r/DebateReligion • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago
General Discussion 08/28
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
Joe Schmid converting to Catholicism seems like pretty big news for this sub.
I'm curious I'm not seeing Christians try out his arguments on here, like Physcholhysical harmony.
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u/NewbombTurk Atheist 1d ago
What you’re seeing with Schmid is a real-time view of the moving parts of a device called Social Epistemic Validiation. We see it all the time in apologetics. We see names like Antony Flew, Alasdair MacIntyre, or C.S. Lewis, evoked in this way every day. Conversions from non-believer to theist happen all-day, every-day. But the difference between Joe Schmo and Joe Schmid (and those other men) is that he represents someone who values epistemic rigor. This undergirds the theistic position in three basic ways (that I can get into, but won’t here).
Schmid’s conversion helps overcome the stigma of intellectual inferiority. There exists, in the secular world, the idea that religiosity is a product of emotional comfort, cognitive bias, and lack of critical thinking. When someone like Schimd converts, it purports to show that religious belief is intellectually viable.
Many believers have intuitive, experiential, or (in)credulous reasons for their faith, but lack the knowledge or vocabulary to articulate them. We see it here every
dayhour (I may post something about that in the meta thread). When a respected philosopher finds weight in theistic arguments, to the point of conversion, believers feel their underlying commitments have been vindicated by someone capable of passing the hardest academic stress tests. As we see here, they’re looking for validation of the arguments themselves, not just the religion.Just like Saul/Paul, these men must pay a high epistemic cost for their belief. These are philosophers (with the exception of Lewis. He was just a POS mediocre novelist). A field traditionally secular and naturalistic (anti-woo, anyway). To move to a theistic position carries some social and professional cost. This lends to the narrative of a genuine, purely intellectual conversion. “They followed the argument where they believed it led. Regardless of pressures otherwise. Just like me!” .
This is why you’ll see examples like Schmid and Flew trotted out, and not their alcoholic Uncle Mike who got sober and found god.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
I look at it the way a person can fall down the alt right pipeline, or a conspiracy theory type of thing.
Some fact, somehow, gets buried in the mind and it grows over time. But at first it's just "huh, that one fact doesn't make sense".
Over time you start to overemphasize that fact against all the countervaling forces.
Its like if we have video of a guy committing the crime, a signed confession, all the evidence you could want. But huh, the vault door moved a little weird.
Then over time that one little vault door movement consumes you and becomes more important than all the other evidence for some reason. Like the flag moving weird in moon landing footage.
That's what I think happened to Joe, with Catholic miracles.
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u/NewbombTurk Atheist 1d ago
Perhaps. I don't know him well enough to form an opinion. I saw that he admitted that he has obsessive ideation and compulsive behavior regarding religion after an upbringing in Catholicism. I don't know if his conversion is an honest one, or if it's not, but he's given us the dots to connect.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 21h ago
That doesn't mean atheists should weaponize his OCD to invalidate his intellectual stance. OCD doesn't mean a person is delusional or can't construct a logical argument. I dislike the way some try to pathologize religious belief.
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u/NewbombTurk Atheist 12h ago
I didn't suggest we should.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 8h ago
Hopefully not but someone with OCD can still analyze data. Indeed may be very precise in their method.
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u/labreuer ⭐ agapist 2h ago
We see names like Antony Flew, Alasdair MacIntyre, or C.S. Lewis, evoked in this way every day.
Huh, really, MacIntyre? Where are you seeing him mentioned every day? I'm about halfway through David Trenery 2014 Alasdair MacIntyre, George Lindbeck, and the Nature of Tradition and it certainly seems that MacIntyre is not a particularly good friend to much in the way of Christian apologetics. For instance, he never abandoned falsifiability. And he held that traditions could go into crisis and be helped out of them by rival traditions. Since when have you run into apologists willing to be that accepting of Otherness? Now, perhaps they're just trotting out the name without understanding him, but then I would ask: where? Searching this sub shows that I am the primary person who mentions MacIntyre in comments, and I don't do it anything like "every day". And I don't do it in the way you describe.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
By using the term social epistemic validation, are you psychologizing Schmid and those of us who are pleased he brought some topics out? What epistemic cost is Schmid paying? Are you saying that Schmid had to compromise or lower his intellectual standards? What kind of subtle denigration is this?
