The absurdity of Christianity

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Is it unethical to point out when something is a placebo because it might nullify the benefit of the placebo?

I've always been mystified as to how Occam, a devout monk who it seems believed scripture to be the infallible truth, could have been responsible for Occam's Razor, the idea that when presented with more than one explanation for a thing, the simplest explanation was the one to accept. How he found scripture and theism simpler than the idea that the whole shebang was largely made up, I don't know. Perhaps he compartmentalised his two ideas in his mind, which apparently is something that some people can do.

As for religious scientists these days, I think there's a fairly common idea that the deity is the creator of the phenomena that scientists are now elucidating, and that there's no inherent contradiction between the existence of their concept of what the deity is and the existence of such phenomena as evolution. I doubt they take scripture as literally as Occam did. In fact belief in scripture as the absolute, literal truth is something I haven't known any religionist to hold to in the UK, though I can't say I've known many religionists.

I was rather surprised to find the notion to be fairly common in the southern states of the USA, though I didn't notice many people there with much science education, and in many ways going there seemed like something of a step back in time, so in hindsight I suppose I should have realised it would be like that. I even heard a preacher of the old fire-and-brimstone type, and half thought myself to have walked into the 19th century. It was such a spectacle that I made a sound recording of him, though apparently it's not seen as unusual in the area he preached in.

I do not disagree.

I hypothesize we all start there; and some evolve.

The methods are diametrically opposed, so it would be quite the act to pull off.

In one method, information is welcome and harvested eagerly;
in the other method, information is threatening and actively excluded.

Maybe someone without a corpus callosum could pull it off

I think you can. I would not dismissed the contributions of scientists just because the're religious.

Not if the person's belief in the "something" is firm

William of Ockham was a product of his time.
He believed that science was a matter of discovery and saw God as the only ontological necessity. The laws of physics exist therefore because god allowed it in his creation. It was up to man to discover the empirical mysteries of the universe.

I don’t think you understand the fallacy. Adjusting an argument that doesn’t work as well as one would like it to work until it does work is not a fallacy. You’re the one claiming that using a different argument is moving the target.

The weakness of screaming for evidence is no one can force you to accept evidence when you have it. I’ve already stated in depth the problems of demanding evidence.

If evidence is that important, please explain to me why anyone should use the scientific method when there is no evidence for it.


Earlier you said something to the effect that apologists are Texas sharpshooters for correcting older ideas with newer ideas, now you’re complaining about older ideas? You know you’re in a philosophy sub-forum, right?

I do also doubt the mind.

Evidence based reasoning did not lead to my iPad. It produces results? Such as…?

What lead to my iPad and reduced infant mortality was justified belief in reliable processes. You’re basically arguing sola indicio when the people or robots or who/whatever they were assembled my iPad from parts, which themselves were in turn designed and manufactured by people operating under the unproven, untested assumption that certain principles worked together to yield desired results. By your reasoning the battery in my iPad shouldn’t be changed unless the tech guy personally handled the lithium himself.

That’s not how people actually work. Nobody actually relies on evidence. Considering the number of cell phone users and iPad users, there is a tiny, select minority of people who have limited internal access (evidence) to the inner workings of devices. Everyone else, like myself, just use the devices. Evidence is not necessary if there is a reliable, external process that informs me of the reliability of the product and justifies my belief in the use of it. I can’t explain how it all works, though I’ve tinkered with making an iPhone app with Swift and I still mess around with Python for other things. At best all I can say is I’m loosely aware of some aspects of electronic devices, but that doesn’t stop me from using them. Dependence and belief in the scientific method is considered rational despite the requirement that it is conceived from facts entirely external from a scientist’s subjective awareness.

Why? Because the scientific method is not a “fact.” It is a method, or process. Scientists operate under the assumption of its reliability, not it’s “actual existence” in physical reality. The reliability of the method justifies belief in it whether or not the scientist actually can cognitively grasp it or can produce evidence of it.

So if you insist on internalist skepticism denouncing, for instance, ontological argument, then be consistent and denounce the scientific method as well.


Ummm…if scientists don’t use their senses, how do they even know the readout from the instruments? Knowing the results from instruments does require direct observation from the experiments. Without the senses, how can scientists communicate and verify results from repeated experiments?

