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I think it's just an age thing. Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet. I think it's just hard to enforce that level of blindness in the age of the internet.
There do seem to be a few people in my life that never grew out of their atheism phase, but they seem generally uncurious.
Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists. I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.
To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.
Yea, you're way off. I haven't done a poll or anything, but the general sense I get is atheism is overwhelmingly popular among people who consider themselves "rationalists". The exceptions are notable and eye-catching.
Atheism-vs-theism is a set of beliefs (of varying confidences) about the way the world is actually is. A "good rationalist" would update their beliefs on the evidence to which they have access and try to minimize the influence of their personality categorization.
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How many religious people constantly question whether there is a God? It seems like either way, people come to a conclusion and follow it. Also, the religious person typically only learns about one religion, a tiny fraction of all the different religious beliefs that people have held since humans existed.
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Rationalists are almost all atheists, because the evidence for God is so incredibly weak, especially compared to the magnitude of the hypothesis (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc.). And it lacks explanatory or predictve power (video if you prefer that format).
I'm going to suggest that you don't understand atheists (or at least, atheist rationalists) very well. You have already skewed the discussion by asking "what if there is no god", which presumes we have any prior reason to think there is a god. "God" does not actually answer any questions we might have about the universe--it is the believer who can use it as an answer for any question, without investigating further. Hence, for example, Lord Kelvin's assertion that many mysteries of life, which we have since explained with science, are completely unexplainable by science.
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Atheism does not entail being unaware that religion exists or of what it is, though.
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I always thought the opposite. It's very hard for me to understand the mindset of someone studying the history of religions and coming out of it believing a specific one happens to be true. Even more so when the conclusion is that the one religion you happened to be born into is the only one that also happens to be true. Thousands of religions and you are born in the only true one, how lucky!
I can understand people coming to the conclusion that some sort of abstract philosophical god exists, in some sense (think of it as "the priniciple of order in the universe" or something like that). But usually that's not what usually happens, usually it's just part of a motte and bailey strategy:
you can't prove or disprove any metaphisical theory
therefore believing in the logos is just as rational as not believing in it
actually believing in the logos is better than not believing in it (motte)
which is why you should believe the doctrine of the roman catholic church as it existed between the council of trent and the second vatican council (bailey)
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You seem to entirely discount the existence of many older atheists who used to be religious.
Many were religious, asked that question, and this led to them becoming atheists.
It's kind of amusing seeing this kind of argument dunking on atheists as just angry teenagers who never grew up. There's a certain kind of religious belligerent who is the mirror image of the condescending atheist sneering at sky fairies.
I'm sorry but this "entirely discount" irritated me more than it probably should have. No I am not "entirely" anything. I'm pointing out a perceived inverse correlation between age and adherence to atheism, oh and wouldn't you know, since we all love polls here so much, that is reflected in polling: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/age-distribution/
Obviously these people exist. I still have all of their books, and used fawn over their youtube videos and post their takes on my various social media accounts. I still celebrate Christopher Hitchens birthday and mourn him on his death day, and still consider him one of the most influential people in my life outside of my own family.
Especially given the types of responses I've gotten, I agree.
Yes, there's an inverse correlation between age and religiosity. You're implicitly pushing the idea that people become more religious over time. But the poll you quote is a snapshot of a particular moment in time. I submit to evidence more polling from the same organization that suggests that since the early 2000s, Americans in general are becoming less religious, and at quite a steady rate [1].
The alternative hypothesis is that ever since there was widespread penetration of Internet access, young people could easily research better explanations than "God did it". And that younger generations are less religious than ever and will stay so over their lifetime, because that's the best explanation for the available evidence.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/11/Detailed-tables-for-upload-11.11.19.pdf
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Most of the responses you've gotten seem more thoughtful than your OP.
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@fuckduck9000 already brought the receipts regarding just how wildly miscalibrated your estimate of how many rationalists are atheists (to wit: the vast majority) so I’m not going to rehash that. I’m merely going to offer what I think is a plausible explanation for how you came to such a wildly inaccurate perception.
