I am collecting reviews of Faith versus Fact (sadly, there haven’t been many so far), and will eventually call attention to both the good ones and bad ones. I won’t try to refute the bad ones—I learned from Nick Cohen not to answer critics), but I think that if I highlight good ones, it’s only fair to call attention to the bad ones. But first let’s have a good one: Brother Jeffrey Tayler’s review in Saturday’s Atlantic, “Can religion and science coexist?” (free link).
Tayler is of course an atheist—and antitheist—which means that I have at least a chance of getting good marks. (I don’t expect to get a single good review from a theist.) And, fortunately, he liked the book and gave a pretty good summary of its contents. Tayler does note that the Pope has somewhat redeemed the Church with his global warming encyclical (which, he claims, lessens the force of my argument that religion makes at least a minor contribution to global-warming denialism), but Tayler neglects to mention that Pope Francis’s solution, which puts the burden on consumers rather than corporations—and totally exculpates population control—is evasive, impractical, and fails to deal with the damaging Catholic dogmas about contraception.
Tayler’s review makes two points that I want to elaborate on. First, he says this:
If there’s a subject Faith Versus Fact could have dealt with in more depth, it’s the question of how people, once shorn of faith, should perceive religion’s astonishing cultural heritage, from literature and music to art and architecture. He only briefly touches on art in the context of its unsuitability as a means of ascertaining truths about the objective world because, he writes, “it lacks the tools for such inquiry.” Works of art “can move us,” he writes, “even change us, but do they convey truth or knowledge?” But he does offer telling asides about his own reaction to such things, to demonstrate that he has a heart, and isn’t just a “cold scientist.”
I suppose the first bit makes a fair point, but I neglected the issue of religious art for two reasons. First, although the artistic heritage of religion is wide and rich, ranging from Leonardo’s paintings to Chartres to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” I have NO IDEA whether, had religion never appeared, artists would have filled the lacuna with equally inspiring nonreligious works. There probably would have been no cathedrals, but art has been secular for a long time, and I find it hard to believe that medieval artists or later musicians wouldn’t have exercised their talents and impulses on secular topics, as did the early Dutch and Flemish painters like Frans Hals or Johannes Vermeer. I’d be interested to hear what readers think about this.
But the main reason I didn’t deal with this issue is that it was irrelevant, or largely irrelevant, to my theses: those involving the competing epistemologies of faith versus rationality in judging what’s true about the cosmos and the life within it. Just as I avoided passing judgment on whether religion has at times been good or bad for society, so I avoided speculating on whether art would have been better or worse without religion. Those issues, while intriguing, are hard to settle and, in truth, tangential to the aim of my book.
Tayler ends his review this way:
Faith Versus Fact could serve as a primer for nonbelievers wishing to present their case to the faithful as well as an aid for doubters struggling to resolve theistic dilemmas themselves. Atheists might hope that it could challenge believers by picking apart arguments for religion’s merits and veracity. But as his book demonstrates, and as the reactions to previous atheistic polemics by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens have proved, it’s unlikely to dissuade those whose faith is strongly grounded. Science might be based on a foundation of rational thought and trial-and-error, but the roots of religion lie in something much more incalculable, and thus much harder to counter.
Indeed, he’s right: hard-core religionists are hard to persuade (but not impossible, as Dawkins’s “Converts Corner” attests). And the arguments of faith, however, wonky, are recalcitrant to reason. But not impossible! Tayler himself writes weekly anti-theist columns for Salon that, of course, are even more “unlikely to dissuade those whose faith is strongly grounded.” But I suspect that both Tayler and I, as he implies above, are aiming at both the doubters and those who haven’t yet been brainwashed by believers.
And a nice tw**t from Tayler:
Tayler also told me that his review was the most active piece on the front page of the Atlantic, which surprised me. But, sure enough, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, there are already 1043 comments—and the piece was published just yesterday. I read down as far as the second comment (below) and stopped:
Dostoevsky was, of course, referring in The Brothers Karamazov to the notion that there can be no morality without God—a common view of the benighted. But whether Dostoevsky actually believed this himself is a matter of dispute.
Tayler said:
“If there’s a subject Faith Versus Fact could have dealt with in more depth, it’s the question of how people, once shorn of faith, should perceive religion’s astonishing cultural heritage, from literature and music to art and architecture.”
That’s an easy one. They should perceive it in exactly the same way they perceive the cultural heritage of ancient Greek and Egyptian gods.