Moreover, do YOU know all the results from every experiment ever run from the beginning of time? Did YOU personally calibrate every instrument? Did you personally MAKE every instrument so that you’ll know results aren’t biased or skewed? And even if you did, are you perfect and capable of making instruments that produce exactly flawless results? It could be that scientists all use the same or similar instruments with the exact same flaws mass produced, hence why they all make the same mistakes. Do we have faith in processes without evidence or not?

"They" in response to "the civilizations that were active in building those structures". I wasn't referring to the aliens.

Neither one of us believes aliens built the pyramids. I realise that you brought this up for the sake up argument but taking ancient aliens beyond that point would be tangential to our discussion.[/quote]
The point is, how do you know any differently? Have you personally been to Puma Punku? Or do you just take my word for it, or Wikipedia’s word for it, or…idk, The Smithsonian Channel or Discovery or History Channel or whoever the heck made the documentary about it? No, I don’t buy into ancient astronauts theory, but the History Channel series is entertaining. But for all you really know, ancient astronauts is just as valid as anything.

Regarding lowering faith in God to any level, touché, but I think you know I intended science to be held to a higher standard. Science is NOT generally held to that standard and the standard argumentation over it typically holds God to a supposedly higher standard it doesn’t reasonably hold itself to. It’s not that God gets held to a lower standard, just that the skeptic in that case is being hypocritical. I tend to skip over that in discussions because I’ve seen it too much and find it too boring to acknowledge. If you hold science to the higher standard and faith in it is equally valid, which direction do you choose and why? Personally…I don’t see why you can’t have it both ways. All knowledge is revealed by God, regardless. If it’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for me.


Or we’re left with a God who has already revealed himself to us. If God reveals himself and you reject him, exactly what could possibly count as proof?

The fire and brimstone thing is dated even for much of southern society. I’ve heard a number of theologians teach about the reality of hell and complain that others are too scared to preach about it for fear that it’s unattractive to seekers.

I do agree with them on one point: whether you desire to be in the presence of God or you only wish to flee the flames, there is nothing particularly moral about the motivation for being saved—UNLESS you first reject selfishness as being immoral, and I would be careful to define selfishness as distinct from greed and envy, which I think is scripturally consistent. The denial of self as taught by Jesus, in my view, was not about the pursuit of selfish gain but rather the pursuit of self-destruction. Various denominations and especially the Catholic Church teach what I believe is the opposite of the intent, which is altruism, martyrdom, and death as desirable. Jesus’ formulation of reciprocity was directed towards people considered by the religious upper class as “evil” and selfish. It is easier for the religious elite to capitalize on the guilt of the collective than the righteousness of the individual. Jesus in effect was invalidating the hypocrisy of the elite because He was strengthening the autonomy of the individual believer by invalidating the same individual’s guilt. Whether you want God or fear hell, the selfish motive to accept grace through faith is inherently virtuous. I don’t really agree with the fire and brimstone approach, but I think it might be one of the most transparent ones. The emphasis on guilt in this school of thought deals with the stain of sin on ALL human beings and the desire to remove it. If you know you are saved, the passionate pleading of these preachers does get to be emotionally overwhelming and tiresome after a while. But better that than beating a congressional to death with a barrage of guilt. [If you are saved, you are free from the consequences of guilt. The focus then is not on personal salvation but rather practical application and winning converts.]

I grew up under fire and brimstone preaching and didn’t even know it had fallen so far out of vogue until I started college and visited other churches. It is true that seekers tend to find F&B unattractive, but I struggled to understand why nobody preached about hell when it seemed so foundational as I was growing up. While it is wrong to deny the reality of hell, “hell” really isn’t mentioned that much in the Bible. “Hades” is somewhat of a holding tank in the afterlife on the way to the resurrection, but is analogous to heaven. “Sheol” is somewhat equivalent to Hades, but is also translated as “the grave” and sometimes seen as being somewhat removed from God. “Gehenna” was a literal location indicating a sort of garbage dump that included the disposal of human bodies. This was later translated to “Hell” which, accurately, indicates a spiritual place of permanent exile from God distinct from the literal burning trash heap outside Jerusalem. “Hell” appears nowhere in the Bible. That word is the product of translation and might have originated in Norse mythology or some such to describe to pagan people what the Outer Darkness and lake of fire are like. But the usual teaching about Hell in those kinds of churches is more poetic than precisely scriptural. It’s amusing to me that some preachers can be so florid about it and still intend Hell to be a literal place.

