god is about holding power over the masses and i dont see the point of entertaining the idea once you've realized it, unless youre just in it for funsies
I agree it wise to look back k to the ancient Greeks for proof, but I’d recommend looking back a bit further. For me, it is Pythagoras that offers the most compelling proof.
For Pythagoras, it was math that proved the existence of a metaphysical reality, which naturally supports the possibility of God. He understood that his theorem for right triangles would be true even if you never bothered to draw one on a chalkboard. A squared plus B squared equals C squared is an organizing principle of material reality that doesn’t need to exist in material reality. Math is a metaphysical principle that creates an ordered physical world.
I wonder if it isn’t more generally adopted in the argument for the existence of God because, while it seems a well-reasoned proof for the possibility of a metaphysical reality, and the ethical teachings of Christ remain unchallenged by it, it offers no proof that the stories of the Bible are true.
In fact, it suggests they are preposterous, since exceptions to the model of metaphysical principals organizing material reality are unnecessary. There’s no need for miracles, or for anyone to rise from the dead. Everything is comfortably controlled from God’s metaphysical perch.
A shame, I think, because it creates a possibility for much better stories. Our religious inclinations aren’t the problem, our anachronistic Doctrines are.
Many people are raised without religion, by parents who don't and never did believe in any brand of manmade god.
So the question only applies to people who once believed, just as they might have once believed in the tooth fairy.
I'm almost intrigued by the false dichotomy of masterful design versus millions of random occurrences. Evolution isn't random, or simple. It's complex, intricate, and took billions of years, disasters, regeneration, more billions of years. In due course, billions of years, this earth, and all its manufactured gods, will no longer exist. Long enough for future generations to study the childish superstitions of their forebearers, in the same way we read about societies that believed in the ancient gods - contemporary gods aren't more real for being modern.
Hello, my friend. I hope you're well as can be hoped.
As a former atheist who has long experience arguing about evolution, I personally am not a fan of either the fine-tuning argument or the watchmaker argument for the existence of God. One reason is that I think they're both defeasible, for the reasons you've laid out and others. Ultimately, both of these fall to the "God of the gaps"--let's say I do find the sequence of events that provides a clean natural explanation for the citric acid cycle; if that were my proof of God, where do I go? And we're pretty good at figuring things out; someone's probably going to solve that eventually (*if they haven't already. I'm not a biochemist, so I don't know what people know about that.)
But the bigger reason I do not like the fine-tuning or watchmaker arguments to argue for God is that they accept the materialist lens as the only way we can know what's true about reality. And the thing is, we all know that the materialist lens is false--even if we can't show that it's false using materialist reasoning. (Which, lol, of course we can't.)
You know that love is real. You know that your life has meaning. You know this in a way that you know what "pain" or "cold" or "red" is, even though you can never know for certain that the "red" I see is the same as your experience, and even though no one can replicate your experience of "love." You also believe in some moral facts: hurting people is bad, and forgiveness is good. These moral facts are also not provable using materialist reasoning.
Now I know some folks on Team Materialism will argue that these things are in fact not real: love is an oxytocin surge, that was evolved to solidify pair-bonding to insure the survival of our neotenous human babies. Red is a wavelength of radiation that our eyes have evolved to detect so we can avoid dangers like fires or poisonous plants. Indeed, some such philosophers (like the late Daniel Dennett) deny that there is such a thing as "qualia" at all.
But what seems like more of a just-so-story handwave: that "love" and "red" and "meaning" are epiphenomena or emergent properties that really are exclusively material and then they, ah, take on additional features that seem pretty dang immaterial at some level of complexity that no one can understand using exclusively materialist reasoning; or that you have, in fact, seen the color red and fallen in love before?
This is just a comment, so I'm not making an exhaustive argument for the existence of God here. What I am saying is that I lived a good deal of my adult life in the materialist frame, and when I was in that frame I could not see evidence of God either. Once I was able to step out of that frame, I could not unsee it. I now cannot look at the world and see it as anything but shot-through with meaning--something that the materialist frame denies is real, but is merely what we choose it to be. But saying that meaning is just whatever I choose, and can then throw over if I change my mind, is to say meaning doesn't exist at all. And I know that cannot be true.
