The first 5 quotes are incorrectly attributed and I find doing this to be offensive. These are from Wikipedia describing Jaques Monod. Until you fix this I will ignore your post in its entirety.
Mitchell,
Thank you for pointing this out. This happened because they are from your response, even though you are not the author. I will try to fix it.
And computers can do that and have done this with learning and evolutionary algorithms, coming up with solutions that no human engineer or human game player ever thought of ā in this way we end up learning from them. This being demonstrable, it is not even reasonable dispute this.
This is not to say that computers are equal with human beings. They are not. But rationality is not the difference. Computers are not even alive. Consciousness is a product of life not rationality.
Exactly! Thus when Xtians (especially theologians) enamored with Greek philosophy tried to use mind body dualism as a basis for Xtianity they went in the wrong direction.
A good portion of atheism is a product of misguided theism. Having been led to look for God in intelligent design and rationality, it is little wonder to me that finding nothing there, they no longer believe in God.
This is a very interesting and thought-provoking point.
This got me thinkingā¦ alotā¦ and I wonder, what do you (and others) think about these questions:
- By pointing people to look for Him in the wrong places and them not finding Him there, it is possible to (for want of a better word) āinoculateā people against the idea of God?
- Pushing it further, to what extent can a community develop, essentially, a theological herd immunity?
For example, Jenny is interested in science and is pointed to Answers in Genesis by their well-meaning parents. Finding the arguments scientifically unconvincing, Jenny concludes God must not exist and turns to Atheism (A massiveover simplified, for the sake of argument). Subsequent conversations with Christians about God are then (in Jennyās mind) framed by what they learnt about the YEC āgodā making efforts at evangelism a non-starter (the āinoculationā effect).
Later, hypothetical Jenny links up with a community of majority Atheist peoples, perhaps through work or friendship at University. If enough share the belief that an inaccurately portrayed Christian āgodā does not exist, no serious conversation about Christianity can get off the ground among them. This might be because, in eyes of the community, the concept of āgodā has already been dismissed as untrue. As a result, the work or friendship group has developed, sociologically speaking, a āherd immunityā to theological enquiry.
What do you/others think?
Except that we are not a herd. People have an annoying tendency to think for themselves. When you lead people to look for God in a certain direction, some people just wonāt be interested. And then there is the next generation who already know the results. If you are thinking of doing this in each generation like some kind of social conditioning, that has its own problems and failings as demonstrated by the communists and the soviet bloc.
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I dunnoā¦ I was a teenager once and did/thought/said some pretty stupid things just because my social group did too. Plenty of people still live like that. 
Seriously though, I sometimes think Western society over emphasises the āIā at times and that people operate in āTribesā not just as individuals. The collective ideas of the tribe (and I mean that in a neutral sense) exerts a strong gravitational pull that is often hard to break away from for good or for bad.
Ultimately, I guess humans are both I and we; individual and tribe. Iām reading Between the Beginning and the End by Dutch Theologian J H Bavinck and he talks about a similar idea. As humans we are each Adam (an individual responsible to God) but we are also adam, mankind as a whole.
Feel free to push back, Iām really just thinking out loud 
I think Mitchell has it right. Iāve spent some time on atheist forums and almost everyone seems to reject belief based on apparent empirical claims which are mistaken. There also seems to be very little curiosity regarding the origins of religion with most harboring conspiracy theorist beliefs that it is all about manipulation and control. Scientism is also rampant and I find most online atheists assume that science will eventually answer all questions no matter how metaphysical, ontological, psychological or philosophical. Philosophy is often dismissed out of hand with rhetoric being the preferred method of persuasion.
Iām not sure what you have in mind with your second question. Could you clarify?
Iāve often worried about that in my own case. Iāve often felt like I donāt really fit in most groups/communities. I have a lot of empathy for others and making a meaningful contribution to the ātribeā has always motivated my choice of occupation. But Iāve always preferred to keep my own council and stubbornly do not want to know what anyone else thinks until Iāve had a chance to reflect on it enough to know what I think. I wish more people would do the same. I donāt like mobs.
