Without evidence to support the belief, that post is just an appeal to authority fallacy.
1 Like
Disagree. At least within the sciences, the strength of the arguments the professor put forth rely on how well they are founded. Think derivation of e.g. newtonian gravitational theory as an inverse square law, which is justified when one considers some conserved quantity (like energy) being evenly radiated outwards from a point-source in space. Another example: the formulas of special relativity, which relies on the axiom stating that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers, ref. the Michelson-Morley experiment. Special relativity would not make much sense unless this axiom is already shown to be a real and observable phenomenon. If, instead of referring to Michelson-Morley, a professor told students in a packed auditorium, “god willed the speed of light to be the same for all observers”, he would be laughed right out of there. So no, I strongly disagree with your assertion.
1 Like
This would count as a reason not to believe him, because students already know enough about science to know that’s just the wrong kind of argument to make.
Of course, the professor needs to make good arguments! But students initially don’t know all that well what good arguments look like, so they have to be guided to go through the motions, like in any other craft. Science is a craft, and we need master craftsmen to guide us so we can devellop their habits. As we accrue those habits, we need teachers less and less. My physics students believe me more than I would like, to be honest…
And also, who are we kidding? None of us have time to re-prove everything. A lot of things - maybe most things - we take on faith that our fellow scientists have done their job. Paradoxically, I think this is true even for the researcher who has to question and disbelieve “everything”, fully aware that so much of the literature is unreliable.
Science reflects objective reality, if it did not then technologies derived from it would not work as relentlessly and reliably as they clearly do, this is in stark contrast to subjective religious beliefs, which have imagined countless deities, and religions to go with them, and claims for magic and the supernatural that have no basis in objective reality.
This is why many of the religious feel the urge to decry science, but even were science as useless as religions at understanding objective reality, it would not be an argument that religious claims have any objective merit. The argument is as lame as it is transparent.
3 Likes
This is bare assertion. I see no good reason to believe this.
The aim of our being is to survive long enough to reproduce and nurture our young. With whatever energy we have left over from that, we can pursue more, shall we say, elevated matters of personal interest or development. If there are enough resources, individuals can even take a pass on reproduction and raising young.
This may not sound very ennobling as it is just nature, red in tooth and claw – but it is factual and supported by science. By contrast the claim that the chief purpose of man is to “obey god and love him continually” is just a bare assertion. It may be a popular or widely supported assertion in some quarters, but it has no basis in reality. It is just someone’s interpretation of a particular old scroll written by bronze age goatherds.
In any event what it means, practically speaking, to either obey / fear or love god is a highly subjective matter that’s very much in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, god’s identity and nature, which you would have to ascertain in order to obey or love him in the first place, is a matter of debate. Is he controlling and vindictive and jealous and wrathful, or slow to anger, for example? Is he preoccupied with the details of people’s sex lives while commanding them to commit genocide and enslave women? Or is he approachable and attractive to little children?
We could also ask ourselves what sort of fruit religious faith bears in the world. What sort of reputation do clergy have, for example? Do they routinely predate upon the vulnerable?
My life is neither failed nor unhappy. It is filled with purpose and meaning, despite not being devoid of challenges. As to the matter of pride, claiming not to be “prideful” just opens one to charges of being prideful, but people who know me would attest that I’m not an asshole.
I didn’t leave Christianity because I wanted to make significanly different choices about how to live. I still don’t murder, rape or pillage, “don’t smoke, chew, or go with girls that do”. If I were going to do things like that I wouldn’t have waited until I’m practically 70 years old to do it. I did not find Christian moral codes stifling or confining so much as I found them to often be hypocritical cover for people who wanted, ironically, to control others or to be right. In the name of God, of course!
I left Christianity because it subtracted rather than added to my understanding of reality. I did it to remove the impedance mismatch between dogma and lived experience. I did it to become free of imposed cognitive dissonance. I did it, in short, so that my life made more sense.
Any deity who needed to punish me by permanently casting me into “the outer darkness” because he’s butt-hurt about not being sufficiently central to my process would not be just. He would be … dare I say it? Prideful. Greedy. Vengeful. Wrathful. Things like that. A good test of character is whether you can rejoice when someone finds their way to a good life rather than preoccupied with whether they did it your way or dependent on you.
I’d suggest that since the only norms and framing available during the period when the OT and NT scriptures were written were those of a despotic ruler, that is how god was portrayed. The most you can hope for from a despot is that they will be in a generally good mood. What you have to prepare for though is that they will be capricious and arbitrary and demand total fealty at all times, and that they will abuse you if they don’t get it. As a deity, your despot can extend that torture to be permanent and enduring, and can extend his control to accessing your innermost thoughts.
