Corgan Sow

Blasphemer, it's a beaver. You shall answer before Missus Gumby!

Ronin

Because we already have representative names for supernova and pulsar...any extra anthropomorphic baggage is utter nonsense, superfluous and limits our understanding of reality.

I understand you completely.

Ronin

I just can't get enough of this one ~

livius drusus

Hello Jacobus and welcome.

Superstition is hard to kill, as is evidenced by several threads here in the bastion of reason and critical thinking (a recent example). So my first question to you is not about what drives the transition, but rather what is your evidence that reason has in fact won the war against superstition? Are you positing a global movement from faith in things unseen to rational thought? How can we know that reason has won everywhere and for good?

Jacobus Altus

Livius Drusus:

Thanks for the thoughtful question and for the welcome.

You wrote:

“Superstition is hard to kill, as is evidenced by several threads here in the bastion of reason and critical thinking (a recent example). So my first question to you is not about what drives the transition, but rather what is your evidence that reason has in fact won the war against superstition? Are you positing a global movement from faith in things unseen to rational thought? How can we know that reason has won everywhere and for good?”

My experience is with Christians in the US, and I will answer in that context.

I think reason has won because we see significant numbers of Christians playing in our arena of rationalism, rather in their historic arena of authoritative pronouncement. In particular, I see modern theists using appeals to science and scholarship to justify (rationalize) their beliefs. Special pleading and appeals to mystery don’t now have the abosolute authority that theists have enjoyed over the centuries, and many have taken their ‘battle’ into our arena. Several examples:

- In the messy evolution shouting match, I see many Christians appealing to the second law of thermodynamics. Whether their appeal is falacious or not would be beside the point: appealing to science places the argument into the arena of rational discussion. A win, in my book.

- Some theists are now citing mathematical probability in their various anti-evolution discussions.

- The Jesus Seminar is trying to tease history from the Bible: its literary and contextual scholarship is driving the fundies nuts.

- The high criticism that the gospel authors were not Apostles of Jesus of Nazareth, but unknown writers a generation or two after Jesus’ death, directly contradicts many clerical statements held through the centuries by pronouncement. [Even ‘Jesus Crtist, Superstar’ promulgated the myth that the gospel writers were apostles of Jesus of Nazareth.]

The theists, having taken to rational arguments, with the possibility of refutation, now are on a one-way street. Since they can’t be wrong, inspired by a perfect God, retreat is impossible. Having made a rational argument, theists are simply stuck with it. In recent years, theists are writing these to a literate first-world population who have almost instant access and world-search capability. Recovery of a flawed argument is impossible once on the Internet. Even retraction would be extremely difficult. Theists’ pronouncements on the Internet are going to be there for many years, and their arguments to science and scholarship are subject to rational dispute: their unexpected one-way street to marginalization.

As a non-theist, I have the capacity to admit error. Theists do not.

As for reason ‘winning evreywhere’, I did not mean to imply such. And I really don’t think the ‘win’ is immediate or global. You might fairly conclude that I posit that the first world is going secular within decades though: see the ARIS survey. I would extrapolate that the majority of the world’s population will follow within several centuries.

Best, Jacobus Altus