I'm not sure why you thought it'd be a good response to "can we ditch the blithe generalizations?" by listing half a dozen more. I'm skeptical of the value of responding to them at all, but I'll reply to a couple:
Might be harsh, but OP himself said he wants the harsh truth instead of sweet talk. I maintain my point. It's not about faith per se, but about religion. And (almost?) all religions offer such sweet lies (or at the very least non-proved made-up explanations) to make the believers feel better. For example you can believe in Heaven, but you can't be sure how it is really -- and the perspective of just nothing, the end is scary, so people came up with the idea of Heaven to minimize their fear of death.
How nice to be able to dismiss the foundational beliefs of 95% of humanity with one pat, condescending generalization about the fear of mortality.
Watch how cheap and easy it is to do this in reverse: maybe the thought of being judged for their actions is scary, so people rejected the idea of God to minimize their guilt of misbehavior. Or maybe the thought of being at the mercy of something so powerful is scary, so people rejected the idea of God so they could think of themselves as the most powerful and intelligent creatures. If you think people form their beliefs out of emotion, that can rationalize their skepticism just as easily as their belief.
Oh, and note that this dismissal is pretty much totally odds with (usually co-existent!) complaints about religion's oppressiveness and the burdens it places on its adherents. If people were just trying to make themselves feel better, there's a lot of easier, more hippie-ish conceptions of the supernatural they could go with. The fact that they don't proves that the explanation above is false at worst and comically reductive at best.
You know, religion will exist as long as it has believers. In order to make new believers arrive it's best to tempt them by sweet promotion (today you get redemption absolutely for free!). And in order to make current believers stay, you threaten them with eternal damnation.
You can destroy and erase from people's memory all science and knowledge, but sooner or later it will return in exactly same form and shape. However, if you destroy and erase all religions, those will never return in the same form and shape.
Yes, I've seen this canard floating around the Internet for years. Doesn't really hold up if you think about it for more than a moment, since basically every society in human history has had some form of religion. And since, from your perspective, religion grew naturally out of human thought and development to begin with.
The only accurate version of this would be to say no
highly specific conception of religion would be reproduced, which might be true but is completely irrelevant as to its truth or falsity. Not only does this not conflict with Christianity, for example, but the idea of "revealed" truth is a
huge part of Christian thought, for example. It's something people have been talking about for millennia, if you care to go looking for it.
As shocking as it may seem, people have actually put a lot of thought into this belief system that, ya' know, spread across the entire world over thousands of years. They didn't just all go "DUR DEATH SCARY" and make up a happy rainbow land.
I always post these at work when bored. When I get back home I have other things to do.
So, you only have time for the facile stuff, and not to have a real discussion?
I'm skeptical, as that smilie face suggests. But if this is indeed true, that's a good argument not to engage in these philosophical drive-bys in the first place.
Don't understand.
Yeah, that's kinda the point. You've obviously done the first-pass skepticism stuff. Now maybe poke around and see what some of the smartest people in the history of the world have said in response, yeah? Believe it or not, most of them actually thought of all this stuff, and even (!) formulated intelligent answers to it. I don't know how many of those answers exist in pat meme form or get passed around subreddits, but they're there.
Laplace's demon is a hypothetical creature that has all the knowledge about the position and momentum of elementary particles, so according to quantum physics using such knowledge you theoretically can (with sufficiently large computing resources) deduce everything there is to know about world.
Correct, except I'm pretty sure the word "quantum" doesn't belong there. I think boring old physics demonstrates the principle just as well. In fact, when I've advanced this argument in other discussions, materialists often use quantum mechanics as a sort of escape hatch to avoid accepting determinism (which doesn't work, but requires a different response).
From what I understand it's simply impossible for such being to exist due to the law of conservation of energy. This is because the world works in a way experiments that led to Heisenberg's principle show. To fulfill this law the world needs to have all the definitions in it at the same time. So in order to create knowledge (the definition of momentum and position) you need to sacrifice energy, and energy is not limitless.
I'm not quite sure if this is accurate, but whether it is or not, it's still just describing physical realities. It does not touch any consideration of whether things exist outside the physical.
Of course God is beyond all this, he has superpowers, we are too stupid to understand him etc. I'm just a puny human being, so I'm basing everything on knowledge, and God is beyond knowledge etc. Fine, maybe that's true, but the thing is you can't prove God exists
"You can't prove God exists" is a totally different statement than "physics says an omnipotent being can't exist." There is/was no basis for that claim, and it's pretty much a non-sequitur, since it implies a link between the physical and the non-physical that is definitionally impossible.
Anyway, there are no proofs for God, and no proofs for magic. Therefore, following this way of thinking, magic might exist too. And dragons. And Cthulhu. And what nots.
Yeah, the old "I don't believe in God for the same reason I don't believe in unicorns" silliness. It's busted logic for more reasons than I have time to enumerate, but the most obvious (and relevant to the quotes above) is that if dragons and unicorns are real, then they're physical creatures for which we would reasonably expect physical evidence to form the basis for belief. That simply has no relationship to how you consider the question of whether things exist outside of physical reality.
The biggest and most significant data point we have in all this is the mere existence of the universe. And I'd kinda like to hear you describe how that went down, because I'm pretty sure if you do it's gonna sound suspiciously like "magic" at some point.
PS: Feel free to point any fallacies in my thinking or misunderstandings (I'm physics layman). I'm still learning. Meanwhile... I took time off work, so I will probably spend more than a week watching films instead of MoFoing, so don't be surprised if I don't reply.
PS2: Make it a new thread if you want. Even if I give up this discussion maybe other people will join in.
Well, you just said you might not even reply, so I'll start a new thread if and when you do.
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