It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.
Appealing to history's greatest minds is a weak appeal to authority. Several of history's greatest minds also spent significant time on pursuits such as alchemy. It does them no disservice to suppose that given modern tools and knowledge they would have formed different opinions. But now we have the ability to explain evolution, brains, astronomy, energy, weather, etc.
Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence.
Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.
This is the fundamental problem, though. There's an internal consistency so long as all evidentiary evaluation is predicated on the underlying assumption that the attestations are true. Confirmation bias does not make a firm foundation for truth-seeking. Once you realize that your standard of evidence could just as easily support any number of (contradictory) belief systems (were you to start from the premise that that particular religion, not yours, was true) the whole thing begins to crumble.
You would think that putting Islam and Protestantism in the same comment would indicate to a reader that I'm well aware that the same standard supports mutually exclusive visions of reality but I guess that doesn't do enough to evangelize atheism or agnosticism or rationalism or whatevertheheck so go ahead and have a fun thread (without me)
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It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
As an atheist, I do not find[1] those philosophies to be particularly coherent or self-consistent - but obviously, my criticism is only superficial. So, I'll do one better.
A large number of theistic philosophers share my opinion on this - hence the innumerable schisms within Abrahamic religions. Those philosophers looked at their religion, found inconsistencies in it, and forked it.
The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles. They survived because might made right. They survived because some influential autocratic warlord was personally swayed by their ideas, and imposed his will on his subjects and neighbours.
Less successful heresies (that, to me have about as good a claim at providing strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views as their parent religions) have gone extinct. Not because their arguments or ideas were bad, but because they didn't have enough spear-tips, sword-points, and gun-muzzles behind them.
This sort of selection process does not seem to be like it leads to accurately determining which of these systems survived because they are actually strong, coherent, self-consistent, and which survived because they were better at killing heretics.
[1] My impression of religion is that it tends to identify its inconsistencies and incoherentness, and neatly package it into a black box that it does not engage with, and expects you to have faith. You get a highly self-consistent system, as long as you don't look inside the box.
> The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles.
Actually, in many cases, they survived because neither side won the power struggle. E.g., Both sides of the Chalcedon(/Ephesus) schism, the East-West Schism, the Protestant/Catholic schism, the Old Catholic/Catholic schism
, the Catholic/Anglican schism (even in England), the reverse schisms between the Uniate Churches and their previous Church of the East/Oriental Orthodox/Eastern Orthodox communities, etc. survive.
Yes, you are correct. 'Won' is a loaded term there - but my point was drawing a distinction between heresies that are still around, and ones that very convincingly lost the struggle for their survival.
From my understanding of European history, that didn't happen because their rhetoricians and intellectuals sat down to peacefully hash things out over tea and crumpets. They didn't survive because of the strength of their arguments - but because of the economics behind them, and because of the caprices of the particular personalities involved.
I'm willing to accept that in the past two centuries, these processes of religious selection have changed substantially [1] - but the fact that this entire argument is painted in the framework of major religions that were established long before the end of European religious wars leads me to believe that 'how religions splintered in 500 AD' is far more relevant for surveying the modern religious atlas than 'how religions splintered in 1900 AD.'
[1] As long as we close our eyes to that Sunni-Shiite thing that's still on-going, and is likely to keep going for the foreseeable future.
If you're not allowed to change the orthodoxy, then the contribution of that generation's greatest minds would by definition be heterodoxies. So what you are really saying is that we should expect the most-patched-up theology to be found in the most recent versions. :)
> Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
They did spend a lot of time and they mostly failed. In many cases those school of thought that ultimately failed were also squashed during a religious power struggle (which is gives organized religion a bad outlook).
I see no issues with Christianity from a philosophical standpoint. It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. I'm curious what you mean in your statement, please unpack your claim.
It depends what philosophical questions you want an answer to.
If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table.
If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible.
If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)
> It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world.
(1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world?
(2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?
"Naturalism" posits that natural laws are the only rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural world.
So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically.
The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.
I would advise you to head down to your local university and take a religious studies course covering a bit of the Bible. It's usually split into OT/NT.
What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts.
So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.
What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).
> What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).
If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies?
I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).
The parent is referring to the (actually, legitimately, really bad) philosophy that you can find in the most puffed-up theology books. It comes from the same process of domain envy that makes some philosophers put the worst math ever in their papers, except it started several hundred years earlier. To cut one slice through it, I can point you to a page of 100% fallacious arguments[0] that only survived as long as they did because they had a popular conclusion.
The very page you link lists a logically sound ontological argument[1]. It appears to me that you're judging the argument fallacious because you don't like the conclusion.
The fallacy in that one is thinking that accepting those axioms is any different than directly accepting the conclusion. :) Stating a bunch of axioms and deriving something doesn't prove what you derived, except in a technical sense of the word "prove," not in a useful sense related to determining the truth. Even if we accept that Godel's logic was sound, there is plainly no more reason to believe in his starting point than there is to directly believe in the end.
What? You contradict yourself several times. Does accepting the axioms obligate you to accept the conclusion or not? First you say it does, then you say it doesn't. And proving something is of course quite literally "determining the truth", you can't just dribble it away like that. This comment looks like word salad intended to let the reader believe whatever they want.
Axioms are not something you ever prove, as in, they're not provable even in principle. I would not call this an axiom, this is simply a premise. It can be determined. You'd trace this premise back up a chain of premise-based arguments, and if all are valid, you eventually reach some of the 5-10 (I forgot) core axioms that underlie all of logic. And those are not provable, but you'd generally be considered mad not to accept them.
I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.
Claiming that Anselm's ontological argument "survived" for centuries is rather misleading. Being known as a thing did not mean it was viewed as a viable argument. It was subjected to some harsh criticism literally as soon as it appeared, and whenever it was brought up in later centuries (and not very often, because it was something of a curiosity) it was treated more critically than reverently.
It's always fascinating to me to observe the small distance between the two in some philosophies.
The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality.
Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.
That's like saying "the most solid philosophy is shaky math." Yes, while plenty of philosophers have physics envy and wish that they were mathematicians, it's not necessarily the best philosophy that is written from that perspective.
