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I find people who are unable to fathom how an intelligent person could be a Christian have often never engaged with any Christian apologetics, and often don't even really know any Christians in real life. I think Christianity is false, but I don't think you have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.
I can agree that they're not stupid, but willful ignorance? Absolutely.
A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.
Cue apologetics about how if God was obvious, then there would be no need for "faith", which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.
That is willful ignorance, for all that they're drinking their own kool-aid. At some point a rational entity who hasn't fucked their own priors sees that an explanation without a million epicycles that reduced to God doesn't really do anything is better stated as God not existing.
Well yes, because if they're not documentable, they don't eliminate the need for faith. If they are, then they would, so they don't happen.
I don't even necessarily disagree with you, but this is just a terrible point. It's countered by the very argument it's trying to address.
What exactly changed that anatomically modern humans living in the period 3-1k BC deserved to have glaring and obvious information doled out from the heavens and yet we moderns are so unfortunate? The seas don't part themselves anymore, it's up to us to raise them the old fashioned way by raising global temperatures.
Call me cynical, but I see a glaring decrease in the intensity and magnitude of such interventions as documentation and history keeping improved through the ages. Christians can claim that Jesus was a real person modern Israel, not that he lead an army to overthrow the Romans, because actual Roman scholars would have disagreed.
How exactly does your degree of faith matter, if your omniscient creator knew exactly how much of it you'd have well before you were even born, and whether it would sufficient or not to spare you from a Hell of their making?
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I believe that miracles continue to happen and that the Catholic Church documents the ones with substantial evidence. It’s also on guard against hoaxes and mistakes and rarely declares an event to be a miracle.
I know it sounds hokey to a non-Catholic, but look into the Eucharistic miracles. Especially those examined by pathologists .
I looked into eucharistic miracles a while back. The chain of sources inevitably bottoms out in Catholic publications. While they are often touted as having been examined by pathologists, the only one in which I've ever seen an actual research paper detailing methods and findings (rather than simply an assurance that the miracle has been authenticated by qualified persons) was the miracle of Lanciano, and in that case all that could be confirmed was that it was an actual piece of a human heart, not that it had ever been a host. Nor was it miraculously preserved, but completely desiccated.
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The variant that persuaded me actually came from the Atheists, who asserted that a God who attempts to secure your love through threats of eternal torture is a monster. That seemed like a pretty good argument to me, along with the obvious-when-you-think-about-it point that if a God existed, and if he wanted us to know he existed, we'd simply have the unalterable knowledge baked in. Of course, if we knew for a certainty that he existed, then the promise of heaven and the threat of hell would be dispositive, even if Hell is the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. On the other hand, if God existed, and wanted us to choose to love him of our own free will, the only way that works is if we get to choose whether or not to believe in him as well. In that case, leaving his existence plausible but ambiguous makes perfect sense, together with Hell as the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. It fits even better if you presume annihilationism is correct, and the people who reject God get exactly what they're expecting: death, and then non-existence.
In any case, the chain of logic seems simple: God wants to share love with people. It's not love unless it's freely chosen. The choice is permanent, and the choice being offered is better than it not being offered. Certain knowledge of the consequences of the choice corrupt the free nature of the choice. Given those constraints, blinding the choice is the obvious way forward.
It seems there are a few pages stuck together here, linking "can choose whether to believe in X" and "can choose whether to love X".
Also, at least in the variety of Christianity I was taught, God doesn't threaten people with eternal torture. He simply gives people what they want for eternity: if that's to be without him, then so be it, and so they end up in a torturous existence by their choice - hell is simply a place where humans, angels, and perhaps others exist without God or the fear of death, which is all they need to create a terrible existence by their own efforts. I'm not a Christian, but like a lot of Christianity, this seems to be to be insightful and plausible in itself. It certainly makes far more sense than an all-benevolent, all-powerful God setting up a realm of eternal torture for fallible beings, and (for some insane reason) hiring a fallen angel to run the place.
That's no God then, that's an Asshole Genie.
Not sure about that: is it being an Asshole Genie to not force someone to love you and want to be around you?
If someone makes a prideful wish, should a genie revise that wish to something smarter?
