We don’t reject religion because of “a flaw.” We reject it because the fundamental basis of it is unsupported. It’s not “a flaw” when a house has no foundation. There is no baby, only bathwater.
The "Simulation theory" people drive me nuts, because they act like a thought experiment predicated on a misunderstanding of the concept of infinity and computability theory is amazing evidence of this hypothesis.
But I completely agree, because it's so vague and all-encompassing, it can effectively be a placeholder answer to anything and everything without actually providing any insight.
The fundamental basis of theism is that this world and everything in it was created, and it has some higher purpose, being planned. While that may be unsupported, the alternative, nihilism, is equally unsupported and also very negative for people and most people who claim to believe that, don't actually act like their life is worthless. They don't practice what they preach
There’s a mountain of evidence that everything we experience is the product of a hot, dense universe evolving according to a set of unthinking laws of physics.
The only place for any purpose or plan would be in the creation of that early universe. In what sense could there be said to be a purpose or plan if it has had no visible effects for a dozen billion years or more?
If we’re going to talk about people practicing what they preach, let’s talk about all the Christians who are sure they’re going to heaven and yet fear death. All the Christians who are certain their loved ones have gone to heaven and yet still grieve for them.
> In what sense could there be said to be a purpose or plan if it has had no visible effects for a dozen billion years or more?
I mean, the idea of a "higher" purpose implies it is "higher" than our reasoning faculties right? If it was clear to us the purpose or the plan, it would not be "higher".
So again, no evidence for either. And both sides don't practice what they preach. Why is it "logical" to believe one and not the other?
Do you apply this reasoning to everything? Maybe the apple fell from the tree because of gravity, or maybe it was caused by some higher being that purposefully moved the apple along that path in a way that exactly matched what it would do if it were falling under the influence of gravity. Who knows, could be either one!
I posit that there's an elephant in your living room. You can't detect it because it's invisible and doesn't interact with ordinary matter so you can't feel it. But it's there. Is it equally logical to believe my claim as it is to believe that there is, in fact, no elephant present?
This is a tiresome argument. Nobody thinks this way until you start talking about gods and then suddenly you turn basic reasoning on its head. "Some incomprehensible entity has a purpose and a plan for the universe but you can't detect it" OK and why should I take this claim seriously?
> Maybe the apple fell from the tree because of gravity, or maybe it was caused by some higher being that purposefully moved the apple along that path in a way that exactly matched what it would do if it were falling under the influence of gravity. Who knows, could be either one!
They aren't mutually exclusive beliefs.
> there's an elephant in your living room
As you realize later on, when it comes to only one claim do we really start entertaining that there might be more than we can objectively measure: the purpose of our lives.
> "Some incomprehensible entity has a purpose and a plan for the universe but you can't detect it" OK and why should I take this claim seriously?
Because the alternative is nihilism. And even the fiercest proponents of it do not seriously live as if their lives are meaningless
Nonsense. Religion serves some needs of the human mind. It's like saying having friends is fundamentally flawed. We don't need friends but we spend hours saying pointless words to each other and somehow feel good about all that wasted time. Humans have these emotional needs. We're not robots that can just program ourselves to be pure truth and productivity machines.
Social groups not built on any kind of shared values or belief system don't actually serve the needs that religions do because they don't scale beyond the familiarity of the specific members of the group
You don't have to believe, you just have to fit in. I once read somebody's theory on why atheist "churches" aren't very successful. In a real church, you have true-believers who are happy competent people with normal jobs and friends and families. They're there because of their belief, not to fill a need to belong to something. Their presence keeps the quality of the social group high so that weak or fake-believers can still participate and enjoy the benefits. If there's nothing for true-believers to believe in, then all you have is unhappy lonely people looking for company and they're not very good company for each other.
It may be hard for a religious person to say "Pretending to believe in God is more important than actually believing." so you may get the feeling that if you don't believe, it's not for you. But I think it kind of is like that. It's a useful lie that everyone silently agrees to perpetuate because it actually works better than anything truthful.
Why is it nonsense but the idea that life is invaluable and meaningless is not, despite the fact that no one, not even the most ardent defenders of this worldview, lives as if it is true?
