"You either love Harry Potter or you don’t, but it makes no sense to engage in a debate about which aspects of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are real or not. They are all conjured by human imagination"
I'm amazed at how many Quora questions ask how something in fiction works or whether a character can do this or that impossible thing. I answer (when I answer) that the author can make them do anything they want to make them do and/or no explanation is needed for how a fictional device 'works.'
In my personal experience religious belief is more emotional and social factors than driven by intellectual/ philosophical processes. I became an atheist in what seemed like an epiphany but was likely brewing unknown to me for a while. Even after I was a bit mad at the god that didn't exist for not existing.
It seems to me that skeptical arguments used to be open to a religion apply to all religions and therefore defeat the purpose of the apologist. I heard the argument against causality proposed by Al - Ghazali that there is no causality, and that God recreates reality every instant (sorry if I am butchering the philosophy, I am going from memory). Therefore, you cannot trust your senses and God can change the situation at any moment. It was first used by an Islamic theologian. I personally heard the same argument from a Hasidic rabbi. The doctrines in Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism are also interchangeable in that the ultimate reality is beyond causality.
Always enjoy your writings on philosophy of religion! I think I first saw you from a debate you had with William Lane Craig--I was a conservative Christian at the time funny enough (though even then I still rejected Creationism!).
I very much agree with your points at the end about skepticism perhaps going a bit too far--sure, maybe one day we’ll have more powerful, computer-integrated brains that are able to come up with new concepts, but that’s totally irrelevant to what we’re discussing now!
If I may nitpick on one thing though, wouldn’t an atheist Platonist technically be a supernaturalist? Or an atheist dualist (not sure if properly dualism counts as supernatural)? Or perhaps not because usually such nonphysical entities are thought to be casually inert?
The best argument I can make for religion is that singing worship songs around a campfire during a beautiful sunset is both pleasant and feels appropriate. Singing “thanks” feels right.
I have found that Evangelical Christians, whom I have frequent contact with in Tennessee (where I live) and Kentucky (where I am from), view science as simply an alternative to religion. They see it through religiously colored glasses in that it is static and something people believe in or not (somewhat Pyrrhonian) rather than a process to understand the world. They often say "the scientists were wrong..." not understanding that knowledge is constantly changing in light of new evidence and that is part of the scientific process. There is also a serious problem how the media (mainstream and all) report "science."
“Religion”, while I guess good in theory, in practice has been a humanitarian disaster...and beside that is all based on superstition and fairytale mythology. Hard pass...
" But I’m more than happy to concede that brains like ours, which evolved to solve problems posed by social life in the Pleistocene savannah, are likely limited. " This, of course, is extremely similar to Darwin, explaining in his autobiography why he moved from being a theist (since the laws of nature seemed so well designed) to agnosticism, which asserts that we are not in a position to give an answer to the question of God's existence.
There is one question even more fundamental that troubles me here. What counts as "natural" as opposed to supernatural? If I recall correctly, Newton was criticised for invoking a supernatural attraction between distant massive bodies, but now we are all used to regarding gravity as a natural force, or at a more fundamental level as the manifestation of a natural energy field.
"You either love Harry Potter or you don’t, but it makes no sense to engage in a debate about which aspects of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are real or not. They are all conjured by human imagination"
I'm amazed at how many Quora questions ask how something in fiction works or whether a character can do this or that impossible thing. I answer (when I answer) that the author can make them do anything they want to make them do and/or no explanation is needed for how a fictional device 'works.'
In my personal experience religious belief is more emotional and social factors than driven by intellectual/ philosophical processes. I became an atheist in what seemed like an epiphany but was likely brewing unknown to me for a while. Even after I was a bit mad at the god that didn't exist for not existing.
It seems to me that skeptical arguments used to be open to a religion apply to all religions and therefore defeat the purpose of the apologist. I heard the argument against causality proposed by Al - Ghazali that there is no causality, and that God recreates reality every instant (sorry if I am butchering the philosophy, I am going from memory). Therefore, you cannot trust your senses and God can change the situation at any moment. It was first used by an Islamic theologian. I personally heard the same argument from a Hasidic rabbi. The doctrines in Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism are also interchangeable in that the ultimate reality is beyond causality.
Always enjoy your writings on philosophy of religion! I think I first saw you from a debate you had with William Lane Craig--I was a conservative Christian at the time funny enough (though even then I still rejected Creationism!).
I very much agree with your points at the end about skepticism perhaps going a bit too far--sure, maybe one day we’ll have more powerful, computer-integrated brains that are able to come up with new concepts, but that’s totally irrelevant to what we’re discussing now!
If I may nitpick on one thing though, wouldn’t an atheist Platonist technically be a supernaturalist? Or an atheist dualist (not sure if properly dualism counts as supernatural)? Or perhaps not because usually such nonphysical entities are thought to be casually inert?
Evidence of unicorns? Hell, I've seen an actual picture of one. What more could you ask?
The best argument I can make for religion is that singing worship songs around a campfire during a beautiful sunset is both pleasant and feels appropriate. Singing “thanks” feels right.
I have found that Evangelical Christians, whom I have frequent contact with in Tennessee (where I live) and Kentucky (where I am from), view science as simply an alternative to religion. They see it through religiously colored glasses in that it is static and something people believe in or not (somewhat Pyrrhonian) rather than a process to understand the world. They often say "the scientists were wrong..." not understanding that knowledge is constantly changing in light of new evidence and that is part of the scientific process. There is also a serious problem how the media (mainstream and all) report "science."
“Religion”, while I guess good in theory, in practice has been a humanitarian disaster...and beside that is all based on superstition and fairytale mythology. Hard pass...
" But I’m more than happy to concede that brains like ours, which evolved to solve problems posed by social life in the Pleistocene savannah, are likely limited. " This, of course, is extremely similar to Darwin, explaining in his autobiography why he moved from being a theist (since the laws of nature seemed so well designed) to agnosticism, which asserts that we are not in a position to give an answer to the question of God's existence.
There is one question even more fundamental that troubles me here. What counts as "natural" as opposed to supernatural? If I recall correctly, Newton was criticised for invoking a supernatural attraction between distant massive bodies, but now we are all used to regarding gravity as a natural force, or at a more fundamental level as the manifestation of a natural energy field.