Imagine that there's a meteor heading towards earth. All evidence suggests that it will hit in three days, and wipe out all multicellular life - it's a big one.
What do you do? How do you live your life your last three days?
One school of thought says, disregard the evidence. Assert, against it all, that the meteor is going to miss. Or if that's hard, decide to trust someone who asserts it (this is usually easier).
This is arguably rational. If you're wrong, it won't matter, and you'll probably feel less awful your last three days.
I think creationist's thinking is something like this:
1. If evolution is true, then God is not.
2 Without a creator's purpose, existence is meaningless.
3. If existence is meaningless, you might as well assume it has a meaning, (because that's no less meaningless than anything else!).
To argue against a creationist, it's probably best - or at least, most efficient - to argue against the first stage in that chain of reasoning. If you want to argue against all theists, you can argue against the second.
If you want to argue against all non-nihilists, I guess you can argue against the third, but that is ... literally pointless either way.
So the third point is a good thing to concede in arguments with creationists (and theists, if you insist).
"I think creationist's thinking is something like this:
1. If evolution is true, then God is not."
Serious question - is this US-specific line of thinking? Because I was raised in Poland, which is ultra-religious and if you aren't a catholic you will be ostracized from your community, and yet evolution was NEVER questioned in my education, and I went to private catholic schools. It's widely accepted by everyone, I think even the pope supports it. Obviously, it's accepted in the line of "evolution is real, but God probably helped a bit along the way", but still, I don't know anyone crazy enough to say evolution is not real. And yet the assumption I always hear on HN and reddit is that if you are religious you don't believe in evolution - how come?
This is mostly a US affliction, but spreading. Not catholic though - about two popes ago the pope issued a paper saying evolution was god's method and that the science was revealing the glory of God's work.
The problem in parts of the US is that some religious leaders decided, quite explicitly, to use evolution to drive a wedge between modern, 'materialist', scientific thinking and their followers. I think this is because they could forsee their congregations falling as more people became better informed and drifted away from religion. So they found a way to make it "us or them" and forge a new sort of unity through opposition. Unfortunately it took hold quite well and has been spread outside the US by US influenced churches and pastors.
In Europe, even religious people don't take their religion seriously. It's rather a personal, cultural thing, something that makes one's soul feel good, something that creates communities, gives hope and consolation etc. It's put in a totally different sphere than worldly matters, like science, physics, biology etc. Religious talks even at ceremonies is always about how humans feel (and of course endlessly repeating the story of Jesus). But they don't usually touch topics that "smell" scientific and fact-like.
But this is quite a new development. It's hard for us to appreciate it, but there are other conceptions of religion's role in life. In the US, many religious people believe that things in the Bible literally describe how stuff is, it's not just an allegory or metaphor to help people in their lives. (Or similarly in Islam, the religion is not separate from all other aspects of life, but an inseparable part, without which nothing else makes sense).
Indirectly. Creationism is really only a thing within certain subsets of baptist and evangelical branches of Christianity, and these branches haven't take a large hold in Europe, whereas in the US they've flourished. Catholics have never really gone for it, even in the US, as far as I'm aware.
> Catholics have never really gone for it, even in the US, as far as I'm aware.
Catholics haven't gone for it the way certain branches of Protestantism have because adhering to Young Earth creationism in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary is largely, in those branches of Protestantism, a defense of a particular extreme form of a sola scriptura (a Protestant doctrine which directly contrasts with Catholicisms dual role for scripture and tradition) with Biblical literalism (which is likewise not a Catholic doctrine.)
There are Young Earth Creationists in the Catholic Church, but its a matter of personal belief that is far removed from the core doctrine and identity of the Church.
I was raised Catholic. There is a subset who have definitely gone for creationism. They know that they are not obliged by the Church to believe in the literal story of genesis, but they still prefer it for various reasons.
> I was raised in Poland, which is ultra-religious
I grew up in Italy. No comment needed, I suppose :-)
Still science is science, and religion is religion. They manage to live together in (enough) harmony. But idiot thesis like creationism are never given any more credit than a promise by a politician in the last days before an election.
It's one of the usual arguments for ignoring the "simulation argument".
I think there's a bigger problem with the religious version that you presented. Namely, for any religion/concept of God, you can imagine another one that wants you to do opposite things. How do you know which God's existence to assume? You're back to trying to find evidence for one God against another God. In practice, this would probably also provide evidence against the claim that "no Gods exist". It's hard to think of evidence of the form "If there's a God, it probably wants X as opposed to not X." that really needs that pre-condition.
So the religious person may just as well go back to trying to gather evidence for God against no-God, because they need to gather evidence for God against the God-that-desires-opposite-things anyway.
>Namely, for any religion/concept of God, you can imagine another one that wants you to do opposite things. How do you know which God's existence to assume?
In some religions, the relation with God is a tangible and personal one. God "speaks to you" so to speak.
So you just "know" -- you're not starting from evaluating random entities against each other as if they're all equal.
Exactly. But then this is already "evidence" to them about the existence of God. Such people have no need to ponder that "If evolution is true then there's no meaning in life so that case is uninteresting, so therefore let's believe in God since then life is meaningful".
