Sunday 11 July 2010

Dumb Subjects: Theology

In the very same blog where I drew so much flak for discussing Feminism, I was reminded of an academic discipline that blows mere sexism out of the water; Theology.

Let me share a revelation I had about religion...

Religion works by telling people a very complicated lie, one that the liars themselves have not yet seen through, before sitting back and allowing them to develop into an adult who will probably never have the intelligence or self awareness to see through it.

You see folks; it's effortless to tell somebody that something is true, but it's nearing the pinnacle of human intellect for that same person to independently recognize the rational nature of the universe, independently develop a concept of falsifiability and comprehension of why irrational propositions do not require considering and, finally, to apply it to something which they may have based their entire life upon.

This idea makes two predictions; the more advanced a society and the smarter the population the higher the proportion of people occupying this part of the spectrum, and the dumber and less advanced the society the more religious people there will be. Does the world support this hypothesis?

Norway and America, folks. Norway and America.

For most of human history knowledge of falsifiability has eluded entire populations (sometimes for hundreds of years), so if you tell a human being in the modern world that a god exists the odds that they will independently discover all of the philosophy required to recognize that this are not so is very, very slim. This is why it is important to teach people the truth, so that they are gifted with a complete understanding of reality without it being dependent on them possessing a fantastic intellect. And it is, of course, easier to make these philosophical revelations if you do not start out on a model of reality which contradicts them.

Let's imagine now that one of these people who has grown up and never realizes that there is no god. To them their religious doctrine is true, and that's the starting point of all reasoning. In essence they leap-frog a single question; "is anything about my religion true?". The logical consequence of this avoidance of a core question is that their religious doctrine gets treated as correct and requiring an explanation and, as their deities and spirits will be forever absent, these explanations will grow infinitely more complex without any objective reality to reign them in and determine which one is "right".

I remember doing philosophy as an A-level, and we often got questions like "If god is good, why is there so much evil in the world?" and "If Jesus died for our sins, can people be evil?". It was religious philosophy.

Whilst dragging up the usual bullshit from Kant, Aquinas, Descartes and a troop of people who scarcely knew why they had to breathe, let alone the cosmology of the universe, I felt intensely dishonest because I knew there was a very simple answer that I was avoiding in order to achieve marks; "Before we discuss whether or not god is good, we would first have to establish whether or not god exists". To my credit, I invariably concluded "But all of this is conjecture; without any evidence that a god actually exists it is meaningless to discuss its attributes". I got 100% in all of my exams, which either means a born again atheist was marking my paper or that, according to my exam board, the conclusion that there is no god is absolutely foolproof.

But what I was doing was theology. I was reasoning about religion. And there is really only one difference between theology and philosophy; theology assumes that the religious entity it is discussing exists before starting its reasoning.

This leads to a precarious situation; if that initial assumption is wrong then all of theology, every single stinking bit of it, has been complete bullshit throughout all of history. It means not a single theological argument has ever been valid, and that their entire discipline is a fantasy based around describing the attributes of beings and entities that never existed in the first place.

Now, by necessity this is true; there are many religions all of which have their own theology. If scientology is right and its theology that Xenu blew up alien souls in volcanoes so they could make Tom Cruise act like a retard is correct, then all other theologies are invalid. If the Christian theology that a Jew died on a cross to cleanse mankind of sin, then all other doctrines are incorrect. If Islamic theology is correct then there's a god in the sky who really wanted the age of betrothel lowered to 7 and hates music, of all things.

Even if one of these gods did exist, the vast majority of theology would be completely untrue. Of course all of these gods are unfalsifiable, and that's where the necessary understanding of both falsifiability and human nature comes into play; if people are claiming something is true, but it's actually unobserved and, more damningly, unfalsifiable, then not only is it bullshit but the people talking about it don't have any comprehension of how to "know" anything on a philosophical level.

Do I need to state the obvious? Theology is absolute bullshit; it's equivalent to (and, in the past, has been identical to) discussing how heavy Thor's hammer is, and whether or not the Red Hulk should have been able to defeat him considering he possesses the Zeus Force and is arguably the strongest character in the entire Marvel multiverse. Certainly Thor has a much higher strength feat than the Rulk, as he shattered an entire planet. That's also a higher strength feat than the Christian God, who actually lost a wrestling match to Isaac, who was human, so presumably both the Rulk AND Thor are much higher than Yahweh on the cosmic power scale.

Of course the real casualty is that it raises the complexity of the religious lie. The more theology is allowed to modify and add to religion the more complex the lie becomes and the fewer people are capable of seeing through it. I am not sure that my intellect alone even explains my atheism; it was reading the Bible, which is incompatible with christian theology on account of the 2,000,000 innocent people killing, baby murdering, vindictive amateur wrestler known as "God" who keeps popping up to piss on everything I'd ever been taught about him.

