Writing /var/www/ultracomfy.net/dokuwiki/data/log/deprecated/2026-11-02.log failed

Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- christianity [2026/10/27 09:40] – ultracomfy
+++ christianity [2026/10/27 10:33] (current) – ultracomfy
@@ Line 89: / Line 89: @@
 ====== God ======
-Christians believe in the abrahamic god, an entity common to all abrahamic faiths like Christianity. As an agnostic I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of a god, but the problem here is that people are making claims that cannot be verified. God, to them, has a particular identity, with a particular history, things the god did and values the god espouses, none of which exists evidence for. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of humans wandering Earth, humans have come up with tens of thousands of different gods to worship, the Christian god is just as much unestablished as all the other ones.
+Christians believe in the abrahamic god, an entity common to all abrahamic faiths like Christianity. As an agnostic I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of a god, but the problem here is that people are making claims that cannot be verified. God, to them, has a particular identity, with a particular history, things the god did and values the god espouses. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of humans wandering Earth, humans have come up with tens of thousands of different gods to worship, where the Christian god is roughly about as unsubstantiated as all the other ones.
 Even if something measurably divine were to happen, every religion would claim that it was //their// god who did it, and the advantage Christians would have in that debate would be exclusively the number of their adherents, not any actual veracity of their argument. Really, the annoying thing about all of this is that even if the god tried to identify itself, we could never be 100% sure because any god could pretend to be anyone. Or, for that matter, it would probably be very hard to know whether something that happened was divine at all (though I guess with that one I would be open to convincing).
-Now, a god would be free to literally just rewire my brain to make me 100% convinced that god is real, and that would solve a lot of problems. But at this time their excellence seems to be rather unbothered and leaves that work to its subjects. If Christianity just said that "we believe in god, and we worship them" then that would be fine, but Christianity makes a lot of falsifiable claims about the nature of its god, all of which //have// been falsified, so that I cannot believe in it. The only solution here is to say that god just makes the world //look// like the claims are falsified, to which I say "yes, maybe" and "I'm waiting until we start verifying anything" or "if the god covers up its own existence then maybe it doesn't want to be worshipped".
+Now, a god would be free to literally just rewire my brain to make me 100% convinced that god is real, and that would solve a lot of problems. But at this time their excellence seems to be rather unbothered and leaves that work to its subjects. If Christianity just said that "we believe in god, and we worship them" then that would be fine, but Christianity makes a lot of falsifiable claims about the nature of its god, none of which are really substantiated in any particular way.
-Interestingly, strength of belief in god has a curious correlation to the lack of quality in their arguments. Unfortunately I cannot find the scene anymore, but there is a Caleb and Sophia video from Jehovah's Witnesses that essentially tries to make a line of argument that goes like this: Beautiful things exist, therefore god exists. Or, here is a more involved one:
+Unfortunately I cannot find the scene anymore, but there is a Caleb and Sophia video from Jehovah's Witnesses that essentially tries to make a line of argument that goes like this: Beautiful things exist, therefore god exists. Or, here is a more involved one:
 <WRAP box>
@@ Line 134: / Line 134: @@
 What does my intelligent mind tell me? Well, my intelligent mind tells me that you should have called it [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity|Argument from Incredulity]] instead. Additionally, it tells me that I don't have sufficient evidence for god's existence and that, even if I agreed that a god must exist, it would not prove that the god in question is indeed Jehovah (as opposed to any other god).
-I'd say that the "things exist, and they can't just come into existence by themselves, so originally ultimately there must have been something that was able to self-cause" argument is about as good of an argument **in favor** of god as "an omnipotent god couldn't create a stone that it itself can't lift because of its omnipotence" is as good an argument **against** god. Nice thought experiments, but neither prove anything in a way that could be demonstrated or, ideally, be tested, measured.
+I'd say that the "things exist, and they can't just come into existence by themselves, so originally ultimately there must have been something that was that was uncaused (god)"((Or Self-Caused)) argument is about as good of an argument **in favor** of god as "an omnipotent god couldn't create a stone that it itself can't lift because of its omnipotence" is as good an argument **against** god. Nice thought experiments, but neither prove anything in a way that could be demonstrated or, ideally, be tested, measured.
-As far as //intelligent design// goes, I will say that this is merely a matter of having or missing the intelligence to find natural explanations for complicated processes. The idea is that god must exist because life as is is way too complicated to have come about randomly. As the character from above is saying, many things in our world are way too orderly to just have happened that way. Well, it is true that many things around us, at least on a large scale, are quite random. Perhaps the better term for that would be "chaotic" instead of random. Weather is a perfect example for something very chaotic but in no way random. The thing is that, on a small scale, many things arrange themselves very orderly and unchaotically indeed. They are incentivized by nature to do so, for example these hexagon-shaped basalt columns arraging themselves more orderly than any line of human beings ever could. There are mechanical, physical processes going on here that make these columns orderly just by the nature of how things are.
