Science, Religion, and the answers to questions.

The question of the compatibility of religion and science depends on what you generally mean by compatible, and religion. But, we'll tend to gloss over compatibilism, but depending on what is meant by those terms it's either true or false, and depends.

You assert that both science and God are essential to our understanding. That already assumes God is real. But further declares God is essential to our understanding. In principle and practice, you actually have to prove that step. And if you did, it would already be a reasonable proof.

The worst problem I see is pretty central to the argument. You seem to be misconstruing being wrong with non-overlapping magisterium. You very much can use science to prove religious claims. But, let me focus down on why you say you can't.

Often times when God is given as an explanation for a natural process it is a gods of the gaps argument. It sees an opening in our understanding (we haven't explained morality, or design in nature, or the origin of the universe) and shoves God in there. Then science comes along and actually gives the correct answer and explains the phenomenon. Using this background you then veer completely the wrong direction. Saying, more or less, that if such points are that way falsified, is it not therefore true that science cannot falsify such notions.

In reality, the way this works is the answer that fails the most, is demonstratively not a good answer. If you had two horses that ran a million races and every time they ran a race the first horse won, and they were preparing to run another race, which horse should we bet on? This is the way it has been with the gods of the gaps, and the track record of the success of supernatural and divine claims. Lighting is caused by Zeus. Wait, it's just a natural phenomenon. Thunder is caused by Thor's Hammer. Wait it's an exploding sonic boom of air around lightning. Disease is caused by demons, and Jesus can shoo those demons away. Wait, they are cause by microscopic life forms. Genetics must be caused by God. Nope. Life must be God by God. Nope. The universe must be caused by God. Nope. -- Each time, supernaturalism is offered as an answer, and each time the answer turns out to be unknown natural phenomenon.

In every case, thus far the answer to every mystery has always turned out to be unknown natural phenomenon. You state in your conclusion that, "to rely solely on science is irrational" -- I must ask you to substantiate that premise. Because, thus far, with regard to how the universe works, the only thing that has ever answered a question, that we use to not know the answer to and we now do know the answer to, made that transition was science. -- At best religion was only interjected into those questions as a placeholder for our ignorance. We don't know why the seasons happen or why there are stars, the gods must have given us the seasons and the stars must be lights embedded in the dome that covers the Earth. -- Now we do. Religion was the wrong answer. And to the best I can tell has never actually answered any question. Science on the other hand has answered everything we've actually answered.


As for the why and how dichotomy, this generally isn't your argument so I'll be a little less kid gloves. It's entirely fictitious. Why are we here? There's plenty of answers. Generally our parents had sex is a pretty good answer to that. How does that work? Well, we have a pretty complete understanding of reproduction. Why does life exist here on this planet ultimately? Because it can. We can't accept all answers. Or rather, we can but we need to check how reasonable they are and decide which one is the most likely to be correct (or which is the least wrong).

The question here isn't really the "most convincing" but actually which one is the most likely to be true. Humans are an odd lot. We are easily distracted by shiny things and hollow promises. So, anybody might be find themselves liking the answer that they are the very special creation of the creator of the universe, who due to accepting these particular beliefs, will be given an eternity of bliss much more than they like the answer, that they evolved on this planet, their parents had sex, and they will die and be dead. While there's nothing to support the former, there's every reason to think the latter is true. But, again, humans love shiny things and hollow promises.

Looking more specifically towards the Christian answers they seem even less convincing. Not because the promises of eternal life and avoiding eternal punishment makes it a sucker's bet to refuse. But, because that stuff is exactly what humans would come up. God needed blood to fix the universe, and only his own blood had enough magic to do it, so he gave himself a body and killed it. He did this to create a loophole in the system he had already invented that nobody could succeed because some mythological ancestors ate magical fruit from a magical tree, and God's anger at them carried down to their innocent children. And finally the only way that God could stop being angry at his creations and needing to send them eternally to the place of infinite torture was to don a baby suit, live a perfect life, and die horribly. Because blood appeases God, and the better the blood, the more it appeases God. So God's blood appeases God the most, and so that was the only way God could be so very appeased to allow all you sinners into heaven anyway, even though you are all vile evil crap. God loved you enough to have a very bad weekend for your sins.

I know I'm making light of the religion there, but if you look at it sociologically you can see all the very human hooks. Humans want to avoid pain and achieve pleasure. So they are promised eternal bliss and to avoid eternal torture. Humans are easily shamed into doing things and guilted into them, so look what you made me do, Jesus had to die for your sins! Or historically it it makes perfect sense that in first century Israel. You have a society that actually believed that blood sacrifice appeased God, and they were very recently taken over by Pagan Rome. And the Pagans absolutely loved their stories about the sons and daughters of gods. Demigods were a hugely popular genre in their culture. And where these two intersect we find the first instances of the religion that says that the Son of God was sacrificed to God for the sins of the people and believing and accepting this gives you eternal life. It later gets complicated through trinitarianism (if the Son of God is God, he sacrificed Himself to Himself), but it's all a pretty direct path to how humans actually invented such things and how the religion was much more strongly influenced by culture than by reality.

If that were true, it would be rather heterodox in and of itself. That seems like a really strange way to run a universe with 70 sextillion stars and hundred of sextillions of planets. But, that humans made up such gods, seems really really likely. Because humans all over this planet make up all kinds of gods. Gods with several heads, that look like humans, that create the universe, that fight and kill giants, that create themselves. We humans love to make up gods. We are easily convinced by such stories, but not because the stories are true. But because the stories are so very deeply human. They are exactly the sorts of things that should convince us, they are specifically designed (self-designed infact) to get followers and be effective, and get more followers and be even more effective.

This is the principle distinction between "convincing" and "correct". We humans can easily be bamboozled, and nobody does it better than we do it to ourselves. Science is so very effective because it pulls out all the stops in order to prevent this from happening. In science, we try very very hard to keep from fooling ourselves.


Science answers the how questions, but it also answers the why questions. Religion answers neither type of question. In the history of answering questions, it's boasting a whopping zero percent. There are not always answers to the why questions. "Why the seas are boiling hot?" "Why were the last powerball numbers 28 36 40 48 55 and 1, and not something else?" However, there's also some how questions that equally don't have answers. "How is the decay of a radioactive isotope caused?" -- Questions do not have to have answers. But, for the questions that don't have answers there's a lot of them that are why questions because it asks for motivations and a lot of things aren't motivated. "Why does the sun rise in the morning?" Sure, inertia and rotating masses, but "Why is it like that?" You can eventually get down to what is basically just statistical noise. Where there is no good reason why it is that and not something else.

And religion comes along, and does what it always does. It shoves god into any question that isn't answered.

However, the core of your argument is that both science and God are essential to our understanding reality. But, is that actually true? What if I insisted that fairies are required to answer these why questions. Any question about why something is that way and not another is attributed to the will of the fairies who made it that way and certainly wouldn't have made it a different way. -- If this even makes logical sense, it cannot be that God is actually essential. God is again, as always, just being inserted as a placeholder for not having an answer, a role indistinguishably similar to my hypothetical fairies. And what if we went the other way, and tried replacing science. That both fishing and God are essential to understanding the universe. We instantly notice that fishing sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't ever answer questions, it's a procedure by which we use fishing poles to catch fish.

