I’m not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the ‘weakest point in Christianity’. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions
The main things that I found had weight is that it’s taking the numerous world religions and saying ‘this one’ without any great reason. When the correct selection may damn you for eternity, it’s worthy of considering the alternatives.
From an outside view, I see no reason to privilege the supernatural portions of Christianity over other religions. Rhetorically, what do you find as the weak points of every other religion? Don’t many of these apply to Christianity?
Generic inconsistencies—having read all the Biblical texts (some multiple times), and referencing databases for discussions of the original pre-translated text, the number of straightforward contradictions is outstanding. If we just assume for a second that some of the text was effectively the word of god, you still don’t know which parts. And that’s disregarding every other religion’s text, seemingly without justification.
Inconsistencies in practice—some branches of Christianity heavily discount the Bible due to the above.… but this makes the problem WORSE. It just dilutes the ‘god content’ even further. Arguments of your specific practitioners being ‘inspired by god’ needs to address all the people who disagree with you but say the same thing.
The specific details about Christ, and your ‘flavor’ of Christianity, are besides the point in light of the above. Other than popularity, Christianity still has the same problems as Zeus and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
All that said, the best argument for Christianity seems to be as a placeholder belief and social system. For some people it’s better just to pick a set of beliefs and go with it (IE: it’s a complex/unknowable local minima problem that’s ‘good enough’).
P.S. - I’d be interested in hearing your arguments ‘for’ God. I’ve yet to see one that isn’t so broad to be effectively meaningless. You might want to just google your argument for God and see if there aren’t already identified issues.
The main things that I found had weight is that it’s taking the numerous world religions and saying ‘this one’ without any great reason.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. You’re not selecting from the set of all existing religions in the world today, but rather from the set of all possible religions, even those that haven’t been invented.
As long as it’s a god with a Big Divine Plan in which humans play a role, sure.
If the gods created the universe so they could watch the big shiny hydrogen balls, and don’t care about the emergent properties of complex proteins on that one planet in that one galaxy, we wouldn’t necessarily know about it.
I guess that when I thought “religion”, I thought “system of worship”, not “system of belief”. To me the a religion would be “true” if it accurately responded to a demand for worship or obedience or such. If the creators of the Universe have no preferences over our actions, then at most you could have a, well, description of them, but not much of a religion thus defined. Discovering such beings would not make me a religious person.
Of course now that I thought of it explicitely, I realize this is a rather narrow definition.
True and I didn’t consider that… but assuming a supreme being had any impact in humanity, it is reasonable to assume that the set of practiced religions are more likely to be true than the set of not discovered religions.
I was trying to minimize the possible tangential arguments. I think trying to expand from 1 religion to 19 major religions is enough to show the problem without going to ~200 religions, which allows room to argue about applicabiliy/similarity of subtypes. Going to all possible religions allows room to argue about applicability of set theory.
I don’t know the best approach for convincing flawed humans, and I would certainly start with the argument from other existing religions (rather than the world-creating cheese sandwich someone came up with). But objectively, given the vast set of possible alternatives that religions ignore, the only real significance to Hinduism or whatever vs Christianity is that it helps show belief is not much evidence for truth. It gives us some evidence (at least in many cases) but not necessarily a significant amount compared to the complexity penalties involved with detailed religious claims. And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as overlapping rather than a proper subset) is pretty detailed if we combine historical claims with some meaningful traits of divinity.
I know this has been discussed before, but I’m not convinced that complexity penalties should apply to anything involving human witnesses.
Suppose someone theorizes that the sun is made of a micro black hole covered in lightbulbs, and there is no obvious physics being broken.… this is an obvious place to use complexity penalties. Simpler models can explain the evidence.
With the Bible though, we have witnesses that presumably entangle the Bible with a divine being. Complexity penalty in this case shouldn’t penalize for extra details. (Considering complexity penalties may still point to “this story is made up for social reasons, and here are some prior sources” instead of “god did it”… but this isn’t due to the amount of detail provided.)
