The Creed is a part of a larger whole, not meant to form a religion on its own. It doesn’t include the great majority of the usual reasons for believing in Christianity, which I would need to address to convince people that it is wrong; it states (some of) the conclusions Christians believe in but not their premises. A Christian wouldn’t try to convert someone just by telling them the Nicene Creed, without even any evidence for believing in the Creed.
However, on further reflection: I must partially retract what I said. The ‘quite easy’ proof I had in mind is not universal: like any proof, its form and existence depend on who that proof is supposed to convince. It’s famously hard to convince a Christian of a disproof of Christianity; it’s also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.
Every human alive has heard of the concept of religion, and of some concrete religions (if not necessarily of Christianity), and usually either believes in one or explicitly does not believe in any. So it could be said there’s no perfectly impartial judge of the validity of a proof. I believe that a neutral, rational, unbiased reasoner would be convinced by my simple proofs; but even apart from not being to test this, a Christian could argue that I’m sneaking assumptions into my definition of a neutral reasoner. (After all, every reasoner must start out with some facts, and if Christianity is true, why not start out believing in it?)
I retract my previous claim. I don’t have a “quite easy” proof any given religion is false, if by proof we mean “some words that would quite easily convince a believer in that religion to stop believing in it.”
it’s also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.
But that is precisely the part that I’m objecting to. I agree that trying to convince a believer would likely lead to some form of “Whatever, dude, you just need to let Jesus into your heart”.
I’m not a Christian. I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change. Prove to me that Christianity is false.
All beliefs are probabilistic and can change. The evidence that would convince us that Christianity is true would have to be commensurate with the prior telling us today that it is false. The existence of that low prior is the proof that it’s very likely false (factoring in our uncertainty about some things).
(By the word ‘prove’, I obviously didn’t mean a logical proof that sets the probability to zero; just one that makes the probability so low that theory would never rise to the level of conscious consideration.)
Why do I think our prior for Christianity should be very low?
First, because it makes supernatural claims; that is, claims which are by definition counter to all previous observations which we had used to determine the natural laws.
Second, because its core claims (and future predictions) are similar to many sets of (mutually contradictory) claims made by many other religions, which implies that generating such claims and eyewitness testimony (as opposed to lasting miraculous artifacts or states of nature) is a natural human behavior which doesn’t need further explanation.
Third, because we know that Christianity and its dogmas have changed a lot during its history, and many sects have risen and fallen which have violently disagreed over every possible point of theology. Even if we assign a high probability to some variant of Christianity being true and ignore all other world religions (actual and possible), the average probability of any specific branch of Christianity would still be low, although not nearly as astronomically low as due to the other reasons given. And since we can trace clear human causes for the beliefs of many sects—like Luther postulating that since Catholic clergy was corrupt, their theology must also be wrong, or like many sects that were declared heretical for political reasons—it’s likely that all sects’ beliefs had human causes, and evolved in large part from previous, non-Christian beliefs.
Fourth, and generalizing the previous point, the reason we’re even talking about Christianity isn’t its claims. It’s not because some Christian prophecies or supernatural beliefs unexpectedly came true. Rather, it’s because many people are Christians and we grew up in or near Christian culture. But a great many religions that once flourished are now diminished or lost to history. And even Christians themselves (unlike some other religions) don’t usually argue that the spread of their religion is a sign that it must be right; on the contrary, they venerate those who believed when Christians were few and persecuted.
The existence of that low prior is the proof that it’s very likely false
I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
And there doesn’t seem to be any reason to talk about priors, anyway. It’s not like at any moment we expect a new chunk of information and will have to update our beliefs. I think it’s simpler to just talk about available evidence.
As a preface let me say that I basically agree with the thrust of your arguments. I am not a Christian, afer all. However I don’t consider them as anything close to a “proof”—they look weaker to me than to you.
makes supernatural claims; that is, claims which are by definition counter to all previous observations
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
its core claims (and future predictions) are similar to many sets of (mutually contradictory) claims made by many other religions
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
the average probability of any specific branch of Christianity would still be low
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
it’s likely that all sects’ beliefs had human causes
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
it’s because many people are Christians
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
Who says that they didn’t? Chinese folk religion acknowledged Shang-di (also called Tian, ‘Heaven’) as the primordial, universal deity, which is essentially a kind of henotheism and quite close historically to monotheism. This is especially true since other deities, while worthy of veneration and sacrifice, were largely conflated with “spirits”. Of course, the later ideology of Confucianism tended to supplant these ancestral beliefs as a genuine foundation for ethics and philosophy/general worldview, although it did encourage the practice of rituals as a way of maintaining social harmony and a tightly-knit community.