It seems that we could very well simply reduce that statement to just science. Science is essential to our understanding of reality. And if you want to add to that, you'd need to show that whatever you're adding is capable of solving actual problems and has a track record for having solved actual problems without science. To the best of my knowledge, only mathematics possibly fits that criteria. Why is it that "to rely solely on science is irrational" -- it seems to be the only thing that gives us correct answers, builds computers, takes us to the moon, cures diseases, doubles our lifespan, and actually replace ignorance with understanding.

On God and How I already know.

>>You know that God exists.

God is about as absurd as elves or unicorns. More even.

>>You want to fight that truth with everything you can,

Fight what truth? All religions make contradictory claims with the same quality of evidence. Why should I accept the Jewish Scape-goat blood sacrifice God of Jesus any more than the Norse collect you from the battle field God of Odin? It's culture invented deities. They don't actually make sense. Why should Odin send Valkyries to collect you from the battlefield? Isn't that just a cultural way to make people fight harder? Why should God sacrifice himself to himself? Isn't that just Jewish scapegoating and blood sacrifice to atone for sins. These aren't ways the universe should actually work. These are ways that primitive people would invent.


>>but it doesn't change the fact that He has made it obvious to anyone who doesn't intentionally blind themselves to it,

By providing better natural answers for everything?

>>and you know it to be true.

I think it's silly. It's hard pressed to suppose that that is me knowing that Allah is God or that the blood of Zalmoxis will make me live forever.

>>You also know that God has a moral standard to which he holds humanity accountable.

According to the Bible, women are chattel, and slavery is fine, and killing people for minor crimes is great. Picking up sticks on a Sunday is as great of a crime as murdering your father on a Monday. You only really use your own moral standard. And it's an insult to such a moral standard to credit your God with it. Your God would burn Gandhi in hell forever for failing to accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior. Gandhi gets eternal torture for a thought crime.


>>Your own conscience tells you this to be true, and also tells you that you've failed to live up to it.

It really doesn't. Anymore than shaving makes me feel that I have changed Allah's creation.


>>There's nothing more I can do to show you these things - you already know them.

These things being the standards of your God? Which suggest that twice as sinful to have a female child as a male child, or that burnt flesh is pleasing to God? Or that God so loved me that he murdered his child, because apparently killing things is some kind of forgiveness. Which it clearly isn't but it's pretty clear why first century Jewish culture might think so.

>>If you continue to walk in willful blindness of the obvious truth,

I cannot express how honestly I think your religion is stupid.


>>then you'll unfortunately have to accept the consequences of denying that truth.

Eternal torment from a loving God, for thought crimes of not believing. Because when Hitler burns Anne Frank for being Jewish we say that he is evil, but when God burns Anne Frank forever for being Jewish that makes him good? That eternal torment is the just desserts for Gandhi or Buddha. Such absurdity should shock the mind of even a child.


>>For your sake, I pray that you won't suppress the truth for the rest of your life. If you take your last breath in this life without repenting and believing in God, it will be too late. And you'll regret it for eternity.

And if you fail to accept Allah, and put partners unto Allah, he will mock you and then send you to hell. Such silly bits of threats of eternal phantorment do not make a good argument. If your God would eternally punish people for finite crimes, he is evil. If your God would eternally torture people for thought crimes, he is absurd. Your religion worships a tyrant in the sky, revels in the blood of his dead son, because culturally sacrificing living things to God to achieve forgiveness made sense to goat herders in the ancient middle east, but in this day and age... wake up!


>>Please, listen to reality. Please, listen to your conscience. Please, listen to truth.

Ditto.

Upon being told I am blind to Jesus...

The problem is that looking objectively at all the evidence is the same as being blind to it all. There's no difference between the evidence for Christianity, and the evidence we'd expect to see if Christianity is false. After all, we can agree that other religions are false religions, and all of them have testimonials and first person experiences. So if Christianity were false, we'd expect it to have exactly what you claim it has. Being blind and being in a room with absolutely no light at all are very similar experiences.

There's no serious difference between Christianity and what we can agree are false other religions. Which is to say that Christianity has no evidence in its favor and considering things like blood sacrifice, and demigod adventures, the sins of ancestors, and fairy tales which are found in Christianity but should not be found in a true religion. Because they make no sense as a matter of reality, God no more needs a dying and rising savior son to be blood sacrificed to himself for propitiation for the sins of the ancestors than God needs a spaceship made of string cheese, but these are things we should expect of a religion that was invented in a mix of cultures obsessed with primitive blood sacrifice and that was hugely in love with the wacky adventures of the sons of gods.

We have no reason to suppose Christianity is any more true than any of the agreed upon false religions, and we have many reasons to suppose that it was simply invented by people between 1800-2000 years ago or so.

A Plothole Nailed to a Stick.

Sometimes when you're in the zone, in this case responding to somebody on Amazon who seems intent on offering TAG as some kind of knockdown to Naturalism. Because if one can equivocate the meaning of "exist", one can somehow create a large enough hole to shove a god into.

It seems rather strange to follow a religion grounded in the primitive notion of blood sacrifice in a society that understands the utter silliness of propitiation by blood. That the creator of the entire universe needed blood to fix the universe and sate his own anger and allow violations of his own rules so much that he donned a baby suit and sacrificed himself to himself, because only He in human form had enough magic in his blood to accomplish this task. And rather than ever look and address these rather terrible shortcomings which, are well marked in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, you attempt to squabble over your strawman versions of naturalist ontology, as if wrongly conflating physically exists with transcendentally exists or morally exists will suddenly make one forget you worship a plot hole nailed to a stick.

Mysteries of size, solving lesser mysteries with greater ones.

We cannot solve the mystery of missing socks by involving elves. While it could plausibly be the right answer the mystery of the socks is a lesser mystery than the mystery of elves. So unless there is some overwhelming evidence in favor of elves, we should rationally reject it.

Problem of Animal Suffering, Fine Tuned Evolution, and Divine Hidiness

Yes. How amazing is it that God chooses to make the universe exactly like it needs to be in order for us to form naturally without God needing to exist. In the case of nature, God tortures animals endlessly to sell the rouse of his non-existence. -- If there were no God, only natural forces could be at work and, you see, evolution requires that this be the case. Maximized suffering tends to be a required byproduct of a struggle for survival which is the engine of evolution. So God tortures animals endlessly so as to better hide from rational people and to better trick them into reasonable unbelief, and thereby into hell where he has them tortured forever.

The fine tuning argument, on it's head.

The fact the universe from its very inception require certain very specific characteristics in an incredibly narrow range for planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies and the chemicals and conditions for life to exist.

There's nothing to indicate they are variables at all and vary at all. In fact, we've never seen characteristic of anything that wasn't contingent on other physics.

And a God does not need these specific characteristics to allow for the natural creation of planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies, chemicals, or the right conditions for life. A God could just make that happen directly. Some land, make it the right temperature, poof life alive, and you're done! These special conditions are those which we have that allow for natural forces to result in exactly the universe we have, without God. This universe looks exactly like a universe would need to look if there were no God, and this is exactly true on every level and on every point. It's massively good evidence for atheism because on atheism we would assume these things would need to be the case and lo and behold they are. The fine-tuning argument in this light is really just looking at the fact that the universe can exist without a God, that it looks exactly as if there is no God, and says, "Well isn't that an amazing coincidence? Isn't that too good to be true? Yes it is, God did it!" -- It's saying that it's amazing that there are no gaps to shove God into, and therefore God.