2 quick points, medieval cathedrals, based on the basilica design of Trajan’s market-hall might have made it in some altered secular or other religious form. And is there a more awe-inspiring dome in the world than Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome?
On hard-core religionists’ apostasies, see Sam Harris’ recent fascinating podcast with Megan Phelps-Roper, grand-daughter of the founder of Westboro Baptist Church. She just had real faith, but her route out started and continued, as she says, by ‘logic’. And of course the son of Michael Behe attributes his leaving Catholicism to an initial reading of Dawkins (+ 6 months of soul-searching). x
Hey, don’t forget that Agrippa started it. Sure, he had a boring portico but it shows how Roman citizens had a public duty to create buildings and Agrippa, Augustus’s general did his.
Of course, religion and civic life and private life were all intertwined so it’s hard to separate all that out in Rome.
Yeah, the ‘Marcus Agrippa fecit..’ inscription below the pediment, which is the first thing you notice: chuffin’ huge letters. But that’s the totalitarian you-are-not-worthy, plebs, bit which gains wonder over time for the mere fact of its survival. Didn’t Hadrian sort of fake it?
Most Roman buildings, I have read, are about lateral lines, the horizonal: the eye is drawn along the building as in Trajan’s market-hall, the Circus Maximus and, if memory serves, in the design for Nero’s place.
The Pantheon is different: walk in and your eye immediately is drawn up to the dome, to the vertical: and if you continue the hemisphere of the dome downwards it reaches exactly to the the floor in a sort of mathematical joke. And I’m told that the circumference of that double dome equals the circumference of the lateral outside of the building. As well as the most breathtaking interior I’ve ever been in, a sort of 4/3 pi r cubed, squared. x
The pantheon is all about showing off how good the Romans were with concrete. Before that they relied on limited availability to marble and limestone. They had to come up with something else and they perfected.
Remember that the Plebs were just one type of aristocrat. We tend to see them as proletarians today bit like the Patricians, they were a civic group made up of the ruling upper classes.
erm…like, re; 1st para. I didn’t know that re: concrete. Nice one.
Re; 2nd para. I was using ‘plebs’ in the modern sense. O me miserum! Shoulda used some other appellation. Mind you, I seem to remember that the description ‘plebs’ became more and more lower class, the later the Roman polity. ‘Common people’, or some such, around about the turn of the millennium.
I omitted my other loved-up love-bomb for the Pantheon: the hole in the roof which lets the sun shine in on the walls, making the whole building a clock and a calendar.
“What’s the time, Marcus?”
“Dunno, let’s go down the Pantheon and find out, Octavian.” x
The hole is the oculus or eye.
I’ve always loathed the misuse of “Plebian” but I did make lots of jokes in school about Caesar’s “Patrician Ambition Tour”. Madonna was doing her “Blonde Ambition Tour” at the time so it got lots of laughs.
Oh and I should also say that Hadrian kept Agrippa’s portico because it hearkened back to the Julio-Claudian emperors a little more than 100 years earlier. It was good PR to connect yourself to the kin of Caesar and Augustus.
Exactly my reaction as well! When I first read that paragraph it sounded to me like Tayler was just reaching for something to say on the “lacking” side, to make his review look fair-minded; as too many reviewers seem to find necessary. Practically a non sequitur, if you ask me.
I felt like that too when I read this yesterday.
Exactly. Note the implication in that suggestion there that this is some issue atheism has to solve that the “faithful” do not, which is the completely backwards way of framing it.
Dostoevsky was mired in the age of moral and political upbringing. Today the zeitgeist is “Without science, anything is possible (and permissible).”
The faithful just like atheists know things because of science, not because they think they are listening to unicorns.
So which is it? “Without God, everything is possible” or “With God, all things are possible?” Theists tend to quote both.
Bottom line, the second stance is much more likely to be used to justify atrocities. Fanatics are fanatics, but religious fanatics will brag about being beyond all reasoning.
Comparing Myth or relevant Religion compared to Science is on its surface fallacious. They do not match at all. Yet they deal with reality as we mostly perceive it. Even before I read about it I was doing my own version and finding Religion wanting in many particulars since Religion isn’t Science even though it was started by most who split their brains between them both. However Science is winning out over Religion in the realm of Science today, just not in the greater society where it is losing.
However there are those who mix Science & Religion and seem to be comfortable with with it to a point.
Creationists modify science to aid their version of Religion. They would say that Scientists are doing the same to hide any impact of anomalies the ID would call “appearance of Deity” within the structure of our Universe.
This is as much about psychology and the human mind as much as empirical data collection.
