Erm...

That was rather the point

What is it with people seeing atheism as some sort of incredibly fundamentalist, dogmatic, radical idea? To quote Dawkins (again because he says it better than me, not because I can't think for myself):



Think about that, we are all atheists. We are all capable of looking at a religion from the outside and concluding that it isn't worth following.

It isn't worth following.

Saying that no religion is worth following is therefore an incredibly banal stance. It's obvious isn't it? If everyone agrees that most religions are rubbish, apart from those within the religion, then surely it is incredibly reasonable/sensible to assume that the only reason they think it's worth following is because the religion has some sort of emotional control over the person, a form of brainwashing.

This characteristic of strong ideas isn't inherently bad - for instance a maths student in raptures about a new formula he's working on is clearly under the control of that idea in a way - even if other students disagree, the student will defend the idea, continue to follow it (until someone changes his mind). It's this aspect of ideas that makes them powerful, that allows us to form societies around ideas, arbitrary characteristics that define for many people, who they are.

Great, up to a point. The problem is at the core of religion is nonsense. You should always have the option of changing your mind. It's good to have a mechanism in place to question ideas, to test their worth.



That's weird. What's wrong with improving ideas? Questioning them, throwing out the bad stuff? WHAT IS WRONG WITH RATIONALITY? Is it immoral? religion teaches us that it's a sin to question things, it's a sin to have knowledge, we should be punished for being alive. When you look at it rationally there should be no reason why those ideas (why we, and Earth exist) shouldn't be as open to debate as any other.

Religion doesn't offer you a crutch, it makes you think that you need one, it is the Grima Wormtongue, telling you you're weak and humble and servile and that you need Jesus to help you, that it's safer in his bosom. No I don't need your bosom Jesus, actually, I have enough wine thanks, and when doctors found the cure for leprosy they had the decency to tell others how to do it too.

Beware of scientists who are willing to ignore the methodology of their profession and claim to have "scientific" knowledge about the probability of an occult phenomenon. That approach does much more to undermine the authority of the author than to demonstrate that belief is unreasonable, implying as it does that he is not as capable a scientist as he claims. Or else that he knows his method is inappropriate to his objectives, but he persists in dishonestly promoting it either for money or the false glory that might be achieved by persuading one's intellectual inferiors that they are cleverly thinking for themselves when they are in fact being defrauded.

Biblical literalism is a relatively new phenomenon. One of greatest theologians in Christian history of the Christian church was Saint Augustine. He only converted to Christianity after Archbishop Ambrose of Milan convinced him that a description of the stars in the Bible was allegorical. Similarly, the book of Revelations is only in the Bible because Augustine read that as an allegory describing events that had already occurred with the rise of the Holy Church in Rome (seen by him as the start of Jesus' 1,000 year reign on Earth).

I have been subjected to many of the arguments both for against religion (in realms of both practical and pure reason). Of those which I have paid attention to (some on both sides I'm afraid are far too stupid to waste time on) the same basic weakness is in evidence every time. They all rely on some axiomatic assumption that they are not sufficient to justify. This leaves them incapable of persuasion - you must already buy into the conclusion (therefore there is / is not a God) before you can accept the full set of premises.

That only applies in general terms though. Atheism is impossible to prove, as is any particular religion, or the assumption that some unknown religion must be correct. However, it is easily possible to show that a particular religion contains contradictory claims. So for instance, in the Old Testament we are clearly told not to eat pork. In the NT - after Jesus is dead - we are told that pork is ok because Jesus died for our sins and there's a new deal with God now. But in the sermon on the mount Jesus says "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled". Which is pretty bad news for women who don't scream when raped, or those who wear cloth woven of wool and linen together (purchasers of Marks and Sparks suits should take care, their everlasting souls are on the line). The same tensions can be found within any complex theology, although as an outsider (atheist) I have to say that the Abrahamic collection look especially vulnerable - and of those Christianity the more so because it is quite colossally schizophrenic.

