Einstein: The Bible Is Pretty Childish

[PSmith08]

Patrick, you are arguing semantics.  The subjunctive case in English is rarely differentiated from the future or conditional when it's being used.  You've now swallowed the poison.

It seems to me that, when language is at issue, semantics are all we have, speaking in linguistically precise terms. The general abuse of the subjunctive mood is hardly my fault, and I wasn't aware that misuse negated the rules of grammar and syntax.

But that is the point. There is really no difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing in this or that God. You can also say that Santa Claus is the personification of the principle that it is nice when people care for each other and give each other presents to show that. That isn't trivial at all. Besides, organized religion and believing in fairy tales is what trivializes "God", not pointing out that the idol worshipping nature of organized religions does that.

That is a reductive attitude that discards from the matter of God a lot that was never there with Santa Claus. You're, in effect, saying that belief is belief. That is facially ridiculous. Now, I have to give you credit for setting up an argument that results in the position that it makes no difference whether we believe in God or not; at the same time, however, to present God as a distant, incomprehensible entity is equally trivializing in its own way. Saying something cannot be understood is, in and of itself, an attempt to do what your "fairy tales" do: relate the transcendent to humans through easier-to-understand terms. Laying down a complex set of behavioral guarantees (i.e., if you do not worship God, then you will go to Hell, which is not a pleasant place unless you're Billy Joel) is, in essence, the same thing as saying that God cannot be understood: it is a terminal argument that ends further discussion. To put it another way, it is a being-argument. It says "God is..." just as clearly as a set of rules and guidelines. Both positions say that there is nothing more to know, whether or not it is possible to know more is an unimportant fact, since there is nothing more to know.

[karlhenning]

The trivialization of the opposed belief is necessary for the non-believer.

I don't know if this genuinely works as a principle;  but certainly a great deal of behavior on the present thread bears it out.

[drogulus]

Laying down a complex set of behavioral guarantees (i.e., if you do not worship God, then you will go to Hell, which is not a pleasant place unless you're Billy Joel) is, in essence, the same thing as saying that God cannot be understood: it is a terminal argument that ends further discussion. To put it another way, it is a being-argument. It says "God is..." just as clearly as a set of rules and guidelines. Both positions say that there is nothing more to know, whether or not it is possible to know more is an unimportant fact, since there is nothing more to know.

    I agree, it's a conversation stopper. However, the fact that there is nothing more to know doesn't make beliefs about that nothing any more secure than knowing that what is believed is false. False is certainly not a justification, and not knowing anything about it is not really much better. At least it's not illogical, but that's not a very high standard. I wouldn't want to be accused of believing everything logically possible.

     Usually beliefs where absent justification is invoked are abandoned at some point by people who ask questions. That's the way it's done. At some point you take the hint, that "don't know" actually means what it says, that the believers really don't know, so instead they believe, and you move on. If you're the curious type you wonder, as I have here, why the people who constantly stress their (rather obvious) ignorance are so anxious to convince others that they nevertheless know what it is they don't know. Dennett calls this kind of thing a "deepity", a false profundity, like "love is just a four letter word". I think you're supposed to marvel at the mysteriousness of it all. 

[Al Moritz]

    At some point you take the hint, that "don't know" actually means what it says, that the believers really don't know, so instead they believe, and you move on. If you're the curious type you wonder, as I have here, why the people who constantly stress their (rather obvious) ignorance are so anxious to convince others that they nevertheless know what it is they don't know. Dennett calls this kind of thing a "deepity", a false profundity, like "love is just a four letter word".

Right, materialists really don't know, they just believe in a naturalistic origin of the universe (honestly, I don't have enough of the absurd faith that it takes to be an atheist). Theists who accept knowledge from divine revelation just move on.

[drogulus]

Right, materialists really don't know, they just believe in a naturalistic origin of the universe (honestly, I don't have enough of the absurd faith that it takes to be an atheist). Theists who accept knowledge from divine revelation just move on.

