someone who refers to oneself as "I am".

It kind of is — except the name given to Moses is closer to "I Am Who I Am", which is consonant with the rest of the OT/NT, where God is known by what he does & what he says (revealing the contours of his character) instead of through examination, deduction, or some sort of experience of the divine.

His point is that we talk of existing, as existing in this universe. But God is outside of it.

An analogy is: it would be wrong to say Tolkien exists in the Lord of the Rings universe, even though he made it, and so in a sense is a precondition for any of the characters in the lore existing.

This is actually not unusual but is the standard theological view

Disagree because it implies intent, but I also find Sephirah to be a better wrapper for this angle of the discussion.

A better analogy that comes to mind is that "God" - in this case - is a violin string, and the universe is the music.

The pain evident in his life story seems to shatter the very assumptions of language even.

I read in that sentence something of the nature of "Humans can't even plumb the depths of 'existence' with surety to understand how to bring that idea to a superseding and underlying ever-being of a God"

Tillich would overload the semi-colon in C.

I wonder if this refers to a central idea in Orthodox theology which is very clear to distinguish between:

- God "υπάρχει" (Greek for existing under someone's authority, "υπ" under -"αρχή" authority) which is used in modern Greek for all things that simply exist and is false for God and,

- God "είναι" (Greek for being, present tense) which is True of God and of nothing else.

Sounds like he would sure love the Abrahamic God - the one when inquired of “who should I tell them sent me” responds with “I AM”

One name I don't see here is "Heidegger". I remember hearing years ago that Tillich drew heavily on Heidegger, sometimes with little more alteration than swapping in "God" for "ground of being".

Perhaps someone better acquainted with Tillich and Heidegger could weigh in?

Paul Tillich is definitely interesting, but I find his conclusions deeply unsatisfying and even somewhat "new agey." This is pretty typical of existentialists though. When you search for meaning and purpose, you tend to find it in reinforcing what it is you want in the first place. So for Nietzsche, it was ultimate freedom, for Kierkegaard it was Christianity, for Camus it was living contradiction, and for Tillich it is some sort of Christian-y/pantheist/new age hybrid. It doesn't help that unlike most existentialists, Tillich is a pretty dull writer.

That doesn't mean he didn't have a number of insights and thought-provoking ideas, and really my criticism is more due to my feelings about existentialism than Tillich itself. I find a vigorous approach to seeking/knowing truth far more interesting and satisfying than seeking (or creating) meaning/purpose.

Doesn't the "rigorous approach to seeking/knowing truth" seem kind of detached from the reality of life to you? It seems to me that humans are not just disembodied thinking things but agents that actually live in the real world, that (in my view) must live to some end, some purpose.

You spend about 8 hours per day in something other than this definition of the “real” world.

Levels of reality imply levels of truth.

Oh, of course there's truth, and it's something to be concerned about. I just mean to say that philosophizing in a way cognizant of our status of living, acting things as opposed to truth-generating machines makes a lot of sense, particularly because there's going to be a level of uncertainty that pervades all our knowledge. But uncertainty shouldn't paralyze us into never-ending rational analysis.

Our purpose is pretty clear: to reproduce. What sets us apart from other animals is the way we structure our curiosity.

Sure, in terms of evolutionary "purpose" (which is not really purpose, just the way we make sense of what evolution is doing---we know that evolution doesn't have some goal in the sense that it is an agent whose will is oriented towards that goal), our biology is (more or less) optimized to pass on genes. That says nothing about what our purpose in the sense of what we ought to do. I imagine most people would simply deny that things have purposes at all; they simply are the way they are.

You were talking about people being detached; to be attached to the reality of life is to act, to reproduce. Our biology tells us that we ought to have children, but we don't see it very clearly because we have found ways to hijack our impulses.

>to act

Yes, that seems clear to me.

>to reproduce

No, that doesn't seem clear to me. I have no trouble imagining being perfectly tethered to the reality of life but having no plans to reproduce. Not that reproduction is a bad thing, but I just mean to say that I don't see how facts about our biology can alone dictate what's meaningful and what's not. It seems to me that from facts we can only derive more facts.

>Our biology tells us that we ought to have children

Well, it doesn't really tell us that we ought to do anything, does it? We're generally instilled with a biological impulse to reproduce, sure. But this still says nothing about what we ought to do. A fact about our biology doesn't directly justify a value concerning what we should do, because facts can't directly justify values, they can only justify other facts.

I'm not arguing this point just for the sake of argument - I wouldn't want my original comment to be read as something like, "Forget about math and philosophy and crap like that, just have sex!" No no, I just mean to say that instead of getting too caught up entirely abstract epistemological issues about which we can never be completely certain about anything (pace Descartes), it makes sense to philosophize in a way directly related to us being living, acting things and not philosophical proof machines. And this living and acting ought not necessarily involve having children, though it could.

> It seems to me that from facts we can only derive more facts.

You seem to think of knowledge as something that has to be expressed in language to exist, whereas I do not.

> because facts can't directly justify values

Values are rooted in biology. Facts are not prescriptive, but our biology is.

> And this living and acting ought not necessarily involve having children, though it could.

You can find all sorts of words and facts to try to justify meaning, but meaning itself is ineffable; it is felt. Individualism will only get you so far.

> it makes sense to philosophize in a way directly related to us being living, acting things and not philosophical proof machines.

I don't think the poster you were replying to would disagree. I think they were getting at how people chase after a simulation of meaning instead of acting in a meaningful way. I think you can seek truth without getting lost in language games.

>You seem to think of knowledge as something that has to be expressed in language to exist, whereas I do not.

I think that's an independent issue. Whether or not beliefs must be linguistically expressible and whether or not values can be derived from facts alone are two separate questions.

>Values are rooted in biology. Facts are not prescriptive, but our biology is.

I don't see why biology is prescriptive. I have biological impulses to do things all the time, and I often don't follow up on them because I know that what I ought to do isn't entirely dependent on what my biological state is.

Suppose I have some kind of impulse to murder someone. Indeed, humans do sometimes have this kind of impulse. It's probably an impulse that one could tell some evolutionary story about---through some long chain of reasoning, this boils down to some kind of reproductive drive. Even if that's all true, that's all fine---but I have no trouble seeing that I ought not murder someone (barring extenuating circumstances), regardless of how strong my biological impulse is to do so.

Suppose you were sitting around, bored one day. And you asked me, "Hey, what should I do today?" And I gave some detailed description of how evolution has sculpted you for reproduction. You would probably say, "Yeah, yeah, that's all true, fine---but what should I do today?" and rightfully so, because my explanation of evolution is a total non-sequitur, and doesn't seem to answer your question at all. And I don't see why blowing up the time scale from "today" to "my entire life" changes the fact that my description of evolution is still a non-sequitur.

>You can find all sorts of words and facts to try to justify meaning, but meaning itself is ineffable; it is felt. Individualism will only get you so far.

Sure. I still think we can talk about it and think about it to some extent, if not to a large extent. Just like I have no trouble justifying why I'm walking down a particular road if someone were to ask me---I have to get to the train station, so I can take the train to my job, so I can work, so I can earn money, so I can put food on the table, etc. It's true that these words don't convey the full experience of what it's like to be me, but I don't that has any bearing on the truth of those words in establishing why it is that I do what I do.

>I think they were getting at how people chase after a simulation of meaning instead of acting in a meaningful way. I think you can seek truth without getting lost in language games.

Well, I think the existentialists wanted to act in a meaningful way and seek truth without getting lost in language games too. What I'm objecting to here is that this entails a rigorous approach to seeking truth as opposed to seeking meaning (in the original poster's words)---to do so seems to lead to getting trapped in abstract epistemological thought and losing touch with the reality of needing to act in the real world.

Instinct is prescriptive. You can muddy the waters with impulses that have been conditioned by experience all you like. You can use your conditioning to override your instinct and do all sorts of unnatural things. That doesn't deny the reality of instinct.

> And you asked me, "Hey, what should I do today?"

You keep bringing up words and facts. Reality is more than words.

>That doesn't deny the reality of instinct.

Sure. But I'm not denying the reality of instinct. What I'm denying is that instinct is normative. What is natural is not necessarily what is good or what we ought to do.

>You keep bringing up words and facts. Reality is more than words.

Sure. This "what should I do today" story isn't some linguistic sleight of hand. I told that story to evoke the intuition that there's a difference between instincts and values.

It's really just that the claim that reproduction is our purpose appears unfounded. The argument seems to be something like:

P1: The process of evolution has sculpted human biology for reproduction. P2: If human biology has been sculpted for reproduction, then we ought to reproduce. C: We ought to reproduce.

P2 is simply unfounded - it just doesn't appear to be true. Perhaps what you're saying is something like "You're just playing a word game here. Saying that we are sculpted to reproduce is the same as saying that we ought to reproduce---these phrases have the same meaning." But these phrases don't have the same meaning. There are facts, and then there are values, and these aren't the same thing---not just linguistically, they really, in reality, are not the same thing.

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And suppose they are the same thing. So our purpose is to reproduce. Does this even mean anything in practice? I take it you believe your purpose is to reproduce. Why is it that you've typed text into a combox and hit "reply"? That doesn't seem conducive to reproduction. It's not just this comment; I suspect that many things, if not the majority of things you do, don't seem conducive to optimizing reproduction. Why would you do these things if they're not helping your purpose?

Perhaps you'd say that "Well, it might not immediately seem like these things are conducive to reproduction, but there's a long story I can tell about how these actually are related to my reproductive drive." But if you start playing these kinds of games, it isn't clear that "our purpose is to reproduce" really means anything in practice at all. You can always construct some story about how your behavior is, through some long chain of reasoning, reducible to a reproductive drive. That still leaves us with the practical question of what our purpose is - what should we actually do? "To reproduce" just isn't helpful.

> What is natural is not necessarily what is good or what we ought to do.

We are so abstracted from our underlying nature with cultural proxies that it is hard to think of what is natural. Also, I never said choice does not exist; prescriptions are not commands.

> There are facts, and then there are values, and these aren't the same thing---not just linguistically, they really, in reality, are not the same thing.

Right, and your biology communicates to you in values alone, because facts are tools for communication.

> P2: If human biology has been sculpted for reproduction, then we ought to reproduce.

That is redundant; the prescription is done unconsciously and without reasoning, so reasoning can always make it seem absurd. If we are built to reproduce then we should expect to feel satisfied when we do so. Mammalian reproduction is far more complex than that though, and human reproduction is the most complex.

> Why would you do these things if they're not helping your purpose?

To me that's like asking why we are consciousness. I don't know. I guess somewhere along the line we became so complex that we managed to hijack our biology. We can focus on short-term pleasure instead of balancing things with long-term satisfaction. I am talking to you out of curiosity.

> That still leaves us with the practical question of what our purpose is - what should we actually do? "To reproduce" just isn't helpful.

I would say that people ask about the meaning of life or their purpose because they have been alienated from their underlying biology. If someone feels satisfied, they won't ask about meaning.

OK - let me clarify the language I've been using. (For brevity, I may speak a bit loosely with certain technical philosophical ideas here, but I'll try to avoid jargon for the most part.) I'm going to spill a good amount of ink here, but that's not because I'm trying very hard to trick you with meaningless words, but on the contrary, I'm trying to spell out very carefully what I'm saying to make it clear that what I'm saying is meaningful, even if you disagree (just like the statement "The earth is flat" is meaningful, though false. But it's not a word game.)

"1+1=2". "The earth is round." "I am sitting on a chair right now." These are all truths.

Truths come in different categories. For example, some truths are mathematical truths. Some truths are truths about the physical world.

Some truths are truths (as opposed to falsities, like "1+1=3") by virtue of other truths being truths. For example, "the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees" is a truth in virtue of Euclid's fifth postulate ("if a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that are less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles") being a truth. If the latter is a truth, then it must be the case that the former is the truth.

Physical truths are not truths purely by virtue of mathematical truths alone. For example, no amount of mathematical truths grounds the truth that there is an inverse square law describing the force between physical objects. This is why Newton had to make observations about the world to formulate the inverse square law---because the inverse square law is true by virtue not purely of mathematical truths.

You may or may not have contentions at this point with what I've said - put that aside as long as you understand what I'm trying to illustrate - some truths are truths by virtue of other truths, and there are, in principle, some categories of truths such that no truth of one category can be a truth in virtue because of a truth of another category (you can at least understand what I'm saying about physical truths and mathematical truths, even if you have contentions about whether this is actually the case). And this isn't a language game, what I'm saying really does have meaning.

OK - now consider "One ought not murder an innocent person without just cause". This is a truth. This is not merely a bunch of words strung together in a grammatically correct way like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". This sentence is an expression of a truth.

Moreover, this is not the same the truth "I believe one ought not murder an innocent person without just cause". This is a truth about my psychological state, expressing something completely different. "One ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" is a truth regardless of whether or not "I believe one ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" is a truth. It is also a truth regardless of whether or not "Most people believe one ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" is a truth. To equate these truths would be to misunderstand what "One ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" means. Just like how "1+1=2" is a truth that is not the same as "I believe 1+1=2". These are completely different. "1+1=2" is a truth regardless of what my belief about it is. Even if I had some strange drive that might somehow be related to reproduction to want to claim "it is not true that 1+1=2", that would have zero bearing on "1+1=2" being a truth. To believe otherwise would be to misunderstand what "1+1=2" means, it's not a truth having to do with my beliefs, desires, motives, psychology, or biology. It is a mathematical truth, which is completely independent from all that. "One ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" is a truth in a very similar way.

In general, ought-truths are not truths by virtue of is-truths alone (of course, ought-truths can be truths of is-truths in conjunction with ought-truths. For example, "I ought not murder Socrates" is a truth by virtue of "Socrates is an innocent person" (is-truth) and "I ought not murder an innocent person" (ought-truth). However, "I ought not murder Socrates" is not a truth by virtue of "Socrates is an innocent person" alone.)

The same applies to the truth "Evolution has sculpted humans for reproduction". This is an is-truth. "I ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" cannot be a truth by virtue of this truth alone. To think that it could would be to misunderstand what "I ought not murder an innocent person without just cause" means. It is not a truth about psychology, biology, history, mathematics, etc. It is a moral truth, and such truths exist independently of truths about the beliefs people have, the psychological states people are in, or biological drives that people have.

Now, you might object that there is no such thing as an ought-truth---"I ought not murder an innocent person" is just the same thing as saying "I believe I ought not murder an innocent person" or "Most believe I ought not murder an innocent person" or "I have bad feelings about murdering innocent people" or something like this. That's fine---but then we're talking about completely different when we talk about "purpose". Purpose in the sense that it is an ought-truth is what I am talking about. I'm not talking about truths about human biology. Those truths are irrelevant---well, not really irrelevant (like I said, ought-truths aren't truths by virtue of is-truths alone, but they can be truths by virtue of is-truths and ought-truths, so there may be relevant is-truths to our purpose), but they are not the whole story.

