I talked with more than 20 Christians during my deconversion, and actually, they acted as if the standard skeptical arguments made a lot of sense.
The response was never “no way, that doesn’t even make sense.” Rather it was, “well of course we might expect God to do X, but Yahweh works in mysterious ways”. Another was, “you need to stop trusting your intellect so much and trust God/TheBible/Jesus instead.”
The interesting thing is that this works beyond the talk. Most Christians act as if they have a perfectly good model of the godless universe inside of them, which they utilize to come up with expectations for the ‘mysterious’ ways in which their God acts.
Perhaps when most people lie (engage in (semi-)fraudulent signalling), people usually have p-zombie style non-self-aware attitude towards the process of lie construction.
I wonder what happens if the hemispheres of religious person are questioned independently. How strongly does religiosity of one side correlate with religiosity of the other side.
Try and get them to explain how we distinguish God working in mysterious ways from God not doing anything at all. Try and get them either to make falsifiable predictions or notice that they can’t.
If they are willing to make falsifiable predictions about things they don’t know about yet, this can be a good way for them to learn that not only does God not work the way you think he ought to, he doesn’t work the way they think he ought to either.
You can’t topple someone’s religious belief with a single argument against one of the lynchpins of their faith (it’s never happened to my knowledge, at least,) but you can make them realize that this is another belief they ought to be suspicious of.
Also, if you’re trying to convince your interlocutor rather than your audience, don’t frame your points as arguments, frame them as points of discussion, such as “I think X because...” or “My take on this is X.”
I think Luke is more an expert on the subject, but I think William Rowe’s argument ( on luke’s old site ) covers the “mysterious ways” quite well. I remember William Craig trying to come up with a terrible argument about animals not feeling “proper” pain to try to circumvent the problem.
Let’s wait for the true expert to step in, though ;)
1) Explain why Fully General Counterarguments are bad.
2) Explain why this particular counterargument doesn’t make sense. This comment by pragmatist puts it nicely:
A consequence of [“God works in mysterious ways”] seems to be that the distribution over possible world states, given the hypothesis that god created the world, should be close to maximum entropy. This means no observation of the world state could count as much evidence for the hypothesis.
I mostly agree, but there are ways of explaining basic Bayesian reasoning without having to get into too many prerequisites. See my reply to David Gerard, which is an attempt to do just that.
Probably best to teach them this before they know it’s a conversation about deconversion. No one is going to want to learn something if it means losing an argument.
So how would you phrase that in words that someone who says “God works in mysterious ways” would even take in? If they understood hypotheses and distributions they wouldn’t be saying things like that. edit: Well, I hope they wouldn’t.
I’m bad at writing/explaining, but here’s my attempt:
Suppose you and a friend are looking at a painting of unknown origin that looks like a bunch of paint was thrown haphazardly at a piece of paper. ”Look,” says your friend, “See how most of the red paint is concentrated in that one corner? This was clearly made by the famous artist Pablo Pretentious!” “But,” you protest, “Most of the canvas isn’t even painted. There are blotches of white paint all over that look like they just dripped off a brush, and there’s splotches of yellow all along the left side, which is the same color as that wall. This just looks like a piece of paper that was left on the ground when this room was remodeled.” ”Laymen like us can’t expect to understand the mind of a great artist! A Pablo painting is designed in a way that is beyond our comprehension—you may think that Pablo wouldn’t paint ugly white dots, but there’s no way we can truly understand the artistic decisions that Pablo Pretentious makes.” “But if that’s the case,” you reply, “Then we can’t predict what a Pablo painting would look like, and that means that to us, any painting would have an equal chance of being produced by Pablo. And if any painting has an equal chance of being a Pablo, then seeing this painting doesn’t tell us anything—it can’t count as evidence either way.” ”But I just told you, we know that it’s a Pablo painting because of all that red in the corner!” ″You can’t have it both ways. Either we have some idea what a Pablo painting looks like, in which case we can make good guesses about this painting’s origin based on how it looks, or we don’t know what a Pablo painting looks like, in which case no painting can tell us anything.”
I’m thinking of the latest wizard wheeze in apologetics, which is to posit that the fact of orderly physics is evidence of God. This is from people belonging to mainstream Christian churches subscribing to the Nicene Creed, i.e. belief in miracles that violate physics as evidence of God. When someone is that determined to be hard of thinking …
I’m thinking of the latest wizard wheeze in apologetics, which is to posit that the fact of orderly physics is evidence of God.
This is new in Christianity? I heard of it as an old Islamic argument: God’s presence continually maintains the order of the universe; without God, everything would fall into chaos; therefore, the fact that you are able to observe a consistent universe is itself evidence of God.
...then it’s pretty much impossible to convince them with actual arguments, so you might as well use other means. You’re never going to be able to convince people who put their fingers in their ears and say “Lalala I can’t hear you!”, but it seems like it should be possible to have some impact on people who will at least listen.
I just had to explain to someone yesterday “No, you just said not-A as evidence of B. You can’t do that and say A is evidence of B. Because if you say both, that means A or not-A has nothing to do with B.”
“You expect me to go get more evidence.”
“No, I expect you to have evidence already to make that claim.”
I’m not entirely sure I convinced, but it’s about as compact as I can get it in small words. “A” and “B” were the actual things we were talking about.
