This is an excerpt from an article on the Daylight Atheism blog. It has been condensed, but you can read the full article here.
In summary: finding the truth about God is like a cosmic shell game; the true believer has no chance at all of finding what the truth is. You have to play the game, and if you lose, you face damnation. This is completely unfair.
That's a brief summary. The condensed article is below. I think it makes a good point. Your thoughts on it?
"Consider a shell game, such as one might see in a traveling carnival. There are three identical hollow shells on a tabletop. The barker places a pea under one shell, then slides all three around. The objective is to guess which shell the pea ends up under.
In theory, it seems like a fair game. Even if you lose track of the pea, you still have a one-in-three chance of winning by picking a shell at random. But what if the game was different – what if, instead of three shells, there were thousands, and the barker was quick-fingered enough to switch all of them around at once? The odds of winning would be almost zero. And what if the stakes were higher – what if there was a million-dollar bet? And, finally, what if participation in the game wasn’t voluntary? That would be incredibly unfair, wouldn’t it?
The facts are these. There are literally thousands of religions in the world. Some are very similar to each other, even to the point of relying on the same holy books and diverging on only a few minor issues of doctrine or interpretation. Others are wildly dissimilar, differing on every detail of significance. All of them, however, are mutually exclusive. No one is a member of more than one religion.
Religion is a cosmic shell game.
If theism – any brand of theism – is true, then the universe is just a shell game at a rigged carnival, with God the barker whirling the pea of the One True Religion around under one of thousands of identical shells. Out of all those multitudes of faiths, the reward for picking the right one is an eternity of bliss and happiness. Failure to pick the correct one instead merits an eternity of torture. And your participation in the game is not voluntary. This, to put it lightly, is monstrously unfair.
How can we be expected to make that determination? How is it fair to ask – to demand – that we sort through this morass of religious confusion and come to the correct choice? The diversity of beliefs, creeds and practices to choose from is truly enormous.
And why confine ourselves to current religions? It is entirely possible that the true religion was a now-extinct faith. Nor can we discount religions because they do not have many followers, because they are too new (or too old), or because they are practiced only by people considered primitive by modern standards. Especially, we cannot use subjective personal standards of what’s too outlandish to be true. All of these things are logically irrelevant to the question of the truth of a particular belief system, and we cannot assume anything at the outset – we must begin with the null hypothesis that all religions have an equal chance of being correct. Only then can we begin to eliminate possibilities by careful examination of the evidence.
But there is another problem we will encounter if we try to do this. No religion can be conclusively proven or disproven by the evidence alone – believers of most, if not all, traditions would agree that, no matter what they feel the facts show, in the end you still have to make a leap of faith. If it were otherwise, religion would not be religion, but science.
However, if this is the case, we can never eliminate any religion from consideration. Some may require greater leaps of faith than others, but they would all stand a chance of being right regardless of the evidence arrayed for or against them. Unfalsifiable God hypotheses could always be invoked to fill the gaps between supportive facts or explain away any contrary ones. Believers could hypothesize that their deity deliberately withheld evidence, or even created false evidence, as a test of their faith, or for unknowable reasons of its own. Many religions do not even attempt to marshal evidence in favor of their claims, but simply postulate the existence of another world beyond our own whose existence must be accepted on faith alone.
Thus, any effort to rationally determine which is the true religion is doomed before it begins. The rules of scientific analysis are stymied by a barrier of faith, and any honest seeker after truth is trapped, hopelessly mired in a swamp of religious confusion. And even if we could somehow overcome the barrier of faith – even if we really did have some way to objectively determine which religions were true and which were false – what guarantee would we have that there would be anything left at the end? We might methodically cut away the thicket of false religions only to find that we had eliminated all of them and had nothing left over. In that case, the true “religion” would be atheism. The religions on this planet cannot all be right – but they could all be wrong!
No religion is different from all the rest. No religion stands out from the crowd. How can we even begin to sort through this mess? It is impossible. Even if we confine ourselves to those religions which anchor themselves in the facts, it would take a lifetime of study to make a comprehensive survey of the evidence for the claims of even one – never mind thousands – and almost no one attempts even that much, even for their belief system of choice. It is simply too much, too hard, to ask human beings with their brief lifespans of threescore and ten years to make this choice. There are too many options, too much confusion, too many religions competing and no way to discriminate among them. Their similarities are so similar, and their differences so different, that there is no good reason to prefer any one over all the others. Anyone who picks one religion is doing little more than guessing."
So, what do you think? Do you agree with the article, that finding the one true religion is like picking out the pea in a shell game - a pea among a thousand cups, with unimaginable stakes riding on you getting the right answer, and no option but for you to take the bet? Or do you disagree with it?