The place that meaning is the most undeniable for me is in God's living creatures, especially my fellow humans. You, for instance, are thoughtful, compassionate, and brave. I have read quite a few of your essays, so though I've never met you in person I know that you have comforted your lover when she was dying even though she couldn't remember you by then. I know you're a good dad, and I know that you have excellent taste in music (by which I mean, we share musical tastes.) And I know that despite your brain cancer, you are still learning and trying to expand your mind. Ragged Clown, I admire you very much.
So I hope that you will forgive me for saying so, my atheist friend, but one of the reasons I believe in God is you.
I don’t want to argue at all but I am curious and I would like to understand your understanding of the limits of materialism. For me, everything to do with life — from those little Archea up through the octopus with the citric acid cycle — has a kind of meaning that is over and above the physics and isn't easily explained by it. I still think of all this as part of the material world though.
Love too. And meanings and emotions. They all seem to me to be part of what evolution has given us to live the best lives that we can. The hard part for me to understand is how it all got started. How those first cells figured how to make entropy go in the other direction seems impossible to understand. Love is easy in comparison.
This has all been on my mind a lot recently. Especially the love thing. I’m doing quite well healthwise still but I know that could change at any time (waiting for MRI results now). There’s a bunch of stuff I dream of doing — from wine in a Greek café to floating down the Mekong to sitting in the shade on a Caribbean island — but love of my family keeps me at home and I think about it every day while I sit on my porch.
A more practical answer: I sometimes watch You Tube videos of people talking about their Near Death Experiences and they are very thought provoking if nothing else. They can move me to tears. I recommend! I have a friend who had a NDE many years ago and it changed her from an agnostic to a believer in God. I also knew someone who experienced a NDE as a child living in an orthodox Jewish community. He became a Buddhist!
Such an interesting read! I’ve listened to most of Tim Keller’s lectures via podcast titled “Questioning Christianity”. I like intellectually analyzing different perspectives with nonjudgmental and equanimous curiosity—or at least hearing the perspective of others who do. Your post was a great read from that lens. I’m not sure where I land yet but I hope to always value other’s perspectives and the personal stories that brought them there. Thank you for sharing yours.
It’s always interesting to read what you and others make of all of this. There is nothing so far that can tempt me to believe in an intentional something— or even more so, an intentional someONE—behind all of this. As you say—if there is an intentional something or someone, where did IT come from?
The assumption that there must be meaning, as well, strikes me as yet another way our big brains make it all about us in a way our other animal kingdom friends do not appear to do, except in their core nonverbal “understanding” that their survival and reproduction are *the* objectives.
Inherent meaning in my beloved flowers, trees, rivers, friendships, familial love and more is a stretch for me. I understand that we find things aesthetically pleasing—all of the senses are there to tell us what we enjoy and what we don’t. But we as individuals don’t necessarily find pleasure or beauty in the same things, especially over the course of centuries or millennia, or from one household or country to another, so the notion of a god of some kind imbuing objects and sensory reactions and various actions with meaning falls short for me.
I will add that if I *were* to be tempted at all, I would not land on any kind of personal or interventionist humanoid figure created by humans in our own image and then promoted by us as having created US in ITS image and having control over events in our lives. The simpler and less humancentric the concept, the greater the chance that I might adopt at least part of it.
Meanwhile I am content to “let the mystery be,” in the words of the great contemporary philosopher-songwriter Iris Dement.
So neither the Fine Tuning nor Watchmaker school works for me. If there were a fine tuner or a watchmaker behind it all, I don’t think we would have been cursed with sinuses LOL
I'm with you, Janet. I can find beauty in my flowers, rivers and lovers without needing meaning to go with it. I'm fascinated to hear how other people interpret it all differently, though.
All worldly religions are dim shadows of the apprehension that "all this" should have meaning and purpose. But if God exists, then He is concerned with everything from quarks to quasars and is far beyond anything we can conceive. What strikes me is that, in a universe in which entropy always wins — in which the natural progression is towards zero — there is a counter to entropy in which energy + time + simple rules = complexity. It's a kind of almost-magic, call it what you will.
As long as there are multiple religions, who disagree on who or what god is, there cannot even be the beginning of an argument. Arbitrary stories all, not concerned with finding truth
god is about holding power over the masses and i dont see the point of entertaining the idea once you've realized it, unless youre just in it for funsies
It is fun though, isn't it?
If only there was anything fun, harmless, about religion.
NO!!!!
I agree it wise to look back k to the ancient Greeks for proof, but I’d recommend looking back a bit further. For me, it is Pythagoras that offers the most compelling proof.
