... no matter which way you go.
Earlier this week, I was listening to an excellent Jordan Peterson podcast, this one with Douglas Murray, who I really admire. Douglas is a gay atheist who has written several excellent books on Europe, immigration and the attack on Western civilization. The topic of the conversation was the link between religion, particularly Christianity, and the West.
Douglas is a huge fan of the West, but he can't bring himself to believe. As they talked about how Christianity is the foundation of our culture, He said he believes all that and can accept 99% of the Catholic or Orthodox faith, but he can't make that last leap dealing with the existence of God and the resurrection of Christ.
As I listened to them talk, I thought, "Why not?" After all, any worldview requires some faith. Materialists believe that soulless forces of nature created the Universe. They don't know it, they believe it. They have faith that it happened.
Any moral point of view requires faith at its foundation. The idea that morality is evolutionary is clearly nonsense. Had the Nazis made a few different decisions during the war, they would have won and then evolution would tell you that gassing all the Jews was a moral good.
Meaning in your life requires faith. It comes from somewhere and you have to rationalize your decisions about what is and isn't important to you with something other than empiricism.
So why all the consternation about God and Jesus? What's the difference between one faith and another? When you come right down to it, it's just a selection between hypotheses that cannot be proven.
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| Me, I'm going with GK Chesterton. His side always seems to be having so much more fun. |
==="... but he can't make that last leap dealing with the existence of God and the resurrection of Christ.
ReplyDeleteAs I listened to them talk, I thought, "Why not?" After all, any worldview requires some faith. Materialists believe that soulless forces of nature created the Universe. They don't know it, they believe it. They have faith that it happened."===
Moreover, reason itself, logically applied to what we know to be true of the world and especially of ourselves, without reference to any religious belief/statement shows us that atheism cannot be the truth about the nature of reality. That is, reason itself shows us that the fundamental common claims of Judaism and Christianity are true.
And once you have finally admitted that God IS, it really doesn't take much "faith" (as most people, especially God-deniers, mis-use that term) acknowledge that the God who creates/causes-to-live embodied rational beings might enter his own Creation as an embodied rational being, and might be murdered, and truly be physically dead ... and yet Live.
==So why all the consternation about God and Jesus?==
ReplyDeleteThat's easy: God makes moral claims on us ... and will judge us against those claims.
==What's the difference between one faith and another? When you come right down to it, it's just a selection between hypotheses that cannot be proven.==
Not at all; nonsense, even.
Firstly, the difference between one faith and another is that not all faiths are true; and one ought to desire to believe things which are true and which one knows to be true.
Secondly, IT IS NOT TRUE that the choice is "between hypotheses that cannot be proven". There are exactly two, mutually exclusive, fundamental hypotheses about the nature of reality:
1) "Life, the Universe, and Everything" just happened ... without cause;
2) "Life, the Universe, and Everything" was intentionally caused.
And reason shows us that 1), the atheistic metaphysic, generates untold absurdities, and thus we know that it is itself absurd, which is to say, that it is false.
"Had the Nazis made a few different decisions during the war, they would have won"
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's true. The Nazis didn't lose because they made a "few bad decisions". They lost because they declared everyone else their enemy. They lost because they demonstrated that the rest of us could not live on the same planet with them. They might have been able to make some different decisions that could have stretched out the war, but eventually the fact that they made everyone else on the planet hate them was going to lead to their demise.
There were things the Nazis could have done to win, but they all would have involved substantially changing the way that they dealt with other people. At which point, they wouldn't have been Nazis anymore.
Tim, I wonder what might have happened if the ME-109 had drop tanks in 1940 or if they hadn't switched to bombing cities and instead kept trying to knock out the RAF. I've read a couple of reputable sources say that the RAF was on the verge of pulling out of SE England.
ReplyDeleteA neutralized Britain changes a great deal.
In any case, today, a triumphant China would teach us similar moral lessons if we used evolution as our guide.
KT, I think you are missing my point.
ReplyDeleteThe best the Nazis could have hoped for was to force the British into "neutrality", because they were never going to be able to invade and there was no way in hell that the British were going to be their allies at that point. At best, the British might have stopped fighting, while busily building up their military and recruiting allies anywhere they could.
Meanwhile, the Nazis would have invaded the USSR, because that's what Nazis did - invade everyone that they shared a border with. The whole concept of "allies" seemed to be foreign to them, Italy and Japan weren't so much "allies" as "countries that we will attack last, after everyone else is gone". And the USSR would have still been a long and bloody battle because, as terrible as Stalin and the Communists were, the Nazis managed to convince everyone in the USSR that being ruled by Nazis would be even worse. The difference between being enslaved, and exterminated.
They could only keep this up so long. Either during the war with the USSR, or shortly after, the British would have a new set of allies and they'd have another go, almost certainly with the US on board this time. That's how the British fought Napoleon, after all - keep putting together better alliances until they got one that was good enough. And the longer the Nazis fought everyone, and the more that every other country saw what happened to Nazi-controlled territories, the more determined everyone would be to fight them off. If the Nazis had made a few different military decisions, WWII could have stretched out, maybe even to a decade or more, but eventually it was all going to come crashing down, because the Nazis were fundamentally incapable of getting along with anyone else. The only decision they could have made that could have made it possible for them to win, was to decide not to act like Nazis anymore.
No worries, Tim. This is the kind of conversation I see over at Quora all the time and I find them to be a lot of fun. "Would the Nazis have been able to defeat the Russians if Guderian had eaten more vegetables?"
ReplyDelete:-)
As for the Soviets, it's hard to say what might have happened had the Germans taken Moscow in the first year. If the British had been knocked out of the war, German doesn't take the same pounding from the air either.