Giberson is now up to part five of his critique of Gnu Atheism, and shows no signs of slowing down. Doesn’t the man have any science to do?
Any any rate, Dr. Karl’s now accusing us of having a double standard when we discuss science and religion: we laugh at religion because it doesn’t progress, or, when it does, it progresses reluctantly, kicked in the tuchus by science. But we don’t seem to recognize that science moves forward by kicking itself in the tuchus. Newton himself got dethroned, so why must we make fun of religion for dethroning Yahweh (in whom Giberson no longer believes) in favor of an apophatic do-nothing God? Don’t we see that theology progresses just like science? As Giberson says, “Is there not a strange double standard here?”
Well, no. First of all, the changes in theology are not driven by an increasingly better knowledge of the nature of God. It’s not like we’ve acquired faith-based evidence that Yahweh is out and Apophatic Jebus is in. The rejection of an angry god in favor of a loving one does not come from any objective method of ascertaining the truth about divinity. Rather, it comes from two things.
1. Improvements in morality that came from secular thought. These “improvements”, although embodied in theological change, do not derive from religious “ways of knowing” or an increasingly sophisticated scrutiny of ancient texts by theologians. They come from our slow but inexorable realization that some things are simply wrong. (As to why this happens, I tend to agree with Peter Singer’s thesis as described in The Expanding Circle.)
Why do we no longer stone adulterers, condone slavery, or kill children who disobey their parents? Not because Jesus changed those laws (he came to uphold the Old Testament law), or because theologians wrested some new insights from scripture revealing that these were bad things to do. Rather, as societies interacted and pondered the issues, we realized that it was simply not on to treat people this way. Yes, these moral changes may have been butressed by speeches from the pulpit, and yes, religious organizations have been involved in social advances, but that’s because those advances were already part of the zeitgeist. The idea that blacks should be treated as equals, for instance, did not derive from a new understanding of scripture, regardless of the importance of black churches in the civil rights movement.
2. Improvements in understanding the world that came from science. Some of the “advances” in theology, like the assertion that the Bible isn’t a science textbook, come, pure and simple, from science showing that that the old Biblical textbook of science was simply wrong. We’re not 6,000 years old, the earth is not flat, and we don’t all descend from a single pair of humans. These discoveries have prompted a whole new wave of theological revisionism, attempting to show that this stuff doesn’t matter after all.
Why do we criticize theological “evolution” while applauding the advance of science? Because as science advances it gets closer and closer to the truth, and we know this because it works better and better at explaining the universe. In contrast, the advance of religion doesn’t bring it any closer to the truth. It can’t, because all of religious belief is based on lies. Theology simply gets better and better at rationalizing those lies. And religion’s other “advances” are prompted by either secular morality or science, so theology gets no credit there. Absent science and secular morality, faith would still be mired in the Middle Ages.
And because with scientific questions, we know how to inquire. (“We” as a species.) With god questions, we don’t. How would one go about inquiring into god? I don’t know, and I don’t even know how to find out.
To be fair, the standard Christian answer would be (I think), “One understands Jesus through prayer and Bible study.”
That might actually be the only difference of any significance between science and religion: science is based on empiricism and logic whereas religion is based on revelation and faith.
Once one understands that “faith” is “wishful thinking” and “revelation” is “the wishful thinking of somebody in a position of authority,” the fundamental problem of religion is made clear.
Take the language used to sell religion and put it in any other context, and even the most gullible would instantly recognize it as a scam. But sell gods and elysian fields with such shady nonsense and the masses eat it up. Go figure.
Cheers,
b&
I believe that, traditionally, this form of zetetics requires a minimum of two individuals (without anything more pressing to concern themselves with) and a pub.
The definitive pinhead. Just ignore him.
There are angels dancing on him eh?!
Now don’t be too scornful of angels and pins; it was one instance where the church scholastics anticipated quantum mechanics.
It was all about whether angels were like hadrons (thus subject to Pauli exclusion) and so only a finite number could dance on the head of the pin, or whether they were like bosons (thus infinitely superimposable) and an infinite number could dance on the head of a pin.
And that’s an argument still being had, since we still don’t know whether Pauli exclusion is a ‘law’ or whether it’s just a limited applicability observation (see electron superimposition in warm superconductivity).
So be just a little forgiving of the scholastics, they were arguing a genuine issue, even if disingenuously.
Forgive me!
mea culpa.
😉
Close, but not quite. Pauli exclusion principle is just a principle, it follows universally from wavefunction symmetries as much as boson non-exclusion does. (Anti-symmetric vs symmetric wavefunction gives destructive vs constructive superposition.)
Electron pairing in classical superconductors is not breaking but relying on exclusion for separation in the pairing. And knowing what makes the new classes of superconductors work gives you a Nobel prize.
Cute. “- Hey! Move over buddy, you impose on my lattice space, in a big way!”