No thanks to all that.
As this time, yes, in addition to being part of articulating the coherence of a view. It would also require more explanation. Feel free to ask.
I believe this.
To be more exact, I would claim that the end of life is to know God.
Some kind of argument: The aim of any being is to engage in the best and noblest activity it can as determined by the kind of being it is. For a human being, the best and noblest kind of activity is knowledge of the best and noblest thing. Therefore, the aim of man is knowledge of the best and noblest thing.
If God exists, then he is the best and noblest thing that one can know. Ergo if God exists, then the aim of our life is to know him.
Maybe I can add a little bit of life to this bare bones argument by illustrating why it is that our aim is peak performance, and not mere survival - although survival often overwhelmingly dominates our attention. Take some kind of engineered product, like a computer. When we use it well below or above its computational capacity, we might say “that’s not what it’s for.” Added features or capabilities are goal oriented, they are there for something. Arguably, this is true in nature as well, whether it’s the cat’s agility, or the eagle’s sight.
That’s an entirely subjective opinion again.
Subjective opinions all, and more than a little circular.
Everything after this is moot, unless you can demonstrate any compelling reason to believe a deity does in fact exist, and then which one of the countless deities humans have imagined.
That’s a false equivalence, and natural things have evolved to survive, the tools that they evolved to use were passed on precisely because they enabled the species or individual to have a survival advantage long enough to reproduce.
You are adding some overarching meaning, yet have offered no evidence of its existence.
2 Likes
If it’s true that natural selection is the “driving” force then the only thing it “cares” about is survival long enough to nurture young. It is optimal for that. When something is optimal for X it is not optimal for Y. Y in this case being enjoyment, ease, freedom from worry, stability / predictability, etc.
A “higher” purpose for humans then becomes overcoming the 'Y’s", if you will. Our brains for example are eager pattern-matching engines given to snap rule of thumb thinking shortcuts, which we are then overly attached to. This is a great adaptation for mere survival (e.g., the bushes rustle, we assume it’s a predator or adversary, run and ask questions later, if at all). We can train ourselves in critical thinking to compensate for this. Though we mostly don’t.
So I don’t see it as any entity or thing having a single best purpose so much as something it’s optimized for that’s in turn not optimal for secondary objectives (in this case, what one does with themselves once survival is attained).
1 Like
I think we’ve reached a point where we’ve identified a clear and striking divergence in our way of thinking. Which started by talking about hell!
My (too) quick reply. If we were really, truly optimized for mere survival, then I should think we would be perfectly happy with mere material security, or with engaging in surviving only. But human being generally want much more than that.
I don’t think the structure of our being is entirely explained or driven by natural selection. No doubt, it has shaped us.
Reproduction is a goal some forego in order to excel in other ways.
Basic survival is truly basic: did I have offspring and was I able to provide for them at my expense to whatever extent they couldn’t do it for themselves, before I died? That I was profoundly miserable the whole time is irrelevant to that goal, apart from how said misery motivates one to, say, hunt for food when you don’t feel like it, etc. So in a way, being “unhappy” even contributes to survival.
Happiness is a very slippery concept. My goal is less to be happy than to be content. Paradoxically, contentment tends to breed happiness. You usually cannot productively approach happiness directly. It is just seeking for emotional states that are inherently transient and unstable.
So I think what we see is exactly what we should expect if survival is our basic and only inherent purpose: we survive, independent of our emotional state or degree of self-actualization.
All of this doesn’t imply that we can’t derive all sorts of purpose and meaning for ourselves, it is just to say that nothing of that sort is truly defined and declared outside ourselves and installed in our essential nature. Even survival is just a byproduct of evolution. We say that evolution “cares” about or has the “goal” of survival of the fittest not because evolution literally thinks, much less cares, but because it helps us reason about existence in terms of apparent, effective goals, yet not “real” goals in the sense of “guided with intent”.
1 Like
Returning to that topic, lol:
I see no reason to think that I am immortal in any way. If I am, I will sigh and deal with it like I always deal with whatever presents itself to me. But I have actually found my mortality to be quite comforting. Nothing is forever, including, say, joy, yes, but also including pain.
We are story-tellers. We need story arcs. Stories don’t just have beginnings and middles – they have ends. I am approaching the clearing at the end of the path, I have “run the race” with honor, and I’m happy to tie it up with a bow and be done with it.
My late / prior wife was a theist to the end (and we coexisted as a couple fine with that) but she was obsessed with the concern that she would completely cease to exist, and be soon forgotten. Her faith allowed her to elide this concern rather than deal with it. I didn’t really try to disabuse her of it because she was busy dying a very slow, baroque death and she needed whatever comforts she could find. I just reassured her I would not forget her – and I haven’t.