I do. If you squint hard enough you can detect monotheism in any religious system at which point the term “monotheism” loses any meaning.
I’m using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
I’m using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
But the point is, the ancestral version of what would later evolve into Judaism was far from monotheistic; much like Chinese folk religion. As with almost anything else in history, monotheism was a gradual development.
Christianity not only has the trinity but also a bunch of saints towards whom you can pray and who then supposedly intervene. Additionally there are a bunch of angels. There’s the devil and demons.
I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
I meant that in response to your framing: “I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change.”
If your belief changes in the future, it’ll be in response to evidence. I can’t know what evidence you’ll receive in the future, so I can’t refute it ahead of time. So all I can do is lower the probability for Christianity now, which will serve as a sufficiently low prior in the future so that any new evidence still doesn’t convince you.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase it well.
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
The Wright brothers’ plane wasn’t claimed to be, or perceived as, supernatural.
The reason miracles are advanced as proof of a religion—the reason they are in the discussion in the first place (and in the Nicene Creed) - is because they are very surprising events. If a prophet goes around performing miracles like curing sick people, and a second prophet goes around saying that whatever we already expect to happen is in itself a miracle (“the miracle of nature”) and lets the sick people die, then we have a reason to believe the first prophet’s other claims (“God is granting me this power”) but not the second one’s.
One meaning of “supernatural” is “unnatural”: that is, an event that cannot happen according to normal natural law. Since we deduce natural law from observation only (and not from revelation or from first principles), this just means unique, unforeseeable events contrary to what we believe are the laws of nature.
This is why many try to refute religious miraculous claims, not by denying the story of the claims, but by giving natural law explanations for the events.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
Claims are cheap, proofs are hard. Christians deny the claims of miracles by non-Christians, at least ones made explicitly in the name of another religion (other than pre-Christian Judaism). They don’t deny the supernatural explanation, they just deny the claim that the miracle occurred. Similarly, if I really believed all the Christian miracles occurred as stated, I would probably believe in Christianity.
You could adopt the position that various miracles are in fact easy to produce, we don’t know how; and different people have discovered how and used those powers to advance their various religions. But that conflicts with the observation that more miracles are always reported of ancient times than of modern, and of highly religious and undeveloped regions than of secular and technologically modern ones. If there was a ‘trick’ to doing miracles without supernatural intervention, we would expect the correlation to go the other way.
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
If that is true, then all the specific claims made by Christianity, as well as any other religion, are false, because they all contradict one another (even between the branches of Christianity). If we take only the common denominator of all religions as true, I’m not sure there’s anything left at all, certainly nothing about e.g. supernatural commands or moral law.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
If a single deity appears to some as monotheistic, and to some as an unbounded number of local and thematic spirits, and both sides claim to have received direct revelations (in human language) of this truth, what can you predict of the elephant?
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
As above, if you are forced to discard any concrete result with which the majority of measurements disagree, you are left with nothing. There is no common set of core beliefs to all religions. There isn’t even one common to all branches of Christianity, except for the idea that “a man named Christ lived around 5BC-35AD in Judea, had disciples and was executed by the Romans”. After all, some people who call themselves Christians believe that Jesus was an ordinary man who performed no miracles.
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
If they end up disagreeing over all experimental results, and over all procedures to measure those results, then I think we have no evidence for there being anything underlying them, any more than there is for e.g. astrology.
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
Survivor/selection bias. You’re only asking the question because it’s a huge religion. Many more religions vanished or remained small than survived. There are documented historical reasons for this, but the only way they could be related to the truth of Christian claims is if God was indirectly helping them spread. Which every other successful, large religion claims as well. Anyway, ‘we won the war so our epistemology is true and Arianism is a heresy’ is not a very convincing argument.
I think we might be starting to rehash the standard atheist/Christian debate. Of course there are counter-counter-arguments for my counter-arguments to your arguments. And there are counter-counter-counter-arguments to those, too. Unless you really like turtles, I am not sure there is much need to go there.