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Western society does tend to extremes and for some time now we have been reacting against all the evils of too much emphasis on the āwe.ā There is a proper balance in there somewhere, if we can avoid the chanting of catchy one-liners which take things too far in one direction or the other. Perhaps one thing to remember is that there are so many different weās ā we of the community, we of the country, we humans of the world, we living organisms of the world,ā¦
That is certainly true and I came of age when that movement was especially strong. Iām sure I absorbed its influence. But recognizing that doesnāt justify a wild pendulum swing in the opposite direction. One direction our species has been moving toward for a long time is toward personal accountability and away from mindless collectivism. I would think the golden mean would be to work toward a deliberate, mindful community dedicated to the common good. It may be that political realities have pushed people toward creating nation states which are too large for that sort of endeavor. Leastwise it would probably be easier to work our way toward larger communities organically in a Confucian way rather than out of fear for survival. In some ways I see Christianity as doing something like that. Whereas splintering into ever more denominations may seem like a failure perhaps it is just being realistic about the size limits for a community conceived in this way.
On self-replication chemistry: " Eigenās paradox states that accurate replication needs complex machinery, but to make complex replicators through evolution requires accurate replication ā a chicken-and-egg problem"
Hi Liam, I like your post and your original herd immunity idea (very apropos at the moment 
)
I suspect that there is a lot of truth to the herd immunity idea. I have heard comments from some atheists that debunking YEC started them on the course. Dawkins attributes his atheism in large part because of the evidence for and explanatory power of evolution by natural selection. So I agree that for some people, finding out that AiG and YEC is nonsense would feel like a ābustā for religion, that they have āseen behind the curtainā, and conclude that the whole thing is a con game.
For these people I suspect that the feel lied to by people they trusted, who must have themselves based their faith on the literal truth of the creation account in genesis. The logic would be that if my parents were drilling YEC into me so ardently and tried to steer me away from the real answers by sending me to AiG, then either they think that faith in God is dependent on acceptance of a young earth, or they feel they need to convince me regardless of the truth otherwise I might lose my faith. Either way, I would conclude that I canāt trust their judgement anymore.
Therefore I would suggest that you are right in that bringing your children up to anchor their faith in YEC is a highly risky strategy if you want them to retain their faith into adulthood without locking them in a cupboard. However, I think you might be doing an injustice to many people here. The reason is that there are two other groups you should consider.
The first group is the ones that find themselves suddenly without faith (after finding out about evolution) and now face a crisis with their family and friends and community, and feel lost and alone and that life has no purpose. These people might typically have a nihilistic crisis and will often go to extremes to find a way back to faith. However, as these people were going through the process of losing their faith, they generally went online and listened to people like Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett, and went to podcasts like theatheistexperience and paulogia and see religion dissected and criticized from every conceivable angle. This group is typically trying to save their faith, but in doing so, end up losing it for more than just the failure of YEC.
The second group I identify here, rests on the fact that Jenny has shown an interest in science. Now this is a huge generalization, but usually people who are interested in science are drawn to its achievements, its relentless search for truth, its curiosity and wonder, its rationality, and just the desire to know. These people are thinkers and are already likely to be curious, doubtful or unsatisfied with some aspects of the general case for God or at least have questions and doubts about scripture or about some of the philosophical arguments. I myself was like this as a teen. In this case, Jenny was perhaps fighting her own doubts in other aspects of her faith and then, when she discovered that YEC and AiG was pseudo-science, she then allowed herself to fully explore her other areas of doubt. Then, following a lot of reading and research, confirmed her conclusion that belief in God is not warranted.
Now, I am not saying that I agree or disagree with āJennyā, but I am saying that as much as it is a mistake to anchor your childrenās faith in YEC, it is just as much of a mistake to fail to give people credit for having a mind of their own and being more complex and capable. I have seen this come up frequently as a ready dismissal of atheists and atheism, that they have just not thought about it very much or have jumped to the conclusion without proper consideration of other factors. (While this is surely true of some atheists, it is just as true of many Christians.)
