But you are just a fallible human
That’s a core difficulty, isn’t it. It always surprises me how easily believers jump over it or ignore it or wave it away. Even if you accept ad arguendo that a god did reveal a holy book to a human being or some human beings, how do you know that the transmission has been unbroken? How can you be confident you can rely on the chain of transmission from then to now?
You could say the god has seen to it that the transmission has never broken…but then why hasn’t the god made that unmistakable to everyone? Believers say the god has done that, we unbelievers are just willful and bad – but if the god had made it genuinely unmistakable we wouldn’t be able to unbelieve, would we. It’s pretty impossible (barring a particular mental disorder) to disbelieve in one’s own existence, for instance – the god could have made it unmistakable in that way. The god didn’t do anything like that. All we have, from our secular point of view, is some people saying things year after year. That’s all.
And then if you don’t accept that a god did reveal a holy book to a human being or some human beings, you have that problem to deal with too. Why should anybody believe that? Because people have said so, but that’s not a good enough reason (given the nature of the claim). Why aren’t believers more bothered by the fact that human claims are all we have as “evidence” that a god revealed a holy book to one or several humans?
And then, as the barmaid points out, they all claim that.
It’s fallibility all the way down.
Faith (smiles smugly)
Seriously, though, that’s the usual answer, isn’t it? You’re just supposed to paper over that huge gap in evidence with a “leap of faith,” and god set it up that way because faith is a good thing. Yet when Gnu Atheists said that religion is a problem because it promotes believing in things without (adequate) evidence, believers howled in indignation and insisted that we don’t understand what faith really is.
Yes, and all that does is move the question sideways. Why should you have “faith” about that one thing? What if your faith is simply misplaced? What if you’re simply having faith in other human beings, no more infallible than you are? What if you’re putting your faith in a very long con? And – this is the key bit – how do you know you’re not?
How would things look different if the holy book were in fact written by human beings and not revealed by a god? They wouldn’t, would they. So why should we put faith in this one thing that could be just people making claims, when we don’t automatically put faith in all claims that people make?
Because reasons:
. Miracles, revelation, and “knowing in one’s heart” that God is real
. The pervasive idea that it doesn’t make sense for the whole amazing universe to exist without a creator
. The requirement for (externally derived and defined) purpose and meaning in life
. The need for an external arbiter of morality
Or as I always put it, if God wanted everyone to believe in him, instead of having people write down stuff in a book and other people having to take their word for it, why wouldn’t he write his words in the sky, that would appear to everyone in their own language? Or write it in their minds? Given the weakness of “other people are telling me this” as evidence, clearly, any being who is all powerful does not *want* everyone to believe in them.
Should a divine creator exist, he clearly wishes to hide. Therefore, atheism sits his divine plan.
Or you look around (at a sunset, a beach, a mountain, whatever) and decide that’s all the evidence anyone should ever need. Only a perverse weirdo could fail to be convinced. Because mountains exist, there is life after death, and the Bible is true.
I remember Thomas Paine’s argument in The Age of Reason, that even if some person receives/is given a revelation, it stops being a revelation as soon as they tell someone else. At that point it’s just hearsay. There’s no good reason an all powerful being couldn’t make its presence known to everyone, if it wanted to. I grant believers the fact that the existence of an all-powerful, supernatural being or beings would be an important thing to know. The existence of such a being or beings should be an observable fact about the world, just like gravity or electromagnetism, plate tectonics and the atomic structure of matter. But it’s not. If all scientific texts and knowledge were magically erased, all of it could be rediscovered and reconstituted because we live in the midst of a physical universe the functioning of which just needs to be observed. It wouldn’t be fast or easy, but it could be done. Not so much with Jesus and Mo and Shiva and Satan. If all religious knowledge were similarly erased, it would never be recovered. It’s really not “knowledge” at all, more like literature, poetry and fairy tales.
As Homer said to Marge, “What if one of the other religions is true? Everytime we go to church, we’re just making God madder and madder.”
Good post Ophelia. Well written – more please!
And that’s if you accept the basic premise ad arguendo, which is hardly the same as having good reasons to accept it. I once debated a seventh day adventist who proudly proclaimed that he always went with the literal meaning of the Biblical text and never trusted his own fallible human judgement in religious questions. I pointed out that it was only that very same fallible human judgement – the one he just told me he didn’t trust – that told him the Bible was reliable in the first place. Of course the same thing goes for the basic premise that there is such a thing as a “god” in the first place.
He was also in the habit of responding to my arguments without actually having read them. For example I had written something about why the Free Will argument did not solve the Problem of Evil (I now think the Problem of Evil itself is a shitty argument, but that’s another story). His response was basically “Don’t forget that God has given us free will (as if I hadn’t brought it up at all)”. He went on to say that humans cannot be perfect unless they have full freedom to chose and still chose to do the right thing out of their very own good nature. I pointed out that – by his own admission – if God created humans perfect they would never use their free will to chose evil in the first place – which was in fact the very argument he was responding to without bothering to read it. At that point he stopped responding to me, but went on making the exact same arguments to others as if nobody had ever answered them before…
#6 I think the hearsay point was made by Hume?
And…all the Kumbaya singin’ apologists simply refuse to admit the actual content of the infallible revelations. You CANNOT believe that Jesus is the Messiah and be Jewish, or vice versa. Mohammed insisted that his arrival was prophesied in scripture…the uncomfortable fact that is isn’t forced him to declare Jewish and Christian books to be ‘corrupted’ or doctored.
Paine too though. I distinctly remember the first time I read that – in a used bookstore, probably 20 years ago. I remember wondering why I’d never quite thought of it before.