The fine-tuning argument here is wrong because, God doesn't need *ANY* special conditions or characteristics. Only atheism requires that those characteristics should be exactly like they are, because these are the kinds of characteristics that could allow a universe to exist, if God didn't exist. "Why if you jigger those characteristics a bit you might not get 70 sextillion stars and 13 billion years to allow random mindless forces to get have life kick up here and there purely by chance!" -- YOU DON'T NEED THAT! GOD CAN MAKE ONE PLANET AND PUT LIFE ON IT!

You don't need just the right stars to make higher elements in those stars and allow them to explode and make the debris for planets to coalesce. God could just make these higher elements, without the right levels to build them in stars. Only atheism needs it to happen by mindless natural forces. "Oh, it's so suspicious that the universe so perfectly fits what it would need for atheism to be true, therefore, clearly, God exists and did that. Here's some things somebody else pulled out of their ass to suggested if they were different the universe wouldn't exist!" -- If the universe were made out of butter rather than elements there'd be no life, therefore Elves made the universe exist out of atoms. If gravity pushed rather than pulled there'd be no life, praise be to the flying spaghetti monster!

If the universe cannot be explained perfectly by natural forces, then God. If the universe can be explained perfectly by natural forces, "Well isn't that remarkably perfect?" Therefore God! The fine tuning argument is basically saying that perfectly meeting the requirements implied by atheism, is too perfect and therefore is evidence of God. There's a very narrow window of universes that can create themselves without God, and we perfectly fall into that window! It's an amazing feat that only God could do.

The universe as evidence for God.

There is evidence that elves exists.

Consider these facts:

1) There is a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach.
2) It rains.
3) Sand exists.

Therefore elves.

----

My analogy here is carefully chosen, it's not solely intended to poke fun at this argument but to show an analogy. While we might well just accept that life exists or that the universe exists because it demonstratively is true in that we exist to see such. We are then asked to weigh the need for a real explanation against Drew ad hoc supposing God exists, and that God should make the universe, as we have a universe it is therefore evidence of God. This is at the core what Drew is arguing.

Our existence is not contingent upon a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. So we cannot say that because we exist, it necessarily must follow that there is a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. But, this is true of life and the universe. We can only exist in universes which life can exist within, and we can only exist on planets which life can exists on, and given that a our parents met, their parents met, and they did exactly what they did. Any difference could well have resulted in different people rather than us. That we exist rather than one of any of those unborn ghosts, sisters and brothers, our half sisters and half brothers if our parents never met, or our cousins if our parents were never born. These odds against us are stupefying, if one pretends they are meaningful.

Why that exact series of events should occur rather than another, is not a question with an answer. It just did. It was hugely unlikely, as would be any specific set of events, but if it didn't something else would have, and it would be equally unlikely. This is the power of the anthropic principle, since we are contingent on everything that lead to us existing, the odds seem amazing, but since we are here they necessarily had to happen.

So claiming that elves made it so that I was born, rather than any of the other combinations of sperm and eggs of my parents, would seem dizzying. Because what are the odds? Well, really the odds are 100%. I can only exist as I do. If somebody else existed, they would only exist as they did. And any of the people who could be here (yet aren't) would be here, and be. They would exist as they did. So really, we need to get around this. It actually pointless to ask about any events that could only be what they are, because our asking is contingent upon them. Elves should want me to exist. If they existed they should make me exist. Since I exist, that is strong evidence for elves. This is actually meaningless. If somebody else existed they could ask the same thing. If Earth were a lifeless hunk of rock, aliens on another planet could well ask the same sorts of questions.

If you think that elves cause it to rain, every time it rains you'll see evidence of elves. We can only look backwards and ask ourselves, how we got here. Which theory is the best to explain the everything we have? We do not suppose that everything we have is evidence of elves, because you believe things about elves would give us everything we have.

We should not be blinded by the odds that life should exist elsewhere in the universe, nor should we be blinded by the odds that there exists a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. Because we are not directly contingent on these existing. We can be objective about this idea, without supposing they are necessarily true. But, should we suppose that there is such a grain of sand?

We know that elves are expert craftsmen and want to make perfectly cubical things, and they made all the grains of sand, and a grain of sand would be so small as to be a marked feat of a great craftsman. Such a grain of sand would be strong evidence for elves, or some highly intelligent supernatural craftsmen with all the same properties as elves. Without elves, you would need to explain how such a grain of sand could exist. You would seemingly have nothing but natural forces to rely upon to make this case. Now, let us suppose I have located (regardless of the odds for it's existence) a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. Is this evidence for elves? Should one accept it as evidence? -- Well, perhaps. But, it's still blindingly bad evidence.

What are the odds against elves? What are the odds that such a grain of sand could form by mindless natural forces? Much like abiogenesis there's a lot of good speculation here but not not a complete understanding of everything. We generally know how sand forms. We understand that it's silica crystals and crystals tend to have sharp edges due to the way crystals are. That we aren't dealing with randomly placing atoms but that the atoms by necessity are fairly uniform and the cleaving of these crystals will actually form sharp edges. In theory this reduces the odds from blindingly close to nothing to something somewhat reasonable. You need to run into parallel sides and right angles. And due to the way crystals form the parallel sides might well also be more likely than we should suppose by otherwise. Much as lipid formation into cell like structures or the the ease at which amino acids form, seems harder on first glance. One could argue that this grain of sand is more likely than it initially seemed, but it would still seem quite perfect. And still, one might assume, be good evidence for elves.

Well, the problem actually tends to go away when we consider how many grains of sand are on all the beaches of the planet. There are ~ 20 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. If elves actually made all the sand and they love cubical things, why aren't they all cubical? Why didn't they just make one grain of sand? Why should there be ~20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the beaches of Earth if these elves just wanted to make one perfectly cubical grain of sand to show off their skill. But, if there were just one grain, then the odds would be staggeringly low that it could be formed by random mindless forces. The only way to get that mindless forces could be responsible is if there were so many grains of sand that one could just break just right to be. There would need to be forces such as crystallization which could allow for perfectly arrayed atoms in the sand, and some manner of sheering that allows for sharp corners. And amazingly all of these exist. Perhaps if elves wanted to carve a grain of sand to look like Mount Rushmore one could not have explained these things as easily. But, the overwhelming evidence is that it can just happened by chance. And there likely are a great many perfectly cubical grains of sand on the beach.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour." - William Blake


And ultimately, this is the case with gods as well. As Carl Sagan noted, "The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth." (70 vs 20 sextillion) -- While the conditions needed for life, may be strange and they may be rare, to show how it could have happened I do only have a smattering of good scientific theories. But, to say that one is only taking facts and I am talking in theories is like saying that you need something to hammer in a nail, and when a hammer is offered, it is declined because one only wants to use atoms. Theories are made of facts. That's what decides the very quality of a theory. And whatever you end up using would equally just be a theory. The difference is that a theory that elves carve perfectly cubic grains of sand, seems so bad one typically wouldn't call it a theory. And supposing that it is the case and just using sand as evidence, because elves make sand. Is actually as firmly established as Drew's claim is.

