lukewarm take at best, and i’m superficially on the same side here.
the notion that a potential soul takes energy from a person is completely unqualified, and used as a basis for the rest of the argument. there are so many external energy sources in the universe even before we start talking about a “spiritual plane”.
I didn’t say the soul pulls energy from the person, but there has to be interaction between material and spirit (I don’t need spirit to be its own manifold in this model so I didn’t presume it)
If the soul doesn’t interact with the material then there’s no connection between the two and theyre not associated.
So we should be able to detect that interaction. It should have enough of a footprint that were able to notice something even if only side channel effects (which is how we discovered radiation and the heating properties of microwaves).
And we haven’t.
As I said, it doesn’t rule out spirit, but like many apologetic arguments, it takes a lot of weird presumptions to assert that spirit does exist, does interact with material, yet cannot be detected with the scientific means we have in the twenty first century. It can happen but then it requires stark changes in the models of mechanics we have (such as possibly the simulated-universe hypothesis). In this case our scopes are good enough to see the proverbial teapot. 🫖
But I appreciate that it’s difficult to comprehend what the issues are, and why this is a failing not merely of Christianity but any narrative that involves spirit or afterlife. It rules out most models of ghost and fairy phenomena as well.
And don’t worry. If you don’t get it today, we’ll have many (hypothetical, thankfully) days together in the break room so that I can assure you do.
Based on his description, it doesn’t have to have an interaction. But, if it doesn’t interact with the material world at all, then there could be no connection or interaction at all between a body and a spirit. That means that you could not ever see or feel spirits in any capacity, and a physical human could not have a soul “attached” to it or associated with it in any way, even if the soul did exist.
If there were no interaction at all, it could never be detected and might as well not exist to us. If there were an interaction, you would expect to be able to detect evidence of it or at least one of its side-effects to indicate that something is there.
He is not saying that we’re so awesome that we surely would see something if it was there, mind you. He’s saying that what we can see already pretty well covers what is happening, so any other phenomena we want to say are happening are not detectable by any means yet devised and our world model works without the need for an outside unknown variable like spirits or souls to make the math add up.
Philosophically speaking, a phenomenon that is completely undetectable and does not influence or interact with anything in any way can be argued to be not happening, full stop. Things in this category fall into the realm of belief/faith, because that’s the only realm things that can’t be measured can exist in.
but that argument would never persuade anyone, it’s just intellectual autofellatio for people who are already on that side of the debate.
if your belief system incorporates souls or spirits, then the fact that they can’t be measured surely is even more proof for them existing outside the “real world”. just like how someone who believes in reincarnation wouldn’t believe that your good and bad deeds are somehow tallied chemically within your body, but kept track of in some incorporeal way, to be used after you’ve left the mortal coil.
all of these systems are based on coincidence and things that are inherently unknowable, like prayer or what happens to your conscience when you die. trying to logic someone out of a belief system isn’t worth the effort or even an interesting endeavour.
That argument wouldn’t persuade someone who is willing to rely on faith, because they have given up reason for loyalty, much the way MAGAs assert the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; it’s a statement of fidis (faith, or fidelity; loyalty) rather than an assertion of truth.
But for those of us trying to understand what is, the silent void is evidence of a silent void in a world where events are not only detectable but also have effects that can be detected through side channel attacks. It’s how the science we depend on to fight plagues and land airplanes and determine evolutionary links is not based merely on a handful of observations but an abundance of data that consistently points towards our mathematical models.
But again, the reason I posted it here (as opposed to athiest communities or philosophical communities) is I know its an oversized pill. Even those who live their lives as naturalists don’t want to acknowledge the gravity of what that means. And I’ve thought about it more than all the proselytizing evangelists I’ve encountered have thought about their belief, combined. I doubt Ned Flanders is going to have much luck with me (or those like me who love thinking about these things) at the water cooler.
And to be fair, my exploration and coming to terms with insignificance was a rough climb down into the abyss and back out again and maybe about a third up the other side. The common problem in Miskatonic University of professors going mad from revelations of forbidden truths is one I’ve experience myself. (Studying the German Reich and the Holocaust in the aughts when the US started feeling fashy did not help matters). We humans want to be special. We want to be God’s chosen. We want to be more than social hominids polluting ourselves to death with industrial exhaust. We want to, at least, be colonizing space and one of the elite species that escaped their terrestrial prison. And we’re not.
Camus’ absurdism is about coming to terms with the reality of death, of a meaningless chaotic world that (considering his time and experience in the Résistance) might not actually be worth experiencing, as a lot of it sucks and is suffering.
Religion, as Camus called it philosophical suicide but others call it a leap of faith is the most common response to the realization that we live our lives to no divine purpose. Most choose to veer away and pretend that reality is different. And that is the nature of faith.
Put simply, there are no embarrassments to materialism, and this is even the consensus of religious scholars.
It didn’t seem at all like an argument to me or an attempt by the OP to persuade anyone of anything. I read it as a description of their thought process as to how they arrived at the conclusions they did in their own life.
While some might find that enlightening if open to it or threatening if they disagree, it didn’t strike me as an attempt to talk me into their (non)religion.
I call it geeking out which is usually instead about anime plots or TTRPG characters and worlds. And it’s a habit of us neurospicy folk that often scares those who aren’t.
My whole point was that while Trump’s memo was meant to enable Christian proselytizers, there is a whole demographic of thinkers (mad, free or otherwise) who will also be enabled, so this may well be a Chesterton’s Fence issue, especially if those thinkers are the office clerks who are super good at data crunching and making sure the LAN doesn’t fall apart.
lukewarm take at best, and i’m superficially on the same side here.
the notion that a potential soul takes energy from a person is completely unqualified, and used as a basis for the rest of the argument. there are so many external energy sources in the universe even before we start talking about a “spiritual plane”.
weak.