But I have never had her need to pursue what Ernst Becker called “immortality projects”. I’m nearing my “best used by date” and I have no desire to go way beyond it, particularly at anyone else’s expense. This is a feature to me, not a bug.
The point of all this being that since I do not believe I’m immortal, hell and heaven are both out of play for me. I can talk about the concepts with the best of them and I can say that, e.g., hell as generally conceived anyway is an unjust vindictive and unrehabilitative punishment, but it’s just not a real “thing” to me in the first place.
1 Like
This is one line of discussion I would be interested in pursuing. I think - shamelessly - that happiness is not a feeling, but an activity, our best, our optimal activity, and that concomitantly, it satisfies us, but not immediately.
This is another path of conversation.
My view, and it’s standard Catholic Christian view, is that we are not immortal, but do truly die, a fact that is sometimes pretty unacceptable. I lost my own father when he was only 49 years old, of cancer, and it’s not something I can be “ok” with, even with the passage of time. He is no more.
But I also hold two other things to be true:
- We have incorruptible, “immortal” souls, and thus a natural part of our individual being subsists beyond death. I think this is something we can argue philosophically, but not trivially. That could be an avenue of conversation.
- We will resurrect at the second coming, and recover the fullness of our being. This I can’t provided any direct argument for, I believe it as an article of faith. This faith itself is not without its own - I dare say ‘scientific’ - justification though. The work of genuine, orderly, apologetics, is to articulate these justifications. Of course, most of what passes for apologetics these days is just a catalogue of ad hoc arguments, with not order to them, except to respond to objections.
I assure you that you are being scammed, and that you do believe in magic. It is super obvious to anyone who doesn’t believe in fairy tales. Lots of scientists believe in magic, lots of scientists get scammed; just like you. The easiest person to fool is the person who thinks they can’t be fooled. I figured you deserved to hear what I had to say, and it seems to have had no effect. I’m sorry I have failed you. Good luck with your magical thinking.
3 Likes
and yet you still believe in magic 
for what it is worth, I could field a football team of scientists I know who believe in bullshit (even exempting religious bullshit!)
2 Likes
I’ve met countless honest Christians. I’ve never even heard of an honest apologists. They don’t exist imo.
2 Likes
Or any that can remotely justify their subjective belief in a deity.
1 Like
I don’t know that I 100% agree with this, although I agree with most of it.
Another priority besides survival, reproduction, and personal interest is to leave the world a better place than how you found it.
Being a nurse has given me a profound sense of meaning and purpose in my life that goes beyond survival and reproduction.
I could easily do other things that would make more money, but being a nurse makes me feel like I make a difference.
2 Likes
Certainly, although the success of that is both subjective and difficult to see.
On an overall basis, particularly for an idealist at heart, the world is pretty clearly worse than I found it, as I’m locked here in the asylum with the other inmates, and there are a LOT of them.
On a personal level, I have always been true to the light I had at any point in time, and have dealt honorably with people, but no one gets this far in life without having done things that, had they known better at the time, they would not have done.
And then it becomes a bit of a hall of mirrors: I would not have married my first wife for example – that’s probably the biggest doltish thing I ever did – but then I would not have had the children I had, would not have married my now-deceased 2nd wife and therefore would not have been with my current wife. How would I know that my life wouldn’t have been worse if I had made that initial decision differently? It probably would be better (for some given value of “better” at least), but … IMO ultimately it comes down to way more dumb luck than we would like to believe, lol. And I have come to the conclusion that it is skillful living within one’s decisions and circumstances and luck that is the most decisive factor. What the Brits would term “making the best of a bad job”.
But sure, the attempt to contribute something that you can point to on your way out the door is worthy, and I have made it. Sometimes I am not sure that I could prove that it succeeded even by my own lights, but no one who knows me would claim that I didn’t try. And that is all anyone can ask, of themselves or of others: a good-faith attempt.
One of the things that religion does a pretty good job of is reassuring people that they matter, to god if to no one else. That abstraction only works until it doesn’t, though. I did not ask much of god, and boy, did I get it. I watched too many events outside my influence much less control go south on what I thought was his watch. I had the choice to blame him for reneging on his lavish promises of protection and comfort, or realize he wasn’t even there. I chose what was behind door #2. It has allowed me not to be bitter, disappointed, or bitterly disappointed. It was the healthy choice. Happily, it was also the rational, evidence-based choice, so it also permitted me to remain sane and to make better sense of life.
All in all, given actual reality, I am pleased with the outcome.
1 Like