In all these years debating with religious people I ve never been faced with an argument that I ended up to find challenging or hard to dismantle. They go from the clever ones to nonsense one ( like "cause I feel it in my heart" ) to the most stupid and elementary ones ( like the classic "what if you're wrong" ) but in the end they always can be rejected by use of reason and logic (even if they usually find unsatisfactory those answers cause they dont praise reason and logic ). Maybe I ve been unlucky and found only weak debaters. So my question is both to religious and not religious people
To non believers I ask, Have you ever faced an argument that really represented a challenge for you or that you weren't able to dismantle?
To believers I ask, is there an argument that you think you can present and that no unbeliever has ever been able to provide a good answer to? ( assuming it wasn't only because you would reject every possible explanation going against your faith, like for example creationists rejecting all the arguments against Noah s ark )
As a nonbeliver, I have come to accept that historically religion was built on reason and evidence, but a very different set of propositions about how that evidence is organised. You see, the problem is that when you try to tell why someone believes what they believe, you get tied up with the problem is less about evidence, than the
interpetation of the evidence. We have come to assume that "reason" necessarily looks for naturalistic explanations to phenemeona (at least first) and uses science to establish the nature of the world as a product of natural phenemeona. This however, does not consistently hold up to examination and you start getting "mystical" ideas when you dealing with things that are 'too big' (the big bang), 'too small' (quantum mechanics), or too long ago to be directly observable. it is when you are dealing with these "unobservables" that we start to project things on to them and creates 'gods' possessing a will and consciousness. Our "reason" is the product of millennia of intellectual evolution and so is not an absolute standard by which to dismiss religious belief.
for example. say for a moment that you said you couldn't trust your teachers and you had to prove that the world is round using
only you own senses. that's actually pretty hard because you look at the horizion, and the immediate vicinity would seem to imply that the world is flat. It is only when you travel
beyond the horizion that you get to a point where you cannot see where you have come from or where you are going. that gives you a hint. So if you think about someone who was asking the same question thousands of years ago, from a position of ignorance, you can see how they may have arrived at the idea that the earth was a flat disc based on the horizon. we take an awful lot of information for granted, so religion wasn't "stupid" or "illogical", it was a way of seeing the world before the scientific method became distinct from philosophy (in the late 19th and ealry 20th century- which is still
very recent in terms of human history). recognising this evolution shows that it is important not to assume that reason provides an absolute standard of the world because of how dependent we are on the accumulated knowledge of the past and how that knowledge changes. the obvious question is whether that increasing knowledge marks a progress
away from religion as a superstition. As I said, I'm a nonbeliever, so you can guess my answer to that.
