I always found the idea of the 'Old Testament God' being vengeful and cruel and the 'New Testament God' being kind and merciful weird. The Old Testament God only killed babies and ordered genocides, while the New Testament God sends most of humanity to eternal torture, which seems much worse.
Yeah. This guy says better rip out your own eye if you are tempted to look at a woman than have your soul forever damned, he is such a wholesome carebear.
Eternal torture is a post-new testament idea, if you read the new testament carefully, reference the Greek, and leave your pre-conceptions at the door, there is no text in the NT that promises eternal hell. There is the lake of fire but there's no indication anyone survives being cast into it. No text anywhere in the NT says hell (which is not a word in the NT, it's either gehenna or the lake of flame) is eternal. Christians invented this later in the religion and now read it back into the NT
That observation also completely forgets about the book of Revelation, which is quite violent! 200 miles of blood, as high a horse's bridle, for one example.
100% of all people before discovering electricity had the wrong belief about how thunders work. It's a terrible argument to base your probability of something being true on how many people believe in it.
Yes I’m sure Robson single-handedly figured out how electricity and thunder work, completely independently of anyone else. He also had a time travel machine which he used to travel to the 18th century, at which time he conducted a simple random sample of beliefs about thunder.
Haha that's not what I meant. I was talking about familiarity with the theoretical, and experimental knowledge.
I have no idea where the time travel machine story came in? Do we agree that they had an erroneous understanding of thunder or do we not? If we agree, no sample is needed, because the correct one didn't exist...
How do we know what the people of the past believed about thunder?
Perhaps we learned it in school; so our knowledge comes from our teacher’s belief.
How do we know the teacher is reliable? She got it from her lesson plan and has no reason to lie. How does the lesson planner know? She got it from a history textbook or google, which are summaries of the beliefs of the majority of historians.
Even if by sheer chance Robson has actually examined primary sources from the mid-19th century when physicists discovered thunder was caused by lightning superheating the air, he would have to still rely on the wisdom of the crowds that there are no sources showing the discovery was made earlier, that the sources are reliable etc.
Basically all our indirect beliefs are based on testimony, which we believe because there is little or no testimony supporting the opposite belief. Even in the rare instances when we believe something counter to the majority, the reasons and arguments we use to support that belief are still based on other testimony we only know is reliable because most people believe it.
These people recorded their own state of mind and then acted in ways that were either in accordance or not. That is the evidence we have about whether they understood the causes of thunder....it doesn't tell us anything about what causes Thunder at all. In other words, what people have believed in the past or now about some thing is not direct evidence of the underlying phenomena.
It's a good argument if you don't take it too far. If 100% of people believed that thunder was from Zeus, I would indeed recommend you place at least 2% credence on it, because you have the capacity to be totally deluded and this is a useful check against it.
To be fair, before electricity was discovered, most people weren't actually sure where thunderbolts came from, so there wasn't a good candidate for that 2%.
I was Christian, and I concluded that my fellow Christians did not truly believe this down in the recesses of their limbic system. You cannot eat McDonald's and play video games thinking this is the fate of most people. I think many of us hoped that it was like a Trump threat that would get walked back a bit on judgement day.
Beliefs in annihilationism (finite time in hell, then oblivion) and universal salvation were hard to square with the text and not that common. But they grew more common as humanity became more digitally connected and the scope of the problem became clearer.
I had a friend who also believed that religious folks do not really believe “deep down”. He said no man would sin given that God watches all we do and might be wrathful and punish us. But he did also say that he believed that religious people believe themselves when they say they believe, if that makes sense. They just didn’t think too much about it. He said everyone lives like they are atheists as far as dealing with reality. Once he explained his views, I never troubled myself with the idea that religious people believe nutty things from thereon. However, religious people *do* appreciate the values taught by religion and the community it provides.
Has you friend never talked to someone who converted religions? I sincerely believed in evangelical Christianity in my teenage years and did my best to adhere to all that entails before I converted to Atheism in my early 20s. Maybe that's not typical but I think many if not most devout people are sincere.
This is common though. Most atheists who were formerly religious were actually quite devout and tried hard to follow all the rules and took them seriously. It's all the many, many people who DON'T convert out who just don't ever think hard about it, nor take it that seriously. It's the ones who do who eventually leave bc it's not a reconcilable set of beliefs to hold.
Bentham's argument is a kind of pyramid scheme. What he proposes is that *if* smart people believe something, and *if* they threaten you sufficiently, then you *should* believe. This creates evolutionary memetic pressure to push this "game theory" of Pascal's wager harder and harder over time. Smart people are convinced by the argument, they make the consequence of disobedience higher, which adds more weight to the "probability," and it snowballs until you have 2,000 years of civilization weighing down on you, forcing you to become a Christian.
This is the same logic that some tribal elder would use among the hunter-gatherers. "If you don't do X, the evil spirits will get you, which we have always believed in since time immemorial." The importance of natural philosophy is that it allows us to escape this trap, the weight of sheer memory, and investigate reality on the basis of what is rather than accumulated rumor and gossip.
The concept of hell doesn't much trouble the Christians you speak to because they don't actually believe in that. That's simple and obvious enough. If they truly believed in it, they would not behave the way they do, so just assume they do not.
This of course raises the question of whether they truly believe in any of the rest of it. It's an interesting question. I think that likely the very question of what it means to "believe" has a different definition, between those who proclaim themselves to be believers versus those who are not. For a non-believer, it's something more like an unavoidable certainty...one that now matter how much you might wish it not to be true, or want to avoid it being true, you can't help accepting is true. For example, I believe in death. I can't NOT believe in death. It'd be great if I could avoid it, but thus far, it's a certainty that is true no matter how much I wish it were not.
