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Joe Schmoe's avatar

You claim that science does not conflict with religion, but your definition of "religion" is basically "some very abstracted Being exists", a religion that I will call Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. It's a motte and bailey. What percentage of the world's people are Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractists? 0.001%?

People's religions almost always make much more definite concrete claims about the world. Judaism holds that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, Moses parted the seas, the Earth flooded with Noah being the last human, etc. Christianity holds that all of these are true plus some more. Hinduism is a collection of hundreds of various folk religions, a panoply of Gods, the Vedas, and Advaita Vedanta. I could go on.

You can try to squirm out of this as being just stories or metaphors, but then you are just retreating back into Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. Does Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism conflict with science? No, but it has been defined that way. The more interesting question is, "is Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism falsifiable?"

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Ethan's avatar

"It’s a bad sign for your view of reality if the more you learn, the worse it gets. But with theism, the only good argument against it—the problem of evil—is old news. That the world contains bad things is not a discovery of contemporary science. While modern science and philosophy turns up numerous new arguments for God, the atheistic case has stagnated, seemingly failing to advance beyond the obvious observation that bad stuff happens. Of course, I’m not minimizing the challenge that that poses to theism—a huge amount of bad stuff does happen, and that’s really weird on theism—but I don’t get the same sense that greater discovery furnishes the case for atheism, the way I do for theism."

This seems like sort of a weird and cheap argumentative move. The existence of a being who is all good and has the power to do whatever he wants predicts states of affairs that are good, and predicts against states of affairs that are bad. It's very easy to say "really the only argument for atheism is the problem of evil", ie, the fact that we observe bad states of affairs. But by the same token, you could say "really the only argument for theism is the argument from good", ie, the fact that we observe good states of affairs.

In the same way that the "argument from evil" can be said to subsume what would otherwise be thought of as several distinct sub-arguments (such as: the argument from wild animal suffering, the evolutionary argument from evil, etc), so too the "argument from good" could be said to subsume basically all of the arguments for theism (fine tuning, psychophysical harmony, etc.)

So when you say "we've developed more arguments for theism as time has gone on but we've only had 1 argument for atheism the whole time" this just feels like a semantic trick. In the same way that, over time, we've arguably discovered new good things about the world that raise the probability of theism (such as psychophysical harmony), we have also, over time, discovered new bad things about the world that raise the probability of atheism (evolution, things like wild animal sentience and insect sentience, new natural diseases and ailments, etc.)

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