The asshole genie thing is that God should know very well that rejecting religion and not worshipping God does not actually mean you wish to be away from all that is good in the world - you simply don't believe that the good things are all absolutely reliant on him.
Going "oh so you want to be cast into the outer darkness" is a cheap gotcha rather unbecoming of any deity that claims to be all-loving. "Oh you don't want broccoli? Well I guess I won't feed you at all."
Taking it further, this idea of the nature of Hell necessitates that God either isn't all-powerful so he physically cannot embrace those who rejected him, isn't all-knowing so he doesn't realize that people don't interpret their wishes as he would, or not all-benevolent so he doesn't give a fuck and would rather cast them into Hell out of spite for being wrong about his existence.
I see it as more "a sensible wish based on the information I have".
Here, I think opinions among Christians diverge, but some options I have heard are (a) the choice is post-mortem, but without the spiritual development and accepted Grace from worshipping and believing in God in this life, the chances are that the Devil is going to persuade your wicked soul that hell is a better option, (b) the idea that everyone really believes in God, so to reject Christianity (or the closest thing you can do in your cultural context) is actually to knowingly reject the highest good, or (c) to think that salvation is available even for those in hell, except perhaps those explicitly said to be damned in the Bible, i.e. Satan and the fallen angels.
I think that some combination of the three is probably needed to fit with the Christian belief that their religion is not, in fact, just a very successful twist on a set of unusual religious practices that evolved among a particular tribe in the Levantine regions, and that the reason why Jesus was geographically so limited (covering just a tiny and somewhat peripheral region of the world) was that he was just a particularly successful example of the many mystics in that period, not some inexplicable mix of divine and human. As you might expect from my wording, I actually believe that it was such a lucky twist, and that Jesus was an unusually successful (and wise) mystic.
Another option, which I haven't heard from Christians (except perhaps some Catholics and Evangelicals - my memory of those particular conversations is hazy) but which makes sense to me from their perspective, is to take "God = the highest good" really seriously and Platonically, and to take very seriously what the New Testament says about worshipping being about what you do rather than what you say or think. This allows them to intepret e.g. John 3:16 as a sufficient rather than necessary condition for salvation. So, someone who pursues the highest good they can conceptualise and know in their particular circumstances is experiencing God's grace and accepting it, even if their historical circumstances etc. mean that they can't be Christians. I like that idea, insofar as I think (despite being a moderately gnostic atheist) that pursuing the highest good(s) one can conceptualise is the best route to a meaningful and happy life, and that the world could be a lot better if more people did it.
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This has been my general approach too. There are few universal 'goods' across all religions. Those are likely good places to start.
Don't betray, murder, rape, lie, steal or be hypocrite. I try my hardest to do all of them. the not lying and not-betraying (even unintentionally) bits are especially hard to keep up all the time.
It's one of the reasons I don't buy people's crap on religion. I have yet meet anyone who consistently does even just these 5. If it's that difficult to follow the LCM (lowest-common-multiple) of all religions together. No way anyone is able to those and all the extras that come depending on which religion you think wins the jackpot.
Perks of being Hindu / Buddhist. Release from the eternal cycle of life/death is exactly what Moksha/Nirvana looks like. So by following an Indian-origin religion and rejecting Christianity, a person gets both the incentive (aim for non-existence) and a guarantee of success (non-existence). Thanks Jesus ?
Win-win if you ask me.
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Walking on water was only seen by Christ's disciples, who had already chosen to follow him. Would you consider bread and fishes glaringly obvious? I wouldn't.
More generally, Christ was very clear and intentional most of the time about keeping his miracles secret. When he raised people from the dead he generally allowed 1-2 people in to see it, if any. There are a few exceptions, but the general rule is that ambiguity is better for our moral development.
Pretty clear is not perfectly clear. Evidence of God is not a stepwise function. The more evidence you have, the more moral responsibility you have too. Some ambiguity is still present even when the evidence is overwhelming.
You make two arguments here:
Christians holds God's existence as axiomatic, which leads them astray
It is evident that God doesn't exist
2 is debatable. 1 is just dirty rhetorical tactics. Christians obviously do not hold the existence of God as axiomatic, or none would ever leave the church. If you can change your mind about an axiom based on evidence then it's not an axiom. Characterizing belief-in-God as axiomatic is just shorthand for "how dare they disagree with me even though I think they're wrong." More importantly, epicycles are a perfectly rational way of explaining a phenomenon given sufficient evidence for that phenomenon. The laws of physics as currently understood contain just as many epicycles, if not more.