The difference between science and (at least Christian) religion can be seen in the following sentence from Dr Karl’s fifth straw man:
This includes a hidden contradiction. The unique historical event that is in question is the resurrection of Christ. But trying “to make sense of their encounters with the risen Christ” is in effect to question what kind of an event this was. So it seems, on the face of it, that we have an historical event which was not, or at least may not have been, an historical event. In logic “p & it is possible that ~p.” My modal logic is very rusty, but that looks to me like a contradiction.
Excellent point. And it sure points out the paucity of tools in the religious ways of “making sense” of something.
I mean, it’s hard not to think of how science, confronted with a similar “unique event,” wouldn’t immediately start coming up with no end of testable hypotheses: epilepsy, schizophrenia, other types of brain lesions/pathology, hypnogogic and/or hypnopompic hallucinations, various forms of intoxication…not to mention premeditated, purposeful manipulation & deceit…So very much to somehow rule out before arriving at the “supernatural.” (Possibly something that should always be in quotes…)
Giberson is right on the money…
except there was no Church then,
there was nobody recording anything then, and the whole crucifixion story came much much later, when everyone who could have possibly been present these was dead,
there was nothing sensible recorded, because even what survives to this day is incoherent despite clearly being rehabilitative,
there was no actual history recorded, unless you believe that zombies walked the Earth and the Jews would somehow worship a criminal human as a God,
and there was, of course, no “risen” Christ. Because if there was, it would have been recorded by actual historians of the time, all of whom, are completely and mysteriously silent on anything and everything associated with the Jesus Christ story.
Aside from that, though, he is good to go. The putz.
For crying out loud, Newton’s laws of motion were not in error, they are merely not universally applicable.
That’s because for on the scale of your Main Street, Newton’s laws are still perfectly valid.
Einstein’s laws of motion can fully account for Newton’s laws – Newton’s laws are merely a special case of Einstein’s. But how does that work for theology? Can The “sophisticated theology” of the apophatic God account for the anthropomorphic God in a similar way?
Theology still works for the special case of made-up crap.
Newtonian Mechanics is Rocket Science !
“Newton himself got dethroned, so why must we make fun of religion for dethroning Yahweh”
Bad physics analogy. Newton isn’t wrong in the same way that belief in Yahweh is wrong. Newton’s theories still work quite well in the physical domains in which they were discovered, they just needed to be modified to account for phenomena in more exotic domains, such as for objects at high speeds (Relativity) or small sizes (quantum mechanics). Yahweh, on the other hand, is a stupid idea that is not correct or useful in any domains of experience.
This isn’t the first bad physics analogy Dr. Karl has used. He previously said some very misleading things about Dirac’s prediction of antimatter as an analogy to religious belief in the unknown (see my comment #33421 at http://biologos.org/blog/exposing-the-straw-men-of-new-atheism-part-two ).
As a Physics PhD, he should know better.
Exactly.
Of course he “knows” better when he’s inhabiting that portion of his brain in which he is a Physics PhD.
But when he switches over to the other part of his brain wherein he’s a “sophisticated and advancing theologian”, then he’s free to believe in six (or vastly more) impossible things before breakfast.
And he just can’t understand why we don’t.
Newton has not been “dethroned”. That is ridiculous. Yahweh was literally dethroned-because he had a throne to begin with. Even now, it turns out, Newtonian gravity laws hold to an amazing degree of accuracy. We do call out Newton (and Darwin, of course) for what they got wrong. What can’t we call out genesis on what it got wrong? (That is, from cover to cover).
If religion were really serious about accommodating science, they would discard all the portions of the Bible that are scientifically and historically false. Or have big red letters saying “these are stories that people loved, but not true things that reflect real occurrences”.
That they do not do these things just means that they don’t really think about the implications of there being no Flood, or Adam, or Moses.
Accomodation is a one way street. And the “dialog” is in reality a monologue.
And if they were serious about moral progress too, they’d throw even more of the Bible out.
Oh come on, Newton was totally pushed off that sciency throne he used to sit on, and his fancy cape was taken away and his funny hat was stepped on until it looked all dirty and flat and useless. His sceptre was broken, his mitre was busted, his crown was tossed out the window. That dude was busted. Any fule kno that.
Gosh, chiz – Nooton is wet and a weed and wore a girly wig. Jeezuz makes th’ planits spin, not fizix.
Put Molesworth and LOLcats together and we’ve got something!
Aha – I thought so!
Always nice to meet another St Custard’s graduate 🙂
Uncle Karl,
Regarding the photo that accompanies your endless, unceasing, tiresome, and rambling rants about gnu atheists and our “straw men”: wouldn’t a scarecrow that actually contains straw have been a better choice?
Kthxbye.
Nice one, Miranda.
Oh, and speaking of non-straw, the comments on Part V are pretty revealing.
Half the Christians are agreeing that the OT God is barbaric, and that Christianity is progressive, while the other half are defending Biblical slavery.
There may be some progress, but it’s not well distributed.
I most despise the Christians who declare “biblical slavery was benign.”