One could perhaps argue the reverse and say that there is a herd immunity in Christian circles against hearing and understanding the arguments of atheistsā¦
The steady increase in people professing no belief in a god or gods, and considering that birth rates of unbelievers are lower than for believers, Christians are losing the battle here at an increasing rate. If Christians want to turn that around, then a more thoughtful approach is needed, that gives credit to the minds of potential atheists and seeks to address their questions seriously and across all fronts rather than just YEC.
As for those who have become atheists through this process; the current culture of belittling them and assuming that they just havenāt thought about it enough, or donāt have the right information, is a major mistake and means that there is a gulf between unbelievers and believers that cannot be crossed.
Both of the above groups will feel like a veil has been lifted. Like a spell has been broken. Think about how once you know how a magician performs a particular trick, you canāt un-know it. This is exactly how a newly minted atheist feels. To suggest that you can raise a child through to adulthood and then they learn that one thing is untrue about what you have taught them and they toss out the entire thing without any further thought is a very narrow view and suggests that the young adult is shallow and feckless.
If you want to reach atheists, you must do it with respect, with facts, with logic and evidence, and you must not use the very language and approaches that drove them away in the first place. You canāt un-break the spell by using the same incantation you did before. Using the same rhetoric that kept them in the faith will no longer attract them back into it. Using more pseudo-science to convince people who have seen through the pseudo-science will not work either.
The immunity you speak of is deeper than just being turned off religion because YEC is broken. It is being turned-off Christianity because of the mode of argumentation, the methods of reasoning, and tendency to assume the conclusion and beg the question. This is because, and I have heard this many times from atheists, they believe they have been fooled by poor arguments, tactics and trickery right across the board. The sort of comments I hear from new atheists is a sudden awareness of how silly they themselves sounded when they were believers. Again, I am not siding with anyone here, but just pointing out the the immunity you speak of is no simple thing.
The biggest mistake you can make is to think that if atheists knew what you knew, they would not be an atheist. As long as you think like that, you will fail.
Thanks Liam, I love the herd immunity idea though!
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@GJDS
This chicken and egg problem is not so straight-forward. If what is being replicated initially is very simple, then the machinery of replication may only need to be as simple or slight less simple.
Also, the replicated material in the case of DNA is only four base-pair combinations yet can produce infinitely complex outcomes such as building complex replicators, which is precisely the situation one would expect to find if we were looking for a system that could lift itself up by its bootstraps.
I appreciate what you have to say here and I think youāve answered the question I put to @LM77 earlier about herd immunity. I think you have a nicely balanced perspective with simple humility devoid of treacle. I appreciate that.
I am one of those atheists but not one who had to struggle much to get away. Perhaps as a result Iāve never needed to read atheist screeds to buffer my resolve. Disbelief wasnāt anything I was invested in. If anything it was a bit of nuisance but unavoidable.
Watching Joseph Campbell being interviewed by Bill Moyers caught my attention and led me to become curious about what it is which gives rise to God belief. Jung, Watts, Pirsig, Hillman and McGilchrist have led me to believe there actually is something which gives rise to God belief which is valuable and important, even if it isnāt an actual being of the sort that have coalesced within any of the religions, Christianity included. But even if it isnāt a being with a mind or psyche which operate just like ours, it does pay to maintain a relationship and to realize that we are actually the minor partner in this arrangement. I have to imagine there are Christians who feel this way too but, if there are, they rarely if ever uncloak to let a guy know.
At the same time, no religion which allows its practitioners to feel a bond with this silent partner can be wrong. What it is cannot be pigeon holed into a simple concept. It is linked to us but is not under our dominion. My hypothesis is that it is a product of consciousness just as is what we call our āselfā. Both are gifts not of our making. The trick is how to instill respect for the silent partner when the evidence is forever elusive. Perhaps a creator with an ever after plan will sweeten the deal but, as with YEC, I think there is a risk of setting people up for a fall from faith as those two attributes become increasingly untenable.