You continue to make this claim without engaging with counterarguments. Even in this thread, @FCfromSSC directly defined hell as "the absence of God" which is quite a bit different from how you characterize it here (as a place God sends people).
It's perfectly consistent for God to value agency above all else, especially since it's agency that gives meaning to moral virtue. It's perfectly consistent to suppose that if God did create people who were incapable of evil, he would not be granting them agency at all.
OK. Now do the whole Old Testament.
I'm using axiomatic to include priors with a probability of both 1 and 1-epsilon. Mathematicians regularly employ axioms, yet are open to reconsidering what they consider axiomatic if the downstream consequences are conflicting or nonsensical, they consider adjusting their upstream assumptions.
Who knows how the brain actually encodes Bayesian priors (it actually does do that, as best as we can tell), it might not be possible for a prior in the brain to be literally one or zero, but observational evidence tells me some people get close, and no amount of evidence anyone can feasibly muster can move them.
Frankly speaking that you even consider point 2 to even be up for debate given most reasonable starting priors, is strong evidence of point 1. What exactly would it take to convince you that God doesn't exist?
The whole omniscience part makes the concept of "agency" rather dubious doesn't it? Ah yes, I know perfectly well in advance if you're going to take the red pill or the blue pill, sucks that you're with 100% certainty going to take the one I've laced with cyanide. On you kid, L+ratio.
I asked Bing what the general consensus about what Hell actually is is the myriad strains of Christianity. Said consensus apparent doesn't exist.
I don't see Hell as the "absence of God" as a mainstream position, and given that it clearly seems to me that he's on an extended vacation, if this counts as Hell, then call me a happy sinner.
Besides, the number of epicycles that a theory is allowed to hold before it ought to be rejected is clearly a function of how useful said theory is at predicting experimental results and constraining expectations. The Standard Model of Physics does an awful lot better at predicting the nature and evolution of the universe than the Bible does, so we can tack on Dark Matter or Dark Energy with the clear knowledge that something must be missing in our understanding.
All the people in the Old Testament are constantly denying God, worshipping idols, etc. even after seeing miracles. Obviously the evidence they saw was still ambiguous or they wouldn't be doing those things.
1-epsilon still doesn't address the people that leave the church, it just sounds like it does.
This is a good thing and is how evidence should work. If something is true, it should be difficult to dissuade someone. If someone has seen lots of evidence for something over the course of their life, of course counterbalancing that evidence will also require quite a lot of work, possibly more than anyone can feasibly muster. Being confident in a belief is not the same thing as adopting that belief as an axiom.
Either you're wrong or they use a different definition of "axiom" than the commonly accepted one. Like I said, if your axioms depend on evidence, they're not axioms at all. Sounds like their actual axioms are something like "truth must be consistent", and the things you describe as axioms would be better characterized as useful assumptions. There is no such thing as a downstream axiom--it's either an axiom or it's not one.
To be honest none of those Bing options really address that; they're more concerned with the ultimate fate of people who get sent to Hell, not the nature of what Hell is. This is obvious enough that I question why you even included that point. I asked Bing "please describe a few commonly-held beliefs regarding the nature of christian hell" and on my first try got a much better response:
So, obviously "hell is the absence of God" is in fact a pretty mainstream position.
Yes I know. So now we're back to square one, as I was saying, where your claim is that there's not enough evidence for Christianity. This is a much less interesting criticism than one about epicycles, forgetting that epicycles are how we get things like the laws of physics in the first place.
If you don't know which of the pills is laced with cyanide, that's not exactly your choice, is it? If you do know, then it's still your choice even if the choice-offerer knows what your decision will be before you've made it.
Axioms don't depend on evidence; you can pick any axiom you want. Once you've picked one, all the evidence you see is interpreted according to that axiom. You can compare the perspectives on a set of evidence through two axioms, and then pick the perspective you prefer, for whatever reason you prefer it. Picking axioms because you prefer the shape of the evidence-cluster they generate is a basic, intuitive part of human reasoning, and it's fair to say that it involves Axioms being influenced by evidence, if somewhat indirectly.