For believers, I think their belief is actually something much, much less than that. It's more like something they enjoy thinking about and value and desire to be true, and also something they very badly want other people to believe and they have many incentives to believe, so they do, because it would take more effort not to, and would be more unpleasant all around. They might try to talk up the sacrifices made for their faith, but get real, they're totally minor in exchange for the benefits (belief you and everyone you love will never truly die, that actually you'll live forever in an afterlife, that justice will eventually be done, and bad people punished...those are great emotional benefits and doesn't even get into the material social benefits).
You can't leave out the social aspects here because I think there's a sense in which it is actually more important to the Christian or Muslim that OTHER PEOPLE believe in their religion than they do themselves. These religions took over the world precisely because they're conversion-based. And it might not provide any benefit at all for YOU to believe in hell, but it provides you with quite a lot of benefit if everyone else does. Same goes with covering your neighbor's wife, or loving your neighbors, etc. The primary mechanism by which these religions operate is to provide the maximum benefits to any individual person if the most possible other people believe in it. If everyone around me believes in Christianity, then I don't need to worry about them stealing from me, murdering me, or trying to steal my spouse, and can count on them being merciful and charitable with me. The religion itself therefore has it coded in for adherents to want more than anything for others around them believe it whether or not they do themselves. And if you look at their actual conduct, you see that in fact what others believe seems to always be much more important to them than what they themselves do, and most are not particularly troubled by their regular lapses of faith and violation of rules.
In most cases it is simply more socially and psychologically rewarding to believe, so people will do so until circumstances change sufficient that it is not. Most people put to the point of a sword, or threatened with burning at the stake, will simply renounce their religion and convert. It's a rare few who would not, and they hold them up as saints and martyrs, again because believing that others truly believe it, is the most appealing and important part.
According to the article, eternal hell is _more_ of a reason to follow a religion, not less (the same way a gun to your head is _more_ of a reason to hand over your wallet)
Are you kidding? If there is a God, he clearly created the Jews as an enhanced version of the Job experiment, I.E “Let’s see how long I can kick this guy/people around and have them still keep worshipping me”. If the Holocaust happened to Hindus, people would be a lot less reticent about mocking the idea that the all powerful Brahma definitely cares for and loves these guys.
Yeah, it's worth pointing out that Nietszche was right, that the notion of a forever Hell was not actually part of early Christian life belief. In fact, major players in the early development of Christian belief and practice—Jerome, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, to name a few—were universalists about salvation, and that strand of Christian belief, more common in the East than the West, is still alive today. On all this, I'd put forward the following: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/love-unmasked-nietzsche-on-eternal-hell/
Pascal's wager is absurd from the start. I cannot imagine that anyone can "just decide" to believe in something like God based on even the most convincing rational argument. True, non-believers do become believers, but my sense is that this always occurs due to some sort of internal epiphany triggered by internal or even external events, rather than rational arguments like Pascal's.
Of course, individuals may decide to become religious observants of religion X, Y or Z and very often this is out of hope that they will then prosper. But if there is a God, he is unlikely to be fooled, unless, indeed, He is as great a Fool as I fear He might be, if indeed He does exist.
I am not even convinced by the most convincing rationale for conversion that I am aware of, the one set forth in Boccaccio's Decameron, i:2. This one is way more credible than Pascal's, even in Bentham Bulldog's elaboration.
Pascal's Wager is an interesting thought experiment, but it makes no sense to me as practical advice. But people do take it as practical advice and this has always perplexed me. It has made me question what other people think "belief" is.
Personally I can't just decide to believe something. I can declare I believe. I can lie about it. I can say I believe that when I roll a die that it will come up a six, but there is no way I can convince myself to actually believe it will.
I don't believe that my mere declaration that I believe in God could possibly fool him. This seems obvious to me. Yet some people do seem to take Pascal's Wager seriously. It makes me wonder, do they believe they can fool God, or is belief just somehow easier for them than me ?
> But putting that aside, I would give Christianity maybe a 2% chance of being true, almost exclusively on the grounds that a lot of smart people have believed in it...
I think you have to account for the time period/state of knowledge in the world these smart Christians are operating in. Like, Issac Newton was extremely religious, but grew up in a time and place when 'the Bible is true' was taken for granted and fact of nature. So he spent a lot of time thinking really hard about reality as he saw it -- explaining the motions of comets and planets etc, and also alchemy and trying to predict the date of the apocalypse based on hidden messages in the bible. The fact he was so successful at one and not the others seems like evidence Christianity is less likely to be true, not more.
I would guess if you can control for the religiosity of one's upbringing (which in turn prob are correlated with society getting less religious over time) more intelligence is negatively correlated with beliefs in the literal truth of religion. I think the fact Francis Collins (head of human genome project) was so famous for being religious sort of shows that today society is surprised when really smart, scientific people take religion literally.
Alex O’Connor, aka, @CosmicSkeptic has years of excellent content on YT if you’re interested in atheism, religious texts, animal rights, ethics, metaphysics, consciousness, etc.
His strongest argument against a Judeo-Christian god is the unfathomable level of animal suffering the process of evolution requires, beginning billions of years before humans arrive on the scene.
This sounds more like an argument for annihilationism (a Christian doctrine that, granted, has been a minority position in the church, but finds support from influential Christians ranging from Ignatius to Irenaeus to CS Lewis) rather than an argument against Christianity.
I was surprised not long ago to learn that annihilationism is now considered a permissible position by the Roman Catholic Church. Respected evangelicals have also held to it. Though in both cases, it's a minority position.
Meanwhile degrees of reward and punishment ARE the majority position across traditions and highly obvious from the text, even though this concept often seems to get glossed over and presented as a binary between heaven and hell.
I don't see a reason why a qualified (rather than universal) annihilation couldn't be among the degrees of punishment, though who knows? Dante, of course, while not giving credence to annihilation, placed the virtuous pagans in conditions perhaps not markedly worse than life on earth.
In context that doesn't make sense though. Hanania discusses two reasons to believe: (1) Pascal's wager type expected value and (2) Deferring to the opinion of huge numbers of smart people throughout history.