And to be sure, thus far, when I have been talking about "facts", what I meant was "is-truths", and when I have been talking about "values", what I meant was "ought-truths".

>I don't know. I guess somewhere along the line we became so complex that we managed to hijack our biology. We can focus on short-term pleasure instead of balancing things with long-term satisfaction. I am talking to you out of curiosity.

So this is a good point to respond to that would help clarify what exactly I mean by purpose. Your response here would be very confusing if you meant purpose in the sense that I meant it. It would be as if you said "My destination is the grocery store," and I asked you, "If your destination is the grocery store, why are you walking toward the zoo?", and you said, "I don't know. I'm curious about what's going on at the zoo." Your response here indicates that your destination isn't in fact the grocery store, or at least, "My destination is the grocery store" is not the whole story, it's actually "My first stop is the zoo, and my final destination is the grocery store," or something like this. To believe otherwise would be to misunderstand what "My destination is the grocery store" means. Now of course, a valid response could have been "My destination is the grocery store, but I got distracted." - having a purpose doesn't preclude a weakness of will causing you to take actions not conducive towards that purpose. But you said "I don't know".

And this isn't some weird meaning I've arbitrarily ascribed to the word purpose. No, purpose in this sense is what actually matters. It is not a description of the way in which a bunch of physical stuff is organized.

For some further intuition on this, it might be fruitful to reread my example of murder in a previous comment in this light. Even if it really were the case that murder was natural, that would have no bearing on its immorality. I'm sure you can come up with other examples where what is natural is immoral.

> Now, you might object that there is no such thing as an ought-truth---"I ought not murder an innocent person" is just the same thing as saying "I believe I ought not murder an innocent person" or "Most believe I ought not murder an innocent person" or "I have bad feelings about murdering innocent people" or something like this. That's fine---but then we're talking about completely different when we talk about "purpose".

Statements of oughts are values not truths. I'm not sure how you've come to the idea that an ought can be a truth.

> Your response here indicates that your destination isn't in fact the grocery store, or at least, "My destination is the grocery store" is not the whole story, it's actually "My first stop is the zoo, and my final destination is the grocery store," or something like this. To believe otherwise would be to misunderstand what "My destination is the grocery store" means.

Tradition is a highly complicated system of values; a lot of values have been made indirect and abstracted far away from our instincts. I think you've constructed an analogy that doesn't really bear any useful resemblance to reality, because it's hard to see how going to the zoo can help me go to the grocery store. I can see how my curiosity leads me to being creative and learning, which are both helpful in the tradition I belong in.

> Purpose in the sense that it is an ought-truth is what I am talking about. I'm not talking about truths about human biology. Those truths are irrelevant---well, not really irrelevant (like I said, ought-truths aren't truths by virtue of is-truths alone, but they can be truths by virtue of is-truths and ought-truths, so there may be relevant is-truths to our purpose), but they are not the whole story.

> And this isn't some weird meaning I've arbitrarily ascribed to the word purpose. No, purpose in this sense is what actually matters. It is not a description of the way in which a bunch of physical stuff is organized.

You keep referring to the truth of reproduction, whereas I am talking about feeling purpose in it. Purpose is validated by the meaning that is gained from it.

> For some further intuition on this, it might be fruitful to reread my example of murder in a previous comment in this light. Even if it really were the case that murder was natural, that would have no bearing on its immorality. I'm sure you can come up with other examples where what is natural is immoral.

Killing is natural. Murder is an immoral act due to the traditional set of values that we have inherited. We react to killing instinctively, but we react to murder because it violates the traditional order. If the traditional order is warped so that people are no longer connected to it, you will see the inner animal emerge from them. If anything natural is deemed immoral, it is from the standpoint of the traditional order.

>Statements of oughts are values not truths.

I think values (in this context) are truths! It's an idea that seems strange at first, and I think that if you asked people on the street, they would probably say indeed that ought-statements aren't objectively true, just matters of opinion or something like that. But I think this is wrong.

But to be sure, what I've been saying is that the claim that "We ought to reproduce as our primary purpose" is true is incorrect. If you don't think ought a statements are truths, then there's actually no disagreement here, you don't think it's true either.

But I think ought-statements can be true. "Spinach is yucky" is a kind of statement that isn't a truth and isn't really true or false---it's just a matter of opinion. But I think that this is fundamentally different from, for example, "The earth revolves around the sun". The latter case is independent of what people believe or what kind of feelings they have about the roundness of the earth---not so for the first case. Now consider " We ought not hold slaves." Is this statement more like "Spinach is yucky" or "The earth revolves around the sun"? There was a time where most people would have disagreed with "We ought not hold slaves". They would have even said it's traditional, it's economically necessary, etc. But all that has no bearing on this statement. Slavery is wrong and has always been wrong - even when it was traditional, when most people held slaves, etc. Because morals aren't just claims about what's traditional or conducive to reproduction. Just like "the earth revolves around the sun", tradition and evolution and psychology don't affect the truth of this statement---it is simply true.

> I think that if you asked people on the street, they would probably say indeed that ought-statements aren't objectively true, just matters of opinion or something like that.

Not that it really matters, but if you asked people in philosophy departments, they would say the same.

> But to be sure, what I've been saying is that the claim that "We ought to reproduce as our primary purpose" is true is incorrect. If you don't think ought a statements are truths, then there's actually no disagreement here, you don't think it's true either.

Since it's a value, it's either right or wrong. You've decided that "reproduction is necessary and sufficient for a meaningful life" is wrong.

> Now consider " We ought not hold slaves." Is this statement more like "Spinach is yucky" or "The earth revolves around the sun"?

It is in the same category as the former; it is a statement of value.

> Slavery is wrong and has always been wrong - even when it was traditional, when most people held slaves, etc. Because morals aren't just claims about what's traditional or conducive to reproduction. Just like "the earth revolves around the sun", tradition and evolution and psychology don't affect the truth of this statement---it is simply true.

I doubt it. I don't want to open up a can of worms, but I have no problem forcing people who have committed heinous crimes to work for nothing; my only problem is that I think such a system may not be implemented properly. Also, I don't have a problem with people not being able to profit from publicising their crimes. I think the only problem I have with the government seizing assets from criminals is that government officials abuse their power.

>Not that it really matters, but if you asked people in philosophy departments, they would say the same.

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4866

The majority of the surveyed subscribe to moral realism (though there are no doubt biases in the demographic of those surveyed, and of course, the language used in descriptions of meta-ethical theories is more technical than "objectively true" or not). But as you said, that's neither here nor there.

>Since it's a value, it's either right or wrong. You've decided that "reproduction is necessary and sufficient for a meaningful life" is wrong.

But what this means for you is, apparently, just that you have positive feelings towards reproduction, and for me to disagree with you is not to reject some clear, objective indication of my purpose as if I've rejected a claim like "the earth is round"---it's actually more like you've told me "spinach is yucky" and I've said "No, I quite like spinach".

>It is in the same category as the former; it is a statement of value.

I don't think so and I don't think you treat such statements like the statements of the former either---

>but I have no problem forcing people who have committed heinous crimes to work for nothing

Sure, fine, I'm talking about holding people who are innocent as slaves, a practice which has been seen as morally permissible at various times and places. Those who thought that it was morally permissible were, in fact, wrong to think so---just as those who thought "the sun revolves around the earth" was a true statement were wrong to think so.

You see my point even if you disagree, right? The point is that there are times, places, cultures where people have done immoral things. That they are a product of evolution or tradition or whatever is besides the point to the immorality of what they've done. I am happy to be born in a society that values not holding (innocent) slaves. Just like I'm happy to be born in a society that understands the earth revolves around the sun. But it would be nonsensical for me to say that I'm happy to be born thinking "Spinach is yucky" because being born otherwise would lead me to believe in the "false" claim "Spinach is not yucky"---that doesn't make any sense, because the yuckiness of spinach isn't some objective property of spinach, and if I liked spinach, then spinach wouldn't be yucky, because a claim like "Spinach is yucky" is no more than an expression of my personal distaste for it. That I have a strong intuition that "slavery is wrong" is more like "the earth revolves around the sun" as opposed to "spinach is yucky" is evidence that moral claims aren't in fact just matters of personal taste. The immorality of holding innocent slaves isn't, prima facie, like the yuckiness of spinach---we certainly don't have the same attitudes towards them.

> The majority of the surveyed subscribe to moral realism (though there are no doubt biases in the demographic of those surveyed, and of course, the language used in descriptions of meta-ethical theories is more technical than "objectively true" or not).

Yeah, I didn't have American universities in mind.

> But what this means for you is, apparently, just that you have positive feelings towards reproduction, and for me to disagree with you is not to reject some clear, objective indication of my purpose as if I've rejected a claim like "the earth is round"---it's actually more like you've told me "spinach is yucky" and I've said "No, I quite like spinach".

I can't see how eating spinach or not has any real effect on society. Some values are more important than others, and some are even more important than facts. When you said, 'Doesn't the "rigorous approach to seeking/knowing truth" seem kind of detached from the reality of life to you?', you seem to be placing values over facts. That doesn't make values factual though.

> I don't think so and I don't think you treat such statements like the statements of the former either---

Well it is a moral judgement, so I treat it more seriously than an aesthetic judgement, but they are both rooted in values all the same.

> Sure, fine, I'm talking about holding people who are innocent as slaves, a practice which has been seen as morally permissible at various times and places. Those who thought that it was morally permissible were, in fact, wrong to think so---just as those who thought "the sun revolves around the earth" was a true statement were wrong to think so.

They're wrong from a modern standpoint. The problem is that morals are like fashions; they are subject to change, and by that I mean, the weight that we place on different values is always changing. If freedom is the highest value, then slavery is the worst crime, or something like that. The problem is that we're not at the end of history; we are not the final judges of the world, and the people that come after us will see the world differently. I don't want to be so cynical to say that morals are simple tools that we use to reach our own ends; I think humans are better than that. I think morality is dependent on having faith in the people that have come before us. You may not think we are still dependent on their valuations, but I think we are.

> You see my point even if you disagree, right? The point is that there are times, places, cultures where people have done immoral things. That they are a product of evolution or tradition or whatever is besides the point to the immorality of what they've done.

They appear wrong from our current standpoint. You cannot scientifically demonstrate that slavery is wrong though. Even pain itself is hard for scientists to measure. We have faith in our intuitions, and it's good that we do, but I can't see how they are factual no matter how confident we are in them.

>I can't see how eating spinach or not has any real effect on society. Some values are more important than others, and some are even more important than facts. When you said, 'Doesn't the "rigorous approach to seeking/knowing truth" seem kind of detached from the reality of life to you?', you seem to be placing values over facts. That doesn't make values factual though.

Sure, my point wasn't that the yuckiness of spinach and the purpose of life were equally important issues, but that on the view that oughts are simply matters of opinion, that my rejections of the claims "spinach is yucky" and "our purpose is to reproduce" are equally valid---I've simply disagreed with an opinion of yours. This is very different from me rejecting a claim like "The earth is round". And I think, with claims like the latter, it makes sense for a rational discussion to be had about whether or not such a claim is right. But with claims like "spinach is yucky", there's surely nothing to be discussed---I like spinach and you don't, end of story. But I think you sense that the purpose of life isn't this kind of claim; otherwise it wouldn't make sense to try to rationally discuss this claim.

So I suppose I'm struggling a bit to understand your case---you think the question of purpose is just a matter of opinion, but at the same time, our purpose is clearly to reproduce? Is this not just your personal opinion, on your view? Perhaps you're saying that, as a matter of fact, that everyone will find fulfillment in reproducing? But even this isn't true, there are plenty of celibates who find fulfillment in their way of life. Maybe just that most people will find fulfillment in reproducing? Maybe so, though there's clearly a lot of things other than reproducing that people find fulfilling---science, religion, mathematics, art, music, sports, and so on. Maybe that an unconscious reproductive drive undergirds the desire to engage in such activities even if they are not immediately related to reproduction directly? OK - maybe so, but if all of human behavior is undergirded by a reproductive drive, "our clear purpose is to reproduce" doesn't actually tell us anything about what to do, since anything that we do would be distantly related to a reproductive drive, and we're back to square one.

(Of course, that's all putting aside that that all says nothing about what our true, objective purpose really is.)

>They're wrong from a modern standpoint. The problem is that morals are like fashions; they are subject to change, and by that I mean, the weight that we place on different values is always changing. >They appear wrong from our current standpoint.

I don't see how the fact that beliefs about morals have varied across time/space/culture means morality must be subjective any more than the fact that beliefs about scientifically discoverable facts have varied across time/space/culture means that scientifically discoverable facts must be subjective. It doesn't matter that there are some people who defend the earth being flat today. It doesn't matter that people used to believe the sun revolved around the earth. These things don't make beliefs about the shape of the earth or the relationship between the earth and the sun fashions in the sense that there's no truth of the matter. So too for morality.

>You cannot scientifically demonstrate that slavery is wrong though.

Maybe so, but I don't think scientific demonstrability is a necessary condition for something to be objectively true.

> Sure, my point wasn't that the yuckiness of spinach and the purpose of life were equally important issues, but that on the view that oughts are simply matters of opinion, that my rejections of the claims "spinach is yucky" and "our purpose is to reproduce" are equally valid---I've simply disagreed with an opinion of yours. This is very different from me rejecting a claim like "The earth is round". And I think, with claims like the latter, it makes sense for a rational discussion to be had about whether or not such a claim is right. But with claims like "spinach is yucky", there's surely nothing to be discussed---I like spinach and you don't, end of story.

If you don't like spinach, I think it would be counterproductive to tell you that you do in fact like it or that you are wrong not to like spinach. I still think you are capable of liking it, so people could offer you suggestions as to how you can make it better. Feeling a meaning in life is exactly like that; you can't tell a depressed person that they're wrong. I think it's healthy for them to have a chance to express themselves though.

> But I think you sense that the purpose of life isn't this kind of claim; otherwise it wouldn't make sense to try to rationally discuss this claim.

I can't see how it's not perfectly fine to rationally discuss subjective claims; there is philosophy of art, for starters. Just because I think morals are subjective, doesn't mean I don't see the value in having compatible values or at least an understanding of why differences exist. If you look up 'ethical expressivism', it might make more sense.

> Maybe that an unconscious reproductive drive undergirds the desire to engage in such activities even if they are not immediately related to reproduction directly? OK - maybe so, but if all of human behavior is undergirded by a reproductive drive, "our clear purpose is to reproduce" doesn't actually tell us anything about what to do, since anything that we do would be distantly related to a reproductive drive, and we're back to square one.

You mentioned detachment from life, and I think curiosity is what makes us humans stand out. I think what we need for fulfilment is so simple that it's so hard for people full of curiosity to accept it. That's why I agree with the idea that a rigorous approach to truth (including truth you don't like) will bring you back to what matters.

