I can agree with almost everything you say, and I have few good arguments for your points about the organized christian religion. The fact that people overwhelmingly inherit their beliefs should be a serious problem to any religious person, and I have no good rationalization for it. It's one of many things for which God owes me an explanation someday.
> Yes, as you say, we're the most powerful consciousness on this planet right now
That's not really what I'm driving at, for that misses the point that I've been trying to defend on behalf of nvahalik. What I'm saying is that by necessity you are the most powerful consciousness in your own life. Same would be true for me were I not a believer. Society may judge and punish deeds that disregard social norms. My friends and acquaintances may value me more or less, colored by their own human experience. My family may need me, for a time.
But if I'm my own boss, then all these folks can go fuck themselves as soon as I become grumpy about their involvement in my life. They are, after all, hairless apes just like me, arisen from and destined to be dust just as I am. As an atheist, you are your own authority/judge/prescriptor/appraiser/lover/whateverer. You may generously entertain your fellow apes' performance of these roles if it suits you. But that choice belongs to you alone. You are your own beginning and end. You are Tom Cruise.
My belief in a creator relieves me of that burden. I rest easy in the confidence that I was created by and live in the quiet presence of a force whose intelligence is transcendentally beyond mine, and yet not totally alien from me either, for I have been assured that, as you say, we are created in the image of God. Not physically; the hairless ape bodies are temporary vessels. But as I alluded to before, your passions, sense of humor, your love of soft furry animals -- these are things that your creator understands. Care was taken in your design and manufacture. It's obvious to me, anyway, that some serious fucking care was taken, one way or another, to give rise to you, a creature with a sense of self and desire to talk religion on the internet.
> And no, as above, I don't think 'it was bound to happen', as that implies an intent to achieve the current state of the universe.
Very well put. I personally feel that intent is overwhelming implied, if not brazenly avowed, by the preposterously complex and beautifully engineered results. If see more than three rocks stacked atop one another while hiking, I know with near certainty that an intelligent being (another hiker) built the structure to mark the trail. It boggles my mind that anyone can entertain lack of intent in the rise of The Whole Fucking Universe, with all of its stacked rocks, furry animals, and sentient self-aware beings.
Original sin and the creation myth and all that... I don't know, and I don't care. I know some do care, but they're the minority, albeit the loudest minority. Here's a trick for when you meet one of them: ask them if they'd still have any use for Christ's mercy if the creation myth were not literally true. That ought to shut them up.
As to why I chose the message of Jesus for my own faith... it probably helps that my family is nominally Christian. But I also really believe myself to have enough objectivity and an open enough mind to chose freely. I've shopped around, and the message of Christ is only one I've found that puts no burden on me whatsoever to earn my way. In fact, Jesus makes it quite plain that we can't earn anything by deeds, and that our only choice is take our salvation as a free gift. Obviously you have to believe in the giver, and once that really sinks in, it's impossible not to love the giver of such a gift with your whole heart, which ends up being the meat of Jesus' response when he was asked what we need to do to be redeemed. The rest of the new testament has a lot of good advice about how to live life, IMO. But there are plenty of believers who have no access to a bible, and a God of mercy and love takes them too.
> I think saying 'it just happened' is to give up on some potentially very interesting lines of enquiry. But I don't think it's necessary to invoke a 'higher intelligent creative force' to address any questions around the process.
I'm genuinely interested to know what alternatives you like. What you would invoke instead of a higher intelligent creative force?
> The fact that people overwhelmingly inherit their beliefs should be a serious problem to any religious person, and I have no good rationalization for it.
and
> As to why I chose the message of Jesus for my own faith... it probably helps that my family is nominally Christian.
You say that you shopped around, but I'm curious what that actually means -- how many of the 4000+ religions you explored, how deep the exploration and experiences were in comparison to the first 10-20 years of your life of being exposed exclusively to your parents' branch of Christianity.
I don't understand the '[Christianity is the only] religion that puts no burden on me to earn my way' bit either -- can you explain that differently please?
Now, please don't compare me to Tom Cruise. ; )
I think I've misunderstood something about my position of not needing a higher power to explain the universe, or to delegate (abrogate?) ultimate responsibility of my actions to. I think I now understand -- this is not something you think is possible for anyone (or perhaps just 'reasonable for a thoughtful person') to think -- would that be a fair statement? There's been a few comments you've made around this subject, that I've carelessly overlooked, so I apologise for not being clearer on this earlier.