The wise approach to religion then is surely to temper one's conclusions with some humility. Disagreeing with any opinion on the matter does not make anyone an idiot. Neither the true believer nor the disbeliever can simply swallow everything they are told - discretion is required in either case - we all face false prophets, even the atheists. Arriving at a conclusion about whether God exists or not still leaves almost all the work still to do - working out what that really means*.


* Organised religion is not merely a way of controlling people; it is a methodology for systematically ignoring difficult questions, or else providing simplistic answers to them. Disorganised religion requires one to answer questions such as why God disapproves of certain lifestyles, or whether he really meant it when he said it. This approach to religion has the (often unwanted) side effect of diluting the religion, but provides the benefit of requiring an inquisitive spirit quite equal to that of the better atheist. The lesser atheist is no more likely to consider those difficult questions than the lesser Christian is. So I propose that we can reject the argument that atheism leads to free thinking as empirically unsound.

A lot of the criticism seems to be aligned directly against Christianity.

What about the other religions? Islam? Hinduism? Jainism? Sikhism? Zoroastrianism? Buddhism? The latter doesn't even believe in a God!

Given that religion cannot adequately explain where 100% of the universe is or what it's made of, I think we are in a very good position to make a concrete claim that it's 100% worthless.

Religion isn't in the business of making claims about what the universe is - science claims that. Religion isn't about outer space and cosmology.



I'll second that as well - there's a lot of what really boils down to 'Boo I don't like Christianity, therefore all forms of faith is bunk' in the Atheist camp.

Apart from it being the creation of an omnipotent being, but that's not a very big claim, so we'll ignore that one.

"all forms of faith are bunkum"

Quite

Science actually does little to "explain" the universe. It more attempts to "describe" or "model" it in ever increasing detail. The difference may seem semantic, but to me it's significant.

You can explain how one thing leads to the next, but all of science is fundamentally based on guessing [LIFTED]. The fact that interactions of nature and the formula we use to describe them are so interesting and valuable to us does nothing to truly explain why anything exists in the first place. For example, it is suggested that "the speed of light is a universal constant". We test that hypothesis and find the results it mathematically predicts are surprisingly accurate. But can anyone here explain why it might be true or false?

Perhaps one day we'll have described the universe in such perfect detail that we'll genuinely understand everything, and perhaps that will be a true revelation. I doubt I'll be here to see it.

So, while most forms of religion have a creation story (but not all), it doesn't attempt to tell us that there are little bits of energy that vibrate at a specific frequency - let's call that matter - and some of this matter has organised itself into particles... and then some of these particles went onto form the elements, and then in a blink of an eye, we have Big Brother and The X Factor.
That's science.

Science doesn't concern itself with what comes next - after you leave here, this existence. That tends to be a big part of religion and faith, that there is something else beyond what we can experience here and now.
Who knows? Maybe that's the missing 90% of the universe that science is currently staring at it's shoes and hoping nobody asks too many questions about.

In my case I stick mainly to the ones I understand. What I know of Buddhism for instance is insufficient to offer a sensible criticism, although I would suggest as as starting point that it appears metaphysically confused and responds to difficult questions only with vague and implausible word games. On the plus side, I understand they don't have this concept of a person remaining a continuous entity into the next life, which is the most serious metaphysical problem with some other religions.

On Sikhism and Hinduism, I have nothing to offer, but I am willing to bet that I would easily turn something up if I am forced.

Islam is easily criticised; it's main weakness is that it is too well grounded in recorded history. So we know that Mohammed had two poets murdered because God thought they deserved to die for not thinking the Koran is the greatest work of poetry in history. And that's just the start of it, but the general gist is that every time Mohammed was annoyed about something, God would intervene by telling him to tell the other person to do as they were told.

