> It is rather like creationists who know nothing about evolution but see fit to mock it, all without bothering to learn anything about it.
I think this is the cause of a lot of the new atheism stuff, since while there were atheists before the early 2000s, that was when atheism became culturally relevant. A lot of this was the creationism/evolution/intelligent design debate (especially in America, where the religious right wanted to "teach both sides" in biology class). I'd also argue it had to do with 9/11 and the war on terror to give a secular justification for the war in Iraq and Islamophobia more generally.
Anyway my point is that a lot of the people arguing for God are just as glib, uncurious, and philosophically uneducated as the New Atheist movement, which arose in response to that. Nowadays with atheism being so popular (at least on the internet), you don't really see the dumb theistic arguments as much unless you look for them or are raised in that mileu.
I'm new to this blog, but I'm curious if you have any compelling arguments for or against Judaism vis avis Christianity? Especially since Christianity requires the acceptance of Judaism, but Judaism does not require the acceptance of Christianity, so it is more likely from a probability standpoint that Judaism is correct.
<< It’s at least a bit surprising that literally billions of people have powerful experiences of a being provided that being is non-existent. >>
Literally millions of people (if not billions) have powerful experiences of astrology as well. Are you also a believer in astrology? What's your sign?
Also, I don't think it's surprising that people believe in all sorts of stuff they wish to be true. Nobody believes in an evil god despite the fact that an evil god is far more probable and does a much better job explaining the suffering of sentient beings.
Imagine a scientist figured out a way to give mice "free will", put the mice in a big cage to interact and live with each other and decided to punish the "evil mice" by burning them at the end of the experiment. We'd have to think the scientist is a pretty evil person.
What does it mean to have an experience of astrology? The stars aren't the sort of thing that can speak to a person. And we have pretty iron clad evidence against astrology.
People having "experiences" with malicious fairies stopped and "experiences" being abducted by aliens started up over the last couple centuries. The things people hallucinate or claim they hallucinate are based on the cultural milieu.
A lot of people think that astrology describes them and speaks to their experience.
We have pretty iron clad evidence against religious claims (evolution etc.) as well but you are using people's subjective experience to override all that. But not in the case of astrology.
I am not sure what sort of religious claims BB subscribes to.
But historically, claims like young earth, heliocentrism came as part of the same package that is religion. After scientific evidence disproved these, religion apologists started desperately clinging onto the ones that had no empirical bearing.
A more rational response was to look at the etiology of these claims and discard them all.
If I said I believed in very distant, light-years away aliens because they spoke to me in my dreams and told
me Kamala Harris would win, you wouldn’t just discard the wrong empirical prediction (Harris winning) and hang onto existence of distant aliens (not amenable to empirical investigation).
You can something similar happening with Marxists trying to hang onto Marxist claims (let’s ignore all the predictions of Marx that failed and hang onto whatever else we can revise).
Historically, the scientific method came as part of the same package that is Christianity. It was Catholic astronomers who discovered the moons of Jupiter and the transit of Venus, it was Catholic and Protestant astronomers who developed the heliocentric model, it was a devout Anglican who discovered the equations that define planetary orbits, and it was a Catholic priest who discovered the Big Bang. The idea that there’s some conflict between science and Christianity is a myth, and doesn’t match the historical record. St. Augustine was teaching that Genesis shouldn’t be taken literally all the way back in the 5th century!
I think an underrated part of the weirdness of New atheism is that it kind of misses the point of much of religion. As you rightly pointed out, religions don't necessarily demand belief. Mine at least, tends to focus more on faith, which means being faithful to the proposition; not necessarily believing it to be true, more acting as if it were true.
(I think the emphasis comes from the fact that the people who were writing those things were so certain that it was true that they didn't bother telling you to think that it was true.)
I was with you right up until the end, when you brought up faith being the key to heaven. I assume that you were only showing how Dawkins incompletely addressed the claim, rather than arguing for it yourself? Any God that would bar Heaven to nonbelievers is pure evil, and not only would I choose nonexistence before that sort of Heaven, this evil would poison any argument for God that depended on his goodness.