      That's right, faith cancels out on both sides, so you go with evidence. Advantage, naturalism. Just because I oppose belief as a truth generator doesn't mean I forbid belief altogether where evidence warrants it. I mean, come on, even if there's no theory of gravity should we have to quake with fear that we'll fall of the earth any minute now? Some sort of naturalism must be endorsed by experience, don't you think? Or is all knowledge to be considered suspect because your special kind is?

       Strictly speaking, naturalistic origin might not be right, though. Naturalism could just be as far as the eye can see and no further, and origin could just be left as a more or less real "don't know", not a "don't know, so let me tell you allll about it" sort of "don't know". 

[Bunny]

It seems to me that, when language is at issue, semantics are all we have, speaking in linguistically precise terms. The general abuse of the subjunctive mood is hardly my fault, and I wasn't aware that misuse negated the rules of grammar and syntax.

That is a reductive attitude that discards from the matter of God a lot that was never there with Santa Claus. You're, in effect, saying that belief is belief. That is facially ridiculous. Now, I have to give you credit for setting up an argument that results in the position that it makes no difference whether we believe in God or not; at the same time, however, to present God as a distant, incomprehensible entity is equally trivializing in its own way. Saying something cannot be understood is, in and of itself, an attempt to do what your "fairy tales" do: relate the transcendent to humans through easier-to-understand terms. Laying down a complex set of behavioral guarantees (i.e., if you do not worship God, then you will go to Hell, which is not a pleasant place unless you're Billy Joel) is, in essence, the same thing as saying that God cannot be understood: it is a terminal argument that ends further discussion. To put it another way, it is a being-argument. It says "God is..." just as clearly as a set of rules and guidelines. Both positions say that there is nothing more to know, whether or not it is possible to know more is an unimportant fact, since there is nothing more to know.

Saying that something is too difficult for the human mind to encompass is not trivializing; it is aggrandizing.  The impossiblity of completely understanding the God is something that has been understood intuitively from the earliest religious experiences of men -- Semele disintegrates on the spot when she is granted her wish to see Zeus in all of his glory; similarly, the Old Testament is filled with references to how a man cannot look upon the face of God and survive -- Elijah is granted a vision of heaven with the face of God obscured.  It is hard to equate that with the trivializing idea that you can strike a bargain with any God: I'll follow the rules and you will protect me from harm (or won't punish me).  There is no protection afforded to earthquake victims who randomly die or survive  regardless of piety, or those afflicted by "dread diseases."    Does anyone seriously believe that Ted Kennedy, for instance, has been stricken with cancer because of his sins?  Or that if he survives it is by the direct intervention of a deity?

If there is a value in organized religion, it doesn't have to do with how man regards the deity, or even how the deity regards the man.  The god of most religions is usually the enforcer/rewarder for breaking/observing the rules that religion promotes: For Judaism, God protects his chosen people if they follow an incredibly complex set of rules that govern how they eat, what they eat, where they sleep, how they pray, how they interact with their parents and neighbors, how they get married, how they die, how they are buried, how they are executed, when a man can have intercourse with his wife, when he can't have intercourse with his wife, what the wife is allowed to do, what the wife isn't allowed to do, who take care of widows and orphans, what happens if a woman has an illegitimate child, how the community deals with or doesn't deal with the children of illegitimate men and women, to what generation punishment on men is applied to their descendants, how to bury the dead, how to mourn the dead, how long to mourn the dead, etc, etc, etc. Moreover, God protects the land and people of Israel if they follow these rules!  Who really believes something like that nowadays except those who espouse the most fundamentalist faith?

