1. Basic situation as I see it is this, God got it in the neck for the following reasons: a. Kant reduced demonstrations for his existence to a shakey moral inference. b. Philologists shredded the Bible so the text became unstable c. Voltaire & co mocked the inconsistencies.
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2. d. Darwin knocked out the natural history side of it. Genetics accelerated this. What’s left is, at best, the Taleb, Jung & Peterson approach. Taleb says religion encodes useful nowledge. Jung & Peterson say it’s psychologically true, i.e. ....
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3. ...you’ve got believe in something, and it’s better to believe in this tried and tested thing than, say, communism, which has worse outcomes. The problem is that there’s more than psych truth. I also know that religion rests on shakey ideas.
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4. Even if I know it’s a psychological necessity, and there’s a need for the numinous. Further problem, it turns out that religion—Xtianity in particular—was a hidden animating force for the Enlightenment and science, because it prioritised truth.
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5. Now that we’ve lost Xtianity, we’ve also lost the grounds for pursuing truth in science (and everything). This partly accounts for our drift to scientism. The result is that we know we’re largely determined by evolution and, at some level, physics.
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6. We also know we have some capacity to make our own values and shape our environment—though this is itself cosntrained by cognitive biases, evolution and, ultimately, physics.
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7. So that’s what man is at the moment: We’re without God, without the idea of truth, stuck with provisional models that might be completely subverted by our ambivalent relationship to truth and our own biological biases.
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