In summary: finding the truth about God is like a cosmic shell game; the true believer has no chance at all of finding what the truth is. You have to play the game, and if you lose, you face damnation. This is completely unfair.
That's a brief summary. The condensed article is below. I think it makes a good point. Your thoughts on it?
"Consider a shell game, such as one might see in a traveling carnival. There are three identical hollow shells on a tabletop. The barker places a pea under one shell, then slides all three around. The objective is to guess which shell the pea ends up under.
In theory, it seems like a fair game. Even if you lose track of the pea, you still have a one-in-three chance of winning by picking a shell at random. But what if the game was different – what if, instead of three shells, there were thousands, and the barker was quick-fingered enough to switch all of them around at once? The odds of winning would be almost zero. And what if the stakes were higher – what if there was a million-dollar bet? And, finally, what if participation in the game wasn’t voluntary? That would be incredibly unfair, wouldn’t it?
The facts are these. There are literally thousands of religions in the world. Some are very similar to each other, even to the point of relying on the same holy books and diverging on only a few minor issues of doctrine or interpretation. Others are wildly dissimilar, differing on every detail of significance. All of them, however, are mutually exclusive. No one is a member of more than one religion.
Religion is a cosmic shell game.
If theism – any brand of theism – is true, then the universe is just a shell game at a rigged carnival, with God the barker whirling the pea of the One True Religion around under one of thousands of identical shells. Out of all those multitudes of faiths, the reward for picking the right one is an eternity of bliss and happiness. Failure to pick the correct one instead merits an eternity of torture. And your participation in the game is not voluntary. This, to put it lightly, is monstrously unfair.
How can we be expected to make that determination? How is it fair to ask – to demand – that we sort through this morass of religious confusion and come to the correct choice? The diversity of beliefs, creeds and practices to choose from is truly enormous.
And why confine ourselves to current religions? It is entirely possible that the true religion was a now-extinct faith. Nor can we discount religions because they do not have many followers, because they are too new (or too old), or because they are practiced only by people considered primitive by modern standards. Especially, we cannot use subjective personal standards of what’s too outlandish to be true. All of these things are logically irrelevant to the question of the truth of a particular belief system, and we cannot assume anything at the outset – we must begin with the null hypothesis that all religions have an equal chance of being correct. Only then can we begin to eliminate possibilities by careful examination of the evidence.
But there is another problem we will encounter if we try to do this. No religion can be conclusively proven or disproven by the evidence alone – believers of most, if not all, traditions would agree that, no matter what they feel the facts show, in the end you still have to make a leap of faith. If it were otherwise, religion would not be religion, but science.
However, if this is the case, we can never eliminate any religion from consideration. Some may require greater leaps of faith than others, but they would all stand a chance of being right regardless of the evidence arrayed for or against them. Unfalsifiable God hypotheses could always be invoked to fill the gaps between supportive facts or explain away any contrary ones. Believers could hypothesize that their deity deliberately withheld evidence, or even created false evidence, as a test of their faith, or for unknowable reasons of its own. Many religions do not even attempt to marshal evidence in favor of their claims, but simply postulate the existence of another world beyond our own whose existence must be accepted on faith alone.
Thus, any effort to rationally determine which is the true religion is doomed before it begins. The rules of scientific analysis are stymied by a barrier of faith, and any honest seeker after truth is trapped, hopelessly mired in a swamp of religious confusion. And even if we could somehow overcome the barrier of faith – even if we really did have some way to objectively determine which religions were true and which were false – what guarantee would we have that there would be anything left at the end? We might methodically cut away the thicket of false religions only to find that we had eliminated all of them and had nothing left over. In that case, the true “religion” would be atheism. The religions on this planet cannot all be right – but they could all be wrong!
No religion is different from all the rest. No religion stands out from the crowd. How can we even begin to sort through this mess? It is impossible. Even if we confine ourselves to those religions which anchor themselves in the facts, it would take a lifetime of study to make a comprehensive survey of the evidence for the claims of even one – never mind thousands – and almost no one attempts even that much, even for their belief system of choice. It is simply too much, too hard, to ask human beings with their brief lifespans of threescore and ten years to make this choice. There are too many options, too much confusion, too many religions competing and no way to discriminate among them. Their similarities are so similar, and their differences so different, that there is no good reason to prefer any one over all the others. Anyone who picks one religion is doing little more than guessing."
So, what do you think? Do you agree with the article, that finding the one true religion is like picking out the pea in a shell game - a pea among a thousand cups, with unimaginable stakes riding on you getting the right answer, and no option but for you to take the bet? Or do you disagree with it?
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