Re: Is Belief in God Rational? A Fresh Look at the Evidence

On Tue, 3 Jun 2025 15:17:31 +0000, Carl Kaufmann wrote:

jillery wrote:

On Mon, 02 Jun 2025 13:13:25 +0200, IDentity <identity@invalid.org>
wrote:
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On Sun, 1 Jun 2025 13:03:32 +0100, David <David@invalid.invald> wrote:
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Hello.
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I'd very much welcome reader's views on this recent article:-
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https://aish.com/is-belief-in-god-rational-a-fresh-look-at-the-evidence
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//What if belief in God isn’t blind faith—but a logical conclusion drawn
from cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom?//

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"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into
an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."
  - Werner Heisenberg, physicist
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From a conversation with the Indian guru Mirra Alfassa, (AKA "The
Mother"), many decades ago:
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Q: Mother, can physical science by its progress open to occultism?
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A: It does not call it "occultism", that's all. It is only a question
of words.... They are making sensational discoveries which people with
occult knowledge already knew thousands of years ago! They have made a
long circuit and come to the same thing.
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With the most recent discoveries in medicine, in the applied sciences,
for instance, they are contacting in this way, with a wonder-struck
interest, things which were known to certain sages a very, very long
time ago. And then they present all this before you as new marvels —
but indeed they are rather old, their marvels!
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They will end up by practising occultism without knowing that they are
doing so! For, in fact, as soon as one draws close, however slightly,
to the truth of things and when one is sincere in one's search, not
satisfied by mere appearances, when one really wants to find something
and goes deep, penetrates behind appearances, then one begins to
advance towards the truth of things; and as one comes closer to it,
well, one finds again the same knowledge that others who began by
going within have brought back from their inner discoveries.
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Only the method and the path are different but the thing discovered
will be the same, because there are not two things to be found, there
is only one. It will necessarily be the same. It all depends on the
path one follows; some go fast, others slowly, some go straight,
others, as I said, go a long way round — and what labour! How they
have laboured!... Besides, it is very respectable.

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Arthur Clarke's Third Law states "Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic." This might seem to follow the spirit
of what you post above.  An important distinction is, while some
people might regard technology as magic, there is no reasonable way
magic can be regarded as technology.
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WRT the last sentence, there is an argument I often make in the
context of fantasy RGPs that magic as presented IS technology. It is
an intrinsic, understandable, repeatable phenomenon that can be
consciously exploited towards desired effects.
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That leads to the question of when does something stop being magic
and start being science? "Girl Genius" has a corollary to Clarke's
Third Law: Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from
science.
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The real question, IMHO, is what constitutes "sufficiently
advanced/analyzed"? Where is that line?

In possible support of your hypothesis, I was watching a 'reaction'
youtube video in the sleepless wee hours, this time a LOTR reaction
of someone in their early 20s who kept making comparisons to of
Gandalf to Dumbledore or wizards he knew (from his gaming?).
In particular, he kept explicitly saying he hoped they would explain
exactly what powers and spells Gandalf had, like he wanted to read
some D&D guidebook because, after all, that must be where they got
the whole idea of Gandalf. It's only logical.
Of course I'm perhaps over-interpreting the root causes of his
perspective. Perhaps my perspective of having been deeply immersed in
the lore of Middle-earth before Gygax and Arneson started playing
with polyhedral dice, having died many a death of cholera, and
wielded chickatrice corpses on the way to ascension warps my
thinking about johnny-come-lately pontification.
But that wraps us back to the start of the thread. What is
rational is so context dependent. Certainly, people can rationalize
their beliefs, with varying degrees of rigor. A full on derivation
that begins with Set Theory may be too much to ask for, and it
certainly won't fit in the margins of this thread.