religion, belief, mythsI’ve always valued truth above other things and it’s hard for me to imagine that other people wouldn’t. There are masses of otherwise intelligent people who really believe in absurd things like the resurrection of Jesus, Noah’s Ark, Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, and Jonah and the Whale, yet many of these same people would outright dismiss modern day claims of supernatural events or the myths of other religions on grounds that they’re preposterous. Is there no consistency in their logic? There are clearly motivations stronger than reason and evidence that compel theists to believe in weird things. I wonder if any of these motivations could do the same to atheists.
They honestly often just don’t see the cognitive dissonance. For many years being brought up as a evangelical protestant deep down I felt my religious views were not subject to the same sort of reason that other views were.
After slowly (it was about a 5 year change) evaluating why I believed the way I believed. I would say the answer to the question in your title for me is nothing.
I use one simple standard for believing things. So if you asked me “Aside from reason and evidence, what would convince you that extra terrestrials walk among us?” I would say to that nothing. The standard for believing something that I use is based on reason and evidence. If we came up with a better way to know a truth claim we would have to use reason and evidence to prove its efficacy.
Pie. Seriously, and I can tell you guys never go to church, so I will tell you the reason that so many people are religious, and that reason is pie.
I have been to many atheist gatherings, and there is never pie. There is no horde of bluehairs all out to produce the best pie for the greater glory of god. There is no palsied old man who always ends up putting a whole bottle of rum in the rum cake because his hand shakes so much. It’s just a geeky sausagefest with diet coke, and a bunch of people talking about how much they don’t believe in the sky fairy.
Religious gatherings? Music, hugging, and truckloads of pie. Pie beyond counting. Pie beyond measure. And if you play it right, go to an irish church or a german church, there will be pie and booze. I went to an Irish church on x-mas eve, had two kinds of pie, enough brownies to make my eyes cross, and some of the most obscenely deliciously alcoholic eggnog I’ve had in my entire life. And all for the price of having to sing x-mas carols for half an hour? Yea, I can do that.
Make the logical argument against religion all you want, it just shows you’re missing the point. People want to feel like their lives have meaning, and Atheism has no easy answer for that. People want to go to a place where everyone makes them feel welcome, where the people will send them food and cards when they’re sick, visit them in the hospital, remember their birthdays…Atheism has no easy answer for that either. People want to go to a place where a nice man stands up on a podium and tells them that they’re going to live forever, and see their dead loved ones again, and all they have to do to get there is drop a few bucks in the collection plate and be nice to everyone, and Atheism sure as hell has no answer for that. We don’t even have pie!
So when you walk up to some religious person and you say, “There is no god, there is no afterlife, there is no meaning, we’re nothing more than slowly rotting meat in a dead cold world.” You really wonder why they don’t believe you? Why they’ll defend their delusion to the death? It’s because we’ve got no pie.
I’m sorry, none.
I want to know what is genuinely true about the universe. The only tools to employ are reason and evidence.
A god that manifests in reality (or manifest reality itself) should be detectable.
Based on my own observations, both of myself and loved ones to whom I am close, humans are truly remarkable in their ability to (mostly unconsciously) construct worldviews that are immensely contradictory without consciously experiencing any cognitive dissonance. One of the common themes I see in those who convert to atheism is a greater sensitivity to that dissonance. But sometimes I think some atheists are a little too self-congratulatory of themselves and each other that they managed to recognize and reconcile it. If you’ll pardon the expression, sensitivity to that is simply “the way we are made”.
Logic and reason are derived from premises which come from intuition based on observation but cannot be ultimately derived themselves by logic or reason. I suppose if I were to believe in god, that belief would come from the same mysterious source from which axiomatic knowledge is derived.
Brain trauma of just the right sort which would cause frequent “religious experiences”, and also damage my memory and cognitive abilities. Possibly some sort of psycho-torture. Any case in which I am not me any longer, I can’t vouch for what my possible belief system would be.
Nothing would convince me to genuinely believe in the God of Christianity short of actual evidence of his existence. All the things we do have clearly point to fabrication. And in order to be religious about my belief I would need not only evidence of his existence, but also evidence of him expecting those religious behaviours of me.
Having said that, I do not absolutely reject the possibility of the existence of an ultra-powerful being. Such beings could certainly exist. I don’t think we’ve ever been in touch with any though, or seen any manifestations of them.
Describe for me what alternative to reason and evidence there is?
I could say that God coming to me in person, near others that see the same thing (as alone, I may simply be insane) would convince me. However, that is evidence, no?
I would say that some marvelous logical proof could, but that is reason, no?
What remains? Perhaps brain washing?
The real trouble here is the misguided assumption that the religious among us are not acting on reason and evidence. They are. That evidence is built up from lies, cleverly hidden.
Consider this: You believe in the existence of atoms. Have you ever seen an atom close up? Odds are, you have not. Is there anything about atoms that couldn’t be explained many other logical ways? Not really. Yes some really fantastic authoritative sources of information, such as the whole of the scientific community, say they exist.
Within a religious circle, the authoritative sources are different. How can one person objectively decide which circle is correct? The only way is to personally repeat experiments that lay the foundation for what that circle espouses. That is, in fact, how science works.
We continually repeat experiments in new forms to try to replicate the results, the results that can be replicated become legitimate, and the ones that can’t be fill the halls of pseudoscience.
But have you done these experiments? In good high schools, they do. They do as many of the core experiments that define the scientific community’s view on the world as can be done. But in a religious environment, they don’t. So in that world it is easy to be misled. And REALLY hard to see that you’ve been misled.
It isn’t the fault of the blind, that they fall in a hole; it is the fault of the sighted around them, for not warning them of the pitfall.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.