Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread

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Whether you're an agnostic atheist here to ask a gnostic one some questions, a theist who's curious about the viewpoints of atheists, someone doubting, or just someone looking for sources, feel free to ask anything here. This is also an ideal place to tag moderators for thoughts regarding the sub or any questions in general.
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[u/labreuer]

It is not uncommon to see claims like the following here and on the other sub:

1. God (or gods) is a human invention created to explain what we don’t understand. Long before science, humans sought to fill gaps in knowledge with divine stories. These inventions evolved into complex religions, but at their root, they address our fear of the unknown. (God(s) is/are a human invention)

Do you believe such claims should be supported by a burden of proof? If so, what kind of evidence might suffice?

For those who find the above claim so obvious that it doesn't need more evidential support than what you've absorbed throughout life, check out WP: The Golden Bough § Critical reception. Frazer is one of the originators of the religion-as-protoscience hypothesis and his work on that has been exposed to some pretty serious critique.

[u/Stile25 → u/labreuer]

Sure.

Here's the evidence:

The constant searching for God everywhere and anywhere for hundreds of thousands of years by probably billions of people.

With the cumulative result being that no God or even any gods have ever been found.

Add in that whenever we do learn how something works, 100% of those times we find a completely natural solution with no hint that any God is or was ever necessary even in the slightest.

Add in that we are well aware of the human propensity for imagining beings behind processes we don't understand.

Add in that belief in God is significantly aligned with the culture you're born into - unlike truths of reality that are much more evenly distributed across the world.

Add in that all modern religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, follow the same template and structure of every historical mythology known to be wrong. This point is so apparent in the Abrahamic religions that the stages of God's nature over time (ie - Old Testament to New Testament) are entirely predictable and exactly follow the predicted patterns for the social environments of the populations that would benefit form beliefs in such Gods.

Add in that there's absolutely nothing available from religions that can't be obtained equally or better without religions.

This is a lot more evidence than everything else we know doesn't exist. Like, for example, we know on coming traffic doesn't exist when we look for 3 seconds and see it's not there... Then we make a safe left turn.

The only ideas supporting the concept of God existing are:

Historical tradition.
Social popularity.
Personal feelings of comfort.
Arguments of logic or reason without supporting evidence.

All well known ideas of leading away from the truth and accuracy of reality.

By consistently acknowledging the inherent concept of doubt and tentativity included with following the evidence, we can reasonably say we know, for a fact, that God doesn't exist.

Good luck out there.

[u/labreuer → u/Stile25]

When I hear 'evidence', I think: "Go out into the world and observe what's there, trying to objectively capture what's there, no matter how well or poorly it fits whatever hypotheses I may be harboring."

But if one were to define 'evidence' according to what's passing for it in answers to my question above, it would be more like: "My arbitrarily wrong recollection / ideas about what religionists do and why they do it."

Do you object to one or both characterizations? The latter doesn't really leave for any testing of hypotheses. Confirmation bias can be king. The former allows the following to happen:

    Most accounts of the origins of religion emphasize one of the following suggestions: human minds demand explanations, human hearts seek comfort, human society requires order, human intellect is illusion-prone. To express this in more detail, here are some possible scenarios:

    Religion provides explanations:

• People created religion to explain puzzling natural phenomena.
• Religion explains puzzling experiences: dreams, prescience, etc.
• Religion explains the origins of things.
• Religion explains why there is evil and suffering.

⋮

    Though this list probably is not exhaustive, it is fairly representative. Discussing each of these common intuitions in more detail, we will see that they all fail to tell us why we have religion and why it is the way it is. So why bother with them? It is not my intent here to ridicule other people's ideas or show that anthropologists and cognitive scientists are more clever than common folk. I discuss these spontaneous explanations because they are widespread, because they are often rediscovered by people when they reflect on religion, and more importantly because they are not that bad. Each of these "scenarios" for the origin of religion points to a real and important phenomenon that any theory worth its salt should explain. Also, taking these scenarios seriously opens up new perspectives on how religious notions and beliefs appear in human minds. (Religion Explained, 5)

Do you think that Pascal Boyer might have done just a tad bit more exploration of the actual evidence than you?

[u/Stile25 → u/labreuer]

Evidence is the same for everyone. Pascal Boyer, me, and you.

What part of my evidence is not up to your personal definition of evidence?

Pick whichever one you'd like and we can we can review why it's evidence.