When you ask about alternatives to invoke instead of a 'higher intelligent creative force', I'm at a loss. I have no alternatives (beyond nature, or what's observed, etc) but more importantly I don't feel a need for them. I've always assumed all atheists think this way. But I've never considered that theists might assume that atheists are plagued by some kind of sensation - doubt, fear, a feeling of absence or missing something profoundly important - because of this.
With regards the 'complexity implies intent' argument -- how do you reconcile that with the observation that plenty of other people see the same levels of complexity but come to a different conclusion?
Tangential to the question of the gap sensation ... you mentioned:
> But there are plenty of believers who have no access to a bible, and a God of mercy and love takes them too.
Are you talking about people who have never been exposed to Christianity? I recall a droll (though likely apocryphal) quote where someone disappointedly asks "So if you'd never told me about Jesus, I'd definitely go to heaven? Why did you tell me then?"
For people who aren't exposed to the Bible (I'm including the ~100,000 years of humans as we'd recognise them) do you feel that they would have felt a higher power was self-evident from complexity, and/or needed an explanation beyond their own (physical) observations & experiences, and/or had a similar conviction to their local gods as you do to yours? Had you been born into a time & culture that worshipped, say, Zeus, what belief system do you think you would have had as an adult?
I expect neither of us is likely to fundamentally change, and that I've turned this into a 'I'm a Christian - AMA!' (sorry! :)
AMA, LOL, no problem. Sorry for the late reply; I'm traveling a lot but still engaged.
Complexity implies intent. The funny thing is that everyone really does agree with this, except when the discussion is ontic in nature. To take an example from Carl Sagan (yes, I know), if we were to detect a radio signal from deep space that counts prime numbers, then there would 100% unanimous agreement that it's of intelligent origin. I'm puzzled as to why folks are willing to extend assumption of intelligence only to our "peers" in the universe (i.e. aliens), but not to any kind of higher creative force responsible for the very existence of both us and those peers.
In other words, absolutely everyone agrees that a machine that transmits prime numbers must have an intelligent designer, and yet some folks say that a FAR more complex machine (such as evolution, or your conscious brain) must not.
> I'm at a loss. I have no alternatives (beyond nature, or what's observed, etc)
Beyond nature? Where did this observable nature come from? Some people dismiss that question as though "nature" is just like arithmetic; one thing naturally leads to another, and here we are! That's insane to me. Why for example are the universe's fundamental physical constants set at the exact values needed to allow "one thing to lead to another"? At this point, a fashionable atheist will inevitably invoke the multiverse and some flavor of the anthropic principle, which naturally leads me back around to same kind of question: where did the fucking multiverse come from? Ultimately there are only two possible answers; either the universe was somehow "intended", or it's turtles all the way down.
> how do you reconcile that with the observation that plenty of other people see the same levels of complexity but come to a different conclusion?
My rather patronizing explanation is that the emotional baggage that often burdens notions of theology makes fertile ground for cognitive disconnect (on both sides of course). I suspect you disagree with regard to your reasoning. :) What am I missing?
> ...this is not something you think is possible for anyone (or perhaps just 'reasonable for a thoughtful person') to think -- would that be a fair statement?
No, I know you believe that, and I don't judge it. My rather too subtle and maybe not useful point is that whatever roles God plays in a religious person's life, those roles must necessarily be played by yourself (or whatever fellow humans you choose). Even if you have no use for those roles, that judgment and the choice to leave them unattended are yours alone; there is no "higher power" for you to appeal to that isn't made of flesh and blood. I understand why atheists dislike this whole notion, and it's not a hill I'll die defending.
> I've never considered that theists might assume that atheists are plagued by some kind of sensation - doubt, fear, a feeling of absence or missing something profoundly important - because of this.
In fact this assumption is central to many Christians' belief system. I find it to be terribly presumptuous and judgmental, but it's ubiquitous. The idea is that non-believers must be defiant, otherwise how is their punishment justified? Same argument goes for the need for forgiveness or redemption. I feel a need for forgiveness from my creator deeply and innately, but I have no idea how I got there, and there's little chance of ever evangelizing someone else into the same conviction. It's not a matter of self esteem; for me it's disappointment at so often falling short of the purposes for which I was created.
> Had you been born into a time & culture that worshipped, say, Zeus, what belief system do you think you would have had as an adult?
That's an excellent question that totally summarizes your point in the prior paragraphs. If my strong tendencies in my current context are any indication, I'd like to believe that I'd still be interested in being a good person, and that the criteria for doing so were such by the authority of a greater being that created me, and that this would secure my redemption just as it does today. BTW this is a very biblical idea, supported in Jesus' own words (can cite and discuss if you want).
