{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate","description":"I. Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham\u2019s Bulldog) and Richard Chappell debate the existence of God. So do JP Andrew, Benjamin Tettu, Sangwon Lee, Ethan Muse, other Ethan, and \u201cAtheistic Journals\u201d, all within this month! I thought the omnipresence of the early \u201800s online atheism debate was a time-bound historical phenomenon. But now that the blogosphere has reincarnated as Substack, it\u2019s back, nearly as strong as ever. I enjoyed participated in the early 00's version, but the current incarnation leaves me cold. I can\u2019t get as interested as I once did in the details of the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Argument From Miracles, et cetera. It\u2019s not just that I\u2019ve already served my time in the theology mines. My lack of belief in God intuitively feels like it precedes all of these things. Consider by analogy a society where people regularly debated whether aliens assisted the rise of Napoleon. There are many reasons to believe in such assistance: Napoleon\u2019s rise from Corsican nobody to Emperor and would-be world conqueror was a bizarre deviation from the usual pattern of history. He won battles outnumbered 4-to-1, when everyone knows victory usually goes to the larger army. He became monarch of France immediately after it had declared eternal enmity against the concept of monarchy and resolved to murder anyone who didn\u2019t hate monarchy enough. And the arguments against such intervention are comparatively flimsy. True, nobody saw aliens, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could conduct its interventions in secret. True, our prior for alien intervention is generally low, but maybe this is unjustified: we have no idea how many historical events the aliens have intervened in; Alexander the Great was pretty strange too. True, Napoleon finally lost, but this is not decisive; maybe the aliens only wanted him to blaze brightly for a few years before his eventual defeat, or maybe stronger aliens were backing the Duke of Wellington. In a world where this hypothesis somehow entered the space of serious debate, it would be hard to dislodge. Our own historical community is protected from it not because they can precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against each of these considerations and conclude its falsehood, but because common sense precludes entertaining it in the first place. This isn\u2019t to say that Reason doesn\u2019t work - if someone could precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against these considerations, they would get the right answer - but as a historical matter, this type of delicate reasoning wasn\u2019t how our society resolved this question. My atheism is more deeply rooted in whatever prevented us from considering this question in the first place than in the type of delicate reasoning that could get us out of it. https:\/\/www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/why-im-staying-out-of-the-substack ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"