I think that many New Athiests and adjacent types will be so repulsed by that last section that they will lose all the valuable insights you’re offering.
> It would be rather concerning if despite all this, you didn’t have even a basic familiarity with pottery
Yeah... That's kind of what I feel when you say that we do not need to formally define sample space, event space and probability function to coherently talk about probability of events.
> Now, Dawkins seems unaware that
Your reply here is very bad. You seem to completely miss the substance of what Dawkins is talking about while nitpicking all the tiny minutiae, which are mostly irrelevant.
Dawkins criticizes Aquinas for the arbitrary allowance for God to have a "get out of regress" card. This kind of critique goes back to Bertram Russel and probably much earlier. You failed to engage with this completely valid point and tried to frame it as something which only people ignorant of philosophy would say, therefore shielding your beliefs from critique. This is a worrisome tendency. I recommend you to be more mindful of it.
Also, I see that I have let this point slide. Why should you just wager on one god that you have the highest credence in as opposed to as many gods as possible, to maximize your chances?
I think people who weren't around at the time have no idea what it was like to be an atheist in the early 2000s. Dawkins and co weren’t writing philosophy. They were inspiring non-believers to come out of the closet. They succeeded.
> But the fact that people have experiences of a certain sort and are wrong doesn’t mean having the experience of X doesn’t give you evidence for X. Indeed, to think that the external world exists, you must trust your experience of it. It’s at least a bit surprising that literally billions of people have powerful experiences of a being provided that being is non-existent.
Billions of people have had experiences of mutually exclusive Gods, of a flat earth, of aliens, and of believing that their girlfriend is “the #1 girlfriend in human history”. Doesn’t make them all true (no offense).
And while “the YouTube comments section is brain dead” is a powerfully true statement, I don’t think it’s so unreasonable for people to be dismissive when, to my understanding, your argument is
1) a priori metaphysics creates infinite evidence for god’s existence
2) if we take as an article of faith that a theory cannot produce people in a skeptical scenario, then in order to explain this article of faith, we need a God…
Even more billions of people have had experiences of the ocean, the stars, trees, and motherly love: should we dismiss their experiences as evidence because sometimes people experience aliens?
The difference is that those experiences are highly replicable. I can see a tree right now and the ocean after a fifteen minute drive. There is no set of steps to experience God, and the experiences of him are wildly divergent.
If Matthew wants to denigrate people for not tinking about the issue for years, I don’t see how can can at all credit unverifiable mystical experiences that are easily explained by humans’ tendency to see what they want to see.
You should certainly be more confident that trees and the ocean exists than you are that God exists, but they remain the same kind of evidence. And there is a set of steps to experience God: prayer, fasting, peyote, etc. They're not a perfect set of steps that work every time, but lots of things in life are like that. I can't always see the moon: sometimes it's cloudy. The fact that I can't always step outside at night and see it isn't great evidence against it not existing.
I’ve spent plenty of time praying, never seen God. Strange how people see many different Gods when praying, and that their tendency to see God depends on all the factors that cause wishful thinking and hallucinations.
Drugs are known for generating very unreliable experiences.
We have the ability to pierce the clouds consistently, and there’s no reason why the cloud temporarily blocking the moon would mean that the moon doesn’t exist, because there’s no explanation for why the moon would exist when the clouds aren’t there, but would not exist when they are. This is not equivalent to God, where there is no process to reliably see him, and people who do experience him are wildly divergent and do so in the most unreliable manner possible.
My Aunt has never seen Mt. Rainier because every single time she visited it was covered in clouds: yet she believes it exists because so many other people have experienced it. There is no process to reliably see the moon, or Mt. Rainier, yet people's experiences of those things are evidence they exist. There are lots of things that there is no reliable way to experience (like "runners high", or ecstatic joy, or true love) yet that would be a poor reason to dismiss those experiences as evidence.