I know the arguments against religions. I find them sufficiently convincing to not be religious. I do not find them rising to the level of “proof”. YMMV, of course.
The Creed is a part of a larger whole, not meant to form a religion on its own. It doesn’t include the great majority of the usual reasons for believing in Christianity, which I would need to address to convince people that it is wrong; it states (some of) the conclusions Christians believe in but not their premises. A Christian wouldn’t try to convert someone just by telling them the Nicene Creed, without even any evidence for believing in the Creed.
However, on further reflection: I must partially retract what I said. The ‘quite easy’ proof I had in mind is not universal: like any proof, its form and existence depend on who that proof is supposed to convince. It’s famously hard to convince a Christian of a disproof of Christianity; it’s also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.
Every human alive has heard of the concept of religion, and of some concrete religions (if not necessarily of Christianity), and usually either believes in one or explicitly does not believe in any. So it could be said there’s no perfectly impartial judge of the validity of a proof. I believe that a neutral, rational, unbiased reasoner would be convinced by my simple proofs; but even apart from not being to test this, a Christian could argue that I’m sneaking assumptions into my definition of a neutral reasoner. (After all, every reasoner must start out with some facts, and if Christianity is true, why not start out believing in it?)
I retract my previous claim. I don’t have a “quite easy” proof any given religion is false, if by proof we mean “some words that would quite easily convince a believer in that religion to stop believing in it.”
But that is precisely the part that I’m objecting to. I agree that trying to convince a believer would likely lead to some form of “Whatever, dude, you just need to let Jesus into your heart”.
I’m not a Christian. I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change. Prove to me that Christianity is false.
All beliefs are probabilistic and can change. The evidence that would convince us that Christianity is true would have to be commensurate with the prior telling us today that it is false. The existence of that low prior is the proof that it’s very likely false (factoring in our uncertainty about some things).
(By the word ‘prove’, I obviously didn’t mean a logical proof that sets the probability to zero; just one that makes the probability so low that theory would never rise to the level of conscious consideration.)
Why do I think our prior for Christianity should be very low?
First, because it makes supernatural claims; that is, claims which are by definition counter to all previous observations which we had used to determine the natural laws.
Second, because its core claims (and future predictions) are similar to many sets of (mutually contradictory) claims made by many other religions, which implies that generating such claims and eyewitness testimony (as opposed to lasting miraculous artifacts or states of nature) is a natural human behavior which doesn’t need further explanation.
Third, because we know that Christianity and its dogmas have changed a lot during its history, and many sects have risen and fallen which have violently disagreed over every possible point of theology. Even if we assign a high probability to some variant of Christianity being true and ignore all other world religions (actual and possible), the average probability of any specific branch of Christianity would still be low, although not nearly as astronomically low as due to the other reasons given. And since we can trace clear human causes for the beliefs of many sects—like Luther postulating that since Catholic clergy was corrupt, their theology must also be wrong, or like many sects that were declared heretical for political reasons—it’s likely that all sects’ beliefs had human causes, and evolved in large part from previous, non-Christian beliefs.
Fourth, and generalizing the previous point, the reason we’re even talking about Christianity isn’t its claims. It’s not because some Christian prophecies or supernatural beliefs unexpectedly came true. Rather, it’s because many people are Christians and we grew up in or near Christian culture. But a great many religions that once flourished are now diminished or lost to history. And even Christians themselves (unlike some other religions) don’t usually argue that the spread of their religion is a sign that it must be right; on the contrary, they venerate those who believed when Christians were few and persecuted.
I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
And there doesn’t seem to be any reason to talk about priors, anyway. It’s not like at any moment we expect a new chunk of information and will have to update our beliefs. I think it’s simpler to just talk about available evidence.
As a preface let me say that I basically agree with the thrust of your arguments. I am not a Christian, afer all. However I don’t consider them as anything close to a “proof”—they look weaker to me than to you.
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
Who says that they didn’t? Chinese folk religion acknowledged Shang-di (also called Tian, ‘Heaven’) as the primordial, universal deity, which is essentially a kind of henotheism and quite close historically to monotheism. This is especially true since other deities, while worthy of veneration and sacrifice, were largely conflated with “spirits”. Of course, the later ideology of Confucianism tended to supplant these ancestral beliefs as a genuine foundation for ethics and philosophy/general worldview, although it did encourage the practice of rituals as a way of maintaining social harmony and a tightly-knit community.
