this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I see where you're drawing the correlation because we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of higher powers the same as I can't tell you whether you are a brain floating in amniotic fluid running through a simulation or not. People approaching philosophical questions usually reach an impasse because that is the nature of philosophy.
But a religious person would be more akin to someone telling you that they know we are in fact floating brains powering an AI civilization. They can't provide you with solid proof but you are incorrect if you think otherwise.
No but the latter is what science-minded people do. They insist that matter comes before consciousness without being able to prove it, though what's extremely obvious in everyone's direct experience is that consciousness is needed before anything else is said about the world. It's a false status quo.
There is a prevelant theory but it's still an unanswered philosophical question that noone truly intelligent would tell you they knew definitively. Anyone asserting that matter 100% comes before conciousness is on the same wavelength as someone telling you there is 100% a god controlling everything.
So we can at least agree that people who are confident in something unproveable are objectively unintelligent.
You're wiggling a bit but let's go with that and get to your original question.
Based on your responses, you probably hold a core belief that matter comes before consciousness. You're smart enough to admit it's not a certainty but you've probably lived your whole life fairly assured it's the case. You speak English well so you have at least been exposed to western culture - which is very materialistic (religious or no, Christianity is also functionally materialistic), and so the core belief both serves you well, and is positively reinforced.
Any new information you get is subconsciously aligned to this core belief. Any decision you make is informed by it. You have a network of data in your head and it all connects to this and some other core beliefs. The same way a religious person can be highly logical but they hold a different core belief and so subtly, everything they know aligns to that belief. The more irrational the core belief, the more convoluted the links are of course but it makes sense to them - they just may not be able to represent it to you with the symbols that is language. And sometimes you'll just get them doing the loading screen face when they try to rationalize their views - then it just becomes a question of which core VALUE is deeper for them; rationality or their religious view.
If rationality is more valuable, it necessarily demolishes the religious view. It demolishes a core belief to which they have aligned all their knowledge about the world. Which is a hell of a trip, and can be very scary. Which is also why rationality often loses.
Maybe some hold both in esteem and sort ideas accordingly holding all is a bit of the whole.
Sure, many people do that kind of a dance or compartmentalization. But that only lasts as long as nothing severe comes to challenge it. Sudden death of a loved one is a cliche but commonly forces people to conclude something.
Death is a certainty. That's what it leads me to conclude. Idk what happened after death. I do know sweating it isn't benefitting me or my loved ones. What does benefit all of us is loving each other and doing what we can for each other with the time we have.
Born and raised in north america, went to a baptist church as a kid so I'm fairly familiar with the bible as well as different types of religious people you'll meet.
As an agnostic now, my only core belief is I know that I don't know. That's something I apply to any philosophical question so it's alien to me that some people can separate logic and religion.
For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn't answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it's not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.
People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it's own, as far as it goes.
Logic is reasoning based on proveable facts so no it's not going to tell you what something is, just how probable something is.
That wouldn't be the logical conclusion because we are limited as humans. We make mistakes, we don't understand everything, we misremember, we can even gaslight ourselves such as the mandela effect. If 50 people told me they experienced an alien abduction, that doesn't make it logically true, now if they were to show me proveable facts of the abduction then I would be more inclined to believe.
I'm not sure what you mean with the last paragraph, you are clearly describing illogical subjective experiences but calling them "very reasonable logic of it's own". What you are describing isn't logic, what you're describing is the opposite of logic. Someone claiming something they believe is true but can't provide validity.
You said that you don't know for sure if it's matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you're saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.
If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren't sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what "objective" and "subjective" means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?
So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren't you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it's implications?
Can you point out what specifically makes you think I believe that? If it will clear things up I will give you my opinion about the subject outright, I would say it depends on whether there is a creator or not, does this creator have a physical form, where did they come from, what allows them to create life, and many more questions. This question can't be answered with our knowledge and it is built on other unanswerable concepts so any answer is just a guess.
Could you explain what that has to do with understanding objective and subjective means? I cannot prove to you that anything exists, I can't even prove to you that we live in the same reality, or that you are a sentient being and not a figment of my imagination. "I think, therefore I am", I can observe my reality but I can neither prove my existence nor confirm my observations are correct. The only conclusion that leaves me with is, I know that I don't know.
I don't value objectivity over subjectivity unless we're talking about logic because logic is about overcoming subjective beliefs to find the objective truth, so it should follow that I hold your logic to the rigidity that it's defined by no?
And again, you are making assumptions about me with no truth behind them.
Every time you're challenged on your beliefs, you claim to not know, but when you're challenging other people's beliefs you use words like "irrational" and "illogical".
You don't behave like someone who is calmly on the fence at all.
