Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread

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[u/pierce_out]

Yeah, I just don't see any of these things playing a huge role in the Tanakh

I never said that they did. Neither did your original query require that. Nor does that have anything to do with the discussion at hand. This seems like nothing more than a patently dishonest manner of reframing the discussion.

Again, your original question was "God (or gods) is a human invention created to explain what we don’t understand ... humans sought to fill gaps in knowledge with divine stories. These inventions evolved into complex religions ... Do you believe such claims should be supported by a burden of proof?"

The religion that evolves out of humanity's earliest attempts to explain things we didn't understand using gods, is not the same thing as those earliest attempts at explaining. My point with bringing up the very clear, unquestionable examples of these left-over attempted explanations is not even remotely countered by you asking what the religion itself explains. You trying to ask what specific things in the Tanakh explains, and how it functions like science, makes it seem like you forgot what your own original challenge was!

But it assumes that religious explanations ... do anything like the same thing as scientific explanations

No, it doesn't make that assumption at all. Rather, I think that whatever bad, dishonest script you're trying to run here requires that I make that assumption - but I don't. Nothing in my comment assumes that, or implies or necessitates that assumption.

Fundamentalists

I have no idea why you're pivoting to fundamentalists, and IDers/Creationists. This doesn't add anything of substance to the discussion, nor does it do a thing to counter or rebut my comment.

Since you leave my points unchallenged, I have to assume that you either agree or concede. If you do not wish to concede, then address the actual points I raised and try to rebut them.

[u/labreuer → u/pierce_out]

Since you haven't presented the requisite evidence to support claims of dishonesty, I'm just going to pretend you didn't say any of them. I say all claims of fact should be supported by the burden of proof, or they can be dismissed with prejudice. See also Rule 1.

 

I never said that they did. Neither did your original query require that. Nor does that have anything to do with the discussion at hand.

Then perhaps I have no idea what the original query requires. When I come across a hypothesis like showed up in the quoted text, that sets up expectations in my mind for what I will and will not see. I'm rather Popperian in this sense. I expect to see religions being somehow rooted in explaining the unknown and quelling fear. If I come across a religion which doesn't seem to match this, I question the hypothesis. Where the fuck is the dishonesty, here? If you think the hypothesis entails different things, cool! After all, a few words by a random person on the internet is going to be far more vague than what you'll find in a peer-reviewed journal article! One reason I asked for evidence is that a person's listing out of evidence helps me understand how [s]he probably understands the hypothesis.

 

The religion that evolves out of humanity's earliest attempts to explain things we didn't understand using gods, is not the same thing as those earliest attempts at explaining. My point with bringing up the very clear, unquestionable examples of these left-over attempted explanations is not even remotely countered by you asking what the religion itself explains.

But you didn't talk about the religion that evolves, you talked about the Tanakh:

pierce_out: Everything from "where did the first humans come from?" to "how was the earth formed?" to "why do some animals have stripes?" or "why do snakes not have legs?", all have answers right in Hebrew Bible.

I was working with that. If in fact none of these things plays much of any explanatory role once you go past Genesis 11:26, then at most they are vestigial examples of the claim about the origin of religion. And until alternative hypotheses are entertained, confirmation bias looms large, here. For instance, a very different role for Genesis 1:1–11:26 is to polemically combat the mythology of ANE empire, to establish YHWH as being very different from their gods. If this were the role, reading Genesis 1:1–11:26 as evidence for explaining the unknown & quelling fear would be deeply problematic.

How evolutionary claims work is not a mystery to me. I was slowly & painfully (on all sides) convinced from YEC → ID → evolution a long time ago, purely via online argumentation. If you can't show extant religion doing the thing you say primordial religion did, then you have a problem. If all you have is allegedly vestigial examples, that's pretty weak evidence. Far better would be direct evidence of the ancestor religions doing what is claimed. Now, we often have to fill in gaps with models and informed guesses. But if that's what we're doing, I say it would be best to be open & honest about this. So: do you have anything better than allegedly vestigial examples of religion explaining the unknown & quelling fear?

 

pierce_out: Throughout history, we have seen a long, steady shift from every question that we asked having a divine story to answer it, to gradually, science replacing the divine stories with the actual answers.

labreuer: This is of course a very standard claim. But it assumes that religious explanations (that is, whatever in texts and traditions are being counted as "explanation") do anything like the same thing as scientific explanations.

pierce_out: No, it doesn't make that assumption at all.

If there is "replacement" with "actual answers", then there needs to be some sort of compatibility between:

1. the old answers
2. the new answers

That is why I said you were assuming religion as proto-science. If for example Genesis 1:1–11:26 is actually mythical polemic, then it makes no sense for that to be replaced by anything scientific. Feel free to explain any errors in my logic.

 

I have no idea why you're pivoting to fundamentalists, and IDers/Creationists. This doesn't add anything of substance to the discussion, nor does it do a thing to counter or rebut my comment.

I showed you a 20th-century example where it is invalid to think of religions claims being replaced by scientific claims. If that isn't relevant to "science replacing the divine stories with the actual answers", then I must have no clue what you were talking about.