You have an intuition that reproduction is far too simple a story. I think at the core all humans have some values hardwired, but we can't exist on that level because culture has become far too complicated. We can't reproduce without cultural sophistication, because societies are too big to not require cultural sophistication. Also, I think you're still partially mixing up short-term and long-term fulfilment. Drugs can make you feel really fulfilled short-term too. Dare I say it, activities that don't feed back to what matters are probably escapist and may even be parasitical. Societies are in trouble when they have a hard time drawing the line between what is constructive and what is parasitical.

> (Of course, that's all putting aside that that all says nothing about what our true, objective purpose really is.)

I can't see how 'objective purpose' is not an oxymoron. A hacker is someone who dismisses the notion of an objective purpose in a tool and repurposes it as they will. Purpose is always subject to a being's existence. You have an intuition behind the word 'purpose' that I do not seem to have, as if purposes can exist without any beings. Do you really believe that morals can exist without any beings?

> These things don't make beliefs about the shape of the earth or the relationship between the earth and the sun fashions in the sense that there's no truth of the matter. So too for morality.

You think morality is progressive like science/knowledge. I would say morality only seems to progress because it reflects science/knowledge. Morality is rooted in emotion. You can reason about it all you like, but there is a reason why the police carry guns around. Ultimately force is the decider of morality in modern society. People who do destructive things see them as being right. Even self-destructive things are seen as being right by those who commit them. You can think in terms of human rights, but the reality of morality is realpolitik. As far as I see it, we humans have failed for thousands of years to do what you seem to think we do.

Do you agree with every single word of the bill of human rights? Or do you see that it is also subject to interpretation?

> Maybe so, but I don't think scientific demonstrability is a necessary condition for something to be objectively true.

Sure I can see why you might think a priori truths are objectively true, but I don't think you can prove slavery is wrong a priori, because the premises will always require experience to accept them. You'll only be preaching to the choir, so to speak. Also, as I've previously stated, words like 'slave' vary a lot culturally, so I'm not sure you could even settle on a definition that people generally agree upon, setting aside the fact that you have to make the definition not too broad or too narrow.

Anyway, I still can't grasp what you mean by the word 'purpose'. It seems logocentric to me. I genuinely don't have the same intuition. I think the difference lies there, and so I don't think we're going to make sense of the differences with words. I understand how people could have a sense for moral realism, and I think some dogma is necessary for culture, so although we don't agree, I don't think it matters all that much.

>I can't see how it's not perfectly fine to rationally discuss subjective claims

You're correct, I was thinking that in defending reproduction being our purpose that you were claiming that this is true and that people who deny this are wrong to do so---but certainly, we can make objective claims about subjective beliefs.

>You mentioned detachment from life, and I think curiosity is what makes us humans stand out. I think what we need for fulfilment is so simple that it's so hard for people full of curiosity to accept it. That's why I agree with the idea that a rigorous approach to truth (including truth you don't like) will bring you back to what matters.

So my point about the rigorous approach to truth is that (insofar as this is something that the existentialists don't do) it's not feasible to bootstrap yourself Cartesian-style from "I think, therefore I am" all the way to normal, everyday truths---but I think this is OK; we should instead embrace a level of uncertainty in our beliefs, and this shouldn't prevent us from acting---there comes a time when we have to step out of the shade of analyzing things rigorously and out into the sunlight of actually doing things in the real world. I suspect you'd largely agree with this.

>You have an intuition that reproduction is far too simple a story.

So, construed as just a psychological fact about what people find meaningful, I think either it's simply not the correct story with a strict interpretation or it's just not a very meaningful story with a loose interpretation. People find meanings in things that aren't reproduction, which is why I say the strict interpretation can't be correct, but if we interpret actions being motivated by reproductive drives so loosely that all kinds of things get categorized as being motivated by a reproductive drive, then I don't see that this story is really telling us anything. Like, there's the famous strawman caricature of Adlerian psychoanalysis, that the psychoanalyst looks at a person who jumps into a lake to save a drowning child and says, "Clearly, this person was motivated by feelings of inferiority to save that child---his behavior was compensation!", and then looks at a person who doesn't jump into a lake to save a drowning child and says, "Clearly, this person was motivated by feelings of inferiority to not save that child---he felt too inferior to do so!" Like, this person hasn't really told us anything meaningful, no matter what happens, he's quick to explain it away through feelings of inferiority. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not (this analogy isn't for me to dispute evolution or evolutionary drives, don't misunderstand me)---it hasn't really told us anything about what actually happens. And I see this as the situation with characterizing all activities people find meaningful as being motivated by a reproductive drive, if that makes sense.

>I can't see how 'objective purpose' is not an oxymoron. A hacker is someone who dismisses the notion of an objective purpose in a tool and repurposes it as they will.

I would normally say that there is a kind of objective purpose in a tool. For example, a hammer. When I talk about the objective purpose of a hammer, I'm talking about the hammer's utility qua hammer---so whether it's hard enough for nails to get driven in when hit, whether the handle is long enough for someone to grasp it, etc. A bad hammer might be one that's made out of sponge or something, so it doesn't actually move any nails. It can be repurposed to be, for example, a paperweight, and maybe do an ok job at doing that. But it's failed to fulfill its purpose as a hammer. And I think there's an analogical sense in which humans can be good qua human. I would talk about a summum bonom, a highest good, under which various virtuous activities fall under.

It's interesting that you bring up hackers. I think repurposing tools to do what they're not meant to do is generally seen as a hack. And in an engineering context, this is generally seen as a bad thing in the long-term, or at least an indicator something's not right---tools should get used for the purpose for which they were designed, at least, in the long-term. (That's not to say anything bad about hackers; I love the idea of a hacker.)

>Purpose is always subject to a being's existence. You have an intuition behind the word 'purpose' that I do not seem to have, as if purposes can exist without any beings. Do you really believe that morals can exist without any beings?

I suppose not, but I also think there can't be any physical facts if there aren't any physical things. But I don't think this means physical facts aren't objectively true; likewise, I still think moral facts are objectively true.

>Do you agree with every single word of the bill of human rights? Or do you see that it is also subject to interpretation?

I see that it's subject to interpretation, yes, because I don't think that any moral truths are grounded in the bill of rights anymore than truths about Newtonian physics are grounded in Newton's Principia. What we think and say about truths is distinct from the existence of truths themselves.

>You think morality is progressive like science/knowledge.

Well, to be sure, there's a distinction between moral epistemology and moral ontology. What I was saying there is that I can be mistaken about moral truths---perhaps even humanity as a whole can be mistaken about moral truths, and they might even regress morally at times, and yet, the fact of the matter about morality doesn't change. This is because our beliefs about morals do not themselves determine what morals are, just like our beliefs about science do not themselves determine what scientific facts are---if humanity were to suddenly regress and start thinking the Earth was flat again, that wouldn't change the roundness of the Earth.

>I don't think you can prove slavery is wrong a priori, because the premises will always require experience to accept them.

Well, I think that we have a strong intuition that it is morally impermissible to deprive one of certain rights, and from that, it logically follows that slavery (in the relevant sense---I think you know what I'm talking about) is immoral.

>You'll only be preaching to the choir, so to speak.

I mean, maybe so - in the same sense that I might be preaching to the choir when I talk about the existence of physical things. Like, maybe I tell you about the chair I'm sitting on, and you say, "Well, I see the chair you're sitting on, and I can touch it, but I don't share the intuition that that means that the chair exists physically." And if you say that, there's nothing more I can really say to you---that's just an intuition you don't share. But of course, I still believe that the chair really is there.

>Anyway, I still can't grasp what you mean by the word 'purpose'. It seems logocentric to me. I genuinely don't have the same intuition. I think the difference lies there, and so I don't think we're going to make sense of the differences with words. I understand how people could have a sense for moral realism, and I think some dogma is necessary for culture, so although we don't agree, I don't think it matters all that much.

I suspect we won't come to an agreement here either---though I do kind of suspect that you do share the same intuition. I certainly don't think you act as if morals are subjective. Like, I suspect that if you came across a culture in which people randomly chose a child every day to kill for no particular reason, you wouldn't think, "Well, that's just their culture---I find it distasteful, but if they believe it's morally right to do this, then I guess it is morally right for them." What I'm basically saying is that we have strong intuitions that morals are true independently of what people think, and that objections like "people disagree about morals" or "people have changed their stances on morals" aren't objections to my intuitions any more than "people disagree about scientific facts" or "people have changed their stances on scientific facts" are objections to science. It is true that the manner in which moral truths exist are strange---it's not like you can go out and touch them. But I also think the same is true for, for example, numbers---I would say that numbers exist, even though we can't go out and touch them. Not that numbers and moral truths exist in the same sense---just providing some intuition.

> I was thinking that in defending reproduction being our purpose that you were claiming that this is true and that people who deny this are wrong to do so---but certainly, we can make objective claims about subjective beliefs.

Yes, I don't think you're wrong for disagreeing with me.

> ... it's not feasible to bootstrap yourself Cartesian-style from "I think, therefore I am" all the way to normal, everyday truths...

Yes, I also think it's impossible to build from the bottom up like that for anything value-dependent.

I know what I am saying is unfalsifiable. I have no problems with that. I don't think purpose/motivation can ever really be falsified. You're still looking to purpose as a guiding principle, rather than a subjective description of what your mind is already doing. I think we look for meaning because it is already defined within us. We can't choose meaning; we can only choose to act, and then we justify our own actions. (I don't think any of that is falsifiable either.)

> I would normally say that there is a kind of objective purpose in a tool. For example, a hammer. When I talk about the objective purpose of a hammer, I'm talking about the hammer's utility qua hammer---so whether it's hard enough for nails to get driven in when hit, whether the handle is long enough for someone to grasp it, etc. A bad hammer might be one that's made out of sponge or something, so it doesn't actually move any nails. It can be repurposed to be, for example, a paperweight, and maybe do an ok job at doing that. But it's failed to fulfill its purpose as a hammer. And I think there's an analogical sense in which humans can be good qua human. I would talk about a summum bonom, a highest good, under which various virtuous activities fall under.

You're talking about language. A monkey that picks up a rock to crack open a nut is using a hammer of sorts. There is no ideal hammer; there is only an intersubjective understanding of a hammer which we might assume is ideal.

> It's interesting that you bring up hackers. I think repurposing tools to do what they're not meant to do is generally seen as a hack. And in an engineering context, this is generally seen as a bad thing in the long-term, or at least an indicator something's not right---tools should get used for the purpose for which they were designed, at least, in the long-term. (That's not to say anything bad about hackers; I love the idea of a hacker.)

Useful hacks get relabeled. The rock could be a paperweight, a hammer, a weapon etc. even if it is explicitly labeled as only one of those things. Purpose is not in the tool itself, nor is it in language; it is in our conception, based on experience and the knowledge we accept, just like morality.

> I suppose not, but I also think there can't be any physical facts if there aren't any physical things. But I don't think this means physical facts aren't objectively true; likewise, I still think moral facts are objectively true.

So a universe could exist without morals if there were no moral agents in it. That means morality is contingent on moral agents existing. Your argument is that beings would eventually end up with the same morals every time, but I don't think so.

If we met a sentient carnivorous species, we should expect its morality to be quite different to a sentient herbivorous species'. I think a carnivore would always construct a moral view that eating animals is right (or its existence would be morally wrong). A sentient herbivore would most likely come to the conclusion that carnivorism is morally wrong and all those carnivorous animals should be exterminated. A sentient parasite would most likely come to the conclusion that parasitism is morally right (that a form of slavery is morally right). Could nature itself be morally wrong for creating those things?

> I don't think that any moral truths are grounded in the bill of rights anymore than truths about Newtonian physics are grounded in Newton's Principia. What we think and say about truths is distinct from the existence of truths themselves.

> Well, I think that we have a strong intuition that it is morally impermissible to deprive one of certain rights, and from that, it logically follows that slavery (in the relevant sense---I think you know what I'm talking about) is immoral.

Okay, so you are a moral fallibilist after all; you are open to the possibility that your moral beliefs are wrong. I think our views are somewhat compatible, since we both see that we are relying on intuition, rather than something testable.

> This is because our beliefs about morals do not themselves determine what morals are, just like our beliefs about science do not themselves determine what scientific facts are---if humanity were to suddenly regress and start thinking the Earth was flat again, that wouldn't change the roundness of the Earth.

> ... when I talk about the existence of physical things. Like, maybe I tell you about the chair I'm sitting on, and you say, "Well, I see the chair you're sitting on, and I can touch it, but I don't share the intuition that that means that the chair exists physically." And if you say that, there's nothing more I can really say to you---that's just an intuition you don't share. But of course, I still believe that the chair really is there.

Language itself is learnable because of the shared basis in the senses. Morals are way more abstract than the chair existing, and even whether the world is round or not. Our experience of physical properties is more or less going to be the same, even with conditions such as blindness etc., since sight, hearing and touch all construct a model of the world that coheres. That is not the case for morality, which starts with something like a sense of pain and jumps to cultural abstractions which we inherit.

> I suspect we won't come to an agreement here either---though I do kind of suspect that you do share the same intuition. I certainly don't think you act as if morals are subjective. Like, I suspect that if you came across a culture in which people randomly chose a child every day to kill for no particular reason, you wouldn't think, "Well, that's just their culture---I find it distasteful, but if they believe it's morally right to do this, then I guess it is morally right for them."

Just because I think morals are subjective, doesn't mean I think anything goes. They are still subject to my own sense of what is sustainable long-term. I understand how they think that what they could be doing is justifiable.

If you wander into anthropology, you will see people who take a stance like what you describe: that one culture cannot morally judge another. I can sort of see where they are coming from: tribes exist because they maintain a set of shared practices. If the tribe goes out of existence, their practices failed them. Their long-term existence means their shared practices have utility. I'm well aware of the immediate problem that it requires time to see the consequences; that's why I think shared knowledge (especially of what doesn't work) is vital.

> What I'm basically saying is that we have strong intuitions that morals are true independently of what people think, and that objections like "people disagree about morals" or "people have changed their stances on morals" aren't objections to my intuitions any more than "people disagree about scientific facts" or "people have changed their stances on scientific facts" are objections to science.

Yes, and a sentient parasite would probably tell us that parasitism seems morally right independent of what people think.

> It is true that the manner in which moral truths exist are strange---it's not like you can go out and touch them. But I also think the same is true for, for example, numbers---I would say that numbers exist, even though we can't go out and touch them. Not that numbers and moral truths exist in the same sense---just providing some intuition.

I don't think morals can be true just like I don't think numbers can be true.

That perspective seems arbitrarily tied to the first billion years of evolution. What of the next billion?

We're not going to escape our biology.

What you reproduce is not the same as what your ancestors reproduced.

So?

So it is not a self-contained purpose. The purpose leaks into other aspects of reality.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Features of the purpose are repurposed, but the purpose remains there all the same.

I mean it is not one singular purpose but a collection of motions from which procreation emerges.

“Purpose” implies a focus of energy. Procreation is a sustained diffusion of energy.

I do believe purpose exists, but that procreation is only tangential with it.