Very tangled, very complicated and complex. You would need a rather large data node to handle it over a single printed book.
And as we’ve brought up before:
With God everything is justified!
Not only are all the abhorrent commands in the Old Testament justified, but once you posit an All Good God as Creator and Overseer of the universe, then every single act of suffering – natural and human-borne – is morally justified. That is, God has moral justification for causing or allowing all of them to occur. There isn’t one scene of human suffering in history, no matter how horrible, that is not in the Christian scheme Ultimately Justified.
And they go further: Christianity holds that we survive death and yet our souls that can go on to suffer eternally, if we haven’t done right by God. There can be nothing worse to be imagined than eternal suffering.
It makes even the worst excesses of human evil seem insignificant.
It’s just a marvel: Say you just put aside all the secular moral ethics that recommend compassionate action and condemn suffering. Then posit evil
and malevolent naturalists recommending nothing but evil all day long. Even given this cartoonishly evil scenario the naturalist world view STILL can’t come close to justifying the amount of suffering that Christians justify by their addition of a God and an afterlives of eternal suffering.
like a dead oak, the “all-is-justified” conceit appears rock-solid at a glance but collapses under the next stiff breeze. when all is justified, all must be justified or the entire enterprise sits hollow.
take any tragedy with multiple casualties, like the charleston church shootings or the indonesian tsunami. presumably those deaths were justified to fulfill a divine purpose. would that purpose have been thwarted had just one less person perished in either instance? if not, then the extra deaths are unjustified, revealing god as sloppy or uncaring. if thwarted, such a creaky plan reveals god’s incompetence and impotence.
i believe i just heard a tree fall in a forest.
Doesn’t even have to be a tragedy. If a casual 6 year old observing the incident would have tried to stop it, and succeeded, then there is no god worthy of the traditional attributes. (Scriven.)
Or, as I like to put it, why doesn’t Jesus ever call 9-1-1?
b&
Maybe he does but the signal hasn’t had time to reach Earth yet from his celestial perch…or the lack of wireless repeaters throughout space combined with the noise from being bombarded by radiation causes the calls to get dropped…Jesus, you act like the guy is a miracle worker!
That’s a damn good reason, given that it seems to me that many criticisms of the book (and of gnu atheism in general) tend to fall into the category of Red Herrings. Subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in topic are one of the most popular ways of “refuting” atheism.
It just means that where you are winning they retreat and attack at another place. All about winning in the area of real knowledge the ID types want to win Nobel Prizes etc. be honored in our culture the way they did a hundred years ago or more.
> I’d be interested to hear what readers think about this.
I did a whole series about this on the German RDF site. To summarize it: The problem with religion, and especially the more missionary strands like Christianity and Islam, is that it’s fundamentally intolerant of any art not obedient to its dogmas, and thus as prone to destroy and suppress as to create.
That religion’s being hailed now for all the great works made in its honor, results in my opinion from the fact that it was, for a very long time, one of the main employers for artists, and deeply influenced the taste of secular employers as well.
We shouldn’t ask if secularism is as capable of producing great art as religion is – recent times have amply proven this – but a valid question I think is if historically, without religion, there would have been equally big concentrations of wealth capable of financing it!
“Without God, everything is possible.” Whenever I see that phrase quoted, it seems to be offered up as some sort of evidence of the existence of god. In other words, morality MUST somehow be absolute and objective, or else the consequences would be truly awful. But clearly, the consequences of a fact are absolutely irrelevant to the validity of that fact. They might as well argue that cancer can’t be real because, if it were, people would suffer and die from that disease. Gravity can’t be real, otherwise people would fall off ladders and planes would crash.
For whatever reason, these folks absolutely abhor the idea that “rules” of morality are changeable human determinations, and insist on taking false comfort in the delusion that they are actually following some god-given rules of morality as set forth in their holy books, despite the fact that they selectively ignore and/or reinterpret those rules to suit their own tastes.
The one thing that religion isn’t is objective. It is the opposite as it is taught to read and believe things subjectively. When I read such publications I read it with an open, analytical mind. However they would tell you to read it openly and unquestioningly. Prey upon emotions to help boost you over into their camp.
Some atheists call it “The Argument From Boo-Hoo.”
1.) If there is no God, then (terrible thing.)
2.) BOO HOO!
3.) Therefore, God exists.
Change 2) to “So what?” and 3) becomes “(O_O) –> (¬_¬) –> (>_ (x_x)”
“…I find it hard to believe that medieval artists or later musicians wouldn’t have exercised their talents and impulses on secular topics…”
Completely agree.