FWIW "invaluable" means the opposite of what you want here.
There's no evidence of any objective source of value or meaning in our lives. All indications are that we're the product of random chance and unthinking laws of physics. Gather a huge amount of hydrogen and eventually it turns into people.
What would it look like to live as if it were true? I still have the emotions and drives that evolution and culture baked into me. I fear death, not because I think my life has some inherent objective value, but because my ancestors who were genetically predisposed to fear death had better odds of reproducing. I care about my family and work to make their lives better not because I believe their lives have some objective value, but because their lives have value to _me_, and that's because my ancestors who were genetically predisposed to value other people had better odds of passing along those genes. What do you think I should be doing differently given my beliefs?
> What would it look like to live as if it were true?
If you believed this to be true, you would overcome your evolutionarily drives and emotions, like we do when we don't procreate and have kids at the age of puberty because we know it will disadvantage us in society. Or like we do when we don't cheat on our spouses to procreate more for the same reason.
We suppress all sorts of evolutionarily better behaviors for the sake of our society.
But no one who believes there is no value or meaning in our lives just wastes away and dies, nor do the ardent supporters of this view just end their lives to prove to us how seriously they take it.
> care about my family and work to make their lives better not because I believe their lives have some objective value, but because their lives have value to _me_,
A value you made up in your head which isn't real and which you have faith in, despite knowing it isn't provable.
Humans are capable of having friends and fulfilling emotional needs without believing in the supernatural.
Like many people, you may have been indoctrinated into believing that only religion is capable of fulfilling these needs, providing community, a moral framework or a sense of purpose or value to life, but that isn't true, it's part of the propaganda of theism.
Just about every reasonably long-lived society ever has had religion. For some reason. Even modern western atheists treat other ideologies like religions. Perhaps it provides comfort and a feeling of security, or provides a purpose when pure pragmatism would reveal that there's no point in living. Or perhaps we're such social animals that we extend that social thinking beyond what's rational, but we do do it nonetheless, even when we have community and morals. Maybe people with other higher purposes don't take to it so readily but not everyone has the luxury of, say, a successful career. You might have been brainwashed into believing that religion is caused by brainwashing.
The fact that religion is common doesn’t mean it has a purpose or that it’s a good idea. Everybody with eyes has blood vessels in front of their retinas even though it’s a bad design with no advantage over having them in the back.
>Even modern western atheists treat other ideologies like religions.
They don't, though. This is a commonly believed fallacy, rooted in the presumption that atheists are essentially hypocrites or blind to religious belief being immutably ingrained into human behavior. But the way atheists approach these "ideologies" is nothing like the way religious people approach religion.
>Perhaps it provides comfort and a feeling of security, or provides a purpose when pure pragmatism would reveal that there's no point in living.
Another commonly believed fallacy, that atheism means "pure pragmatism" and that only religion can provide a sense of meaning to life.
Atheists are actually capable of emotions, and empathy, and morality, and finding value in the world and their own lives, just like anyone else. They aren't insects or Vulcans or sociopaths. To quote Douglas Adams, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
>Maybe people with other higher purposes don't take to it so readily but not everyone has the luxury of, say, a successful career.
This is a new one. Atheism is a luxury of wealthy elites? No, atheists exist at every point of the social and economic ladder, and there are even atheists in foxholes, despite the quip.
>You might have been brainwashed into believing that religion is caused by brainwashing.
I'm not going to call it brainwashing but the knee-jerk animosity from a lot of theists towards the very concept of a life not centered around and entirely defined by belief certainly seems like fear of committing thoughtcrime.
> Atheists are actually capable of emotions, and empathy, and morality, and finding value in the world and their own lives,
Can you prove, in a way distinguished from how you claim religion has no proof, that there is any value in the world or in your or any of our lives? Objective value, not just something you make up or feel in your heart.
Sometimes I wish I could just pick up a religion out of pragmatism. But I don't believe in supernatural stuff, and the secular "religions" (or whatever you call an `Option<Religion>` like humanism don't have much appeal.
