As an atheist myself since the age of about 7, I simply do not understand how theists can trust in a God given this argument. — scientia de summis

The problem of God and evil is significant and even the most sophisticated religious thinkers like David Bentley Hart find this argument has impact on their faith. So you are onto something.

How is it that a good God seemingly built a creation that is chaotic, bloodthirsty, ugly, dangerous and predicated on disease, pain and violence? Where animals eat each other alive and go extinct and children perish in their millions every year from starvation, cancer and other preventable diseases? Not to mention wildfires, floods, earthquakes, famines, plagues.

Where was God during the Holocaust or during Pol Pot's or Stalin's murderous reigns -as families and children were slaughtered? And yet some fellow from a small town in the midwest will say that God intervened and helped him to pass his exams....

Looked at critically, creation itself is a miserable, poorly designed place riddled with horrors and weaknesses. If God had been a car maker he would have been prosecuted for negligence and substandard practice and sued for all the flaws he left in his products - MS, Alzheimer's, ALS, leukaemia, Addisons, diabetes, tooth decay, Huntington's, schizophrenia, polio - we could fill pages with the inherent weaknesses in human design.

Really only medicine has allowed women to stop dying in childbirth in vast numbers and tooth decay was a significant cause of disease and early death until dentistry came along.

Only a bunch of language games, fast talking and tap dancing from religious apologists can try to explain this away. Not that they can. This is really only a problem for beliefs that stress God's goodness and the providential order of creation, so Eastern faiths avoid this one.

Is it any wonder that some early forms of Christianity accepted that the material world was evil and created by a demiurge?

This creation is incompatible the common iteration of the Christian God. But apart from what some men wrote in ancient scriptures, who said God cares? Deism is perfectly compatible with our horror show on Earth.

need to stop freaking out about religion and start being more considerate of others, and you have my permission to remind me of that. — Athena

Don't be afraid to call out and oppose supernatural appeals to bigotry where they happen. It is best understood this way: 'I don't hate you, I hate your beliefs.'

faith has wonderful psychological effects, but it can also be the worse source of evil we have. — Athena

No point in setting up faith as a magical word. It is just belief without evidence and works no differently than in the case of those people who thought Hitler was delivering them a magnificent world based on blood magic and race. Faith is the excuse people give for believing in something when they have no good reasons.

The Christians I know attempt to resolve every problem with prayers and they have complete faith that God/Jesus will answer their prayers. Obviously, if that is what one believes, God, will take care of everyone and all we need do is pray. Those who survive the hurricane, flood, landslide, or whatever, will be reassured God takes care of them — Athena

This is true but what of it? All religions commit atrocities and justify it with appeals to truth or faith. There is no necessary correlation between religious belief and moral behaviour. The history of our world is one of religions energetically basing their actions on choreographed bigotry and human rights violations. Hardly surprising when the only shaky evidence for God is in ancient books and outrageous claims.

We cannot have infinite regression, so it’s more logical to say that we were designed by a all truthful [thing?]. — Franz Liszt

You fail to demonstrate a couple of key things and address none of my points. Until you can demonstrate god or that the world can't have been the product of natural processes, you can't really proceed. It sounds more like you are making an assumption based on the fallacy from incredulity - that it can't possibly be any other way than you think.

The reasons it cannot be aliens is because we would have to know they are all truthful too, but then they would need something all truthful. — Franz Liszt

Demonstrate how you come to this conclusion. For Aliens how can you demonstrate that all of life and with it all illusions of causality and meaning as we know it are not just the product of an advanced laboratory?

In any case, what I presented above does not point to Christianity in the slightest, let alone ‘God’. — Franz Liszt

Actually the argument you presented is known as a presuppositional argument for God and is used by apologists almost word for word. I just polished it up for you. I don't mind if you are an apologist or an atheist. I just thought it was amusing.

am beginning to think that I took too far a assumption based off of some other responses I have received. If we need our logic to be true, is there another explanation you can think of? — Franz Liszt

There are so many responses possible, I simply don't have the energy to go through them. A few brief comments are as follows.

Firstly, the idea of God has no explanatory power. When someone says 'God did it' this is exactly the same as saying the Magic Man did it or Aliens did it. Aliens are probably more plausible since thousands of people claim abduction experiences and we know there are other planets. (BTW I do not have reason to believe in aliens).