> My Aunt has never seen Mt. Rainier because every single time she visited it was covered in clouds
She can see a photograph, or a live satellite image. These artifacts are created by a physical process, not very fallible human consciousness. Unless there’s a good reason to think that all the photographs of Mr. Rainer are fake, or somehow represent something else, that’s reliable evidence right there.
> There is no process to reliably see the moon
There is, in fact, a process to reliably see the moon. Either wait until there are no clouds, move somewhere where there are no clouds, or go to space. If you could see God by going to space, that would be tremendously more reliable and trustworthy than the unreliable forms of human evidence currently presented.
> There are lots of things that there is no reliable way to experience (like "runners high")
Presumably you could experience it by running and enjoying it. The experience is also broadly shared by people who claim to experience it, even if minute particulars vary, much less to the extent that a belief in God(s) or other religious phenomena vary.
But even with this, I would confidently say that I am already was confident that runner’s high is real compared to the ocean. God is way way way less probable.
> ecstatic joy
Nearly everyone experiences joy at some point. It can be measured and explained biologically and psychologically in a reliable way. You can probably also induce it through drugs. There’s no convincing alternate explanation for almost everyone saying that they experience estatic joy in the same way that there is a unifying explanation for religious experiences of God.
> true love
The only True Love is the Love of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Since Jesus wasn’t our lord and savior, true love doesn’t exist. QED.
How many (non drug) mystical experiences do not involve a deity? (They are common) They would, in the world of Bayes, move the needle toward falsifying the idea of a god.
I've found that many times when I am enraged by someone, it is because I have fundamentally misunderstood the activity they are engaging in. I am observing (correctly) that they are insanely bad at the thing I think they are trying to do, without noticing that they aren't trying to do that thing at all, they are trying to do something else. I suspect you are making the same sort of error with respect to Dawkins.
Lets consider an analogy. I know ancient people had beliefs about the world being composed of earth, air, fire, and water. Some of them I'm sure were educated philosophers who had very detailed beliefs about these things with technical vocabulary and sophisticated explanations. And I would wager that if you go down to your local chemistry department and ask any professor about it, that (1) they will be completely ignorant of that technical vocabulary and those sophisticated explanations and such, and (2) they will confidently tell you that the earth-air-fire-water theory is nonsense, and that you would do better to study the periodic table. They might even throw out a two sentence argument against the earth-air-fire-water theory that failed to stand up to philosophical rigor. You could label your entire chemistry department as "Pathologically incurious, confused, and smug" if you want to, but that would be missing the point. They don't spend time engaging with those ancient ideas because no person who is serious about understanding how things actually work engages with those ancient ideas. The community of people actually trying to understand the world has long since moved on to greener pastures. In truth your chemistry professors are probably more curious about the materials that make up our world than anyone else on campus.
So if they can't actually engage with the technical vocabulary and sophisticated arguments of the earth-air-fire-water theory, then what are they actually doing? They are giving you permission to disagree with your superstitious uncle who chants about earth-air-fire-water while doing a rain dance (and can't engage with the technical vocabulary and sophisticated arguments either), confidence to ultimately ignore him, and direction to channel your curiosity about the materials that make up our world into actual learning. And that is roughly what Dawkins did for young atheists like me. He gave us permission to disagree with religious family members, classmates, and street preachers - people whose understanding of Aquinas was at least as bad as Dawkins' own. He gave us confidence to ultimately ignore them, and direction towards actual learning in the sciences. I will always be grateful to him for that. But was he ever going to engage on a technical philosophical level? To convince philosophers that he had refuted Aquinas? Of course not. He wasn't trying to.
This is about Dawkins; not new atheism. I agree that he is a face - maybe one of the biggest faces - but he is not the only thing in the movement. I think the new atheists might have been too dismissive and bad at philosophy in some ways, but this does seem like a strawman. Also, the quote is quite ironic given who wrote it lol
Disagreed. Dennett z’’l was a very serious philosopher. I would somewhat consider Peter Singer and Bertrand Russell in the new atheists (though Russell obviously preceded he had new atheist-esque vibes) who I think are obviously very serious philosophers.