Theologians ~ They don't know nothin'

This quote has stuck with me:

> Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks, rendering themselves obsolete.

https://libquotes.com/chris-hedges/quote/lbh3k8n

^^^ you are here.

many, even most, individuals do not hold fast to virtue even in their daily lives, and society has only crude solutions for dealing with that, but we must deal with it.

organizations that consist of individuals who do hold fast to principle we tend to label as "cults", and their chosen principles are not necessarily favored by any majority.

we need organizations, as imperfect as they are--which is as imperfect as we are--and so we regulate them as best we can.

the Tillich quote you cite sounds Ayn Randian.

We do need organizations. And we also need to see them for how they behave sometimes.

Both things can be true.

Interesting that the word 'humility' does not appear in the article, but it seems to me that is what the article is about.

No matter how you explain the world to yourself, I think you need some humility to recognize that you do not have a complete understanding. Humans also need faith to function, but not too much, or it's too easy to stay wrong and too easy to dismiss the idea that other people can have a valid point of view that disagrees with your own point of view.

>Humans also need faith to function

Faith is fundamentally a bad idea. Take my word for it.

If you're rebuttal is: "Why should I take your word" you've already partially come around to a more formal method of thinking that is based on questioning.

I wonder if you're taking a particularly narrow definition of what faith is.

I don't think it's possible to operate without faith, regardless of belief in god. You are not going to get out and check every bridge you drive across. You're going to trust that they are not going to fall, and that is a type of faith.

The same can be said for the vast majority of human experience. Living requires us to constantly act with incomplete knowledge. I'm not sure that complete knowledge is even possible.

No, the rebuttal is, “I’d rather take my own word for it.”

Did you see the definition of faith Tillich uses? Do you think that's "fundamentally a bad idea?"

Humans do not need “faith” to function.

If you’re talking about “having faith” as in “I have faith my car will start with morning”, then yes, but that is not the same thing as theological faith. I have loads of evidence and experience that I can draw on to “have faith my car will start”, whereas “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”.

This may come as a surprise to you but I have "religious" faith because of evidence, not lack thereof. As to how it operates on a day to day basis in my life, I have faith in God just as I have faith in my wife: it is a relationship founded upon experience and knowledge. Certainly the objection would be that that is entirely subjective, but that is where objective arguments can then be laid out in addition to my "experience" of God in my life: philosophical arguments for God, historical arguments for God's actions in time and space, etc. I am a convert and came from a non-religious background, most often seeking reasons to not convert, FWIW.

I am from a non-religious background as well, and I would love to be able to have religious faith.

I like the comparison with having faith your wife, but it also shows the gap of reasoning between you and the post you are responding to, no?

You start by saying

> This may come as a surprise to you but I have "religious" faith because of evidence, not lack thereof

What is that evidence? Are you sure you are not playing on words here? Because faith has positive effects on you?

I like the argument about humility stated in another thread. For me, humility really seems to be the core value of religion that I find helpful.

Another point you make I don't quite understand:

> Certainly the objection would be that that is entirely subjective, but that is where objective arguments can then be laid out in addition to my "experience" of God in my life: philosophical arguments for God, historical arguments for God's actions in time and space, etc

What are these arguments that are not debunked? As far as I know, proofs of God and arguments for His/Its/Her/Their existence are very indicative of the time and author's reasoning system.

But there are none that I know of that have stood the test of time - be it Aquin, Kant, Descartes or whoever else?

> What are these arguments that are not debunked?...there are none that I know of that have stood the test of time

To say that the classical arguments for God, e.g. Aquinas' five ways, have simply been "debunked" is completely false. I recall reading Dawkin's The God Delusion in early college and being convinced that these arguments were indeed antiquated. However as I began to read book-length treatments on various arguments (beginning, contingency, etc) I realized Dawkins et al oversimplified the entire enterprise. Are there debates about them? Sure and there always will be. But there are many professional philosophers who consider various classical arguments sound (though they often prefer one over the other, a gradient of "soundness").

> What is that evidence? Are you sure you are not playing on words here?

Putting aside the philosophical (see above), the historical arguments for Christianity and especially the mystery resurrection are what specifically convinced me.

tldr

- The gospels are written within a single generation of the apostles. They were likely written because the apostles and early disciples were beginning to die.

- We have documentary evidence of the gospels being faithful to the original documents. We have a vast number of manuscripts, many more than most any other ancient work, and they all are in agreement with one another (ignoring small copyist errors here and there).

- There are embarrassing stories in the gospels (Jesus' baptism, Jesus' rebuke of family, his inability to work miracles in certain places, Jesus' uncertainty as to the time of his return, the apostles total abandonment of him at his passion)

- There is nothing placed in Jesus' mouth that are reflective of later debates in the early Christian communities (e.g. do we still circumcise?), which one would expect if later Christians were as free to make up stories to fit the "needs" or "meanings" in their community.

- The names of people in the gospels correspond exactly to 1st century census data. If you were born in the 90s, you know a lot of Jennifers, yet there are very little baby Jennifers today. Names come and go quickly in cultures (outside of the true constant ones). There have been studies of the many names in the stories of Jesus and they all correspond to the timeframe expected (30ish AD) based on census data.

- What explains the presence of the woman at the empty tomb? Woman held low esteem in ancient society, yet they are the first ones to learn of Jesus' resurrection. If this story was simply made up, why do we not see Peter, James, and John finding the empty tomb and immediately becoming full of faith?

- After the collapse of faith of the apostles and their abandonment of Jesus at his passion, they all come "on board" with his resurrection and all go to their deaths attesting to this.

- What explains the completely novel concept of a pre-resurrection resurrection? Jesus rose Lazarus from the dead, but this was simply a resuscitation. Jesus' resurrection on the other hand is an eschatological resurrection, which means "end of time" resurrection. He is given a glorified, eternal body that is capable of things unknown to us (passing through walls, suddenly appearing, etc). There were some Jews at the time of Christ who believed in an end-of-time resurrection, but nobody believed that a single person would experience this sort of thing before everybody else. This is a completely novel idea in Jewish thought and for it to so suddenly appear and fully formed within a Jewish "sect" is truly remarkable. Greek and Roman sources fail to explain this as well. The concept of an eschatological resurrection of so foreign that even the resurrection stories have an odd tone to them unlike the rest of the gospels, notably containing zero explicit biblical proofs ("here's where the Old Testament said I would rise") and containing remarks about various people doubting, being scared, etc. NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God is considered one of the best treatments on this.

Thanks for your reply. I'll spend some more time reading it in detail at a later point.

To clarify one thing: I haven't even read Dawkins' books.

My stance on "proof of god's existance" arguments stems from, among others, a very goos philosophy PhD which I had the fortune to have as a high school teacher for a while (until he quit and went back to scholarship).

His favorite subjects were Thomas von Aquin and Immanuel Kant, both believers in Christian theological "proofs" of various kinds.

I couldn't think of a less flamboyant word than "debunked". To put in other words: all of the proofs of god's existance that I have seeen have turned out to be logical fallacies.

My best friend, who was strongly catholic most of his life, but went on to study phiolosphy, I think concluded the same.

That doesn't mean he's lost his faith completely though. AFAIK he doesn't like to call himself a Catholic anymore though.

Which brings me to another issue, if not the main one, with these proofs:

which god's existance do they aim to prove? Belief in most religions seems mutually exclusive (in a single mind, and without redefining and muddying historical terms), as much as we'd like otherwise.

"Proving" something like "there is an entity or cause of effect that is more powerful than any entities or causes of effect that we know" is not a proof of the existance of any particular human-defined "God".

Interesting discussion. If I may chime in, isn't the standard people set for proof of god's existence often impossibly high? Can't really blame anyone for setting the bar high, but are we sure it's not too high?

Even in mathematics all proofs depend on axioms in some way. And axioms are statements considered to be universally true without proof.

Is the bar for proof in this case set higher than for a mathematical proof?

What is proof anyway?

> A proof becomes a proof only after the social act of “accepting it as a proof.” This is as true for mathematics as it is for physics, linguistics, or biology. The evolution of commonly accepted criteria for an argument’s being a proof is an almost untouched theme in the history of science. In any case, the ideal for what constitutes a mathematical demonstration of a “nonobvious truth” has remained unchanged since the time of Euclid: we must arrive at such a truth from “obvious” hypotheses, or assertions that have already been proved, by means of a series of explicitly described, “obviously valid” elementary deductions. [0]

Do we have any true 100% proof for anything (where we don't rely on some assumption that we consider true without a proof)?

[0] A Course in Mathematical Logic for Mathematicians (2010), page 45

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Acknowledging the axiomatic structure of logical reasoning is surely valuable.

But if you want to relate this to mathematics, I think you should aim for more rigor. What definition of god you are even aiming to prove? Or accept as an axiom?

And mathematical axioms are expected to be "self-evident", true! E.g., "if P is true, P is not false".

Discussing these foundations of reasoning is interesting. But your conclusion sounds to me much like "we can't know anything and thinking is futile". The "100% proof" is a strawman — nobody demands one for God, as it is already impossible to perform a "100% proof" of the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun. As far as my feeble mind understands, this is not how science works.

Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago.

Proving that something does not exist ist rarely possible outside of abstract mathematics.

But it is not possible to describe God in purely mathematical terms either, right? At least not without straying far from any concrete monotheistic religion.

At best we can agree that God is one of infinitely many theories which are impossible to prove or disprove. Which makes it something for which "theory" is not even the right word.

But the more serious you take some religions, and the more you go back in time, this is not what religion was all about.

Religion is not only inner peace and positivity.

It has been the foundation of ethics, I guess — which is important to me, again! And I would not argue that ethics can be "logically proven".

But religion also often demands obedience, and used to make very concrete statements about what is true or false in the physical world.

Only the increased possibilities to prove some of that wrong (e.g. praying can defeat physics and cause miracles) led to today's, more fuzzy definitions of Christian faith, step by step, over the course of centuries.

Of course I acknowledge that this is a matter of interpretation and any single religious person can choose to ignore organized religion and such claims — as long as they are allowed to.

> Do we have any true 100% proof for anything (where we don't rely on some assumption that we consider true without a proof)?

I am trying to interpret your comment in a more charitable way, but it just seems to me like a classic logical fallacy that would "prove" anything and basically makes any rational argument futile.

If God is an intangible abstract concept without a measurable, tangible relation to the physical world: fine! If it is also not a well-defined abstract concept that allows itself to be proven or disproven: also fine!

But then what's left is emotion, ideas, human thought, ethics. Those are powerful and important parts of civilization.

But we have then left any logical argument about "proving god's existence".

And it has been consensus for a long time that these arguments are futile, for the exact reasons discussed here.

Pretending otherwise is what mads high school phiolosophy classes unbearable when there were to many zealousl religious students and a bad teacher. It derails into either woo rhethorics or a shouting match.

And this is why I said that studying these proofs is an interesting intellectual exercise, and sometimes tells a lot about the societal context.

But no, these are not proofs in the sense of a falsifiable scientific methodology.

The point I was trying to make was just that we often need to reevaluate the tools (methods) we use, and that we need axioms in order to "proof" anything.

What proof do you seek? You mentioned before "proof of god's existance". I doubt that is even possible. If it were, religion would be a science and faith would not be needed.

The better aim would probably be to seek for proof that the existence of god is possible. And then, if there is any possibility that any claims made by religions could be true. And then go from there.

> Discussing these foundations of reasoning is interesting. But your conclusion sounds to me much like "we can't know anything and thinking is futile".

Yes, for the first part, but your extrapolation in the second part is not what I concluded at all.

It's just that we need to know the tools we use and their limitations.

You agreed that we need axioms. Next step would be to define what kind of axioms would find acceptable.

You said it needs to be "self-evident" and gave an example of "if P is true, P is not false". The law of non-contradiction. But is that enough? Do you reject the concept of superpositions in quantum mechanics as not possible? Defining what we can accept without a "proof" could be the key.

You listed many good and interesting points. I agree with many of them. But sometimes I would say you jump to conclusions too fast with too many assumptions. Eg:

> it just seems to me like a classic logical fallacy that would "prove" anything and basically makes any rational argument futile.

I was just trying to make an argument about the need for axioms. We need things that are considered to be universally true without proof to proof anything.

and:

> Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago.

That statement could be considered a logical fallacy. But I agree with you that there is nothing to gain in discussing statements like "thinking is futile".

We need to be aware at all times that logical systems, scientific method, etc. are human made tools that are fantastic, but still have limitations. We need to know when they are applicable and when they are not. So that we can notice, if we are abusing them in any way in order to reach our conclusions. (And to set realistic goals/expectations of what, how and with what confidence we can conclude something.)

I think we have some common ground as well as some differing perspectives, I'll leave it at that and thank you for participating in this civil discussion.

Just one thing, I want to elaborate on what I meant here:

> > Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago.

> That statement could be considered a logical fallacy. But I agree with you that there is nothing to gain in discussing statements like "thinking is futile".

I don't see why you say that "Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago." relating to "100% proofs" would be considered a logical fallacy?

What I was aiming at is the fundamental principle of "evidence" in the context of sciences, and the philosophical underpinnings of "empiricism".

Claimed "evidence" for the metaphysical idea of God, particularly the Christian God, if I understand correctly, was the origin of this discussion.

And unless someone can up with a falsifiable definition of God, it just is muddying the waters and derailing discussion IMO to use scientific terms in relation to non-falsifiable ideas.

It is an entirely different matter to me to honestly ponder the human condition, ethics, the foundations of civilisation, and the values of religious belief. It is also interesting to consider "what can I know" and to realise that a "closed" scientific world view is in fact not in accordance with scientific principles.

Still, I don't see how it would make sense to equate religious beliefs with mathematical axioms.

Yes, it's an interesting discussion, but we have branched into many tangled arguments and discussing multiple things at once gets hard.

If you allow me to take a step back to your OP I was first responding to, in order to try to clarify the basis of my arguments.

There you spoke of theological "proofs" and made sweeping statement how "all turned out to be logical fallacies" / "debunked".

I asked questions about general foundations of reasoning. The aim was to discuss what is a "proof" in philosophy? To make it easier to see how hard this fundamental question really is, I first moved to a more well defined domain like mathematics. Our discussion then moved into a different direction, but the original point I was trying to get to was how shaky are foundations of definitions of things like "proof" and "logical fallacy" in philosophy. With enough freedom in interpretation, any philosophical proof could probably be interpreted in a way that it could be treated as a logical fallacy.

But yeah, while it's fun, this kind of discussions can get really long. And HN is not really an appropriate place for this. There are some things that I think are simple misunderstandings, but I'm not sure how I can clarify/communicate them succinctly enough to fit them here without turning this into a way too long post. Anyway, it's been a pleasure chatting with you.

I too have enjoyed the chat with you, that's why I am following up still that long after the original comment we both responded to was posted :)

What I meant was

- the commonly accepted scienfic method regarding the physical world says that we technically always work with hypothesises, that must allow themselves to be proved wrong. We can never be "100% sure" from a strict philosphical standpoint. This is the basis of modern science, we instead discuss theories that allow for themselves to be proven wrong, which conversely means that they allow to predict physical measurements.