Many people here will be familiar with the classic essay The Asshole Filter. TLDR: a feminist complains that all men are assholes, but the actual problem is that she has made it so impossible for non-asshole men to approach her that the only remaining men who are willing to transgress against her stated wishes and approach her are, well, assholes. So her perception of the “asshole level” of the average man is wildly skewed due to a bubble that she herself is reinforcing, causing her to be blind to all the non-assholes with whom she is failing to interact, or who are avoiding interacting with her.
Similarly, if you’re a devoutly-religious person in rationalist spaces, most of us just basically don’t touch the subject with you. We understand that it’s a very important part of your life, that you do not wish to have your faith shaken, and that overall it’s just not a conversation worth having with you. Many of us recognize, on an intellectual level at least, the value that religion brings to the lives of its participants, and for my part at least I’m happy for you that it has enriched your life. We don’t actually accept any of the claims of your religion, and religion in general pretty much bounces off a lot of us - for reasons that could be aesthetic, empirical, practical, etc. - but we don’t begrudge you your faith. The only people who are willing to actively challenge your faith and engage antagonistically with it are those who either 1. have a much bigger problem with religion than the average rationalist does, or 2. lacks the social graces or sophistication to understand why that’s not generally an argument worth having, which means that the quality of discourse you’re likely to have with those people is unlikely to be very good.
I don’t think you’re intentionally projecting that asshole filter, but I also don’t think you understand the modal atheist very well at all, let alone the modal rationalist, given how inaccurate your naïve estimate of how many of them are atheists was.
I like your posts but this is pretty weak and it really cuts both ways. An uncharitable mirror-statement: "We understand that you atheists don't want your self-serving delusions shaken because it's important to maintaining your hedonistic lifestyle and you probably couldn't handle it, so we theists just don't bring it up."
The more charitable view is that theists/non-theists just hold to different, very defensible axioms and that unless you want to debate those axioms there's no point in having a discussion. And frankly there is probably an incredibly massive amount of self-serving rationalization going on on both sides because we're all human beings.
This is redundant; the necessary being cannot be corporeal because what is corporeal can be corrupted, and what is not corporeal cannot be visible.
That's a feature, not a bug; everyone, not just people who have encountered a particular religious tradition, can know God.
In classical theism, God not only does things, but everything that exists at any moment exists only at that moment insofar as God makes it exist, so this is wildly inaccurate.
The arguments you're talking about were developed throughout the history of philosophy by people who had no particular motivation to appear any way in internet debates thousands of years later.
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Uh, no, I don't think so.
The most defensible position is far closer to the atheist's than the theist's. That's been demonstrated repeatedly. Between the two, it's the religious who have a strong motivation to continue believing what they do and suffer much worse if they allow good-faith debate. The atheism-theism war of the 2000s and early '10s could never be resolved, of course, but the religious made far more claims about material reality that were proven false.
The religious have never stopped trying to prove how the atheist's position is logically false. The new tactic is presuppositional apologetics, from what I understand, but even that is a decade old and the atheists have consistently demonstrated how these arguments are also wrong or not as strong as the theist wants.
The new tactic where exactly? I have no idea what presuppositional apologetics is; probably a more fruitful tactic is real engagement with the history of philosophy and with the arguments that have been proposed by the best thinkers in it. Cosmological arguments for example are absolutely treated as worthy of serious engagement by even atheist philosophers of religion.
Online is where I see it, but I know that there are some irl debates between "famous" people. The basic idea, from what I understand, is that logics, rationality, etc. have to assume God in the first place, but then atheists go on to use the former to reject the latter. This isn't new, not exactly, it grew in popularity in the early 2010s.