Bullshit. It was slavery. You could beat the shit out of your slave as long as he/she didn’t die, you could sell that slave, you owned any issue coming out of female slaves as as slave, female slaves had no right or refusal for sexual relations, slaves were the permanent property of the slave-owner.
Slavery. Evil. Get it?
Also, these lying evil Christian bastards claim there that indentured servitude is not slavery. As if it were some sort of “entry level job”.
Bullshit. Indentured servitude was common in the Americas during Colonial times. One-third of those indentured died before fulfilling their term. Most ran away. Conditions were just as deplorable for this group of slaves as for those who were “regular” slaves. Don’t try to tell me indentured servitude was benign, when the evidence is exactly and 180 degrees opposite.
The bible condones slavery and indentured servitude. It’s morally wrong. And therefore is not a guide for any moral pronouncement.
And, therefore, the moral argument for god fails.
Slavery. Evil. Get it?
The Bible’s moral standing on slavery is even worse than that because this “peculiar institution” was not in fact necessarily evil.
My Serbian ancestors competed to be Turkish slaves. Specifically, members of the Sultan’s elite Janissary corps, who had nearly unrivaled access to the Empire’s power, wealth, and prestige, but were nonetheless slaves serving at the pleasure of the Sultan. These slaves’ power grew so great that they nearly disposed the Sultan when Selim III attempted to curb their influence in the early 19th century.
All the great Islamic dynasties were founded by slave armies—the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and the Mamluks were all former slaves, never mind the Qur’anic injunction against Muslims holding other Muslims as slaves. In this context, being a slave meant a path to wealth and power that was ordinarily unobtainable.
The stain on Biblical slavery is even deeper because Biblical slavery is evil, yet did not have to be so.
I thought that was his profile photo.
I assumed that was a Picture of Karl Giberson; his writings seem to emanate from an empty suit.
Here’s a thought:
If revealed religion was correct, it would never change, because it would be based on eternal truths from an all knowing God. If revealed religion were correct, its very source would guarantee that it would never have to change. But it does change, so obviously it is not inspired by an all-knowing being.
Science, on the other hand, is not percieved or claimed to be anything other than a work-in-progress undertaken by fallible human beings. We all acknowledge that the sources of and practices of science can lead to error. Therefore the fact that science is wrong sometimes and must change is not a black mark against science that discredits it (the way that theism is discredited by changing) because science was never claimed to come from an infallible source in the first place.
New Atheist critics dismiss this progress [in theology] because it is not acknowledged by lay people on Main Street or in intellectual backwaters like those where Al Mohler and Ken Ham paddle about. This is a gigantic blind spot for people like Richard Dawkins, on par with failing to acknowledge that electricity has changed the world in some important ways just because there are some villages in Tibet go without it.
I grew up with the liberal theology promoted by Giberson and by Zimmerman’s Clergy Letter Project, actually being raised in one of its member churches, The First Unitarian Society in Madison, WI. My primary criticism of liberal theology, based on my own personal experience with it, is not only that it peddles meaningless nonsense, but that more importantly it leaves its adherents completely ignorant of religion as it is actually practiced in society and throughout our history.
Aside from science, a major factor that led to my own hard atheism was learning first-hand about real-world religious belief. Of this I was completely ignorant even as a young adult, in spite of years of Sunday School. When I first did learn about actual religious belief (motivated at the time by a knock-out minister’s daughter from a conservative sect expecting a conversion), I felt resentful that my liberal Church wasted my time and taught me nothing about even Christianity’s core beliefs, why these beliefs were held, why they are in conflict with other religious beliefs and logical facts, and how these beliefs shape the world.
I want my own children to be very well informed of authentic religious beliefs and arguments, and that information comes from either the truly faithful or from hard atheists. In my own experience, liberal churches, if they acknowledge religious facts at all, offer only wooly inaccuracies, and what good is that?
“authentic religious beliefs and arguments …… comes from either the truly faithful or from hard atheists.”
Spot on.
Good point. I never thought of it that way. I noticed it, but I didn’t think of it that way. I noticed it for instance when listening to an interview with William Sloane Coffin on “Fresh Air” once. He said something liberal-theological (about god not wanting WSC’s son to be killed in a car crash, and being just as devastated about it as WSC), which I though was rather moving in its way, but just as unfounded as any other claim about what god does or doesn’t want.
It irritates me the way religious people are so quick to find motives & (wrong term) ‘rationalizations’ for what their god(s) supposedly does & why. It would be more honest of them to say “I don’t know why god does this that or the other, (s)he is just an inscrutable nutter.” They are the ones who are just plain bonkers.
“God moves in mysterious ways.”
Anything you can think of by way of rationalization, the religionistas have already employed it for centuries, if not millenia.
He’s God for godsakes! Since when does a god have to deal with something he does not WANT to have happen? Which of his powers is on the blink– ominiscience? omnipotence? omnibenevolence?
Okay, I forgive the guy whose kid died for trying to rationalize a god that does nothing, –but how does one distinguish this god from a delusion… and how does one imagine he knows what god feels?
