4 ms·

> it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe, right? If it were that self-apparent, wouldn't we expect Kant, Kierkegaard, Anselm, Anscombe, Heidegger, G

by jawns 3y ago

> it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe, right? If it were that self-apparent, wouldn't we expect Kant, Kierkegaard, Anselm, Anscombe, Heidegger, Gödel, or the countless other philosophers and heavy thinkers of the past several centuries to have not even wrestled with the question? Heck, even Antony Flew, a contemporary philosopher of religion who was a staunch advocate of atheism for much of his career, later declared himself a theist. Did he simply fail to realize that it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe? What do you know that they didn't? What did they know that you might not?

silverquiet 3y ago
It's because the implications suck - our consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon; we are the meat in our heads. Once that meat dies, we're gone forever. It's not an easy thing to deal with.
- rimunroe 3y ago
  > It's because the implications suck - our consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon; we are the meat in our heads. Once that meat dies, we're gone forever. It's not an easy thing to deal with. I've heard both theists and atheists express similar feelings about the implications of physicalism (I think that's the term, but I'm not a philosopher), but I've never understood why in anything other than an abstract sense. I can understand why someone would be concerned by things ending so finally, but it's not like you'll be around afterward to feel bad about it. If anything I find it very comforting. I can understand wanting to be around for other people, but afaik there are plenty of religions where people aren't able to intervene after death and I don't hear the same concerns about those.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    It goes beyond the fear of death. Much of western society is built on the Christian notion of divinity of man. The Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable right[s]." There is an internal logic to this statement. It starts with the premise that God created man, and proceeds to assume that, in doing so, he endowed man with "unalienable rights." Supposedly secular western people invoke the same basic concept. For example, they talk about things like "human dignity": https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-is-human-dignity/ https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-i... ("At its most basic, the concept of human dignity is the belief that all people hold a special value that’s tied solely to their humanity."). That papers over God as the source of "human dignity" but it's expressing the same basic belief. That assertion makes no logical sense if you abandon the underlying metaphysical notion and posit that humans are actually just meat.
- silent_cal 3y ago
  No, it's not just because of the implications. It's because materialism is illogical. If materialism were true, you would not have any immaterial concepts. But clearly you do.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    There's no such thing as a truly immaterial concept. The most implausible, logically contradictory or essentially abstract thought exists only insofar as there is a material configuration of state representation, and it is this physical representation with which other concepts, also configurations of physical matter, interact through the medium of energic exchange, all driven by the universal pull of entropic degradation. Abstract concepts, even ones considered materially 'incomprehensible' like love, or ones considered materially inconsistent or impossible like taking the square root of a circle, are names - very long, patterned symbol sequences condensed from salient features of the far more complex structures they reflect, objects that would be otherwise inconvenient to discuss or contemplate on human time scales and within human constraints. Abstract information, any information, is the result of an energetic compromise necessary for our relatively insubstantial chunk of brain tissue to be able to play-manipulate objects far greater in scale, scope and remoteness then it physically could interact with. But it is still physically manipulating them, or rather the lightest of lightweight representations of them, at the mechnical, physical matrix of neurological energy exchange processes.
    - silent_cal 3y ago
      Immaterial concepts are abstracted from the physical world, but they in themselves are immaterial. You can hide this plain fact in all the mumbo-jumbo you want, but it remains a fact. Even a simple concept, like the definition of a circle, is not material in itself.
atq2119 3y ago
There have always been a number of reasons for why somebody might believe in the supernatural, the sibling comment points out one of them. Two important reasons have declined substantially over the last 200 years. First, the "God of the gaps" has basically disappeared. All natural phenomena in our personal experience are understood well enough that we can say with confidence that nothing supernatural is required to explain them. That doesn't mean that every individual understands them well enough, and while it's not a hard binary distinction, there is certainly a correlation between spirituality / belief in the supernatural and lack of understanding of natural science. Second, religion is to a large extent social glue. As humans increasingly live in large cities, social glue in general is disappearing, and religion is just one facet of that.

by jawns 3y ago

silverquiet 3y ago

It's because the implications suck - our consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon; we are the meat in our heads. Once that meat dies, we're gone forever. It's not an easy thing to deal with.

rimunroe 3y ago
> It's because the implications suck - our consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon; we are the meat in our heads. Once that meat dies, we're gone forever. It's not an easy thing to deal with. I've heard both theists and atheists express similar feelings about the implications of physicalism (I think that's the term, but I'm not a philosopher), but I've never understood why in anything other than an abstract sense. I can understand why someone would be concerned by things ending so finally, but it's not like you'll be around afterward to feel bad about it. If anything I find it very comforting. I can understand wanting to be around for other people, but afaik there are plenty of religions where people aren't able to intervene after death and I don't hear the same concerns about those.
- rayiner 3y ago
  It goes beyond the fear of death. Much of western society is built on the Christian notion of divinity of man. The Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable right[s]." There is an internal logic to this statement. It starts with the premise that God created man, and proceeds to assume that, in doing so, he endowed man with "unalienable rights." Supposedly secular western people invoke the same basic concept. For example, they talk about things like "human dignity": https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-is-human-dignity/ https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-i... ("At its most basic, the concept of human dignity is the belief that all people hold a special value that’s tied solely to their humanity."). That papers over God as the source of "human dignity" but it's expressing the same basic belief. That assertion makes no logical sense if you abandon the underlying metaphysical notion and posit that humans are actually just meat.
silent_cal 3y ago
No, it's not just because of the implications. It's because materialism is illogical. If materialism were true, you would not have any immaterial concepts. But clearly you do.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  There's no such thing as a truly immaterial concept. The most implausible, logically contradictory or essentially abstract thought exists only insofar as there is a material configuration of state representation, and it is this physical representation with which other concepts, also configurations of physical matter, interact through the medium of energic exchange, all driven by the universal pull of entropic degradation. Abstract concepts, even ones considered materially 'incomprehensible' like love, or ones considered materially inconsistent or impossible like taking the square root of a circle, are names - very long, patterned symbol sequences condensed from salient features of the far more complex structures they reflect, objects that would be otherwise inconvenient to discuss or contemplate on human time scales and within human constraints. Abstract information, any information, is the result of an energetic compromise necessary for our relatively insubstantial chunk of brain tissue to be able to play-manipulate objects far greater in scale, scope and remoteness then it physically could interact with. But it is still physically manipulating them, or rather the lightest of lightweight representations of them, at the mechnical, physical matrix of neurological energy exchange processes.
  - silent_cal 3y ago
    Immaterial concepts are abstracted from the physical world, but they in themselves are immaterial. You can hide this plain fact in all the mumbo-jumbo you want, but it remains a fact. Even a simple concept, like the definition of a circle, is not material in itself.

atq2119 3y ago

There have always been a number of reasons for why somebody might believe in the supernatural, the sibling comment points out one of them. Two important reasons have declined substantially over the last 200 years. First, the "God of the gaps" has basically disappeared. All natural phenomena in our personal experience are understood well enough that we can say with confidence that nothing supernatural is required to explain them. That doesn't mean that every individual understands them well enough, and while it's not a hard binary distinction, there is certainly a correlation between spirituality / belief in the supernatural and lack of understanding of natural science. Second, religion is to a large extent social glue. As humans increasingly live in large cities, social glue in general is disappearing, and religion is just one facet of that.