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The major difference between your statement and mine is that I didn’t say anything negative about your religion at all, unless you think saying something is false, but useful and beneficial to those who believe it has an identical valence to saying something is a “self-serving delusion” and that it is only useful to maintain “a hedonistic lifestyle”. Sure, I think it’s fair to infer that I believe that the truth claims of, at least, Christianity will be harder to take seriously once subjected to high-quality atheist arguments, but in no sense to I mean to imply that any of us atheists would just CRUSH you with FACTS and LOGIC if we deigned to bother arguing with you. It’s more that we have a stable equilibrium here as it regards religion which most of us, both the theists and the non-theists seem to derive significant benefit from, and neither party seems strongly incentivized to threaten that equilibrium.
Also, I can’t speak for a lot of people here, but I’m personally not living a particularly “hedonistic” life at all; I barely drink, I don’t use drugs, I haven’t hooked up with anyone outside of the context of a monogamous relationship in years, and I strongly desire to marry and have children in the very near future. All of this is eminently possible and reasonable without taking pretty much any of Catholicism’s truth claims seriously; contrary to popular belief, pre-Christian peoples all over the world were practicing monogamy and relatively “non-hedonistic” lifestyles long before Christ showed up, so I dispute that there’s any significant observable inverse relationship between “Christian-style theism” and “hedonism”.
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I'm an atheist, and I wouldn't say I'm "ignorant" of anything. I've been highly interested in religion and mythology since middle school, and I've done a lot of reading in this area. I've never really stopped reading about religion. I've read the Bible as well as religious and secular Bible commentaries, the Quran and several biographies of Muhammed, studied Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism in college, read pagan apologia like Sallust's On the Gods and the World and what remains of Julian the Apostate's Against the Galileans, and recently I've been reading through some important Vaishnavite Hindu texts, like the Srimad Bhagavatam. I've attended services everywhere from Eastern Orthodox churches to Hare Krishna temples.
I'm not convinced of the metaphysical truth claims of any revealed religion I've investigated, and I'm not compelled by watered down forms of religion like deism or "spiritual but not religious."
I'm very curious. I've constantly investigated religious texts and rituals around the world. I like to think I have an open mind.
The most I can say is that the concepts of metis and signalling have given me grounds to believe that religion could have some place in society to make large social groups function well. But other than that pragmatic argument, I don't think I've been convinced by any particular religious claim.
What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?
I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true. The best introduction to this tradition that doesn't require you spending an inordinate amount of time reading Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is probably Edward Feser, who has a couple books that distill a lot of the classical argumentation into a more approachable format.
Just wanted to let you know that I ordered "The Last Superstition" off of this recommendation and it just got here today. Thank you!
Cool, would love to hear what you think of it!
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I minored in philosophy with a focus on classical philosophy. Granted, I've always found ethics more interesting than metaphysics, but I am at least familiar with Plato and Aristotle's metaphysics. Certainly, I think there's a lot to respect in both of their philosophies, though I think I'm more impressed with their ability to find the right questions to ask, rather than their ability to arrive at the correct answers.
I'll admit that Aquinas is a gap in my studies, since he's quite a bit later than I'm usually interested in when it comes to philosophy. What little I have seen of Thomism has generally impressed me, though it hasn't really swayed me much. Catholicism does have a lot of smart people in its stable, but so do other religions. Buddhist Abhidharma literature and the works of Nāgārjuna are also philosophically formidable, and I still don't believe in reincarnation and Nirvana in an "orthodox" Buddhist fashion.
I might check out Edward Feser. If you had to pick one book of his that you think I would benefit most from, which would you recommend?
I'd skip on Feser entirely and just read Logic and Theism by Sobel, which was written 15 years before Feser, presents the scholastic arguments in a modern, formalized way, and refutes Feser arguments, as well as approaching other types of arguments for and against theism.
That book is not recommended enough given how thorough it is.
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Re. Feser:
"The Last Superstition" is a polemic against New Atheism that, while technically correct about how laughably ignorant many New Atheist arguments were of philosophy, isn't going to convince the unconvinced simply due to how angry it is.
"Scholastic Metaphysics" looks very good. I'm ashamed to say I've owned a copy for two years and have yet to start it. He is good at making tricky, subtle philosophical concepts accessable even to a dumb ox like yours truly, though.