Many of our theories for abiogenesis deal with healthy bit with stuff we're not sure about, but many things we are. We know there are basic ways to replicate and basic biochemistry that works, there are balls of lipids that could protect an early organism and there are many. We know all of the basic stuff we need to happen are entirely possible and we know a lot of facts like the property of crystals to form sharp edges which suggest that far from being an impossibility it's actually nudged significantly towards being likely. The universe is exactly as it should look if there were no God. That's a fact. It's built on other facts and other theories and even educated guesses and reasonable inferences. The universe is vast and old with time and chemicals aplenty to kick up life here and there, and maybe a perfect cube of sand or two. Whether it's in the waves of Hawaii, off up near some rocks in Indonesia, unnoticed in the waters of the Florida Keys, or on some atoll largely ignored. There is more sand on these beaches than there are stars in the sky, we don't know if it's only a one in a million chance or one in a billion. Or if it's one in a hundred sextillion and we should count our lucky stars that life exists at all (as there'd only be a 70% chance for 1 and we'd likely still then be that one and have gotten lucky). If there was an all powerful being who created us, why should there be an uncountably number of pointless planets revolving around pointless stars in pointless galaxies we can barely see with billion dollar telescopes. And galaxies we can't because they formed so far away that they don't yet exist to us yet. A god would only need to create one planet, wouldn't even need a star and certainly not one that only gives us 2 out of every billion photons. A God could create any manner of universe, so why create one that looks exactly like one that could happen by way of mindless natural forces? Why create a universe where solar genesis happens? Where nebula create stars? Where life evolves? Where life can evolve? Where only the tiniest fraction of a long 13.75 billion years where in 0.0001 billion is of any relevance to our species? Unless you talk about the 2 billion years it took for our species to evolve from tiny nothing of bacteria into highly impressive species with 7 billion people each made up of 50-75 trillion cells. Which is a lot of work for nothing. Though if there were no gods then this is the only way to be here. And since we can only look into the past and ask for the best explanation of it, it's actually remarkably damning for theism. Everything that needs to be true for atheism to be true, is true.

Why should every question we've ever really answered always come down to mindless natural forces? Why is it that when theists claimed that lightning was caused by the gods, that disease was caused by demons, that heredity was the domain of God, that the sun was a fiery chariot across the sky, why should they always be wrong? Well, they don't have to be. They just are. It turns out that that supernatural answers of gods and elves and spirits and ghosts turn out to be wrong. We understand this reality because we've looked a lot of claims made over the years, and we know what sorts of answers are likely correct. So if we care about our answers and we like to guess correctly when we only have guesses we can make, we should guess at unknown natural forces because after all those are the only answers that have ever been right. When somebody guesses at gods for the million-and-first time, we should be unsurprised when those claims turn out to be wrong and it turns out that again it was mindless natural forces. In fact, since that is always what has happened throughout all of history, we should expect it!

For atheism to be right, stars should form naturally. Planets should form naturally. Life should form naturally. Elements should form naturally. A process by which simple forms can become progressively more complex must exist. Everything should be made of pretty much the same stuff. You need to a lot of time to get anything as strange as life to kick up, by chance. There needs to be an enormous amount of universe to exist to allow life to kick up, because it like cuboid grains of sand should be rare. There needs to be an enormous amount of time for life to kick up in. It would take real work to go from a simple form to a complicated form, and it would take real time to do that work. And everything from Human parasites, to human food animals, to humans would have had to have come about by this process. Everything from the tides to the seasons need to be the result of mindless natural forces. And every time a theist says that we can't explain that, they need to be wrong. Wrong about the tides, wrong about the seasons, and wrong about every explanation that says a creative superbeing is making puppets of us. And all of this is true. Everything that needs to be the case, for the universe to exist as it does without a God, exists exactly in that way it needs to. Everything. And everything is a whole lot of facts. So many in fact, that you'd be hard pressed to keep any of them straight without modeling those facts and drawing conclusions. And hence the need for theories.

You wish to oppose all this evidence. Everything we know about the universe, such that it's exactly what it needs to be for there to be no God. And do so by assuming God in the first place, and using the existence of the universe as evidence. I am at a loss as to how you cannot see through this as obviously hollow. We can only exist in universes where we exist. Such is no more convincing that elves that arranged for our parents to meet, so that we could exist. Because it's seems such a rare set of events.

If elves would make grains of sand to be a perfect cube, that such sand is evidence for elves. If you believe that elves cause it to rain, then everytime it rains you'd see evidence of elves. This doesn't work. Because you never established the first bit, that there are elves, that this is their intent. And that there aren't better answers out there. You are trying to use, what must be the case, as evidence for something that people made up without any good reason to do so.

After all, if there are no gods, then we need to understand why people keep inventing them. And coincidentally they invent thousands of them, and none of them agree with each other, but all of them agree with the person making the god claims. We know a lot about the gods of men, and they don't reside on Olympus or Sinai, they are in the heads of men. Who look at the complicated world, the happenstance nature of reality, all those cogs and bits that gave rise to them and think that it could happen no other way that the universe intended it for you. That the elves arranged those cogs and bits so that you might be. But, really, if it wasn't you, it would be something else. And isn't it that much more odd that you're making a claim that most people are wrong about. Theists know that other theists are wrong, they can see all too clearly that what others propose is absurd, and should see that those propositions are believed just as clearly and just as strongly as their beliefs. You are supposing an answer that we know human beings make up out of the blue for no reason. From the cargo cults of the John From to the God who needs blood to fix the universe, these are beliefs that humans invent and there's no good reason to suppose that it's true, or to suppose that a perfect God should want for a universe, or that a universe is what an all powerful God should want.

The universe doesn't care about us. The solar system formation process bombarded Earth with massive impacts over and over again, and still can to this day, though there are far fewer rocks, they can wipe out the dinosaurs for no reason leaving the birds as their only survivors. Life has to evolve through a process that amounts to torture, that necessarily as a consequence of geometric population growth kept in check only by mindless natural forces causes most life forms to live terrible lives of pain, suffering, illness and death, and the best of them may breed more before succumbing. If there were a creative God, who made evolution, who guided evolution, we should spit in his face for being a sadistic bastard. But, if there are only mindless natural forces, evolution would be the only way to get at complicated organisms through the struggle for survival.

Surely, everybody should see that the entire universe being made exactly in such a way to happen by mindless natural forces, is strong evidence against a God. One could suppose there is a trickster God who wants to hide, but there no reason to suppose this either, and good reasons to suppose against it. And so few gods are trickster gods. Humans tend to only invent gods who love them and planned for them and made them happen. But, such a God could do far better than this universe. Mindless natural forces could only do this universe. But, looking at the universe that we have, we find a universe such that God is unnecessary. But, more than unnecessary such a God shouldn't create a universe like this at all. And this is very strong evidence indeed. Everything atheists need for the universe to exist without God existing does exist, and on the opposite claim, the God of theism is bending over backwards spitting out pointless planets for no reason at all, torturing animals needlessly, and giving us 13.74 billion years of pointless time.

Can a universe be evidence for God? Yes. Is this universe good evidence for God? No. This universe is good evidence for atheism.

On the laws of thermodynamics and evolution and life.

I have yet to meet the person who has ever put forth the argument you describe. My guess is that you haven't either. It's a strawman- an argument nobody is actually positing, stated merely so that the person stating it can claim superior knowledge.

Some people do make that fallacy. They say things like because everything has a cause the universe has a cause. That actually fails due to composition.

Thanks for stating the obvious. It doesn't change the fact that the entire rest of the known universe follows basic fundamental laws that render Life impossible.

That the vast majority of the universe is inhospitable to life and that there's 70 sextillion stars in trillions of galaxies, with even more planets and moons around that, most of which are undoubtedly dead and the whole thing some ~14 billion years old is exactly what we should expect if there is no God. Without a God the only way to make life is by getting really lucky, and you might well need 70 sextillion stars to get lucky enough to mix up the chemicals enough times in enough places and do so over and over and over again in a really old universe. If God existed, you'd need one star and one planet. And even that arrangement might well overly complex.

