| Sal.Paradise said: There is evidence of a hell, heaven, a God etc, the problem for many people is that the evidence is not empirical, and many people only subscribe to that form of knowledge. It is a fundamental problem that will never be resolved. Scripture and religious experience is just as valid as 'proof' for the believer as empirical knowledge is to the atheist. This is why Russell's teapot fails, not to mention the fallacy of unfalsifiable claims not being valuable information, among other reasons. Your second sentence is fine, accepting traditional science has nothing to contribute to this argument. I still think it's funny that you would ridicule or pity a religious person for believing in a heaven or hell etc with zero empiricial evidence when you cannot produce any against its existence either. Teaching that something does not exist without any evidence also, to you, should qualify as 'teaching stories as facts'. But then, it's easy to make jokes at someone's expense, actually thinking about what is actually being said behind those statements takes more effort. |
That these are considered valid evidence for belief is exactly the problem non-believers often have with religion. It leads people to making decisions - often major decisions that effect other people - on an unreliable foundation of information.
Scripture's origins are in many ways surrounded in mystery, and the few things we can claim with relative certainty imply that elements of scripture, such as the Christian Gospels, were written well after the claimed events took place. As Thomas Paine said in his Age of Reason, we are not obliged to believe in what ultimately amounts to hearsay, and I add that we would not rely solely on hearsay in asserting any other claim to be true:
"Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him."
Also, we now know that certain areas of scripture directly conflict with known reality. The beginnings and age of the universe and evolution conflict with the creation accounts of Genesis, the number and location of species on this planet and how it was populated conflict with the tale of Noah's Ark, the modern understanding of linquistic evolution conflicts with the Tower of Babel, and so on and so forth.
And since the Enlightenment, we have been well aware of the number of ways in which scripture disagrees with itself, let alone modern science. Looking at the Gospels alone, they disagree on things like what Jesus was wearing during various events, what he said as he hung on the cross, the number of Beatitudes he preached, or whether he taught the Beatitudes at all. Expand beyond the Gospels, and you have Paul telling a starkly different tale of Judas' death in the Acts of the Apostles than the Gospel of Matthew. And these are just minor details, let alone issues of morality, what people should or should not do, and how one should live to ultimately enter Heaven. You can go on and on with examples in which Biblical text contradicts itself. Such clearly inaccurate texts should not be relied on anymore than Homer's Odyssey or other fantastical tales written in ancient times.
As for religious experience, we should all be disinclined to trust someone else's experience for reasons already mentioned above, but I'd also be quite skeptical of any experience I might have of my own. And it should be pointed out that relgious experiences can be found within every culture on Earth, regardless of the religion they practice. Christian Mystics, Muslim Sufi, Jewish Kabbalah, Tibetan Buddhism, and many more. Who are channeling the "real" divine spirits?
The issue is that people are, in general, quite unreliable, and because of this unreliableness we are capable of misinterpreting natural occurences as having supernatural origins. People often struggle to properly remember a grocery list written down earlier in the day, let alone the details of a supposedly divine experience. Given the myriad of cognitive biases that can warp our perception of any given situation, let alone the number of other factors that could impact our judgement, like mood/mind altering drugs, hunger, sleep deprivation, a weakened mental state, a mental disability, a powerful surge of emotion, or even magnetism, we cannot fully trust our day to day perception of the world.
Of course, in most situations we don't need to fully trust our perception of reality, because the consequences of making a mistake aren't very severe. Relaying to someone else a phone number, for example. If they call the wrong person, it's not a big deal. But for more important matters, we need to ensure that our perception of reality is the correct perception of reality, and this is why we developed the scientific method, and now rely on empirical evidence that can be corroborated by an endless number of people when coming to a conclusion. Our reliance on empirical evidence is an effort to reduce the unreliablility of humans to an absolute minimum.
Religion intentionally undermines this, not just by discouraging a reliance on empirical evidence, but by further encouraging blind faith and labeling it a virtue.
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As has often been said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thousands of years old text and some people having some visions aren't enough to claim there is an all powerful, divine being interceding in the progression of our civilization.
