Podcast #140: Round-Earthers, Evidence, and the Power of Prayer

26 March 12, 2017 by

After beginning episode #140 with the realization that we may soon be receiving a human body part in the mail, we revisit (hopefully for the last time) the fact that there are “roundearthers” out there who actually deny that our planet is flat (people will believe just about anything it seems). We then discuss a listener’s challenge about whether or not both theists and atheists stack the deck against their opponents, after which we weigh in on the so-called “power of prayer” (does it help, and if not are we just doing it wrong?). This segues into the issue of comforting those who suffer, and the good and bad ways of doing that. Our “Dick Move, God” segment introduces us to a man whose daughter wasn’t killed in a religious war but who wishes she had been, and Christian’s bieber involves wanting more bodily fluids to be emitted on TV, while Jason’s has to do with the antiquated issue of long-distance charges.

Also, they send us a toe we’re supposed to shit ourselves with fear.

26 Comments (click here to leave a comment)

  1. • Maybe it’s like Pac-man. You fly off the Earth in one direction and end up on the other side. Bonus: any ghosts following you slowdown in the shortcut.
    • If it’s not Scottish, it’s craaaaap.
    • What a great way to live, when the flu and polio killed millions.
    • I think you would have more or less the same religions. They might be called different names, but in a post-knowledge sort of world, people would tell stories to convey knowledge. Myths and national myths would return.
    • Paganism would easy to see coming back. People more dependent on the fortunes of nature trying to explain good and evil and trying to alter outcomes through prayers or gifts or sacrifices. Tribal religions like Judaism would also be reconstructed as a means of maintaining a culture. The more philosophical religions would probably come back eventually as mankind regained the use of writing and had more time to spare to philosophical discussions, so I imagine you’d see a new Buddhism and Taoism and even Christianity based on moral philosophy.
    • They might differ on details, but they would have the same basic moral teachings because that’s how people think. There is nothing new under the sun.
    • In 6,000 years, there will be the Church of Superman, who died to save us from Doomsday, then rose again… and he could fly and shoot lasers from his eyes. A-men.
    • Prayer for me these days is cheap therapy. I get to dump out all of the emotions and garbage and shit at the sky and I feel better regardless of whether anyone is listening or not.
    • Or as the Thinking Atheist podcast put it, Johnny is shot and we’re praying for him…
    o If Johnny dies, then God wanted to take him home. Praise be to God.
    o If Johnny survives, but is paralyzed, then God has a new plan for his life or God needed to ‘get his attention.’
    o If Johnny fully recovers, our prayers affected a miracle.
    • Life lesson from the book of Job: Never be the MOST righteous man. Be righteous, but every now and again, steal a candy bar or rob a bank or commit a little light adultery.
    • “If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And, if we’re very, very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.”
    • I don’t vomit that much on my first trip to the bathroom. When I have stomach flu, it usually takes a 3-7 times before the mass of it comes out.

  2. The thought experiment from the voicemail fails to establish that the evidence for theism is weak. Christianity is a religion about Gods unique action in human history. How would that work if you start with the premise that all of history gets destroyed lol

    That’s like saying evolution isn’t really science because if we started over with five people and destroyed the entire fossil record and all other living animals we never would come up with Darwins Origin of the Species.

  3. Yeah, I tried to make a similar point by suggesting that, if all prior history were wiped out and we had to start over, there’d be like no John F. Kennedy Drives anywhere.

  4. Yes, that’s the point. If humanity and all knowledge started over, scientists would still arrive at most if not all of the same theories we have today at some point regarding relativity, gravity, evolution, etc. If we started with a new set of humans though, we’re not going to have the same religions because most of them are based on particular people that lived and were proclaimed as prophets or spiritual leaders, or in the point you’re making which makes the caller’s point, the same streets.

  5. Kenneth, even if you destroyed the entire fossil record (which was not part of the test), the theory of evolution would eventually be arrived at, it would just take longer.

    You’d still have other scientific theories and knowledge that would be arrived at eventually: relativity, gravity, medicine, astronomy, geology, etc.