But most of us don’t even bother with the subject of Hell. Sure, we believe it is a literal place. Sure, we believe in the lake of fire. But we don’t really feel much of any sense of urgency about it. Once a Christian is saved, he’s not going there. It becomes irrelevant. For all the meaning it has for Christians it might as well not exist. The only urgency we have for believing in it at all is not because we are afraid of going there, but because we don’t want anyone else to go there, either. I’ve noticed that new converts tend to come in waves through families rather than large swathes of individuals. My wife left the UMC, which she attended more as a social obligation, for the SBC more because of the influence of my mother. She attributes her conversion more to the sincerity of more Baptists, rather than so many Methodists who seem to make a game of religion. Her relationship with my mother was kinda like Ruth and Naomi. So the primary interest of Christians is the conversion of those we are closest to, which makes sense because that is within any believing individual’s sphere of influence. For seekers attending church purely of their own volition, they are going to be wary of anyone emotionally manipulating them in cheap and obvious ways. They tend to want to be close to God for God’s sake rather than being afraid of hell, which they see as insincere motivation for conversion. I don’t really see the problem, but it’s not my conscience on the line, either. A purely seeker-sensitive approach that waters down theology isn’t healthy for any church, but an undue emphasis on human depravity isn’t going to win any souls, either. The emphasis tends to be positive, that God doesn’t desire anyone to go to hell but that everyone choose to receive God’s grace. Everyone is loved, valued, desired, and welcomed regardless of race, gender, orientation, criminal background, or prior religious affiliations or practice.

Not really, I mean…I’ve known plenty people who stopped going to church after high school. Even I skipped out while away from home, though that was largely due to difficulty finding a church I liked. There’s no shortage of people who abandon their faith early own for lack of sincerity.

IDK, maybe it’s a denominational thing that I don’t get. I accepted Christ at an early age but did not make my faith public until later. I put more pressure on my youngest kid NOT to join the church because I didn’t want his sincerity to ever be in question. My oldest daughter was disappointed that I wouldn’t let her be baptized when she wanted to be because I wanted to be sure she was sincere in her belief and not just jealous of her older brother. Baptists tend to be more hands-off with their own kids precisely because we know it’s difficult to perceive a sincerely held belief when the child is pressured into making a decision. And even then we sometimes find that what we believed to be such a sincere belief really wasn’t when children grow up to abandon the faith. It is easier to maintain one’s own faith when we have the support system of fellow believers, but in the end there is no forcing someone to actually believe.

There have been cases where a church did impose a belief on a population with deadly consequences for refusal. No authority can see into or control the human mind. Conversion by force is not a conversion, and the church suffers terribly any time it goes down that route.

One former acquaintance comes to mind… If you know anything about the Catholic Church, you know how triggered they get over even the hint of sexual predators in their midst. When I taught in a Catholic school, I had to undergo regular training in recognizing signs of sexual predators, especially grooming. Our daughter became friends with this other girl whose dad was a real creeper. Since this all happened before I was employed there, I didn’t recognize the signs the way other teachers did. Long story short, he had started hunting down my daughter when he dropped his girl off at school. I mean OBSESSED, and teachers picked up on the scent immediately. They started heavily enforcing rules that parents could walk their students to the drop off point but not actually enter the room, and they’d send my girl on an “errand” in order to limit contact.

The dad was obsessed with my daughter sleeping over, to which we were, like, NO, and then their family began attending church with us. Who am I to say someone can’t go to church? We’d be all civil and friendly like we didn’t know what was going on, but even our church volunteers enforced rules about other adults having contact with kids. The whole point, we discovered over time, was to get close to our daughter. When he couldn’t see her, that family drifted away from church and we never saw them again. They even drifted away from the Catholic school. We have no idea what happened to them since. We feel badly for his two daughters and for all the girls that have sleepovers at his place, but delighted our daughter isn’t one of them.