Incidentally, if someone says - "I can't think of any other explanation other than God did it" - that is a logical fallacy called the fallacy of incredulity. There are lots of things we can't explain, running to the supernatural - whether it be Brahman or Osiris - is lazy and retrograde. When humans couldn't explain diseases (not all that long ago and still the case in some countries) we thought sicknesses were caused by evil magic, witches and demons.

Secondly, the believer in God has to demonstrate that reason or meaning is impossible without a God or Magic Man as a starting premise. This can't be done. It's just a claim made.

The big one is this. You need to establish God exists before it can be a candidate explanation for anything. You can’t just say the only reason logic makes since is because God exits. This is no more meaningful than saying the only reason meaning exists is because the Hindu creator Brahma exists. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Additionally, there is no explanation of just how God or Brahma might be responsible for the existence of meaning. This unsatisfying argument, like most uses of God has, as I already stated above, no explanatory power. In almost every instance where God is offered as an explanation you could swap God for the word magic and it would serve the same function in any argument.

Placing God as that scaffolding is just another way of saying that don't know what accounts for our confidence. — frank

Yep, and it is a great example of the fallacy from incredulity in action. Which is - "I can't think of any other explanation for the world therefore God. Or Aliens... or...."

f we are just loads of chemicals grouped together through a random procces, then everything we experience may well be wrong. How do we know that our logical thoughts would actually show any truth in this universe? The answer, if we are just a bunch of chemicals, is that we can’t. Using this logic, science is just an illusion, so is logic. However, we have used science and logic to come to these conclusions, which becomes a paradox. — Franz Liszt

If your thinking is so loose then no wonder you are confused. But having said that - I don't know who you are but what you have done here is build a standard Christian apologist argument as per William Lane Craig. This what a cunning apologist might do if he or she were to blunder onto this site.

Why not try this to steel man the effort - atheism is self-refuting because if all we are is matter behaving to random forces, then logic can't make sense because it has no foundation for making meaning. Logical argument falls down if we don't have God and a guarantor for all meaning, goodness and truth.

My point is that hardship will be easier to overcome if the person is prepared for it. And that without such a preparation in advance, a person is less likely to overcome hardship. — baker

That could useful if I were talking about how hardship is overcome but I'm not.

That's deeply interesting Wayfarer. I had a long interest in Krishnamurti - I think it was his exceptional clarity on some matters and his no nonsense approach that for me, anyway, cut through most of the other teachers I heard back then. He was the thinker I needed. And his story was extraordinary.

I started with Alan Watts, I always wondered what he would be like to know, but I suspected he had strong hedonistic impulses that might have taken him off course. I studied philosophy at university briefly but had an argument with the Head of Department when he said, 'You are not here to learn, you are to give us what we want and parrot back to us everything we say.' I quit, went out and bought Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces and read for several years. Those were the days...

I accept there are other ways of knowing and being, that Niikolas and others are referring to - that it's not just made up, but refers to something real. Real, but off the beaten track of mainstream culture. — Wayfarer

I understand that - I was immersed in Jung and theosophy amongst others in the 1980's. I would need someone to demonstrate that this is justifiable before accepting it. Just because there are impressive cross cultural snippets about it doesn't make it true. The same thing could be said about human sacrifice (not that I am comparing the two).

It's easy to read about them or imagine that you might realise them, but in practice it's very difficult. — Wayfarer

Who did it successfully in your view?

to experiencing the wholeness of human being in relation to its origin or what Plotinus called the ONE? — Nikolas

Sorry - This kind of model isn't my thing; if it is exoteric - I don't get it :smile: For me human beings are clever animals with language and an ability to develop conceptual frameworks. For me there is no pathway or oneness available to us - there are only good and bad ideas.

Do you believe that all the ancient traditions initiating with a conscious source exist at the exoteric level and devolve into opposing opinions. — Nikolas

I couldn't say for certain. I think people are similar so their ideas are often similar. But people are also tribal, so approaches develop and split off and often expand in deliberate contrast.

We speak of different things. — Nikolas

I think we speak of the same things differently.

