I didn't even go to Catholic school, but in the process of Confirmation I learned enough apologetics to deflect or reject or just willfully not understand most of these.
A Good Catholic will tell you that the universe could not exist without God, and/or that nothing good can exist without God, so if there were no God, there would either be no universe, or the universe would be hell.
It would sort of be like me trying to convince you quantum physics is wrong and starting out by saying, "Imagine a world without quantum physics." You have nothing with which to substitute quantum physics. Your mind returns a divide by zero error.
Additionally, religious folks in general tend to claim to believe that morality comes from God. And when they say this, they really truly mean that if there were no God, there would be no morality. That the fact that morality exists is a kind of proof that God exists. I am not making this up. I have been told by a religious person that, if they were to learn that God did not exist, they would immediately embark upon an orgy of murder and theft, because, "There would be no reason not to." They believe this about themselves despite the fact that we know it to be a misunderstanding of psychology. I am not saying all religious people have exactly this glitch, but I am trying to emphasize that your friend(s) probably don't have the cognitive algorithms in place to even comprehend these questions the way you mean them.
I have been told by a religious person that, if they were to learn that God did not exist, they would immediately embark upon an orgy of murder and theft, because, "There would be no reason not to." They believe this about themselves despite the fact that we know it to be a misunderstanding of psychology.
To avoid a typical mind fallacy, let's say that some people really have no non-supernatural reason to avoid murder and theft. But they are in a minority, so there is a high prior probability that the given religious person does not belong ther...
I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...
I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.
And yet it is the truth.
I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?