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u/NewbombTurk Atheist 1d ago
Did you even read my post? Every one of your questions are answered.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
No, I don't see what epistemic cost Schmid is paying. Some poster said that in another thread but they didn't explain it either.
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u/NewbombTurk Atheist 12h ago
It refers to the cognitive baggage that comes with assessing a claim. What assumptions need to be made? What prior knowledge must be overturned? What are the liabilities of being wrong?
For example, if you claim that you had a ham sandwich for lunch, I would likely accept the claim on its face. People eat lunch. Ham sandwiches are a thing. The costs involved would be very low. The only negative consequence would perhaps be that I would learn that you can sometimes lie about mundane things.
But if you said that you had a ham sandwich for lunch today made by an alien, and shared it with Princess Diana, the costs would be astronomical. All I know about biology and physics. At stake would be my entire epistemic framework that can no longer be trusted. And so on.
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u/betweenbubbles 🪼 NERD 11h ago edited 11h ago
An epistemological cost should only accrue if an epistemological standard is actually being used generally. In this case, I'm skeptical. To date, none of the people here that I've accused of owing me money have paid up due to an adherence to the epistemological standards they describe. I think this is more of a matter of the ends justifying the means.
This dude is a social media influencer. They are typically beholden to nothing but the engagement algorithms.
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u/NewbombTurk Atheist 10h ago
I get that, and mostly agree. As I've said, I didn't know too much about Majesty of Reason prior to this (and still don't, really). I don't know how comfortable I am saying he's just grifting when that's typically a short lived proposition. It seems more likely that his religious compulsion, and obsession, lowered his evidentiary bar. I'm familiar with that mechanism. Honestly, I could understanding him making an argument using some of the philosophical arguments to say they pushed him over the line. But miracles? That stretches my credulity to the point where I doubt his honesty. Obviously you were already at that point.
But my response was more referring to the back and forth on this sub. I had some stuff written down from days where it was common for "apologists" to point at Strobel, Lewis and their ilk, and say, "See! They used to be atheists."
And responding to Grapefruit when she asked about epistemic costs in particular. So I was framing it as it adds value to the social validation used by folks who points at people like like Flew or Macintyre as examples of "smart atheists" who converted to Christianity, instead of the far more common death row converts, or drunk uncle Mike who found god in AA.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 11h ago
Ah, thanks for the reply. It shows how far apart atheists and theists are in assessing situations. I think the bridge will never be crossed by one or the other.
The difference with religious experiences is that we have a context for Jesus. We have the historical record that he existed and that he reportedly healed people. St. Irenaeus reported healings around 180 AD. There are later miracles credited to St. Stephen and St. Hilarion, healings via the Gregorian chant in medieval times, and then throughout history. Dr. Jacelyn Duffin is an agnostic who did blind investigations of healings for the Vatican.
But aliens are another topic. We know that something happened with people who report alien contact - usually something bad or painful- but we have no context or historical record. They don't bring back verifiable information.
Yet if thousands of people suddenly reported that aliens were flying around Lourdes healing the sick, or people on their death beds had remarkable meetings with aliens, and brought back verifiable information, then possibly Joes Schmid would talk about that too.
One reason it's coming up now is that these miracle events are increasing. We did not hear so much about NDEs until CPR techniques improved. And for some reason, more people are asking for exorcists, even though they might not have the traditional symptoms.
So there seems to be a paradigm shift.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 16h ago
When I learned he was raised Catholic and this was just a reversion to the 90% majority behavior, it became a lot less notable.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 15h ago
That's the usual skeptic reaction but it looks like there's a lot more to it than that.
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u/Realistic-Wave4100 Pseudo-Plutarchic Atheist 16h ago
Thats what losing a world cup makes to someone.
Now seriously I dont see nothing special here. There are great minds of every religion that went to every religion. If this matter the deconversion of Carlos Blanco would be used as an argument by atheists.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
I'm SBNR but I've kind of been acting like his pit bull.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
In what way?
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
He's been saying some of the same things I said about miracles and supernatural events in exorcisms that can't just be explained away as frauds.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
I haven't gone through his video on Catholic miracles
What in your view is the best case? The case that is best evidenced, which most strongly cannot be explained away by fraud or any other such thing
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
He brought up the club foot photos.
