This episode of DXP begins with a caller ranting about how the earth is supposedly round, after which we announce that the DXP Cruise is actually happening! (Details provided.) We take a voicemail about unity coexisting with diversity, and then revisit our thought experiment about whether, in the face of some apocalyptic worldwide tragedy, the evidence for religion would eventually emerge the way scientific evidence would. We take another call that challenges Jason about whether he is just a deist, after which we get to our biebers: Jason is annoyed by what happens after he sits down, and Christian is biebered by having to be a grower.
Also, being a physics teacher at a Christian school sounds awesome.
Podcast #89: Anarchy and Theism
Podcast #425: Weight Loss, Death, and Israel
Podcast #1: The American Work Ethic, ISIS, and Irrelevant Traffic Laws
Podcast #99: Having the Choice to Choose Life
Science is observational knowledge. Religious knowledge is philosophical or requires revelation.
You can’t validate faith with observational knowledge, you can reason your way there via philosophy, but if you claim a special revelation as the origin of your religion, then humanity would never be able to find its way back to that revelation if it were lost. Of course, if it were a special revelation, it would never be lost, if God were able to prevent it.
If you reach the point of Deism, why not just embrace agnostism/atheism?
Nerd fact:
Aragorn and Arwen weren’t the first human-elf pairing.
The first were Luthien and Beren. Beren was human, Luthien was an immortal elven princess. Beren dies and Luthien travels back to the Blessed Realm, enters the halls of Mandos (Hades) and sings him such a beautiful song of pain and misery and the burden of death, that he releases Beren and they return to Middle Earth and have children. Their children are offered the choice by the Ainar (gods) of whether they will be judged as men and subject to death or judged as elves and live forever.
Elrond chooses to be an immortal elf. His daughter chooses to become human, so all of Aragorn and Arwen’s children will be mortal men. They will still retain a longer life than most of humanity because of their Numenor blood and they will possess the ability to give up their spirits to death should they live long enough, but all of them will eventually die.
Arwen did choose to die as a human. That was why Elrond was so against their pairing because it meant that there would be a point when Arwen died and he did not know if he would ever see her again.
So in the Silmarillion does Luthien die? In the FOTR film Aragorn says she does.
Christian, just wondering, have you ever looked into or considered secular Buddhism or Taoist ideas?
Seems like their outlook on suffering would be more meaningful and applicable to you than the Christian point of view.
IIRC, I think she chooses mortality because she wanted to be with Beren forever even in the halls of death and whatever fate awaited humanity.
I haven’t. Do I still hold the Christian point of view? Shit.
Yeah, the suffering as a means of personal growth, I think is very much in line with Protestant and Evangelical Christian thought.
I’m probably doing it a disservice, but Buddhist thought on suffering is that life is full of both happiness and suffering, but causes of our suffering is our expectation and desires. We expect happiness, and bad things happen, so we suffer.
There’s a whole thing involving a lot more philosophical steps, but I think the gist is to try to accept life as it comes to us, both happiness and suffering, and live aware in the moment.
My favourite teacher in high school was my physics teacher. I went to a Catholic school and he was some other denominational and quite fundamentalist. We often talked about our faith in physics class and i loved it. But he didn’t believe in evolution and there was a rumour that’s why he lost his job. I googled him recently and it looked like he was now in a Christian school.
Listening to you discuss the if everything is wiped out religious knowledge would change. The argument is frustratingly stupid. I almost went to call in, but as the conversation unfolded, most of the points I wanted to make were hit on. Like Jason, I don’t understand the point. The USA wouldn’t exist the same either, anything historically based would be different. No one claims that a revealed religion can be discovered by science, so bravo, great “argument”.
However, I’m pretty sure Ricky Gervais wants to use the thought experiment to promote a very narrow self-refuting view of knowledge known as scientism.
Christian and Jason, Please enjoy my failed attempts to condense the following into a three minute voicemail as I’m pretty sure none of them (with the possible exception of the last one) will not make it on the air.
1. If you listen more carefully to what Jervais said, he said if you eliminate all knowledge of fiction, fiction would be created with different details, but if you eliminate all knowledge of science, science would be recreated with the same details. But his thought experiment begs the question, what is fiction and what is not? It is probably historical fact that Jesus was a real person that cruised around Palestine, told a bunch of stories, and amassed a huge following. What aspect of that gets eliminated in Jervais’s thought experiment. Just the stories that Jesus told? All of the stories that the community of Jesus’s followers told each other to explain their collective existence? This is important because anyone studying the historical facts of Jesus life, death, and (we’ll leave this part out for now) cannot understand those facts without understanding the contemporaneous stories. The individuals who enacted the history, did so in reliance on the stories told by Jesus and his followers.