Actually, we can't. Not even close.

We can and do. In fact, that's pretty much just how climate science works. Heat in vs. heat out.

There's not even close to enough matter in the observable universe to explain the energy that it generates. That's why the aforementioned "Dark Matter" theory exists.

Gravity isn't energy it's a force. You can't take a magnet and make power out of it. You need magnetic flux. The change in gravity is energy. Gravity is just a force there making anything with mass stick together and tugging at spacetime to do it.

This isn't a topic that's open for debate. It's a settled scientific fact.

The fact that you're wrong is certainly worth addressing. Dark Matter is a theory because galaxies spin too fast without flinging apart. So the presumption is there's more gravity there than we suspect. That's not bonus energy, it's additional gravity. And it's concerning galaxies not Earth. And it doesn't have any known implications on "energy in, energy out" on Earth.

For the Universe to be expanding at the rate it's expanding, there simply isn't enough matter in existence.

That's dark energy. If there were only matter things would actually collapse as we originally suspected. The universe however is accelerating in it's expansion. But this is nothing to do with the matter but rather that spacetime is expanding.

But in terms of evolution, it means that natural systems never move from simple states to complex states. It's not how the universe works. Look at any other planet in the solar system. Are they "evolving"? No. They're cooling. They're moving from a state of high energy to a state of low energy.

That's why we have metabolism. It's basically the one of the defining bits of life. They salvage energy and store it. That's what plants do. It's not that they are basking in the sun but rather that they are banking some of the suns energy because that a massive ball of negative entropic energy we orbit around, is constantly bombarding us with it. The entire raison d' etra of life is that it captures energy originally from the sun and uses it to do better at getting more of it. And the better organisms are at this the more of them exist, because we also bank those tricks in hereditary molecules. We end up hitting an energy ceiling whereby most of the potential new critters can't exist. So it ends up, sorting out those banks of tricks, and if anybody happened to have accidentally copied it down wrong and tweaked it for the better, that critter will be more likely to do better, have more copies, and more copies of that helpful trick.

So just some duplicating gunk trying edging each other out for a fraction of that incoming energy to duplicate a but more is entirely possible within the confines of thermodynamics. And that's also basically the definition of life.

Your objection is basically that we don't know of anything else that has a metabolism that isn't alive. And we only know about life on this planet. And you're using this objection to attempt to say that life on this planet isn't possible.

He instead used the term "Natural Selection", which only means "If you kill all the redheads, only blondes and brunettes will be left to reproduce".

He wanted to try to stick to the science and arguments. People had knee jerk reactions to claims about transmutation at the time, as Darwin so acutely learned from Vestiges (book). Also, redheadedness is a recessive gene. You could certainly select against it with murder. But that's artificial selection, not natural selection. Natural selection is when you allow nature to do it because of the struggle for existence and rather than select for just something like non-redheadedness you select for *anything* that makes one do better and the difference has to be ever so slight and you get eons to do it in. Darwin's argument here was quite good. In a couple hundred years look what we did to pigeons and dogs, imagine what the selection of nature could do in eons!

It doesn't say, as so many Atheists seem to think, that the universe wakes up one morning and decides that people are a cooler idea than apes. That's a distinction that requires intelligence. Which the universe doesn't have.

That distinction requires people not intelligence. Humans are apes. Ape is a taxonomic group and humans are certainly a great ape. And evolution never made that decision. After all, there are still apes and there are still monkeys. It's not that one is cooler than the other but that each group has survived on it's own merits.

Me, I argue that evolution is inconsistent with the second law because the second law says that evolution can't happen.

It doesn't. It says things will tend to lose their energy and order. Your argument would suggest more directly that life itself cannot exist. That I cannot from eating sugars and breathing oxygen live from day to day without decaying in short order. And it's actually true if I were not alive. As soon as my metabolism shuts down and I'm not unbanking energy stored reserves of the negative entropy of the sun my body will break down. The problem here is that we're alive, and we store energy. We effectively have sugar-batteries. So even though we should stop working, we fight that breakdown and loss by adding even more energy into the system, constantly. We get that energy from the sun and banking it is called metabolism. And we tend to make copies of ourselves so if one copy stops working there are others, and if one copy happens to be an improvement then more copies of that copy are made and the future copies will be improved. And necessarily since worse copies won't copy they won't be around.

Far from thermodynamics making evolution impossible, thermodynamics are the reason why evolution works. You got to beat the decay and anything that doesn't is screwed. So the critters with the best methods of thriving giving such decay do the best, and thus there are more of them. Is it any wonder that some of the most successful organisms thrive on poop and death?

There's absolutely no way to explain why the universe, sans God, would suddenly decide that Elephants are "better" than snails.

People tend to decide such things like that. But, nature doesn't. You can tell by the existence of both elephants and snails. They both do a great job. Elephants exploit economy of size and run warm blooded, and snails conserve their energy and protect their bodies with a natural ceramic. Those are both really great strategies and they both do very well in their respective niches. And both of them beat out the decay.

But "better"? Nature doesn't really decide that. I suppose one could argue that lizards are better than trilobites because trilobites bit it, but that just surviving. Copies of lizards are still around, so by some measure they were better at avoiding the decay. But, that's a bit narrow of a definition.

So basically, if we just overlook that troublesome "How did Life come into being in the first place?" thing, then everything is hunky-dory. But we can't. That's the entire issue.

No it's not. All your objections were to how things cannot possibly beat out decay but metabolism and evolution certainly do solve that. You could build a little rover with a solar panel, battery and wheels, and that would suffice to solve those problems. Abiogenesis is actually a completely different issue. Where do these original copiers come from? And odds for that are pretty good that they just kicked up by chance.

The worst part of Kalam

I think the worst part of the Kalam Cosmological Argument is the presumptive nature of the whole thing. While the Bible answers the question of cosmology with "God did it", the cosmology in the Bible that "God did" isn't starting the inflationary expansion of the universe or causing the big bang. But rather painstakingly and skillfully (Psalms 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.) created a large metal-like dome held up by strong pillars to keep the cosmic ocean divided and the waters above the heavens and below the Earth apart.

In the Bible, we live under a large metal like dome of heaven, with little twinkly lights stuck into it and above the heavens there's the waters and below the earth the other waters which God so helpfully divided up in Genesis. The Bible's answer to this is "God did it".

-- That's fine, but you don't get to copypasta that answer onto a modern cosmological framework and suppose that the authors of the Bible had any freaking clue what the universe was like.  "God did it" is the answer the Bible gives to the metal-like dome protecting us from the cosmic ocean, you don't get just re-appropriate that answer to new cosmologies that are less horribly wrong. It's like saying Jesus cured diseases. No, he shooed out demons that caused diseases. You don't get to use the modern understanding and the answer "God did it", because the "God did it" was to answer in the context of the primitive understanding. The Bible says God is the reason the sun revolves around the Earth, sorry Bitches, no backsies!

The fluxuations of science.

Science use to say the universe was infinitely old, then 2 billion years, 3 billion years, 10 billion years, 8 billion years, 9.5 billion years, 10 billion years, 8-12 billion years, 12 billion years, 13-14 billion years, 12.5 billion years, 14.8 billion years, 13 billion years,  13.7 billion years, 13.72 billion years, 13.73 billion years, 13.75 billion years.! Science can't make up it's mind. It could be anything tomorrow, and then something different the next day! -- Anybody who supposes things along this line of reasoning, really didn't pay enough attention to that sequence of numbers to notice the underlying pattern.

