*** The Official MAGAposting thread ***

[oskar]

Thanks for posting this. Some thoughts as I watch it:

1. Peterson's introduction is correct. The idea of God is not taken seriously by challengers. This appears to me to be due to the common conflation of the idea of a god with a specific god. Also due to conflating science with metaphysics.

2. Peterson's explanation about legitimacy of the idea of the existence of God is good. If, however, he were to imply that the evidence is for the existence of God, that would probably not be correct. There isn't much that can be evidence for the existence of God since the existence of God is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one.

Furthermore, the best logic I've come across implies that God does in fact exist (from the simulation hypothesis); we just have no idea what God is and peoples' religions could have nothing to do with the real God (i.e. the origin of the Universe).

3. I'm not a fan of Peterson's discussion of truth. He seems to jump to conclusions, or just not fully explain his steps. On the flip side, those who think they know what is true because they *cough* use science *cough* actually don't know.

I was thinking of doing a step by step on the video but I'll just stop here because it's better that way.





Humans are adapted to survive rather than to this expressed mode of rationality. It can be the case that populations that hold religious beliefs and rituals survive better than ones that don't. The dumb position could be the one that tries to eschew that which most benefits fitness.


Also, I'd like to note that atheism is an experiment. Religion, not as much. Religion has survived, it seems to work. But atheism, nobody knows if it don't know if it works over long periods of time, and there is reason to believe that it might not work.

1 - Most people who believe in a god believe in a specific god and the attributes they assign to a specific or non-specific god can vary greatly, so it's good to start off by defining the properties of the god you're trying to argue for. I'm perfectly happy to argue against either.

2 - Again, depends on your definition of god. A creator god is a scientific hypothesis that can be tested. A god that intervenes through natural disasters, answers prayers and hands out miracles to cancer patients is a scientific hypothesis and is testable.
If you want in to hand in the simulation hypothesis as evidence for a god, I really need you to define the word god.

3 - "I don't know." Is a possible answer. I don't say that any god hypothesis is demonstrably false, my position is that they are untestable. If you say you believe in a god, you should have a good reason why you think it is true, rather than defaulting to "I don't know".

I have answered this in length before, but in short I think religion is a vestigial meme that originates from our ability to recognize patterns and look for explanations even if we don't have one yet. Religion is the earliest attempt at science and deserves credit for that, but virtually all scientific explanations you get from religion have been demonstrated to be false - from the origin of the world, celestial mechanics to dietary guidance. The little that remains are some shaky metaphysical arguments for a prime mover.

[wufwugy]

2 - Again, depends on your definition of god. A creator god is a scientific hypothesis that can be tested. A god that intervenes through natural disasters, answers prayers and hands out miracles to cancer patients is a scientific hypothesis and is testable.

I'd say these can be testable, but aren't necessarily. A god could organize components of reality that we don't detect that impact components we do detect.

If you want in to hand in the simulation hypothesis as evidence for a god, I really need you to define the word god.

Both the simulation hypothesis as well as the "big bang was the beginning" allows for the existence of an entity (for lack of a better term) that created this reality.

I bring this up because it is close to the god Peterson discusses. The leap Peterson makes isn't about the idea that god could exist, but about the idea that human experience signifies god. It could, and it could not. Who knows?

I have answered this in length before, but in short I think religion is a vestigial meme that originates from our ability to recognize patterns and look for explanations even if we don't have one yet. Religion is the earliest attempt at science and deserves credit for that, but virtually all scientific explanations you get from religion have been demonstrated to be false - from the origin of the world, celestial mechanics to dietary guidance. The little that remains are some shaky metaphysical arguments for a prime mover.

This is very close to what Peterson has claimed, and he discussed it in that debate.

What I think is going on is that fundamentalists have their specific interpretation and atheists counter that, then everybody walks away thinking they discussed the entire set of "god." Yet it was just one small bit. Here's an example:

An interpretation of religious dietary laws is "something something health something something." Maybe that claim doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. But here's a much smarter interpretation: religious dietary laws exist because the populations that espouse them survived. Did the laws make those populations physically healthier? Probably not. But did the laws do things like keep the Jewish community together over generations and across continents since the laws made it so that they would not dine with non-Jews? Could be.