I didn’t say the soul pulls energy from the person, but there has to be interaction between material and spirit (I don’t need spirit to be its own manifold in this model so I didn’t presume it)
If the soul doesn’t interact with the material then there’s no connection between the two and theyre not associated.
So we should be able to detect that interaction. It should have enough of a footprint that were able to notice something even if only side channel effects (which is how we discovered radiation and the heating properties of microwaves).
And we haven’t.
As I said, it doesn’t rule out spirit, but like many apologetic arguments, it takes a lot of weird presumptions to assert that spirit does exist, does interact with material, yet cannot be detected with the scientific means we have in the twenty first century. It can happen but then it requires stark changes in the models of mechanics we have (such as possibly the simulated-universe hypothesis). In this case our scopes are good enough to see the proverbial teapot. 🫖
But I appreciate that it’s difficult to comprehend what the issues are, and why this is a failing not merely of Christianity but any narrative that involves spirit or afterlife. It rules out most models of ghost and fairy phenomena as well.
And don’t worry. If you don’t get it today, we’ll have many (hypothetical, thankfully) days together in the break room so that I can assure you do.
why does there have to be interaction?
Based on his description, it doesn’t have to have an interaction. But, if it doesn’t interact with the material world at all, then there could be no connection or interaction at all between a body and a spirit. That means that you could not ever see or feel spirits in any capacity, and a physical human could not have a soul “attached” to it or associated with it in any way, even if the soul did exist.
If there were no interaction at all, it could never be detected and might as well not exist to us. If there were an interaction, you would expect to be able to detect evidence of it or at least one of its side-effects to indicate that something is there.
He is not saying that we’re so awesome that we surely would see something if it was there, mind you. He’s saying that what we can see already pretty well covers what is happening, so any other phenomena we want to say are happening are not detectable by any means yet devised and our world model works without the need for an outside unknown variable like spirits or souls to make the math add up.
Philosophically speaking, a phenomenon that is completely undetectable and does not influence or interact with anything in any way can be argued to be not happening, full stop. Things in this category fall into the realm of belief/faith, because that’s the only realm things that can’t be measured can exist in.
but that argument would never persuade anyone, it’s just intellectual autofellatio for people who are already on that side of the debate.
if your belief system incorporates souls or spirits, then the fact that they can’t be measured surely is even more proof for them existing outside the “real world”. just like how someone who believes in reincarnation wouldn’t believe that your good and bad deeds are somehow tallied chemically within your body, but kept track of in some incorporeal way, to be used after you’ve left the mortal coil.
all of these systems are based on coincidence and things that are inherently unknowable, like prayer or what happens to your conscience when you die. trying to logic someone out of a belief system isn’t worth the effort or even an interesting endeavour.
That argument wouldn’t persuade someone who is willing to rely on faith, because they have given up reason for loyalty, much the way MAGAs assert the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; it’s a statement of fidis (faith, or fidelity; loyalty) rather than an assertion of truth.
But for those of us trying to understand what is, the silent void is evidence of a silent void in a world where events are not only detectable but also have effects that can be detected through side channel attacks. It’s how the science we depend on to fight plagues and land airplanes and determine evolutionary links is not based merely on a handful of observations but an abundance of data that consistently points towards our mathematical models.
But again, the reason I posted it here (as opposed to athiest communities or philosophical communities) is I know its an oversized pill. Even those who live their lives as naturalists don’t want to acknowledge the gravity of what that means. And I’ve thought about it more than all the proselytizing evangelists I’ve encountered have thought about their belief, combined. I doubt Ned Flanders is going to have much luck with me (or those like me who love thinking about these things) at the water cooler.
And to be fair, my exploration and coming to terms with insignificance was a rough climb down into the abyss
and back out againand maybe about a third up the other side. The common problem in Miskatonic University of professors going mad from revelations of forbidden truths is one I’ve experience myself. (Studying the German Reich and the Holocaust in the aughts when the US started feeling fashy did not help matters). We humans want to be special. We want to be God’s chosen. We want to be more than social hominids polluting ourselves to death with industrial exhaust. We want to, at least, be colonizing space and one of the elite species that escaped their terrestrial prison. And we’re not.Camus’ absurdism is about coming to terms with the reality of death, of a meaningless chaotic world that (considering his time and experience in the Résistance) might not actually be worth experiencing, as a lot of it sucks and is suffering.
Religion, as Camus called it philosophical suicide but others call it a leap of faith is the most common response to the realization that we live our lives to no divine purpose. Most choose to veer away and pretend that reality is different. And that is the nature of faith.
Put simply, there are no embarrassments to materialism, and this is even the consensus of religious scholars.
It didn’t seem at all like an argument to me or an attempt by the OP to persuade anyone of anything. I read it as a description of their thought process as to how they arrived at the conclusions they did in their own life.
While some might find that enlightening if open to it or threatening if they disagree, it didn’t strike me as an attempt to talk me into their (non)religion.
i’ve never seen someone write like that just for sharing.
I call it geeking out which is usually instead about anime plots or TTRPG characters and worlds. And it’s a habit of us neurospicy folk that often scares those who aren’t.
My whole point was that while Trump’s memo was meant to enable Christian proselytizers, there is a whole demographic of thinkers (mad, free or otherwise) who will also be enabled, so this may well be a Chesterton’s Fence issue, especially if those thinkers are the office clerks who are super good at data crunching and making sure the LAN doesn’t fall apart.