My question is if anyone can explain why they would believe this, and how it’s okay for morality to be subjective. — Franz Liszt

You forget that religious morality is subjective. All morality is subjective, but, as you say, we can choose to agree on a presupposition like, for instance, human flourishing being the goal for human behavior.

Remember that religious believers don't agree on moral positions even within their own tiny slither of religious dogma. Just take the Protestant faith in the Christian tradition.

Believers hold contradictory and often mutually hostile views on: the role of women in church and culture, gay marriage, capital punishment, euthanasia, human rights - to name a few hot issues. I have met Christians, even within the same church who hold views that gay people are morally wrong and will go to hell and by contrast, others for whom sexual preferences are of no interest to god. What does god think?

Herein lies the problem. Religious people base their morality on their subjective preferences of what they think god wants. Be very careful around people who think they know what a god wants.

the shadows on the wall? — Nikolas

Forget Plato's Cave. If you want to chasing after shadows, try spirituality.

There have been a zillion attempts to distill the elements of the true spirituality underpinning all religion from Theosophical syncretism to Jung.

What is fascinating always is the underpinning of status seeking and elitism inherent in the proposition. Only special people have capacity to see the truth. Or in words like this:

humanity as a whole lacks the conscious ability to understand and instead become enchanted with the shadows on the wall? — Nikolas

The only people I know who were in favor of separating children from their families at the border were Christians. — Athena

That's true. But there are questions that come out of this. Why is it that Christianity - and let's face it, so many religions worldwide - so effortlessly undertake evil actions?

Is it just a matter of believe oneself to be God's favourite? Might it not also be what happens when you think you have access to special knowledge that comes from an uncountable, extramundane source that is the origin of all morality.

I don't mind paying taxes. I live in a community.

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

And secular culture has no way of differentiating the two! — Wayfarer

Well I just did, so that can't be right. Even the secular world has access to the homily: 'Ye shall know them by their fruits.'

First - not really comfortable with the word 'truth'. How do you understand it ? Is it about getting things right or the reaching of a specific goal, a solution to a problem or knowledge of how the world is ? — Amity

A sign of the times. Postmodernism has 'taught' us that we live in a relativist world and for at least 40 years many people have been afraid to call anything truth or a fact for fear of offending or being wrong. And there's the whole post-truth, alternative facts, science denying caper. As the man said to his doctor when told to quit smoking for health reasons, "That's just your opinion, Man."

Truth to me is small t not big T. As I wrote before - we were able to send men to the moon and back and yet some wonder if reality really exists or if it is really possible to make secure predictions using inductive reasoning.

When it comes to making choices in life we can determine what ideas are helpful or even probable based upon evidence. It's a fact that if you swallow certain poisons you die. It's a fact that people with type 1 diabetes require insulin. If you are going to cross a busy road, do you use faith and close your eyes as you step into the traffic or do you use careful observation with experience and then cross?

And sure, we can all make mistakes or get things wrong and there is no such thing as 100% certainty. And not everything may be knowable and just because it isn't knowable right now doesn't mean we are at liberty to insert a fallacy from incredulity and determine that the only explanation we can think of is the spirit world or magic.

So, a different pathway - things that inspire geniuses from the subconscious. — Amity

There are a plethora of stories about dreams and coincidence and happy magical accidents impacting on the arts or discoveries or life altering events. Jung was fond of synchronicity. I generally say, so what? Can we actually test if such whimsical stories are true? And even if they are, do they really offer us a method for determining what actions to take and what to believe? I say no. The problem with thinking you are inspired by visions is, firstly this can't be tested, and secondly this could make you either Gandhi or Charles Manson.

It's an unspoken truth that Karl Marx is one of the most influential philosopher in my view of modernity. — Shawn

I think you could also say that Marx is one of the most widely coopted and least read thinkers of modernity.

Anecdotal I know but I have yet to meet a Marxist that has actually read Marx and I have met many. On asking around at University, this seemed to be a common thing. There ought to be an award going for the most referenced unread books - Das Kapital would be in there along with The Bible and A Brief History of Time.

Very much appreciate your courtesy and interest. — Wayfarer

You too, Sir. I appreciate your patience and knowledge.

