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.
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.
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.
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.
I get this with money. “Money is just funny looking paper. Why will people accept it in exchange for anything in this vast cornucopia of real goods and services?” I know the reasons, and one argument for it is even intuitive: “Don’t I accept money as payment? Do I have any reason to think I’m unusual in this regard?” But every time I think about it anew, the “funny looking paper” argument seems convincing and I have to replay the counterarguments to get myself to disagree with it.
You might find that the sense of bother never quite goes away.
Hadn’t considered that quite as much, but admit it could be a very real possibility.
So why should “If everything has a cause, then what caused god?” bother a theist?
Point taken, but it actually bothers me that theists don’t seem to be bothered by anything. Now that I’m on “the other side,” it is just astounding that the world is so religiously divided. I think it would bother me as a Christian that my god made the most important thing in all of existence so subtle with respect to discoverability, that billions of people all over the world are well aware of the bible and toss it aside with ease in favor of theology-as-revealed-by-golden-plates or humans-as-non-functioning-thetans.
One possible trick to help build your confidence is to notice when you do things that are known to be wrong.
This seems worthy, but could you connect that practice to how you “gained an understanding for why you were uncomfortable with losing your religion”?
Point taken, but it actually bothers me that theists don’t seem to be bothered by anything.
Well put. I think that was one of the things that convinced me that I probably wasn’t right about god or religion, though it took a long time to get to that level of awareness.
but could you connect that practice to how you “gained an understanding for why you were uncomfortable with losing your religion”?
Sure, looking back it seems sufficiently vague to need clarification, even to myself.
For me, I came from a background where it was pretty much assumed that people are rational agents, and that everything we do is for a justifiable reason. It just seemed to follow that if something feels a certain way, then it was almost certain to be that way. A whole slew of biases could or did manifest here that I couldn’t even begin to fathom until I took a class on psychology, which revealed to me the “Just World hypothesis” which turns into blaming the victim.
Now that I am aware of some of the many ways in which human minds fail, I have knowledge of some of the horrible consequences that these happy illusions can lead to. Having a visceral understanding of these horrors gave me a strong urge not to do them. But having had the very same urges just before, I knew how they felt from the other side, and how comfortable they were.
At least, that’s what I think I was referring to. Thanks for asking for clarification.
Thanks for clarifying; I think that makes sense. Basically you both learned more about the biases you had, saw that they were undesirable in terms of their consequences, but also due to the “freshness” of being under their spell, you also saw what it was that made them “happy illusions” and “comfortable.”
That does make more sense—you gained some distance, saw that you wanted to move away from those aspects of your former self, but also saw why leaving the old mindset behind might have left a lingering “botherdness” or “subtle longing” that was difficult to pin down?
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.
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.
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.
I get this with money. “Money is just funny looking paper. Why will people accept it in exchange for anything in this vast cornucopia of real goods and services?” I know the reasons, and one argument for it is even intuitive: “Don’t I accept money as payment? Do I have any reason to think I’m unusual in this regard?” But every time I think about it anew, the “funny looking paper” argument seems convincing and I have to replay the counterarguments to get myself to disagree with it.
Hadn’t considered that quite as much, but admit it could be a very real possibility.
Point taken, but it actually bothers me that theists don’t seem to be bothered by anything. Now that I’m on “the other side,” it is just astounding that the world is so religiously divided. I think it would bother me as a Christian that my god made the most important thing in all of existence so subtle with respect to discoverability, that billions of people all over the world are well aware of the bible and toss it aside with ease in favor of theology-as-revealed-by-golden-plates or humans-as-non-functioning-thetans.
This seems worthy, but could you connect that practice to how you “gained an understanding for why you were uncomfortable with losing your religion”?
Well put. I think that was one of the things that convinced me that I probably wasn’t right about god or religion, though it took a long time to get to that level of awareness.
Sure, looking back it seems sufficiently vague to need clarification, even to myself.
For me, I came from a background where it was pretty much assumed that people are rational agents, and that everything we do is for a justifiable reason. It just seemed to follow that if something feels a certain way, then it was almost certain to be that way. A whole slew of biases could or did manifest here that I couldn’t even begin to fathom until I took a class on psychology, which revealed to me the “Just World hypothesis” which turns into blaming the victim.
Now that I am aware of some of the many ways in which human minds fail, I have knowledge of some of the horrible consequences that these happy illusions can lead to. Having a visceral understanding of these horrors gave me a strong urge not to do them. But having had the very same urges just before, I knew how they felt from the other side, and how comfortable they were.
At least, that’s what I think I was referring to. Thanks for asking for clarification.
Thanks for clarifying; I think that makes sense. Basically you both learned more about the biases you had, saw that they were undesirable in terms of their consequences, but also due to the “freshness” of being under their spell, you also saw what it was that made them “happy illusions” and “comfortable.”
That does make more sense—you gained some distance, saw that you wanted to move away from those aspects of your former self, but also saw why leaving the old mindset behind might have left a lingering “botherdness” or “subtle longing” that was difficult to pin down?
Is that even close?
I think you said it better than I could have. Yeah, that is very close to what I was trying to get at.