What would prove to you that there is a God?

>>I think the strength of evidence required to falsify a claim depends on the amount of evidence extant.

Actually and somewhat interestingly, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. The old axiom that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is true but what is meant by "extraordinary" isn't simply "a lot" but a quality difference as well. There is some arcane debate out there as to what would convince an ardent atheist there is a God. And some folks claim "well if God came down and talked to me", but others have rightfully noted that somethings like left-temporal lobe epilepsy can cause that exact heterophenomenon and it might well be a better conclusion that you are simply having an exceptionally vivid hallucination (as many are),  rather than God is really talking to you. So then where does that leave the proposition?

The problem here is that a lot of evidence is different than extraordinary. You really need an explanation that explains everything. And to the above question I think a satisfactory answer is that if I woke up from a matrix like game designed and executed by God, upon waking I quickly regain my real memories and understand the physics of the real universe are nothing like the massive multiplayer networked video game that is all of this universe and that real physics were completely different than the physics of Earth. Such evidence would be substantially more extraordinary than something claiming to be God coming around and showing off what could be super-advanced alien technology on Earth. Extraordinary doesn't mean a lot of additional evidence to the contrary but something that could actually overthrow everything we think we know about the universe.

On De-Evolution and the Fall of Man

 Though it is not very common, there is an argument that stupid design is explained by the fall of man in Genesis. I tend to go to the trouble of showing how silly such ideas are by refuting them. It seems like a lot of work to refute a rather laughable claim, but why not? It's just a few thousand words and maybe you'll free a mind. As I bothered to write up a pretty good explanation elsewhere I'll repost it here, because it's awesome and I tend to look back here to find awesome things. Even if nobody read this blog, except for you (warning nobody might read this, but if that's true then its a safe statement because nobody read it), it still works as a great resource to save things.

While one could attempt to make that argument. The problem is that Pareto efficiency of the designs observed combined with an understanding of the evolutionary ancestry requirements producing better and specific assumptions, don't fit at all.

Allow me an example. There is a nerve in humans and in all mammals called the recurrent laryngeal nerve which travels from the brain to the larynx, via the heart. It travels down from the head, loops around the aortal arch and back up to the larynx. In the giraffe this is like twenty feet of unneeded nerve to travel a few inches. This is a largely inefficient design, but under your theory it would have had to have developed since the Fall of Man. That somehow the deterioration of the perfect design made all the recurrent laryngeal nerves of all mammals and all the four legged land critters (and a good number of the ocean critters, just not arthropods) suddenly lengthened and looped around the heart.for no reason.

Moving from one design to another would likely cause the larynx to fail. Basically what we have is a Pareto efficiency, it's not the best design, but it is one that any alteration would cause serious errors and thus cannot be changed (save gradually), and no set of gradual changes could get you to the more efficient design. But, the reverse is also true. You can't go from the efficient design to the inefficient one without also likely breaking the system completely.

However the evolutionary explanation is really straight forward. We are rejiggered.fish. In fish the path the nerve takes is a straight line. It goes right through the heart there because that's the best and most efficient design. The problem is that through our evolution the heart has moved down in the torso the head has become more isolated and the larynx is not located much closer to the brain than to the heart. So once it developed in our evolutionary ancestor (and the ancestor of a all the rejiggered fish, read all four legged land animals and any of the water dwelling descendents thereof)  it couldn't be changed. In fact, it can't be changed. You can't get from the efficient design to the inefficient one or the efficient design to the inefficient one. Evolutionary the design was quite efficient  in our distant ancestors but doesn't work well for us, and as such, it is not only explained by evolutionary theory but such things are predicted by evolution and are only explained by evolution. You could say that that our eyes are so fantastic that they need an intelligence to explain how wonderful and intricate they are, however, you can't use that explanation to explain why all the blood vessels and nerves in the mammalian eyes (including ours) go forward towards light and not back towards the brain which is their final destination. Which requires that they be narrowed and made rather clear and that a large hole causing a blind spot exists in our vision.

You also cannot use some sort of de-evolution from the Genesis Fall of Man as an explanation. The designs are good, they are just wrong. They are well designed to cope with things like flawed design at the most basic level, but also it's impossible to go from the most basic design principles to the inferior ones without breaking the entire system. And even if you could,  you'd need an explanation for how good the system is at coping with the most basic errors.

So,
The explanation you are offering fails to account for such designs.
The explanation you are offering could not allow a transition from a perfect design to the inferior but well coped designs.
The alternative explanation explains such specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation predicts these specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation gives the specific reasons why those mistakes should be very common.
The alternative explanation makes a wide swath of specific explanations which perfectly mesh with what we know. We know for example that evolutionarily fish are the first vertebrates and some of the systems would work fantastically for them.

So the explanation accepted by the science is one that explains all the data at hand, predicting a great deal of it, fits with known facts, and requires no unknown assumptions. Your explanation cannot account for the data at hand, does nothing to predict how things should turn out or if they are consistent with the assumptions, requires a great deal of unknown assumptions and is primarily based on iron age interpretation of Semitic mythology from late bronze age principly accepted by some of the nomadic goatherders of the time, and varied throughout the region.

I think when things are this clear you should seriously consider if you could be wrong. Taking into account things like the modern understanding that certainty is an emotion rather than reliable metric by which to judge the quality of the evidence, and that being wrong feels exactly like being right while it's happening.

Mark Shea and various drivel.

So in some distant corner of the internet I am discussion religion with religious people and was offered in part an article by Mark Shea that was dreadful, I did my due dilligence and tore it up but I figured since it hit upon some of the very general important bits of Plantinga's argument against naturalism I should repost it here.

Mark Shea's article is rather terrible. It first parrots the claim that if God doesn't exist that atheists should care less. This is both dismissive and wrong. I care deeply when my fellow human beings fritter their lives away on harmful dangerous nonsense.

And then it notes Haldane's objection which is parroted by C.S. Lewis and rehashed more modernly by the likes of Plantinga with his argument against naturalism. Largely that if minds are naturally evolved that they cannot be dependable. Therefore that belief is (minds are naturally evolved) is undependable. The mistake here is more subtle because it is discounting all of epistemology and science. It's entirely true that our minds are made of atoms and that our minds are evolved and that our minds suffer from massive cognitive biases and mistakes, hallucinations, sensory errors, perception mistakes, etc. The question then becomes how do we get around these problems? How can we, considering the limited nature of our brains, manage to come about to find beliefs which are likely true. Not just give us a feeling of certainty but which are something we should really accept. And the answer is largely by delegating our beliefs the best we can to reality. Testing those beliefs and coming up with the best conclusion we can and be ready to abandon that conclusion the instant it stops being the best. Generally, we need to build a functional epistemology from the ground up.

The conclusion that others offer is that we should just dive into our biases assume that our minds are designed by God and can do no wrong. And that believing otherwise forces one to do the really hard job of living a examined rather than unexamined life. But, that our brains are evolved and cognitive biases exist are manifestly true. The conclusions of Lewis and Plantinga is basically to claim that "maybe your brain is faulty, but my brain is perfect" which is the clearest hobgoblin of a faulty mind one could make manifest.

Science and the application of Relgion.

"Science works for everything else. The reluctance to use it for religion may have to do with the fact that science slices through the tissue paper nonsense of theology like a hot knife through non-existent butter."