The moral of the story is not all conversions are sincere, nor do all who join a church really have the best intentions. It isn’t a given fact that a child will maintain his faith into adulthood. In my own experience, loyalty is something I highly value, which makes leaving a job or a church especially difficult. I found last year that conditions in my church and job were making it too difficult to stay. The church I work for now is much friendlier to my needs than the previous one (the previous church was great at first, but the climate changed drastically over the course of about a decade), and for the most part I love my day job. But regarding the day job, there are some aspects that are less than desirable for the long term, and I fully intend to start looking for new job as soon as my new contract takes effect. So sometimes leaving a church is actually healthy, and there is no need to feel obligated to stay in one when there is something deeply wrong or troubling with theology or the people. I think one should make the effort, fix things, and leave if things won’t ever improve. But nothing but yourself can shackle you to a faith you don’t like. Declining numbers in churches is pretty indicative that kids aren’t sticking to their faith into adulthood.

I do believe that salvation once attained cannot be lost. If you can possibly turn away from your faith, you never believed in the first place, same as how a person can occupy the same church pew from birth to death and never be saved. The only people who can possibly know the state of one’s soul are the individual and God. Tread lightly on the assumption that people continue in the religion of their childhood. Sometimes that religion was never theirs to begin with.

Well…think about Occam. There is no simpler explanation than that the universe and everything in was created by God ex nihilo. The only assumption required is that God exists at all.

In truth, Occam’s razor is much abused. While simplest explanations are always PREFERRED, it does not occur in reality that the simplest explanations are always the correct ones. It’s like this one time when I asked a friend how things were with her bf…she started to answer, got stuck, laughed, and just said, “It’s complicated.”

Interesting that you say we scream. How many people do we know of who raised their voices to that level when asking for evidence? I can't think of one. Your use of the word reminds me of an experiment that was done to demonstrate the distorting effect that such emotive words can have on people's reports of a road traffic accident. They tested the responses of eye witnesses to an accident by asking such questions as these about the event:
1. How fast was the vehicle travelling when it hit the tree?
2. How fast was the vehicle travelling when it smashed into the tree?
The results were that people who were asked the second question tended to overestimate the speed of the vehicle, while those asked the first question didn't. It's easy to go and use emotive words when one is feeling passionate about a subject, and I'm not saying you deliberately tried to brainwash us, or that it's likely to have worked on us, I'm just saying that you deviated from the truth when you used it, and that it's a word that smacks strongly of brainwashing when it's used without factual justification.

One piece of evidence for scientific method is that science works in practice - it predicts well enough to allow us to create all kinds of clever devices that work. Personally I don't know where I'd be without my knowledge of it, such as it is.

I think you're correct that some people who demand evidence have no intention of accepting it, that they've made up their minds already and only seek to win the argument. But clear thinkers can look at the results and sort the truth from the brainwashing and tricks, with some success.

Of course the simpler theory doesn't always turn out to be correct, and on reflection maybe Occam wasn't really such a paradox after all. I gather the modern scientific version of his razor is that simpler theories are to be preferred because they tend to be more testable. Whether that's a distortion of what Occam originally said or not, probably doesn't matter much. I think it matters more that the form of his razor we use is sensible. No good scientist would accept a theory purely on the basis of its simplicity. What could be a simpler explanation of the existence of the universe than "a pixie put it there." ?

Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t recall naming names. If you fit that description, that’s not my problem. At any rate, the whole “evidence, evidence” does come across as a little screechy at times.

By that I mean specifically those who demand evidence with no intention of ever accepting it.

As I’ve said before, the scientific method cannot itself humanly be externally verified. It would be rational to point out that the scientific method works EXTERNALLY. That is, the method itself is reliable purely as a PROCESS despite our inability to internally grasp its parts. If you make that argument, then it is rational to claim that a belief can be a justified belief EVEN IF there is no evidence for it. Guess who else supposedly doesn’t need evidence to believe something?

Evidence isn’t a bad thing, exactly. Christians would want evidence if we were expected to believe some potentially significant theological point. There are several occasions throughout the Bible when people needed evidence for one thing or another. But there is a fine line between requiring some kind of verification that a prophetic message came from God and understanding a foundational concept as properly basic.