- Then there's maths, which indeed is closely tied to the basic logic also underpinning the scientific method. Maths has axioms. These need no proof. Axioms are classified by their simplicity, usefulness and shall not contradict each other. A particular religious faith is not usually considered similar to the usually used mathematical axioms, at least that's my perception.

(edit: and there is of course the whole fun world of incompleteness and decidability, but I consider this a sub-topic of maths, philosophy and CS)

Thanks for your reply! I wasn't trying to be spicy, just trying to write up a semi-thorough response in the middle of some tasks. I appreciate your feedback. There is something certainly to be said about logical proofs of God being inherently a very odd thing. How do you "prove" something that is Being Itself. In my religious journey I read a lot of philosophical books and while I was convinced by some of the philosophical arguments, they did indeed leave me a little empty. For example, I think the argument of contingency is a very good one, but even when accepting that I cannot say that I "know" or "see" or "believe" in God. It is like being told that some guy named Bob exists in a different city. Ok, so what? I haven't seen him, heard him, touched him. Until you see him, the abstract really doesn't bring you across the finish line so to speak. I look at philosophical arguments more about "clearing the ground" for God, placing Him within a "why this is a reasonable belief" context. T

To actually encounter God is completely different, which is also why I found the historical arguments far more effective for me in my journey as we have in Jesus, so we are told, the God-Man making Himself known to us. We get to see God. I personally became very convinced of the historicity of the gospels after about 10 years of intensive study, having started out as somebody who enjoyed them as "myth".

Yet this God is also peculiar: He suffered complete desolation on the cross. And here I find myself in this strange life, full of trials and sorrow, and I see Christ as fully explanatory of how suffering and hope possess meaning. I encounter Christ in these moments as I know that Christ doesn't remove suffering but transforms it. He doesn't take away my crosses, he makes them light and even, dare I say, full of love.

I really appreciate your responses – while I basically remain at my POV, unable to really invest in religion in an ontological way, I do feel as part of an aged, Christian-based culture and feel very deeply about some aspects of this heritage, without really being Christian myself. For me, emotional experience of the world and expanding my mind has certainly led me to see religion differently than as a 15-year old, meaning much more reapectfully. I still fit into the atheist ane agnostic cohort but I see religion as part of the fabrics of civilization today. And transient, like language. But I value a lot of Christian culture (e.g. Bachs music and prior art) and some Christian values (e.g. ethics of forgiveness and human rights)

I likewise appreciate your replies and thoughtfulness. You did remind me of one of my favorite "arguments" for God:

> There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

> Therefore there must be a God.

> (You either see this one or you don't.)

- Dr. Peter Kreeft (https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/20_arguments-gods-ex...)

Bach, man, if you look at my HN comments you'll probably see Bach mentioned at least 10% of the time. His music is unlike anything else out there: all individual parts unique and interesting yet everything forming a unified whole, constantly, across every single measure. You can listen to a cello line and be fully entranced and then listen to a violin going at the same time, likewise love it for itself, and then have the ability to then listen to them simultaneously and hear the harmonies. Every other composer I've listened to has a "dominant" section/theme, for example let's say the violins are playing a melody and the cellos are acting as a harmonic filler. It's beautiful, but listening to the cellos by themselves could be pretty boring. But with Bach, every single instrument is doing something enjoyable at the same time.

The performance of "Magnificat" (or anything performed by the Netherlands Bach Society) may help others to "see" this argument more clearly :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUWG2axB3w

Yes <3

It sounds pathetic but sometimes I think his music has saved my life at a certain point. The fact that all voices are always "singing" makes it also very enjoyable to practise his music.

People claming to be witnesses to the resurrected Christ spent the rest of their lives executing on the Great Commission, going as far as India, Russia, Spain, and Carthage. Many did so under the threat of torture and death, and many were tortured and killed, never recanting.

There's no comparable event in history, and especially not in antiquity. Much of what we take for granted as ancient history comes with far fewer sources.

This is what kind of cracked my atheism and lead me to more fairly evaluate the claims of Christianity. Until that point I'd been a bit of a scoffer, taking for granted the premise that no organized religion could possibly be true.

Discovering eucharistic miracles led me further toward accepting Christianity as true. I still feel like kind of a crackpot mentioning the evidence. But there's strikingingly consistent features of eucharistic miracles, going back to a time where it wouldn't have been possible to fake. They all have a somewhat rare blood type, including ones that were preserved centuries before we knew about blood type. They're all human cardiac muscle. The more recent ones, which haven't decayed and lost evidence, have features that are consistent with someone undergoing extreme physical stress. They also have features that are consistent only with living tissue, even for samples that have been sitting in tap water for months or years.

See this book: https://www.amazon.com/Cardiologist-Examines-Jesus-Stunning-...

Do you have a pithy response to Hume's argument against miracles (e.g. in the case of the resurrection, that any naturalistic explanation not involving resurrection for the historical evidence, no matter how unlikely, is still more likely than resurrection occurring)?

> “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”.

I'm pretty sure this definition comes from atheists. I think it's a strawman. I don't know any religious person who thinks they believe without any evidence.

The definition of "evidence" is what then comes under scrutiny.

The person of faith believes evidence in the form of 1st person subjective experience is sufficient to justify their beliefs.

The person of science believes evidence must meet a fundamentally different set of criteria.

There are two different language games being played, with each player insisting their ruleset is the right one.

Yes, I think this is the right argument to have - what constitutes acceptable evidence for an individual to believe something, and what evidence is there, rather than trying to say faith is by definition stupid and therefore people who have faith are stupid, which as I say is a strawman.

Evidence “number go up”. But when is information actionable?

Faith in the ultimate analysis has existence independent of evidence.

> The person of faith believes evidence in the form of 1st person subjective experience is sufficient to justify their beliefs.

> The person of science believes evidence must meet a fundamentally different set of criteria.

Ironically, these two claims are themselves are both faith based, necessarily - those who make such claims do not have access to the fact of the matter on either of these (because it is not possible to attain), thus the mind injects predictions (based on its training) into the individual's stream stream of "reality", and the individual falls for it (as their culture has taught them to).

Science even teaches this stuff, which makes the whole thing even more hilarious.

The Rationalist community (SSC, LessWrong) has an excellent approach to it (too bad they also forget their scriptures): ~"we are not rationalists, we are aspiring rationalists".

Meanwhile: how many innocent Humans died around the world today while us super smart Westerners are living it up in a state of unrealized delusion and unearned decadence?

It is not. I would welcome you to watch actual debates. This definition of faith is what happens when arguments are defeated. The response will always be

“Well that’s where you have to have faith”

> The response will always be

You are not actually omniscient, it only seems like you are, and you have faith in your perception (as you have been taught to by the ideology you were raised in).

I was raised as a Christian.

I sent an observation that is consistent even among some of the most stringent bible believing people.

Though it may seem like you possess omniscient knowledge of all that exists, this too is a false belief you've picked up from different ideological indoctrination you've been subjected to, one which is much stealthier than Christianity.

A possible remedy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)

They key flaw in your model of reality (or in your ideology's terminology: reality) is the inconsistency between "always" and "some".

That doesn't mean that there is no evidence for the faith they are advocating.

When the evidence you present is defeated and you respond “that’s where you have to have faith”, that is literally “belief absent evidence”.

That’s not even counting the types of “evidence”. Like “ nature is beautiful” and “bananas fit in your hand and angle toward your mouth”.

It is an invitation to evolve your imagination.

“Evidence” is not “imaginary”.

This whole thing with AI is imagination becoming reality. This is not an age of reductionism.

That definition actually comes from the epistle to the Hebrews, Chapter 11. It’s a way, way less poetic way of saying “Faith is evidence of things not seen, and the essence of things hopes for.”

And then the chapter goes on to give examples of people who had faith—none of which did what they did or believed the way they do because of anything describable as what would count as evidence in science, or a court of law.

This is not to say that the faithful are irrational or even that they are wrong. The faithful have good reasons to believe as they do, but those reasons are not confirmed by evidence.

Why is this so important? Well, what do you do when all the evidence says you are doomed to fail? Or that there is no way out? Do you give up? Or does your hope, as Hebrews says, consist of things not seen?

If the faithful insist that their faith is confirmed like any other belief is confirmed, they will miss the whole point of faith, and when the time comes that they need that kind of faith, they find they don’t have it.

> none of which did what they did or believed the way they do because of anything describable as what would count as evidence in science, or a court of law.

Abraham is in that list, and is elsewhere described as the paragon of faith. Yet in Genesis 18/19 Abraham is said to have met and talked with God, and discussed the destruction of Sodom, which Abraham then witnessed immediately. Abraham's faith was not a belief in a God he had never seen.

Likewise Cain, Abel and Noah are in the Hebrews 11 list but Genesis says they spoke with God before they exercised their faith.

In Hebrews 11 the "things unseen" are elaborated as the creation of the universe and the future fulfillment of God's promises (almost entirely the latter). They're unseen not because there is no evidence for them, but simply because the faithful people did not live to see them fulfilled.

"Faith is belief without evidence" is a trope widely believed by Christians and atheists, but that's not the faith being promoted in Hebrews.

> Abraham is in that list,

Yes, and one of the things Abraham did was take his kid out for a human sacrifice--because he saw god in a dream.

Its one thing if you and I were talking with God, while a bunch of guys in lab coats were doing experiments trying to verify whether it was God or just some kind of magic trick.

But there's no sense of the word "evidence" in which a dream is evidence that God wants you to kill your kids.

> things unseen

i.e. things we do not gain knowledge about through our sensory organs, i.e. not empirical evidence. Hebrews is rather poetic, at least in my favorite English translations, but I don't think it could be any clearer that faith doesn't come from sensory experience in the way empirical evidence does.

> but that's not the faith being promoted in Hebrews.

People wonder why I care so much about what Hebrews says about faith, given that I'm an atheist. The reason is this: if you think faith is the same thing as evidence, then sooner or later, when you really need a good reason to ignore all the evidence which makes you feel like you are doomed, you will need the kind of faith which gives you things to hope for, even though the answers are as yet unseen. When (not if, this eventually happens to everybody) that happens, I hope you find you have the right kind of faith too see you through.

Disclosure: I'm a former Christian, now an atheist.

It's true that the people discussed in Hebrews 11 were said to have met and spoken with God. But, unless I'm missing something, the chapter still seems to say that present-day believers must have faith in a God they've never seen; verse 6 says that anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists, which to me implies that they haven't met him as the early believers did. So this still seems to require some kind of leap of faith, beyond the evidence available to us today. I'll leave it at that, since we clearly disagree.

Disclosure: I'm a former agnostic, now Christian.

A person could have a well-founded belief in God without seeing him as Abraham did. What if someone in the early church had seen apostolic miracles and talked to an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus? Would it still be a "leap of faith" for them to believe in God and his promises? I would say not. So I don't think verse 6 "requires some kind of leap of faith" in the sense you're using it.

I think such a person would still need faith, per verse 6, to put their justified belief into action in critical moments, e.g. at a moment when they're facing persecution for following Jesus.

Now, how much of a "leap of faith" is required given the evidence really available to believers then and now... that's the big question about which we presumably disagree.

> What if someone in the early church had seen apostolic miracles and talked to an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus?

If you saw somebody walking around healing people, and he claimed that all known religions were false, and you should start worshiping this new god, would you do it?

Or would you just think this has to be some kind of magic trick/scam?

Yes, I don't think there's any real evidence. I'm curious about what persuaded you to become a Christian.

I think there's a big big stretch between "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." and "faith is belief absent evidence", and lots of room for different opinions in there.

I think one of the reasons there are so many opinions is because people give different meanings to the words “faith” and “evidence.”

Here is the difference for me: A teacher has two students, and she firmly believes they both can succeed in her class, and in life.

1. The first student has a history of getting good grades, has engaged parents, secure home, etc. The teacher takes this as EVIDENCE that the student will succeed.

2. The second student has always gotten very bad grades. He gets in trouble a lot. His parents are disengaged and have trouble keeping food on the table. Nevertheless, the teacher has an unshakable belief that this student can succeed. In complete contradiction to every piece of objective evidence. Because she has FAITH in the kid.

There is a huge difference between those two ways of coming to a belief. This difference should not just be glossed over. Both kinds of ways of coming to believe are essential to human existence.

Sometimes, the apropos thing to do is throw out all the evidence. Sometimes the most rational thing to do is have the courage to keep going by faith.

It comes from the Bible, for instance in Hebrews - "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

And you get from that "believing absent evidence"?

I get from that that faith is where your confidence in the logical conclusions of your belief gives you impetus to turn your hope into action.

Faith isn't to do with why you believe, its to do with what you do with that belief, and the separate question of why you believe of course involves evidence.

> its to do with what you do with that belief

No, that is simply what follows from having faith as is demanded of adherents. Faith in itself does not mean that. Faith is to fully believe by choice, and if one does, then it necessitates that they do what is demanded of followers.

No see. Now you’re taking a third definition of faith and mangling it to shift the goal posts.

This is a constant thing we see among religion argument.

I do agree with you that “faith” is often defined in this way, but it is absolutely not the definition we are discussing.

> I do agree with you that “faith” is often defined in this way, but it is absolutely not the definition we are discussing.

Well yeah, because it's in the Bible that way, and a lot of the people you're talking about are Christian.

It's fine for people to have different definitions of things as long as they agree when arguing. But just as I'm not talking about your definition of faith when you say 'faith', you're not talking about my definition of 'faith' when you say 'faith'.

If you want to talk about 'belief absent evidence', I agree that's a bad thing, so there's probably no argument there. Furthermore, I think the vast majority of religious people think they do have evidence for their belief and don't agree that they have 'belief absent evidence'.

Perhaps they're using the word wrong, but that's not a real area of disagreement.

> I don't know any religious person who thinks they believe without any evidence.

That is what faith is by definition. You can't redefine the term, whether you have faith or not.

Subjective experience is not empirical evidence i.e. evidence, colloquially used. Even on the individual level there's a willful interpretation involved. They might play the semantic game of calling it evidence, but it isn't.

No, that's a common misconception. Faith in the context of religion requires or enables action. It's taking your belief and acting on it.

That is just what follows from faith, not the definition of faith. That is just as true of anything someone really believes in; your actions would or ought not be incongruent with your beliefs.

If you believed animals are sentient and ought not be harmed at all, then you wouldn't harm them. But those actions that follow have no bearing on the meaning of belief or faith (where the latter can be distinguished as being a "willful" belief).

In classical Christianity, "having faith" really means "being faithful". To be a a faithful husband/wife, you have to do more than "believe" that you are married, you have change your life such that it is inseparable from your spouse. The same is true for Christians.

I mean, I'm a pretty big anti-theist, and I think that misinformation and supernatural thinking is pretty much invariably bad, but I'll admit that I have some level of "faith".

I have "faith" in the sense that I don't think most scientists are faking scientific papers. I have faith that when the NIH publishes a study it's usually accurate. I have faith that physics and mathematics is a good way of modeling the world.