    You wouldn’t, however, get Islam or Buddhism again. You might get something that shares some of the same tenets, but you wouldn’t get the same religion worshiping the same God and/or prophets.

  7. Maybe I just don’t get the caller’s point. If science consists of formulating hypotheses from observable data, then of course if they were to start from scratch and have the exact same observable data to work with they’d come to similar conclusions about it eventually.

    But to say that people would not arrive at Christianity under the same circumstances is sort of obvious, isn’t it? If someone were to point this out and use it to fault Christianity then they’re just making the familiar mistake of expecting Christianity to be just like science, and special revelation to be just like general revelation.

    But again, maybe I’m missing the point. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  8. Yeah, I don’t think you get it. The call was in relation to our discussion about evidence and what constitutes evidence. I’ll try to make the point a different way and see if that helps.

    Is Mormonism true? Would it exist if Joseph Smith hadn’t lived? Is Scientology true? Would it exist if L. Ron Hubbard was never born? Neither of these would exist without these two men. Maybe something similar or maybe something completely different or maybe nothing at all would have filled their void.

    Would relativity and gravity and evolution still exist if Einstein, Newton, and Darwin had never been born? Yes, and eventually scientists would come to the same theories on them.

    There’s no evidence for Mormonism and Scientology that would come to light without these false leaders presenting a bunch of made up shit. The evidence for the scientific theories is there no matter if someone figures it out or not.

    So if you wiped out mankind and all knowledge and started over with a new set of people, you wouldn’t get the same religions necessarily, but you would necessarily eventually end up with the same scientific theories because the evidence for them is independent of which people lived when.

  9. It seems odd to frame any discussion of religion in terms of the “evidence for theism.” Maybe that’s what makes this whole discussion kind of slippery. To me it seems that theism is one explanatory model among others. If you put it in “x happened because y” form, it’s something like “the man had a seizure because a demon had possessed him” vs “the man had a seizure because he had brain damage.” In a world in which you cannot access the brain, the demon story makes perfect sense. Then technology comes along and changes things.
    Maybe the better analogy would have been “you got sick because you angered the invisible dragon in my garage (or sky god or whatever)” vs “you got sick because of some bacteria which we can observe in the lab.”

  10. If all that’s all that’s intended by this scenario, then I think it is true on its face. By definition, religions like Christianity are not arrived at by means of general revelation, whereas scientific discoveries are. Like I said above, it’s just obvious.

  12. maybe evolution was a bad analogy. Either way, I was just trying to show that the thought experiment stacks the deck by scratching out history.

    Aristotle didn’t have any theistic resources and reasoned to a kind of prime mover, omnibenevolent, theism through philosophy alone. So it’s almost certain that a belief in God would come back given enough time and clear thinking 🙂

    You couldn’t get to Christianity without the “revealed” portion of revelation…… but I don’t see how that diminishes anything.

  13. There isn’t anything slippery about evidence for theism. It’s popped up in religious communities (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) and also OUTSIDE of those communities (the philosophers God, the God of the physicists, the spiritual pilgrims, etc).

    God of the gaps is a weak form of evidence, but fa not the only form we encounter

  16. Ok.

    Since we’re talking about what is personally interesting to us now I guess, the idea that if all knowledge and all humans were wiped out and we started over, we’d probably end up with a completely different set of religions but the same science, is interesting to me. That’s why I played the voice mail. It doesn’t have to be interesting to you and if we received a comment every time something we talked about wasn’t interesting to someone, well, we’d have a lot of comments. Thanks for your input though.

  17. haha don’t be such a pansy! I’m not commenting to say you picked a boring topic. It could be a very interesting topic. I just don’t understand what her point is….. you haven’t actually played the voicemail…. maybe she explains it better than you

  19. boom! Now I get it. Jason brought up evidence and you are pointing out that the evidence for picking out a specific religion is inherently weak because it isn’t self correcting and relies on history and personal testimony. There is a guy named John Loftus who says something similar. “All historical evidence is bad evidence”.