Personally, I think whatever hypothesis one embraces for explaining the mystery, it would be better to always speak of it tentatively since we donāt and never will have confirmation in this life. I like the way Hillman speaks of these things as having an āas ifā quality. So, for my hypothesis, I would say āit as if God is a co-product of consciousnessā or āit is as if Godās bandwidth is as deep as ours is shallowā or even āit is as if God assembles and holds together the world as we know it as a cohesive whole which we are able to examine a thimble full at a time with our smaller band width of consciousnessā.
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Thanks Mark, I appreciate your comments.
Yours are some interesting ideas. I will look up those authors and think about that some more.
Fair warning, a lot of Watts is forgettable. The only thing I recommend by him is The Wisdom of Insecurity. I read a lot of Jung but was never sure I knew exactly what he meant. Pirsig was probably schizophrenic and wrote two philosophical novels but I liked the metaphysics behind his Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. I read most of James Hillmanās books and absorbed a lot of his way of understanding what we are as people. Iain McGilchrist was another huge eye opener and Iām still chipping away at his The Master and His Emissary but animated treatment of a talk he gave summarizing his ideas is what hooked me.
Nothing about this topic is straightforward, and your idea of ālift itselfā does not address the problem.
My position here is that the universe is rational, in that it is governed by rational laws, which of course were created by a rational Being. The other view seems to be that, yes, we live in a universe that has rational laws, but it is a magical place, because there is no rational source for these rational laws.
As have said before. It seems evident to me that a Rational God created a rational universe to be the rational habitant for a rational species, humanity. OK, saying God did it does not prove anything. The job I have taken on is to show why it is most reasonable to say God did it and then do the work of science to show how God did it. The best reason I feel called to do this is because no one else is doing it and it seems that others feel bound to prove that God did not create rational human beings.
Instead of writing a book about the Selfish Gene, Dawkins should have written a book about the Rational Gene and helped us understand after why 100 years of evolutionary science does not have a clue as how the brain has evolved.
We seem to be in agree that humans are composed of body, mind, and spirit, but I do not agree with your history. The Fathers of the Church were Hellenistic Gentiles. Greek philosophy was part of who they were and was part of the reason they turned from the old gods. Their task was to make Christianity compatible with this philosophy thus converting most of the Hellenistic world and the way they did this was through the Trinity.
This should have meant that humans were also a trinity of body, mind, and spirit, but this was a bridge too far. They did their job, now we need to do ours. We need to break with Greek philosophy and see humans as they really are, body, mind, and spirit, a trinity
Mat6erialism/science takes body/mind dualism and tries to make it body monism, but if that were the case then they would have lost the mind, decapitated humanity, which is actually a worse model than mind/body dualism. They āsolvedā the problem of dualism by imposing a worse solution. I donāt see where you have developed your a model of the human as mind, body, and spirit ,which we need so we can replace Western Dualism with trinitarianism.
We cannot blame others for our mistakes. I am responsible for what I do. I am not perfect, however God knows that I am not perfect and does not expect me to be perfect. God does expects me to do my best with the task and the tools God has given me.
This comment has generated comments which are far off the current topic. We need a new topic for this new line of discussion. .
My position is that the universe is rational, because all rationality requires is following a set of rules, and the universe and all its parts certainly do that. I also believe that the universe was created, but I donāt think rationality is His most important characteristic but the least important. The other view is not that much different. We believe in a God that has no source and they believe the laws of nature have no source. Their view is no more or less āmagicalā than our own.
It seems evident to me that a living spirit God created the universe as a womb in order to give birth to living spirits which would be much more like children than the angels. This because life is a self-organizing process and thus while the angels are no more than what God made them to be, we as living organisms are what we make ourselves to be by growth, learning and the choices we make. So while the angels start with much greater knowledge and power, the angels have built in limitations. But our infinite potential reflecting Godās infinite actuality means there is no end to what God can give us and end to what we can receive from God. This eternal parent-child relationship is the substance of eternal life.
The rational order of the universe was simply a necessary requirement for life. It doesnāt mean that we need to worship rationality as our God.