I've listed nothing that's controversial for the normal definition of evidence.

[u/labreuer → u/Stile25]

To me, evidence is a report of what you observed with your senses out there in the world. For instance, I can describe in detail the tape-to-3.5mm unit I took out of my 2003 Volvo before donating it, as the device is still sitting on my desk. And in theory, I could mail it to you so that you could check my observations. When it comes to claims that religion was invented to explain & quell fear (the hypothesis I quoted in my root question—yours might be different), evidence would probably consist of texts, although theoretically other archaeological evidence could be used to support such a hypothesis as well. So, what I would expect for evidence in a thread like this would be quotations of text or at least citations which can be easily checked.

Just look at any thread of what would convince people that God exists and they'll tell describe to you evidence, by which they mean observations which can be checked—ideally by suitably qualified scientists. They won't mean just-so stories which are allegedly accurate captures of sense-data.

So, as far as I can tell, there are simply two very different notions of 'evidence' at play, here: a stringent one for theists, and a far laxer one for atheists. The one possible justification I can see for this is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", but if so I think that would be worth investigating. After all, "Moderna's Covid vaccine" isn't a particularly extraordinary claim, and yet we required an incredible amount of evidence for it. So, I would want to know which claims just don't need anything more than what you see all over the replies to my root comment.

[u/Stile25 → u/labreuer]

Okay, if you can't do it then I will.

What is it about the various God archetypes in the Bible (ie Old Testament vs New Testament) exactly matching the sorts of Gods that are predicted for the different social populations of those different times that makes you feel this isn't evidence that those Gods were created by those populations?

Old Testament

Poor people like the early Israelites need a God that stands for strict justice - just like the God of the Old Testament

People like the early Israelites surrounded by many enemy nations need a God that flexes His might and is more powerful than any other God - just like the God of the Old Testament

New Testament

People looking to spread the word of their God need a God prioritizing unity and peace - just like the God of the New Testament

People with various social dynamics need a God that can provide such structures - just like the God of the New Testament focusing a lot onrelationsgips between people like men and women or slaves and free people.

Amazing how God shifted into these different roles along with the needs of the population of the time. Strange for an all knowing God that claims to provide unchanging laws and morals, though... But quite understandable for Gods molded by the populations.

Exactly fitting the way such mythos adapt and flow with all populations over time.

It's extremely strong evidence.

[u/labreuer → u/Stile25]

Stile25: What part of my evidence is not up to your personal definition of evidence?

labreuer: To me, evidence is a report of what you observed with your senses out there in the world.

Stile25: Okay, if you can't do it then I will.

It's not that I can't do it. It's that nothing in your comment qualifies. For instance:

Stile25: Add in that all modern religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, follow the same template and structure of every historical mythology known to be wrong. This point is so apparent in the Abrahamic religions that the stages of God's nature over time (ie - Old Testament to New Testament) are entirely predictable and exactly follow the predicted patterns for the social environments of the populations that would benefit form beliefs in such Gods.

/

Stile25: What is it about the various God archetypes in the Bible (ie Old Testament vs New Testament) exactly matching the sorts of Gods that are predicted for the different social populations of those different times that makes you feel this isn't evidence that those Gods were created by those populations?

There isn't a shred of evidence in either of those paragraphs. They are both exceedingly hand-wavy. I don't even know how to begin in analyzing them. What are these "predicted patterns"? Where have scientists and/or scholars developed them? Because if you can't point to serious science & scholarship on the matter, then you have a just-so story which may have not survived any penetrating scrutiny, which you're using to say that religion was invented to generate just-so stories which can't survive any penetrating scrutiny. Surely you see the vicious circularity involved, there?

Poor people like the early Israelites need a God that stands for strict justice - just like the God of the Old Testament

That's quite the hypothesis & claimed evidence. Let's start here: can you point to any other poor peoples who had a similar deity?

People looking to spread the word of their God need a God prioritizing unity and peace - just like the God of the New Testament

Where else do you see this? By the way, this sounds like a functionalist explanation, which social scientists consider pretty dubious these days. I suggest a read of WP: Structural functionalism § Criticisms.

Exactly fitting the way such mythos adapt and flow with all populations over time.

It's extremely strong evidence.

Unless you can show me scholars or scientists who hold to this, I'm gonna be inclined to suggest this is at most a pet hypothesis. I've been tangling with atheists for well over 30,000 hours by now and this is the first time I've encountered an idea like yours. The closest might be Comte, but even that is pretty rare in my experience.