I do. If you squint hard enough you can detect monotheism in any religious system at which point the term “monotheism” loses any meaning.
I’m using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
But the point is, the ancestral version of what would later evolve into Judaism was far from monotheistic; much like Chinese folk religion. As with almost anything else in history, monotheism was a gradual development.
Sure. But let’s go a bit upthread and look at my original sentence:
Note the word “develop”.
Christianity not only has the trinity but also a bunch of saints towards whom you can pray and who then supposedly intervene. Additionally there are a bunch of angels. There’s the devil and demons.
I meant that in response to your framing: “I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change.”
If your belief changes in the future, it’ll be in response to evidence. I can’t know what evidence you’ll receive in the future, so I can’t refute it ahead of time. So all I can do is lower the probability for Christianity now, which will serve as a sufficiently low prior in the future so that any new evidence still doesn’t convince you.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase it well.
The Wright brothers’ plane wasn’t claimed to be, or perceived as, supernatural.
The reason miracles are advanced as proof of a religion—the reason they are in the discussion in the first place (and in the Nicene Creed) - is because they are very surprising events. If a prophet goes around performing miracles like curing sick people, and a second prophet goes around saying that whatever we already expect to happen is in itself a miracle (“the miracle of nature”) and lets the sick people die, then we have a reason to believe the first prophet’s other claims (“God is granting me this power”) but not the second one’s.
One meaning of “supernatural” is “unnatural”: that is, an event that cannot happen according to normal natural law. Since we deduce natural law from observation only (and not from revelation or from first principles), this just means unique, unforeseeable events contrary to what we believe are the laws of nature.
This is why many try to refute religious miraculous claims, not by denying the story of the claims, but by giving natural law explanations for the events.
Claims are cheap, proofs are hard. Christians deny the claims of miracles by non-Christians, at least ones made explicitly in the name of another religion (other than pre-Christian Judaism). They don’t deny the supernatural explanation, they just deny the claim that the miracle occurred. Similarly, if I really believed all the Christian miracles occurred as stated, I would probably believe in Christianity.
You could adopt the position that various miracles are in fact easy to produce, we don’t know how; and different people have discovered how and used those powers to advance their various religions. But that conflicts with the observation that more miracles are always reported of ancient times than of modern, and of highly religious and undeveloped regions than of secular and technologically modern ones. If there was a ‘trick’ to doing miracles without supernatural intervention, we would expect the correlation to go the other way.
If that is true, then all the specific claims made by Christianity, as well as any other religion, are false, because they all contradict one another (even between the branches of Christianity). If we take only the common denominator of all religions as true, I’m not sure there’s anything left at all, certainly nothing about e.g. supernatural commands or moral law.
If a single deity appears to some as monotheistic, and to some as an unbounded number of local and thematic spirits, and both sides claim to have received direct revelations (in human language) of this truth, what can you predict of the elephant?
As above, if you are forced to discard any concrete result with which the majority of measurements disagree, you are left with nothing. There is no common set of core beliefs to all religions. There isn’t even one common to all branches of Christianity, except for the idea that “a man named Christ lived around 5BC-35AD in Judea, had disciples and was executed by the Romans”. After all, some people who call themselves Christians believe that Jesus was an ordinary man who performed no miracles.
If they end up disagreeing over all experimental results, and over all procedures to measure those results, then I think we have no evidence for there being anything underlying them, any more than there is for e.g. astrology.
Survivor/selection bias. You’re only asking the question because it’s a huge religion. Many more religions vanished or remained small than survived. There are documented historical reasons for this, but the only way they could be related to the truth of Christian claims is if God was indirectly helping them spread. Which every other successful, large religion claims as well. Anyway, ‘we won the war so our epistemology is true and Arianism is a heresy’ is not a very convincing argument.
I think we might be starting to rehash the standard atheist/Christian debate. Of course there are counter-counter-arguments for my counter-arguments to your arguments. And there are counter-counter-counter-arguments to those, too. Unless you really like turtles, I am not sure there is much need to go there.
I know the arguments against religions. I find them sufficiently convincing to not be religious. I do not find them rising to the level of “proof”. YMMV, of course.