Don’t theists get tired of sticking up for this god who isn’t there?
He said something liberal-theological (about god not wanting WSC’s son to be killed in a car crash, and being just as devastated about it as WSC)
Well if god didn’t want it to happen, why didn’t god stop it happening? Superman would’ve!
I think the idea of God being “devastated” by some bad happening is just nauseating. Are we to imagine god weeping, sinking his head in his hands? Doesn’t sound very apophatic to me.
…And when theology gets really really good at rationalizing those lies, it gets classified as “sophisticated theology.”
Giberson’s arguments are just adorable. Whenever I read these posts of his, I hear them being read by a voice like that of the Steve Carell character in “The Office”—absolute inanity spoken with deliberate sincerity.
Try it using Ricky Gervais’ voice – it’s even better 🙂
Christianity is rooted in unique historical events that were recorded by the early church as they tried to make sense of their encounters with the risen Christ.
Unique historical events, if we uhhh exclude all the events that were like it. Exceptionalism knows no bounds I guess. Where would religion be without special pleading. Lol.
That’s another contradiction, to go with the one Eric pointed out. If it’s “unique” then how is it historical? If it’s historical it can’t be “unique” – it has to fit criteria that make it historical.
I don’t understand your argument. Unique and historical are orthogonal concepts to me; one doesn’t influence the other.
If a putative “event” is unique, then maybe it’s not actually historical at all; maybe it’s legendary. Dr Karl is sneaking in a little imprimatur there by calling it both.
Ophelia, are you using legendary in the sense of apochryphal? Because I don’t get the same connotation from legendary…
Dr Karl is sneaking in a little imprimatur there by calling it both.
Good way to put it. Not to mention sneaking in some unwarranted presuppositions, and plenty of not so sneaky glorification. He would probably be the first to admit to a gallon or two of confirmation bias too. One gets the impression that he doesn’t plan on being impartially fair and balanced any time in the near future. 😛
I still think there’s something I’m missing in your argument.
Pompeii is unique. Pearl Harbor is unique. JFK assassination is unique. I’m having trouble seeing *anything* in history as not unique; a location and time pins things down pretty uniquely.
Now if you’re talking class of events, none of the examples I listed are unique, volcanoes, wars and assassinations aren’t particularly uncommon. But then gibbering boy couldn’t argue uniqueness for Jesus by that either, see Osiris and Mithras.
And, of course, ignoring the fact that the events described in the NT were probably no more historically accurate than the events described in The Odyssey or The Labors of Hercules.
I think we need to hold the New Theologians to the same level of evidence that they would use in evaluating the historical accuracy of ALL of the past religions.
That’s actually something I’ve found that generally sends theists scurrying for cover.
Challenge them to propose a methodology for evaluating a religion that demonstrates their religion is true that doesn’t also demonstrate that any other religion is true and that demonstrates that all other religions are false without demonstrating that their own religion is false.
They usually get about as far as “my gods speak to me” before running for the hills.
Cheers,
b&
PS Ben, your photo of a wading bird (on one leg) is I reckon a stilt –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-necked_Stilt
Thanks! I do believe you’re right.
b&
Of course! Heracles/Hercules was the son of god, endured a violent death, his mortal part died & he ascended into heaven with Zeus the divine father.
Now who could have pinched that idea…
You seriously need to read Justin Martyr. Yes, that Martyr, the original Christian apologist and the man who lent his name to dying in the name of Jesus.
Writing in the second century, he obsessively compiled an extensive catalog of pagan demigods whose stories were indistinguishable from Jesus’. And he used those lists two ways: first, to try to persuade pagans that Christians weren’t quite so batshit insane as everybody else seemed to think they were; and to argue that time-travelling devils planted the pagan stories in order to convince people that Jesus was a fake Johnny-come-lately.
No, I’m not making this up.
A simple Google search will point you in the right direction.
Cheers,
b&
I still can’t figure out why Dr. Karl’s sophisticated apophatic god could be bothered to create a human avatar of himself and come to earth in order to be executed in a showy bloody, gruesome manner.
For what?
Oh right, so that this God Who Doesn’t Do Anything (does anyone else conjure up the image of the Knights Who Say Ni?) can forgive mankind of its sins, including that sin committed by the first humans with souls, who were totally real but metaphorical?
Here’s a hint for you Dr. Karl — if you’re discarding the OT Yahweh for something more sophisticated, you have to junk all of the mythology in the NT as well. That includes all of the miracles, up to and including the alleged “empty tomb”.
If the OT Yahweh is out, so is Adam and Eve. Without Adam and Eve, there’s no “fall”. Without the “fall”, there’s no need for Jesus. And without Jesus, you might as well be a Spinozian deist. Which would be fine with me, because that god doesn’t demand tax breaks for its preachers, doesn’t condemn people who are other-oriented, doesn’t demand undeserved respect in the halls of Congress.
You just can’t reconcile an historical Jesus with an apophatic deity.
Karl is a pussy cat, compared to what Denise O’Leary is saying about you over at the UD site.
