That’s been debunked by numerous scholars already. It’s a decade old story now.

I have not found myself convinced enough about anything to have it tattooed (apart from many other reasons against tattoos). Yet almost nobody in the world would know about it; I could hide it; I could have it removed later on.

But to publish a rather emotional book whose only foundation are logical fallacies and that can never be easily removed from our planet, just baffles me. Your refutation is spot on, as always, easy to follow, well structured.

Thank you.

I think primacy is an important factor (it’s basically just one element of the Outsider Test thesis: one’s religion and superstitions are always geohistorical accidents), but it wouldn’t suffice alone.

One can sort through many options before clinging to one; what causes lock-in is an emotional attachment to one. And certain worldviews have had an actual well-funded industry that has spent centuries honing rhetorical and psychological techniques for producing that attachment; even when the institutions are not themselves the instrument applying them, their products become widely distributed memes that individuals end up spreading and applying on their own. This is why we have so many Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Mormons and almost no Raelians or Scientologists or Zoroastrians. Their psychological recruitment techniques just aren’t up to technical snuff.

But this point comes round full circle too: the ubiquity of a worldview’s adoption becomes itself an emotional attachment promoter. In emotional economics, joining a large privileged in-group is always going to be more attractive. Thus geohistorical accident comes in again.

Agreed. I will note, though, that part of the problem I really think is actually a lack of caring about really wanting to answer the question, and a lack of humility and self-honesty to admit that that’s the case.

My personal position is somewhere between pantheism and panentheism. But I recognize that I can never offer that as an answer for anything unless I had a much more robust understanding of God that could produce concrete, preferably falsifiable, ideas that could actually guide investigation. At best, it’s “Okay, I think I have an idea of what, but the question is how”.

Just last night it occurred to me that there are lots of worldviews that aim at simplifying the world. Creationism has among its benefits the idea that you can get rid of the complexity of that messy, fuzzy line between species. That’s why they keep asking about when a dog produced a non-dog: They need sharp boundaries. But nature doesn’t provide them. And that’s a problem for creationism that doesn’t deny the evidence as much as for any other belief system.

In other words (as you would expect from your Bayesian approach), any worldview that simplifies the world against evidence ends up overcomplicating it when the evidence is brought back in. Ring species are something that creationists have to basically brush under the rug in terms of their significance. Q adherents end up believing in an incredibly complex web of connections because they actually need to explain two worlds: the real world and their fantastic projection on top of it.

So someone like a Brierley can only accept that can-kicking by not caring about the answers. Because if you care, really care, to find an answer that holds up, that you can use, that you can deploy in lots of circumstances, you keep looking and double-checking.

AntiCitizenX has argued that a lot of the basis for religious belief is the primacy effect. Religious adherents stumbled upon an intuitive answer first, and many struggle to get rid of it. I think that must be a big part of it.

And what that tells me is that they really, fundamentally don’t care about the meaning question, or the morality question. Because if they did, like a biologist (Christian or not) who actually wants to understand the world, or a doctor who actually wants to cure patients, they would stop acting like believers even if only in this one question.

That’s all true. But it doesn’t feel that way from their POV. Like when I was a Taoist. I thought the Tao literally explained everything, and was brilliantly apposite as an explanation too. It took me years to realize it didn’t really; that all it was doing was kicking the can down the road, leaving the impression of having explained things but not really, and that I didn’t have any evidence that any of its explanations were true anyway (and plenty of evidence some of them at least are false).

It’s like, which I’ll point out in today’s entry (which will soon be linked in the launch article above), the meaning of life: Brierley feels like everything is pointless unless some ultimate spirit declares it to have a point; and that sates his worry, so he doesn’t go any further—like, to ask, why a spirit saying so even matters. How does that actually produce any meaning to life we should care about? Why is God right? The can has just been kicked down the road. Nothing has actually been explained. But it feels like it has. And that’s easier than doing all the hard work of actually answering the question of why some things matter more than other things, or matter at all.

Just saying “God says so” doesn’t actually get you there. You need to be able to work out how God would defend his recommendations and purposes as any we should share or approve or agree with. But once you do that, you end up not needing God in the first place. You have all the reasons you need already. Whereas if you can’t defend God’s recommendations, then their being his recommendations doesn’t produce any ultimate meaning or purpose for you after all. It’s a Catch-22. God doesn’t help you. Unless what you are selling is a unique transactional benefit (pie in the sky when you die); but then you need evidence any of that exists.

And even evidence a god exists isn’t evidence any heaven or paradise exists or who gets to go there. So that’s just sideshow; they never, as you note, have any evidence all their ancillary conclusions about that god are true. Which makes it all the more sad to see people exhaust vast hours and labors building incredibly elaborate and convoluted rationalizations for all that (and still ending up with no evidence for any of the important stuff) rather than spending all those hours and labors just doing the actual thing you should have been doing instead: working out why anything would ever matter, whether a God existed or not. Theism sucks all the resources out of the mind and life of people who could have put those resources into actually building a productive, fact-based philosophy of life. And that’s tragic.

Weird AI result.

Of course it’s (as expected) not entirely correct (myths often can be disproven; and priors always favor their not being true) and it wouldn’t be effective as rhetoric (e.g. defenders of the truth of myths claim they are evidence-based, that is in fact their primary apologetic, so we can’t simply gainsay that claim). But apart from that, this is almost a coherent and credible sentiment.

completion engine https:/textsynth.com and one interesting result is: A myth is a belief or an idea that hasn’t been proven or disproven. It’s not an evidence-based hypothesis that can be tested empirically. Yet we live with it and we try to figure it out. When we do, we try to use its assumptions, or elements of it, as truths. The anti-Christ myth may be a truth, even if it isn’t proven. If it’s not a truth, it should be abandoned. There’s nothing to gain from clinging to a myth that could kill us all.

The apologist at best is like a person who comes up to me one day and says, excitedly, that he found an explanation for all those UFO sightings. “I have a spacecraft! I found one! It’s in my backyard!” To which I (would, if I hadn’t been burnt too many times) reply, “Wow, cool! Can I see it?” “No”. “Okay, but if I don’t see it, I don’t know if it’s a working spaceship, I don’t know if it’s the right shape to explain what we’re talking about, I don’t know if it’s not some rock that you incompetently confused for a spaceship”. “You’ll see it when you die, trust me”.

The moral problem? God’s nature is good! Great, can you define God’s nature for me? Or demonstrate it? Show me what part of God’s nature is the good part and then we have a definition of goodness that I can independently assess. Nope, can’t do that. The bald assertion relies on us just listening to what other humans are telling us.

Fine-tuning? God did the finetuning! Cool! How? Why? What variables did God pick from? Is there a multiverse? “I can’t answer those questions for you. There’s your metaphysical inference”.

Theistic apologetics is heavily about giving a non-answer to a question as if it’s an answer. I don’t need to be convinced that there’s meaning, guys. I need to know how I can sort a good meaning from a bad one or a non-existent one perceived delusively, if meaning might change by context, etc. etc. You don’t have that answer. So you have no answer.

It’s not just that this makes the theory unfalsifiable. It makes it useless. Even if there is a God, until theists (or pantheists or panentheists like myself) can write a paper that tells us something like what we should expect the total size of the universe should be or what dark energy actually is and how it really behaves based on that potential theoretical approach, they just have a gigantic bald assertion.

The only thing that would be better is if you went back on his show and debated (or discussed) these things with him directly. I wonder if he would be willing to do that, given that it would require him to engage with you in a not so safe and comfortable role as simply being a moderator..

I smell a money making scheme but would appreciate your comments

Owen