3 dudes with crossed legs
Hmm.
Is it simplistic or just simple?
Sure, “there isn’t one” is simple, and easy to say, and kind of bare bones – indeed boring, but that’s not really much of a reason to abandon atheism for christianity is it? Baroque complication may be more fun but that doesn’t make it true.
I don’t know. There’s too much empty space. Everything is way too far apart. None of it is cozy or manageable enough to make the human idea of a “God” at all believable. It even smells weird in space – a burnt metal sort of smell. That’s simplistic, if you like.
Christianity is an accretion onto an earlier religion, and both of them are almost pre-scientific. Many things that human beings have learned since then show a much “bigger picture” for human beings to fit into than anything in the religious writings of Christianity. None of the authors had any inkling of either the vastness of space or of the tiny particles of physics or of the chemical processes that describe much of life. The framework of Christianity that McGrath touts is much smaller and more crabbed than the natural framework of science. The reality is more majestic than the divine grouch who spends all his time thinking of ever more dire punishments for the creatures he supposedly loves the best, for the crime of being themselves.
Insofar as the discussion characterizes religion as necessary in teaching right from wrong, it doesn’t have a significantly better track record than ordinary human socialization. Indeed, many American Christians are unable to perceive that lying is wrong, cheating is wrong, breaking promises is wrong, bullying is wrong, violating women’s boundaries is wrong, bribery and extortion are wrong, unkindness is wrong, inciting violence is wrong, name-calling is wrong, mocking is wrong, and a host of other actions that harm other people on purpose are wrong.
I seem to recall McGrath being one of Dawkins’s “fleas” way back when The God Delusion came out. He struck me as not being particularly bright, so his calling atheism simplistic has non-positive significance to me.
Honesty is generally “simplistic”. You don’t have to make up a whole bunch of excuses for why things are working out the way they are if you’ve fundamentally telling it straight.
Religion is highly complicated because at the end of the day it is all about making shit up and pretending its true, and when you do that and your ideas don’t work, you need to come up with excuses why, particularly if your made-up shit involves you having access to a perfect, all knowing being.
Maddog,
Not a bad comment there. Judeo-Christianity has been cobbled together out of a whole bunch of preceding accretions. (And Confucius had the Golden Rule around 500 years BC.)
(“There’s a Jewish joke that says there’s no Heaven or Hell: we all go to the same place when we die, where Moses and Rabbi Akiva give constant and everlasting classes on the Bible and the Talmud. For the righteous this is eternal bliss, while for the wicked this is eternal suffering.”)
But I contend that while the invention of a single all-powerful god by the monotheists solved for the priesthood class at the time the problem of inter-faith competition, it opened the way for some monstrous later developments, like human sacrifice. The priests of Moloch used to throw live children into a fiery pit to appease this bloodthirsty, vengeful god, and all families were expected to contribute their firstborn son. It was all written up brilliantly by James A Michener (and staff) in The Covenant.
Yahweh is arguably a watered-down Moloch, who created humankind in a Paradise Garden better even than Disneyland, and as well made a talking snake, who tempted the first humans to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; with disastrous results for all of us. (See Genesis 3). This made it necessary for God to assume human form as his own firstborn son, and be crucified as a blood sacrifice to himself to appease himself, thereby taking upon himself all the sins of humanity that arose out of his earlier decision to create that Talking Snake. (Talk about a bad day..!)
And what branch of human endeavour covers the knowledge of good and evil’? Why, philosophy of course. As Sherlock Holmes might say, ‘there is the smoking gun, Watson.’
It looks to me like the Garden of Eden story was the first battle fought in the war between philosophy and religion, which OB’s threadstarter here shows is still going on, even though most religious thinkers have long since quit the field, convinced that discretion is the better part of valour.
For the rest, all any atheist, nontheist or polytheist contestant need to remember is the number 24. Easy enough, as it’s exactly double the number of Christ’s Apostles, including poor old Judas Iscariot, who has really copped a bad press ever since for helping God out with his Vast Eternal Plan.
But the story of 24 will have to wait for a later comment.
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https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-what-is-the-jewish-afterlife-like-1.5362876
Of course amidgardsperpentism, ahippogriffism, adarthvaderism etc. are “simplistic” in exactly the same way, so I guess by that same logic…
McGrath brought out a book called The Dawkins Delusion in 2007. It was bad. Suffice it to say, it did not show that Dawkins was in any way deluded.
Bjarte, that is the argument I usually make with “people of faith.” I tell them that we have more in common than we have separating us: they disbelieve hundreds of religions. I only disbelieve in one more than they do.
Papito, exactly. When I started my career as militant atheist online in the aftermath of 9-11, I quickly developed a huge arsenal of arguments against “God’s” (whatever that’s supposed to mean?!?) existence. Then, after a while, I stopped using all of them. Not because any believers ever managed to come up with a satisfactory answer, mind You, and some ended up painting themselves hopelessly into a corner of contradictions trying, but because arguing against God’s existence implicitly places the burden of proof where it doesn’t belong. Besides, those weren’t my real reasons for not believing in God anyway: I.e. I couldn’t honestly say that I would believe in God if not for the fact that, say, the Argument from Evil was so convincing. It’s not (it’s always embarrassing to hear other atheists rage against the evils of the Bibilcal God, and then go on to argue that that very same omni-malevolent monster can’t possibly exist, because the existence of evil is incompatible with the idea of a perfectly good and just God. In fact, something like the Holocaust is exactly what I for one would expect is Yahweh were in charge of everything).
My true reason for not believing in God is exactly the same as my reason for not believing in the Midgard Serpent, and the same reason even the Christians themselves don’t believe in Shiva, Osiris, Zeus, and an infinite number of other possible Gods for which there is neither more nor less evidence than their own (0 = 0). To me “atheism” is just another word for refusing to add something to our picture of reality as painted by science without a minimum of justification. Any such addition to my ontology has to earn its place, or Occam’s razor takes care of it. And that really is all there is to it. So these days the only argument for “atheism” I ever use essentially boils down to “No double standards or special pleading will do”. Simplistic, I know…
*if Yahweh were in charge of everything
David Evans,
I borrowed ‘The Dawkins Delusion’ out of curiosity from the local library.
I found it hilarious. ;-)