In response to Ryan Walters' post "Why..." (March 1, 2012):
While it is true that religion is not necessary for people to act morally, not every person thinks critically and determines what is right and what is wrong. This is the reason that societies have laws. However, laws are external rules; religion, by tapping into a person's internalised beliefs, can become internal.
Furthermore, this question assumes that religion has no basis in reality, which is a very difficult claim to prove. Some religions, certainly, can be disputed by appealing to empirical evidence which contradicts their doctrines; others, though, take this into account and add the idea of unknowability into the very definition of their deities. Such religions can be neither proven nor disproved.
I'm afraid building unknowability into your concept of god doesn't really protect you from reasonable criticism. That would be a classic informal fallacy of appeal to ignorance.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if this course does nothing else for you, I hope it leaves you with the sense that the importance of religion in people's lives need have very little to do with the literal truth of the foundational stories they tell...
True, but it does prevent your claims from being disproved - it simply doesn't prove them either. If one says that lack of evidence is enough to disprove a concept, one could also say that atheism lacks evidence that there is no deity; if a deity is by definition unknowable, then its unknowability is not evidence that it does not exist.
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