For Pythagoras, it was math that proved the existence of a metaphysical reality, which naturally supports the possibility of God. He understood that his theorem for right triangles would be true even if you never bothered to draw one on a chalkboard. A squared plus B squared equals C squared is an organizing principle of material reality that doesn’t need to exist in material reality. Math is a metaphysical principle that creates an ordered physical world.
I wonder if it isn’t more generally adopted in the argument for the existence of God because, while it seems a well-reasoned proof for the possibility of a metaphysical reality, and the ethical teachings of Christ remain unchallenged by it, it offers no proof that the stories of the Bible are true.
In fact, it suggests they are preposterous, since exceptions to the model of metaphysical principals organizing material reality are unnecessary. There’s no need for miracles, or for anyone to rise from the dead. Everything is comfortably controlled from God’s metaphysical perch.
A shame, I think, because it creates a possibility for much better stories. Our religious inclinations aren’t the problem, our anachronistic Doctrines are.
It’s fascinating to think of the Greeks discovering all these important principles that we just put aside.
Tempted back?
Many people are raised without religion, by parents who don't and never did believe in any brand of manmade god.
So the question only applies to people who once believed, just as they might have once believed in the tooth fairy.
I'm almost intrigued by the false dichotomy of masterful design versus millions of random occurrences. Evolution isn't random, or simple. It's complex, intricate, and took billions of years, disasters, regeneration, more billions of years. In due course, billions of years, this earth, and all its manufactured gods, will no longer exist. Long enough for future generations to study the childish superstitions of their forebearers, in the same way we read about societies that believed in the ancient gods - contemporary gods aren't more real for being modern.
Yes, evolution is very impressive.
And slow, very slow, even without a weekly day of rest. 😁
Hello, my friend. I hope you're well as can be hoped.
As a former atheist who has long experience arguing about evolution, I personally am not a fan of either the fine-tuning argument or the watchmaker argument for the existence of God. One reason is that I think they're both defeasible, for the reasons you've laid out and others. Ultimately, both of these fall to the "God of the gaps"--let's say I do find the sequence of events that provides a clean natural explanation for the citric acid cycle; if that were my proof of God, where do I go? And we're pretty good at figuring things out; someone's probably going to solve that eventually (*if they haven't already. I'm not a biochemist, so I don't know what people know about that.)
But the bigger reason I do not like the fine-tuning or watchmaker arguments to argue for God is that they accept the materialist lens as the only way we can know what's true about reality. And the thing is, we all know that the materialist lens is false--even if we can't show that it's false using materialist reasoning. (Which, lol, of course we can't.)
You know that love is real. You know that your life has meaning. You know this in a way that you know what "pain" or "cold" or "red" is, even though you can never know for certain that the "red" I see is the same as your experience, and even though no one can replicate your experience of "love." You also believe in some moral facts: hurting people is bad, and forgiveness is good. These moral facts are also not provable using materialist reasoning.
Now I know some folks on Team Materialism will argue that these things are in fact not real: love is an oxytocin surge, that was evolved to solidify pair-bonding to insure the survival of our neotenous human babies. Red is a wavelength of radiation that our eyes have evolved to detect so we can avoid dangers like fires or poisonous plants. Indeed, some such philosophers (like the late Daniel Dennett) deny that there is such a thing as "qualia" at all.
But what seems like more of a just-so-story handwave: that "love" and "red" and "meaning" are epiphenomena or emergent properties that really are exclusively material and then they, ah, take on additional features that seem pretty dang immaterial at some level of complexity that no one can understand using exclusively materialist reasoning; or that you have, in fact, seen the color red and fallen in love before?
This is just a comment, so I'm not making an exhaustive argument for the existence of God here. What I am saying is that I lived a good deal of my adult life in the materialist frame, and when I was in that frame I could not see evidence of God either. Once I was able to step out of that frame, I could not unsee it. I now cannot look at the world and see it as anything but shot-through with meaning--something that the materialist frame denies is real, but is merely what we choose it to be. But saying that meaning is just whatever I choose, and can then throw over if I change my mind, is to say meaning doesn't exist at all. And I know that cannot be true.
The place that meaning is the most undeniable for me is in God's living creatures, especially my fellow humans. You, for instance, are thoughtful, compassionate, and brave. I have read quite a few of your essays, so though I've never met you in person I know that you have comforted your lover when she was dying even though she couldn't remember you by then. I know you're a good dad, and I know that you have excellent taste in music (by which I mean, we share musical tastes.) And I know that despite your brain cancer, you are still learning and trying to expand your mind. Ragged Clown, I admire you very much.