Thanks to Regina for noting how awesome this turn of phrase is.

Christianity by prophetic evidence.

>>I say Christianity is true, by the prophetic fulfillment (various empires arising, wars coming to pass, Messianic prophetic fulfillments, eschatological fulfillments like Israels' rebirth, etc.),

I don't think any of these count. Not just because I'm a doubter but because I think any of them could be considered prophetic in reality. And it ignores all the failed prophecies in the Bible. I mean the end of the world was going to be in Jesus' generation, over and over we hear this. It was downright soon, and yet nothing.

Compare some of these to the prophecies of Nostradamus. I'm not saying Nostradamus was magical, but he was fairly secular. And the comparisons are clear. You can get these prophecies from pretty much anywhere. Wars typically happen, especially in the first millennium. If somebody predicted there would be no more wars, that would be amazing. If true, that would be miraculous. That wars happen and countries arising, etc, are facts of life. Not magical predictions. Muhammad predicted Islam would splinter into many different factions. It has! OMG!

Next the Messianic prophecies, are written into the Bible. If you look at the scholarship and the proper understanding of the Bible, we can see that the major edits between Mark->Luke and Mark->Matthew are edits to establish prophecies as true. If this means adding in a hamfisted genealogy that contradicts the other hamfisted genealogy so be it. If it means writing a bizarre narrative where everybody has to go back to their father's birth-town when *NOBODY* would ever do that, so be it. And what's more you can see them making it fit prophecies that didn't even exist. Matthew 2:15 says it's a prophecy that "Out of Egypt, I have called my Son" but that's from Hosea 11:1 and says "11:1 When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt." -- It's talking about Exodus. The author of that part of Matthew made them go to Egypt just to get out of Egypt, in an origin story directly in conflict to the added stuff Luke adds. Or going to Bethlehem (Matthew 2:5) to fulfill Micah 5:2 that's about a military leader who according to Micah 5:6 will lay waste to Assyria by sword, and Bethlehem Ephratah is a clan. It's a group of people and says as much! How much credit should I give prophecies like this? What about demonstrations of power? Muhammad pointed at the moon and broke it into two pieces. Isn't that amazing? It says so in the Koran, which was magically dictated to to Muhammad (who couldn't even write). How are these that amazing.

Finally eschatological predictions are a fickle thing. Perhaps you should read the book "88 reasons why the world will end in 1988", which is filled with escatological predictions. Further, have you read the Israel prophecy? It doesn't say that. Further, the prophecy was purposely fulfilled. So the Bible doesn't really say that but part of the reasons Israel was brought about was because people said it was prophesied! It would be as amazing as saying that somebody will post to this thread the words "Rosebud, pickle, vicecounte." -- It's an amazing prophecy. I mean, those are randomish words, "vicecounte" is even misspelled! What are the odds? Well really they are quite good.

"I have my faith, and others have faith in only the certainty of death" - No. That's obvious and dishonest. They have faith in the same sorts of nonsense. The 2012 apocalypse with Nibiru, Camping's new end of the world is in October. There's people with faith in Nostradamus, and even a group that thinks that the song American Pie is a prophecy of a coming apocalypse. And they all have faith, and as good of evidence as you do. So really, what makes your religion special? Shouldn't they rightly have as much faith in the 12th Imam because of the known miracles of Muhammad and the holiest of Miracles of the Koran itself? They seem exactly as reliable and if your religion is the true religion, shouldn't it seem better than all those, as we agree, fake religions? Shouldn't God's real chosen religion, be awesome enough to overcome the general human biases that keeps them believing what they were taught as children?

I'm trying out OTF as an argument. That it doesn't matter because a religion should be better than others if it's true. That if God chose your religion or made your religion that it should be important, or right. It should be good enough to exceed the natural human cognitive biases that are all around us.  It seems remarkably good, but generally most anti-theist arguments are pretty good.

Objectivity to Christianity.

Something I wrote elsewhere about using the Outsider Test of Faith:

Mostly I'm pointing it out because it of the Outsider Test of Faith. I'm currently reading the Christian Delusion which is everything critics claimed the God delusion should be. A scholarly work that deals with the nuances of Christian faith by experts in their fields. It's the best thing I've read. (yes the sentence ended there). -- But, it is a really good set of points that certainty is an emotion and that humans are well primed toward biases. We emotionally react to threatened beliefs, when we should let them rise or fall on their merits. And as children we believe whatever we're told. So simply telling children there is a God suffices to make them believers who defend the faith. But, it holds equally true for any faith. Especially in light of this we must, necessarily, strive to examine religion objectively. Because if you are a God who is intent on burning people forever in hell for failing to believe, you really should make your chosen religion able to be believed objectively. Such that you don't already have to be that religion, to believe that religion. That you could be compelled away from your current faith to the correct faith reliably by something. But, if we honestly look at the evidence and we can't find one religion that consistently wins (except perhaps Secular Humanism or Scientific/Naturalist Pantheism). If we try to use any metric objectively, we consistently find that every religion is true (which means the metric doesn't work) or we find that none of them are. This ultimately is a very serious problem for religion.

If what you use to believe your religion can be used to believe any religion, then you are necessarily treating your religion differently than you treat other people's religions, and since we can all agree other religions are false religions. Then what you are using to believe your religion can be used to believe false religions. -- It's a pretty critical problem for religion, but it's also a fairly new set of arguments so I might as well give them a whirl. After all, the logic is pretty inescapable, your religion should be different if it's right, so we should determine a way to figure this out. We have reliable methods for determining truth, and they determine your religion is false. We can use unreliable methods for determining truth, but they determine that all religions are true. -- And it's not really gotcha logic. Maybe there is a method of consistently determining truth, and only Christianity passes. As such, we would then be right to convert to Christianity. But, at a minimum we must look at religions the same way those not of that religion view them, and doing so reveals the same obvious flaws that are so apparent to everybody else. Asking one to accept talking reptiles, and talking donkeys, magical trees and worldwide floods is bad enough when you have your personal feelings of certainty to rely on, but when you need to do so objectively? It's laughable. If somebody-else's religion had those, Christians would point and laugh on a daily basis. -- So asking for objectivity, is actually rather damning to the faith.

Religion as an virus quasispecies.

On some distant forum somebody said that religions are nothing like viruses because viruses form quasispecies. It was a really terrible argument for a disanalogy (the person in question insists there's nothing that can ever be gleaned from thinking of religion like a virus), but putting the mootness aside, I addressed the comparison on the merits and it actually looked pretty good.

....

This isn't to say that we cannot apply quasi-species understandings to religions just that we have to apply it with regard to the various denominations and individuals adherents to the religion (you can't have multiple religions within an individual but rather within a society). Each of which is slightly different after all, and if for example, you were to attack Biblical literalism and certain elements of literalism were completely persona non grata  then the quasi-species response would adapt by having the non-literialist elements propagate in that environment. Just as the AZT resistant members of an HIV quasi-species within an HIV+ individual suddenly spike up when subjected to AZT. Which can allow the infection to become more benign but certainly prevents it from being defeated. It simply adapts within the quasi-species by having something akin to species variation between the individual's strains. So rather than just having one monolithic "true strain" there are a cloud of different individual agents each with pros and cons. And subjecting the group to a particular factor allows the group to adapt. As such, we really can, in a way, apply such quasi-species understanding to religions. There's not after all one true religion but a wide variety of different faiths, each slightly different. When one part is attacked, it is not necessarily universal to the entire collection but rather to some smaller section thereof.