The urge to be creative and to hone creative skills in order to achieve something extraordinary would have been acted upon even if religion had never developed.
I find myself ambivalent on the subject of religion and art. I would distinguish ‘art and religion’ from ‘religious art’, one being simply inspired by religion, the other created specifically for the glory of whatever religion.
I travel Europe regularly and spend much of my time visiting the great cathedrals, and popping my head into any interesting looking church I happen to be passing. Much of the art proudly displayed, especially the massive altar pieces, is to my eye frequently grotesque in the extreme. Vulgar gold splattered everywhere, statues too numerous to count (especially those of that most miserable of women, the virgin Mary), and all sorts of ornamentation too hideous to contemplate. Yes the craftsmanship is incredible, but the result is horrible, and all either inspired by religion or specifically glorying in it.
Of course, there is much religious art that is fabulous, as a visit to the Sistine chapel will confirm. Indeed, ironically Moorish art is absolutely stunning, as a visit to the Alhambra palace, or the (even finer, in my opinion) Great Mosque in Córdoba will testify. Much of this art, however, was specifically commissioned, and the artist would produce to order. The artists had a talent within them which needed expression, and had there been no religion then it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the art produced would have been no less impressive. After all, the great composers produced reams of music with no religious theme to it; I would argue, for example, that none of Beethoven’s symphonies were in any way religious. The ninth is one of the greatest dedications to humanity ever composed, though it frequently is wrongly believed to have religious overtones. It also must be remembered that many composers, for example Haydn and Bach, actually worked in the church, at least for part of their careers, so inevitably their music was often religiously themed.
Work for free? Creation of these luxuries required a concentration of capital and the Church had that. If the wealth had been evenly distributed within the population, it wouldn’t have been as readily available to pay these artists.
I’ve read online a dutch review of Faith vs Fact by a theologian. His comments were so bad I don’t even think he read the book. Fortunately, there was an atheist in the comment section that put him in his place.
For those interested and able to read Dutch: http://delachendetheoloog.blogspot.nl/2015/06/coyne-j-faith-versus-fact.html
On the religion/art connection:
Given all the non-religious art that continues to be made as more societies secularized, isn’t the answer pretty clear?
People would be making art regardless of religion. (I grew up making lots of art, all my artist friends are feverishly cranking out art and religion hasn’t motivated any of it).
While I certainly appreciate the religion-themed work of the giants of the past, in art galleries I find myself more interested in the wealth of art – usually later centuries – that isn’t religious. It’s generally more varied, interesting and compelling to me. In fact, when I have toured Europe as much as I appreciated the craft of Cathedrals, paintings, stained windows and other forms of artistic expression, I found myself getting “religious iconography fatigue.” It just got so bloody repetitious. Oh look, another representation of Christ, or Mary, or what have you. I found myself thinking “I wonder what these people could have done if they hadn’t been so constrained to these religious subjects.”
Yes, and although people often refuse to see it as literature, there is a vast catalogue of interesting, well written science fiction literature out there that isn’t inspired by religion.
Furthermore, look at all the lovely Roman Republican art created mostly to say “hey hey look at me, the awesome politician” and Augustus’s art was mostly propagandistic. Art can be/be used for whatever you want (look at the Stalinist and Nazi art).
If you’re going for pretty things – the Romantics weren’t all religious. Many wrote poems about nature.
Diana,
Excellent point about science fiction. The catalog sure is extensive already, and clearly fulfilling for a huge number of people.
(It’s quite a thought experiment to think where we might be now if the energy devoted to religion had been devoted to developing science, earlier).
Good review of FVF by Tayler. Though it was interesting to me how much more restrained he seemed to be. I’m so used to his “sermon mode” at this point. Tayler seemed to keep the flourishes to a minimum, putting Jerry’s thoughts front and center.
I read the first few pages of comments and the level of ignorance was astounding.
Plenty of idiots arguing that science is fatih based, and can therefore be dismissed. Such irony.
I read all the comments when there were “only” about 75. As you say, there are a lot of idiots out there. I got quite frustrated reading them.
In any context outside of religion, everybody instantly knows that faith is a very, very bad thing. You don’t have faith that the used car dealer is telling you the truth about the car you’re thinking of buying from him — and, if he urges you to have faith in him, no need to have your own mechanic check it out, you know for a fact that he’s scamming you.
The only question is whether or not religion is a valid exception to the evil nature of faith.
