religion
, untheism
I intend to bring a question proposed by Eliezer Yudkowsky before a wider audience. An untheist is defined as “someone who grew up in a society where the concept of God had simply never been invented,” an antitheist is defined as “someone who has explicit arguments against explicit theism,” and it is proposed that atheists = untheists + antitheists. Now, the question:
And as for the claim that religion is compatible with Reason - well, is there a single religious claim that a well-developed, sophisticated Untheist culture would not reject? When they have no reason to suspend judgment, and no anti-epistemology of separate magisteria, and no established religions in their society to avoid upsetting?
Of course, imagine a religion which claims that the oceans can be 10km deep. Even if this religion claims this on the basis of religious texts or authority, the claim is still correct. An untheist culture who would have checked that there indeed exist deep sea trenches of over 10km depth would indeed believe in one of the claims of that religion. Of course, they will not necessarily accept the reasons that religion provide for the claim.
While my example is fictitious, there are quite close examples of that in history. Saint Augustine, for instance, claimed that time had a beginning. Today, on other grounds than Augustine, we believe that time began with the Big Bang. Of course, the theory might turn out to be incorrect, but until proven to be so, we are to believe with Augustine that time had a beginning. And this would be true for any untheist with a minimum of knowledge of modern cosmology.
In short: Yes, why not? As long as it is backed up by testable evidence.
In a more detailed manner: It’s a really tough issue to tackle since we can only speculate. In order to answer truly, there is a need of a purely religion-free secular society for at least 2 generations to test out the related hypotheses.
I would personally think that most people (you can’t generalize such things to absolution) in such societies will demand proofs and facts for the claims of religion to accept them. It won’t be any different from any modern atheist in a religious surrounding. If they bring proofs that Jesus existed and is the son of God, or that the red sea parted for the Israelites to pass when fleeing from Egypt and some sort of evidence that it was indeed a God that caused it (I really can’t imagine what kind of evidence would that be, but it is irrelevant), I see no reason why would any critical thinkers deny something that has been shown, tested and verified in a scientific method.
If we’d take the St. Augustine’s example by @Raskolnikov, it’s a different issue. Religious people may actually reach correct conclusions, based on their religion or from empirical reasons. It has happened many times, and it will probably happen again. The fact that a (usually speculative and philosophical) conclusion is correct (at least to some degree), does not make claims of religion as a whole correct. About this particular example, we don’t even know if time really had a beginning or not, where and when. We just theorize that our known universe with its time-line began 13.7 billion years ago.
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