Dennett debated Plantinga on the EAAN and there's a whole book written about it. Dennett spent half his time doing things like comparing God to superman and talking about how He and intelligent design were fantasies. It was very typical of the new atheism, mocking & derision took first place.
Zichrona Livracha, which is a Jewish phrase said for people who have passed away that means may his/ her memory be blessed. It was kinda a joke but I didn’t know if anyone would get it
This kind of tells me you’re not a very curious person :) There’s lots of interesting “New Atheist” thinkers that are up your allie. Not sure if you’ve read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, but also since you’re a probability person, you’d probably like Stenger’s book on God as a failed hypothesis. To use a metaphor, dismissing the “New Atheist” movement because you don’t like Dawkins’ edgy-ish books from the 2000s is kind of like saying you like Christianity circa 70 AD without interacting with the works of St. Paul. What’s also funny about your bashing of Dawkins is that Dawkins isn’t even popular among proported New Atheists now lol
The others are bad. Stenger is off the rails--he's been refuted at length on fine-tuning both by Collins and especially Barnes. And as the rest of the article explains, it's not just Dawkins.
I know this isn't the main subject of the post, but you mention it several times, so I'll ask anyways. What's the deal with the fine-tuning argument? To me, it seems obvious that if we posit an infinite multiverse, then of course there will exist some universes with the constants necessary to sustain life, and any intelligent life that exists will by definition observe themselves to be in such a "fine-tuned" universe. So how does this become a strong argument for theism? I'm genuinely curious and want to know.
I think the multiverse is an acceptable alternative explanation for God: note how no one introduces fine tuning by talking about the Goldilocks zone of earth's orbit: Once you know that you are but one planet among many, anthopics easily explain the situation.
The good counter I've seen to the multiverse explanation of fine tuning is that the multiverse is multiplying entities unnecessarily, which may make it a more complicated explanation than God.
I think Matthew and Collins would do a better job at explaining all the different ways such a dialogue could go, but personally the thing that made me initially consider fine tuning to be a live option was the Boltzmann brain argument as explained by Huemer, he’s still agnostic between the two hypotheses but it was a good intro.
"I try to speak as plainly as possibly. It’s hard to talk about the anthropic argument plainly, and I’ll have to mention—and define—some technical terminology like the number Beth 2. But explaining something complicated often is difficult, and you won’t get it immediately. "
Perhaps. But I still think that if someone holds a belief that seems strange on the face of it, is hard to explain in a convincing manner, and crucially is held by only a small number of people, then our priors should lean strongly toward skepticism.
The assumption that atheists rarely become theists is so frequently untrue that it can become a convincing argument in favor of God.
Growing up in a staunchly atheistic family—my parents were not only atheists but also communists, I read Marx in high-school, went to communist party meetings—I later became a believer through a combination of religious experience and logical deduction. Ironically it was reading some of Dawkins' absurd anti-God arguments among other things that convinced me that the existence of God is actually more likely than the mental gymnastics necessary to prove the opposite.
> It is rather like creationists who know nothing about evolution but see fit to mock it, all without bothering to learn anything about it.
I think this is the cause of a lot of the new atheism stuff, since while there were atheists before the early 2000s, that was when atheism became culturally relevant. A lot of this was the creationism/evolution/intelligent design debate (especially in America, where the religious right wanted to "teach both sides" in biology class). I'd also argue it had to do with 9/11 and the war on terror to give a secular justification for the war in Iraq and Islamophobia more generally.
Anyway my point is that a lot of the people arguing for God are just as glib, uncurious, and philosophically uneducated as the New Atheist movement, which arose in response to that. Nowadays with atheism being so popular (at least on the internet), you don't really see the dumb theistic arguments as much unless you look for them or are raised in that mileu.
I'm new to this blog, but I'm curious if you have any compelling arguments for or against Judaism vis avis Christianity? Especially since Christianity requires the acceptance of Judaism, but Judaism does not require the acceptance of Christianity, so it is more likely from a probability standpoint that Judaism is correct.