Factor #1 obviously recommends believing *more* in the hellish version of Christianity than the non-hellish version.
Factor #2 also does probably, I don't have access to survey data but I'd imagine that annihilationism has been a minority position historically. You say so yourself.
It sounds like you are proposing a Factor #3, Wishful Thinking.
Read the works of David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier on Jesus and his historicity. I thinks it’s very unlikely you’ll still have a 2% credence after reading them. Not that they’ll necessarily convince you Jesus never existed, rather, you’ll just learn so much about how utterly primitive and obviously culture-bound and man-made the entire biblical corpus is from reading them that you won’t be able to take seriously “smart people” who argue for the Bible’s legitimacy anymore. I was raised in a very serious, academically-minded fundamentalist Christian home and studied the Bible from an early age all the way up until my de-conversion at about 20. My reading on the Bible during those early years was something like, “wtf is going on? No one teaching me about this makes any sense, every other verse is inscrutable, and there is no way to ‘live by the Bible’ or ‘follow God’s will’ because the whole thing is a vague confused mess.” (At least, that’s how I started to feel once I tried to get serious about really understanding “The Word” and seeking out “God’s will for my life” with my whole heart.) Reading Fitzgerald and Carrier *made the Bible make sense*. It’s a deeply fascinating object of study, and reading about it has opened a window for me onto ancient Mediterranean/Middle-Eastern culture, literature, history, sociology, and psychology. It’s really, really fascinating stuff!
As Bentham’s Bulldog has noted, Richard Carrier is a crank, not even accepted by mainstream scholarship. And, this is me saying this, mainstream scholarship already has an apparent bias against traditional Christian history, as evidenced by the previous skepticism of the historicity of Jesus and David which was eventually overturned. Yet they agree that he’s a crank.
I don’t agree with BB’s assessment of Carrier. That he’s not a mainstream scholar is true. But he’s not un-credentialed or unpublished, and his poor reception amongst mainstream scholars doesn’t mean much to me. Mainstream biblical studies has been heavily influenced by centuries of religious dogma and uncritical methods, and the consensus in the field doesn’t count for much in my book (though certainly not nothing). My reading on this topic hasn’t been very balanced—mostly consisting of Christian apologists, ex-apologists, and mythicist types—but it has been fairly extensive, and I really wouldn’t dismiss Carrier out of hand on BB’s opinion. I’ve been much more impressed by Carrier’s approach and reasonableness than any other writer/researcher covering the topic that I’ve read. Would love recommendations for books on biblical studies or early Christianity if you know good ones.
Mainstream scholarship is super skeptical of traditional religious accounts. It has to a large extent abandoned traditional religious beliefs. It rejects the gospels and Acts as reliable (this includes Nicene necessities like the Resurrection or the idea that Jesus didn’t claim to be God), and it rejects that they were written by their traditional authors. From what I’ve gathered, most of what Bart Ehrman has popularized is what mainstream scholarship accepts. You overestimate how much mainstream scholarship is influenced by religious tradition, because it simply rejects most of it.
To be honest, my impressions come from sophisticated popularizations of the field and interviews with scholars (Though I can list some books below that they popularize). But to be brutally honest, Richard Carrier’s arguments frequently strike me as so bad that I didn’t need to have a super in-depth understanding of biblical studies to respond to them. By far my favorite popularizers on each side of the believer vs. skeptic side have been David Pallmann on the YouTube channel “Faith Because of Reason” (Bentham likes him too even though he doesn’t accept many of his arguments) and Kevin Nontradicath on YouTube. Pallmann has some good videos responding to Carrier, which I’ll list below. The larger YouTube channels Testify and InspiringPhilosophy are pretty good too, though not as good as Pallmann. Testify has a great series where he responds to Ehrman’s arguments.
And to clarify, I think similar criticisms apply to both Carrier and mainstream critical scholarship (watch Testify’s videos on Ehrman to see what I mean. Ehrman apparently makes quite basic errors). But Carrier is even worse.
Kevin Nontradicath has made the most interesting critiques of conservative scholarship that I’ve seen, and he’s one of the few that I’ve seen that gave me a generally good impression. He’s also debated Pallmann. Actually, when some credentialed mainstream scholars at Duke tried to respond to Pallmann’s arguments on YouTube, it did not go over well for them (in fact, I’d call it embarrassing), but Kevin did pretty okay and had some points I hadn’t heard before.
Some books from a conservative perspective:
- The Case for Jesus - Brant Pitre (he had a recent fascinating interview with Alex O’Connor on YouTube I recommend checking out)
This is an interesting article but I think Richard's view of what he think's the most interesting point of Christianity is 'The fact that he sends people to hell for all eternity is the most interesting thing about Christianity', is missing the true essence of what Christianity is.
The main message of Christianity is about Jesus dying on the cross (and then being resurrected) to provide the means for sinners to be reconciled with a completely righteous and morally perfect infinite God. The infinite God Himself set the standard for what is right, good and moral and He measures everything according to that standard. So anything falling short of that standard is sinful and what the bible teaches repeatedly is that every human being who has ever lived since Adam's fall has committed sin.
So since God is infinitely holy and perfect, all sins are ultimately against God. This is the reason that the only just punishment for sin (which is a violation of His infinite holiness) must also be infinite with hell (eternal separation from the presence of God). After all, if God is perfectly just, how could He not send people to hell for breaking His laws? If He just ignored all sin, then He wouldn't be just.
So the sacrifice of Christ maintains God's justice (sin is punished) and at the same time extends God's mercy and grace to who all who believe. Perfect justice and perfect mercy and love all at the same time.
This is the essence of Christianity and how hell fits within that framework. Richard's understanding of how a perfectly holy God views sin is too low.
> So since God is infinitely holy and perfect, all sins are ultimately against God. This is the reason that the only just punishment for sin (which is a violation of His infinite holiness) must also be infinite with hell (eternal separation from the presence of God).