(2,000,000 people is just the named death toll, where numbers are given. Also worthy of note is the fact that Satan kills 10 people in the Bible, and he's essentially the bad guy for giving mankind knowledge. Sometimes I wonder if that entire book was written to test the hypothesis that people will believe what you say, not what actually is. If you say the murderer is the good guy people will believe it. After all; to disbelieve it you'd need to independently develop a coherent ethical philosophy, and that's just plain difficult isn't it?)

And the worst thing is that, had I been smarter, I might have been able to justify why god seemed to have such a hardon for murdering babies and collecting rape victims for his followers. I certainly can now; "Whatever god does is good". Had I realized that I might not be blogging about the obvious non-existence of god; the complete lack of evidence could have easily eluded me, along with the reason why evidence is necessary at all, and I might be setting fire to an abortion clinic or telling a young child that AIDS is a plague sent by god to kill gay people.

Well, probably not, but this is the problem with theology; I was fortunate that the theology taught to me did not include the absolute morality of god, and that I mistakenly believed absolute morality to be the law of my country, which painted a God who wantonly murdered between spates of absolutely schizophrenic rambling and sexism as a bad guy, which instantly disproved him because I had been taught he was a loving, caring being. But there is theology that covers that, and if it had got to me I could easily have been persuaded to not look closer.

And you know the worst thing? The part that really bets to me? It's that a person with a Theology degree (and a PhD whilst we're at it) doesn't know how much harder my degree was. They have no idea of what absolute bunkum they've been involved in, which means they can't appreciate what a spaztastic mongbat they are.

11 comments:

  1. unless, yanno, they were an engineering/religion double major, or some equivalent. I've met them, they exist.

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  2. unless, yanno, they were an engineering/religion double major, or some equivalent. I've met them, they exist.


    If you study one quacky subject and one rigorous one, the validity of the rigorous one doesn't seep into the stupid one.

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  3. What is all of the philosophy that conclusively proves that God does not exist? You show no evidence , that abscence of evidence is evidence of abscence is a fallacy. To be more technical, it's argumentum ad ignorantiam. The existence of God, being non-falsifiable, is simply ambiguous. Given such ambiguity, it is sensible (Occam's razor in action) to presume that God does not exist. I cannot, however, argue in the affirmative that God does exist without evidence that it is so.

    Americans are dumb and primitive, apparently? Your argument is philosophically unsound, as it is an argumentum ad populum. It does nothing to prove your larger argument. More particularly, you presume that people in Norway have all independently developed concepts of falsifiability and all comprehend that irrational propositions need not be considered. Perhaps they were given their own set of dogmas? Oh wait, never mind. I'm an American, let me just go into the corner and pick my nose.

    As the question of God is ambiguous, theology is only folly if God does not exist. For those for whom God does exist, theology is (ideally) a rational application of philosophical principles to their worldview. As in the case with your A-levels, the proposition is wholly conditioned upon the premise that God exists. The only thing that mattered for the person marking your paper is that your proceeding arguments were sound.

    True, the multiplicity of theologies implies that the vast majority of theologies are untrue. Most theologies acknowledge this when they assert that theirs is the one true creed. But here you make your own presumptions. If one of these gods did exist, then the theology devolving from that god would be true, and therefore not bullshit. Therefore, you have proved your assertion "theology is absolute bullshit" is itself bullshit, i.e. an assertion that deliberately obscures the truth to serve one's own ends.

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  4. Part Two

    You claim that religious belief is based on the unobserved. I have known more than one person who will state with certainty that they have had religious truth revealed to them. For such a person, the assertion that God does not exist is as sensible as the assertion that apples are not red.

    Your logic concerning Yahweh doesn't work out. Yahweh is ostensibly omnipotent; that does not mean he couldn't lose a wrestling match. The point of that passage is that Jacob struggled with God and wasn't destroyed by the struggle. In short, he was a strong man with a strong faith. God, in the Christian worldview, created the universe, and has the power to transform and destroy the world (as seen in Revelation), and by extension, based on the cosmology of the time, the universe.

    There are a great many Christians who will simply tell you, when confronted with the inconsistency of Christian theology, that such parts are allegorical and are not literally true. Some more complex believers will tell you that the Bible is a melange of oral histories, hope-sustaining prophecy, religious law (which in biblical Jewish society was law for just about everything), and moral teachings. To these more enlightened believers, the Bible is a mixed bag that contains a set of moral teachings surpassing all others. The really audacious ones, like Thomas Jefferson, might well be Deists.