<< It’s at least a bit surprising that literally billions of people have powerful experiences of a being provided that being is non-existent. >>
Literally millions of people (if not billions) have powerful experiences of astrology as well. Are you also a believer in astrology? What's your sign?
Also, I don't think it's surprising that people believe in all sorts of stuff they wish to be true. Nobody believes in an evil god despite the fact that an evil god is far more probable and does a much better job explaining the suffering of sentient beings.
Imagine a scientist figured out a way to give mice "free will", put the mice in a big cage to interact and live with each other and decided to punish the "evil mice" by burning them at the end of the experiment. We'd have to think the scientist is a pretty evil person.
What does it mean to have an experience of astrology? The stars aren't the sort of thing that can speak to a person. And we have pretty iron clad evidence against astrology.
People having "experiences" with malicious fairies stopped and "experiences" being abducted by aliens started up over the last couple centuries. The things people hallucinate or claim they hallucinate are based on the cultural milieu.
A lot of people think that astrology describes them and speaks to their experience.
We have pretty iron clad evidence against religious claims (evolution etc.) as well but you are using people's subjective experience to override all that. But not in the case of astrology.
>We have pretty iron clad evidence against religious claims (evolution etc.)
Can you unpack that? I can imagine someone citing evolution as evidence against young earth creationism, but BB is not a creationist.
me when I constantly keep reinteperating my religion so that it fits the emprical data.
Perhaps some people don't assume their religion explains everything about the natural world.
I am not sure what sort of religious claims BB subscribes to.
But historically, claims like young earth, heliocentrism came as part of the same package that is religion. After scientific evidence disproved these, religion apologists started desperately clinging onto the ones that had no empirical bearing.
A more rational response was to look at the etiology of these claims and discard them all.
If I said I believed in very distant, light-years away aliens because they spoke to me in my dreams and told
me Kamala Harris would win, you wouldn’t just discard the wrong empirical prediction (Harris winning) and hang onto existence of distant aliens (not amenable to empirical investigation).
You can something similar happening with Marxists trying to hang onto Marxist claims (let’s ignore all the predictions of Marx that failed and hang onto whatever else we can revise).
Historically, the scientific method came as part of the same package that is Christianity. It was Catholic astronomers who discovered the moons of Jupiter and the transit of Venus, it was Catholic and Protestant astronomers who developed the heliocentric model, it was a devout Anglican who discovered the equations that define planetary orbits, and it was a Catholic priest who discovered the Big Bang. The idea that there’s some conflict between science and Christianity is a myth, and doesn’t match the historical record. St. Augustine was teaching that Genesis shouldn’t be taken literally all the way back in the 5th century!
<<The idea that there’s some conflict between science and Christianity is a myth.>>
Also please admit that Jesus has been an atheist all along and let's be done with the revisionism.
I think an underrated part of the weirdness of New atheism is that it kind of misses the point of much of religion. As you rightly pointed out, religions don't necessarily demand belief. Mine at least, tends to focus more on faith, which means being faithful to the proposition; not necessarily believing it to be true, more acting as if it were true.
(I think the emphasis comes from the fact that the people who were writing those things were so certain that it was true that they didn't bother telling you to think that it was true.)
{Edit: fixed typo - changed "party" to "part"}
Funny typo: "you didn’t have even a basic familiarity with poverty" should be "pottery"
I was with you right up until the end, when you brought up faith being the key to heaven. I assume that you were only showing how Dawkins incompletely addressed the claim, rather than arguing for it yourself? Any God that would bar Heaven to nonbelievers is pure evil, and not only would I choose nonexistence before that sort of Heaven, this evil would poison any argument for God that depended on his goodness.
I think that many New Athiests and adjacent types will be so repulsed by that last section that they will lose all the valuable insights you’re offering.
> It would be rather concerning if despite all this, you didn’t have even a basic familiarity with pottery
Yeah... That's kind of what I feel when you say that we do not need to formally define sample space, event space and probability function to coherently talk about probability of events.