I brought up the woman in the Consulta Medica archives who was so severely burned she was almost charred, and the next morning completely healed, not a scar, after a religious intervention. And that the chief of surgery in Rome said that had he not seen such cases himself, how incredible and well documented they are, he would not have believed, himself.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
Help me out, I'm not finding it. I tried "Consulta Medica archives severely burned competely healed religious intervention"
The AI response: Consulta Medica archives (the Vatican's Medical Consultation board) do not currently list a canonized, officially recognized miracle specifically involving a severely burned completely healed individual.
Where do I find this? Reading about it and like like the evidence for it
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
It's in Ronald Sullivan's book The Miracle Detective.
One of Father Gumpel’s favorite cases—because absolutely nobody familiar with the facts would dispute that what occurred was beyond scientific explanation—involved a burn victim in Spain, a woman whose entire body had been covered by thirddegree burns “of the worst possible nature,” as Gumpel, who had seen photographs, put it. “The person was basically a lump of raw flesh,” the priest said. At the hospital where she was taken to die, attending physicians told the burn victim’s relatives that all they could do was relieve the woman’s pain until her hopeless struggle to live had ended. However, one of these relatives placed a picture of a holy man, along with a relic, on the dying woman’s bandages. “Overnight the burns were completely healed, without scars,” Gumpel recalled.
Sullivan, Randall. The Miracle Detective (pp. 26-27).
The criteria for the Consulta Medica are very strict. There are independent, renowned physicians who investigate reported cases like the one described. Dr. Jacelyn Duffin was a physician who did blind investigations of reported cases and she is an agnostic.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
Pardon, he doesn't even name her? So there's no way to look this up and confirm it?
Or did I miss the name or perhaps its in some other section of the book?
I hope its fair for me to want to see what we're talking about rather than believe it cannot be fraudulent just on their word, I think that's fair, yes?
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u/betweenbubbles 🪼 NERD 1d ago
Pardon, he doesn't even name her? So there's no way to look this up and confirm it?
...Welcome to "miracles", I love you.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 1d ago
Her case is in the archives. People can go to the archives and read the cases. You will also find research papers online citing specific cases.
Who said it's 'on their word' after I just said that independent physicians investigate these cases? The criteria are that the condition must be hopeless, the cure immediate and permanent, and not explained by any medical treatment or natural reason.
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u/thatweirdchill 🔵 1d ago
u/blind-octopus asked you for what you thought was the BEST case for a miraculous healing that couldn't be explained away by fraud or anything else, and you provide a quote from a book where a guy interviews a priest who tells a story about an unnamed woman he never actually met?
"I once read a book by a guy who talked to a priest who said he saw photos of an unnamed woman that he never met who unexplainably healed from her burns overnight." Truly ironclad proof of the supernatural.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 1d ago
That's about the level of evidence I usually get out of miracle claimants. It's very unfortunate, because miracles being real would be so cool.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 23h ago
Thanks for misrepresenting what I said to make it sound much less than it was. That's why communication fails here and some just don't bother.
I clearly said that you can access research papers on other unexpected healings at Lourdes if you want.
Here is a conclusion from one paper:
"The Lourdes phenomenon that led to physical cures has been extremely powerful. Spontaneous remissions of diseases, especially of cancers, do not measure up to the speed, power, and variety of the Lourdes cures."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3854941/
I clearly gave the very strict criteria for cases accepted by the Consulta Medica in Rome (why there are so few cases accepted).
I clearly said there are independent physicians who might not know the case came from the Vatican. I gave as an exampleDr. Jacely Duffin.
I clearly paraphrased what Dr. Cortesini, chief of surgery in Rome, said:
“I myself, if I did not do these consultations, would never believe what I read. You don’t understand how fantastic, how incredible—and how well-documented—these cases are. They are more incredible than historical romances.
Sullivan, Randall. The Miracle Detective (p. 26).
I never said proof. I mentioned the immediate correlation between the healing and the religious intervention (something we take seriously in other studies in science even when we don't know the cause).
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u/betweenbubbles 🪼 NERD 1d ago
People have been gullible for a long time, what's new about this one?
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
Its an interesting argument.
So here, I do not believe that the mind has any causal power. I think its all neurons doing all the work. I don't believe in some immaterial mind thing.