That gets me angry. O’Leary seems to imply – along with other tosh – that the US putting men on the moon was due to the strength of religion in your country, not because the USA was a large, populous & wealthy industrialized nation in the 1960s while the USSR was comparativley poor & stifled in its growth & Europe was still picking itself up after the war. I imagine mine is the type of reaction she wants. I shall go & have a cup of tea from my Darwin mug to calm down.
I didn’t get angry. I just laughed.
She cites climategate and “Expelled” (the movie) as evidence. That pretty much shows high gullibility.
With O’Leary it’s more likely dishonesty than gullibility.
What about Yuri Gargarin and Laika the Dog? The Soviets were setting the pace there for quite a while.
Yes, and the USSR was first to land anything on the moon, and the first to land a remote controlled rover (Lunokhod) on the moon (and the USA Mars rovers are largely based on the Lunokhod design).
And now, in the very near future, Russia will be the only nation capable of transporting people and supplies to the ISS.
What’s happened ? Has religion collapsed in the USA ?
Yes, all true. The USSR could have done it – it required resources on a massive scale. At least she doesn’t say it was a conspiracy & never happened.
🙁
Uh, what!? This is not even close:
“Among the creators of Pathfinder and Sojourner, the reviews of Lunokhod are mixed. According to Don Bickler of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, one of the engineers who directed Sojourner’s design, technology has changed so much since the early 1970s that the Mars rover bore little resemblance to its lunar predecessor. Bickler says that during his work on Sojourner he briefly studied the Lunokhod design, but he wasn’t influenced by it. “There was nothing we could use there,” he says flatly.
Down the hall from Bickler, Tom Rivellini offers a kinder perspective. Rivellini, who helped create the airbags that got Pathfinder and Sojourner safely to the Martian surface, is now working on a proposed robotic mission to retrieve samples from the moon’s south polar region. He says of the Soviet missions, “When you go back and look at this stuff, it’s impressive…. They were inventing the wheel; nobody had done this.” Rivellini points out that unlike the Soviets, whose big Proton boosters could carry heavy payloads, he and his colleagues have to design for smaller launchers, a limitation that can make spacecraft design and production more difficult and expensive. Still, Rivellini says, future robotic explorers that roam the planets will owe a debt to Lunokhod. “Personally, the way I view the work the Soviets did back in those days is as a proof of concept that it could be done,” Rivellini says.”
As an example of monumental difference: the 8 wheels of Lunokhod’s had unique independent suspension wheel design with fixed angle and steering was by differential drive, while US rovers employ a legacy 6 wheel rocker-bogie suspension system and steering is on front and back wheels individually.
Thanks a bunch for forgetting EU and Japan, who both have supply transport systems to the ISS for years! 🙁
Thanks a lot for that.
That guy is batshit crazy insane even by fundie standards. And vile to boot.
So is that what it means xtians say they need god to be good ?
Now I’m going to go and dip my mind in bleach …
…Not because Jesus changed those laws (he came to uphold the Old Testament law)…
I know that there are quotes from Matthew, of Jesus claiming to uphold the OT law. However this makes very little sense in context of the rest of his recorded teachings. For example, his famous intervention to save an alleged adulterous woman from stoning. Note that in that story, he succeeds in saving her by basically putting a guilt trip on her persecuters, rather than by directly forbidding them (‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone’). Often he operated in this sort of stealth mode, where he subverts the old way rather than directly confronting it. He seemed to enjoy picking moral bits out of the OT and using them to negate the crazy parts. That’s basically where his version of the golden rule came from. He takes the OT injunction to respect your neighbor, and extends neighbor to mean anyone whom your actions might affect.
That leaves two options for the quotes about Jesus upholding the full OT law: either they are falsely attributed, or he was trying to win over the Jews by appearing to improve their system rather than overturn it. His method of improvement seems to be by turning it pretty much on its head, and the religious leaders were evidently not fooled.
You’re missing an option
As Chris Hitchens notes in God Is Not Great, the story of Jesus and the adultress woman looks a lot like it was tacked on at a later date.
Actually, as I wrote in another reply to TreeRooster that has vanished into the aether, the Gospels are clearly entirely fictional in exactly the same way that Paul Bunyan stories are entirely fictional. There are the exact same kinds of discrepancies between the canonical texts of each, and for exactly the same reasons.
Looking for an historical Jesus is as futile and doomed to failure as looking for an historical Paul Bunyan. Not only did neither ever actually exist, neither ever even pretended to actually exist. You only get some very confused Christians in the second century and later who somehow think that their own syncretic pagan demigod was real amongst the great multitudes of other indistinguishable contemporary syncretic pagan demigods with equally-mythical origins.
Cheers,
b&
Well that’s obvious- the earliest Gospels were written a full generation after the events that they supposedly chronicle, which by itself should raise suspicion, but that story itself seems to have been added to the mix at a later date.
