The God / Dawkins Delusion

mixed_biscuits

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Children obviously wouldn't spontaneously create all the trappings of the church but there is an argument that humans innately tend to view the world around them animistically (they read agency into everything) and then have to be deprogrammed.
 

mixed_biscuits

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What about the whole issue of repentance? You don't need to hide your sins if you commit them and then at a later date renounce your earlier actions. Suddenly it is sin-a-go-go with a get out of jail free card.

Repentance is unfortunate, but Original Sin means that you can't wash the slate completely clean.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps

The UK has laws which are codified and enforced in an attempt to stop people doing Bad Stuff. These laws are not created in reference to any holy scripture (as they once were, of course) but by appeal to concepts like human rights, innate freedom, equality, respect for others' property and so on. Many other countries around the world have something similar. So any argument along the line than atheism negates the very concept of law is clearly specious bollocks.

Edit: and let's face it, if religious belief actually did instil morality into people, human law would be redundant, since everyone would naturally perform virtuous acts for the promise of eternal reward (or good karma, or whatever) and refrain from committing sins for fear of damnation (or reincarnation as a slug). The very existence of temporal law-and-order in religious societies is proof that faith alone doesn't make people behave nicely, isn't it?
 
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mixed_biscuits

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don't. either way, don't offer up anecdotes about your "atheist friend" & C of E as proof of anything

It's proof that the 'truth' stick that atheists beat religious people with doesn't always work: he knows full well that the premise on which the church is based is very likely to be false, but chooses to suspend disbelief.

It's proof that secular-minded people will live a lie in order to scratch the itch that they cannot scratch otherhow.

If your goal is the wholesale elimination of religion, then this is the fly in the ointment.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Convince me (the devil's advocate) that this 'stuff' is truly 'bad.'

Devil's advocacy is one thing, but that's just asinine. Is there really any value to be gained from examining this kind of thing? It strikes me as being a bit like trying to have a conversation about maths with someone who keeps saying "Yeah, but how do you know 1+1=2?".
 

mixed_biscuits

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Devil's advocacy is one thing, but that's just asinine.

No, you need to show that one can prove that personal moral values can be objectively wrong.

It would be as fruitless a quest as proving an aesthetic judgement incorrect.

Morality is not mathematical.

Unless one suspends disbelief and establishes some axioms: the rights of men; thou shalt not kill etc.

Spot the difference, eh.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, well you could say something like "All the world's religions say it's wrong to kill and steal, so although we, as a secular society, regard the nominal origin of these injunctions (Ten Commandments etc.) as mythical, we consider that their universality is proof that the perceived immorality of murder and theft are in some sense hard-wired into the human make-up, and therefore a good starting point for constructing a set of laws that do not depend on a false status as god-given in order to be considered to be legally binding."

Or something like that.

Edit: in any case, you've side-stepped my previous point, namely that the existence of the rule of law in secular societies is a clear demonstration that theism is not a prerequisite for a lawful society.
 
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Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
No, you need to show that one can prove that personal moral values can be objectively wrong.

It would be as fruitless a quest as proving an aesthetic judgement incorrect.

Morality is not mathematical.

Unless one suspends disbelief and establishes some axioms: the rights of men; thou shalt not kill etc.

Spot the difference, eh.

I think you're muddying the debate a little now.

For my part, I've encountered theories of objective secular morality that I find partially, but not wholly convincing. I think this is an area where we still have a lot of intellectual work to do and that in the future we have a clearer, more codified picture of things. (And I certainly have more confidence in this project than the one of establishing an objective aesthetics).
But regardless of my personal views, the main point is that there clearly are many people out there who believe in a system of objective secular morality much more strongly and with more confidence than I do (believe me, I've had the somewhat dubious pleasure of engaging in intellectual discussion with such people in the past).
As you yourself were arguing upthread, in terms of morality being 'absolute' for someone, what seems to matter most is not whether the moral beliefs in question are actually true, but just that they feel totally certain to the person holding them. What I and (I think) Tea were pointing out is that certainty is in fact present in people other than religious believers and is a part of institutions which are not religious.
 

mixed_biscuits

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I'm feeling a bit Out of Office today tbh. I'll have a proper think and reply later, possibly after a good night's sleep.

Thank God, eh. ;)
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Bit of a break from the current topic, but I wonder if anyone else spotted this on today's beeb:

Schools told 'no swimming in Ramadan' for Muslim pupils

It strikes me that stories like this weren't common ten or even five years ago. It seems to follow a pattern: a lot of Muslims feel their religion and way of life to be under threat, their unelected 'community leaders' make ever more hysterical demands for special treatment, moderate Muslims and liberal non-Muslims in local government feel they have to comply for the sake of community relations, word gets out and the Tory press have a field day, there's a reaction of outrage and/or pisstakery from non-Muslims, and the whole thing starts again from step 1.

