DB, I think you’re making a false dichotomy, and I don’t see how your position avoids your religion degenerating into power-worship or something equally unpalatable. Why do you worship and serve God? Because he’s good? Bzzt, nope, because you’ve made “good” completely content-free when predicated of God. Because he’s big and powerful and created the world? Power-worship. (Would you worship the devil if he were more powerful than God?) Because he’s saved you from your sins? Mere self-interest. (If the devil could make an even better offer—save you from your sins and provide you with a billion dollars, or whatever—would you worship him instead?)
Also: If you don’t trust your notion of goodness to tell you whether or not God would engage in genocide or mass murder on a feeble pretext, why do you trust it to tell you whether or not he’d supply you with deliberately deceiving scriptures, traditions, revelations, etc.?
I can’t speak for Eliezer, but I expect he’d agree with me on this: yes, sure, there are religions that can’t be disproven, or even have strong evidence offered against them. (Or for them.) I think he’s saying only (1) that it’s not true that religion as such somehow doesn’t interact with evidence in such a way as to be disprovable, and (2) that some religions with a great many adherents saying that they can’t be disproved are—to be as generous as possible—the descendants of religions that were disprovable, and it sure looks as if the adjustments that may have made them non-disprovable were made in direct response to the appearance of credible threats of actual disproof.
(Of course “disproof” in that paragraph is shorthand for “being rendered very improbable by weighty contrary evidence”.)
Of course all of us believe some things despite being aware of what ought to be sufficient contrary evidence. Put a little differently: all of us are irrational sometimes. That undisputed fact doesn’t tell us anything about whether it’s ever right to believe things despite a heavy preponderance of contrary evidence, or when it is if so.
If you find the idea of trying to become more rational and less biased “anxious” and outmoded and otherwise disagreeable: well, fine, that’s up to you. I’ve suggested before (in conversation with someone else) that maybe there should be a site at www.embracingbias.com for those who take that view. But then, what are you doing here? :-)
I think “Christianity” is too vague a term to denote something disprovable (or provable). But, again being as generous as possible, some varieties of Christianity do make statements about the world that could be supported or undermined by evidence, and typically it turns out that it’s the latter. And these aren’t freaky culty fringe versions of Christianity, but perfectly mainstream versions—except that in some circles nowadays what’s considered mainstream is something that would have been considered majorly blasphemous to just about any serious Christian from the start of Christianity through to a couple of centuries ago at the latest.
Of course that needn’t bother you; plenty of things that are widely and solidly known now would have astonished the scientists of a couple of centuries ago, and that doesn’t discredit science. The difference is that Christianity, or any other revealed religion, is backward-looking in a way that (for instance) science isn’t. Unless you reckon that God has revealed everything to you directly, whatever reasons you have for believing in Christianity rather than (say) some sort of vague deism or something vaguely Christian but lavishly heretical have to go via the beliefs of the church through the ages, or the Bible, or some other thing that establishes continuity with the ancient Christian tradition. And that is somewhat discredited if it turns out that until very recently almost all Christians believed (as part of their religion) a bunch of false things.
DB, I think you’re making a false dichotomy, and I don’t see how your position avoids your religion degenerating into power-worship or something equally unpalatable. Why do you worship and serve God? Because he’s good? Bzzt, nope, because you’ve made “good” completely content-free when predicated of God. Because he’s big and powerful and created the world? Power-worship. (Would you worship the devil if he were more powerful than God?) Because he’s saved you from your sins? Mere self-interest. (If the devil could make an even better offer—save you from your sins and provide you with a billion dollars, or whatever—would you worship him instead?)
Also: If you don’t trust your notion of goodness to tell you whether or not God would engage in genocide or mass murder on a feeble pretext, why do you trust it to tell you whether or not he’d supply you with deliberately deceiving scriptures, traditions, revelations, etc.?
I can’t speak for Eliezer, but I expect he’d agree with me on this: yes, sure, there are religions that can’t be disproven, or even have strong evidence offered against them. (Or for them.) I think he’s saying only (1) that it’s not true that religion as such somehow doesn’t interact with evidence in such a way as to be disprovable, and (2) that some religions with a great many adherents saying that they can’t be disproved are—to be as generous as possible—the descendants of religions that were disprovable, and it sure looks as if the adjustments that may have made them non-disprovable were made in direct response to the appearance of credible threats of actual disproof.
(Of course “disproof” in that paragraph is shorthand for “being rendered very improbable by weighty contrary evidence”.)
Of course all of us believe some things despite being aware of what ought to be sufficient contrary evidence. Put a little differently: all of us are irrational sometimes. That undisputed fact doesn’t tell us anything about whether it’s ever right to believe things despite a heavy preponderance of contrary evidence, or when it is if so.
If you find the idea of trying to become more rational and less biased “anxious” and outmoded and otherwise disagreeable: well, fine, that’s up to you. I’ve suggested before (in conversation with someone else) that maybe there should be a site at www.embracingbias.com for those who take that view. But then, what are you doing here? :-)
I think “Christianity” is too vague a term to denote something disprovable (or provable). But, again being as generous as possible, some varieties of Christianity do make statements about the world that could be supported or undermined by evidence, and typically it turns out that it’s the latter. And these aren’t freaky culty fringe versions of Christianity, but perfectly mainstream versions—except that in some circles nowadays what’s considered mainstream is something that would have been considered majorly blasphemous to just about any serious Christian from the start of Christianity through to a couple of centuries ago at the latest.
Of course that needn’t bother you; plenty of things that are widely and solidly known now would have astonished the scientists of a couple of centuries ago, and that doesn’t discredit science. The difference is that Christianity, or any other revealed religion, is backward-looking in a way that (for instance) science isn’t. Unless you reckon that God has revealed everything to you directly, whatever reasons you have for believing in Christianity rather than (say) some sort of vague deism or something vaguely Christian but lavishly heretical have to go via the beliefs of the church through the ages, or the Bible, or some other thing that establishes continuity with the ancient Christian tradition. And that is somewhat discredited if it turns out that until very recently almost all Christians believed (as part of their religion) a bunch of false things.