But it seems there some equivocation or similar confusion around here:
if any painting has an equal chance of being a Pablo, then seeing this painting doesn’t tell us anything—it can’t count as evidence either way.
If I know nothing about Pablo’s methods and so can’t tell whether any painting is a Pablo painting, why should I expect that seeing a genuine Pablo painting will tell me anything. Particularly since it seems like I already learned something from this painting—I don’t understand Pablo’s methods.
That’s probably equally true the other way around—that is, most atheist literature makes no sense to Christians.
I talked with more than 20 Christians during my deconversion, and actually, they acted as if the standard skeptical arguments made a lot of sense.
The response was never “no way, that doesn’t even make sense.” Rather it was, “well of course we might expect God to do X, but Yahweh works in mysterious ways”. Another was, “you need to stop trusting your intellect so much and trust God/TheBible/Jesus instead.”
The interesting thing is that this works beyond the talk. Most Christians act as if they have a perfectly good model of the godless universe inside of them, which they utilize to come up with expectations for the ‘mysterious’ ways in which their God acts.
Perhaps when most people lie (engage in (semi-)fraudulent signalling), people usually have p-zombie style non-self-aware attitude towards the process of lie construction.
I wonder what happens if the hemispheres of religious person are questioned independently. How strongly does religiosity of one side correlate with religiosity of the other side.
How does one deal with this fully general counterargument, “God works in mysterious ways”?
Try and get them to explain how we distinguish God working in mysterious ways from God not doing anything at all. Try and get them either to make falsifiable predictions or notice that they can’t.
If they are willing to make falsifiable predictions about things they don’t know about yet, this can be a good way for them to learn that not only does God not work the way you think he ought to, he doesn’t work the way they think he ought to either.
You can’t topple someone’s religious belief with a single argument against one of the lynchpins of their faith (it’s never happened to my knowledge, at least,) but you can make them realize that this is another belief they ought to be suspicious of.
Also, if you’re trying to convince your interlocutor rather than your audience, don’t frame your points as arguments, frame them as points of discussion, such as “I think X because...” or “My take on this is X.”
/me shrugs
I’d give the argument from evil. If there were a God like the one that Christians worship, the world wouldn’t suck as much as it does.
That does not invalidate the “argument” in any way, since mysterious ways include the sucky world, and in any case, it is all just a “test”.
I think Luke is more an expert on the subject, but I think William Rowe’s argument ( on luke’s old site ) covers the “mysterious ways” quite well. I remember William Craig trying to come up with a terrible argument about animals not feeling “proper” pain to try to circumvent the problem.
Let’s wait for the true expert to step in, though ;)
Or maybe it would.
Yeah, YHVH can be a right bastard at times...
There are a few things you can do:
1) Explain why Fully General Counterarguments are bad.
2) Explain why this particular counterargument doesn’t make sense. This comment by pragmatist puts it nicely:
Alert: inferential distance failure!
You would have to make them first read the sequences and learn university-level math and physics. And probably some philosophy of science.
I mostly agree, but there are ways of explaining basic Bayesian reasoning without having to get into too many prerequisites. See my reply to David Gerard, which is an attempt to do just that.
Probably best to teach them this before they know it’s a conversation about deconversion. No one is going to want to learn something if it means losing an argument.
So how would you phrase that in words that someone who says “God works in mysterious ways” would even take in? If they understood hypotheses and distributions they wouldn’t be saying things like that. edit: Well, I hope they wouldn’t.
I’m bad at writing/explaining, but here’s my attempt:
I’m thinking of the latest wizard wheeze in apologetics, which is to posit that the fact of orderly physics is evidence of God. This is from people belonging to mainstream Christian churches subscribing to the Nicene Creed, i.e. belief in miracles that violate physics as evidence of God. When someone is that determined to be hard of thinking …
This is new in Christianity? I heard of it as an old Islamic argument: God’s presence continually maintains the order of the universe; without God, everything would fall into chaos; therefore, the fact that you are able to observe a consistent universe is itself evidence of God.
Wonder how the same arguers deal with an unorderly universe with flying horse miracles.
I suppose there aren’t really new apologetics. I wonder if there’s a list:
God of the gaps.
Argument from wishful thinking (ontological argument and variants).
I feel there is God, therefore God.
Both A and not-A are evidence of God.
Edit: Of course there’s a list.
...then it’s pretty much impossible to convince them with actual arguments, so you might as well use other means. You’re never going to be able to convince people who put their fingers in their ears and say “Lalala I can’t hear you!”, but it seems like it should be possible to have some impact on people who will at least listen.
“One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.”—H.L. Mencken.
I just had to explain to someone yesterday “No, you just said not-A as evidence of B. You can’t do that and say A is evidence of B. Because if you say both, that means A or not-A has nothing to do with B.”
“You expect me to go get more evidence.”
“No, I expect you to have evidence already to make that claim.”
I’m not entirely sure I convinced, but it’s about as compact as I can get it in small words. “A” and “B” were the actual things we were talking about.
I like this story.
But it seems there some equivocation or similar confusion around here:
If I know nothing about Pablo’s methods and so can’t tell whether any painting is a Pablo painting, why should I expect that seeing a genuine Pablo painting will tell me anything. Particularly since it seems like I already learned something from this painting—I don’t understand Pablo’s methods.
They might if they are good at compartmentalizing.
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2012/02/results-of-the-.html