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Desrtopa comments on Recent de-convert saturated by religious community; advice? - Less Wrong Discussion

30 Post author: jwhendy 04 April 2011 03:25AM

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Comment author: beriukay 04 April 2011 02:39:11PM 3 points [-]

For my own part, I'd say that I need to do more work brainstorming through possible conversation paths, and especially identifying why this all bothers me so much.

You might find that the sense of bother never quite goes away. In my experience, there are some (bad) arguments which will always feel right, and some great arguments which will always feel wrong. There are many ex-theists, for example, who still fear hell, even though they know it doesn't exist.

I admit that I still don't find some of the counters to the Teleological Argument to be very satisfying. I suspect that this is a leftover from my theist days, and I'm really not sure how to get rid of that nibbling uncertainty. I'm not even sure if I want to, because I can use it to try to understand people like my old self. Yeah, the question "If god is so omnipotent, can he make a rock so big that even he can't lift it" points to an obvious absurdity, but I remember hearing it and thinking that the questioner was just trying to be cute and clever, and laughing at the question. It never bothered me after that, and it never contributed to my deconversion. So why should "If everything has a cause, then what caused god?" bother a theist?

One possible trick to help build your confidence is to notice when you do things that are known to be wrong. Make a game out of catching yourself when you engage in the most dualistic or irrational of behaviors (like seeing faces in wood, or thinking you have control over the upcoming dice roll, or even being scared of ridiculously improbable things because of watching a horror movie in the dark the other day). If you haven't taken the time, study the cognitive biases that make you susceptible to wrongness, and try to catch your biggest offenders.

This worked to help me gain an understanding for why I was uncomfortable with losing my religion, and got me out of the corner, so to speak.

Comment author: Desrtopa 04 April 2011 04:46:48PM 5 points [-]

So why should "If everything has a cause, then what caused god?" bother a theist?

My preferred take is "why should we suppose that anything that's exceptional in its not-needing-a-causeness resembles an anthropocentric conception of God?" Provided that the universe began a finite time ago, there was some event that wasn't caused by earlier events, but that's in no way an argument for theism as we generally understand it.

Comment author: jwhendy 04 April 2011 09:04:47PM 0 points [-]

I generally agree and have landed at "if there's something outside our known universe, then we can't know anything about it." There may be objections to this, but if all we have to go on is our observations of causality, physical laws, time, etc... it seems difficult to project assertions on what might very well lay outside of those observationally-derived rules.

In any case, the theist doesn't start with what we observe, the argument always starts with defining god as a necessary being that by definition (redundant) doesn't require a cause. Thus the answer to "what was the first cause?" handily has an answer waiting for it... by definition.