> Now, Dawkins seems unaware that
Your reply here is very bad. You seem to completely miss the substance of what Dawkins is talking about while nitpicking all the tiny minutiae, which are mostly irrelevant.
Dawkins criticizes Aquinas for the arbitrary allowance for God to have a "get out of regress" card. This kind of critique goes back to Bertram Russel and probably much earlier. You failed to engage with this completely valid point and tried to frame it as something which only people ignorant of philosophy would say, therefore shielding your beliefs from critique. This is a worrisome tendency. I recommend you to be more mindful of it.
<<A 1/100,000 chance they’re right makes belief in God have high payout. >>
Try the Hindu gods as well. Here's a list to get you started. Big pay out promised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hindu_deities
Yeah, if you're wagering you should wager on the beings you have highest credence in.
Great, then I'm wagering on Ra. Good luck to everyone but I don't think you guys have picked the right god.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra
Whether that's reasonable will depend, of course, on the substantive reasonableness of having highest credence in Ra.
Well it should also depend on the rewards.
Also, I see that I have let this point slide. Why should you just wager on one god that you have the highest credence in as opposed to as many gods as possible, to maximize your chances?
You don't need to worship every Hindu deity to be a Hindu.
I think people who weren't around at the time have no idea what it was like to be an atheist in the early 2000s. Dawkins and co weren’t writing philosophy. They were inspiring non-believers to come out of the closet. They succeeded.
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/what-was-the-god-delusion-about
You reminded me to finish this post that I started months ago — the last time a bunch of philosophers accused Dawkins of writing bad philosophy.
> But the fact that people have experiences of a certain sort and are wrong doesn’t mean having the experience of X doesn’t give you evidence for X. Indeed, to think that the external world exists, you must trust your experience of it. It’s at least a bit surprising that literally billions of people have powerful experiences of a being provided that being is non-existent.
Billions of people have had experiences of mutually exclusive Gods, of a flat earth, of aliens, and of believing that their girlfriend is “the #1 girlfriend in human history”. Doesn’t make them all true (no offense).
And while “the YouTube comments section is brain dead” is a powerfully true statement, I don’t think it’s so unreasonable for people to be dismissive when, to my understanding, your argument is
1) a priori metaphysics creates infinite evidence for god’s existence
2) if we take as an article of faith that a theory cannot produce people in a skeptical scenario, then in order to explain this article of faith, we need a God…
Even more billions of people have had experiences of the ocean, the stars, trees, and motherly love: should we dismiss their experiences as evidence because sometimes people experience aliens?
The difference is that those experiences are highly replicable. I can see a tree right now and the ocean after a fifteen minute drive. There is no set of steps to experience God, and the experiences of him are wildly divergent.
If Matthew wants to denigrate people for not tinking about the issue for years, I don’t see how can can at all credit unverifiable mystical experiences that are easily explained by humans’ tendency to see what they want to see.
You should certainly be more confident that trees and the ocean exists than you are that God exists, but they remain the same kind of evidence. And there is a set of steps to experience God: prayer, fasting, peyote, etc. They're not a perfect set of steps that work every time, but lots of things in life are like that. I can't always see the moon: sometimes it's cloudy. The fact that I can't always step outside at night and see it isn't great evidence against it not existing.
I’ve spent plenty of time praying, never seen God. Strange how people see many different Gods when praying, and that their tendency to see God depends on all the factors that cause wishful thinking and hallucinations.
Drugs are known for generating very unreliable experiences.
We have the ability to pierce the clouds consistently, and there’s no reason why the cloud temporarily blocking the moon would mean that the moon doesn’t exist, because there’s no explanation for why the moon would exist when the clouds aren’t there, but would not exist when they are. This is not equivalent to God, where there is no process to reliably see him, and people who do experience him are wildly divergent and do so in the most unreliable manner possible.