If God "speaks to you", you already "know" he exists. This was precisely what I tried to point out in my previous comment. If you have a method to pick out a particular God out of all possible Gods, then this method (or something related) can also be used to reject atheism directly. There's no need for the elaborate argument that I responded to.
By the way, this is disputable. I'm not denying that idiots/creationists use this argument; I question the argument itself.
If evolution is true, a literary interpretation of the Bible is not. Still, evolution can be seen as a wonderful present from a "superior intelligence".
I'm a Christian who finds evidence for evolution pretty strong. http://biologos.org/ is an organization promoting this general view.
I also find the evidence for Christ's resurrection quite strong. "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel is a book that lays it out well (though I'm not a huge fan of the literary approach).
I assume you speak about the third step, that if you suspect existence may meaningless, you might as well assume it has a meaning, because if you were correct it doesn't matter that you are wrong anyway (by definition).
I don't think it's like Pascal's wager, because there's no need for probability here, and you're not trying to avoid any bad outcome. I think it's more like how Pascal rejected the concern that he might be insane (if you ask yourself "how do I know I'm not crazy?" you're basically already assuming you're not crazy).
But, I haven't actually read all of Pascal's Pensees. What extracts I have read of it suggests to me that he's heavily straw-manned both by later philosophers and people writing about it today, so for all I know the "wager" was more like this, too.
Isn't using Pascal's wager to support faith kind of broken due to the idea that for any possibility that there's a God who rewards you with a happy life for belief in them, there's an equal possibility that there's an evil God, who punishes you for belief in them?
Pascal's wager also supposes that faith is "free". It doesn't factor in the cost like having to dismiss all modern notions of Biology in certain cases. You have to weigh the chance of eternal damnation against the possibility of wasting your only life (no afterlife) laboring under false pretenses.
I'm all too used to my argument being put in a box and dismissed with a standard argument for that box. But please don't do that, OK?
Hell is nowhere in this chain of argument. God arguably is, but that's in step 2. It's step 3 which may kinda, sorta remind you of Pascal's Wager, but it's only an argument against nihilism, not even for theism.
Yes, conceding step 3 leaves wide open the question of what to believe in instead of nihilism. Even conceding step 2 leaves open the question of "what sort of god are we talking about". But this is precisely the point. That means you can argue these things separately, while still acknowledging your opponent's ultimate concern.
I'm not dismissing anything. Just pointing people to a relevant interesting page. Try not to be too hasty to read arguments into comments where there are none :)
The point of article is if you start any discussion with outright declaring someone wrong, there is no chance of you changing their thoughts. So you are right we have to start by conceding some points. Like in any negotiation you win by little bit of give and take.
> Existence IS meaningless, this is the very beauty of it: you can give it any meaning you want.
Although you have to concede quite a lot. When you feel awe at the stars, or the exhilaration of love, or burning anger at injustice, you must tell yourself, "this feeling is just an adaptive delusion; there's nothing good about caring or wrong about rape and murder per se, I just happen not to like them because I'm That Sort of Mammal".
If you say "existence is meaningless, morality doesn't exist" and in the next breath say anything about what people should or shouldn't do, including whether they should believe in God, I respectfully submit that it's inconsistent to do so. (Not that you should mind inconsistency.) This is my beef with people like Dawkins: if he's right, everything he says is utterly pointless.
That is why I never talk about what people should or should not do - I talk only about some mind tricks that work for me.
That said, I can concede a lot without pretending the universe somehow cares for me. I eat good food, and drink good wine, and just enjoy everything I have.
You just make up some meaning from thin air. All meaning is made up. Meaning is a human construct, as any other concept.
Even if you disagree with me, you may concede that for all practical means the universe is infinite and the human mind is finite. Since something finite can't contain the infinite, how foolish would I be if I pretend to understand the universe?
Not that I agree with the creationists, I would love to believe that I'm special because some big guy in the sky gave me life. It is a comforting idea, but in order to accept the concept of an anthropomorphic god you have to believe that humans are somehow special, and this is very pretentious. I'm living in this tiny little rock floating in space which existence is barely a drop in the ocean of time. I'm not special except in the minds of the few people that manage to like me.
But I will not pretend my own version of god is less made-up: the Tao we talk about is not the real Tao.
What do you do? How do you live your life your last three days?
One school of thought says, disregard the evidence. Assert, against it all, that the meteor is going to miss. Or if that's hard, decide to trust someone who asserts it (this is usually easier).
This is arguably rational. If you're wrong, it won't matter, and you'll probably feel less awful your last three days.
I think creationist's thinking is something like this:
1. If evolution is true, then God is not. 2 Without a creator's purpose, existence is meaningless. 3. If existence is meaningless, you might as well assume it has a meaning, (because that's no less meaningless than anything else!).
To argue against a creationist, it's probably best - or at least, most efficient - to argue against the first stage in that chain of reasoning. If you want to argue against all theists, you can argue against the second.
If you want to argue against all non-nihilists, I guess you can argue against the third, but that is ... literally pointless either way.
So the third point is a good thing to concede in arguments with creationists (and theists, if you insist).