Why Wear the Whole Hat?

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BTW, it was an ordained minister by the name of George LeMetre who proposed the Big Bang theory in about 1915. Says a lot about his beliefs in God creating the Universe.

An argument against, "some other Christian's sincerely held beliefs," IS a straw-man argument when you are arguing with me because those are not my beliefs. You've set up the beliefs of other Christians as if they were mine, or should be, when they are not so that you can easily dismiss them. However, in actuality you haven't even considered my beliefs.

Your continued use of the straw-man (other people's beliefs) when arguing with me ultimately betrays a deeper fallacy, a false dichotomy. You seem to think there are only two choices, yours and theirs, and that any divergent belief such as my own is not valid because it is not one of the two choices you arbitrarily chose to consider.


Like I said before,

"I think that most Christians who claim to take the Bible literally, if they were truly honest with themselves, could find at least five, if not more, scriptures that they could not take literally no matter what they claim to the contrary. I do not feel that taking the Bible as literally as possible is a prerequisite to being a Christian or having salvific faith in God.

Let me try to make this clearer. I don't believe in the Bible. I believe in God. In other words, God and the Bible are not synonymous as both you and the most Conservative Christians would like to believe for your own ease. You say that the Bible is man-made and, therefore, God is man-made. They think the Bible was directly written by the actual hand of God and, therefore, the Bible is God. You both fail to consider that the Bible could have been written by fallible people who wrote about their actual experiences with a real God. Wouldn't that result in a collection of writings that both reflected human vices and inconsistencies as well as some actual real description of God?



You don't seem to understand why this is a fallacious argument. It is a fallacious argument because it is a gauntlet that not even your own beliefs can withstand. It is an impossible double standard. If my beliefs go down because they are not universal so do all of yours. You cannot argue against my beliefs in favor of your own because you cannot satisfy your own stringent prerequisite.

I guess you could say that all beliefs are false, including your own, just to spit me. However, just using the word false at all implies that there are true beliefs out there somewhere by which to measure the falsity of others. Those true beliefs by which you actually measure are obviously not universal, since, according to your standards, we are clear exceptions to the rule.

Last edited by spdjeanne on 08 Dec 2007, 6:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Yes, it says that he obviously did not think that Scientific Theory and Theology were mutually exclusive.

Even biblical literalists admit there are metaphors in the Bible. See if you can find anyone who believes this biblical passage from the Dong of Solomon is to be taken literally, instead of as a poetic metaphor:

I invite you to take this literally, draw a picture, and put it in this thread.


It's logically possible for just one of them to be true, and it might not even be one of those claiming to be the one and only true faith.

I argue that the existence of many faiths means either that any deity that might exist doesn't insist that only one faith is true, or that this deity or deities is far from just and merciful, and possibly would find it funny to reveal the true faith only to one mute, illiterate schizophrenic.

By the way, cosmologists still find things to disagree on. Would you say that means none of them can be right?


That doesn't mean she's wrong. From what I have seen her write about her beliefs, she would be mainstream in Europe, where the fundamentalists are a minority, and widely viewed with the suspicion they deserve.


All I can see it says is that he was not a Young Earth creationist, which again makes him a mainstream Christian. Even the Vatican has astronomers who are quite happy with the big bang theory. As far as they are concerned, God is who started the big bang.

I have only ever met fundamentalists online, unless you count one guy who tried to persuade me that the proof of God's existence was that life could not have evolved (he gave up on that one very quickly). With that one possible exception, none of the Christians I have met were like the fundamentalists who are so loud in the US. Even the Christian clerics I have met were moderates more like spdjeanne than like our own Chuchulainn, for example.

I get the impression that you both want spdjeanne to become a Bible thumper. Why? Aren't there enough of them?

Gromit, Nice typo.

I'd like to hear the metaphor for that.

Your beliefs, as you have articulated them so far, are too convoluted to discuss.




I knew it would be a matter of time before you contradicted yourself. I said that you don't believe in the god of the bible. You made a straw-man argument, while accusing me of a straw-man.



I'd refer you to my "Avoid the Noid" thread. The falicy of logic you are making is divorcing an idea from its origins. It's absurd to argue that the Noid pre-existed the 1990's Domino's Pizza commercials in the same manner that it's absurd to argue the existence of the god of abraham, who is concerned with human affairs, who sat on his hands for 200,000 years, before deciding to reveal himself to humanity 3500 years ago.





You don't seem to understand why this is NOT a fallacious argument. Belief in the supernatural is qualitatively different than belief in science. All scientific claims admit to being POTENTIALLY false, given new evidence, but are held as provisionally true, given the body of evidence that supports them. Faith in contrast, requires the suspension of skeptical inquiry in order to be believed in. You either believe in a thing or you don't. No evidence is even required.
Now, if you claim at this point-that I'm making a straw-man of your beliefs, because you think them to be based on evidence, then they aren't beliefs at all, merely undisciplined and sloppy theories that blend the provable with the unprovable.

I don't see how you telling me that, "(I) don’t believe in the god of the bible,” and my correcting your assumption is a straw-man argument on my part. When you say someone, “believes in the God of the Bible,” you obviously mean something much more literal and conservative than what I mean when I say it. Therefore, I was trying to explain what that difference was so that you would understand my position better. I DO believe in the God of the Bible, but I don't believe the literal interpretation of the Bible or that the Bible IS God.

