re: #177 freetoken

Dillahunty’s latest video tackles a particularly onerous topic:

I say onerous because trying to be too dismissive of religious words is itself a problem.

We humans may all tend to think in certain patterns typical of our species, but there is a great deal of variation.

That there are many, perhaps most, humans who harbor religious ideas of “god” means we have to take such concept seriously.

Acutally, we can be dismissive of any concept widely held without evidence, or arguments from popularity. The world is round, the universe is not “pinholes in the firmament,” there is no aether, spontaneous generation is bunk, &c. “God” is not off the table just because people assert “God.”

We can’t just pretend we can call it all gibberish and be done with it.

Sigh, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim (in this case there is one or more gods). A great number of religious believers of all faiths cannot even define what they mean by a god, much less agree on it.

Religious beliefs in gods are largely geography-based (unlike physics, or chemistry, or mathematics, which are the same everywhere).

A common argument for one of the thousands of variants of the Christian god is that he “exists outside space and time.” Yeah, until you can define what “exists outside space and time” even means (as well as how one knows what God’s gender is) then it’s gibberish.

Instead, we need to reason through the ideas with people.

I’m reading Carrier’s Proving History, as he refers to it so much as a prolegomena to his major book on the historicity of Jesus that I figured I really had to read it before I get too much into that latter book.

Proving History is very much about writing the most rigorous history one can, thus the use of Bayes Theorem as the mechanism for reasoning in the decision in what to believe as what truly happened in the past.

So if we are to take history seriously, and know we have to respond to religious people seriously, then Theological Noncognitivism isn’t sufficient.

The fact atheists even exist (despite the best efforts of monotheistic religions to kill them throughout the ages) needs explanation if one is going to assert (some) god (of some sort of qualities) exists.