Do theists agree that knowledge of God is natural knowledge? What do atheists think of this concept?
Knowledge of God is acquired. It is taught. In many religions, you learn it from a book or from others who learned it from the book.
I like Dawkins' formulation for the prevalence of religion in human cultures. Man didn't evolve to believe in gods or religions. He evolved to coopt traits that evolved into mankind for other reasons.
He gives the examples of moths flying into flames. If you ask what evolutionary purpose that behavior serves because it is so prevalent in moth populations, perhaps universal, Dawkins will tell you that you are asking the wrong question:
What is the Darwinian survival value of religion? That’s not the right question, says Richard Dawkins. To find the right question, he relies on an evolutionary analogy: Why do moths fly into flames? It means instant death, so what’s the evolutionary value of this kamikaze behavior? Dawkins delivers a crash course in proximate and ultimate causality, two very important distinctions in biology. Moths evolved to navigate using celestial objects as compasses. The moon and the stars emit parallel light, a very reliable and consistent beam, meaning a moth can fly in a straight line guided by that light. Candle light is an entirely different source that emits light in a spiral… leading straight to the hottest part of the flame. These moths aren’t suicidal, says Dawkins, it’s a misfiring of an evolutionary trait because of a modern technology in their environment. “The right question is not, ‘What’s the survival value of a suicidal behavior in moths?'” he says, “The right question is, ‘What is the survival value of having the kind of physiology which, under some circumstances, leads you to fly into a flames?'”
Religious activity, by this reckoning, is post-linguistic man co-opting instincts that evolved for other reasons, such as the tendency of many mammals to assign agency to rustling leaves, for example, because to make a type 1 error could be lethal. Better to run from a noise that wasn't a threat than not to run from one that is. Also, children are born with a propensity to obey authority figures also due to evolution for the same reason. Obedient children are more likely to survive than ones who don't take the advice of parents and other elders.
Then, eventually, man develops language, and the priestly class co-opts these evolved instinct by telling the people that the activity of the world is due to a conscious agent who should be obeyed, and they have been programmed by evolution to hear and believe it.
Religion, Dawkins proposes, offers no more benefit to man than flying into flames and bulbs does for the moth. It is an expensive practice, consuming inordinate resources, for little apparent benefit except to the priestly class. Because of religion, people spend hours idly in church. They used to sacrifice animals and people. They spend hours praying to a God that probably isn't there and reading words that have little value if the central premise upon which they are based is false.
So, by this reckoning, the prevalence of religion in human societies is not because religion offers some evolutionary advantage, but because man had learned to exploit man and his innate proclivities unrelated to religion.
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It's a little bit of a digression, but consider the advent of the Sabbath and the cost to humankind because of it. I assume that once upon a time, it was expected that all able-bodied people work every day, whether that was herding, farming, fishing, or whatever. It would have been considered antisocial not to.
Then this priestly class and organized arise. They needed the faithful to periodically come to them with money and for indoctrination, and this meant walking or taking a cart or horse or camel each way, and staying and listening for hours, which meant taking a day away from work on a regular basis. How do the priests convince the people that NOT taking that day off is godly, while working is sinning, but just on that one day.
I think you can see where this is going. The first step was updating the then oral creation story. The week of creation was invented, six for working, and one for rest. And with it, the work week and the weekend. Did it never seem odd to anybody that a God would need six days to complete his work, and then another to rest.
Why the week? Natural cycles like days, months, and years are all either to frequent or too infrequent, so a new cycle of time was created that didn't match any astronomical cycle. This is probably how and why Judaism and later Christianity came up a Commandment to respect the Sabbath by taking every seventh day off for religious activities.
I mention this here because of the enormous cost to society to have an idle priestly class supported by people who are forced to be less productive one day in seven. Who benefits from that? Why would people agree to this? Because their instincts to conform and submit to authority figures compels them to, not because it is of any value to anybody except the priests who avoid labor and the heat of the day.
Planets maintaining their rotations, earth maintain it's rotation, sun maintaining, all this is signs. But people are so far gone in "science" authority, they can't see it.
The regularity of the cosmos is what we would expect in a godless universe stable enough for life and mind to form naturalistically. Consider a car driven by a human being and one going over a cliff. The car may speed and slow a little, and veer slightly left and right requiring correction from the driver. The second one will follow a predictable, mathematical path. That's the way the universe works, too. Orbits are entirely predictable and representable with simple mathematics. Mars doesn't wobble in its orbit or slow and speed randomly like the driven car. It's path is more like the one going over a cliff.
The proclamations of science have proven useful. None of them need a god. Religion has added nothing to that understanding. Au contraire. The Christian Bible got it all wrong. Biblical cosmology depicts a flat and stationary earth, a sun orbiting it that can be stopped, and a literal canopy of embedded stars through which rain leaks - the snow globe model. Why wouldn't we consider science the authority wherever religion contradicts it?
Forums are not a place of guidance, whether attaining it or giving it.
You're not going to be giving skeptics guidance (I'm assuming you mean religious guidance) because all you have to offer are unsubstantiated claims, which they disregard. Nor will you accept guidance from them, because they have nothing to offer you but reasoned, evidenced arguments, which cannot penetrate faith-based belief.
A watch also we know is designed for other then it's complexity but the type of material
What's interesting to me about this teleological argument for God is that the somebody walking along passes all of the shrubs or trees or pebbles without thinking they were intelligently designed, then comes across something that is, and immediately recognized that this thing is different from the natural objects around him. It's actually more of an argument that intelligently designed things and natural objects are different enough that the walker can instantly identify the lone intelligently designed object he encounters and distinguish it from everything else. It's different. So why generalize what is true for the one to everything else that didn't evoke this reaction?
Brilliant!
