Religious Fundamentalism Makes Smart People Pretend To Be Dumb

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Matthew Ryan Brandon

See, this is the problem, and it’s always been a problem. You need it to be slow and steady… and you also need it to be fast and erratic. If you don’t have the former, it’s entirely implausible. If you don’t have the latter, it’s entirely implausible. The former makes the latter impossible, and the latter makes the former impossible.

Time to get a new theory, folks. It’s over.

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James Apperson

Matthew Ryan Brandon

Options:

1. Evolution of species.

2. Simulation theory. But this just moves the problem back, because then the 'real world' still only has the same options.

3. Magic People did a Big Magic.

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Matthew Ryan Brandon

James Apperson No. 

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James Apperson

Matthew Ryan Brandon

Aight'

I'll bite.

What option am I missing?

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Matthew Ryan Brandon

James Apperson 4. The first mover intelligently designed creation.

See, it’s easy to mock when all you want to do is mock instead of have proper discussions.

Whether one wants to believe the first mover guides evolution is perfectly valid as far as I’m concerned. Though I wouldn’t agree with that unless He took a specific hands on approach to the guiding.

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James Apperson

Matthew Ryan Brandon

Option 4 is just Option 3 repackaged.

Granted, maybe your religion's #Marketing prefers not to call it "magic".

But if we're being honest, that's what it is.

At least I was charitable enough to humor the possibility of Magic Person(s) doing a Big Magic.

-Such as speaking the universe into existence, or taking any action at all absent of temporal states.

-aka "Magic".

Perhaps your religion prefers to assume 1 Magic Person instead of multiples.

But that difference is trivial outside of (independent of) religious thought-control systems. And in any case, there is no available data or logical reasoning available to humans that objectively favors monotheism over polytheism.

In fact, polytheism predates monotheism by a very long mile.

In fact, the men who wrote the Torah were all polytheists.

So we may as well keep "Magic People" on the board as an equal or better packaging of Option #4.

Just as importantly, ...

Genesis is *not* about a single Magic Man talking to his own multiple person-alities and deciding to create a universe.

In the oldest version of that fable, multiple Magic People (none of which were Yahweh) were talking about terraforming a floating glob of mud (in the OCEAN we now call "outer space") ... inside of that already-existing universe.

Meanwhile, I was civil in my initial reply.

Those are the options.

At least I was respectful enough to speak to you like a fellow adult instead of walking on eggshells around the possibility that you might be saddled with religious fragility.

Meanwhile, most (almost all) cosmologists think the energies this universe consists of ...

have always existed.

They do not think time, space, or energy began at the onset of Rapid Expansion.

When they talk about "the beginning of the Universe", they just mean "the beginning of classical descriptions of the Universe"; in other words, the beginning of the process that generated the structure of the Universe that we are familiar with.

We do not know that this universe had the same meaning of "beginning" that fundamentalist religions imagine.

We do not know that our universe is "contingent".

We don't know if this is the first, last, or only universe.

We don't know if the A-theory of time is correct. -Which William Lane Craig admits is one of the assumptions required for the Kalam to work.

Without those religious assumptions being validated by science,

...

We have no need to postulate (and no justification to assume or insist) that any Prime Mover(s) were in play. Nor COULD they have been if TIME didn't exist yet; unless we want to allow for that magical nonsense by saying that rationality can-and-should go f* itself. 

Matthew Ryan Brandon

James Apperson Only one thing I’m going to bother responding to here, for my own sanity’s sake.

“Taking any action at all absent of temporal states” - Aside from the mockery, you’ve obviously tried to think about these things. The problem is, this is mistaken. There is nothing “magic” or even illogical about there being a “first action”. As an analogy, think about a stop watch. If you were to start a stop watch, the moment you click that start button is simultaneously a first action, and it is also the first moment on the stop watch. There is nothing “magic” about it, it’s actually quite reasonable. The action itself is not “absent a temporal state”, because the creation event IS the first temporal moment, they are simultaneous events.

If you are going to say the argument is based on God being timeless, well I argue that God is, in fact, in time since the creation of the universe. Timeless sans creation, in time since creation. Since I agree with the philosopher William Lane Craig who says that if one is to have a real relation to the universe (aka creating time, space, and matter), than one would need to be in time, otherwise the relation cannot be real.

There you go.

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James Apperson

Matthew Ryan Brandon

Thoughts are events.

Deciding to make a universe ... is a temporal event.

Experiencing one's God-self as a self without a universe to be "God" over ... is a prior temporal state.

--

--

Meanwhile, ...

"I think. Therefore, I AM".

If a "God" no think, then a "God" no am.

Whereas, if a "God" does think, then a "God" is experiencing the type of events we call "thoughts".

If such an Entity has always been both existing and conscious, then its mind is its own type of universe, and that universe contains an infinite regress of thoughts.

Thoughts, as events, to be logically coherent, happen sequentially; one thought logically giving birth to the next.

Without a logical series of thoughts occurring in a logical sequence, that's just static (at best).

-The mind then collapses, and the "i" ceases to be.

Again, thoughts ... are events.

Such events, meanwhile, cannot lead up to a "first event".

Nor can there be anything at all happening "before time".

Nor can there be an Entity that has "always existed" if there wasn't an "always" to exist within.

 

Meanwhile, if someone says "My God doesn't exist in time, and doesn't occupy any space", then they've just admitted "My God exists nowhere and never".

They've just defined their Magic Daddy right out of existence.

And if they amend that a bit, so that he only USED TO exist nowhere and never, UNTIL the universe began, then that means:

He BEGAN to exist as soon as the universe began to exist. 

It's funny how **words* don't mean **words** whenever (which is always) religious fundamentalists are busy outsmarting themselves. -which is, apparently, pretty easy to do.

Meanwhile, I still think it's cute that WLC's religion offers us "forgiveness" for the inevitable manifestations of the very same defects that his god willfully decided to curse us with in the first place,

...

but only if we make a string of lucky guesses which lead up to exactly the correctest available version of his "one true", psychosocially violent, and proven-harmful fundamentalist religion.

-Made possible by a God with multiple personalities ... having the Daddy Dom personality send his Sub-Son personality to:

* animate a Kosher Meat Puppet,

* pretend it's a mortal person,

* pretend to have it "die",

* as a mock human sacrifice,

* so that the Daddy-personality can justify forgiving us for the failings he sabotaged us with in the first place.

*Just so he'd have horrors to rescue lucky religion-guessers from,

* just so they'd be extra-thankful and "glorify" him for such ...

...

...

heroism.

-A religion predicated on aggressive misrepresentations of an even older, equally debunked, and equally insane religion.

Matthew Ryan Brandon

James Apperson If God is omniscient he need not have temporally successive thoughts 

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James Apperson

Matthew Ryan Brandon

"Knowing everything" means:

All knowledge

is

always contained

within his mental database.

It would also mean he always has immediate and complete access to that data.

It does *not* mean he is always having every possible thought, or always thinking about all facts.

However, let's pretend it means that.

Let's imagine a conscious entity that is always simultaneously thinking about all things.

Nothing in any Bible says this.

In fact, I can easily cite biblical texts that claim otherwise.

But let's consider the possibility.

Notice:

That just makes the problem infinitely worse.

Now we've gone from:

a.) a deity who thinks logically

to

b) a deity whose entire mind that "exists nowhere never" UNTIL the universe began ... is just a loud and perpetually repeating burst of noise.

To avoid that, you'd have to say he simultaneously ponders every detail of every fact ... in logical sequence. But you're trying to avoid admitting "sequence". So you're stuck with incoherent, infinitely repeating noise ... that was happening "nowhere and never" until the Universe began.