OpenChristian
(Formerly Lemm.ee)
This is a community for progressive Christians and friends to discuss our faith, support each other, and share inspiration for our spiritual journeys.
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There’s a pretty famous thought experiment called the magic tea pot
I believe there’s a magic tea pot, it’s so small we can’t detect it floating out in space. It controls the universe, it communicates in secret to me and tells me its will.
Would you accept “the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence as absence” about that?
What about an invisible t-Rex that no one can detect but that definitely controls the weather.
I can assert made up things all day. And if I make my claims impossible to falsify, that is there’s no way for you to prove them false, that shouldn’t elevate them to somehow being more true, or more worth people treating with any amount of respect because they can’t disprove it.
I’m making the claim, there’s an invisible t-Rex that is undetectable by any instrument, there’s a magic tea pot floating around Jupiter far too tiny to spot on any telescope. To anyone listening to those claims they don’t need any evidence at all to dismiss them, I need to bring forth some proof that these things exist.
And even if I could convince, without proof, millions of people that these things exist. Every time a child recovered from an illness we gave praise the tea pot. Every time a team won a football game they directed they gaze towards Jupiter and uttered a blessing unto the teapot. Before every wedding people left out a snack for the t-Rex in hopes of securing fine weather.
The fact that I’ve convinced many people of the tea pot and t-rex, the fact that they assign many events to them, none of that undoes the original burden of proof.
I cannot definitively prove that the teapot doesn't exist.
Now, I also do not see any proof that the teapot is benevolent or responsible for the functioning of the universe in any way. That just doesn't seem very likely to me. I'm gonna go ahead and live my life as though the teapot does not exist, even though it very well might. I'm comfortable enough in my assumption that the teapot is irrelevant to me that I don't think I need evidence of its absence. That doesn't make the teapot's existence any more "true".
I myself am an atheist in that I choose to only believe things that I can prove.
That same logic you just laid out applies to the thousands of magical deities that man has invented over the years.
There’s no evidence I can point to to say that Odin hasn’t blessed a particularly good day. But Odin is just some thought that some human person had at some point, no more worth my concern than the teapot.
If you accept that line of reasoning then belief almost always boils down to a much softer version of “well ok, not any one man made god in particular, but you can’t disprove the idea of some higher power”
And really that is just a question of the supernatural. Is there something that exists outside of nature. Is there some force we can encounter that we could never define as part of the universe we exist in but yet still feel its effect.
Some would argue that feeling that force to begin with would make it part of nature. I am open to the idea, the universe is stranger than we can imagine, but we’ve never encountered such a phenomenon. Even things that seemed fantastical and unexplainable at first, fire, electricity, the double split experiment, all can be understood and explained.
Humanity’s story has been one of encountering new things and explaining how they work, what they are, why they exist. Every best part of the human journey has come from some form of being confused and trying to understand. So if the question is, are there things we will encounter in the universe which we can’t understand, I think there little value and presuming the answer to be “yes” as all it could do is discourage the person meant to discover it.
I think your final point is very good in that scientific discovery relies on people questioning assumptions and attempting to verify or debunk them. We "encountered" fire, gravity, and electricity - I don't think we've invented them as anthropomorphic characters the same way we've invented gods. Ultimately, I do not think it's possible to find evidence of absence for God in a way that will satisfy others due to the very nature of the concept of God. I also think Pascal's wager has enough merit to it that one should try to live a moral life, but not enough that it demands piety to any one tradition.
If you have read about Pascal’s wager, I found it interesting to read about Pascals Mugging
I agree with you about encountering vs inventing. Every named supernatural deity is invented by someone, in that some living person first tells the story of their particular god or writes it down. To the believer though these inventions often are considered to be encounters, the person telling the story of their revelation from their god isn't inventing that they are explaining their encounter with the supernatural.
I suppose that’s the bit that I look at and go, ok one of two things is true here. Either that person writing their particular holy book has had some kind of encounter with the supernatural or they’ve made this up, either intentionally or unintentionally. I think it’s important to be clear that making it up, inventing it, isn’t necessarily some sort of malicious act. My brain makes up wild implausible nonsensical stories every time I fall asleep, we call those dreams. A man in a cave suffering from dehydration and hunger could be telling no lies at all when they tell me about the mystical creature that appeared before them and told them the secrets of the universe, to them it’s a revelation, to me it’s their brain furiously firing off electrical impulses due to not having enough electrolytes.
And at the heart of every religion recorded by man is that question, that claim, this isn't something the author made up, it is real.
And that is the claim that makes me go, ok, prove you didn’t make this up. Prove that this is real and not a dream or an imagination or a flight of fancy.
I’ve yet to find anyone offer compelling proof. Most proof comes in the form of “look at this thing that is good, I have attribute it to my magic deity” while I often can agree that the good thing is good I see no reason to attribute it to the magic deity.
And there are many opportunities magic deities have. I’ve heard many believers attribute healing to their deity of choice, but it’s always some disease that can be healed. What does every single deity have against amputees? Science can’t regrow limbs and they won’t regrow themselves. If an amputee regrew a limb, a thing that doesn’t happen naturally, then I would have some shred of evidence that there’s a supernatural healer at work. And yet over thousands of years and millions upon millions of amputees, no deity has decided one worthy enough to heal.