Zoroastrianism is cool, I won't hear a word said against it. If I joined a religion it would definitely be that one. They have accountants to decide whether you go to heaven or hell. Whilst in logical terms I am an agnostic, my basic opinion is that Christianity is really just a load of good Zoroastrian stuff shoe-horned into the weaker Judaism that its founding prophet inherited from his dad (and tbh his dad was a carpenter not a deity IMO), with generations of subsequent theologians working their tits off to paper over the huge array of cracks in the facade. I think Jesus would have done far better to do away with the OT altogether. In fact I wonder if that isn't exactly what the real life guy actually tried to do. But here I digress away from claims that I could actually defend.

I also rather approve of the Norse and Greek pantheons. You'll note they don't hobble themselves with claims of infinite wisdom, love or power, which makes them less prone to variations of the arguments from evil and bad design.

@ prof Out of curiosity, how do you know that we haven't discovered 90% of the universe?

That sounds suspiciously intriguing, have you been reading about Physics? Cool, physics is awesome. If physics discovers heaven, then we'll model heaven. If it hasn't discovered heaven, maybe it isn't there. What other things that probably aren't there should we give 10% of our earnings in the name of, unicorns? Physics hasn't discovered unicorns yet. Silly physics.

Science came up wit the theory of matter and then created models and tests to see if it was a valid theory. Those tests came back positive, those models help us cure cancer. It turned out to be a [LIFTED] amazing theory.

A religion came up with a theory of Original Sin. What good came out of that? What did that help us achieve? It helped us see that we are all guilty and inherently evil.

That's a load of crap, but you should teach it to your kids.

+1.

The way I see it, science describes what happened (big bang, primordial soup etc) but not why. I don't think it ever can. As far as I can tell, all of Physics works from t=0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second or something equally small but can't tell us anything about before that. If the laws of Physics are applicable to this universe, does that mean that they can only ever describe from the Big Bang onwards and can never describe beyond it?

Can someone explain to me the difference between a belief in a god and someone who has delusional thoughts? Seriously, I'm interested.

On another tangent, seeing (AFAIK) Lucifer was God's favourite Angel who he had a tiff with, why did he just not strike him down where he stood rather than let him disappear into an unreachable (unreachable? for God?) underworld to cause mayhem? Again, I am seriously interested.

"The Universe" literally means "Everything". It takes a special kind of mind to envision what is "outside" that particular box. The spacial concept of "outside" only exists here on the "inside". The same goes for time - it only exists as a concept within the universe. The idea of "before time began" is meaningless because before time, by definition there was no time.

When children ask impossible questions, the obvious reaction is to make up nice stories to tell them. Often they involve giant elephants or turtles, or invisible men in the sky with giant handkerchiefs.

Science could and no doubt will go far beyond what we can explain today. I have no doubt that evolution will fill in its missing links. The big bang will be causally explained from first plink to concluding plonk. And the act of seeing a pretty girl and falling in love will be explained n such detail that we are able one day to pinpoint the exact sequence of neron activity that correlates to "dat ass".

But in that process we will not lose the explanatory power of God, because we couldn't possibly under any circumstances demonstrate that the initial impulse that created the big bang was unaware of the consequences. Nor would the proof that brain chemistry explains all thought and identity actually mean there was no soul.

Manc's assumption appears to be that religion exists to explain certain phenomena, and that if science presents an alternative explanation, then religion ceases to have any purpose. In fact there are multiple approaches that religion can take to this scenario:

Denial works for some. There is nothing at all that science could possibly do to prove that the universe wasn't created 5 minutes ago by an omnipotent God.
We can do that for pages no problem. Manc can point at some fact, and I will just say "God made it look that way, Genesis is the literal truth". For fun I would even import the omphalos hypothesis ("God had to make it look that way"). It's stupid, but you won't prove it wrong with science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis

Acceptance works better though. God used the Big Bang (or whatever) to create the universe. Genesis is analogous, it was never meant to be taken literally. Why not?

As for souls, they can exist. They might occupy time but not space, or neither, or both. Science could never sufficiently understand the components of the human organism to prove that there is no occult component.

It makes no difference really what arguments Manc actually presents (and I say this as a fellow atheist), there is never going to be any validity in drawing a religious conclusion from a scientific fact. It only proves that you don't understand science.