Once people realize that the faith they have in their holy men and holy books is no different from the faith that people place in any other confidence scam, there’s not much left to support religion and its claims. Nothing at all, really, when it comes right down to it.
It’s no coincidence that the priests bang constantly on the importance of faith.
b&
No, there are a few non-religious areas where “faith” is considered a good thing — and the religious try to draw a resemblance.
Such as:
Believing that a loved one is innocent when they’ve been unfairly framed for a crime.
Ignoring skeptics and critics and successfully pursuing your artistic passion.
Struggling against the odds to achieve a worthy but difficult goal.
Keeping in good spirits despite terrible suffering.
And so forth and so on. Most of those don’t involve support of fact claims, they’re about endurance, perseverance, or other values or virtues. The loyalty of “having faith” in someone’s innocence is generally only praiseworthy if the person is, in fact, innocent.
The having faith in a loved one argument is one I don’t think washes. In that case you have a lot of personal knowledge of that person, often years or even a lifetime. You know a person well enough to know whether they could or would commit a crime, and are able to tell if they are lying to you. Of course, there are plenty who still get fooled, and sometimes it’s easier to fool someone who knows you than someone who doesn’t. But most of us are probably pretty good judges of the characters of those we know well.
Also, the ones you point out as not supporting fact claims, I think religion is being disingenuous by using them as a parallel, because they’re not for that very reason.
A majority aren’t that quick at thinking analytically on their feet. Even if they’re good at it normally, it’s much harder when someone in authority is challenging you. So when a religious person challenges them with having faith their partner loves them, they don’t realize it’s not the same thing, and they’re sucked into thinking that religious faith is like that and therefore good.
Just another disingeuous conflation from relegion’s obfuscatory repertoire.
That’s one of the best tongue twisters ever. 😀
I agree, I don’t need faith that my husband loves me, I have 33 years of happy marriage to prove it.
Chartres as an example: seen as a unity, this cathedral is the result of the work of several generations of masons/engineers, sculptors,painters and glassmakers. But the urge behind all this unexampled planning and labor was the French Roman Catholic Church and the prestige and money of French aristocrats and royalty. Which is to say that monumental art requires an institutional support and basis that are totalizing.
Chartres is an almost unbelievably beautiful and sublime tribute to ‘Notre Dame.’ Yet that it was raised by the Catholic church in her honor does not prevent a secular pilgrim such as myself from being awed––no, overawed––upon visiting Chartres. Contemplating the western Rose I do not think of the Christian god-the-father or his crucified son; rather I marvel that it was built at all and pay silent homage to the artists of the 12th and 13th centuries who did this exalted work.
A little confession; a slight owning-up. I have felt a mite worshipful toward Mary. Were I religious, I would follow a goddess and her matriarchal church.
We live in a time of the artist as an individual. This has been the case since early 19th century Romanticism. But even Beethoven needed institutional support in order to compose and live. What LvB wrought, however, was secular, or, if one prefers, privately transcendental. The playing in the hall was the religious service, the audience the congregation, and the ‘transubstantiation’ the realization of human genius acting in midst of the ordinary.
It seems to me that in the absence of religion, and therefore the acceptance of naturalism, that the energies devoted to celebrating religious matters would still need to be spent and so natural themes would have taken the place of religious ones in art.
If nature was fully appreciated without the distractions of religion, as the “creator” of all life, the earth, the cosmos, I have no doubt that the art would be as good as the religious stuff. It would be better; there wouldn’t be a thousand crucifixion works, and a thousand virgin mother works, and a thousand…
More than worrying about the fate of the arts devoid of their religious context, I keep wondering how much ancient art, literature and history would have survived without religiously motivated destruction and neglect during the dark and middle-ages.
…and ongoing…
Well, technically it is still middle-ages in ISIS-held territories…
Good point!
Awful reality, though. Makes one wish those statues and artifacts had remained beneath the sands a few centuries longer…
I spent the weekend in that comments thread. Don’t know why. Just a peculiar form of entertainment.
I wonder if our ancient cave dwellers had an almighty poo bar in mind when they created their art on cave walls. Were they expressing something mystical or paying homage to the creatures that sustained their lives.
Art was hijacked like other forms of human expression for the glory of g…CHOKE and what about the motivations of the composers of religious compositions. Bet your Professors boots it was a place in the gold lined streets of the rosy afterlife and if one could ground these arrangements of musical notes, it would be somewhere in the sphere of extreme WOO. Sounds nice though and I am by no means adverse to listening to it but some forms I can’t stand = personal taste.
