Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. In case my initial reply to MugaSofer was misleading, Dennett doesn’t really seem to be suggesting here that this is really what most theists believe, or that many theists would try to convert atheists with this tactic. It’s more just a tongue-in-cheek example of what happens when you lose track of what concept a particular group of syllables is supposed to point at.
But I think there are a great many people who purport to believe in “God,” whose concept of God really is quite close to something like the “anthropomorphic representation of natural processes, or of the universe and its inner workings.” Probably not for those who identify with a particular religion, but most of the “spiritual but not religious” types seem to have something like this in mind. Indeed, I’ve had quite a few conversations where it became clear that someone couldn’t tell me the difference between a universe where “God exists” and where “God doesn’t exist.”
Regarding the second paragraph, I agree with your estimate that most “spiritual but not religious” people might think this way. I was, at some point in the past, exactly there in belief-space—I identified as “spiritual but not religious” explicitly, and explicitly held beliefs along those lines (minus the “anthropomorphic” part, keeping only the “mental” or “thinking” part of the anthropomorphism for some reason).
When I later realized that there was no tangible difference and no existing experiment that could tell me whether it was true, I kind of stopped caring, and eventually the questions dissipated on their own, though I couldn’t tell exactly why at the time. When I found LW and read the sequences, I figured out what had happened, which was fun, but the real crisis of faith (if you can call it that—I never was religious to begin with, only “spiritual”) had happened long before then.
People I see who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and also know some science seem to behave in very similar manners to how I did back then, so I think it makes sense to assume a significant amount of them believe something like this.
In case my initial reply to MugaSofer was misleading, Dennett doesn’t really seem to be suggesting here that this is really what most theists believe, or that many theists would try to convert atheists with this tactic.
For the record, I didn’t interpret your comment that way.
Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. In case my initial reply to MugaSofer was misleading, Dennett doesn’t really seem to be suggesting here that this is really what most theists believe, or that many theists would try to convert atheists with this tactic. It’s more just a tongue-in-cheek example of what happens when you lose track of what concept a particular group of syllables is supposed to point at.
But I think there are a great many people who purport to believe in “God,” whose concept of God really is quite close to something like the “anthropomorphic representation of natural processes, or of the universe and its inner workings.” Probably not for those who identify with a particular religion, but most of the “spiritual but not religious” types seem to have something like this in mind. Indeed, I’ve had quite a few conversations where it became clear that someone couldn’t tell me the difference between a universe where “God exists” and where “God doesn’t exist.”
Regarding the second paragraph, I agree with your estimate that most “spiritual but not religious” people might think this way. I was, at some point in the past, exactly there in belief-space—I identified as “spiritual but not religious” explicitly, and explicitly held beliefs along those lines (minus the “anthropomorphic” part, keeping only the “mental” or “thinking” part of the anthropomorphism for some reason).
When I later realized that there was no tangible difference and no existing experiment that could tell me whether it was true, I kind of stopped caring, and eventually the questions dissipated on their own, though I couldn’t tell exactly why at the time. When I found LW and read the sequences, I figured out what had happened, which was fun, but the real crisis of faith (if you can call it that—I never was religious to begin with, only “spiritual”) had happened long before then.
People I see who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and also know some science seem to behave in very similar manners to how I did back then, so I think it makes sense to assume a significant amount of them believe something like this.
For the record, I didn’t interpret your comment that way.