/lit/ - Literature

It was God Himself. He thought He could hide away His creations before humans such as dinosaurs and so on and so on. But we figured it out.
Sometimes God works in mysterious ways.

the reader

>>9431153
He dances around the subject without ever perceiving why God exists. He's an Ivan.

>>9431153
The new atheists make the same mistakes that Gibbons and Volatire did, they disregard the positive effects, and sometimes even the existence, of sincere faith.

Dismissive, snobbish disregard of an primary aspect of human life (spiritualism) is mind boggling, especially considering the intellectual abilities of the proponents of these views. When I hear Sam Harris puzzling over the left's incredible capacity for anti-intellectualism and zealotry, his queries easily could be answered by pointing out that nature abhors a vacuum, and that many secularists are replacing spiritualism with political ideology, and are willing to burn the heretics to post-structural social progressiveness.

>>9431209
So how come right wingers also replace their religion with ideology? A lot of people claim to be christian but embody none of the religion's values and are more motivated by their politics.

I don't buy the religion vs ideology angle, they're always intermixed.

>>9431209
I used to think like you but changed. Can you argue this from a psychological perspective?

This book changed my mind: "Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not"

>>9431237
>lot of people claim to be christian but embody none of the religion's values and are more motivated by their politics

I agree 100%

>I don't buy the religion vs ideology angle, they're always intermixed.

What I am saying is that people have to have a raison d'être, and that if it isnt something relatively benign like Christian Ethics (as opposed to using Christianity to increase money or power or something like that), it can just as easily be some awful -ism.

>>9431247
I think a profound moment for me is in Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Herzog. In this 35,000 year old cave is an altar with a bear skull. Or 160,000 years ago in Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel, human burials with religious objects are found. The mystical other has been with us for all time, and assuming that in 200 years we can strip away the perceived or perhaps real? mystical and not have a profound and not necessarily positive effect on what humans do and how we live seems to be deeply problematic to me. Forgive me if that was poorly put.

No event that is more miraculous than the miracle that it seeks to discredit can be used as an explanation to deny that a miracle actually occurred. Yet Dawkins routinely does this. I'm only half remember but he tries to explain how a statue could move on its own, and because he ascribes anything that ever happens to chance, he posited that the atoms in the statue just happened to vibrate a certain way or something like that. The whole thing was ridiculous because nobody seriously argues for the existence of God using miracles like that but Dawkins only goes after the "easy" stuff. Compare how of the book is devoted to his misunderstanding of Pascal's Wager to his even worse misunderstanding of Aquinas, which I think he only devoted a paragraph to.

He also a lot of things without really explaining them. Where does that one in a billion chance of life developing on earth figure come from? I suspect he pulled it out of his ass. Scott Hahn's book Answering New Atheism had a very good rebuttal to this. He demonstrated just how improbable it was for a single celled organism to randomly develop and "one in a billion" isn't even in the ballpark.

I'm frankly dismayed at rigidity of new atheism. This absolute adherence to the idea that everything must be explained, everything must right-this-instant have proof is not only unhelpful, but not even an appropriate attitude towards religion OR science, for that matter.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (widely accepted and studied by mathematicians) basically posits that provability is a weaker form of truth: i.e. Truth may not necessarily be provable and yet still be truth. There's also the idea of tacit truths -- truths that can only be understood once we actively participate in them -- that paint a fuller, more comprehensive picture of the relationship between faith and knowledge.

New atheism betrays its roots trying to fight religion.

>>9431247
>Can you argue this from a psychological perspective?
Faith is our intuitive perception that the world should follow certain predictable rules.

Dawkins is. The only sin of the false prophet is self-delusion.