The great value of religion isn't faith but its rules; especially those rules that govern how humans interact with each other.  Religion is the glue that binds together human existence: we mark our birth, our passage into maturity, our mating, our procreation, and finally our old age and death the way religion has taught us.  Does it matter if we believe in anything so long as we observe the most important rules -- to be as considerate and as honest as possible in our dealings with each other?  Whether this is the result of divine inspiration or just the product of a brilliant human mind is beside the point, and in truth it doesn't really matter.

[Al Moritz]

      That's right, faith cancels out on both sides, so you go with evidence. Advantage, naturalism.

Whoooaaaaahhaaaaahhhaaaaaa! That's where atheism always looses me big time. Based on evidence? Haha, c'mon, don't be silly. Where is the evidence that the universe was created by natural causes? You can extrapolate from the fact that the universe operates by natural causes ^*), but that is not evidence. It is not even scientific extrapolation, it is philosophocal, metaphysical extrapolation.

_____________

^*) which is no evidence for atheism. The theist holds that God designed the laws of nature so that the universe operates by natural causes. From evidence, the atheistic and theistic options are indistinguishable.

In fact, the first scientists who started the scientific revolution expected (and were confirmed in their expectation) that the universe operates by orderly laws, which they viewed as God-given.

[Bunny]

      That's right, faith cancels out on both sides, so you go with evidence. Advantage, naturalism. Just because I oppose belief as a truth generator doesn't mean I forbid belief altogether where evidence warrants it. I mean, come on, even if there's no theory of gravity should we have to quake with fear that we'll fall of the earth any minute now? Some sort of naturalism must be endorsed by experience, don't you think? Or is all knowledge to be considered suspect because your special kind is?

       Strictly speaking, naturalistic origin might not be right, though. Naturalism could just be as far as the eye can see and no further, and origin could just be left as a more or less real "don't know", not a "don't know, so let me tell you allll about it" sort of "don't know". 

Whoooaaaaahhaaaaahhhaaaaaa! That's where atheism always looses me big time. Based on evidence? Haha, c'mon, don't be silly. Where is the evidence that the universe was created by natural causes? You can extrapolate from the fact that the universe operates by natural causes ^*), but that is not evidence. It is not even scientific extrapolation, it is philosophocal, metaphysical extrapolation.

_____________

^*) which is no evidence for atheism. The theist holds that God designed the laws of nature so that the universe operates by natural causes. From evidence, the atheistic and theistic options are indistinguishable.

In fact, the first scientists who started the scientific revolution expected (and were confirmed in their expectation) that the universe operates by orderly laws, which they viewed as God-given.

                   

[Brian]

Where is the evidence that the universe was created by natural causes?

Erm ... the universe? 

Silliness aside, the fact that 200 years ago people were asking the same thing about the origin of human beings, and our own planet, and our sun and moon, bodes well for our eventually coming closer to figuring this one out. Staking one's religious faith on things scientists haven't figured out yet leaves open the problem of the scientists figuring them out - for instance, C.S. Lewis' arguments about morality proving God exists is outdated now that scientists, anthropologists and so on have honed in on the evolution of morality and the very natural means by which the "Moral Law" came about.

[Al Moritz]

Erm ... the universe? 

Silliness aside, the fact that 200 years ago people were asking the same thing about the origin of human beings, and our own planet, and our sun and moon, bodes well for our eventually coming closer to figuring this one out. Staking one's religious faith on things scientists haven't figured out yet leaves open the problem of the scientists figuring them out - for instance, C.S. Lewis' arguments about morality proving God exists is outdated now that scientists, anthropologists and so on have honed in on the evolution of morality and the very natural means by which the "Moral Law" came about.

Here you are wrong, and you haven't paid attention in discussions before this one. There is a  difference between things that science has not yet discovered (where some insert the always ill-fated "God of the Gaps") and things that science cannot in principle discover.

See also, for example:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,6316.msg154585.html#msg154585

After reading that post, please read also the one previous to it. Following this, please download and read the paper by George Ellis that I refer and link to.