Yeah, the “women caught in adultery” story is missing from the earliest manuscripts of gJohn. It’s a pity in a way, because it’s one of the better stories in the Bible. I suppose this shows us that religious folks were quite capable and willing to “improve” the Bible by making up new stories to enhance the narrative.
In other words, the narrative parts of Bible are fiction.
Although it would have been an even better story if Jesus had said “Your law says to stone a woman to death for committing adultery? What a $%*&ed up law! Why would you follow a barbaric law like that?”
That would have contradicted Mark when Jesus said that he had come to uphold the law, not overthrow it.
The story’s basically an asspull to get around the problem of saying that he was there to uphold the law without promoting an obviously unjust law.
It’s very simple, and I guess the only reason why Karl doesn’t get it is because he somehow depends on not getting it, but:
Whenever we find new information, science gets more specific, and religion gets less specific.
Newton is actually a perfect example of this, but not when compared to Einstein – let’s compare him to Laplace, who was more of a contemporary.
Newton worked out his laws of gravitation, and saw that some very, very simple rules could account for the motions of the planets; thus, there was no need for God to personally move the planets about, making science more specific and religion less so. However, Newton could never find a stable solution for the 3 body orbital problem, and believed one didn’t exist for either that or the general n-body problem – and thus, he believed that it was only God’s divine intervention that kept the planets in their stable orbits.
But then Laplace came along, and proved that the solar system could be stable on its own, without continual divine intervention. Thus, science became more specific, and religion less so.
This modern “apophatic” God is simply the inevitable result of the hard rock of truth continually grinding down the sandstone of theology; when you have to retreat to the position where your beliefs are equivalent to nothing, then you might as well just believe in nothing.
Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là
as we all know
yep!
Yes, that’s an interesting point.
Atheists are often accused of believing in nothing, but it’s the theists that actually believe in nothing– (they just use a lot of blustery rhetoric to keep themselves from realizing it.)
Worse, some, like Karen Armstrong, admit that they believe in nothing, and then consider it a worthy enterprise to use dense, verbose language to describe nothing and discuss nothing at great length.
Yes, science hones information and tests it so we can find out more and more.
Religions just obscures things and writes off more things to “mystery” and shoves god deeper into gaps as science progresses.
Theists play games of rhetoric to keep themselves from noticing that different religions get different answers while science is the same for everyone no matter what they believe. Doesn’t Uncle Karl know that those with conflicting religions can (and do) play the same silly rhetoric game that he plays?
Do they not wonder how a real god could be this unclear with his “word” knowing the division, sectarian violence, confusion, and strife it would cause would cause to the supposed pinnacle of his creation?
That’s similar to the point I was trying to make in my comment at #4, only more clearly stated.
“A difference that makes no difference is no difference.”
— William James
Or, “a distinction without a difference” (James Fenimore Cooper and later Mark Twain).
If Karl (and others) didn’t write that shit, how’d they pay the bills? Huhn?
Simple welfare would be more efficient, if the food-preparation industry could not take up the slack.
Im puzzled and disappointed that Jerry went so easy on the religious in this post. He says of moral progress, “Yes, these moral changes may have been butressed by speeches from the pulpit, and yes, religious organizations have been involved in social advances..”.
Geez.. Yes, religious organizations have been involved in social advances, but usually by being in opposition to them. The bible was quoted as justification to fight the abolition of slavery, as justification to fight the legalization of interracial marriage and other advances in race relations, and today its used to justify the fight to continue discrimination against gay people. And how about contraception and population management? And when you think about it, environmental conservation is also social issue. Dont even get me started on christians and the environment..
Right on, bro. Religion only becomes civilised when secular authority forces civilisation upon it. And even then, it resists with bloody tooth and claw.
One of these days, I’m going to try to find out who (and where and when) was the last heretic (or atheist or apostate or whatever) executed by the western Christian religions (ie Catholicism and European Protestantism). I expect it wouldn’t be all that long ago.
I too find the “religious progress” concept a hard one to swallow. Better to say that religious thought is dragged along by the larger culture (often kicking and screaming and fighting all the way) until some theologian looks up and says: “My! Look how far we’ve come!”
But this only points at what seems to me to be a much deeper problem, which is that religious thought _cannot_ actually “progress” in its own terms, because it has no internal resources to measure progress or regress. One might choose to say that religious thought is “progressing” on things like human rights, but that progress can only be judged via standards _external_ _to_ religious thought.
Crimony, I get pulled away for a few hrs and there’s a new post already with 46 comments. Apologies if this repeats someone – I don’t have time right now to read thru all 46 (by which time there may well be another 46).
Anyway, what I want to throw out is something I have long suspected, in hopes of getting some thoughts:
1) The demise of slavery was far more the result of the industrial revolution than any sudden increase in a sense of morality. Suddenly it was possible to get help with tasks that didn’t involve another person in shackles. The chronologies of the two mesh, anyway.