+As far as //intelligent design// goes, I will say that this is merely a matter of having or missing the intelligence to find natural explanations for complicated processes. The idea is that god must exist because life as is is way too complicated to have come about randomly. As the character from above is saying, many things in our world are way too orderly to just have happened that way. Well, it is true that many things around us, at least on a large scale, are quite random. Perhaps the better term for that would be "chaotic" instead of random. Weather is a perfect example for something very chaotic but in no way random. The thing is that, on a small scale, many things arrange themselves very orderly and unchaotically indeed. The laws of nature seem to have some kind of order built into them, like for example these hexagon-shaped basalt columns arraging themselves more orderly than any line of human beings ever could. There are mechanical, physical processes going on here that make these columns orderly just by the nature of how things are.
-Now, when it comes to life, life is capable of sustaining itself (that's just the definition of life, really), and this continuity allows life the process of //iteration//. Iteration is crucial to living beings because it has the ability then to evolve beyond hexagons. By random chance living things will all be born different and "fitter" beings have a better chance of being naturally selected. Or in other words, fitter beings have a better chance of reproducing than less fit beings, which means their genes propagate better. At each generation, the ancestor's genes are fortified and new variations introduced, which - if fit - will be fortified with their next generation. This generational iteration over billions of years is what allowed for the formation of not just single-cellular living beings, multi-cellular living beings and finally living things as complex and well adapted as the human. Do note that even DNA and single-cellular beings used to not exist and themselves came about in this way. I say this because I know someone will go "who designed DNA?", if they're smart.
+Now, when it comes to life, life is capable of sustaining itself (that's just the definition of life, really), and this continuity allows life the process of //iteration//. Iteration is crucial to living beings because it has the ability then to evolve beyond hexagons. Random mutation, among other things, causes some living things to be born different, and "fitter" beings have a better chance of being naturally selected. Or in other words, fitter beings have a better chance of reproducing than less fit beings, which means their genes propagate better. At each generation, new variations are introduced, which - if fitter - have a higher chance than others to reproduce. This generational iteration over billions of years is what allowed for the formation of not just single-cellular living beings, multi-cellular living beings and finally living things as complex and well adapted as the human.
-While evolution can explain the development and diversification of life, it does not explain how life came into being in the first place. Unfortunately, the evidence on that front is a lot less substantiated than desirable, but the general consensus at this time is that it is likely that life emerged spontaneously at the bottom of the seas near hydrothermal vents in a process called //abiogenesis//.
+While evolution can explain the development and diversification of life, it does not explain how life came into being in the first place. Unfortunately, the evidence on that front is a lot less substantiated than desirable, but the general consensus at this time is that it is likely that life emerged spontaneously in a process called //abiogenesis//.
 <WRAP center round rationalwiki 60%>
@@ Line 151: / Line 151: @@
 </WRAP>
-Functionally, abiogenesis is beyond me. I wasn't in school for long enough (or didn't pick the right classes) to learn about it. I'm not qualified to explain most of the things I try to explain on this website, but this topic is so deep in the "biomathematics" that even I have enough respect for it to not try at all. Functionally the idea is that, on a molecular level, simple organisms are simple enough that they could feasibly just happen to be randomly assembled (oops, I just tried to explain it). So while a tornado sweeping through a junkyard does indeed not assemble a Boeing 747((See [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hoyle%27s_fallacy|RationalWiki: Tornado in a Junkyard - Hoyle's Fallacy]], see especially the Unrealistic Expectations and Manufacture of Parts sections.)), it can, if repeated billions of times near all hydrothermal vents over billions of years //concurrently//, assemble perhaps at least one working part just by pure chance. From there, evolution does the rest.
+Functionally, abiogenesis is beyond me. I wasn't in school for long enough (or didn't pick the right classes) to learn about it. I'm not qualified to explain most of the things I try to explain on this website, but this topic is so deep in the "biomathematics" that even I have enough respect for it to not try at all. If repeated billions of times over billions of years //concurrently//, naturally occurring chemical processes could have produced increasingly complex systems, until self-replication emerges. From there, evolution would do the rest((For further reading on why some people think this is wrong, read [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hoyle%27s_fallacy|RationalWiki: Tornado in a Junkyard - Hoyle's Fallacy]].)). As I said, I don't fully understand this and, if I am informed correctly, a strong scientific consensus doesn't really exist, but we at least have a potential mechanism by which life could have emerged, which makes it reasonable for me to believe that a supernatural explanation is not necessary.
 The point of all of this: We need not invent gods to explain life. Complex things can arise from less complex things, and we don't need an ultra-complex magic being to create beings of our level of complexity from thin air. In comparison to the complexity of a god, we are still quite basic living beings anyway. There is no reason that god couldn't have made us more complex, more sophisticated. I mean, birds have some very breathtaking, highly adapted and extremely optimized feathers, but that level of complexity/optimization is just a tiny speck in comparison to the sophistication of life that a god could have given us if god had just wanted to. Why instead create life so lowly, deplorable and simple that it's just uncomplex enough to leave the door open for it to be explained away with just a bit of chemistry and evolution? I mean, seriously, they're a god. What's stopping them? Why would a god need to create animals with wings just so that they could fly, they're a god, goddamnit. Why is it always that with anything god supposedly does, god always does it in a way such that natural explanations are better explanations than a god? This has been an ongoing thing for centuries now.