Religious art apart from the subject matter is truly a thing to behold but so are a lot of human made artefacts where the workmanship is incredible or so simple that you catch your breath.
So no, religion! bar humbug! Science is art, it is inspirational, truth seeking, beautiful and sometimes very scary as we learn about the universe and life.
Arguing that a classic work of fiction validates the theistic claims of another work of fiction via the Argument from Consequences is not something I’d parade about so readily were I arguing for theism…
May I politely ask why you don’t at least go after some of the more popular “refutations”? Not every half-wit with a “theory” that opens their mouth, but at least the handful or so that you might notice are getting a LOT of attention?
Sometimes those of us who are not professional scientists might struggle if engaging in a debate with creationists who think they have indeed “refuted” something.
I’d love, for example, a sequel to WEIT or an updated expansion with even more detail and responses to creationist criticism.
Many scientists publish popular books to arm us with information, but then don’t want to give the creationist’s rebuttals the time of day (I don’t blame anyone for thinking this way, I’m sure it seems futile and pointless) but how are we to combat the creation scientist’s rebuttal without further knowledge and information?
I could see how this might become some sort of tiresome never ending cycle of responses, and responses to the responses, but it could occasionally be worth it.
I’m aware of the concern that debating creationists will somehow give the public an impression that they (creation and evolution) are on equal grounds. But I truly wish there were some place to go to to find in depth responses to claims made by Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, and Frank Turek among others.
Just today, I was bombarded with some creationists who claimed that there has been some animals in the wrong fossil layer discovered. I’d respond with was it peered reviewed? Is it credible? Was it a forgery? Was it an anomaly? Any time the word “anomaly” is used, creationist’s like to call that a cop out.
I felt bad for Michael Shermer’s debate with Hovind. Any lay-person not familiar at all with the evidence would clearly think Hovind “won”. I’m a student, far from an expert, but not exactly a lay-person either, and I found some of his points hard to refute. But Shermer isn’t a biologist. And neither is Bill Nye in the famous Nye/Ham debate. So I just wish an actual expert might go toe to toe with these people, whether in person or in written language.
Why would Garry Kasparov want to play backgammon with a tiddly-winks player?
Michael, the creationist/fossil record debate was over 150 years ago and it’s an issue which only arises to any extent in the US. Over here in Europe, we don’t even have widespread pejorative epithets for creationists – ‘nutjobs’, ‘loons’ – because they barely appear in the public discourse. It’s over, done, wipe your hands and move on. Maybe you should tell your creationist acquaintances that from Europe they just look jaw-droppingly stupid.
Someone pointed out that the fossil record argument is impossible to win for an evolutionist: once you fill in a gap with a transitional form, you’ve created 2 more gaps. A debate like that could go on forever. x
Michael,
You could do worse than have a browse through the material at TalkOrigins http://www.talkorigins.org/ A lot of the FAQ are directed specifically at the sort of spurious creationist/ID assertions you mention.
Steve beat me to it with TalkOrigins. You’ll find most or all of what you’re looking for there and/or at the links they provide.
PCC has also addressed most of the typical religious shibboleths in many a WEIT post here; I suspect a little searching would lead to hours of helpful reading.
It is partly because they don’t actually deserve any kind of equal time, or any time really.
All the basic arguments have been run and won.
It would end up being a never ending story of any and every little bit of supposed contradictory evidence popping up and demanding a rebuttal, until the next insufficient trivial bit of nonsense they come up with.
It could end up, yea but, yea but, yea but, ad absurdum.
Stephan J Gould wrote on it, but I forget where.
It is a fair question to ask however and others have pointed to good sites for answers.
Art that has been paid for off the backs of poverty stricken peasants isn’t necessarily the good that looking at it without an understanding of its provenance might suggest. When I walk through European cathedrals, I find my enjoyment is marred by the knowledge that generations of people who had barely enough to eat were extorted mercilessly by the church to pay for these monuments to corruption and lies. Even if all the great religious art of the world were to evaporate along with religion, it would be a small price to pay to be rid of its divisiveness and perversion.
It seems plausible to me that many works of religious art are debatably secular really. For example, all the works depicting Greek/Roman gods and heroes by those within Christendom were often (each taken case by case) done for non-religious reason s
I read “Without god, everything is possible”
as an ironic take on “Without god, everything is permissible”.
There is no notion of intentionality in possible as there is with permissible, which is a necessary component of morality, that is, agency.
I think the commenter was getting at our potential in general.
Without the restriction of god and religions, and with, science and technology rationality, all sorts of things are possible, moral and material.