I agree with this for certain meanings of "axiom". If I accept this definition as true though, it hardly seems problematic to accept the existence of God as axiomatic. I think most of the time when people use the term they really just mean "you're more confident about this than you should be."
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Seems to me like the majority opinion, or certainly what I would expect from grabbing a random Christian off the street. If the clergy of either hold more nuanced views, they're not doing a good job of promulgating them.
I don't really care to litigate every single definition of Hell someone dragged out from under the closet over the past 2 millennia.
Once again, I point out that even going the definition you keep bringing up, I'm doing perfectly fine as is.
I'm pretty sure that I never claimed that all Christians had an invincible degree of belief in God. I wouldn't expect to see deconverts in that case either.
I contend that it's true for otherwise intelligent Christians, the kind who have actually examined the tenets of their religion instead of just going with general vibes like the majority of any movement do.
I have no way of estimating in any rigorous way how much evidence there is for or against Christianity, yet I can clearly tell which one is overwhelming. Evidently you disagree, and evidently that doesn't convince me, or vice versa.
If the interlocutor knows, then there was no choice at all. I don't even think Free Will is a coherent concept, and the universe is deterministic with the possible exception of random processes at the subatomic level, which doesn't change anything. In principle, I think all sapient entities can be dissected to understand with near perfect accuracy what their response to any given stimuli would be, to the limits determined by Quantum Uncertainty. We simply lack the tools to scan them that accurately, or the compute to render them 1:1 on useful time scales.
Our concept of choice is a useful social fiction, and useful only because we can't actually simulate everyone perfectly.
What is clear to me that an omniscient and omnibenevolent deity ought to know with absolute certainty what anything they create will ever do, and is thus entirely on the hook for any horrors along the way. I deny that this is possible to salvage in any way, though kudos to Apologists for trying their hardest.
You're not in Hell by that definition.
You're the one who went out of your way to respond to the "separation" definition, then tried to claim it wasn't a mainstream definition. Asking you to actually respond to the definition is not asking you to litigate every single definition.
What you claimed was that Christianity holds God as an axiom. To me this is a meaningless statement, since organizations do not actually have beliefs, so I interpreted it as "Christians hold God as an axiom." Still, "otherwise intelligent Christians" leave the church all the time so it doesn't seem to be an axiom for them either. At this point we're left with "anyone who has studied the church, and not left it, holds God's existence as an axiom" which seems unfalsifiable given how much we've warped the definitions at this point. It's easier and more accurate to just say "some people are very confident that Christianity is correct" than to claim that anyone who disagrees with you must only do so because their adoption of axioms prevents them from taking contradictory evidence seriously.
If I offer someone the choice between $100 or $1, they have a choice, even if they will take the $100 every time. I don't see how knowing beforehand somehow removes the choice itself.
I'm not convinced that the limits of Quantum Uncertainty are so limiting at all. The butterfly effect means that even a single atom out of place will almost certainly lead to vastly different outcomes over long enough time scales.
Not that it matters anyways. If our decisions are caused by purely physical phenomena, whether they are predictable or not is irrelevant--either way they are perhaps not truly "ours." At the same time, if they are purely physical, there's the hard problem of consciousness to deal with. I am self-aware, as I assume you are too. I remain unconvinced that consciousness is a property which properly-arranged atoms can produce from nothing. You can define away consciousness the same way you can define away free will--"it's actually just an illusion caused by the underlying atoms"--and doing so seems incorrect.
Do you believe you have moral worth? Do you believe your experiences matter? If so I'd contend that you and I are on the same page. Consciousness exists, as does free will, at least for all intents and purposes.
Basically the entire reason I hop into these debates is to try and focus attention onto this specific point. Pascal's Wager, Free Will, Theodicy, etc. are all interesting debates (and somewhat valuable) but in the end all that matters is our actual estimation of which theories are most valuable/likely. I've worked hard to determine the truth through the scientific method, and would be happy to do so again as part of some double crux. In the meantime, drive-by half-baked philosophy is just annoying and compels me to respond.
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