As such, taking a cue from HIV research in an attempt to address religion as a quasi-species, we should focus on the most critical elements that are true for all religious viewpoints to have a provoke a broadly neutralizing effect, such as replication (indoctrination of children is immoral), or metabolic (religion is wrong for the various reasons, have some science). We should do this far more than we should focus on tiny elements like "Isaiah, according to the Bible summoned, two she-bears to maul children and this is horrible!" Because the small elements will not be broadly effective against the entire quasi-species. Rather one needs to focus on the absolutely critical elements true to all religion, for example: faith. While some religions do not exalt accepting crap on no evidence as a virtue, those religions are very benign. Rather than address some auxiliary characteristic of the infection (Errors in the Bible, Condones Slavery, Historically Inaccurate), we should address the most central element to have the best shot at a real impact, namely religious epistemology. If you allow things you want to be true to have priority of those things which are, by evidence, more likely to be true, you'll have any number of various and diverse religions, in fact you'll be able to justify any belief.

On the orginic origins of religion, the alternative of science, and how to know.

>>People don't cling to religion because it's some evil virus that has invaded their minds...they cling to it because they are "keen to accept" it, and they are keen to accept it because they've been conditioned by evolution to do so,

Religions arise naturally from our own humanness. If we put humans without any culture whatsoever somewhere they would very likely end up with religion and language, culture and the golden rule. They could well end up with a number of these things. The reasons for this are deeply deeply human and the result of human attempts to understand the world and understand each other. And while the language and religion developed may end up being as strange and bizarre as some possess the imaginations to suppose of alien lifeforms this isn't because religions are good. Just that religion is deeply human. We're apt to assume things are caused by things. We're apt to think of our thoughts as not being a part of our brain, but something outside of our brains.

The question here is whether religions are net positive or not, we must ask in a sense what shall we replace religion with. While this question is largely derided in modernity to asking what we would replace a heroin addiction with, it is largely important. For much of our history, there was nothing to replace religion with at all. There was no science, no understanding, no way to understand the world. There were guesses, and claims, and superstition and these generally are what religion is at it's core. Religion is the vacuum. The choice typically has not been between religion and nothing, because religion is the nothing choice. It's the easy choice. Science, rationalism, reasonable debate, functional epistemology, skepticism, these things take work. These take society and effort to maintain.

The question is not if religions arise naturally, but whether they are good for us. Would we be better without religion. And today, the answer to that is yes. Not because religions were ever good for us, but because we previously didn't have a better alternative. We tend to think of rationalism as the alternative to religion, that if we didn't have religion we would have rationalism. And today that's the case, but throughout much of human history the idea of getting rid of religion was anathema because there really isn't something it could be replaced with. The options were only religion. Because religion is the default state. However, now we have a proper alternative which has proven itself the only thing actually able to make progress, make understanding possible, and making reality understandable. Rather than the doldrums of religion, we can have real understanding. We can have science.

But, during the time when religion was the only option, religions fought each other each other and evolved and become more adapted to propagating themselves. Propagating themselves on children, winning converts through war, and insuring beliefs of those adhering to them. These guesses, superstitions, and intuitions weaponized themselves. They rose and fell, survived and thrived, on their ability to command adherence, to persist against any threats and to expand. We now have something to replace religion with, that provides real answers, real morality, better societies, dependable knowledge, and understanding of ourselves and the universe that so often gave rise to religions in the first place. And now, we are made to fight tooth and nail to make progress against comfortable ideas of the iron and bronze age. We have to fight for gay rights, for science, for abolitionism, for women's rights, for history, for humanism, and for peace against highly evolved hogwash well attuned to pressing our buttons and claiming we can have what we want so long as we turn over our minds to such hogwash and tell it to our children.

We have an alternative now, which is not only better but can show that it's better, not just is providing us profound understandings of the universe but by making us healthy, happy, and right. Previously, the question of would we be better without religion, would be rather absurd. What would you replace it with? Now the answer is, yes, yes we would.

>>When confronted by contradictory evidence, you disregard it as irrelevant....claiming that people act altruistically without religion, while failing to mention the complementary argument...that people act badly without religion also.

No. The way to see whether the net effect matters is by trying something with and without that variable. The question isn't religion and bad things and good things. But rather if there were no religion, would such and such happen?

With religion:
Good things happen.
Bad things happen.


Without religion:
Good things happen.
Significantly fewer bad things happen.

If there were no religion, would 9/11 have happened? No.
If there were no religion, would people help fight poverty? Yes.
If there were no religion, would racism happen? Yes.
If there were no religion, would crusades happen? No.

The question isn't look at good things that happen with religion. What happens with religion is a moot point. And the question isn't what bad things would still happen without religion, that's also a moot point. The question we need to address is what would change? What would the world look like without religion? And would it, as a whole, be better off. We don't have to concern ourselves with the "Yes" answers. We don't have to care about good things that would happen with or without religion, we only need to concern ourselves with those things that happen only because of religion. That there's no secular reason for doing such thing. Like flying a plane into a building. It isn't that bad things would still happen without religion, or that good things happen with religion, but those things which happen now that wouldn't happen in a world without religion. And of those, I can find few examples that do not repulse me.

After all, religion has gotten significantly better over the years since proper secular science and understanding came around. Most of the stuff they would like to do is pocket vetoed by the laugh test. They would be laughed out of the room for making such claims or doing such actions. But this isn't because religions are right, but because they stop being wrong about such things. They aren't good and getting better, but rather they are adapting to try and not seem absurd. People are trying to bend over backwards to make their religious beliefs something that wouldn't be ashamed to show their neighbors. Religion is like a plane that is going to crash, and religionists are tossing everything overboard in an attempt to save weight. Out with the luggage, out with the baggage, get rid of the chairs, empty the cargo hold, drain off some of the fuel, but at a certain point, there's nothing left. While you can say, look how much lighter they've become, they are improving all the time, it has little to do with them and how good they are, but rather what they need to do to compete with reality in a world that has an actual method of determining reality.

What would the world be like without religion is the question to ask, not look at this good thing that would happen anyway, or what about this bad thing that would happen anyway. We need to look at those things that wouldn't happen with or without religion.

On the acceptance of Faith as an answer.

Why should faith be seen as anything close to proof? Accepting it as anything more than a cop out and an admission that they don't care whether or not their beliefs are true seems a mistake. I care whether what I believe is true. I want to believe the most true things and the fewest false things. And if they don't care whether their beliefs are true, then there's no real argument to be had. One can't simply claim faith, and suffice that settle the matter. Unless one also concedes that by doing so, they is more likely accept something likely false over something likely true, and this is acceptable to said person.

After all, if you care whether your beliefs are true, you necessarily must use the only known method for properly determining truth from falsehoods, namely the rational weighing of evidence. One is entitled to forgo a functional epistemology, but in so doing they need to accept their beliefs are going to contain, on average, less truth and more falsehoods, and they must be okay with that and understand that I am not. -- That is after all what they mean by faith.

Followup: Apparently in context what I mean by 'faith' has been questioned. Apparently since a commenter can equivocate what he means when he says faith, my consistent usage is therefore wrong. So just for the information purposes, what I mean by faith is as follows (from Merriam Webster):

(2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof  

I'm sure none of you were confused, but it's best to clarify.  More specifically faith as used in the context:


Why do you believe in God?
-- I have faith.


Such context is addressed above.