2) The shift from a vengeful god to a benevolent one has as much to do with antibiotics and other scientific insight as anything. Before, people could and would routinely suddenly take ill and die in the span of a few days, for little apparent reason. We started to increasingly understand why starting in the 1800’s, and began to be able to effectively deal with many of the various causes largely beginning in the 1940’s. (I think this is reflected in the general mournfulness of early bluegrass/country music that has largely disappeared in the current songs).
Thoughts? Does this echo something someone’s already written but that I’ve never read?
Well I certainly dont agree with your first point..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline
Thanx for steering me to that. I didn’t realize there was so much of that before the 19th century. Still, the momentum really builds from ~1840 onward.
Well I don’t quite agree with your second point either, but at least regarding your first point you do have some corroboration in the USA at least in that it was the industrial north that took the anti-slavery initiative. Slaves, without shackles, were still a necessary factor in keeping the southern plantations as profitable as they were.
But re your second point, regardless of what you or anybody may regard the Christian God as, the Christian religion has been routinely ‘benevolent’ throughout its history, if only to the select few. Consider the ‘charity of the monasteries’ which kept many peons alive during various stressful periods.
No, the problem was that the Church – the Roman Church in particular – was of the view that nothing could be done to improve the lot of the suffering, because this was how God had made the world and that was that (“All’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds” to quote Voltaire satirising Leibniz).
It wasn’t until Martin Luther’s ‘revolution’ which emphasised that belief and faith, not doing “good works” was the only way to heaven that the Enlightenment folks decided that it was man, not God, who had created ‘the human condition’, and what man had created, he could recreate, and improve it.
Thereafter, we start to get secular social and political institutions aimed at improving mankind’s lot, and not just doing (repeated) acts of individual charity.
Note Uncle Karl’s remark that ‘theology and biblical studies move forward as well in dramatic and revolutionary ways’. When theologians like Keith Ward are reduced to repeating Aquinas’s proofs and then making a leap to the ‘historical witness’ to justify a belief in Christianity, I think it can hardly be said that theology has advanced in any significant way whatsoever (and then there’s Swinburne…). But biblical studies have certainly moved forward in such a dramatic and revolutionary way that they have destroyed any serious reason for believing in the ‘historical witness’ that such as Ward witters on about. Has Uncle Karl bothered to acquaint himself with these studies he so blithely refers to?
Yes, Giberson, it is wonderful that theology keeps diluting religious nonsense. Keep it up until it disappears.
And Uncle Karl should be required to state precisely in what ways theology has made ‘dramatic and revolutionary’ advances. (There was of course the ‘death of God’ theology… but that was some years back now; perhaps He’s been reborn?)
It seem you’ve hit a powerful nerve with Uncle Karl, Jerry– You’ve made him THINK about his beliefs and now he feels compelled to convince himself and others that his beliefs are not as ludicrous as the beliefs he dismisses. I think that’s a good thing to get theists to do. They’ve been sliding by too long on this silly delusion that “having faith” is worthy of some special respect or doesn’t need justification. But why shouldn’t their magical beliefs be subject to the same scrutiny as the magical beliefs they dismiss as unscientific, silly, or crazy?
Unfortunately for Uncle Karl, science can’t help him with his task of justifying what he believes. That’s the problem with believing things that aren’t true.
There is no more evidence for gods and souls than there is for gremlins and sprites, so, from a scientific point of view, they are the same. Magic stories about Jesus don’t change that. In today’s world, it’s increasingly difficult to hide from the fact that humans are prone to believing in all sorts of things that just aren’t true. It’s just that the theists wants to believe that they have some special power to discern the real magical stories from the fake ones. (Talk about arrogant…) I think all former believers of some such thing can relate to Uncle Karl. I can; but my beliefs were more “new agey”. So what is a theist to do to keep from examining whether his own beliefs might be a myth– Why, s/he does what uncle Karl does and uses lots and lots of words to say nothing much at all while tossing a snipe towards those who disbelieve the things one so desperately wishes to be true.
Methinks he doth protest too much. But I am thankful for the amusement.
Does anyone else read his name as “gibbers on”?
Sadly, yes.
I’m a swede, so the single “s” patronymic derivative clash with the original (I think) patronymic usage we have (double “ss” as in “NN’s son”).
From the clash comes not accommodation but sundering of subject (especially when I’m tired) – how appropriately inappropriate!
Incidentally, though, I do not think it is right to describe religion as being made up of ‘lies’; if it were, then things would surely be much easier. A lie is after all the assertion that something which you know or believe is not true, is true. But the religiously minded are (in the main) not simultaneously accepting that science has shown religion to be false and then nevertheless asserting that religion is true in the knowledge or belief that what they are saying is in fact false. And, again, I know I harp on about this, but there is an immensely interesting and illuminating body of work about religion, with fascinating debates, being created by cognitive scientists and anthropologists. I think an acquaintance with it would help us not to keep going over the same ground again and again.
How about myths? Is there anything which distinguishes religious stories from myths?