What evidence is there for that? — Wayfarer

I don't know,I am not a biologist. But here's the thing. If we discover that something is true we accept it.

I've known a few seriously wealthy individuals. They were pretty ordinary or miserable folk and it never made me imagine that money (past having enough for reasonable comfort) was worth pursuing.

Young earth creationists have no evidence, obviously — Wayfarer

The point is there's a lot of stuff being called scientific that isn't.

what would it take to convince Richard Dawkins that it’s real? — Wayfarer

You need to put that to Dawkins. It's not my subject. But generally science is open to revision and new information. If It Is Proven. The time to believe something is when there is evidence.

The respected researcher making 120K might feel greatly superior to the billionaire. — norm

I would think that would be justifiable. Behind every fortune is a terrible crime (Balzac).

Are you familiar with the replication crisis? How do you reckon that would play out in respect of this question? — Wayfarer

It plays out just fine. I don't accept claims unless there is evidence. If claims can't be reproduced they need to be shelved. Bad science exists, especially when tied to commercial stakeholders, esp drug companies. Or Young Earth Creationists. But the beauty of the method is that scientists are continually trying to falsify other scientist's results and their own. This makes it harder to justify nonsense because it will generally be exposed.

My point is simply that we don't accept a belief without good evidence.

Science is an ideology, not a religion. — T Clark

Everything is ideology if you try hard enough.

Thank you for your extensive response.

But leaving that aside, naturalism also methodologically excludes the possibility that there might be alternative cognitive modes or ways-of-knowing about which the sensorily-grounded methods of empirical science can detect nothing. — Wayfarer

No I would say if it exists, we can investigate it. 'Might be' is not 'is'. Otherwise it is woo.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, — Richard Lewontin

But this and the rest of what he says is just rhetoric without examples.

One of the things I think it says is that, to all intents, for this kind of thinking, science *is* a religion. Hence, 'the religion of scientism'. — Wayfarer

I don't think the case is made at all. All it is trying to do is say that isms are a dirty word and there's an attempt to turn the dreaded R word back on science.

I think anyone on a spiritual path has a sense of trying to navigate to a higher destiny. — Wayfarer

This quote and so many similar from people interested in spirituality just suggests (and you may not be like this) the underlying ethos of elitism and status seeking. I'm special because I have my God/Buddha/Guru/faith/Kabbalah... And of course by way of exquisite contrast the person who just wants evidence before accepting any claims is a lesser course human being. Not that you may be of this ilk.

St Augustine said that 'miracles are not against nature, they're against what we understand about nature'. — Wayfarer

Sophistry. If miracles happen then there would be evidence.

Proferssor Bart Ehrman is probably more nuanced. He thinks YbY was probably real but few of the stories are.

I guess I've just always come to the usual conclusions - why should I care what is written in any holy book?

The tantalizing proposal is that early Christian tradition may not have seen Jesus as divine nor risen from death. The later vulgar superhero twist to the story avoids engaging with the idea that this particular hero's journey may have been about self-knowledge, not everlasting life.

Sociologist and religious scholar John Carroll wrote an interesting book on Mark, with Jesus as an existential figure. The point was more (and I am putting this crudely) that Jesus ( traces of this are in Mark, the oldest Gospel - around 70 AD) was not interested in God and doctrine but in exploring the self - he died in despair and his rising again is tentative. There is a later end tacked onto Mark that tries to make it seem more glorious. Gnosis is perhaps an existential Jesus' answer to Camus' absurdity, to touch on another discussion.

If I were to say to you that you should not foist your view on others by not procreating other people who will have to take on the human enterprise who may not find this good, what would you say? I used an example of bowling for example. Just because I like bowling, should all of humanity bowl now? Why is the whole human project of having to exist and follow the structures of society be any different? — schopenhauer1

see my previous point.

Jesus is a real historical figure. — schopenhauer1

Actually there is no certainty on this. Some suggest the character may have been based on a real person - there were numerous itinerant messianic teachers at the time it is stated. There are branches of mythicists who argue he is a total fiction - Dr Richard Carrier is an exponent of this.

I personally don't care if he was based on a real man or not. The question is what status do we give the claims made in the stories about yeshua ben yosef - those from outside and inside the tradition.