> You say that you shopped around
Well, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and it should probably be taken just as casually as I put it. I have been exposed to the ideas of all of the major faith systems (There aren't really 4000 religions; that figure counts all of the minor variations of a very limited number of major religions). I've been struggling with this stuff since I was 10 years old --my first existential crisis, the first of many. But I ain't no religious scholar, and as dragonwriter pointed on elsewhere in this discussion thread, I remain greatly ignorant of important details.
> I don't understand the '[Christianity is the only] religion that puts no burden on me to earn my way' bit either -- can you explain that differently please?
Let me think about how to phrase it differently than in paragraph surrounding that bit.
> In other words, absolutely everyone agrees that a machine that transmits prime numbers must have an intelligent designer, and yet some folks say that a FAR more complex machine (such as evolution, or your conscious brain) must not.
Ooookay, but the problem there is the proverbial god of gaps challenge. Right now we don't know the full details for big bang -> solar-system style aggregation -> goldilocks planets -> amino acids -> RNA -> DNA -> complex multicelullar lifeforms ... though some of the steps within are speculated about with some good degrees of confidence.
Either way, previously non-secular types would attest that spontaneous generation of maggots was only explainable by gods ... and before that, thunder, lightning, spring growth, autumn harvest, eyeball, eclipse, flagella, laryngeal nerve, and so on.
You seem to be suggesting that evolution currently sits entirely within the unexplained category, despite very little about evolution not being understood or explained by epistemological observation.
I'm drawn to a Richard Dawkins quote[2] - viz: "Evolution is almost universally accepted by those who understand it, almost universally rejected by those who don't." It's a slightly pithy quote, but all the best quotes are. :)
Either way, yes, I concur that if we got a clear radio signal from a remote planet that indicated some signs of intelligence, the thoughtful conclusion would be that there was an intelligence at the originating end of that.
On the other hand, if we had multiple disparate and/or plagiaristic books written some decades after the alleged existence of a man claiming (perhaps posthumously) to be a god, whose activities in life aren't correlated by any historians of the day, whose teachings provide no insights into our world that weren't already understood by contemporary humans, includes some parochial (eg stars falling to the earth) misunderstandings of the universe, and offering guides on (for example) how to manage your slaves ... that this isn't necessarily in the same ballpark as prime numbers from a distant galaxy.
To be candid, it worries me that we may be disagreeing over the import and relevance of this, because it means we really have no common base on which to continue a dialog.
Somewhat similarly, I'm not going to cop-out with the anthropomorphic universe, other than to draw the usual analogy to the puddle that finds itself in a hole perfectly shaped to fit itself, and concluding the hole was designed for it.
Obviously we're suited to this universe, with the various fundamental physical constants (etc) that this universe entails.
But ... as I've said before, if you can't explain something today it doesn't mean a god was involved (or, as you put it, that the universe was 'intended').
Let alone that a specific - in this case Christian deity - was responsible.
All you've done there -- similar to your 'turtles all the way down' disparagement -- is to suggest that there's some (no-evidence-for) metaphysical explanation, and asserted that the clear winner is the religion you happen to have acquired. (Yes, I know we spoke of this before, and you mentioned in passing that you were tongue-in-cheek about shopping around, but there's a LOT of religions that have previously out-numbered in absolute and/or relative numbers Christians today. My concerns on this front still stand -- most people inherit their religion, and they may rationalise that using whatever conveniences are to hand, but it doesn't detract from the fact that almost all religious people reflect the beliefs that they were indoctrinated with as a child. There's some good research on the evolutionary benefits (survival trait) for children to believe everything their parents tell them, long before they acquire critical thinking skills.)
As Hitchens observed on this front -- we can conservatively speculate that humans existed (in a form we'd recognise as humans) for around 100,000 years BC (if you will), and during all that time of suffering no intervention from an omnipresent god. Then (and rather than popping into a more advanced civilisation (China, say)) there was a guy who may not have actually existed, claiming (and perhaps only after the fact, and by proxy, and fairly inconsistently when you compare Mark and Luke[3]) to meet some Jewish prophecies, was purported to arrive to solve this problem of suffering. However, suffering continues in pretty much the same ways that it did pre-JC.
> I feel a need for forgiveness from my creator deeply and innately, but I have no idea how I got there ...
I really have no idea on how I could, let alone should, respond to that. It clearly reflects a fundamental disparity in the way that we view the world. I have a feeling that we could never reconcile it without compromising our belief / understanding frameworks.
> ... I'd like to believe that I'd still be interested in being a good person ...