You could also check out his blog archives for a taste. Many posts are topical and/or polemical so look for ones where he addresses particular concept.
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Probably Five Proofs for the Existence of God. I thought that one was fantastic and pretty easily digestible. It also doesn't aim too high, it's not trying to make you a Catholic, just a theist.
Since you have more experience with the classics than I realized, let me say - I have been reading through a series called A History of Ancient Philosophy by Giovanni Reale. It's translated from Italian in a way that leaves it a little difficult to get through at times, but if you can manage, it's a major hidden gem that connects and unifies the strands of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the Neoplatonists into a profoundly satisfying narrative centered around Plato's discovery of supersensible being as the fulcrum of classical thought. Very long but very strongly recommended if you have an appetite for that sort of thing, some of the best philosophical work I've ever seen.
Have you read any of Feser's other stuff? I've been really curious about Aristotle's Revenge.
Not that one, no, but I mean to pick it up at some point.
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We do have surveys. The five most common belief systems on that question in /r/themotte were, in order:
Atheist (humanist) 27.8 %
Agnostic 23 %
Other atheist 13.6 %
Atheist (antitheist) 12.7 %
Catholic 4.8 %
The remaining 20% are mostly theists of various faiths, they'd have trouble putting the same name on the ballot, so challenging even the third runner-up atheist subgroup would be a tall order.
Yeah I definitely believe I could be wrong. It seems like an extreme level of cognitive dissonance to me to constantly be posting about HBD and asking tough questions and wanting to kill sacred cows and all of that, but then just be absolutely unwilling to explore religion.
?
I thought that casual assertions of faith around here were accepted. Those who are faithful explore religion and plainly state that in comments and are not attacked by local atheists.
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Well, we might reasonably think that the relevant question should be "What evidence indicates that your beliefs are true?" - the prickliness you're experiencing is a suspicion that saying "observations of reality" rather than a more generic term like "evidence" might amount to smuggling in an assumption about the validity or non-validity of certain forms of evidence with the effect of arbitrarily ruling out valid arguments.
There are plenty of theistic arguments from the history of philosophy that are interesting and worth thinking about. They cannot really said to be narrowly observational in nature; that's not to say they don't depend on certain observations, but the observation they rely on will be something like "There exists at least one contingent being," and the essential content of the argument is deriving what logically follows from the existence of such a contingent being based on an analysis of contingency, necessity, and causation, embodied in metaphysical principles like the principle of sufficient reason, ultimately aiming to establish that contingent being implies necessary being.
So in a strictly precise sense, the theist would respond to your question with: any observation at all indicates that my beliefs are true, because any observation is an observation of a contingent thing, and (the theist argues) the existence of any contingent thing ultimately entails the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality that explains the being of the observed contingent thing, and the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality is what theists are trying to establish.
The exact chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion is not something I've set out here, both because I'm just trying to explain how the argument works to clarify the basic sort of claim that is being made, and because my philosophy is a bit rusty so I probably couldn't explain it here remotely as well as an academic work on the subject. I recognize that tends to kill discussion because who wants to be told to go get a book on something, but oh well.
We ask for observations of reality because that's what the question amounts to: how should our behavior change if the god of Thomas' five proofs exists? If the only difference between a universe with a god and the universe without one is that the former is more consistent with some metaphysical approach, why should I care?
It's similar to discussing consciousness: if you can't tell if someone is conscious or a p-zombie, why does it matter?
In the classical schema, the knowledge of God is presented as the apex of theoretical contemplation, which does not need any external justification but is itself the foundational good of human life. From Aristotle's Protrepticus:
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Ironically given your point it is Religions that generally don't like it when you gore their (sometimes literal) sacred cows, so in my experience curious contrarians are much more likely to be atheist if only because when they started to ask tough questions about the religions they were probably raised in, the answers were things like "God moves in mysterious ways" and "Have faith" and the like. Not very satifying to the curious who want to know why.