Well, the antinatalist foists nothing on no one. Their political statement of "NO" to life, creates no forced dealing with participating and being forced to deal with the social-economic-cultural superstructure.

The procreation sympathizers do indeed foist their view on others, whether they can evaluate it negative or not. Their solution is these people better get with the program that they think is "good" or kill themselves. — schopenhauer1

Not sure this issue resonates with me vey much. I am simply making the point that your presuppositions here may not be recognizable to everyone.

don't think Wayfarer was talking about supernatural phenomena. We'll let him respond. — T Clark

Wayfarer doesn't really say where his ideas may lead, hence my earlier question. I am simply introducing this as part of the discussion as it is an obvious potential direction. But happy to be told it isn't relevant by W or you.

What is being made worse by making the political statement that one should not perpetuate the socio-economic-cultural project? Why is this necessary to perpetuate? — schopenhauer1

I don't understand the sentence.

he fact is, we as humans can evaluate something as negative while we are doing those things. We don't just "exist" but we know we like or don't like something as we are doing it. Why would we want to foist an existence where one not only has to survive, but can evaluate a negative value to this very act of having to survive? — schopenhauer1

The history of psychology and counselling would be at odds with this. The fact is, many, many people don't know they are unhappy and don't know what they want.

This leads to all sorts of problems. Is there another way, sure - look at the world, forgive me, holistically. As one unified system. There are sciences that do things that way - ecology, geology, evolutionary biology, hydrogeology. Observational rather than experimental sciences. — T Clark

Ok, holistically is fine - many disciplines that can come together usefully, based around evidence and demonstrable results. If it is observational, it is still part of the extant material world, so technically it is physical and measurable. But where someone says there is a supernatural explanation for a physical phenomenon, I would want demonstrated evidence that this is the case. It is a simple thing.

I am quite certain that science hasn't and perhaps can't explain everything. But the time to believe in a proposition is when there is evidence for it.

Why is a movement against perpetuating the package of social structure and negative evaluation of human activities needed to survive condemned off the bat — schopenhauer1

Well, it is not always a given that changes to undermine the stats quo are going to be good. It is always possible that you will make things worse. And people do not agree about ways forward.

Self-reflection. We can evaluate what we are doing in these social structures, and come to conclusions that we do not like doing these things while we are doing them. — schopenhauer1

I would want a much better understanding of whether this claim is true and in what ways. Not everyone can evaluate. Some people lack insight. Some are rewarded as much as they are penalized. Some do not experience harm even if it is present.

Since when is the ‘scientific method’ not itself a worldview.? — Joshs

Science is just a tool we can use that has demonstrated consistent reliability and its findings can be replicated or reviewed and perhaps found wanting. It probably never arrives at a final revelation, unlike say, organized religion.

Happy for you to enter into meta-discussion of science's alleged worldview al la Feyerabend, with whom I quite agree that science can go too far in its claims and it can be badly used, like any tool. Although I note that people like Feyeraband are quite pleased to seek evidence based medical treatment when sick, rather than a prayer group.

If you are going to say science is a worldview, fine. So is everything, from medicine to sport. But some worldviews are more helpful than others.

just scientism speaking — Wayfarer

Not that you meant this, perhaps, but isn't the tendency to use this word 'scientism' usually a patronizing label? Is applying it to Sagan useful?

Given you are pretty much an atheist (from our pervious conversation), as far as more literalist theists may be concerned, what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment?

Forgive the crude summary and feel free to correct me - it sometimes seems to me that you are saying you have greater innate sensitivity because you know that the universe has more in it than matter. My question is where (in general terms) do your presuppositions actually lead you?

Delusion and self-deception are certainly pitfalls in any spiritual path. It doesn't mean that there isn't a path to follow. — Wayfarer

Never said there was not, only that we can't assert it is ipso facto better than naturalism.

There are ways of knowing the world that do not require an objective reality. — T Clark

What are you thinking?

There's a good argument to be made that objective reality is a human construct which boils down to that which can be perceived, conceived, and understood by humans. — T Clark

Yes, it is pretty tedious and there is no consensus on this.

"Truth" is generally defined as congruence with objective reality. — T Clark

'Correspondence' is probably a better word and comes with a venerable if much attacked theory.