...What? As a technical matter, the laws of probability say that evidence (eyewitness or otherwise) tells us how to update a prior probability, and ultimately a complexity penalty seems like the only way to get sensible priors.
I take you to mean that in a real eyewitness account, we should expect details. That seems more or less right, but largely irrelevant to what I’m saying—even the idea of a human-like mind is more complicated than it appears. That’s before we get to the details of the story (which we might doubt to some degree, in more trustworthy cases, even while paradoxically taking those details as evidence for some core claim).
Even the bare claim that God was involved with certain historical figures is another logically distinct detail we need to penalize before we get to the specifics of any one Gospel or source for the Torah. So the evidence of witnesses would need to overcome this penalty. And of course, in order for them to justify the beliefs about God, we would need to understand what that word means and how someone could directly or indirectly observe its object.
I may have misread your initial comment. To paraphrase to check my reading: you are penalizing due to complexity of a ‘god’ prior but, on the balance, eyewitness details should increase your estimate of the claimed witnessed set being true. More details from eyewitnesses do not then penalize further. The complexity of the god models are just so complex in the first place, that eyewitness details don’t increase your estimate much.
What I’m not grasping is what this sentence meant:
And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as overlapping rather than a proper subset) is pretty detailed if we combine historical claims with some meaningful traits of divinity.
Functionally, we’re talking about the set of vaguely Bible shaped gods… not all the details would need to be true. Eyewitness claims that this bible shaped god interacted with a historical figure should STILL increase your estimate of it happening.… even though that increase may still be infinitesimal.
Excepting things like “the following sentence is false”, eyewitness details should always increase the chance of something like the referenced object existing. It may in parallel also provide evidence that the ‘custody chain’ is faulty or faked… but that’s a different issue.
Pretty much. I’m saying that “vaguely Bible shaped,” rather than “touched down only in Jackson County, Missouri in 1978,” is itself a detail to be justified.
I’m not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the ‘weakest point in Christianity’. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions
The main things that I found had weight is that it’s taking the numerous world religions and saying ‘this one’ without any great reason. When the correct selection may damn you for eternity, it’s worthy of considering the alternatives.
From an outside view, I see no reason to privilege the supernatural portions of Christianity over other religions. Rhetorically, what do you find as the weak points of every other religion? Don’t many of these apply to Christianity?
Generic inconsistencies—having read all the Biblical texts (some multiple times), and referencing databases for discussions of the original pre-translated text, the number of straightforward contradictions is outstanding. If we just assume for a second that some of the text was effectively the word of god, you still don’t know which parts. And that’s disregarding every other religion’s text, seemingly without justification.
Inconsistencies in practice—some branches of Christianity heavily discount the Bible due to the above.… but this makes the problem WORSE. It just dilutes the ‘god content’ even further. Arguments of your specific practitioners being ‘inspired by god’ needs to address all the people who disagree with you but say the same thing.
The specific details about Christ, and your ‘flavor’ of Christianity, are besides the point in light of the above. Other than popularity, Christianity still has the same problems as Zeus and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
All that said, the best argument for Christianity seems to be as a placeholder belief and social system. For some people it’s better just to pick a set of beliefs and go with it (IE: it’s a complex/unknowable local minima problem that’s ‘good enough’).
P.S. - I’d be interested in hearing your arguments ‘for’ God. I’ve yet to see one that isn’t so broad to be effectively meaningless. You might want to just google your argument for God and see if there aren’t already identified issues.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. You’re not selecting from the set of all existing religions in the world today, but rather from the set of all possible religions, even those that haven’t been invented.
Wait, why? If God existed, I’d expect the true religion to be among actually existing ones.
As long as it’s a god with a Big Divine Plan in which humans play a role, sure.