My Aunt has never seen Mt. Rainier because every single time she visited it was covered in clouds: yet she believes it exists because so many other people have experienced it. There is no process to reliably see the moon, or Mt. Rainier, yet people's experiences of those things are evidence they exist. There are lots of things that there is no reliable way to experience (like "runners high", or ecstatic joy, or true love) yet that would be a poor reason to dismiss those experiences as evidence.
> My Aunt has never seen Mt. Rainier because every single time she visited it was covered in clouds
She can see a photograph, or a live satellite image. These artifacts are created by a physical process, not very fallible human consciousness. Unless there’s a good reason to think that all the photographs of Mr. Rainer are fake, or somehow represent something else, that’s reliable evidence right there.
> There is no process to reliably see the moon
There is, in fact, a process to reliably see the moon. Either wait until there are no clouds, move somewhere where there are no clouds, or go to space. If you could see God by going to space, that would be tremendously more reliable and trustworthy than the unreliable forms of human evidence currently presented.
> There are lots of things that there is no reliable way to experience (like "runners high")
Presumably you could experience it by running and enjoying it. The experience is also broadly shared by people who claim to experience it, even if minute particulars vary, much less to the extent that a belief in God(s) or other religious phenomena vary.
Also, uh, we can directly observe runner’s high, unless I’m misreading this: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/18/11/2523/291108#:~:text=Data%20Analysis,DEPICT%20software%20(Gunn%20et%20al.
But even with this, I would confidently say that I am already was confident that runner’s high is real compared to the ocean. God is way way way less probable.
> ecstatic joy
Nearly everyone experiences joy at some point. It can be measured and explained biologically and psychologically in a reliable way. You can probably also induce it through drugs. There’s no convincing alternate explanation for almost everyone saying that they experience estatic joy in the same way that there is a unifying explanation for religious experiences of God.
> true love
The only True Love is the Love of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Since Jesus wasn’t our lord and savior, true love doesn’t exist. QED.
How many (non drug) mystical experiences do not involve a deity? (They are common) They would, in the world of Bayes, move the needle toward falsifying the idea of a god.
I've found that many times when I am enraged by someone, it is because I have fundamentally misunderstood the activity they are engaging in. I am observing (correctly) that they are insanely bad at the thing I think they are trying to do, without noticing that they aren't trying to do that thing at all, they are trying to do something else. I suspect you are making the same sort of error with respect to Dawkins.
Lets consider an analogy. I know ancient people had beliefs about the world being composed of earth, air, fire, and water. Some of them I'm sure were educated philosophers who had very detailed beliefs about these things with technical vocabulary and sophisticated explanations. And I would wager that if you go down to your local chemistry department and ask any professor about it, that (1) they will be completely ignorant of that technical vocabulary and those sophisticated explanations and such, and (2) they will confidently tell you that the earth-air-fire-water theory is nonsense, and that you would do better to study the periodic table. They might even throw out a two sentence argument against the earth-air-fire-water theory that failed to stand up to philosophical rigor. You could label your entire chemistry department as "Pathologically incurious, confused, and smug" if you want to, but that would be missing the point. They don't spend time engaging with those ancient ideas because no person who is serious about understanding how things actually work engages with those ancient ideas. The community of people actually trying to understand the world has long since moved on to greener pastures. In truth your chemistry professors are probably more curious about the materials that make up our world than anyone else on campus.
So if they can't actually engage with the technical vocabulary and sophisticated arguments of the earth-air-fire-water theory, then what are they actually doing? They are giving you permission to disagree with your superstitious uncle who chants about earth-air-fire-water while doing a rain dance (and can't engage with the technical vocabulary and sophisticated arguments either), confidence to ultimately ignore him, and direction to channel your curiosity about the materials that make up our world into actual learning. And that is roughly what Dawkins did for young atheists like me. He gave us permission to disagree with religious family members, classmates, and street preachers - people whose understanding of Aquinas was at least as bad as Dawkins' own. He gave us confidence to ultimately ignore them, and direction towards actual learning in the sciences. I will always be grateful to him for that. But was he ever going to engage on a technical philosophical level? To convince philosophers that he had refuted Aquinas? Of course not. He wasn't trying to.