"God is infinitely holy, so he must punish sins with eternal damnation" is simply a non sequitur, isn't it? The only connection between the premise and the conclusion is the word "infinite", and it isn't even being used in the same sense in both places.
> After all, if God is perfectly just, how could He not send people to hell for breaking His laws? If He just ignored all sin, then He wouldn't be just.
Why aren't there other alternatives than either sending people to hell or doing nothing?
> God is infinitely holy, so he must punish sins with eternal damnation" is simply a non sequitur, isn't it? The only connection between the premise and the conclusion is the word "infinite", and it isn't even being used in the same sense in both places.
Perhaps the answer to your question has to do with with what the bible explains of both eternity and what happens after death. There's no second chances for salvation after death. Rejecting God in this life and then dying means someone has rejected God for eternity (eternal damnation). The bible says that once we die, we either enter into eternal life or eternal death. Hebrews 9:27 'And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment'.
So when a holy God judges a person for their sin after death, someone either enters into eternal life (heaven) or eternal death (hell) based on whether or not that person has accepted Christ as the payment for their sins (which is necessary to satisfy a holy God). Luke 16:19-30 talks about these two after-life situations.
> Why aren't there other alternatives than either sending people to hell or doing nothing?
I think my answer above touches on this? The only two eternal states of being after death is either being in the presence of God (heaven) or not in His presence (Hell). The bible does not give any other outcomes.
"There's no second chances for salvation after death."
But if that's the case, it's because God made it that way. If the soul is eternal and conscious, why should it not be allowed to change its mind? God, being omnipotent, has the power to accept the soul's redemption after death, so why does he choose not to?
"The only two eternal states of being after death is either being in the presence of God (heaven) or not in His presence (Hell). The bible does not give any other outcomes."
But why does "not in his presence" have to take place in a lake of fire, or even in existence at all?
> But if that's the case, it's because God made it that way. If the soul is eternal and conscious, why should it not be allowed to change its mind? God, being omnipotent, has the power to accept the soul's redemption after death, so why does he choose not to?
This is an interesting question. To start with, God has clearly and explicitly stated that salvation can only occur in this life. Hebrews 9:27 ‘And just as it appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement’. 2nd Corinthians 6:2 says ‘Behold, now (this life) is the favorable time, now is the day of salvation.’
So why no second chances after death? Because no one goes to hell because they didn’t have enough chances to be saved. God in His mercy, give every person ample and sufficient opportunity to be saved and someone’s heart doesn’t change simply because they die.
In the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 the rich man who goes to hell has no repentance in his heart; he instead just has regret that he’s in eternal torment. When he asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers, Abraham says, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead’ (Luke 16:31.
In other words, the word of the scriptures is already sufficient for salvation for everyone alive and no further revelation or chances will be offered to salvation to those who refuse to hear what’s already been proclaimed through the bible.
> But why does "not in his presence" have to take place in a lake of fire, or even in existence at all?
The short answer is because is because hell is God’s eternal infinite justice poured out on those who reject Him and die as unrepentant sinners. Romans 6:23 ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’. Matthew 25:46 ‘And these (the unsaved) will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life’.
So why is God punishing people then? Why can’t He just do something else? Because God’s mercy, love and justice requires that he punishes those who have sinned against Him. How could God be loving, holy or just if he simply ignored and allowed all sinful actions to occur without punishment or judgement of any sort?
To use an extreme example, should Stalin and Hitler have no eternal consequences or judgment for the actions they took during their lives?
1. God reveals over and over again through the bible that one of the elements of His character is that He is perfectly good. 1 John 1:5 says 'God is light, in him there is no darkness at all'. So since He is good and cannot be unjust or evil, then if He's determined that there only being two eternal outcomes after death (in His presence or separated from His presence) this is both right and just. Psalm 18:30 says 'This God - His way is perfect....'
2. God has not kept what happens after death a secret or hidden. Anyone can pick up a bible and read for themselves what God has revealed will happen after death. God desires this knowledge to be known and believed which is why He shared it. 2 Peter 3:9 'The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance."
There doesn’t seem to be an argument here apart from “trust the Bible”. Sure, if we take everything in the Bible as axiomatically true, then we could have skipped the whole debate. But it’s going to be terribly unconvincing to anybody who doesn’t think that.
Richard’s essay was in regards to hell and christianity. The primary source on those topics is the bible. There’s no other way to find the answers to the questions you are asking about God, hell, whether there’s second chances in the afterlife etc without consulting the bible.
Whether or not someone chooses to believe what God says in the Bible is a matter of faith. I simply tried to share with you what Bible teaches on these topics.
I always found the idea of the 'Old Testament God' being vengeful and cruel and the 'New Testament God' being kind and merciful weird. The Old Testament God only killed babies and ordered genocides, while the New Testament God sends most of humanity to eternal torture, which seems much worse.
Yeah. This guy says better rip out your own eye if you are tempted to look at a woman than have your soul forever damned, he is such a wholesome carebear.
Eternal torture is a post-new testament idea, if you read the new testament carefully, reference the Greek, and leave your pre-conceptions at the door, there is no text in the NT that promises eternal hell. There is the lake of fire but there's no indication anyone survives being cast into it. No text anywhere in the NT says hell (which is not a word in the NT, it's either gehenna or the lake of flame) is eternal. Christians invented this later in the religion and now read it back into the NT
Well Pascal’s wager apparently implies you should believe it anyway
Christianity was supposed to be end of the story.
That observation also completely forgets about the book of Revelation, which is quite violent! 200 miles of blood, as high a horse's bridle, for one example.
This is clever, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard it earlier.
100% of all people before discovering electricity had the wrong belief about how thunders work. It's a terrible argument to base your probability of something being true on how many people believe in it.
You only believe people used to have the wrong idea about thunder because that’s what lots of people believe.