[Ryan Howard]

Something must be the ultimate explanation that is the basis for everything else. In the case of the theist it is God, in the case of the atheist it has to be eternal matter (that a naturalistic "creation out of nothing" is absurd I have explained elsewhere). The problem with eternal matter is that, in order to be not just eternal but also eternally functional, it has to have miraculous properties that we know ordinary matter does not possess (e.g. not obeying the second law of thermodynamics). So if the atheist proclaims that his views (in fact, beliefs) are more "scientific" than the theist position, I have to laugh my ass off. Whatever way you twist and turn things, the atheist has to assume new, unobserved and unobservable properties of matter, which makes his position anything but scientific, rather, a modern fairy tale. That this fairy tale is materialistic, and dressed up in (pseudo-) scientific language, does not in any way help to make it "scientific".

Al, what you say here makes sense to me...I'm curious if anyone has read Hawking and/or Stenger on the subject of the universe's origins, since both seem to have made arguments that the universe could naturalistically come into existence from nothing. I'm only somewhat familiar with the Hawking/Hartle model of the cosmos, which suggests that time is bounded in the past yet did not have a distinct beginning; there is also the subject of "quantum cosmology," which attempts to circumvent the problem of an initial "cause" for the universe through quantum mechanics. The goals of these models seem to be to show that the universe coming into existence from nothing would not necessarily violate the laws of physics; Stenger, from what I understand, has argued in his own way the the laws of physics could have come from nothing. I'm dubious about whether any of these approaches genuinely work their way back to nothing without assuming some kind of preexisting states or laws...on the other hand, who am I to argue physics with these guys?

[Brian]

you haven't paid attention in discussions before this one.

Guilty as charged, and predictably so. Will do.

[Al Moritz]

Al, what you say here makes sense to me...I'm curious if anyone has read Hawking and/or Stenger on the subject of the universe's origins, since both seem to have made arguments that the universe could naturalistically come into existence from nothing. I'm only somewhat familiar with the Hawking/Hartle model of the cosmos, which suggests that time is bounded in the past yet did not have a distinct beginning;

I discuss the problems with the Hawking/Hartle model here:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,5919.msg174242.html#msg174242

there is also the subject of "quantum cosmology," which attempts to circumvent the problem of an initial "cause" for the universe through quantum mechanics. The goals of these models seem to be to show that the universe coming into existence from nothing would not necessarily violate the laws of physics; Stenger, from what I understand, has argued in his own way the the laws of physics could have come from nothing. I'm dubious about whether any of these approaches genuinely work their way back to nothing without assuming some kind of preexisting states or laws...on the other hand, who am I to argue physics with these guys?

You are absolutely right to be dubious in the way you mention. It is always a preexisting state or law, never "nothing", because truly nothing evidently has no properties. Quantum fluctuations (which might give birth to universes, a purely speculative and tremendously large leap from known physics into the unknown) presuppose quantum vacua in which they can occur. But a quantum vacuum is not nothing, it is a field, and the physical laws that govern it, are obviously not nothing as well.

In a previous post I had said that claiming creation of universes out of quantum vacua to be a naturalistic "creation out of nothing" is the most profound intellectual blunder that I have encountered in all my life. I stand by this statement.

[Joe_Campbell]

Erm ... the universe? 

Silliness aside, the fact that 200 years ago people were asking the same thing about the origin of human beings, and our own planet, and our sun and moon, bodes well for our eventually coming closer to figuring this one out. Staking one's religious faith on things scientists haven't figured out yet leaves open the problem of the scientists figuring them out - for instance, C.S. Lewis' arguments about morality proving God exists is outdated now that scientists, anthropologists and so on have honed in on the evolution of morality and the very natural means by which the "Moral Law" came about.

I believe I've read stuff about this (the link that Shrunk mentioned?). However, I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that 'because evolution has been used to explain morality's existence' that it automatically does mean this is the way things happened. It's an explanation that fits within the model, but I can't see how testable it is, let alone verifiable...in other words, it's a nice idea, and may even be right, but I can't see it being used as an argument against the 'God' justification for morality.