And perhaps relevantly, the only religion present in even single digit numbers is the one that literally-and-not-just-figuratively invented apologetics and thus is most likely to be able to provide an actual answer(that is at least not facially stupid) to gored sacred cows.
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Don’t beat yourself up, you just tried to apply a valid argument to the wrong group. Turns out the data shows that the scepticism involved in rationalism is rarely able to support also being a theist.
As far as HBD, wokism, feminism, most of the stuff we argue about is concerned, I consider these matters largely settled to my satisfaction, my arguing is more fine-tuning, as a hobby and public service than 'exploring' or 'seeking an answer'. So it is with the god question, I searched until I had an answer, then I moved on. I'm always open for business, but I don't go door-to-door.
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Is...is this a troll? It pattern matches way too well to what an atheist might say about Christians if you replaced the term in your post. Like, down to the actual words and sentences.
No this is definitely not a troll. I actually sortof hate the (blatantly inverted) myth that religious people can't be scientists, but I think it illustrates my point really well, so here goes:
You can have a devout Catholic particle physicist, astronomer, biologist, etc. These things are completely compatible with each other. Consider the breadth of experience that a devout Catholic astronomer has. They are able to tap into both the beauty of the universe, as well as integrate this into a broader (in my opinion richer) understanding about how humans and our morality fit into that universe. They get the "stars are cool" side of things, but they also get the divine "this is bigger than me" philosophical side of things.
To a devout Atheist, only part of this is available. You certainly get the "stars are cool" part, but you have to remain intentionally ignorant of the rest of the human experience.
Another example could be: I am a musician, and because of my understanding of music, I hear a drastically different thing when listening to it than somebody who isn't. Things which are "clever" in music just aren't apparent to a person who doesn't understand what is happening. Because I am willing to explore the idea that music is more than just patterned noise, my experience is richer. It's why the listening experience is richer for a musician than it is for a non-musician.
The same is true for cooking, painting, sculpting, etc. If you're a chef, you get to tap into a better understanding of what another chef is making for you and why it is interesting.
An atheist sees thousands of years of human history, art, and philosophy and (to stay in my metaphor) they just see the patterned noise that a non-musician hears when listening to music. It's pretty colors on a canvas, but that's kindof it.
A Catholic visiting Saint Peters Basilica sees something more than an atheist.
But the Catholic misses out on nothing.
The Atheist retort to this is, of course: but what if its all fake? Okay that's a fine question, but that starts driving into a question that I think causes the snake to sort of eat its own tail: what's real? Is the love I feel for my wife and children "real"? etc. etc. (this is a well trodden discussion that I don't think I need to remap)
I disagree with your point, but have to admit this is a well written and thought provoking way of promoting religion. I’d say it only holds water for the major/standard religions, but still.
How would you feel about a religion that hasn’t led to major art, or at least that wouldn’t give understanding. Something like shamanism or animism?
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Actually, the Catholic misses out on an awful lot. An accomplished buddhist monk who visited the Basilica would doubtless experience something more than a purely materialist perspective - and all of those doors would be closed to the papist. A practicing Christian hermeticist would see entire extra layers of meaning and teaching contained within the art as well, to say nothing of an orthodox Christian.
Your argument only really works if Catholicism is the One True Faith, but when you take into account the diversity of religious experiences and perspectives that can be found in the world it falls apart. From my personal perspective, your faith keeps you intentionally ignorant of vast swathes of human experience in much the same way that you claim atheism does.
Maybe the Buddhist seems more (although I don’t think so), but the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew, and the Catholic certainly see more than the atheist.
I recently spent some time in Abu Dhabi, and visited The White Mosque there. Because of my willingness to explore or accept the validity of the divine, I see more there than an Atheist would.