Here’s an anthropologist (Benson Saler) describing what happened when the Wayu (the Wayu are a traditional Amerindian population in lowland South America) informant who was telling him some myths about god-like beings suddenly stopped and asked him if he believed the stories:
‘I sensed one of those glorious moments in ethnographic fieldwork when a window unexpectedly opens on a topic of considerable importance, and I thought deeply about how I should reply. Apparently, I thought deeply for too long a time, for the myth-teller punctuated my silence by declaring, “We don’t believe these things happened.” In a follow-up discussion the myth-teller stated flatly that Maleiwa, Juya, and other godlike beings in the traditional narratives don’t actually exist. It is entertaining and instructive to tell stories about them…. Other informants with whom I subsequently discussed this matter for the most part supported the myth-teller. Without further labouring the point, let me give it as my opinion that the godlike beings of Wayu myth are not themselves religious objects. They do serve, however, as discursive devices for talking not only about Wayu religion but about many aspects of Wayu like, and particularly the cognized and experienced tensions and contrasts of that life.’ (Quoted in ‘Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission’ by Harvey Whitehouse (Altamira).)
It’s a complicated business!
‘aspects of Wayu LIFE’!
The double standard is in the main religious special pleading. Even Giberson has to see that … no, wait, he is an accommodationist, he relies on that special pleading too.
Which can be interpreted as that theology gets better at lying, both as outcome and in principle. (When taking rationalizing of known lies as more, and more complex, lies.)
‘Scuses. Yet again does the scripting fool me, this was intended as a standalone comment.
(Ah, apparently you have to empty the cache instead of reloading pages, if clicking the wrong link and activating the script.)
I like the apophatic approach to religion (deciding what god isn’t rather than what god is). If people follow it honestly they should eventually decide that god isn’t, and stop wasting our time with these silly “philosophical” critiques.
What’s striking about the article in context is that Karl’s readers are attacking him for not being theistic enough, and for thereby having a position too close to Jerry’s. Their position is to privilege the Bible as a source of facts, for some (unfathomable) reason.
I think that’s funny– there really is no way to tell a true religious claim from a false one, and the more theists talk about what they each believe, the more they will realize they don’t believe the same stuff at all. I don’t even think most theists know what exactly they believer– they are just afraid bad things will happen if they stopped believing it.
the “women caught in adultery” story is missing from the earliest manuscripts of John
I hope that everyone is familiar with the Johannine comma, the clause fraudulently added to a Latin translation of 1 John 5:7-8 in the 3d century to provide Gospel support for the recently invented notion of the Trinity. Without this adultering clause, which appears in numerous subsequent Bible translations including the KJV, there is simply no support for Trinitarian theology in the New Testament.
There is perhaps no better direct evidence than this for Jerry’s statement that “all of religious belief is based on lies.”
Question for Giberson: Is the elimination of the Johannine comma in some modern Bible translations an example of what Giberson means by “biblical studies move forward as well in dramatic and revolutionary ways”? Should not the rejection of this fraudulent addition of the Bible not also imply a rejection of the Trinity?
I agree with all of this article except:
“the advance of religion doesn’t bring it any closer to the truth”
As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out religions used to have many gods, then they had a few, now (the most widespread)have only one. They only have to go one further before the reach the true number.
“As a matter of fact, science has given religion no instruction, it has merely issued prohibitions. It has warned religion that there are certain things it must not meddle with, certain departments on which it must not encroach. In this way religion has been forced farther and farther back, until it is left with what? Not with anything that can be known, or is known; it is left supreme in the kingdom of nowhere, ruling over an empire of nothing at all.
And so long as religion strives for a more tangible possession so long must there be a conflict between science and religion. But—”as the limits of possible cognition are established, the causes of possible conflict will diminish. And a permanent peace will be reached when science becomes fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and relative; while religion becomes fully convinced that the mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.” So, when science has monopolised the entire field of human knowledge, actual and possible, and when religion is satisfied that it knows nothing, and never can know anything of the object of its worship, that it can offer nothing in the shape of counsel or advice, but that its function is to sit in owl-like solemnity, contemplating nothing, meanwhile offering man an eternal conundrum that he must everlastingly give up, then, and not till then, there will be peace between science and religion. And this is called a reconciliation. Mr. Spencer finds two combatants engaged in deadly conflict, he murders one and offers the other the corpse, with the hope that now they will live peacefully together. The scientist is asked to be content with all there is. The religious man is asked to find comfort in the reflection that science must eventually monopolise the entire field of knowledge, but that, in return, religion will be left free to work in an unknowable region, to occupy itself with an unknowable object, and to eternally cry “all is mystery” in an amended philosophic version of the Athanasian Creed.”
-Chapman Cohen (Theism or Atheism)
Thanks Jerry!
Tim Harris makes a good point to which I note that such as Ward claim that Aquinas and others old theologians don’t advocate the God of the gaps who answers fewer gaps with the progress of science but who is the metaphysical answer- the Primary Cause [ Aquinas] as explanation and Sufficient Reason [Leibniz].
Lamberth’s atelic/ teleonomic argument dethrones any metaphysical directed-evolution as the metaphysical cannot gainsay the physical!