So I hope that you will forgive me for saying so, my atheist friend, but one of the reasons I believe in God is you.
I’m as moved today as I was yesterday, Dr P.
I don’t want to argue at all but I am curious and I would like to understand your understanding of the limits of materialism. For me, everything to do with life — from those little Archea up through the octopus with the citric acid cycle — has a kind of meaning that is over and above the physics and isn't easily explained by it. I still think of all this as part of the material world though.
Love too. And meanings and emotions. They all seem to me to be part of what evolution has given us to live the best lives that we can. The hard part for me to understand is how it all got started. How those first cells figured how to make entropy go in the other direction seems impossible to understand. Love is easy in comparison.
This has all been on my mind a lot recently. Especially the love thing. I’m doing quite well healthwise still but I know that could change at any time (waiting for MRI results now). There’s a bunch of stuff I dream of doing — from wine in a Greek café to floating down the Mekong to sitting in the shade on a Caribbean island — but love of my family keeps me at home and I think about it every day while I sit on my porch.
Oh, wow. Dr P! You have brought a tear to my eye. I’ll write a more thoughtful reply in the morning. Thank you. ♥️
If you know, you know. It's inside, not outside.
That's where it is, Bettina.
A more practical answer: I sometimes watch You Tube videos of people talking about their Near Death Experiences and they are very thought provoking if nothing else. They can move me to tears. I recommend! I have a friend who had a NDE many years ago and it changed her from an agnostic to a believer in God. I also knew someone who experienced a NDE as a child living in an orthodox Jewish community. He became a Buddhist!
Such an interesting read! I’ve listened to most of Tim Keller’s lectures via podcast titled “Questioning Christianity”. I like intellectually analyzing different perspectives with nonjudgmental and equanimous curiosity—or at least hearing the perspective of others who do. Your post was a great read from that lens. I’m not sure where I land yet but I hope to always value other’s perspectives and the personal stories that brought them there. Thank you for sharing yours.
Thank you so much, Alice. I am glad you enjoyed it.
It’s always interesting to read what you and others make of all of this. There is nothing so far that can tempt me to believe in an intentional something— or even more so, an intentional someONE—behind all of this. As you say—if there is an intentional something or someone, where did IT come from?
The assumption that there must be meaning, as well, strikes me as yet another way our big brains make it all about us in a way our other animal kingdom friends do not appear to do, except in their core nonverbal “understanding” that their survival and reproduction are *the* objectives.
Inherent meaning in my beloved flowers, trees, rivers, friendships, familial love and more is a stretch for me. I understand that we find things aesthetically pleasing—all of the senses are there to tell us what we enjoy and what we don’t. But we as individuals don’t necessarily find pleasure or beauty in the same things, especially over the course of centuries or millennia, or from one household or country to another, so the notion of a god of some kind imbuing objects and sensory reactions and various actions with meaning falls short for me.
I will add that if I *were* to be tempted at all, I would not land on any kind of personal or interventionist humanoid figure created by humans in our own image and then promoted by us as having created US in ITS image and having control over events in our lives. The simpler and less humancentric the concept, the greater the chance that I might adopt at least part of it.
Meanwhile I am content to “let the mystery be,” in the words of the great contemporary philosopher-songwriter Iris Dement.
So neither the Fine Tuning nor Watchmaker school works for me. If there were a fine tuner or a watchmaker behind it all, I don’t think we would have been cursed with sinuses LOL
I'm with you, Janet. I can find beauty in my flowers, rivers and lovers without needing meaning to go with it. I'm fascinated to hear how other people interpret it all differently, though.
Same!
All worldly religions are dim shadows of the apprehension that "all this" should have meaning and purpose. But if God exists, then He is concerned with everything from quarks to quasars and is far beyond anything we can conceive. What strikes me is that, in a universe in which entropy always wins — in which the natural progression is towards zero — there is a counter to entropy in which energy + time + simple rules = complexity. It's a kind of almost-magic, call it what you will.
Opposing the entropy. That's the secret. That's the answer!
As long as there are multiple religions, who disagree on who or what god is, there cannot even be the beginning of an argument. Arbitrary stories all, not concerned with finding truth