    I don't see how your degree was harder than that of a person who has a Ph.D in Theology. Even if it is bunkum, articulating a complex and consistent system of bunkum is arguably more difficult than learning a complex and consistent system of true things (like physics and engineering), as it requires a great deal more creative thought to make it all work out. It's why everyone loves MacGyver!

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  5. What is all of the philosophy that conclusively proves that God does not exist? You show no evidence , that abscence of evidence is evidence of abscence is a fallacy.


    And claiming I made the claim that lack of evidence is 'disproof' would be a fallacy too, because I didn't.

    Let me tell you about things that do and do not exist, and why only things which exist have proof or disproof.

    Things that exist interact with the physical universe. These interactions are characteristic of the thing that is interacting, and we can look at these interactions and say "this is proof of the thing that is interacting". Furthermore, if we look at another interaction, we know whether or not is is the same thing interacting by the nature of those interactions. If it is not, we call this "disproof of the thing that is interacting".

    Things that don't exist never interact with the physical universe. They have no effect on anything, by virtue of the fact that they are not there. They do not interact with anything, and because of this there is no proof or disproof of the thing. Because for a thing to leave proof or disproof it must exist in the first place.

    If a thing cannot be proven or disproven, it means it is characteristic of a thing which doesn't exist.

    God cannot be proven or disproven. This is the primary characteristic of a thing that doesn't exist; it interacts with nothing, leaving neither proof or disproof of itself.

    This is why nobody is claiming to have 'disproven' god. To claim that, you have to accept that there was evidence for him in the first place.

    And that would be irrational, wouldn't it?

    The very fact that there is no proof or disproof of god characterizes him as "a thing that never existed".


    I don't see how your degree was harder than that of a person who has a Ph.D in Theology


    You have no idea fella.

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  6. I had a typo in my comment about your evidence. I meant to note that you made no affirmative case for God's non-existence, and so I had to presume that your belief that God does not exist was predicated on the lack of evidence for his existence. Such nonbelief in God is rational, but it does not preclude God's existence.

    Your propositions:
    If things exist, they leave evidence of it in their interactions.
    If things do not exist, they do not leave evidence of it in their interactions.
    As there is no evidence for God, He does not exist.

    "Things that exist interact with the physical universe."

    It seems God has interacted with the physical universe, if you believe Scripture. That He has not been seen to do so recently is not necessarily a problem; He's omnipotent, and has apparently chosen either not to interact, or not to observably interact.

    "Things that don't exist never interact with the physical universe."

    Right-o on that one.

    "Because for a thing to leave proof or disproof it must exist in the first place."

    Right again.

    "The very fact that there is no proof or disproof of god characterizes him as 'a thing that never existed'."

    No, it characterizes Him as a thing that probably never existed.

    "You have no idea fella."

    Feel free to elaborate.

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  7. Feel free to elaborate.


    I do.


    No, it characterizes Him as a thing that probably never existed.


    There's no evidence.


    It seems God has interacted with the physical universe, if you believe Scripture. That He has not been seen to do so recently is not necessarily a problem; He's omnipotent, and has apparently chosen either not to interact, or not to observably interact.


    There's no evidence.


    As there is no evidence for God, He does not exist.


    A lie. I never said god didn't exist because there is no evidence. I said there is no evidence because god doesn't exist.

    Stop making straw mans.

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  8. I'm sorry if I made a straw man, it was not my intention. I merely observed that you assert that God does not exist, and presumed that that assertion was predicated on the lack of evidence for his existence.

    Lack of evidence is strong grounds for nonbelief, but it is not grounds for nonexistence if the thing in question can exist without being observed. There is no reason that such a property is outside God's power, as he is by definition omnipotent. If this the case, neither you nor I can speak meaningfully on the question of God's existence.

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  9. I merely observed that you assert that God does not exist.


    I don't assert god doesn't exist. God doesn't exist. I just observe the lack of proof or disproof, which is because god doesn't exist to leave this proof or disprove.

    You don't need to assert the existence of an empty box, just observe that there's nothing inside it.


    Lack of evidence is strong grounds for nonbelief.


    Yes it is. It's actually the perfect grounds for disbelief.


    If this the case, neither you nor I can speak meaningfully on the question of God's existence.


    We don't need to speak meaningfully on god's existence. There is no god.

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  10. You're treating God's nonexistence as a priori knowledge? Wow, you've made everything so simple! Thank you!

    P.S. Most empty boxes are full. Just because you can't see air doesn't mean it isn't there.

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  11. You're treating God's nonexistence as a priori knowledge? Wow, you've made everything so simple! Thank you!

    At no point did I.

    "P.S. Most empty boxes are full. Just because you can't see air doesn't mean it isn't there. "

    FAIL

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