This is about Dawkins; not new atheism. I agree that he is a face - maybe one of the biggest faces - but he is not the only thing in the movement. I think the new atheists might have been too dismissive and bad at philosophy in some ways, but this does seem like a strawman. Also, the quote is quite ironic given who wrote it lol
But the others aren't much more serious.
Disagreed. Dennett z’’l was a very serious philosopher. I would somewhat consider Peter Singer and Bertrand Russell in the new atheists (though Russell obviously preceded he had new atheist-esque vibes) who I think are obviously very serious philosophers.
But he was unserious when talking about religion. And Singer and Russell aren't new atheists.
Dennett debated Plantinga on the EAAN and there's a whole book written about it. Dennett spent half his time doing things like comparing God to superman and talking about how He and intelligent design were fantasies. It was very typical of the new atheism, mocking & derision took first place.
z"l?
Zichrona Livracha, which is a Jewish phrase said for people who have passed away that means may his/ her memory be blessed. It was kinda a joke but I didn’t know if anyone would get it
I got it. I'm surprised to see it here.
Thought you did by ur name but wasn’t sure lol
This kind of tells me you’re not a very curious person :) There’s lots of interesting “New Atheist” thinkers that are up your allie. Not sure if you’ve read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, but also since you’re a probability person, you’d probably like Stenger’s book on God as a failed hypothesis. To use a metaphor, dismissing the “New Atheist” movement because you don’t like Dawkins’ edgy-ish books from the 2000s is kind of like saying you like Christianity circa 70 AD without interacting with the works of St. Paul. What’s also funny about your bashing of Dawkins is that Dawkins isn’t even popular among proported New Atheists now lol
The others are bad. Stenger is off the rails--he's been refuted at length on fine-tuning both by Collins and especially Barnes. And as the rest of the article explains, it's not just Dawkins.
Also, much of it isn't about Dawkins!
Fashion is why people beat up on them, for the most part. Not argumentation.
I know this isn't the main subject of the post, but you mention it several times, so I'll ask anyways. What's the deal with the fine-tuning argument? To me, it seems obvious that if we posit an infinite multiverse, then of course there will exist some universes with the constants necessary to sustain life, and any intelligent life that exists will by definition observe themselves to be in such a "fine-tuned" universe. So how does this become a strong argument for theism? I'm genuinely curious and want to know.
I think the multiverse is an acceptable alternative explanation for God: note how no one introduces fine tuning by talking about the Goldilocks zone of earth's orbit: Once you know that you are but one planet among many, anthopics easily explain the situation.
The good counter I've seen to the multiverse explanation of fine tuning is that the multiverse is multiplying entities unnecessarily, which may make it a more complicated explanation than God.
I think Matthew and Collins would do a better job at explaining all the different ways such a dialogue could go, but personally the thing that made me initially consider fine tuning to be a live option was the Boltzmann brain argument as explained by Huemer, he’s still agnostic between the two hypotheses but it was a good intro.
"I try to speak as plainly as possibly. It’s hard to talk about the anthropic argument plainly, and I’ll have to mention—and define—some technical terminology like the number Beth 2. But explaining something complicated often is difficult, and you won’t get it immediately. "
Perhaps. But I still think that if someone holds a belief that seems strange on the face of it, is hard to explain in a convincing manner, and crucially is held by only a small number of people, then our priors should lean strongly toward skepticism.
For anyone really interested in fine tuning argument.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:81766962-73b9-4b9a-9d06-26a0e38a2080
The assumption that atheists rarely become theists is so frequently untrue that it can become a convincing argument in favor of God.
Growing up in a staunchly atheistic family—my parents were not only atheists but also communists, I read Marx in high-school, went to communist party meetings—I later became a believer through a combination of religious experience and logical deduction. Ironically it was reading some of Dawkins' absurd anti-God arguments among other things that convinced me that the existence of God is actually more likely than the mental gymnastics necessary to prove the opposite.