    I don’t think that evidence is BAD if its not self correcting….. it’s just not “as good” as science. And that’s OK. Different methods deliver different results. But here is the thing….

    Christians invented science. So it’s not like science belongs to skeptics. Or that skeptics use science and christians use something else. We all use science to answer scientific questions. Theology isn’t a scientific enterprise. Just like moral questions, historical questions, philosophical questions, political questions, etc. But we can still have certainty in these other areas even when the results aren’t self correcting. And no one ever restricts themselves to having an opinion unless it’s a scientific one.

  20. I guess I was referring to the discussion in this thread as slippery – not the entire history of philosophy of religion. 🙂

    But still, religious belief doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you believe because somebody has provided you a mountain of evidence that just makes it so compelling that you can’t deny the existence of the sky god or the invisible dragon anymore. It seems like the kind of thing you believe because you were taught it as a child and you grew up around it and/or it resonates with you in a certain way.

    I think the objection that a lot of atheists or agnostics have is that many religious folks make use of all these ad-hoc explanations whenever someone points out an inconsistency in their belief system. Did you pray for healing but your cancer didn’t go away? Oh, it was God’s will, so that actually was an answer to your prayer. Did you do everything right but still bad things happen to you? That’s just God teaching you a lesson. So basically the objection is that you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a god using anything like evidence, because there’s always some kind of new twist or ad-hoc justification that makes the whole thing pointless. And presumably if all of our current religions were wiped out we would just start out creating new ones. But to me, that’s a weird way to frame religious belief – as if it’s the same kind of epistemological thing as say a belief that a volcano is going to erupt based on the evidence that has been presented to you. These just aren’t the same kinds of things. We use the word “belief” for them both, but that’s misleading.

    So from that perspective, being agnostic is the most liberating position. Freely acknowledging that we can’t really know for sure about the existence of a god or gods isn’t the same as denying it. I can admit that maybe you do have an invisible dragon in your garage, but I certainly don’t have the perceptual apparatus to observe it or interact with it, and when it comes right down to it, it makes no real difference in my life one way or the other, so you can believe in it while I don’t, and we can all go happily on our way without it causing any harm one way or the other. Until it starts telling you to pass laws that force me to live according to your values and your rules that the invisible dragon has whispered into your ear. Then we have a problem.

  21. Aristotle had the whole pantheon of Greek gods, which were used to explain every single thing from victories and losses in battle to weather events to people’s emotions and moods. Read some Homer. I would call that a “theistic resource.”

  22. Christians use ad-hoc explanations for anything that they can’t explain. But ad-hoc explanations are considered “cheating” in science. There’s a significant difference.

    It also seems significant because religion asks things of people that carry huge costs. But with no explanatory basis other than “because the sky god told me.”

    And “Christians invented science” is an interesting claim. Are you referring to Enlightenment era western Europe? OK, everyone in the western world at that time was “Christian,” but in a world where you have no other choice, what does that even mean? And is your claim that the ancient Greeks and ancient Eastern cultures weren’t already “creating science” long before Descartes et al came along? This is not the version of history that I learned at the “fancy college” that I ran off to when I abandoned the life that God had planned for me.

  23. Because you do not realize the difference between an invisible sky dragon and the God of the worlds theistic religions I think we would be doomed to talk past each other 🙂

  26. I don’t pray much any more for similar reasons to some of the ones that you cite: God has bigger fish to fry, what difference does it make most of the time, lack of hard evidence that it fixes. There are many things in a faith walk that are less than obvious and consistent. Truth seems to evolve and change. When deciding to pray for someone logic may ask the question “why?”. This is a question for those engaged in the lifelong entanglement of faith. If not in the faith, why ask? Seems like a waste of time. What would you do with the answer? My other random response is comparing prayer to touch. Do we understand all the chemistry and odd comfort that can happen when we touch each other? Like prayer, it is not always the same. I think we would agree, none of us know all the truth that is out there. We supposedly only use a portion of our brain. What else is it capable of? To dismiss prayer completely, may shortchange my total experience. Not sure. Appreciate you speaking outside the lines of a doctrinal coloring book.

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