1. Belief;
2. Observation and reason.
That's what it was like for me. Like any normal child, at first I didn't think to doubt what I was told. I don't know whether it was the contradictory nature of alternative advice / instruction, the contradictory nature of my own experiences, or the development of my mind to understand the notion of disbelief that first taught me that not everything I was told was the absolute truth.

With religion, my family was secular and they never said a word about deities. I was first exposed to religion at the age of 5 at school. Initially I don't suppose I had any particular reason to doubt it. Nothing else the teachers taught me so far had shown itself to be false or debatable. But somewhere along the line I eventually picked up the idea that it could be false. Perhaps it was even the religious teaching itself, which mentioned belief and unbelief, that put such an idea into my head. I do remember feeling anxious because of my doubts. They were telling us that we needed to believe the stories in order to go to heaven, and there was a strong insinuation that there was something seriously wrong with anybody who didn't believe it.

Luckily I heard one story in which I didn't notice any cognitive belief expressed, only actions that merely suggest belief, and that was enough to get whoever it was healed by Jesus, who then declared that their faith had healed them. I can't find the story now, and I may have heard it wrong at the time, or even been taught it wrong, but although the teacher didn't stress the point I'd noticed, I was relieved to conclude that cognitive belief wasn't strictly necessary. Because I knew that I wasn't convinced about the veracity of what I was being told, and that my doubt wasn't something I could unlearn, any more than I can unlearn any other idea that occurs to me that still seems plausible in spite of every argument I can think of to discredit it. And I don't thank the buffoons who put me through that worrying experience. God or no god, my doubt was harming nobody and I didn't deserve the anxiety and guilt feelings their teaching inflicted on me.

During the following 2 or 3 decades I rejected superstition more and more. The last thing to go was the idea that there may be some conscious supernatural thingy that had planned our existence and was somehow looking after us and had some kind of a purpose and an afterlife for us.

I'd dispensed with orthodox Christianity long before that went, because I could see so much wrong with it, so much I disapproved of (such as St. Paul) and I'd never been exposed to the notion that scripture was literally and perfectly true or that there was any particular merit in studying it, except out of academic interest in it as a fascinating set of old documents, and to test its veracity. I find the idea that witches have supernatural power to be laughable, ditto that spiritualists really communicate with the dead, but scripture believes they have that kind of power. So from that perspective I'm damned for not believing in witches and spirit mediums.

One thing that impressed me was in some book (about the Sphinx, the megaliths, and / or the Dead Sea Scrolls), which said that a lot of people find it a struggle to think freely for themselves about matters that might support their rejection of any indoctrination they'd already absorbed, and that strong guilt and fear were likely to be encountered along the way. That resonated with me.

When I was about 40 years old I happened to crack a very irreverent joke about the deity, and had a slightly uneasy time of it travelling through a thunderstorm immediately afterwards. And yet here I am. The superstition I'd absorbed over my life from certain people around me was clearly not quite dead at that age. But imagine the insane magical thinking of it, actually harbouring the notion that the deity was about to strike me with lightning for poking fun at him. It didn't make me stay indoors till the storm was over, or otherwise hamper my activities, but it was there, and to this day it reminds me of how strong the primitive parts of the mind can be, and how easily it can put silly ideas into an otherwise fairly level-headed person.

No, I don't think I said anything that would make you think I was accusing you of getting personal, though your words here seem to be fast heading that way. Before, I suspect you were just using the term to help dismiss those who want things to be evidence-based. I'll leave it to observers to decide for themselves which arguments they find the most coherent, clear and credible. If you provide anything like that, there will likely be a spectrum of different personal reactions to it, some expressed, some not.

For my part, I think much of what you say is either without evidence or just unclear. There's a lot of it, and I doubt I'll ever get through it all. But occasionally I see something where at least the error seems plain, such as your syllogism about Trump and charity, though you might see my reply as being just me rejecting your evidence. Nobody who uses their intelligence well can swallow an idea that doesn't make sense to them, or an idea that looks seriously faulty, and if your syllogism had been correct then I wouldn't have rejected it - indeed I didn't reject it out of hand, I carefully explained the problem with it, and I think I was clear.