I am Catholic, and won’t lie about my biases. To the general point about the necessary ignorance of Atheists, however, the specific religion is irrelevant. Somebody elsewhere made a comparison to a nationalist visiting a national monument and feeling differently than a globalist. I think that approaches the same point I’m making
Actually, it is relevant. In this case you made the claim that the Catholic misses out on nothing, but that's absolutely not true. The Catholic misses out on multiple different interpretations of the same root phenomena - he has no appreciation for the ways that the eternal Dao reveals and unfolds itself in the construction of the Basilica, no understanding of how it serves as an expression of Krishna's glory, nor does he understand how it is a reflection of the sublime beauty of Melek Taûs. You haven't made an argument against atheism, you've made an argument against all religions. My own spirituality views Catholicism as a partial revelation, a single perspective that, while valuable, does not contain the entirety of the truth. To me, your own understanding of the beauty of the basilica is just as flawed and limited as that of the atheist in your original argument, and I simply do not accept Baruch Spinoza (whose work was actually banned by the Catholic church for 'atheism' among other things) necessarily had a lesser capacity for the appreciation of beauty than Fred Phelps. Again, your argument is only valid if the other person already accepts that Catholicism is true - it might be convincing to people who are already papists, but that's not going to actually convert or win anyone over. As a weapon of persuasion, it isn't going to reach anybody who you haven't already won over, because it relies on them accepting your premises already.
No you do not undertake my point, or are willfully misinterpreting it.
Yes he does. Yes I do, and that is my point.
No, he actually doesn't, and I do not believe you do either - how can you claim to be a Catholic while simultaneously appreciating the Dao? Daoism makes a series of claims about the universe that are fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism... which means that if you can appreciate the divinity of the Dao without being a Daoist, then nothing stops an atheist from doing the same to your Catholic understanding of the divine. There are real and serious differences between Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Hinduism and Yezidism - they paint very different pictures of the nature of the underlying reality. The Buddhist draws different lessons from the Basilica than the Daoist who draws different lessons again from the Catholic, and while they are all religions, "the divine" means incredibly different things within each of them, and if you want to put them all into a generic category then you cannot actually keep atheism or pantheism from joining that category as well (see Spinoza once again).
If I've continued to misunderstand your point, please explain it to me in simpler terms.
Have you considered that your model of religious people is simply wrong?
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If it's fake though, your better understanding is at best just noise. If you think you are psychic and can see auras, you will think you have more to say about people's words and truthfulness and the multi colored auras may even add beauty to their speech. But if you have a brain tumour then none of that information is true. If you call the FBI and tell them you know Bob Smith is going to kill someone, whether you have true or fake information is critical.
The same for an astronomer, if you think the reason for some phenomena is God and it is not, then you are further away from the actual truth.
You are correct that the Catholic has additional context and information, but that is only a good thing if they are actually correct. If not it may well be actively harmful. If it was only taken within the aesthetic context than that isn't really a problem. But I would argue that history shows that people are really very bad at keeping their beliefs in that sphere.
If Catholicism is wrong that gay sex is sinful and instead Gay God thinks it is the most virtuous act and gets you into Heaven, then that additional information being taught may have doomed hundreds of thousands of people to Hell. Whether your additional information is accurate or not is basically the whole point, if you are going to try to teach and pressure people into following it.
Catholics can certainly be scientists however no question, the ones that are generally focus on the fact that God created a universe that He wants to be explored with reason. So while God might be the ultimate cause of a super nova, the proximate cause was running out of hydrogen or whatever. Whether the sense of wonder of Godly creation outweighs the materialistic sense of wonder about a vast universe of chaos and beauty does not seem to be proven though.
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Yeah, but no one is actually arguing that? Not here, anyways. I'll argue that religious people engage in some level of compartmentalization when it comes to science, but not that they couldn't do it.
You can do all those things even without religion. You can have a sense of "this is beautiful" or "this is cool". People can, for example, experience many of the same feelings about nations instead of religion, where they get some awe or wonder from tying things to their people as opposed to God.
What you're saying just doesn't happen, and I know that because I've personally had the kind of moments where I felt many of the same things you described while also being an atheist.
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