No, I'm pretty sure some people are familiar with physics and its history.
Yes I’m sure Robson single-handedly figured out how electricity and thunder work, completely independently of anyone else. He also had a time travel machine which he used to travel to the 18th century, at which time he conducted a simple random sample of beliefs about thunder.
Haha that's not what I meant. I was talking about familiarity with the theoretical, and experimental knowledge.
I have no idea where the time travel machine story came in? Do we agree that they had an erroneous understanding of thunder or do we not? If we agree, no sample is needed, because the correct one didn't exist...
How do we know what the people of the past believed about thunder?
Perhaps we learned it in school; so our knowledge comes from our teacher’s belief.
How do we know the teacher is reliable? She got it from her lesson plan and has no reason to lie. How does the lesson planner know? She got it from a history textbook or google, which are summaries of the beliefs of the majority of historians.
Even if by sheer chance Robson has actually examined primary sources from the mid-19th century when physicists discovered thunder was caused by lightning superheating the air, he would have to still rely on the wisdom of the crowds that there are no sources showing the discovery was made earlier, that the sources are reliable etc.
Basically all our indirect beliefs are based on testimony, which we believe because there is little or no testimony supporting the opposite belief. Even in the rare instances when we believe something counter to the majority, the reasons and arguments we use to support that belief are still based on other testimony we only know is reliable because most people believe it.
These people recorded their own state of mind and then acted in ways that were either in accordance or not. That is the evidence we have about whether they understood the causes of thunder....it doesn't tell us anything about what causes Thunder at all. In other words, what people have believed in the past or now about some thing is not direct evidence of the underlying phenomena.
It's a good argument if you don't take it too far. If 100% of people believed that thunder was from Zeus, I would indeed recommend you place at least 2% credence on it, because you have the capacity to be totally deluded and this is a useful check against it.
To be fair, before electricity was discovered, most people weren't actually sure where thunderbolts came from, so there wasn't a good candidate for that 2%.
I was Christian, and I concluded that my fellow Christians did not truly believe this down in the recesses of their limbic system. You cannot eat McDonald's and play video games thinking this is the fate of most people. I think many of us hoped that it was like a Trump threat that would get walked back a bit on judgement day.
Beliefs in annihilationism (finite time in hell, then oblivion) and universal salvation were hard to square with the text and not that common. But they grew more common as humanity became more digitally connected and the scope of the problem became clearer.
2% is surprisingly high.
I had a friend who also believed that religious folks do not really believe “deep down”. He said no man would sin given that God watches all we do and might be wrathful and punish us. But he did also say that he believed that religious people believe themselves when they say they believe, if that makes sense. They just didn’t think too much about it. He said everyone lives like they are atheists as far as dealing with reality. Once he explained his views, I never troubled myself with the idea that religious people believe nutty things from thereon. However, religious people *do* appreciate the values taught by religion and the community it provides.
Has you friend never talked to someone who converted religions? I sincerely believed in evangelical Christianity in my teenage years and did my best to adhere to all that entails before I converted to Atheism in my early 20s. Maybe that's not typical but I think many if not most devout people are sincere.
This is common though. Most atheists who were formerly religious were actually quite devout and tried hard to follow all the rules and took them seriously. It's all the many, many people who DON'T convert out who just don't ever think hard about it, nor take it that seriously. It's the ones who do who eventually leave bc it's not a reconcilable set of beliefs to hold.
The reply seems to generalize what I said to all belief, rather than just the specifics of hell doctrine.
Bentham's argument is a kind of pyramid scheme. What he proposes is that *if* smart people believe something, and *if* they threaten you sufficiently, then you *should* believe. This creates evolutionary memetic pressure to push this "game theory" of Pascal's wager harder and harder over time. Smart people are convinced by the argument, they make the consequence of disobedience higher, which adds more weight to the "probability," and it snowballs until you have 2,000 years of civilization weighing down on you, forcing you to become a Christian.
This is the same logic that some tribal elder would use among the hunter-gatherers. "If you don't do X, the evil spirits will get you, which we have always believed in since time immemorial." The importance of natural philosophy is that it allows us to escape this trap, the weight of sheer memory, and investigate reality on the basis of what is rather than accumulated rumor and gossip.
The concept of hell doesn't much trouble the Christians you speak to because they don't actually believe in that. That's simple and obvious enough. If they truly believed in it, they would not behave the way they do, so just assume they do not.
This of course raises the question of whether they truly believe in any of the rest of it. It's an interesting question. I think that likely the very question of what it means to "believe" has a different definition, between those who proclaim themselves to be believers versus those who are not. For a non-believer, it's something more like an unavoidable certainty...one that now matter how much you might wish it not to be true, or want to avoid it being true, you can't help accepting is true. For example, I believe in death. I can't NOT believe in death. It'd be great if I could avoid it, but thus far, it's a certainty that is true no matter how much I wish it were not.
For believers, I think their belief is actually something much, much less than that. It's more like something they enjoy thinking about and value and desire to be true, and also something they very badly want other people to believe and they have many incentives to believe, so they do, because it would take more effort not to, and would be more unpleasant all around. They might try to talk up the sacrifices made for their faith, but get real, they're totally minor in exchange for the benefits (belief you and everyone you love will never truly die, that actually you'll live forever in an afterlife, that justice will eventually be done, and bad people punished...those are great emotional benefits and doesn't even get into the material social benefits).
You can't leave out the social aspects here because I think there's a sense in which it is actually more important to the Christian or Muslim that OTHER PEOPLE believe in their religion than they do themselves. These religions took over the world precisely because they're conversion-based. And it might not provide any benefit at all for YOU to believe in hell, but it provides you with quite a lot of benefit if everyone else does. Same goes with covering your neighbor's wife, or loving your neighbors, etc. The primary mechanism by which these religions operate is to provide the maximum benefits to any individual person if the most possible other people believe in it. If everyone around me believes in Christianity, then I don't need to worry about them stealing from me, murdering me, or trying to steal my spouse, and can count on them being merciful and charitable with me. The religion itself therefore has it coded in for adherents to want more than anything for others around them believe it whether or not they do themselves. And if you look at their actual conduct, you see that in fact what others believe seems to always be much more important to them than what they themselves do, and most are not particularly troubled by their regular lapses of faith and violation of rules.