Also, I don’t see how what I said about you believing that the Bible and God are synonymous is a straw-man in light of you saying that,



You believe that God is only a character in the Bible that could not have possibly existed previous to the Bible having been conceived of or written down. You believe the Bible was man-made, therefore, God is man-made. Have I said anything in this paragraph that is not your position? If it is accurate then my argument is not a straw-man.



You still have not explained why a belief taken on faith must be UNIVERSAL to be true. You have merely described what it is to believe by faith.



I have never said that I believed in God because of the Scientific evidence only that Scientific evidence does not contradict belief in God. I don’t see how my belief in God by faith alone must be held universally to be true. You conveniently just left that part out.

As for why you are making a straw-man argument, I’ve already explained that you are reacting to and arguing against positions that are not mine but other people's positions. The reason you say that my beliefs are convoluted is because they don't match what you think I should believe, given your understanding of the world as a false dichotomy, but you have yet to explain how MY beliefs, themselves, are actually convoluted. At least Gromit has the decency to react to the things I actually say instead of something he planted on me.

Also, you never really addressed the false dichotomy you're making throughout this thread between your point of view and the Conservative Christians. Why do you believe those are the only two options except that it makes your choice about what to believe easier?

Last edited by spdjeanne on 08 Dec 2007, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wow this thread is weak. Went way off point by like...what....post number two?

Well, yes, but the thread has provided examples of the main point, which is why I'm sticking with it.

Well, I'm happy for you if your getting something out of the responses. The proof I'm seeing from it is just too depressing to want to wade through.

I guess I felt obligate, since I started the thread in the first place, to keep it going for a while. I hope you don't mind my having quoted your phrase as the subject line. Do you know where that expression comes from? Did you make it up? Either way, I still like it.

I think I was talking to someone about how people seem to grab on entire stereotypes of being without sorting out what's right and wrong, as if it didn't seem to matter as much as fitting a norm, and they brought that phrase up. Being pragmatic about communication I liked the fact that it was a good way to congeal that whole concept into about four words and that people generally knew what it meant - so, it stuck. And no, I don't mind you borrowing it - it'd be a little hypocritical of me if I did.

Gromit: I doubt that anyone really wants spdjeane or anyone to becvome a bible thumper, seeing as there are already a few enough of them around here. I don't really care whether people believe or not; it's the haranguing about their religion that irritates me. Christians are quite entitled to say what they want, but the continuous tubthumping and p8ulpit bashing is getting rather annoying. Yes, we can't prove the existence of God, and some of us are never going to believe in the Christian one; why then do some people want us to accept their point of view blindly when we believe something different?

I see nothing in modern cosmology or evolutionary theory that directly contradicts the account of the Creation as given in Genesis 1, save for the literal interpretation of the Creation as taking exactly six sequential days of twenty-four hours each. (For fun, sometime, compare Genesis 1 and the current interpretation of the Big Bang. Remember that until the infant Universe expanded and cooled enough for laws of physics to exist, its nature at that point was chaotic in the extreme, and that scientifically, nothing can be meaningfully said about the state of the monobloc prior to the Bang.)

(As a side note, I agree with Calvin, of "Calvin and Hobbes" - it should have been called "The Horrendous Space Kablooie!! !")

(As another side note, it is also interesting to note that the account of Creation in Genesis 1 is directly contradicted by the account of Creation in Genesis 2, in which Man is created before plants, animals, or free-standing water, rather that after.)

Life exists in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry. Molecules are not randomly assembled from stray atoms - rather, they can fit together only in certain configurations, dictated by physical laws. The substances formed from these molecules do not combine in just any old form, either - sugar, for instance, is soluble in water, not air (not even very moist air), even though both air and water contain hydrogen and oxygen.

If you like, you can consider God as the Author of these laws (I kind of lean toward this view, as I find the equivalent of a trillion-cushion billiards shot that ends up with, well, us, to be more impressive that a more direct intervention). In this case, scientists may be the most religious of us all, as, in learning more about the underlying laws of the Universe, they come closer to knowing the Mind of God...

I hope that you are not referring to me as the one of the 'some people' in your last sentence. Ultimately, all I'm arguing for in this thread is for people to stop buying into the stereotypes of what it is to be Christian or what it is to be Atheist. The reason I am specifically talking about my beliefs is because I think I make a good example of someone who does not conform to the American Conservative Christian stereotype but whose beliefs are definitively still Christian in nature. If I had been an Atheist, I could have just as easily broken the mold. When I was an Atheist, I did not fit the Richard Dawkins stereotypical point of view that so many people seem to think they have to swallow hook line and sinker. At that time, I did not believe in God as a real being, but thought that belief in God was mostly cultural and could be a good and healthy part of a person's psychological outlook on life.

Originally, the thread was supposed to be about why people feel that it is necessary to buy into the whole stereotype instead of accepting individual beliefs on their own merit.

My conclusions:

I believe people 'wear the whole hat' for safety, power, and ease. First, the stereotypes make people feel safe because in joining a vast congruous society of people they no longer have to stand on their own. Second, the stereotypes make people feel powerful by enabling the creation of these vast societies and in the ability of these societies to gang up on the unsuspecting loner. Finally, accepting a stereotype, a bundle of beliefs, is easier because stereotypes are much less mentally challenging than having to sort through all the individual claims to arrive at a belief system on your own.

I think that's very true, and the people who go it alone do so for their own sake because they have that much of a natural gut-level aversion to just buying anything hook, line, and sinker.