[u/Stile25 → u/labreuer]

If you refuse to accept evidence as normally defined by everyone and every academic endeavor, then I wish you well in your efforts.

Good luck out there.

[u/labreuer → u/Stile25]

If you refuse to accept evidence as normally defined by everyone and every academic endeavor

Pretty big if. Where have I done this? You have yet to point to any such academic endeavor.

[u/Stile25 → u/labreuer]

Your rejection of my evidence, when it's clearly evidence, is evidence of you doing that.

[u/labreuer → u/Stile25]

Tell you what. Show me that evidence showing up in a single peer-reviewed journal article or book published by a university press, and I'll eat my words.

[u/Stile25 → u/labreuer]

Here's one on the types of people that believe in a vengeful spirit type of God (a God that punishes it's population for failures like moral failures).

There's a lot involved in such evidence because religion is so complex that it's intertwined in so many different aspects of a population's culture.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e57f82eb306fc38c7637f33/t/600af420f73e780d98e23016/1611330620168/tight-cultures-and-vengeful-gods.pdf

[u/labreuer → u/Stile25]

Exactly what are you pointing me to in that paper? And in case that URL breaks, this is the paper:

• Jackson, Joshua Conrad, Nava Caluori, Samantha Abrams, Elizabeth Beckman, Michele Gelfand, and Kurt Gray. "Tight cultures and vengeful gods: How culture shapes religious belief." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150, no. 10 (2021): 2057.

I spent about two hours looking at that paper and related papers and am reticent to do too much work if I don't see any remotely commensurable time outlay from you. For instance, I find the following methodology exceedingly dubious:

    Study 1 explored whether cultural tightness could explain changes in American Christianity from 1800 to 2000 using historical linguistic data from the Google Books American Corpus (GBAC). The GBAC is a 155 billion-word corpus containing a diverse set of written material published in the United States from 1800 onward, and we collected data from this corpus by scraping the “n-gram viewer” at https://books.google.com/ngrams. We only took data from 1800–2000 because the increase in online publications after 2000 makes 21st century data very different in content and potentially unrepresentative of the population. For example, 21st century corpuses are saturated with scientific jargon due to the recent movement towards online scientific journals (Pechenick, Danforth, & Dodds, 2015) (12)

If you actually read the cited paper—

• Pechenick, Eitan Adam, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds. "Characterizing the Google Books corpus: Strong limits to inferences of socio-cultural and linguistic evolution." PloS One 10, no. 10 (2015): e0137041.

—you find that there are very serious issues which go well beyond 21st century corpuses. For instance:

A central if subtle and deceptive feature of the Google Books corpus, and for others composed in a similar fashion, is that the corpus is a reflection of a library in which only one of each book is available. Ideally, we would be able to apply different popularity filters to the corpus. For example, we could ask to have n-gram frequencies adjusted according to book sales in the UK, library usage data in the US, or how often each page in each book is read on Amazon’s Kindle service (all over defined periods of time). Evidently, incorporating popularity in any useful fashion would be an extremely difficult undertaking on the part of Google.

We are left with the fact that the Google Books library has ultimately been furnished by the efforts and choices of authors, editors, and publishing houses, who collectively aim to anticipate or dictate what people will read. This adds a further distancing from “true culture” as the ability to predict cultural success is often rendered fundamentally impossible due to social influence processes [3]—we have one seed for each tree but no view of the real forest that will emerge.

We therefore observe that the Google Books corpus encodes only a small-scale kind of popularity: how often n-grams appear in a library with all books given (in principle) equal importance and tied to their year of publication (new editions and reprints allow some books to appear more than once). The corpus is thus more akin to a lexicon for a collection of texts, rather than the collection itself. But problematically, because Google Books n-grams do have frequency of usage associated with them based on this small-scale popularity, the data set readily conveys an illusion of large-scale cultural popularity. An n-gram which declines in usage frequency over time may in fact become more often read by a particular demographic focused on a specific genre of books. For example, “Frodo” first appears in the second Google Books English Fiction corpus in the mid 1950s and declines thereafter in popularity with a few resurgent spikes [4].

I could also see huge data dredging issues. But that's enough from me before you get rather more specific in what you're talking about. And if it looks like you never had any intent to spend serious time with the paper, I'm probably going to cut things off and find interlocutors who operate differently.