MarkusRamikin comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 October 2007 01:59AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 April 2015 09:03:53PM 1 point [-]

Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.

(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)

Comment author: Persol 07 April 2015 11:27:14PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the 'weakest point in Christianity'. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions

The main things that I found had weight is that it's taking the numerous world religions and saying 'this one' without any great reason. When the correct selection may damn you for eternity, it's worthy of considering the alternatives.

  • From an outside view, I see no reason to privilege the supernatural portions of Christianity over other religions. Rhetorically, what do you find as the weak points of every other religion? Don't many of these apply to Christianity?
  • Generic inconsistencies - having read all the Biblical texts (some multiple times), and referencing databases for discussions of the original pre-translated text, the number of straightforward contradictions is outstanding. If we just assume for a second that some of the text was effectively the word of god, you still don't know which parts. And that's disregarding every other religion's text, seemingly without justification.
  • Inconsistencies in practice - some branches of Christianity heavily discount the Bible due to the above.... but this makes the problem WORSE. It just dilutes the 'god content' even further. Arguments of your specific practitioners being 'inspired by god' needs to address all the people who disagree with you but say the same thing.

The specific details about Christ, and your 'flavor' of Christianity, are besides the point in light of the above. Other than popularity, Christianity still has the same problems as Zeus and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

All that said, the best argument for Christianity seems to be as a placeholder belief and social system. For some people it's better just to pick a set of beliefs and go with it (IE: it's a complex/unknowable local minima problem that's 'good enough').

P.S. - I'd be interested in hearing your arguments 'for' God. I've yet to see one that isn't so broad to be effectively meaningless. You might want to just google your argument for God and see if there aren't already identified issues.

Comment author: dxu 07 April 2015 11:49:23PM 5 points [-]

The main things that I found had weight is that it's taking the numerous world religions and saying 'this one' without any great reason.

In fact, it's even worse than that. You're not selecting from the set of all existing religions in the world today, but rather from the set of all possible religions, even those that haven't been invented.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 09 April 2015 06:43:29AM 0 points [-]

Wait, why? If God existed, I'd expect the true religion to be among actually existing ones.

Comment author: Wes_W 09 April 2015 07:18:17AM 2 points [-]

As long as it's a god with a Big Divine Plan in which humans play a role, sure.

If the gods created the universe so they could watch the big shiny hydrogen balls, and don't care about the emergent properties of complex proteins on that one planet in that one galaxy, we wouldn't necessarily know about it.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 09 April 2015 10:19:32AM *  0 points [-]

Well crap.

I guess that when I thought "religion", I thought "system of worship", not "system of belief". To me the a religion would be "true" if it accurately responded to a demand for worship or obedience or such. If the creators of the Universe have no preferences over our actions, then at most you could have a, well, description of them, but not much of a religion thus defined. Discovering such beings would not make me a religious person.

Of course now that I thought of it explicitely, I realize this is a rather narrow definition.

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