The principle flaw would remain. Genes are not autonomous entities directing evolution or anything else. It is simply a means of storing information about what is learned in the evolutionary algorithm by which life develops.
ā¦ sacrificing Christianity on the altar of the idol of reason is idolatry.
The doctrine of the Trinity, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons and one God is not the the tri-partate modalism which you turn this into. That we have body, mind, and spirit has absolutely NOTHING to do with the doctrine of the Trinity. The three headed God which you are pushing is more like something from Hindusim.
Your tripartism is not quite my view at all. What I believe is an intersection of two effective dualities: that of mind and body and that of physical and spiritual ā which means there are really four different parts: physical body, physical mind, spiritual body, and spiritual mind. And the physical is just temporary. Only the spiritual is lasting.
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We believe that God has no source because God is eternal and self created. Science does not believe that the universe is eternal and self created.
An eternal, self created God is not magical, because that is Who God is. An eternal, self created universe is magical, because that is not what the universe is. .
The beauty of the Trinity is that God has no āmost important characteristic,ā but three equally important characteristics., including the ability to think. This is hard to understand, but certainly not illogical or impossible.
Interesting. You make the universe alive, which was the problem that Dawkins had with Lovelock (Gaia.) It explains humans, but not so much other biota. Do you see a connection with ecology?
We worship God Who is Rational (Wise,) Powerful (Almighty,) and Loving (Spirit.)
Of course.
I do no think that you know enough about what I think to make this judgement. Have you read my article on Academia.edu on the One And the Many? God does not have three heads any more than God has three bodies and three āhearts.ā
You are right. We have very different views. You have not resolved the dualism of Greek philosophy, but end up with spiritual monism which is more Hindu than anything I believe. You do know that Hinduism and Greek philosophy have a common source.
Still your thinking shows originality and effort. If you are interested in an alternate point of view I will send you my book.
We were not talking about science or about the universe. Science is not in opposition to theism. We were talking about atheists and natural law. Whatever you say about God to justify saying God has no source they can say about the laws of nature which they claim is responsible for creating the universe. You called it magical, not me. But I donāt see how their view is any more magical than ours. They certainly think it is less so. After all the laws of nature are derived from scientific evidence and as far as they can tell, God is just a story we made up. To be sure, the claim that their view comes from science alone is just nonsense, so there is no justification in equating their view with science. But the idea that their view is more magical than the theist view is just as nonsensical if not more so, especially since the description and answers which most theists give to questions is little more than an appeal to divine magic and mystery.
Ah yesā¦ your tripartate modalism equating the trinity to body, mind, and spirit ā which has nothing to do with the doctrine of the Trinity. It takes more than just saying the word āTrinityā to be in agreement with the teaching of the creed of Nicea 325 AD defining Christianity ā the word isnāt even in the creed, let alone the Bible.
The universe is not alive. Stop making stuff up. A womb does not have to be alive. Ever hear of an artificial womb? Not alive ā just a machine like an incubator. The important thing is its functionality which we have been able to reproduce to some degree artificially (still a work in progress).
Christianity worships one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ā not a Tripartate being of three functionalities. What you worship sounds more like this, which I guess is more a derivative of Buddhism than Hinduism.
The teaching that everything comes from God who is spirit comes from the Bible (John 4:24) ā spiritual monism indeed. And the teaching that we are resurrected to a spiritual body which is imperishable while the physical body passes away all comes from Paul in 1 Cor 15.
I donāt know what you think resolving the dualism of Greek philosophy consists of. But their dualism was all about mind and body and equating the mind to some other realm of existence which the Gnostics equated to the spiritual. This is something which I certainly reject. There is nothing spiritual about the mind ā it is a completely physical existence. Computers demonstrate that rationality is completely physical, and there is nothing spiritual or non-physical about it. If there is any dualism there it is an effective dualism of two forms of self-organization (life) with their own wants, needs, and inheritance passed on to the next generation. The teaching about a spiritual aspect of existence comes from the Bible and it is only what it says about spiritual things which I care anything about. If you want to say that comes from Hinduism too, that is your problem, which I want no part of.