If the gods created the universe so they could watch the big shiny hydrogen balls, and don’t care about the emergent properties of complex proteins on that one planet in that one galaxy, we wouldn’t necessarily know about it.
Well crap.
I guess that when I thought “religion”, I thought “system of worship”, not “system of belief”. To me the a religion would be “true” if it accurately responded to a demand for worship or obedience or such. If the creators of the Universe have no preferences over our actions, then at most you could have a, well, description of them, but not much of a religion thus defined. Discovering such beings would not make me a religious person.
Of course now that I thought of it explicitely, I realize this is a rather narrow definition.
True and I didn’t consider that… but assuming a supreme being had any impact in humanity, it is reasonable to assume that the set of practiced religions are more likely to be true than the set of not discovered religions.
I was trying to minimize the possible tangential arguments. I think trying to expand from 1 religion to 19 major religions is enough to show the problem without going to ~200 religions, which allows room to argue about applicabiliy/similarity of subtypes. Going to all possible religions allows room to argue about applicability of set theory.
I don’t know the best approach for convincing flawed humans, and I would certainly start with the argument from other existing religions (rather than the world-creating cheese sandwich someone came up with). But objectively, given the vast set of possible alternatives that religions ignore, the only real significance to Hinduism or whatever vs Christianity is that it helps show belief is not much evidence for truth. It gives us some evidence (at least in many cases) but not necessarily a significant amount compared to the complexity penalties involved with detailed religious claims. And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as overlapping rather than a proper subset) is pretty detailed if we combine historical claims with some meaningful traits of divinity.
I know this has been discussed before, but I’m not convinced that complexity penalties should apply to anything involving human witnesses.
Suppose someone theorizes that the sun is made of a micro black hole covered in lightbulbs, and there is no obvious physics being broken.… this is an obvious place to use complexity penalties. Simpler models can explain the evidence.
With the Bible though, we have witnesses that presumably entangle the Bible with a divine being. Complexity penalty in this case shouldn’t penalize for extra details. (Considering complexity penalties may still point to “this story is made up for social reasons, and here are some prior sources” instead of “god did it”… but this isn’t due to the amount of detail provided.)
...What? As a technical matter, the laws of probability say that evidence (eyewitness or otherwise) tells us how to update a prior probability, and ultimately a complexity penalty seems like the only way to get sensible priors.
I take you to mean that in a real eyewitness account, we should expect details. That seems more or less right, but largely irrelevant to what I’m saying—even the idea of a human-like mind is more complicated than it appears. That’s before we get to the details of the story (which we might doubt to some degree, in more trustworthy cases, even while paradoxically taking those details as evidence for some core claim).
Even the bare claim that God was involved with certain historical figures is another logically distinct detail we need to penalize before we get to the specifics of any one Gospel or source for the Torah. So the evidence of witnesses would need to overcome this penalty. And of course, in order for them to justify the beliefs about God, we would need to understand what that word means and how someone could directly or indirectly observe its object.
I may have misread your initial comment. To paraphrase to check my reading: you are penalizing due to complexity of a ‘god’ prior but, on the balance, eyewitness details should increase your estimate of the claimed witnessed set being true. More details from eyewitnesses do not then penalize further. The complexity of the god models are just so complex in the first place, that eyewitness details don’t increase your estimate much.
What I’m not grasping is what this sentence meant:
Functionally, we’re talking about the set of vaguely Bible shaped gods… not all the details would need to be true. Eyewitness claims that this bible shaped god interacted with a historical figure should STILL increase your estimate of it happening.… even though that increase may still be infinitesimal.
Excepting things like “the following sentence is false”, eyewitness details should always increase the chance of something like the referenced object existing. It may in parallel also provide evidence that the ‘custody chain’ is faulty or faked… but that’s a different issue.
Pretty much. I’m saying that “vaguely Bible shaped,” rather than “touched down only in Jackson County, Missouri in 1978,” is itself a detail to be justified.