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This logic is not sound. Why couldn't be the case that only one religion is right?
Three people looking at a triangle might have different opinions about what shape it is. It is inconceivable that they are all right, but that does not imply that they are all wrong.
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I think the part that’s left out is “since they all can’t be right, yet use the same standard of authority for truth, the most likely scenario is that none of them have a reasonable claim to truth”.
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If only one religion is right, then the God of that religion is either evil or an asshole or not all knowing and all powerful.
If you think about it, and all knowing all powerful God that allows a gigantic portion of his beloved children to live in complete and total ignorance for their entire lives without even the chance of ever knowing the truth would be a terrible asshole at best, and that's only assuming that he doesn't throw everyone that doesn't get the truth he didn't give them into hell forever.
Of course that only covers the abrahamic religions. I feel like Zoroastrianism would probably still be okay because as little of it as I understand it seems to be more like the world is a stage where a chess game is being played and each piece moves as it will and the battling deities over watching the game can only make so many moves each to keep it fair.
Buddhism can't really complain about it other than that it sucks that we're all currently stuck in hell and having to live tens of thousands of lives until we're allowed to get out, seems like more people should make it out as time goes by.
Either way though, if there is one true religion it would be amazing if the god of that religion would occasionally pop onto the planet and remind everybody that they exist, maybe give us the bread and circuses show to catch us back up, maybe throw out a couple of worldwide hey I forgive everybody's and then pop back off just to remind us.
A thousand years without a reappearance of the God of all gods is a long time to keep the torch burning.
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He just stepped out to grab some milk and cigarettes, he'll be back soon.
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Zoroastrianism sounds cool as hell tbh
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it would be amazing if the god of that religion would occasionally pop onto the planet and remind everybody that they exist, maybe give us the bread and circuses show to catch us back up, maybe throw out a couple of worldwide hey I forgive everybody's and then pop back off just to remind us.
A thousand years without a reappearance of the God of all gods is a long time to keep the torch burning.
https://slrpnk.net/comment/9243887
A dramatization, if you will.
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Yeah, so if you’re a worshipper of the Greek pantheon you could be right. The Greek gods are powerful but not all-powerful, wise but not all-knowing, and not particularly loving (they have their own agenda). Sometimes they’re even assholes but not particularly evil.
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The logic seems sound to me.
If they all look at thin air, and claim there is different kinds of magical beings, and as evidence they say they imagined it, isn't it reasonable to conclude there actually is none of the magical beings they claim? Since they use the same vastly erroneous process to make similar extraordinary claims.
As Richard Dawkins say: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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That's why it says "most reasonable conclusion." If all of these religions have the same level of evidence of their existence, all have people who are certain that their religion is real and all others are false, and they all claim to be the "truth" then what's most reasonable?
Obviously it's possible that any given religion is correct about the world, but if you ask me which is more probable: that every human religion is wrong except the 1 that is correct, or that every human religion is wrong? I think I agree with the original quote
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or they each see a different face of the same truth
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The reasonable conclusion comes from the vast range of possibilities of what is true, which is exponentially larger than the range of possibilities specifically expressed in the world's popular religions, even if we were to assume that every human being has their own understanding of what is true. The range of possibilities not conceived of by one of eight-billion human beings is vastly greater, so the chances of one person getting it right is akin to winning the lottery.
If we assume that any two people agree on religious truth, that number of religions becomes less, and the odds it is not one of those becomes even greater.
Note that there are about (not quite) 40,000 denominations of Christianity (and then all the non-denominational churches, some of which are megachurches that stay ND so they are not recognized as an NRM, which law enforcement presumes is a potentially-dangerous cult-or-sect) so we get very specific as to what religious truth is, and we fight wars or litigate over these specifics.
Considering the scope of the universe compared to the scope of life on earth (let alone human life), it's highly more likely the Milky Way galaxy (including the solar system and everything in it) is incidental to any divine purpose of the cosmos. The difference between the chances that we're special or important, and the chances mold under a specific Sequoia tree in central California is special or important is infinitesimal.
So even when we only consider theistic possibilities within the universe as we see and understand it, any popular religion that has a non-zero possibility of being true still doesn't have much more than that.
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Correct. By their very nature of certain religions being mutually exclusive, they can't all be correct, but they could all be wrong.
They aren't wrong because some are mutually exclusive. That's a non-sequitur. They are false or at least not true, because the evidence either falsifies the claims or doesn't prove them to be true.
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And it's obviously the one with a god of THUNDER!!!
What, there are two?