Trying not to quote you out of context.
I think we're all (for large but perhaps not 100% inclusive values of) interested in being good people.
Long before Spacey, K. was pretending to be a lunatic US president (and long before it was fashionable to play such a role in real life) he was in a massively under-rated film called K-Pax. (Not just a grossly under-rated film, but few people know that Gene Brewer wrote 3 sequels to that story ... all wonderful reads.)
Anyhoo, there's a lovely comment that Prot makes in the first film / book: 'Every being in the universe knows right from wrong'.
I have zero evidence for it, but I tend to think it makes sense in the context of a larger (say, galactic-sized) culture -- once you've evolved sufficiently to abstract yourself into another being's position, it's (relatively) easy to identify right from wrong.
At the most basic it's the reciprocity law -- do unto others, if you will. It predates JC's teachings by at least 500 years, documented in China, and the idea almost definitely existed as a proposition for a happy society before that, and in multiple other locations. It's not a particularly difficult idea to come up with, I think (though that's said with the benefit of having other people previously come up with it).
Btw, I'm hugely appreciative of the time, effort, and thought you put into this - even if I may (I suspect) appear massively disparaging. As noted before, I'm obviously not about to change my position, nor are you likely to. I chuckled out loud at the 'What am I missing?' comment - and genuinely delight in your comments, your understanding of my viewpoint, and regret that at some point HN is going to lock this thread to read-only.
> Yes, as you say, we're the most powerful consciousness on this planet right now
That's not really what I'm driving at, for that misses the point that I've been trying to defend on behalf of nvahalik. What I'm saying is that by necessity you are the most powerful consciousness in your own life. Same would be true for me were I not a believer. Society may judge and punish deeds that disregard social norms. My friends and acquaintances may value me more or less, colored by their own human experience. My family may need me, for a time.
But if I'm my own boss, then all these folks can go fuck themselves as soon as I become grumpy about their involvement in my life. They are, after all, hairless apes just like me, arisen from and destined to be dust just as I am. As an atheist, you are your own authority/judge/prescriptor/appraiser/lover/whateverer. You may generously entertain your fellow apes' performance of these roles if it suits you. But that choice belongs to you alone. You are your own beginning and end. You are Tom Cruise.
My belief in a creator relieves me of that burden. I rest easy in the confidence that I was created by and live in the quiet presence of a force whose intelligence is transcendentally beyond mine, and yet not totally alien from me either, for I have been assured that, as you say, we are created in the image of God. Not physically; the hairless ape bodies are temporary vessels. But as I alluded to before, your passions, sense of humor, your love of soft furry animals -- these are things that your creator understands. Care was taken in your design and manufacture. It's obvious to me, anyway, that some serious fucking care was taken, one way or another, to give rise to you, a creature with a sense of self and desire to talk religion on the internet.
> And no, as above, I don't think 'it was bound to happen', as that implies an intent to achieve the current state of the universe.
Very well put. I personally feel that intent is overwhelming implied, if not brazenly avowed, by the preposterously complex and beautifully engineered results. If see more than three rocks stacked atop one another while hiking, I know with near certainty that an intelligent being (another hiker) built the structure to mark the trail. It boggles my mind that anyone can entertain lack of intent in the rise of The Whole Fucking Universe, with all of its stacked rocks, furry animals, and sentient self-aware beings.
Original sin and the creation myth and all that... I don't know, and I don't care. I know some do care, but they're the minority, albeit the loudest minority. Here's a trick for when you meet one of them: ask them if they'd still have any use for Christ's mercy if the creation myth were not literally true. That ought to shut them up.
As to why I chose the message of Jesus for my own faith... it probably helps that my family is nominally Christian. But I also really believe myself to have enough objectivity and an open enough mind to chose freely. I've shopped around, and the message of Christ is only one I've found that puts no burden on me whatsoever to earn my way. In fact, Jesus makes it quite plain that we can't earn anything by deeds, and that our only choice is take our salvation as a free gift. Obviously you have to believe in the giver, and once that really sinks in, it's impossible not to love the giver of such a gift with your whole heart, which ends up being the meat of Jesus' response when he was asked what we need to do to be redeemed. The rest of the new testament has a lot of good advice about how to live life, IMO. But there are plenty of believers who have no access to a bible, and a God of mercy and love takes them too.
> I think saying 'it just happened' is to give up on some potentially very interesting lines of enquiry. But I don't think it's necessary to invoke a 'higher intelligent creative force' to address any questions around the process.
I'm genuinely interested to know what alternatives you like. What you would invoke instead of a higher intelligent creative force?