In most cases it is simply more socially and psychologically rewarding to believe, so people will do so until circumstances change sufficient that it is not. Most people put to the point of a sword, or threatened with burning at the stake, will simply renounce their religion and convert. It's a rare few who would not, and they hold them up as saints and martyrs, again because believing that others truly believe it, is the most appealing and important part.
Clearly Judaism is the best bet -- they are some of the smartest people who ever lived and don't even believe in eternal hell.
According to the article, eternal hell is _more_ of a reason to follow a religion, not less (the same way a gun to your head is _more_ of a reason to hand over your wallet)
Are you kidding? If there is a God, he clearly created the Jews as an enhanced version of the Job experiment, I.E “Let’s see how long I can kick this guy/people around and have them still keep worshipping me”. If the Holocaust happened to Hindus, people would be a lot less reticent about mocking the idea that the all powerful Brahma definitely cares for and loves these guys.
Yeah, it's worth pointing out that Nietszche was right, that the notion of a forever Hell was not actually part of early Christian life belief. In fact, major players in the early development of Christian belief and practice—Jerome, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, to name a few—were universalists about salvation, and that strand of Christian belief, more common in the East than the West, is still alive today. On all this, I'd put forward the following: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/love-unmasked-nietzsche-on-eternal-hell/
Pascal's wager is absurd from the start. I cannot imagine that anyone can "just decide" to believe in something like God based on even the most convincing rational argument. True, non-believers do become believers, but my sense is that this always occurs due to some sort of internal epiphany triggered by internal or even external events, rather than rational arguments like Pascal's.
Of course, individuals may decide to become religious observants of religion X, Y or Z and very often this is out of hope that they will then prosper. But if there is a God, he is unlikely to be fooled, unless, indeed, He is as great a Fool as I fear He might be, if indeed He does exist.
I am not even convinced by the most convincing rationale for conversion that I am aware of, the one set forth in Boccaccio's Decameron, i:2. This one is way more credible than Pascal's, even in Bentham Bulldog's elaboration.
Yes.
Pascal's Wager is an interesting thought experiment, but it makes no sense to me as practical advice. But people do take it as practical advice and this has always perplexed me. It has made me question what other people think "belief" is.
Personally I can't just decide to believe something. I can declare I believe. I can lie about it. I can say I believe that when I roll a die that it will come up a six, but there is no way I can convince myself to actually believe it will.
I don't believe that my mere declaration that I believe in God could possibly fool him. This seems obvious to me. Yet some people do seem to take Pascal's Wager seriously. It makes me wonder, do they believe they can fool God, or is belief just somehow easier for them than me ?
No one takes this wager seriously except for Christians who are hopeful it will be an argument that works on non-believers.
Nobody tell him about Roko's Basilisk... which if we're talking about belief-extortion, may take the cake. An all-timer of nerd-sniping.
> But putting that aside, I would give Christianity maybe a 2% chance of being true, almost exclusively on the grounds that a lot of smart people have believed in it...
I think you have to account for the time period/state of knowledge in the world these smart Christians are operating in. Like, Issac Newton was extremely religious, but grew up in a time and place when 'the Bible is true' was taken for granted and fact of nature. So he spent a lot of time thinking really hard about reality as he saw it -- explaining the motions of comets and planets etc, and also alchemy and trying to predict the date of the apocalypse based on hidden messages in the bible. The fact he was so successful at one and not the others seems like evidence Christianity is less likely to be true, not more.
I would guess if you can control for the religiosity of one's upbringing (which in turn prob are correlated with society getting less religious over time) more intelligence is negatively correlated with beliefs in the literal truth of religion. I think the fact Francis Collins (head of human genome project) was so famous for being religious sort of shows that today society is surprised when really smart, scientific people take religion literally.
Alex O’Connor, aka, @CosmicSkeptic has years of excellent content on YT if you’re interested in atheism, religious texts, animal rights, ethics, metaphysics, consciousness, etc.
His strongest argument against a Judeo-Christian god is the unfathomable level of animal suffering the process of evolution requires, beginning billions of years before humans arrive on the scene.
That would require you to care about animal suffering, which most people don’t unless it’s the family pet.
Are we to think that God, a perfect being, doesn’t care about animal suffering? What about his eye being on the sparrow?
His eye is watching the suffering and death of the sparrow with amusement clearly
100% malevolence, 80% effectiveness.
During five decades of reading on this and related topics and I've never heard this profound argument. Thanks for sharing. Will find his YT
This sounds more like an argument for annihilationism (a Christian doctrine that, granted, has been a minority position in the church, but finds support from influential Christians ranging from Ignatius to Irenaeus to CS Lewis) rather than an argument against Christianity.
I was surprised not long ago to learn that annihilationism is now considered a permissible position by the Roman Catholic Church. Respected evangelicals have also held to it. Though in both cases, it's a minority position.
Meanwhile degrees of reward and punishment ARE the majority position across traditions and highly obvious from the text, even though this concept often seems to get glossed over and presented as a binary between heaven and hell.
I don't see a reason why a qualified (rather than universal) annihilation couldn't be among the degrees of punishment, though who knows? Dante, of course, while not giving credence to annihilation, placed the virtuous pagans in conditions perhaps not markedly worse than life on earth.
In context that doesn't make sense though. Hanania discusses two reasons to believe: (1) Pascal's wager type expected value and (2) Deferring to the opinion of huge numbers of smart people throughout history.
Factor #1 obviously recommends believing *more* in the hellish version of Christianity than the non-hellish version.