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I do think it's reasonable to say they are all wrong, but I agree with you, this logic provided in the image doesn't make sense.
It being impossible for all to be true, doesn't imply they are all false.
It's likely they are all false, if you subscribe to the philosophy of science, where without testable evidence, it's deemed unreasonable to assume something likely to be true.
The (in my opinion) correct opinion is that all religions are very likely false, because none have provided convincing evidence according to the scientific method.
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It could be the case, but it’s more reasonable to think that they are all wrong rather than to think that 334 of them are wrong and 1 of them is right.
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Say I have 6 people all guessing a different result of a roll of a D6. It's inconceivable that they are all right, and it's absolutely not a "reasonable conclusion" that they are all wrong.
Additionally, if we include the people who believe they know there is no god (a position held with no proof) as a religion (which is not much of a stretch) then it's also included in the " they are all wrong" group.
I lack a belief in a god because I've been provided no evidence that own exists, but the logic in this picture is full of holes.
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If you think his logic is bad here, wait till you read his position on the Iraq War.
The Christopher Hitchens style of atheism is very heavy on the pithy one-liners and very light on real philosophy, reason, or ethics. Neoconservatism in a nutshell.
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Say I have 6 people all guessing a different result of a roll of a D6. It’s inconceivable that they are all right, and it’s absolutely not a “reasonable conclusion” that they are all wrong.
In this strawman, you are correct as you 1) already know there are only 6 possible answers to choose from; 2) you know at least 1 of the participants will get it right as you set the conditions to be "different results" and 3) the result is discrete and absolute.
None of the above conditions apply to religions in general... 1) we do not know how many possible right answer are there; 2) the options are endless and can overlap and 3) if one of them is right in someway, it would 100% be a matter of perspective and context
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- already know there are only 6 possible answers to choose from; 2) you know at least 1 of the participants will get it right as you set the conditions to be “different results” and 3) the result is discrete and absolute.
You are pointing out how a 6D dice is different than picking/defining a religion. I'm not saying they are the same thing, I'm giving you an example where just because it is inconceivable all answers are correct, that doesn't mean no answer can be correct. There is no strawman in my argument, I'm just applying the logic to something we would all agree one.
- we do not know how many possible right answer are there; 2) the options are endless and can overlap and 3) if one of them is right in someway, it would 100% be a matter of perspective and context
This is expanding, by leaps and bounds, the argument in the OP's image. You are now introducing a bunch of other things. Unprovable, of course. Seriously, how could you know that being correct about a religious would be "100% a matter of perspective and context"? Why couldn't it be just objectively and patently correct? The fact that some might be partially correct doesn't change the fact that one could be completely correct.
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None of the above conditions apply to religions in general…
Or any kind of philosophy, for that matter. You can always play at God of the Gaps and insist the scientific worldview is incomplete. You can always lean on the Gödel's incompleteness theorem to assert a certain amount of unknowableness in the universe.
Does that mean every effort at understanding the world around us is pointless? Or does it mean the task of building a working model of the universe is more difficult than any single lifetime - or civilization's worth of lifetimes - can hope to accomplish?
if one of them is right in someway, it would 100% be a matter of perspective and context
Which seems like it would add some degree of value to our overarching understanding of our human condition. Something worth studying and learning from, rather than casually dismissing as wrong for being incomplete.
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People are attacking this as if it’s a hard deductive proof and if is very clearly a statement of what is “most reasonable.”
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The most reasonable conclusion is that they aren't all correct.
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I don't think that's an accurate comparison, it's more like a few hundred people guessing a different result of a practically infinite-sided die. For all we know, the origin of the universe can be anything, and it's maybe (who are we kidding, definitely) something even beyond our imaginations. For all we know, we're trapped in Charlie's Chocolate Factory. What are the odds that anyone who ever wrote a book about a diety/universal origins actually got it right? Hint: it's not 1/6 odds, or even 1/1,000,000,000, it's 1/∞. Technically not zero, but c'mon, it's practically zero.
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The argument put forth is not that the chances of them being right is small, but that because they can't all be right, they must all be wrong. I gave a counter example that demonstrates, pretty clearly, that this logic doesn't make sense. I'm not comparing religious beliefs to a D6, but giving a demonstration as to why the logic is bad.
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Right but they are right that it's not zero.
It might be that everyone is wrong, but just maybe someone got it right...
Remember that next time the crazy man walking down the street screams at you that they made the world with their fart and a lighter... Cause it might just be the correct answer.
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I miss Hitch
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We all do. He was not a humble man, but a sharp one.