2. Which leads to the difference between verfiability and reliability. The scientific method is verifiable in that you can formulate a hypothesis and conduct an experiment to verify that your hypothesis fits with the experimental observations. And because natural phenomena are largely reproducible, the conclusions reached through the scientific method tend to be reliable. But reliable has a much broader meaning that is equally applicable to religion, or fiction. Communities, or societies, have always used (or relied on) stories, fiction, or mythology, to define themselves. Historical events are a big part of the stories, but the fiction or the mythology that incorporates historicity is what constructs a compelling human narrative that binds communities together. And stable communities are almost a prequisite for practicing the scientific method. Said another way no fiction = no community = no science. So in Jervais’s thought experiment, if we eliminated all fiction from the world, we would not recreate scientific knowledge at all.
3. Christian’s insistence that anyone (in this case Jason) who believes that Christianity is true must agree with Jervais’s conclusion as to all religions except Christianity reflects Christian’s continuing assumption that if Christianity is “true” it must be the Calvary Chapel version of Christianity. This is preposterous. Christianity, or religion generally, is a story that creates community for the betterment of the group and thereby the individual. (Most of us would say that when done well, the group of beneficiaries is bigger, and when done poorly, the group of beneficiaries is smaller. Although I suppose the Calvinists might say that when done well the rewards for the individuals in the group, however small, are maximized, while the punishments for those outside the group are maximized.) This is true regardless of whether the stories on which Christianity are historically accurate or merely accurate in as much as they serve their intended purpose. I go back to the Peter Rollins episode and Christian’s insistence that Rollins say whether he believes in the historical accuracy of the New Testament. This is entirely irrelevant to how Rollins would evaluate whether Christianity is true. He would say Christianity is the system of stories about Christ’s life, death, and resurrection (whether historically accurate or not) that tells us that world around us is transformed when we embrace our doubts and suffering and love our neighbor, and that the experience of this love, i.e. God, is what changes us and those around us. For Rollins, Christianity is true if love of neighbor leads to the transformation(s) foretold by the Christian story.
To bring this back to Jervais’s thought experiment, If we eliminated the current fictionalized details of the Christian story and people created a new story with new fictionalized details based on the idea that self-sacrificing love of neighbor transforms ourselves and the world around us, how would that story be any more or less reliable than the story that Jason, Rollins or anyone else affirms as true now. Other stories or systems of stories may lead to the same transformation, which would make those stories just as true as Christianity. (I think this is another way of stating Jason’s point about the allegorically Muslim dude in the Last Battle).
Did I get deleted?
From what?
So you post this in two places??? I’m not repeating my arguments here.
posted a very long comment on Gervais’s thought experiment this morning. It showed up with a time stamp and in the recent comments indicator. Now it’s gone. maybe it’s like your podcast segments when you forgot to press record–life changing for the benefit of no one.
Oh weird. I just looked to see if it was awaiting approval or anything. I can actually see it on the back-end and it says it’s approved…
What if I reply to it? Will it show up then?
I would love for Jason to drive for Uber…. just for the stories lol
The whole science/religion thing hashed out last week and this week both, it’s like 50 First Dates. There’s things Drew Barrymore knows or can find out every day, but if Adam Sandler wants to make himself known to her, he finds a way to reveal who he is. Whether he reveals or not doesn’t change his character, just if she knows him or not.
Same can be said about whatever true “religion” there is, if it’s genuine the proverbial Adam Sandler will find a way to reveal himself if he wants to be known. All the extra man-made cruft around that revelation wouldn’t exist the same, but at its core, that one true religion– whatever it is– would reemerge. Abraham claimed to do it. Moses claimed to do it. Jesus claimed to do it. Mohammed claimed to do it. Joseph Smith claimed to do it. Etc etc.
We all have been given access to touch a certain part of the elephant and will come to a conclusion based on our location, conjectures from those around us, and imaginations. But in every religion, the “elephant” allows itself to be known, as it would be after rebooting all knowledge.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
After posting it the first time, I realized that people are still arguing over here. I thought it made more sense here.
Doesn’t it seem like the whole historical knowledge vs. non-historical knowledge thing is a bit of a red herring in this science/religion discussion? It seems like there are two separate issues. One is how do you go about obtaining religious knowledge or belief vs how do you go about obtaining scientific knowledge or beliefs. But the other is about divine revelation and what it can be in different time periods and also who can receive it.
The Gervais thought experiment I think hinges on the assumption that there is no divine revelation, or if there is it’s not the kind of thing that can be tested, confirmed, etc. And that last part is true since religion has always partaken freely of ad-hoc explanations while science is supposed to hold itself to a different standard. But for a person who truly, deeply believes in the Judeo-Christian God, this shouldn’t be a problem because they must believe that that god would reveal himself to humans again (after standing by and allowing all the babies to be slaughtered, of course).
So maybe the better question is why would you believe in divine revelation at all if you had never directly experienced it – especially if the people who do claim to have experienced it set up some very self-serving power structures that don’t necessarily benefit you?
It reminds me of the old joke that if women had invented Mormonism it would be the wives who get to decide if their husbands can get into heaven or whatever they call the inner sphere.