Literally René Descartes, arguably one of the most important mathematicians and philosophers in history, spends most of his meditations trying to prove the existence of God. Religious people can be very logical and believe in their religion for logical reasons, even if you and I disagree with those reasons.
Which he couldn’t/didn’t do, giving credence to my position that you don’t come to belief in god through logic.
Look, I spent 40 years working with literal rocket scientists, I understand that smart people can be religious. Literally zero of them were raised without religion and came to it because of logical deduction. Smart people will either try to justify things they were raised to believe, or they’ll just say that their religious beliefs come from a faith that isn’t tied to logic. But rocket scientists who were raised Hindu will do the same with their pantheon as Christians do with their god.
lol. there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.
people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it, usually at young age when they lacked the rational apparatus to resist such brainwashing.
We know this now, due to in large part very smart people trying to prove it can be done in scientific ways with real philosophical and logic systems, and failing… Not just non-believers saying it’s obvious.
well no, we know it because non-existence is the default status quo. if you want to claim there is a spaghetti monster running the world, the burden of proof is on your side, no one has a responsibility to prove you it is nonsense.
so the effort of all these very smart people trying to find god would only be of interest if they had actually find him… in which case he should be handcuffed and brought to hague.
to be fair, logic and inference are different things. logic helps you build structure around a given set of axioms.
actually pure logic can be horribly unhelpful if you start with axioms that are not aligned with reality. that’s why some really smart people can believe in stupid things.
there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.
Agreed
people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it
It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).
Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.
In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.
I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.
All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).
i am using the word brainwashing to express my disdain for people who force religion on kids who can’t make free choice, it is not meant to be taken in the strictest literal sense. otherwise i agree with your comment.
Surprising amount of extemely logical people go full horse shoe into believing “religion is a useful technology despite being mostly quack”. To me this is just sociopathy of a different flavor.
It’s just people justifying their beliefs. As I said to someone else, I worked for decades with extremely smart people. A pretty good percentage of atheists, but lots of people who also believed whatever religion they were raised in. All of them made their peace with being scientists and being religious, one way or another.
I didn’t say it made him dumb, I implied that faith doesn’t flow from logic. Plus it’s a little problematic to say that our great minds were people of faith when, for much of our history, not being a person of faith could mean death. But it’s true, there were folks like Thomas Aquinas who were brilliant and more than average religious.
The narrative of Galileo vs the Church is misrepresented to push a specific narrative, the whole thing is obviously very nuanced, but to keep it short he was in disagreement with the Church, but he was a Catholic himself who happened to live in a period where the Church was on edge due to the tension with Protestantism. The fight wasn’t on science vs religion, but on who had the religious authority, individuals or the Church.
Galileo is portrayed as a proto-skeptic later on because it was useful to present the European enlightenment as a rupture with the old world, nevermind that Europeans pushed racism as a science while claiming to be purely rational, you can see this kind of misrepresentation of many early scientists as well such as Newton, who’s obsession with esoterism is rarely discussed, and even when promoting a grand narrative of the West as the cradle of reason people like to ignore that as far as we know Pythagoras was a weird religious dude with a cult, you don’t need to be rational in all spheres to be rational in some, and if we want to highlight the diversity of western thought as a good thing (which I believe it is) we can also find examples of early skeptics way before the enlightenment. Cicero literally wrote a skeptic as one of his characters to express his ideas, and while he’s clearly trying to promote stoicism instead, the fact that he includes a skeptic shows that there were already skeptics in society even back in Rome. And again, in my opinion this is a good thing, we generally need more skepticism, not less, but let’s not reinforce narratives that are just false and used to whitewash the horrendous crimes of colonialism to this day.
he has a BS in math. not something you usually associate with the pope 🤷♂️
deleted by creator
oh my sweet summer child… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity
I’d say he must be very logical except, you know…
Literally René Descartes, arguably one of the most important mathematicians and philosophers in history, spends most of his meditations trying to prove the existence of God. Religious people can be very logical and believe in their religion for logical reasons, even if you and I disagree with those reasons.