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On Falwell: "If you gave his corpse an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox."
The single quote of Hitchens I remember best. And the gnashing of teeth by the other assholes on the show with him when he tore Falwell apart at the announcement of his death
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It's like he was made for the cameras and microphones, they loved and flattered him, kept him compelling even at his most hungover and disgruntled.
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Isn't it just as likely that one religion across c all of human history was right than absolutely none from like a 'logic' standpoint?
I'm not a religious person, but the conclusion that all are wrong because all can't be right is just bad logic and doesn't follow from the premise.
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Since it is inconceivable all scientific theories are correct, the most logical conclusion is they are all wrong.
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Almost. That is almost what Science says. It does say that most theories are probably wrong and certainly any that have been shown to contradict known evidence are. The ones that are not known to be wrong should be treated skeptically ( not cynically ). In practice, all we can do is work with the best that we have so far. They are the “most correct” even if they turn out to be wrong.
Like another commenter though, the problem with your analogy here is that not all scientific theories try to describe the same phenomenon and so they are not all mutually nullifying ( as the original quote proposes religions are ). Newton’s Laws do not support or nullify evolution whereas the Jews and Christians cannot both be right about Jesus and, if either of them is right about the rest, then the Norse certainly got it wrong.
I dislike it when people argue science vs religion though. The standard for science is evidence. The standard for religion is faith. They are almost opposite concepts. One is not invalid because it does not adhere to the other. Comparing them is at best not useful and pehaps deliberately misleading.
A person truly without religious faith is probably agnostic. Most atheists I have talked to have quite a lot of religious faith ( arrived at absent evidence ). They are just not honest about it. Richard Dawkins for example wrote a completely political and anti-Science book called The God Delusion and did not even seem to realize that he was arguing for faith over evidence. It is filled with stuff like “I believe” someday science will answer every question. Our current math and science excludes a great many answers in principle ( not just unknown but unknowable ). So his opinion is not rooted in evidence. “I believe” is of course self-evidently a statement of faith. “Science” can be what you call your religion whether you add in the Flying Spaghetti monsters or not.
Apologies. I kind of went off here. Not a criticism of the comment above. I just like science and would rather people not mislabel their political or “faith-based” opinions as scientific assertions.
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Again, you can't have multiple competing ideologies be correct concurrently because some are going to conflict, but if at least one matches reality then your concept ( again from a logic standpoint ) is bad.
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I like the explanation of AI with a pencil and googly eyes. Give the pencil some googly eyes and call it Mohammed, or Carl, and talk to someone with it, using ventriloquism or something, doesn't have to be good. They will form an emotional connection to the pencil and react, some even violently, if the pencil is broken midconversation in front of them.
That is the reason why people think AI is a thing. That is also why people think a god is a thing. They are wrong in both cases.
Gods are never real in a sense of natural science, they have no body, no voice; they aren't existant. They exist as an idea, a thought people have.
Gods never work in the physical world, none of them have a will, they can only be used to steer people through the people's thoughts.
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ai is a thing though?
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It isn't an intelligence, it's just repeating patterns (the behaviorism theory of psychology has already been disproven (if I'm not mistaken). This just shows, people percieve anything capable of speech intelligent (like parrots, bit not crows which are scientifically proven to be intelligent). I'm sure some of my fellow autistics could chime in and tell how we're percieved (spoiler alert, not great).
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They are all wrong... only Doug Forcett got it right
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Since it's inconceivable that everything on TV is true, then everything on TV must be false!
Seriously what terrible quote from a terrible chud.
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Without trying to defend him here ( not my goal ), that is a pretty weak analogy.
“Everything on TV” is not a zero sum game. For one thing to be true, it is not necessary for everything else to be false. There is little dependency between the content on one channel and another.
Looking at his own cultural religious tradition, the major religions say contradictory things and say that they are the truth. Islam and Judaism both reject that Christ is a God whereas it is pretty important to the Christians that he is. They cannot all be right. That is clearly what he is saying.
Although, taking a step back, many religions throughout history require faith in the Gods they profess but not necessarily a rejection of other Gods. That seems to be a more recent thing.
If it was not required to reject the Egyptian Gods to accept the Norse ones, then his reasoning falls apart and your analogy becomes valid.
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Everything on TV is false. It's curated. It's edited. It's commercialized. There is not a single thing on TV that fully represents an experience as if it were not on TV.
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Terrible comparison. Other than propaganda like right-wing "news," TV clearly delineates what is fiction and non-fiction. Religions all claim to be true and contradict one another.