FWIW, I find it interesting that a theological axiom could be countered by a biological theory...

[Ten thumbs]

It seems incontrovertible to me that a code of morality is necessary for the survival of a civilization. The Bible provided such a code for a few thousand years and has therefore proved very valuable. Hardly a contribution that can be described as childish.

[M forever]

It seems incontrovertible to me that a code of morality is necessary for the survival of a civilization. The Bible provided such a code for a few thousand years and has therefore proved very valuable.

No, it didn't. Not at all. People just always selected from the texts whatever they wanted and ignored whatever they didn't want. And they still do that.

[Brian]

The Bible provided such a code for a few thousand years and has therefore proved very valuable.

Valuable perhaps, but certainly not comprehensive. If the Bible is to continue to be such a code, somebody had better rewrite the parts about homosexuals, inequality of genders, and the existence of Hell.

[M forever]

That's not even necessary because

People just always selected from the texts whatever they wanted and ignored whatever they didn't want. And they still do that.

Besides, who would be supposedly qualified to write or edit such a code? The bible is a deeply immoral book from our modern, civilized (well, more or less) point of view, a primitive tribal myhtology which mandates and celebrates genocide and hatred, intolerance and violence as a solution for problems.

[drogulus]

Whoooaaaaahhaaaaahhhaaaaaa! That's where atheism always looses me big time. Based on evidence? Haha, c'mon, don't be silly. Where is the evidence that the universe was created by natural causes? You can extrapolate from the fact that the universe operates by natural causes ^*), but that is not evidence. It is not even scientific extrapolation, it is philosophocal, metaphysical extrapolation.

_____________

^*) which is no evidence for atheism. The theist holds that God designed the laws of nature so that the universe operates by natural causes. From evidence, the atheistic and theistic options are indistinguishable.

In fact, the first scientists who started the scientific revolution expected (and were confirmed in their expectation) that the universe operates by orderly laws, which they viewed as God-given.

      No, Al, you didn't get what I said. I didn't say "naturalism explains creation", I said creation can't be explained either theistically or naturally, and I said elsewhere that I think creation will eventually be seen as unworkable because it exports the idea of time from its natural home in a continuum and turns it into an absolute. The idea of "time before time" is regressive. It returns to a form of the absolute coordinate system that relativity replaced. Once again, you're forced by these bad models to replace time with another time, matter with shmatter, which one hopes will do just as well as matter for preserving information so a god can form and grow up to design universes. What a mess!

    Faith cancels out for any opposition of explanatory schemes, since it's simply dishonest to claim it for one side (acknowledged in a backhanded way by your reference to the faith in natural causes). You're right that faith of a sort is necessary to rely on the continued cooperation of nature in allowing us to exist, but the slide from that to the belief that faith in anything equals the odds between natural and supernatural explanations just isn't so. Once you divide through by faith, you're left with what you have faith in. So the advantage does go to naturalism as the working assumption for anyone trying to do real work in understanding what there is. And in my last post I really did acknowledge the limitations of any model for a useful theory of origins.

       Strictly speaking, naturalistic origin might not be right, though. Naturalism could just be as far as the eye can see and no further, and origin could just be left as a more or less real "don't know", not a "don't know, so let me tell you allll about it" sort of "don't know". 

     Edit: I'm really saying more than just "naturalism doesn't explain origin". Perhaps the concept of origin is fatally flawed. That seems to be where Hawking is coming from.

[Guido]

Al, I don't know how you can be so sure that the second law holds in all possible physical situations even when the laws of physics (or prelaws or whatever we call them) are completely different to what we can even concieve of now... e.g. Does entropy increase if there is no time (as we know it?) There's just too many questions and unknowns for any one to be as sure about these facts as you appear to be... or am I missing something?