Factor #2 also does probably, I don't have access to survey data but I'd imagine that annihilationism has been a minority position historically. You say so yourself.
It sounds like you are proposing a Factor #3, Wishful Thinking.
I feel like you grifted from a comment I made to Lance Bush earlier this month for the idea for this article! Check it out: https://substack.com/@reader000001/note/c-152444399?r=1lxm2l&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action Expect to hear from my lawyer! (I’m joking, but if you actually did happen to see my exchange with Lance and were inspired to write this article by it I’d be flattered.)
Read the works of David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier on Jesus and his historicity. I thinks it’s very unlikely you’ll still have a 2% credence after reading them. Not that they’ll necessarily convince you Jesus never existed, rather, you’ll just learn so much about how utterly primitive and obviously culture-bound and man-made the entire biblical corpus is from reading them that you won’t be able to take seriously “smart people” who argue for the Bible’s legitimacy anymore. I was raised in a very serious, academically-minded fundamentalist Christian home and studied the Bible from an early age all the way up until my de-conversion at about 20. My reading on the Bible during those early years was something like, “wtf is going on? No one teaching me about this makes any sense, every other verse is inscrutable, and there is no way to ‘live by the Bible’ or ‘follow God’s will’ because the whole thing is a vague confused mess.” (At least, that’s how I started to feel once I tried to get serious about really understanding “The Word” and seeking out “God’s will for my life” with my whole heart.) Reading Fitzgerald and Carrier *made the Bible make sense*. It’s a deeply fascinating object of study, and reading about it has opened a window for me onto ancient Mediterranean/Middle-Eastern culture, literature, history, sociology, and psychology. It’s really, really fascinating stuff!
As Bentham’s Bulldog has noted, Richard Carrier is a crank, not even accepted by mainstream scholarship. And, this is me saying this, mainstream scholarship already has an apparent bias against traditional Christian history, as evidenced by the previous skepticism of the historicity of Jesus and David which was eventually overturned. Yet they agree that he’s a crank.
I don’t agree with BB’s assessment of Carrier. That he’s not a mainstream scholar is true. But he’s not un-credentialed or unpublished, and his poor reception amongst mainstream scholars doesn’t mean much to me. Mainstream biblical studies has been heavily influenced by centuries of religious dogma and uncritical methods, and the consensus in the field doesn’t count for much in my book (though certainly not nothing). My reading on this topic hasn’t been very balanced—mostly consisting of Christian apologists, ex-apologists, and mythicist types—but it has been fairly extensive, and I really wouldn’t dismiss Carrier out of hand on BB’s opinion. I’ve been much more impressed by Carrier’s approach and reasonableness than any other writer/researcher covering the topic that I’ve read. Would love recommendations for books on biblical studies or early Christianity if you know good ones.
Mainstream scholarship is super skeptical of traditional religious accounts. It has to a large extent abandoned traditional religious beliefs. It rejects the gospels and Acts as reliable (this includes Nicene necessities like the Resurrection or the idea that Jesus didn’t claim to be God), and it rejects that they were written by their traditional authors. From what I’ve gathered, most of what Bart Ehrman has popularized is what mainstream scholarship accepts. You overestimate how much mainstream scholarship is influenced by religious tradition, because it simply rejects most of it.
To be honest, my impressions come from sophisticated popularizations of the field and interviews with scholars (Though I can list some books below that they popularize). But to be brutally honest, Richard Carrier’s arguments frequently strike me as so bad that I didn’t need to have a super in-depth understanding of biblical studies to respond to them. By far my favorite popularizers on each side of the believer vs. skeptic side have been David Pallmann on the YouTube channel “Faith Because of Reason” (Bentham likes him too even though he doesn’t accept many of his arguments) and Kevin Nontradicath on YouTube. Pallmann has some good videos responding to Carrier, which I’ll list below. The larger YouTube channels Testify and InspiringPhilosophy are pretty good too, though not as good as Pallmann. Testify has a great series where he responds to Ehrman’s arguments.
And to clarify, I think similar criticisms apply to both Carrier and mainstream critical scholarship (watch Testify’s videos on Ehrman to see what I mean. Ehrman apparently makes quite basic errors). But Carrier is even worse.
Kevin Nontradicath has made the most interesting critiques of conservative scholarship that I’ve seen, and he’s one of the few that I’ve seen that gave me a generally good impression. He’s also debated Pallmann. Actually, when some credentialed mainstream scholars at Duke tried to respond to Pallmann’s arguments on YouTube, it did not go over well for them (in fact, I’d call it embarrassing), but Kevin did pretty okay and had some points I hadn’t heard before.
Some books from a conservative perspective:
- The Case for Jesus - Brant Pitre (he had a recent fascinating interview with Alex O’Connor on YouTube I recommend checking out)
- Craig Blomberg (Various “Reliability” works)
- Richard Bauckam - Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
YouTube:
David Pallmann: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzjQv4A03oilJH9AS9obx-HJTFTZ0z2jz&si=tF-7gvZRyz-j-zgD
Testify: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbVf0T8-zFVhreHdGX0VAIYnVk1EkQxQI&si=b9_kgm06W6gla6Pz
(Yes, I agree that Testify’s approach is too provocative but his arguments seem mostly solid)
Christianity always has been, and forever will be, based on extortion and bribes.
Believe this nonsense, and you’re eternally in bliss. Don’t believe this nonsense, and you’re eternally damned.
Such bollocks.
When you’re dead, you’re dead. I’m good with it. Not gonna spend my days sucking up to tooth fairies.
This is an interesting article but I think Richard's view of what he think's the most interesting point of Christianity is 'The fact that he sends people to hell for all eternity is the most interesting thing about Christianity', is missing the true essence of what Christianity is.