The reason I say "faith" is because conceivably I could dispute every paper and try and replicate it on my own, and try and go through elaborate proofs to make sure every mathematical theorem is correct, and I think there might even be value in that, but I also have a life to live. At some point, I have to put my trust into others and just hope it works out, and usually it does.

Of course, this falls apart, there's been plenty of cases of scientists faking data, the NIH and CDC have gotten stuff wrong before, and plenty of things in physics have been proven wrong either mathematically or experimentally, so of course it's not a perfect system (nothing involving trust ever is), but I will acknowledge that way I live my life involves something that could be considered "faith".

Nah dude. That’s exactly what I am saying. Your “faith” in science is not misplaced, and it is not absent evidence of working. If science didn’t work, you couldn’t have written that comment. You also have evidence that a small minority of people exploit that trust for personal gain, but this is a fixable thing.

This is an entirely different definition of faith.

Sure, I would say that it's not an article of faith to say that, I don't know, transistors work as expected, because obviously I can very clearly demonstrate that by sending this very message.

But "science" isn't a monolith. Most science is stuff I don't really understand with any kind of intimate detail. Pretty much anything involving chemistry, biology, health, or physics is over my head; I'll try and read the abstract of a paper in those subjects and I feel like I generally understand it well enough, but I don't know enough to actually criticize anything.

If we take the Jan Hendrik Schon scandal from about 22 years ago, I know I would have read the papers and just taken on faith that the paper writer wasn't lying. I'm not equipped enough in physics or chemistry to call bullshit on anything being said in there and I probably would have trusted it. I also would have been wrong.

Now the Jan Hendrik Schon case isn't a great example, because of course he was caught, and it's tempting to say "see! Science is self-correcting!" and I think it broadly is, but at the same we really have no way of knowing how prevalent these cases of fraud actually are. Maybe other scientists are just better at covering up their tracks.

Of course this is getting into the bigger "replication crisis" in science, but I generally believe a vast majority of scientists are honest with their results, and I generally believe the results of their papers are at least truthful, but at some level that's an article of "faith", or maybe just an article of "intellectual laziness" on my end.

I guess I might argue that there's not much of a difference between the two.

Unlike scientific 'faith', religious faith requires hoop jumping to maintain it in the face of evidence proving it false/unlikely. Or reducing ones faith to unfalsifiable things.

I took the latter path until I realized there was nothing left but hot air and wasted time.

That's fair; I guess the difference between what I'm defining as "faith" is that I am more than happy to be wrong.

If it turned out that a paper was using fudged data, or the results were measured poorly, or that the math being used to crunch something was incorrect, I would like to think that I would be willing to readjust my position on it and go where the latest research points. Einstein proved that Newton's "laws" of physics were really just really good approximations, and I think the vast majority of physicists were willing to adjust accordingly.

If it turned out tomorrow that Type Theory was shown to be unsound or something, I'm pretty sure I'd just concede that I was wrong to believe it, and then move onto whatever revised framework came along to replace it. I wouldn't just tune out all contrary perspectives and vehemently insist that "no type theory is always right and I have faith!!!"

So you're right; it's not equivalent to religious faith, because religious faith typically involves readjusting your perception of the world to fit with it, while "faith" in science involves changing the data to fit better with the world.

I don't think that's quite an equivalent loss of "faith".

More equivalent would be where you see enough evidence of faked/false papers being published that you start believing that most papers are faked/false. More equivalent would be you concluding that (e.g) the FDA does not possess either the authority or expertise (or both) to ever correctly make any judgements about the safety of food or drugs. More equivalent would be your deciding that CDC doesn't actually understand how disease spreads and thus should be ignored.

(I'm aware that the latter two examples here sound suspiciously related to specific recent events/trends in the USA, but that's accidental and not intentional on my part)

Assuredly there are some things you believe which aren’t scientifically provable? In particular questions about how one should order their life? Not questions about ‘is’ but questions about ‘should’.

Is a love of peace over violence, freedom over slavery, ignorance over wisdom simply a matter of taste?

Yeah but I wouldn't really consider that "faith", more "opinions".

Like, I think the best moral code tends to be "try and maximize empathy" as at least for me that seems to usually leads to the best results.

Do I have some kind of objective proof that that's best? No, not really, it's a "feels" based judgement, but I don't think that's a "faith" based thing either, any more than me saying that "Donkey Kong Country 2 is the best game ever" would be.

We can objectively measure how close something is to some moral framework, but the weighting of that moral framework will eventually get subjective. I don't think subjectivity implies "faith".

This isn't true though. You're mixing up divine and human interpretations.

Divinity just "is". Existence is defensible. Human interpretation is necessarily always incomplete because you can't condense divinity into something measurable. It just doesn't make sense in human terms.

What we can do, and what faith entails, is that we can measure existence piecemeal and trust that it still fits together.

> I can draw on to “have faith my car will start”, whereas “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”.

I have some bad news for you:

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

The implementation of reality/"reality" is Indirect Realism, but you experience it and (implicitly) assert it to be Direct Realism, due (in part) to the ideology you are "subscribed" to, whether you know it or not.

Your ideology has taught you to respond with (predictable) memes, perhaps we will now get to see them and I will increment my counters.

Oh, in case you "don't know what I'm talking about":

> whereas “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”

You think you are referring to reality, but you are actually referring to the model of reality contained within your mind, the composition of which is what you have been trained on by your culture, ideology, etc.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...

(I could go on and on and on...there is so much for you to learn, if you still have adequate ability.)

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

The sad part about Western Civilization, Planet Earth, 2024, is that there are some conceptual spaces (the one we are in right now) where you are "disallowed" (it's complicated) from using science and the scientific method to figure out what is going on, because either of the two are more than capable enough to figure this out on your own....what I am saying can be learned directly from science.

There is actually quite a lot of evidence of God. There are many books, works, ancient religious structures, etc. which provides that evidence.

It's the same evidence as there is evidence for ancient Sumerians.

But then maybe you'll say "anything that exists is not evidence, we have to apply scrutiny to that evidence to see if it holds up". And of course everyone's level of scrutiny and what they view as proof and not proof will differ, so that's a road leading to nowhere fast.

Perhaps the simplest proof of a God is that none of us truly live our lives as if there were no God. Many of even atheists don't live as if there is not a moral tally over their lives. They don't live as if their lives were truly meaningless (for if they did, they would see no issue in ending the whole cosmic accident of their own life or the lives of others on a whim). If God didn't exist, the ones who truly don't believe would likely act out much more on their beliefs no?

Point 1: ">There is actually quite a lot of evidence of God. There are many books, works, ancient religious structures, etc. which provides that evidence. It's the same evidence as there is evidence for ancient Sumerians. " This is a false equivalency. We know the Sumerians existed both because of their writings and other physical artifacts. However, if none of these were present today, that doesn't mean the Sumerians didn't exist. Similarly, just because there are words describing a god, and they came from a previous society, does not mean their god exists. Most people can agree on solid evidence or at least are willing to compromise/determine standards of evidence in order to agree with others. Point 2: "Many of even atheists don't live as if there is not a moral tally over their lives. They don't live as if their lives were truly meaningless" Human history and evolution in general show that altruism helps promote species' growth. Morals are codified behaviors that generally (not always!!) promote the growth of a human society. It is evolutionary-negative to end other members of your own species, so those traits are heavily selected against.

Bottom line, people are naturally good because that's what gets humans reproducing. No god needed

> Bottom line, people are naturally good because that's what gets humans reproducing. No god needed

This flies in the face of survival of the fittest, species fitness, and all sorts of other evolutionary ideas. There is also lots of evidence that humans are not naturally good and that this does not get humans reproducing. The most reproducing man in history, Genghis Khan was not very good at all.

It also skirted around the other point that atheists do not live their lives as if they were meaningless, which they purport to believe.

>"This flies in the face of survival of the fittest, species fitness, and all sorts of other evolutionary ideas." For the counterexample, see pack animals and their dynamics. Re: Genghis, certainly force has a way of making exceptions to generalities, but in the average case the good guy gets the girl, holds down the stable, well-paying job in a socially adjusted manner, and thus the genes get spread.

>"It also skirted around the other point that atheists do not live their lives as if they were meaningless, which they purport to believe."

My life is meaningful to me and that's all I personally care about, I don't care that you think everyone of a particular lack of belief has to have a particular mental state associated with that arbitrary tag.

"If God didn't exist, the ones who truly don't believe would likely act out much more on their beliefs no?"

I don't need some fear based faith system keeping me in check. Life is hard, difficult, and unfair enough as is without me adding hateful chaos to the mix.

I do find it weird that people need the threat of a punishment in the hereafter to keep their baser instincts in check. I am highly suspicious of anyone who cannot seem to fathom that goodness or morality can be found in something outside of divinity. What may they be hiding under that coat of piety and how many rounds does it hold?

Many people seem to assume I meant "they would act badly" I mean "we would see them ending their lives on a whim, since life, they believe, is an accident and meaningless".

> I don't need some fear based faith system keeping me in check.

Maybe others do?

I believe in God for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it just seems much more plausible that someone created the universe. If we walked in to the middle of nowhere and saw a beautiful statue, most of us would say "wow, I wonder who made it?" not "wow, what an incredible coincidence that this thing which has meaning to me just spontaneously formed".

Another main reason is that I _feel_ like there is a God, and generally my feelings tell me things. When I feel hungry, I don't think "ah, but that feeling is only an illusion!" instead I go and eat.

I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat.

p.s. I'm not trying to convince anyone here, just putting my thoughts out there in case they are helpful to anyone else.

I started writing a reply about how this is the 'infinite monkeys' argument, however on rereading your reply it looks like this is not correct.

It seems like you are saying you base your reality on your feelings.

To extend your examples, what do you think when you look up in the sky and see a Goodyear blimp? Do you think 'Wow look at that blimp, what a modern miracle that humans have made things that can fly" or do you go buy tires?

EDIT: I dont mean to detract from or insult your beliefs in anyway. They sound very nice :)

Ha, I've not seen a blimp in a long time!

I think I'd probably think both those things :P

I wouldn't say that I _only_ base my view of reality on my feelings, but I don't discount them just because they might be hard to explain.

I think our feelings, as well as our thoughts, should be listened to.

Not that it really makes any difference, but I have a science background (PhD, post-doc) so am used to thinking about evidence, so I hope you don't get the impression that I'm just too stupid to be an atheist!

I appreciate your respectful reply, though. It's actually fun when you can exchange a few thoughts with people on the internet in a respectful way.

As a side note, I also spent a period mentally tallying up the (sometimes famous) people on both sides of the God debate. When I discovered that someone I admire/respect believed in God, I'd add a mental mark on one column, and when I discovered someone else I admire/respect who doesn't, I'd add a mark in the other column.

Both columns became full pretty quickly, so I concluded that someone's point of view on God cannot be a case of intellect or integrity. This at least helped me not feel insecure about my beliefs on that front.

One reason why I don't hide my beliefs (although I rarely flaunt them, either) is so anyone else carrying out the same exercise has some more data. They might of course choose to put me in a "stupid believer" category, but that is up to them!

> I think our feelings, as well as our thoughts, should be listened to

But why? Not asking to be difficult; I'm trying to understand why we should listen to either.

I've learned that my thoughts are often filled with unhelpful nonsense baked into me at an early age by the conditioning of traumatized parents. I've learned that I can change the kinds of thoughts that I have by learning new skills and reframing situations so that the next time I encounter a situation that would lead to unhelpful nonsense thoughts, those are no longer the default reaction. My thoughts aren't me - they're the results of processes in my brain. I've learned that often the most useful thing is to not listen to my thoughts, because they're spinning narratives that simply aren't true ("I'm worthless", "everything is my fault", "<person> must be thinking awful things about me", etc).

Our interpretation of feelings are mediated by thought. Given the susceptibility of thought to conditioning and external shaping, what makes a feeling worth listening to?

To be clear, I'm not saying that thoughts/feelings are never useful or true. We depend on them to make sense of the world and to survive our environment. I'm saying that they're often not true, and this raises the question: what differentiates the useful/true ones from the ones that are not? Simply having the thought/feeling isn't enough.

I went through a period of time in my life when I experienced thoughts/feelings "as me". I felt identical to them. Once I realized that they're appearances in consciousness alongside every other appearance in consciousness: sights, sounds, physical sensations, smells, etc., my relationship with thoughts/feelings shifted. I appear to be closer to "that which is aware" of these appearances in consciousness. When you start observing these thoughts/feelings playing out from a distance, it becomes increasingly clear that they're often just plain wrong, but wrong for understandable reasons (e.g. the anxious brain borne of childhood trauma).

> But why? Not asking to be difficult; I'm trying to understand why we should listen to either.

Because our thoughts and feelings are really all we have to go on, when it comes to understanding the world around us.

I don't mean that _every_ thought or feeling should be acted on necessarily, but that they should all be given consideration.

For example, I read somewhere that ~70% of atheists admit to praying in the last year (or something like that. I don't remember the source). I think it's fair to say that the urge or feeling of wanting to pray is common.

Many people would dismiss that feeling with their thoughts, i.e. rationalise why the feeling is really a result of something else etc.

Whereas my take (by listening to my feelings) is that perhaps there is a reason why the urge to pray is a common one, and it might be as simple as something/someone to pray to actually exists.

> For example, I read somewhere that ~70% of atheists admit to praying in the last year (or something like that. I don't remember the source). I think it's fair to say that the urge or feeling of wanting to pray is common.

I am an atheist. I am very strict about the fact I do not believe in a God. My beliefs are strongly based in science, and I also believe Gods are fictionally created by people who need something more in their life.

However saying all that, there have been 3 major personal crisis in my life, and I have prayed in every one of them.

I cant explain it, I dont understand it. But I am hopefully intelligent enough not to close the door on it and let my mind ponder the whys of it from time to time.

JR1427, your comments here have provoked thought. Thankyou :)

Most of us would say "Wow, I wonder who made it" about a statue, but not a tree that is growing next to it.

> I believe in God for a number of reasons.

I'm not sure that what you describe as "reasons" actually qualify as reasons.

> Firstly, it just seems much more plausible that someone created the universe.

Why is that more plausible? You think that there is "an uncaused thing," which you call "God," and that this uncaused thing created the universe. Why is that more plausible than the uncaused thing being the universe itself? The universe manifestly exists; your idea of "someone" who created it does not (it may exist, but does not manifestly exist in the way the universe does).

> If we walked in to the middle of nowhere and saw a beautiful statue, most of us would say "wow, > I wonder who made it?" not "wow, what an incredible coincidence that this thing which has > meaning to me just spontaneously formed".

This is a variant of a common creationist argument, often promoted by those who prefer the term "intelligent design" to "creationism." But so-called "intelligent design" is just a variant of hard-core creationism.

> Another main reason is that I _feel_ like there is a God, and generally my feelings tell me > things. When I feel hungry, I don't think "ah, but that feeling is only an illusion!" instead I > go and eat.