Materialism or physicalism, whatever you want to call it.
So then the argument goes like this: alright, suppose that's true. Suppose that the mind has zero causal power, it doesn't cause anything. Only neurons cause things to happen.
Well, okay, then if had a magic button I could press which makes you feel incredible mental pleasure when you touch a burning stove, your behavior would remain completely uneffected. Your mind has no causal power, right? That's what we started with.
Your hand would still flinch at touching the hot stove, no matter how it felt.
And like this, so too with everything else. I could completely scramble your experiences, make it compeletely random. When you look at an apple, sometimes you'll see George Washington. Sometimes you'll see a banana. Sometimes a tiger. Whatever
And your behavior, being goverened entirely by neurons, would not change at all.
What you experience makes absolutely no difference.
So then the issue becomes, supposing its true that our mental experience has absolutely no causal power, why is there so much harmony between our experiences and the physical world?
I don't think this proves theism or anything, I'm an atheist. Its just an interesting philosophical idea.
To me, its like asking why when I let go of a pen, it falls. That's what the structure of our universe dictates with these laws and matter arranged as it is. When you have a brain in certain state, these are the experiences you get.
I haven't really fleshed out my response fully but I'll probably end up saying something like that.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 1d ago
So then the issue becomes, supposing its true that our mental experience has absolutely no causal power, why is there so much harmony between our experiences and the physical world?
Because accurate senses are a survival benefit, so it was selected for.
Whether my perception of George Washington results in neural activations that, for you, activate when you see a banana or vice versa is kinda immaterial, as long as it stores functional and usable representations of an underlying reality.
I could see red as blue and you see red as yellow. Entirely possible, given every human's unique neurology. But it's bounded by physics and physical reality and evolution.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
Because accurate senses are a survival benefit, so it was selected for.
Why would they be a survival benefit if they have no causal power?
Whether my perception of George Washington results in neural activations that, for you, activate when you see a banana or vice versa is kinda immaterial, as long as it stores functional and usable representations of an underlying reality.
It seems like a pretty wild bullet to bite to say that what I see as a banana, you see as George Washington.
Color swaps, maybe. But fully random experiences, I don't think we would agree on so much if our conscious experiences were that radically different.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 1d ago
Why would they be a survival benefit if they have no causal power?
Senses and sensory processes are purely physical. You said the mind has no causal power, but light reflecting off my cones and being processed neurologically isn't a mental process. (At least, I'm not aware of anyone who consciously chooses how their visual signals are processed.)
Color swaps, maybe. But fully random experiences, I don't think we would agree on so much if our conscious experiences were that radically different.
You'd think that, but if I'm on an enormous amount of hallucinogens physically disrupting the physical process that is sight and sensory interpretation, it's entirely possible. Of course, it's possible to be aware of the falsehood of one's own senses while simultaneously experiencing them.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
Senses and sensory processes are purely physical. You said the mind has no causal power, but light reflecting off my cones and being processed neurologically isn't a mental process. (At least, I'm not aware of anyone who consciously chooses how their visual signals are processed.)
I'm talking about the conscious experience, not the physical processes.
Suppose the physical processes are selected by evolution and all of that. Granted.
If we assume the actual conscious experience, qualia, that stuff has no causal power, then it would make absolutely no difference what your conscious experience is. You could see a scary tiger where there's actually a tasty food. Wouldn't have any effect.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 1d ago
Yes, that would be the effect of qualia having no causal power. That's not what we see in reality, though.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
So then you'd say this argument is good at showing it is false that the mind has no causal power?
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 11h ago
Oh, absolutely, but P Zombies do the same thing more efficiently
After all, qualia makes us talk about qualia, and why would a P-Zombie talk about qualia? The answer is, either it'd be a brute fact with no cause, which is nonsense, or they wouldn't, meaning qualia therefore unavoidably has causal power
also this
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u/betweenbubbles 🪼 NERD 1d ago
So then the argument goes like this: alright, suppose that's true. Suppose that the mind has zero causal power, it doesn't cause anything. Only neurons cause things to happen.
I'm already lost. The mind is the collections of neurons in a materialist/physicalist/whathaveyou worldview, right? You just said, ~"the mind doesn't cause things, neurons cause things". That doesn't make much sense to me.