>>9431273
>I think a profound moment for me is in Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Herzog. In this 35,000 year old cave is an altar with a bear skull. Or 160,000 years ago in Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel, human burials with religious objects are found. The mystical other has been with us for all time
Moderns can just impute into ancient objects what they think it should mean from a modern perspective, you're not going to reconstruct paleopsychology, you can't really know what the people that constructed that stuff actually thought about it
We don't have their soft brains just bones and the little remains that could fossilize, what looks like spirituality could be something quite different, just because they were morphologically modern doesn't mean they didn't think and understand things radically different from us
Real "spirituality"/"religion" might come much later

>>9431313
I agree, its a basic of historiography, but there is an obvious valley between the profane and useful (a spear, a granary, piles of fishbones in a midden), and the sacred (the ritual burials at stonehenge or the similar imagery between modern shamanist practices in the rainforest and carved art on peruvian temples). That sacred has certainly been with us from the beginning, and the disregard shown for it by Hitchens and Dawkins or 18th century philosophes scorning "superstition" has always undermined their positions for me.

>>9431288
are you fucking serious Jordanson?

>>9431352
So what would a good Dawkins be like? Just reconcile evolution with religions sort of like the Catholic church did? Or would you be against that?

This post is sincere.

>>9431365
What are you even referring to?

>>9431352
You can't know what a ritual burial is, just because it looks like one doesn't mean it actually is, people claim neanderthals even did it [making humans not special in that regard then]

>>9431369
>So what would a good Dawkins be like?
We must acknowledge that there is a possibility/strong likelihood that there is no god, and religion comes from pattern recognition. But making physics Godgod[/spoiler] rejects moral philosophy. We are not just animales and a society of meritocratic technocrats would toss aside the beatitudes with no concern. As much as I despise "new age" philosophy and the crunchy soccer moms that practice it, their world view usually deifies health and wellness, if not intellectual rigor. The ideal atheist social philosopher acknowledges that culture exists, not to be stricken down t. social progressives and post-structuralists, but to provide structure to peoples lives and to guide them to fulfilling existence that minimizes suffering for the great majority. Taking a hammer to belief and leaving ruins does nothing for anyone, especially considering he may be wrong.

>>9431399
All history is using evidence to concoct narratives that are plausible. We cannot re-live it, so we do what we can.

When we see hundreds of bog people, young men, seemingly healthy and possibly elite, probably warriors, getting their throat cut at 25, we can assume that either they transgressed upon a taboo or were sacrificed. They were not doing it willynilly, even if they saw a sacred action as a profane action (the gods do exist, no question, and they need blood. sorry bob, its your turn. the liver says so)

>>9431412
fuckin spoiler fuckup

>>9431382
you know damn well bucko

>>9431428
I'm actually 100% serious that I wasn't referring to that.

I got the idea reading from Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter.

Tacit faith I got from this paper:
http://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD26-2/TAD26-2-pg21-31-pdf.pdf

>>9431428
How can someone misunderstand the incompleteness theorem so badly

>>9431428

I agree with
>>9431443
Incompleteness doesn't somehow demand the existence of God in all proofs. Peterson totally misses the point.

>>9431439
will have a read. feel free to direct me towards other apologetics that rely on a meditation on faith. No god is real please, don't have time for that.

>>9431280
http://www.hawking.org.uk/life-in-the-universe.html

>>9431288
Aquinas was a pseudoscientist from the middle ages who really needs to be forgotten about. Pascals wager is illogical even on ethical grounds, let alone empirical.

>>9431209
Negatives greatly outweigh the scant positives, which are built on a false supposition anyway.

>>9431537

>>9431547
Why are atheistic opinions always labelled with the fedora meme? Not very fair really

>>9431556
>Calling aquinas a pseudoscientist
>Scant positives for ethical christianity

Dismissive attitude that with no real arguments isnt very fair either.

>>9431537
Oh man great argument!
Wait where did it go? I'd swear I saw you having an argument just now.

I don't understand why organised Atheism even exists, and I say that as someone who doesn't believe in Creationism. It's not like I would meet up and discuss the virtues of not playing basketball with other people who don't play basketball. It's redundant. Let those who want to have faith have it, and if you don't then there isn't anything to discuss.

>>9431537

The whole point you're missing is that the existence of God is inherently un-provable: it is axiomatic. Un-provability isn't enough to dismiss it though.

So by the same token, Pascal's wager (which you brought up for some reason) is equally unhelpful.