This conflates two very different senses of the words "feel" and "feelings." Hunger is a biological sensation; your "feeling" that there is a God is not and is a very, very different kind of "feeling."

Consider this: if you had been left alone on a desert island as a child, with no other humans around, you would still feel hunger, because that is a natural, biological sensation.

But you almost certainly would not have the "feeling" you have now that there is a God, and even if you did, that God would even more certainly not have the characteristics you ascribe to it now.

The "God" that you "feel" exists, which has whatever characteristics you ascribe to it, is a social construct. In the absence of a social environment, it is vanishingly unlikely that you would construct a similar idea on your own.

Again, this "feeling" is not at all like hunger: it is a purely psychological phenomenon in a way that "feeling" hungry is not. Using the words "feel" and "feeling" in these two different ways confuses the issue rather than clarifies it.

> I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat.

This is not really even intelligible.

>This is a variant of a common creationist argument, often promoted by those who prefer the term "intelligent design" to "creationism." But so-called "intelligent design" is just a variant of hard-core creationism.

Are you implying that belief that the universe was intelligently designed necessarily implies belief that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, among other beliefs? That doesn't seem right.

No, not implying that. These are not my terms, but I would call the 6000 years ago stuff "young earth creationism," distinct from several kinds of "old earth creationism."

My point was just that proponents of so-called "intelligent design" sometimes try to create the impression that it is not itself a form of creationism, but it very much is. Not exactly the same as young earth creationism or any of the old earth variants, but still very much creationism nonetheless.

The basic idea as I understand it is that life exhibits "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved naturally, and therefore must have been created by some "designer." It is the "must have been created" part that makes is fundamentally creationist.

Just to chime in here, I don't think that the complexity of life is a clincher for existence of God.

I don't think that humans are in a very good position to judge the complexity of things. A more intelligent creature might think the universe very crude and simple, and a less intelligent one might think it terribly complex.

From a scientific point of view, I don't think we can judge how intelligent we are, so arguments around complexity don't necessarily help.

As for evolution, well, I've seen it happen in the lab. I think it happens, and I think it's plausible that evolution is how all life as we know it today arose. I don't think we have really hard evidence for that yet, and just because a mechanisms _could_ have done something, doesn't mean it did.

I can imagine a that evolution was a tool used to create life procedurally. If I was creating a universe, then I think I would use procedural generation! But here I am slipping in to assuming God created things in the same way a programmer creates games and simulations, which of course is pure speculation.

>My point was just that proponents of so-called "intelligent design" sometimes try to create the impression that it is not itself a form of creationism, but it very much is. Not exactly the same as young earth creationism or any of the old earth variants, but still very much creationism nonetheless.

Ah, I see, yes, it does seem to me that most if not all intelligent design proponents are creationists (usually I see creationism being used to refer to young earth creationism). I don't know of intelligent design proponents who deny creationism, that's interesting.

>The basic idea as I understand it is that life exhibits "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved naturally, and therefore must have been created by some "designer." It is the "must have been created" part that makes is fundamentally creationist.

Well, to be sure, while intelligent design theory is a theory meant to compete with evolutionary theory (what you've just outlined), what the original poster has said isn't necessarily intelligent design theory. They seem to have in mind the fine-tuning argument, roughly speaking that the order/structure of the universe suggests that the universe was designed to be that way. This argument doesn't compete with any scientific theories (except perhaps the multiverse theory, though my sense is that this is a contentious theory among scientists and atheist philosophers alike). But yes, this argument too suggests creationism.

Creationism is part and parcel of theism, though---your original comment seemed to imply that creationism is something obviously silly (as in, silly in a way in which theism is not)? Or am I just not reading you right?

> I don't know of intelligent design proponents who deny creationism, that's interesting.

I don't know if any intelligent design proponents deny creationism in all its forms. They hardly can, since what they are proposing is itself a form of creationism. But many try to obscure the fact that it is a form of creationism.

> what the original poster has said isn't necessarily intelligent design theory. They seem to have in mind the fine-tuning argument, roughly speaking that the order/structure of the universe suggests that the universe was designed

It's the same argument, though. Whether it's a "beautiful statue," as in the post I replied to here, or a watch, or a blood-clotting mechanism, or "the order/structure of the universe," the argument is "this thing was clearly designed, therefore the God that I profess to believe in is real."

Doesn't matter whether you call it "intelligent design" or "fine-tuning" or whatever, it's all the same: this thing was "designed," therefore there is/was a "designer" who intentionally created it. It's all creationism.

This is all sort of an aside from my main point to the post I replied to, which is that by equating the fact that he "feels" there is a God with "feeling" hungry, he is using the words "feel" and "feeling" very sloppily at best, and conflating two very different things in a way that confuses rather than clarifies.

Certainly, there are those who use this kind of sloppy language exactly because it confuses rather than clarifies. He may just be a victim of one, possibly many times removed, or he may be one himself. I dunno.

>it's all the same

Yes, in the sense that they point towards a creator of the universe. But intelligent design theory is more readily dismissed as anti-scientific nonsense, while the fine-tuning argument is not.

Since your original reply to the original poster was that "none of these reasons are reasons", and you went on to say, re: the design argument, nothing more than "this is a creationist argument", the implication seemed to be that an argument being a creationist one is reason enough to dismiss it. If you were just making a comment that the argument was expressing a belief that the universe was created (creationism), that seems fairly obvious, and I don't have anything to quibble about.

I would not agree that the fine-tuning argument "point[s] towards a creator." As I understand it, it is that if various natural constants had values other than those we observe, either life as we know it, or even the universe itself, could not exist. Nothing about a creator.

Certainly, there are those, seemingly including you, who would like to use it to "point towards a creator," but I think that in general, they want to point in that direction regardless, and will hang their hats on whatever comes along that seems like it might get them where they want to go.

>As I understand it, it is that if various natural constants had values other than those we observe, either life as we know it, or even the universe itself, could not exist.

This is just a fact, no?

The fine-tuning argument is something like, Premise (1) this fact is true, and it must be because of chance, necessity, or design. Premise (2) it is not by chance or necessity. Conclusion: it is by design.

You can reject the premises (probably premise 2), but it's a valid (even if unsound) argument whose conclusion points towards a creator. And its rejection probably warrants some explanation rather than an out-of-hand dismissal.

Good lord. Your (2) is entirely unfounded and can absolutely be rejected with no further explanation than that. All you have is (1), from which no conclusion can be drawn.

Again, nothing about (1) itself "points towards a creator." You just seem to wish that it did.

At first glance (2) seems plausible, no? Given that there's an apparently narrow range in which certain universal/cosmological constants lie, outside of which life (possibly the universe itself in the way we know it) would be impossible, it seems that that these constants are what they are is a very low probability event. And in the same way that we would probably say a coin that turns up heads a thousand times in a row isn't by chance (we would probably have no trouble saying it's by design in this case, that is, the coin has been rigged), it seems plausible to say the Goldilocks state of affairs isn't by chance. And it seems that the state of affairs could have been other than what they are, so it seems that it's not by necessity. So it's not obvious that we can reject (2) out of hand.

There is, I think, a good case to be made against (2)---for example, an appeal to the anthropic principle, or an appeal to multiverse theory. But this is far from a rejection with no further explanation.

> At first glance (2) seems plausible, no?

Not particularly.

> it seems that that these constants are what they are is a very low probability event.

Pure speculation.

> we would probably say a coin that turns up heads a thousand times... [is] by design

This is just yet another misplaced, unhelpful analogy similar to many others made by creationists of various stripes. It gets you nowhere.

> it seems that the state of affairs could have been other than what they are

Again, pure speculation.

> So it's not obvious that we can reject (2) out of hand.

Given that it is entirely unfounded, I would say that we not only can, but should.

I think that you just want to get to a particular conclusion and will postulate whatever it takes to get there.

>Pure speculation.

But saying that the constants are what they are not being a very low probability event isn't pure speculation? Saying that the state of affairs can only possibly be what they are isn't pure speculation?

>unhelpful analogy

Maybe so, but I don't see why it's not fruitful to spell out why this analogy is unhelpful.

>Given that it is entirely unfounded, I would say that we not only can, but should.

Does it not warrant an explanation for why things are by chance, or why things are by necessity? An explanation for why things being by chance or necessity is founded? Otherwise, (2) appears intuitive, I can conceive that the gravitational constant could have been something other than what it is, and since I can imagine it, it seems that things could have been this way, and there should be an explanation why they are not. Now, maybe it's the case that conceivability isn't the same as possibility, but I think that warrants being addressed. Or maybe it's that there is an explanation, e.g. that if the constant wasn't what it is, we wouldn't be around to talk about it. But again, I think that warrants being spelled out.

>I think that you just want to get to a particular conclusion and will postulate whatever it takes to get there.

Maybe so, but I think if someone postulates something intuitive but false, regardless of their motivations, it's better to address why it's false instead of shutting down discussion.

> Does it not warrant an explanation for why things are by chance, or why things are by necessity?

Sure .. and here physics has no necessity for a purposeful creator.

Of all the multitudes of parallel universes that can come into existence .. the only ones that have any observers who can comment on what a long shot it is to be in a universe with observers are those universes that have the dice rolled just right for such observers to exist.

The existence of billion dollar lottery winners is not proof of the existence of god, it's strong evidence that multiple lotteries with many entrants exist.

Yes, right, exactly, this is the kind of explanation that I've been saying is warranted spelling out. And there's a lot to discuss here - what does it even mean for a multitude of parallel universes to exist? why should we believe that's something that's possible? how does it work exactly? what are the implications of such a theory? is there any rigorous science we can do to flesh out how this works? and other questions. And people have written a lot on this topic.

> saying that the constants are what they are not being a very low probability event isn't pure speculation?

I am not suggesting that that is the case. You are speculating here, I am not.

> I don't see why it's not fruitful to spell out why this analogy is unhelpful.

Not the way it works. Your analogy, your burden.

> Does it not warrant an explanation for why things are by chance, or why things are by necessity? An explanation for why things being by chance or necessity is founded?

I am not speculating that either of those is or is not the case.

You speculate because it gets you to the conclusion that you clearly want. I have no such need.

> I think if someone postulates something intuitive

Your speculation is not actually "intuitive." You describe it that way only because it is to your liking.

> but false, regardless of their motivations, it's better to address why it's false instead of shutting down discussion.

Depends on the discussion. As for this one, I will decline to continue it further.

Thank for your comments. I'll try to respond to some of them, just for interest, but bear in mind I'm not trying to convince you of anything, so please just take them as intended - a hopefully friendly and stimulating exchange of points of view.

> I'm not sure that what you describe as "reasons" actually qualify as reasons.

I'm assuming you don't believe in God, so I'd be surprised if you did think my reasons qualified as reasons! But they do for me. I wasn't trying to put forward my best arguments in order to try and convince someone.

> This is a variant of a common creationist argument, often promoted by those who prefer the term "intelligent design" to "creationism." But so-called "intelligent design" is just a variant of hard-core creationism.

I'm not exactly sure what your point is. To be clear, I don't think that God made things with a wave of a wand. There seems to be good evidence for the physical mechanism for the creation of lots of things. I think these mechanisms might be thought of as the tools of whoever created (and presumably architects) the universe. But who knows, I'm just speculating. To be honest, the details of the mechanism of creation don't seem very important to me right now.

> This conflates two very different senses of the words "feel" and "feelings." Hunger is a biological sensation; your "feeling" that there is a God is not and is a very, very different kind of "feeling."

Assuming you are an atheist, then I'm surprised you think there is any kind of feeling _other_ than biological ones.

What type of feeling is my sense that there is a God, if not biological?

Personally I have no clear opinion on what the origins of this feeling are, but all I know is I have it.

> Consider this: if you had been left alone on a desert island as a child ... But you almost certainly would not have the "feeling" you have now that there is a God

I don't know if there is any evidence to back this up, but I'd be interested to hear it.

> and even if you did, that God would even more certainly not have the characteristics you ascribe to it now.

I don't think I really ascribed any characteristics to God.

But I do think it's interesting that different and unconnected people across the world, and through time, very often come to the conclusion that something/someone created the universe.

> This is not really even intelligible.

"I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat." was meant as a metaphor. People often say they "hunger" for things that are not food. Similarly, if one believes that there is a God to hunger for, then God is the food, and to accept this is to eat from God.

Given that the god of the Bible is a literally an amalgamation of various ancient Sumerian gods, I don't believe that this is the win that you think it is.

And however powerful you think he is, he got his ass handed to him by Chemosh, a member of a Moabite pantheon, after the king of the Moabites sacrificed his heir in a burnt offering to his own god.

I didn't make it up. That's in the Bible.

The Christian god is what happens when you take a fictional character and keep on ascribing to him greater and greater powers because it's easier than describing his limitations. Same thing happened with Superman in the 40s and 50s, really.

> If God didn't exist, the ones who truly don't believe would likely act out much more on their beliefs no?

But I do. My morality doesn't come from an imaginary being. It comes from my relationships with other people. I don't kill people because (a) it would bring me no joy to do so, (b) would bring me no benefit, and (c) we have laws that prevent killing because societies are more stable when they don't engage in random killings. Societies only get to exist if the people in them find a net benefit in staying alive and having others stay alive. It's amazing how many cultures have existed throughout our history as a species and none of them just went crazy because they didn't believe in some land-locked storm god who forgot about his wife.

The idea that people are just going to go apeshit if they truly believed there wasn't a god is right up there in terms of ridiculousness with all the men in the Republican party and pastors who claim steadfast morality but keep getting caught with minors, women who aren't their wives, and gay men. So I feel sorry for you if you are so inherently immoral that you need to be held back by stories of a man in the sky, but some of us don't live our lives in fear of supernatural retaliation.

And if we're being real, the vast majority of the planet don't believe in your god, including people who claim to be Christian. It's just easier to say that you do so that people will leave you alone.

> “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”.

I think that's a bit simplistic.

I was taught (in a Buddhist context) that "faith" should be interpreted as a kind of confidence. To do meditation (beyond something like mindfulness), you need confidence that you aren't going to explode, or harm yourself. It's like that game of deliberately falling backward, with the confidence that your friends will catch you before you hit the ground. So you need confidence in your teacher and in the teaching.

You gain that kind of confidence based on experience; you don't trust your friends (or your teacher) because you're supposed to; you trust them because they have shown themselves reliable in the past. You don't acquire confidence in a flash, as it were on the road to Damascus; it's something that develops.

I don't know whether the Christian notion of faith jibes with this Buddhist interpretation.

/me no longer a Buddhist, nor any kind of thing-ist.

You could suggest we have a confidence interval for various things (e.g. 99% for gravity, 55% for whether x/y/z will happen or a president gets a second term), but in the capacity of Christianity the expression of faith demanded necessarily goes beyond mild conviction. The institutions (and what is conveyed in the Bible) don't want you to kinda sorta believe, they want you to believe by willfully eschewing all doubt. It's an action as much as a descriptor for belief.