Note that this is merely a recommendation from Stoke-on-Trent council - I don't know how much weight such things carry, but that won't stop the Sun from turning this into "NUTTY COUNCIL BANS SWIMMING OVER RAMADAN MADNESS!".
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
go do it then. go do a double-blind study & report back on your findings. or don't. either way, don't offer up anecdotes about your "atheist friend" & C of E as proof of anything.

The studies have been done on this- religious people (in the U.S. at least) have a higher incidence of abortion, homicide, rape, violent crime, etc. I don't think there's a single measure that they do better, instead of worse, on than the general pop.

But I will have to dig up the reference...
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Not necessarily, but your saying that doesn't make my assertion wrong either. After all, there are no absolute values in a Godless universe.



The factual correctness of the belief doesn't matter - it's the effect that it has on what people do that matters.

There aren't absolute values even in a universe where you insist there's a Ceiling Cat, either.

There are some pretty useful constants though, yeah.

Why would an axiomatic moral system need God? You could posit the same moral axioms (it's wrong to kill, don't steal, etc.) without positing the God axiom and get the same results; that is to say, shitty ones. Because people don't live by axioms. We're organic machines, we live by necessity- I'm not that optimistic, reallly.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
quite a few people have been on to that particular scam over the centuries. the Wobblies were particularly good on it,

The mob is good at it. Patriarchy's based on it. It's called a protection racket. Make up a threat so you can provide the protection against said threat- at a price! In the case of the church, it's eternal damnation. In the case of patriarchy, it's rape and prostitution.
 
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mixed_biscuits

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This house believes that the theist meme is either hard-wired, long-lasting or both and that there is no evidence that atheism is either a compelling meme or especially beneficial to human flourishing (which I take to be success at spreading one's genetic and cultural material).

There are only three stories that can be told about the history of theism:

1) A broken historical record with hard breaks in cultural transmission. Implication: theism is hard-wired and reoccurs spontaneously.
2) A broken historical record with intermittent periods of atheism: Theism can be over-powered by atheist materialism but the latter is unsuccessful (there is no evidence of an atheist society having met with great success).
3) A broken record with dislocation of cultural transmission: The theist meme is appealing enough to survive 1000s of years of dislocating incidents and consequent reinterpretations.

Given that attempts completely (within ring-fenced, local contexts) to suppress religion in the 20th C failed spectacularly, I propose that a) expectations that theism disappears globally are hopelessly optimistic b) expectations that an exclusively atheist society might be possible, let alone prove successful are highly optimistic c) thoughts of being able to bring about a successful atheistic society through coercive means are, in view of the recent historical record, foolish.

I would also contend that recent atheism has only proved possible in states that are mature and already stable and that the subsequent shift from theism within those states has not been reflected in a great increase in their fortunes.
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
But there's another option.

It's also possible (and imo highly likely) that theism isn't itself hard-wired, but is a byproduct of certain tendencies/deficiencies in human thinking that *are* based in our neural hardwiring. The types of models that chalk up theism to blindspots or general tendencies in human thought are especially useful because their powers of explanation are so multifarious- they end up accounting for all sorts of strange human beliefs and behaviors, not just theism or beliefs in gods/divine beings.

I could waste my time trying to explain a bunch of these, but plenty of people have already done it, and better than I would. Here's a vid of one my favorite theories about the neural basis of religion... (it's not too jargony or technical)... Andy Thompson on Hyperactive Agency Detection:

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mixed_biscuits

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Ah cool, I like this kind of thing.

It's also possible (and imo highly likely) that theism isn't itself hard-wired, but is a byproduct of certain tendencies/deficiencies in human thinking that *are* based in our neural hardwiring.

At 18:14 he says that 'Children will spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention.' So perhaps 'hyperactive agency detection' always makes the leap to theism.

So, in order to maintain itself, atheism will need to do constant work correcting biases. In order to survive - at least before a 'change in fundamental human nature' (52:59), which he judges unlikely - it will need to be culturally transmitted successfully.

To prosper culturally, atheist societies will have to meet with comparatively more success at enabling human flourishing. Can they or are we better off indulging some, or all, of our biases?

Other points:

The vocabulary he uses suggests opposition - disabusing believers rather than informing them. Given that negative tactics (rejection rather than substitution) have generally failed (even the most coercive ones), this approach seems ill-conceived. That he uses overly oppositional language suggests possible bias - perhaps why he was unable to meet the 'religious belief is adaptive' implication proposed by the last questioner.

His ascription of intentionally manipulative, hierarchical structures to even primitive religion - that religion has been 'exploiting' biases thousands of years before science became aware of them - is odd. Presumably the first religious followers were just that: followers, sharing experiences of the disembodied god agent produced by hyperactive agency detection bias.

The brain scanning argument is surely a non-sequitur: it is obviously not the case that because something has a correlate in neural activity it then has no metacognitive existence. When I look at a plate the parts of the brain that process visual information might light up. This doesn't mean that the plate has no independent existence.
 
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