Honestly, he should've called the book The Religion Delusion instead and I might've taken it more seriously.

Religion is hard to justify in any sense by my own lights, but the concept of God itself isn't as irrational as atheists make it out to be.

>>9431601
That's how atheists put themselves in a confusion position: they both try to reason about religion's sociopolitical effects and also reason about metaphysics.

Gets too confusing for their own good.

I'm irreligious, but I don't care for nu-atheism ideologues and hold the same view of religion as much of this board.

I haven't read this. Tell me where he's wrong. A cursory reading of the wikipedia article doesn't raise any objections from me.

>>9431565
I guess Aquinas is just failed physics - the idea that particles have to set in motion by a god in order to move at all is ridiculous. I think people are ethical, not religions.

>>9431566
All these flavours and you choose saltiness :(

>>9431580
I can't disprove it - but by that same reasoning I can't disprove the Hellenic gods either, or Darth Vader. If I can't dismiss it, can you assert it?

>>9431605

This is one of the reasons I find atheists so obnoxious to talk to. Every time I talk to one about the first cause they will inevitably try to shift the conversation to Christianity and they want me to prove that instead. It's so far out of the scope of discussion and they don't understand why.

>>9431627
The whole point of the Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates that even Mathematics relies on un-provable assertions (axioms). Your attitude would prevent us from going past 1 + 1 = 2.

>>9431605
>>9431638

I'm a philosophy student who's an atheist. I never bring it up in everyday conversation.

>>9431658
listen mate, indulge me for a second and try to be as truthful as you can.

Do you actually believe that proofs are not possible without the prerequisite of deism?

>>9431153
Dawkins was. He was delusional enough to think it matters.

>>9431745
I actively distance myself from that opinion.

I repeat: Just as Mathematics can be consistent and rely on un-provable assertions, so can metaphysical truths exist without explicit proofs.

Again: I'm not saying that some form of Deism is the only way proofs are possible.

I repeat: Provability is a weaker form of Truth; Truth does not rely on provability.

>>9431658
No that's not it at all, study harder

>>9431802
>Provability is a weaker form of Truth; Truth does not rely on provability.

I will completely disregard the first part because I can't engage with it without insulting you. I'll chalk it down to some aphorism practice... As far as the second part goes, that may be so, but are you not human? Is falsifiability not a good golden rule, as boring as it may be, for our epistemic shortcomings?

>>9431280
Low chances of something happening can easily be explained by an infinite amount of occurrences for that chance. I believe someone said it was the chance that a hurricane would blow through a city and leave a 747 perfectly assembled in its wake. Everyone agrees that such a thing would be theoretically possible, but so rare as to be a non-factor.

So what about another law of probability, that, given an infinite number of chances for an event to occur, the probability of it happening approaches a certainty? Assuming a cyclical eternity of this universe, it's almost certain that if events can occur to produce life as we know it, that it will occur. In my opinion, there's much better examples that point towards the divine and mystical compared to a low probability of events as if our planet were the first form in the history of the universe.

>>9431153
Religious. Haven't you realized that atheism is the only answer?

>>9431953

Attempting to explain something by positing an infinite amount of chances for it to occur doesn't actually explain anything, it merely enlarges the problem infinitely. Now on top of explaining the 'something' you have to explain why there's an infinite amount of chances for it to have occurred, and I'm not too sure that's possible in a finite universe. We can presume a cyclical universe but that again enlarges the problem because there is no observable evidence to suggest true true while there is observable evidence to suggest the universe had a beginning and will have an end.

>>9432097
>Attempting to explain something by positing an infinite amount of chances for it to occur doesn't actually explain anything
I can see an obvious argument both for and against this.
If it has an infinite number of chances of happening, then this might make it unsurprising that at some point it does. So if explanation is a matter of rendering the explanandum unsurprising, that's some explanation.
But the infinity of chances of occurring does not itself provide a description of what it was that happened that one time to make the event in question finally occur.

>>9431627
you misunderstand Aquinas, if you even read him

>>9431537
>Negatives greatly outweigh the scant positives
On what scale?