I never felt as though I could "choose" to believe anything, or not easily at any rate. I could choose not to explore certain data and be satisfied with ignorance (though I try not to) but if something is incongruent with the facts as I understand them, then I can't "faith" my way to believing it.

> the expression of faith demanded necessarily goes beyond mild conviction.

OK. So in Buddhism (the way I was taught it), confidence or faith isn't something you express; you either have enough to achieve what you're trying to achieve, or you don't. And nobody demands it. But you're right, it's not an all-or-nothing deal.

> necessarily goes beyond mild conviction.

Indeed (although I'm not sure what "mild conviction" means; being convinced of something means you can see no room for doubt). For some kinds of meditation, e.g. some kinds of Tantric meditation, you need something that feels like certainty. It's not about falsifiable facts; it's about trusting, because you have to let go (like falling backwards).

I don't know any evangelical Christians; I think that for them, expressing their faith is part of the deal, and it is expected (i.e. demanded). In that sort of context, I can imagine a pastor or community "demanding" that you hold beliefs that are false to fact, e.g. Young Earth. That's not what I understand by "confidence".

Regarding trust and confidence, I just watched a two-part PBS documentary about Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre; it was an eye-opener. A lot of testimony from people who totally trusted this guy for a long time, despite (what looked to me like) his total charlatanism. He just wanted to be admired, apparently.

You may notice that I did not specify theological faith.

Perhaps all religious and metaphysical argument can be abstracted away into the simulation hypothesis - i.e. that we all live in a perfect simulation, running on a substrate somewhere else. The key point in this argument is that no experimental or observational evidence is capable of proving or disproving the existence of the simulation, since it is a perfect simulation.

This is logically equivalent to the statement that a supernatural being is continually intervening in the world, but only when nobody is watching, and only such that no evidence of intervention is left behind.

Similarly, nobody can prove that a person who claims to hear the voice of a supernatural being in their head (and that's the inspiration for writing a holy text which forms the basis of a religion) is actually just schizophrenic, rather than having had their neurons plucked like strings by said supernatural being.

This view seems to upset atheists more than anyone else, since it places their certainty about the fundamentally mechanistic and non-simulated nature of reality in the same bin with religious evangelicals, but the religious people don't like it much either as there is no clear basis to choose one religion as superior to another, other than the purely utilitarian arguments about which one provides the optimal moral basis for a healthy society.

Hence the mysterious unknowable nature of reality: some questions cannot be answered. Even the mathematicians agree on that these days.

This is one of the reasons that I've mostly shifted to "agnostic" after many years of considering myself a hard atheist.

The degree to which I still consider myself an atheist is mostly rooted in my belief that if some god-like entity or non-entity or whatever "exists", he/she/it/they is certainly not like the common conception of some "father god" figure in the clouds.

It took me awhile to realize (after going down quite a few science and philosophical rabbit holes), that the atheist's position is untenable - not because I think there is a god, but because there seems to be no reason to believe we can actually know one way or the other.

I'm not religious, but I do find myself spending more time contemplating this primordial unknown. I'm a strong believer in the value of science, but if for no other reason than our lack of progress on the hard problem of consciousness, I have to accept that it doesn't have ultimate answers. Maybe someday this will change.

Personally I think it's untenable because you have to believe in a god to reject it which largely puts atheists and fundamentalists in the same bucket.

They both believe in the same god but practice their faith differently.

The root problem is that you can easily contest and rationalize anthropomorphic gods which kind of defeats the purpose of the discussion to begin with.

> you have to believe in a god to reject it which largely puts atheists and fundamentalists in the same bucket

How do you figure?

Both positions are claims about absolute truth in a domain that is philosophically and scientifically impossible to make absolute truth claims about. If there is faith being practiced, it is in the holding of these opposed beliefs, but that is not equivalent to sharing a belief about god.

I also believe that no two people can have the same mental model of a god, just something very similar. Religious doctrine is useful for getting everyone "on the same page" so to speak.

When comparing notes, the doctrines are that absolute medium. For the multitude of reasons, binary conclusions are easier.

To say one does or doesn't accept the existence of a thing is to acknowledge that there is a model of that thing that does or does not exist.

The model of that thing is what has to exist to rationalize a belief.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the discussion doesn't end at binary conclusions of religious doctrine. The discussion of a god is continuous by nature in the same way science continuously models the universe.

Faith here is engaging in the discussion knowing it doesn't end. It's really not about belief either way. We all share the same experience.

> To say one does or doesn't accept the existence of a thing is to acknowledge that there is a model of that thing that does or does not exist.

In some cultures, kids grow up believing that Santa Claus is the source of the gifts that show up under the tree.

As they grow older, they learn that gifts are actually something humans give each other, and that Santa doesn’t really exist.

The shared mental model established by this myth/fantasy has no bearing on the actual existence of a supernatural jolly old fellow who drives a magical sleigh.

I agree with you that in order to take a position on something, it’s necessary to have some kind of model of that thing. But a model is just a model, and could correlate to something real, or to nothing at all.

Take any major controversial belief and apply the same logic:

- Flat earth theory

- Astrology

- Encounters with aliens

- Bigfoot

The shared models required to have public discourse about these topics says nothing about the underlying truth of them.

> Faith here is engaging in the discussion knowing it doesn't end. It's really not about belief either way. We all share the same experience.

This is not what most people mean when they talk about faith. What you’re describing sounds closer to agnosticism.

And we absolutely do not all share the same experience. We probably all exist within the same physical reality, whatever that is, but there are countless examples available to underscore the fact that subjective experience is a vast spectrum.

Some people see sounds as colors. Some people have vivid visual imaginations. Some people have a mind’s eye that is blind. Some people experience colors so differently that they’re considered colorblind. Some people can conjure music in their mind. Some people have an inner voice. Some people hear nothing but silence.

> I also believe that no two people can have the same mental model of a god

> We all share the same experience.

It’s probably the case that no two people can have the same mental model of anything they’re capable of modeling. But setting aside the spectrum of individual subjective experience for a moment, aren’t these claims in direct conflict?

I really do appreciate your comment and I spent a long time trying to word this in a digestible way (even tried gpt but I just went back to my original text because gpt made it so much more unapproachable). I do think I understand where our presumptions misaligned though. I should say I agree with your comment on faith more than my presentation. My definition of practical faith, for instance, is more of a prepared calmness by relinquishing material bonds and worries to an immaterial power. Sufficient and deliberate practice can really help one's resolve in the most dire situations and I find that uniquely powerful.

Anyways... lmk if this makes sense.

Using both examples to start; the realization of Santa, and the conflict you highlighted at the end of your comment:

In the absolute reality, humans in aggregate don't have omniscience, let alone one human having omniscience (or a god. Bonus philosophy below if you want it). This is where our shared knowledge is composed of half-truths because we cannot qualify things in totality.

Our universally shared reality (experience, in my words) is necessarily the same to its absolutely weird limits but our individual perception and cognitive windows can only ever reveal a summary truth here, often by condensing knowledge into symbols.

The abstractions of the same root belief system then spawn divergent perceptions of a god with infinite variability as they decohere into greater philosophical quandries beyond what symbols can reliably communicate and may in fact translate differently depending on culture, time, place, etc.

In the purest sense, a belief in a god and verifiable reality don't have to be incompatible or be incorrect, just incomplete as of our current understanding. The alignment of truths is also known as edification, but you can drop the spiritual implications if you would like. Edification begins with material foundation (observable reality) and builds into the abstract (intuitive reality or whatever you want to call it). Science is a map, and philosophy is the compass. True north should always align.

But you gave some really good examples of fictional concepts whose belief measurably does not reflect reality.

The caveat for me is this: Santa is real in many forms including the symbols (traditional, corporate), the legend of St. Nick, and the dude at the mall. These are all realized representations of a fictional model (excluding any possibly real historical St. Nicks), but like you say it doesn't mean that the model is a supernatural guy you can catch breaking and entering. In totality, the "real" Santa is a cosmic projection of our shared idea of Santa that occasionally materializes (through our actions) as a real physical presence if only in approximation of the myth. To completely "know" Santa is to understand the total accumulation of all existing and possibly imaginable lore. At that point faith in the magnitude of possibility transcends belief because the experiential Santa is inconceivably larger than the possibly of a simple, palpable jolly fat man avoiding international sanctions. Total immersion in a pool (immersion in nothing but Santa lore) doesn't mean you now breathe water (Santa myths, symbols), but you have the experience necessary to understand the reality of the water in the larger pool house (reality) and it's the immersion itself that "realizes" a single vast and profound truth in the grander scheme.

Maybe a little more useful is the delusional half-truths in which many maintain a fiction of a frisbee-like earth. Within this delusion f-earthers misrepresent reality as an idea that contributes to the same canon as heathenous scientists do, simply (not so simply) at odds in modeling. While the idea* of f-earth is true, it does not materialize in any way we can measure.

To rephrase this: the belief itself is a held truth, founded from our shared perceptive reality, that maaayyy mostly contain component truths, but the assemblage does not reflect the absolute truth of the universe, so we distinguish it as categorically false. It's somewhere on the map, but it's not a navigable path in this reality. Of course we can perform the same exercise we did with Santa to fully understand it, but the point is that fiction can be composed entirely of truths. It largely falls apart when a large enough representation of the fiction does not match observable reality and is only stable within itself. That self-stability is the reality we accept while acknowledging that it's a fiction from any grander perspective.

Now, obviously those two cases have implications for the fiction of any arbitrary belief system, especially theistic systems. But lacking omniscience we are left with precipitate simulacrums of our collective understanding of a (or any) god. Atheists may also contribute to this philosophy and theists likewise as they are typically not forming ideas in a cultural vacuum and so the simulacra overlap, inconclusive. In any such case, the capabilities of humans fall short in realizing the totality of what a god represents which falls back into the faith argument; leave it or take it, you're not wrong. It becomes real in as many parts that align with your map and compass. For agnostics it may simply stop at a shrug. For zealots it may be an unshakeable confidence in the afterlife.

The ground truth of the belief is that belief itself projects a kaleidoscope of incomplete *experiences* (used it well this time) that, given enough turns, unify into absolute truth about the nature of reality.

So to model a god is not to detract or subtract regardless of whether it's a model that portraits your reality window or is just a decorative accent or even has no place at all. It's always going to be a presentation of discourse on the perceived nature of the whole.

*I believe that omniscience communicates a sort of intelligence that implies anthropomorphic designer God so I don't like the term. I take omniscience as total knowledge of all information in the sense that every subatomic particle to its macro structures and every exchange of energy is felt and known across all space and time without any cognitive distinction or focus on any one part. Simply witnessing all distinctions and their manifolds in totality.

It should upset, or rather irritate, anyone with a scientific mindset, because the idea of a perfect simulation is an untestable hypothesis, and an untestable hypothesis, listen carefully, isn't worth shit: and why don't you know this already? What makes you keen to promote an untestable hypothesis? The natural assumption to make is that you were bitten by the religion bug, and are seeking a way to sneak religion into cosmology through the back door.

Well, we often deal with untestable questions in science, such as: what was the molecular pathway that led to the origin of life? Time has erased the data we'd need to test any hypothesis, thus even if we do create a living cell from simple elements, there's no way at all to be sure that was the route that life took. Hence we can't rule out some supernatural being jiggling the atoms about just so at the origin of life.

So, even if we choose to believe in a purely mechanistic universe, we can't definitively test that hypothesis using the tools and methods of science. Practically, this means that the scope of science as a means for discovering the nature of reality is limited.

edit: note that a reproducible glitch in the simulation would be of interest, and one could even argue that looking for such glitches is in part what scientists do.

we sort of know the conditions of early earth don’t we? if you can recreate possible pathways to the origin of life based upon those conditions that seems like infinitely better possible explanation something totally supernatural

i get what you’re saying with the limits of science but this seems like a bad example

> and an untestable hypothesis, listen carefully, isn't worth shit

You have a proof for this "isn't worth shit" fact?

These conversations are surreal.

> The natural assumption to make is that you were bitten by the religion bug, and are seeking a way to sneak religion into cosmology through the back door.

The unnatural approach, strict logic/epistemology/rationality/etc, is to wonder what is true. But once one falls victim to an ideology filled with heuristics, like science, it often disables those services within the mind, rendering one unable to wonder what is true.

For fun: do you believe atoms exist?

Do you believe that atoms always existed (post the big bang), or that they only began existing after they were discovered to exist?

Also: do you believe that is air you are breathing?

Was gravity an idea not worth shit before we developed ways to empirically test it out?

I'm sorry: unfalsifiable, then. Fine distinction.

Do you have any thoughts on responses to Popperian falsifiability e.g. those from Kuhn and Feyerabend? The criterion of falsifiability doesn't seem to be a very popular idea in philosophy of science anymore.

Everything is unfalsifiable until we develop tests for it.

I think this view is agnostic at its core but it requires each individual to make a choice between a simulation without an ultimate observer and a simulation with an ultimate observer. It can get even more tricky if you consider the multi-verse and the possibility that all simulatable realities exist simultaneously and completely. That give a new breadth, IMO, to the idea of omnipotence since one may feel compelled to assume that such an ultimate observer is aware of each of those possible universes/realities.

If one makes the choice to believe in a God-like ultimate observer then one is required to confront the nature of their relationship between their own subjective experience and that ultimate observer. One of the consequences that I believe results from contemplating this with respect to multi-verses will be the necessity of rejecting the idea of revelation entirely.

If that is a correct view, then it leaves the would-be believer in a paradoxical (or even absurd) condition. One is driven by the question of their relationship to some ultimate source while never being able to reconcile it.

Of course, if you simply reject the ultimate observer, or even an ultimate source from which everything emanates, then you don't have anything to contemplate at all and any discussion on the matter would appear trivial and frivolous.

> nobody can prove that a person who claims to hear the voice of a supernatural being in their head (…) is actually just schizophrenic

Bipolar chiming in. Personally, I find hallucinations and mood swings to be very different from God. The disconnect from reality caused by the former is very distinct, even though I’m forced to act as if they were real.

God tends to come in the form of action, something tangible, something outside logic and emotion. I’ve never heard words or had feelings associated with it. It’s not part of any moods like everything else is.

Of course, this is all impossible to prove. After all, I’m diagnosed with a mental illness which has delusional thinking as a common symptom. I wouldn’t trust me. :)

The leap from "we are in a simulation" to "some pieces of bread have a tag that marks them as belonging to the body of Christ" is rather small.

That's not that much data. It's really not that remarkable once you've bought into the idea of your existence being a simulation.

What led you arrive at this? Would love to read these works

Not OP, but IIRC Jonathan Edwards held that the whole universe existed in the mind of God.

This is functionally indistinguishable from the "perfect simulation" hypothesis.

That was what leapt immediately to mind the first time I encountered the Simulation Hypothesis, as one raised on Christian theology.

A lot of the concepts about simulation and related things, are in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter, although it doesn't go into theology much, though there are headings like "Articles of Reductionist Faith".

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