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While Hitchens is a bit of an arrogant blowhard. He's not wrong, they are all mostly wrong with Buddhists being an interesting outlier. The truth is much easier and obvious than "some guy sitting in a cloud smiting us for being what it created us to be". Think how boring that would eventually get. You want your projects to work, how frustrating would it be to be so incompetent this was all unintentional. God(the admin of this little zone) does not play dice.
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I mean yes, but that logic is pretty awful. By that logic, there's no way creationism and evolution could both be right, so they both must be wrong.
Edit: yes yes I fucking get it. This was just me being pedantic about some guy's statement, no need to get your fedoras in a knot.
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Again, not a great equivalent to what he said.
If you mean creationism to mean Christian doctrine then you do not get the mass nullification effect. If you mean creationism to mean all creation myths then of course you do. However, as soon as you add evolution it changes things because there is evidence for evolution and it “is predictive” and therefore testable. That means that you are not relying only on the existence of incompatible alternatives for nullification. This breaks his premise.
It is not a particularly great statement. But all the alternatives here in the comments seem to miss what he was saying.
The “logic” of his statement is that there are many incompatible religious options presented. The incompatibilities mean that they cannot all be right. The number of options serves as the “evidence” for wrongness. Without independent evidence to support any given option, the weight of evidence against it ( the combined likelihood of the other options ) is greater than the evidence for it it ( single option ). You could make the argument for each alternative individually until all have been eliminated.
You cannot do this if evolution is an option. It has more evidentiary weight than the aggregate evidence of the alternatives. Evidence wise, it is logical to take evolution as valid and reject the others. Remove evolution and the remaining portfolio of creation myths is left with no clear winner ( and hence the likelihood that they are all losers becomes logical ).
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This argument only really works against non-syncretic religions, and there's a whole lot of syncretic ones. It makes sense it would resonate to a British atheist though.
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You only need to worship 1 thing in this world.
The Stanley Cup
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The tennis one or the hydration one?
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As a religious/spiritual person I agree, and I don't see how that's a bad thing. In science we understand that our models are all wrong, and only the next most accurate representation of a part of reality until a newer discovery or testing allows us to make even more refined models.
All religions can benefit from an application of the scientific method.
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Or god is an asshole. He knows the correct way to reach heaven and only told one person.
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Consistent with the notion that man was made in the image of God based on my experience with humanity.
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God is either a prick or doesn't exist. A good god wouldn't do what he does.
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Since it's inconceivable that all religions can be right
It's not that inconceivable. I think religions are flawed interpretations of a single truth that seems to be universal to human existence.
Study enough religions and you start to see how they rhyme.
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What's your point? That religion is flawed? Then, yes, I agree, that was what I was trying to convey in my original comment.
The exclusivity is a product of man trying to control others. Just look at early Christianity, which was non-hierarchical and gender-equal. It was only later that it was turned into the power structure of Catholicism.
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I would agree that it's not "inconceivable". I can conceive of it just fine. It's just a pretty absurd idea.
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The old ones are copying each other from oral traditions. Notice the common ideas from cultures along the Silk Road. The further away from it, the more different they become.
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Which is it then, is there only one or multiple gods? Was the earth conceived from dreams according to Australian Aboriginals, or did a deity created it by his/her own hands according to many other religions? Where is the single truth in this?
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Would you agree that it is unlikely thst any religion is presenting that single truth correctly?
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Absolutely, people who achieve enlightenment interpret the experience through the lens of their own culture. Buddhism is that truth seen through the lens of Buddha's Hinduism, Christianity (minus anything Paul wrote) is that truth seen through the lens of Jesus's Jew upbringing.
There's even people who have achieved it nowadays that interpret life as a sort of video game.
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I came here for the hippy dippy “I think all religions are really about the same thing” line and was not disappointed.
Why are they all so flawed? What is it about essential human nature that we are not able to get right after so many tries? You’re saying that 300 wrongs indicate the proximity of a right. What if they’re all just wandering in the same huge valley of wrong?
Besides, these religions are not just philosophical perspectives that rhyme. They make hard claims which contradict one another.
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Or puts on tinfoil hat They’re all right because reality is an illusion created by quanta’s consciousness.
Honestly, might not be a bad idea for a novel…
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I don't think it goes that deep, but in the iron druid series if enough people believe in it, it exists (yes even a marvel version of thor). Quite entertaining read, but I might be biased by the telepathically talking irish wolfhound (which loves to throw in movie references).
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