The main message of Christianity is about Jesus dying on the cross (and then being resurrected) to provide the means for sinners to be reconciled with a completely righteous and morally perfect infinite God. The infinite God Himself set the standard for what is right, good and moral and He measures everything according to that standard. So anything falling short of that standard is sinful and what the bible teaches repeatedly is that every human being who has ever lived since Adam's fall has committed sin.
So since God is infinitely holy and perfect, all sins are ultimately against God. This is the reason that the only just punishment for sin (which is a violation of His infinite holiness) must also be infinite with hell (eternal separation from the presence of God). After all, if God is perfectly just, how could He not send people to hell for breaking His laws? If He just ignored all sin, then He wouldn't be just.
So the sacrifice of Christ maintains God's justice (sin is punished) and at the same time extends God's mercy and grace to who all who believe. Perfect justice and perfect mercy and love all at the same time.
This is the essence of Christianity and how hell fits within that framework. Richard's understanding of how a perfectly holy God views sin is too low.
> So since God is infinitely holy and perfect, all sins are ultimately against God. This is the reason that the only just punishment for sin (which is a violation of His infinite holiness) must also be infinite with hell (eternal separation from the presence of God).
"God is infinitely holy, so he must punish sins with eternal damnation" is simply a non sequitur, isn't it? The only connection between the premise and the conclusion is the word "infinite", and it isn't even being used in the same sense in both places.
> After all, if God is perfectly just, how could He not send people to hell for breaking His laws? If He just ignored all sin, then He wouldn't be just.
Why aren't there other alternatives than either sending people to hell or doing nothing?
> God is infinitely holy, so he must punish sins with eternal damnation" is simply a non sequitur, isn't it? The only connection between the premise and the conclusion is the word "infinite", and it isn't even being used in the same sense in both places.
Perhaps the answer to your question has to do with with what the bible explains of both eternity and what happens after death. There's no second chances for salvation after death. Rejecting God in this life and then dying means someone has rejected God for eternity (eternal damnation). The bible says that once we die, we either enter into eternal life or eternal death. Hebrews 9:27 'And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment'.
So when a holy God judges a person for their sin after death, someone either enters into eternal life (heaven) or eternal death (hell) based on whether or not that person has accepted Christ as the payment for their sins (which is necessary to satisfy a holy God). Luke 16:19-30 talks about these two after-life situations.
> Why aren't there other alternatives than either sending people to hell or doing nothing?
I think my answer above touches on this? The only two eternal states of being after death is either being in the presence of God (heaven) or not in His presence (Hell). The bible does not give any other outcomes.
"There's no second chances for salvation after death."
But if that's the case, it's because God made it that way. If the soul is eternal and conscious, why should it not be allowed to change its mind? God, being omnipotent, has the power to accept the soul's redemption after death, so why does he choose not to?
"The only two eternal states of being after death is either being in the presence of God (heaven) or not in His presence (Hell). The bible does not give any other outcomes."
But why does "not in his presence" have to take place in a lake of fire, or even in existence at all?
> But if that's the case, it's because God made it that way. If the soul is eternal and conscious, why should it not be allowed to change its mind? God, being omnipotent, has the power to accept the soul's redemption after death, so why does he choose not to?
This is an interesting question. To start with, God has clearly and explicitly stated that salvation can only occur in this life. Hebrews 9:27 ‘And just as it appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement’. 2nd Corinthians 6:2 says ‘Behold, now (this life) is the favorable time, now is the day of salvation.’
So why no second chances after death? Because no one goes to hell because they didn’t have enough chances to be saved. God in His mercy, give every person ample and sufficient opportunity to be saved and someone’s heart doesn’t change simply because they die.
In the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 the rich man who goes to hell has no repentance in his heart; he instead just has regret that he’s in eternal torment. When he asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers, Abraham says, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead’ (Luke 16:31.
In other words, the word of the scriptures is already sufficient for salvation for everyone alive and no further revelation or chances will be offered to salvation to those who refuse to hear what’s already been proclaimed through the bible.
> But why does "not in his presence" have to take place in a lake of fire, or even in existence at all?
The short answer is because is because hell is God’s eternal infinite justice poured out on those who reject Him and die as unrepentant sinners. Romans 6:23 ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’. Matthew 25:46 ‘And these (the unsaved) will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life’.
So why is God punishing people then? Why can’t He just do something else? Because God’s mercy, love and justice requires that he punishes those who have sinned against Him. How could God be loving, holy or just if he simply ignored and allowed all sinful actions to occur without punishment or judgement of any sort?
To use an extreme example, should Stalin and Hitler have no eternal consequences or judgment for the actions they took during their lives?
Right, that’s what the Bible says, but why is it not very unjust and evil of God to set things up that way?
A few things come to mind on this.
1. God reveals over and over again through the bible that one of the elements of His character is that He is perfectly good. 1 John 1:5 says 'God is light, in him there is no darkness at all'. So since He is good and cannot be unjust or evil, then if He's determined that there only being two eternal outcomes after death (in His presence or separated from His presence) this is both right and just. Psalm 18:30 says 'This God - His way is perfect....'
2. God has not kept what happens after death a secret or hidden. Anyone can pick up a bible and read for themselves what God has revealed will happen after death. God desires this knowledge to be known and believed which is why He shared it. 2 Peter 3:9 'The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance."
There doesn’t seem to be an argument here apart from “trust the Bible”. Sure, if we take everything in the Bible as axiomatically true, then we could have skipped the whole debate. But it’s going to be terribly unconvincing to anybody who doesn’t think that.
Richard’s essay was in regards to hell and christianity. The primary source on those topics is the bible. There’s no other way to find the answers to the questions you are asking about God, hell, whether there’s second chances in the afterlife etc without consulting the bible.
Whether or not someone chooses to believe what God says in the Bible is a matter of faith. I simply tried to share with you what Bible teaches on these topics.
There's this book that argues against a Christian theology of eternal torture:
https://www.amazon.com/That-All-Shall-Saved-Universal/dp/1665206012
That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart
All Dogs go to Heaven.