I’m going to comment on some of this:
I’m going to ignore a lot of what she says. Why? Because a lot of what she says consists of question-begging assertions, in which she tendentiously characterizes the opposing position, rather than mounting a real argument to the contrary.
This is because what she’s doing here is a very in-house piece which plays to a sympathetic audience of fellow infidels. An exercise in mutual flattery.
This chapter is already long as it is. Instead, I'll encourage you to spend a little time on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer websites.
Her reliance on these sources unwittingly illustrates her lack of critical thinking.
When you look at the history of what we know about the world, you see a noticeable pattern. Natural explanations of things have been replacing supernatural explanations of them. Like a steamroller. Why the Sun rises and sets. Where thunder and lightning come from. Why people get sick. Why people look like their parents. How the complexity of life came into being. I could go on and on. All these things were once explained by religion.
This is closely related to #1 (the consistent replacement of supernatural explanations of the world with natural ones). But it's different enough to deserve its own section.
When you look at the history of religion, you see that the perceived power of God has been diminishing. As our understanding of the physical world has increased -- and as our ability to test theories and claims has improved -- the domain of God's miracles and interventions, or other supposed supernatural phenomena, has consistently shrunk.
Examples: We stopped needing God to explain floods... but we still needed him to explain sickness and health. Then we didn't need him to explain sickness and health... but we still needed him to explain consciousness. Now we're beginning to get a grip on consciousness, so we'll soon need God to explain... what?
This is what atheists call the "god of the gaps."
That’s a popular, ignorant caricature of “religion.” Except for a handful of occasionalists, Christian theologians have always affirmed a doctrine of second causes. You also have a doctrine of providence in Scripture. People new perfectly well that rain, lightening, and thunder came from clouds. Indeed, they could see that for themselves. Same thing with so many other natural events.
If God (or any other metaphysical being or beings) were real, and people were really perceiving him/ her/ it/ them, why do these perceptions differ so wildly?
When different people look at, say, a tree, we more or less agree about what we're looking at: what size it is, what shape, whether it currently has leaves or not and what color those leaves are, etc. We may have disagreements regarding the tree -- what other plants it's most closely related to, where it stands in the evolutionary scheme, should it be cut down to make way for a new sports stadium, etc. But unless one of us is hallucinating or deranged or literally unable to see, we can all agree on the tree's basic existence, and the basic facts about it.
i) I’d just note in passing that an idealist like Berkeley can deny the tree’s basic existence without being deranged or hallucinating. I don’t agree with him, but his position is consistent and even rational, if pretty outré.
ii) More to the point, a tree is hardly fundamental to our existence. But take something far more elemental like time. Time conditions human existence is a way that a tree does not. Time is a pervasive feature of human experience.
Yet time isn’t directly perceivable. And for that reason, there are conflicting theories of time. Broadly speaking, you have the A theory and the B theory. And these, in turn, break down into many variations on the A theory and the B theory.
This is an issue in physics as well as philosophy. Does physics imply a “block view” of time?
There are even people like Zeno who deny the reality of time, and justify their denial by very ingenious arguments that are hard to disprove.
By Greta’s logic, we should deny the existence of time simply because philosophers can’t agree on the nature of time, or even the existence of time.
The fact that religion runs in families.
The single strongest factor in determining what religion a person is? It's what religion they were brought up with. By far.
This dramatically illustrates her utter lack of self-critical judgment. Yes, religion often runs in families. Likewise, irreligion often runs in families. Indeed, the pattern operates at a regional or national level as well as a familial level. I daresay a higher percentage of women named Maria are religious than women named Greta. “Greta” is Swedish, and Sweden is less religious than Latin America.
Over the years and decades and centuries, our understanding of the physical world has grown and clarified by a ridiculous amount. We understand things about the Universe that we couldn't have imagined a thousand years ago, or a hundred, or even ten.
That’s true up to a point, but the progress of science is easily overstated. To my knowledge, the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics is just as controversial today as it was a century ago.
Likewise, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity remain irreconcilable despite the finest minds in the business devoting decades to resolving the problem.
Or consider the Darwin wars, that broke out a few years ago within the evolutionary establishment.
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