Which he couldn’t/didn’t do, giving credence to my position that you don’t come to belief in god through logic.
Look, I spent 40 years working with literal rocket scientists, I understand that smart people can be religious. Literally zero of them were raised without religion and came to it because of logical deduction. Smart people will either try to justify things they were raised to believe, or they’ll just say that their religious beliefs come from a faith that isn’t tied to logic. But rocket scientists who were raised Hindu will do the same with their pantheon as Christians do with their god.
lol. there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.
people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it, usually at young age when they lacked the rational apparatus to resist such brainwashing.
I suggest you read Spinoza.
We know this now, due to in large part very smart people trying to prove it can be done in scientific ways with real philosophical and logic systems, and failing… Not just non-believers saying it’s obvious.
well no, we know it because non-existence is the default status quo. if you want to claim there is a spaghetti monster running the world, the burden of proof is on your side, no one has a responsibility to prove you it is nonsense.
so the effort of all these very smart people trying to find god would only be of interest if they had actually find him… in which case he should be handcuffed and brought to hague.
to be fair, logic and inference are different things. logic helps you build structure around a given set of axioms.
actually pure logic can be horribly unhelpful if you start with axioms that are not aligned with reality. that’s why some really smart people can believe in stupid things.
starting with axioms “not aligned with reality” is not fault of logic 😂
Agreed
It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).
Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.
In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.
I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.
All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).
So yeah, it’s complicated.
i am using the word brainwashing to express my disdain for people who force religion on kids who can’t make free choice, it is not meant to be taken in the strictest literal sense. otherwise i agree with your comment.
Surprising amount of extemely logical people go full horse shoe into believing “religion is a useful technology despite being mostly quack”. To me this is just sociopathy of a different flavor.
It’s just people justifying their beliefs. As I said to someone else, I worked for decades with extremely smart people. A pretty good percentage of atheists, but lots of people who also believed whatever religion they were raised in. All of them made their peace with being scientists and being religious, one way or another.
Our greatest minds were peoplw of faith Plus beliving doesnt make one dumb
I didn’t say it made him dumb, I implied that faith doesn’t flow from logic. Plus it’s a little problematic to say that our great minds were people of faith when, for much of our history, not being a person of faith could mean death. But it’s true, there were folks like Thomas Aquinas who were brilliant and more than average religious.
You could life and not be xealos or pious aka faithful. The past wasnt as xealot as you think it was
Edit: i would have poikted to Leibnitz and Hum as brilliant people, especially Leibnitz, who were faithful
Galileo might not have agreed with you.
Also the word is zealous.
The narrative of Galileo vs the Church is misrepresented to push a specific narrative, the whole thing is obviously very nuanced, but to keep it short he was in disagreement with the Church, but he was a Catholic himself who happened to live in a period where the Church was on edge due to the tension with Protestantism. The fight wasn’t on science vs religion, but on who had the religious authority, individuals or the Church.
Galileo is portrayed as a proto-skeptic later on because it was useful to present the European enlightenment as a rupture with the old world, nevermind that Europeans pushed racism as a science while claiming to be purely rational, you can see this kind of misrepresentation of many early scientists as well such as Newton, who’s obsession with esoterism is rarely discussed, and even when promoting a grand narrative of the West as the cradle of reason people like to ignore that as far as we know Pythagoras was a weird religious dude with a cult, you don’t need to be rational in all spheres to be rational in some, and if we want to highlight the diversity of western thought as a good thing (which I believe it is) we can also find examples of early skeptics way before the enlightenment. Cicero literally wrote a skeptic as one of his characters to express his ideas, and while he’s clearly trying to promote stoicism instead, the fact that he includes a skeptic shows that there were already skeptics in society even back in Rome. And again, in my opinion this is a good thing, we generally need more skepticism, not less, but let’s not reinforce narratives that are just false and used to whitewash the horrendous crimes of colonialism to this day.
One plus one is two and Jesus is God incarnate.