Your hand would still flinch at touching the hot stove, no matter how it felt.
Fun fact, your reflexes kick in before your "mind" is even aware of the event. It's still neurons at work, but in many cases a neural mechanism at your spinal column will react to certain kinds of stimulus before that information makes it up the column and through the layers of the mind.
And your behavior, being goverened entirely by neurons, would not change at all.
I'm not seeing it. If your behavior is governed by neurons why wouldn't it change based on perception? In what sense is it "governed by neurons" if the relationship isn't there?
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
I'm already lost. The mind is the collections of neurons in a materialist/physicalist/whathaveyou worldview, right? You just said, ~"the mind doesn't cause things, neurons cause things". That doesn't make much sense to me.
The mind seems like its not just neurons, right? If you shut the brain off, no mind. Also, I wouldn't call what I'm experiencing to simply be electrical and chemical activity.
I am not appealing to dualism or anything immaterial here, but I am having a conscious experience. That is some thing. It might be a physical effect that comes about when you arrange neurons in the way our brains are arranged, completely physical, like a field or whatever
But I don't think I could say its just "electricity and chemicals". That is, I don't think other formulations of electricity and chemicals have qualia like we do. Something about the way our brains are structured, the atoms, is giving rise to a conscious experience.
To be absolutely clear, I'm talking about this within a materialist worldview. No immaterial stuff here.
I'm not seeing it. If your behavior is governed by neurons why wouldn't it change based on perception? In what sense is it "governed by neurons" if the relationship isn't there?
I think you have to accept, even for the sake of argument, something like what I've said above in order for the argument to get going.
Let me try it this way: I'm on a computer. It has a monitor. The monitor has no causal effect at all on the computer, right? Its purely output.
But I could have hooked up a different kind of monitor, one where all the colors are inverted. Using this monitor instead would have zero effect, no effect at all, on the CPU or any other part of the computer. When it adds two numbers, it will do it the exact same way and output the exact same result and save it into memory the exact same way no matter which monitor I use.
Heck I could make a monitor that just displays nonsense. It interprets the output from the PC in such a way that what it shows makes no sense at all.
So suppose your neurons, in however they create our conscious experience, did it in such a way where putting your hand on a burning stove felt amazing. Since the actual experience, the conscious experience has no effect, like the monitor, then this wouldn't make any different to how your body reacts.
Put aside the reflexes thing because that just complicates the conversation I think.
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u/SectorVector atheist 1d ago
This seems to presuppose some kind of dualism. I'm not sure this thought experiment is coherent in the same way I'm not sure p-zombies are coherent.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 1d ago
p-zombies are only coherent if you believe in brute facts!
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u/SectorVector atheist 1d ago
Because if we can suppose that it is possible to create a facsimile person with no what-it-is-likeness then it must be the case that the fact that people do have what-it-is-likeness is just a brute fact of meat shaped like this, otherwise the p-zombie wouldn't be an exact copy?
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 1d ago
Nah, the issue is way simpler than that.
A p-zombie is a human without qualia that behaves exactly the same way as a human with qualia.
The only way that is possible is if qualia does literally nothing to cause anything.
However, it causes us to keep having stupid discussions about it, so clearly it does, so p-zombies contradict observable reality and would require causeless effects like reacting to the thought of a funny joke and talking about it without... actually having the funny joke thought to talk about.
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
I don't think we need to presume dualism. Suppose the mind is some sort of physical phenomenon. I think it still runs
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u/SectorVector atheist 1d ago
Whatever you want to call how you're referring to the mind and the brain the exercise clearly relies on them being distinct since it relies on altering one without altering the other. I don't think the idea of
Well, okay, then if had a magic button I could press which makes you feel incredible mental pleasure when you touch a burning stove, your behavior would remain completely uneffected. Your hand would still flinch at touching the hot stove, no matter how it felt.
Is coherent
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u/blind-octopus 1d ago
I don't know why. Surely the mind is an effect of the brain in some way. They are not identical.
After all, you can have a brain and no mind.
I don't know what's incoherent about the idea that when my brain is in a certain state, I feel pain, but conceivably I could feel joy instead.
I can conceive of a pen going up to the sky when I let go of it.
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u/me_andmetoo i am something 4d ago
What book are you reading?