I worry that your debating position and your actual beliefs are out of alignment and I'm not sure whether you're misleading us or yourself.
They are just trying to align everything that's being said to their previously held beliefs. People aren't typically all that aware of what their core beliefs are because an alternative, challenging core belief would have to breach all the way into it for it them to realize they have one. Without the salient contrast, they just don't notice it's there. It's just blue against a blue background, and unless a yellow comes along, they're not going to realize there's anything there. The materialistic worldview is so prevalent that a random online conversation isn't likely to get through, no matter how well argued. I've had similar discussions many times and sooner or later people just kind of "reset" and I find myself having to say the same things again and again because there's just this impenetrable thought loop going on. Logic doesn't breach it, it's just that they keep asking for all the different ways we can reach the number 42. If I tell them 41+1=42, they ask again and I have to try to explain how 40+2 is also 42, and so on ad nauseum. "Hahaa, but there's a 33-4347+132562+767368, I bet you can't do anything to get that to 42". That can be done all day. If the person isn't truly open for new ways to think (and few people in these type of settings are), as in they aren't actively looking for it with an open curiosity, it's not likely they'll realize much during that convo.
It's really, really, natural and normal. I just thought it was funny because OP is behaving the exact same way they're asking about in their initial post. They'll probably eventually figure it out.
If I don't know something then im going to say I don't know, am I supposed to make up an answer? I call it irrational and illogical to be confident in something noone can know, which is the opposite of my stance.
What exactly are you reading as "not calm"? I've talked nothing but logic, no emotion involved in this at all yet the other guy is taking leaps and bounds to make assumptions of me that have all been incorrect guesses.
What exactly is it that confuses you so I can clear it up?
You present yourself as an agnostic but are very one sided in the debate, and you only have criticism for religious people. If you're going to use words like irrational and illogical for religious beliefs, at least have the intellectual honesty that your position is far more atheist than you're admitting to us or yourself. It's not nuanced or balanced at all.
You really don't need to go far to find proof that what you just said was false. I said people who claim with certainty that matter came before conciousness are as unintelligent as someone claiming they know what happens in the afterlife.
Sure, and Trump claims to respect women equally and has no qualms promoting women, but his contempt for them leaks out and the overall picture is starkly clear.
Maybe you don't realise that normal people consider words like "illogical", "irrational" and "unintelligent" pejorative.
Your behaviour is very like the people on here before the election spending at their time explaining why the Democrats are terrible and people shouldn't vote for them, but when challenged, claimed that they didn't support Trump at all. It was never clear whether they were lying to others or themselves
You're being condescendingly dismissive about other people's beliefs, overwhelmingly about religious beliefs, and I begin to think that you yourself believe that agnostism is the most defensible intellectual position, so you adopt it in theory, but you use it mainly to belittle religious viewpoints. I think emotionally and in behaviour you're an atheist, but you're not prepared to admit it to yourself because your intellectual heroes are agnostic and you look down on staunchly atheistic people, despite behaving like one online.
Give in. It's 2025. Be yourself.
Ah I see what the problem is, you think you know me and you've created an entire personality based on things I never said. Then when I give you proof of your false accusations you try to paint me as a villain that is harassing all religious people even though I haven't. Ad hominem. Have a good night buddy
Would it help you if we called it anti-theistic rather than atheistic? Regarding your overwhelmingly anti-theistic perspective, there's a difference between belief and proof that you're ignoring - you can't prove your atheism and you disrespect people who believe things without proof, so you deny your atheism.
But you believe lots of things without proof. It's how we go about our daily lives. It's normal. You don't get your spectrometer out so that you don't inadvertently believe without proof that the skirt is blue despite knowing full well that you are vulnerable to optical illusions, and you don't have to have proof that the creepy guy is a creep to avoid him. This is normal. This is how we evolved to learn about the world.
I think the reason that I've upset you is that I've caused you cognitive dissonance, because I assert that you believe atheism without proof and it seriously challenges your self image because the one argument you used against religion all the time was that believing things without proof is illogical, irrational and unintelligent, and whilst you're happy to claim that you mean that in the nicest, most neutral, inoffensive and non-insulting way, you don't half react badly when I put you at the receiving end of your own criticism.
If you really in your heart truly believed that atheism and religious belief both have equal merit and there's no rational way to decide between them, you wouldn't spend the whole day inviting religious folk to explain to you why they're so irrational, illogical and unintelligent when it comes to religion. You have an opinion, and it's very strongly held, but you never admit it, because it's not as logical as claiming there's no answer and you so very strongly want to believe that you're logical and rational. But I want you to accept yourself as you really are, a bunch of flesh and blood, leaping to conclusions every day on everything based on flimsy evidence and little logical deduction, controlled by emotions and flooded with hormones all day long. We all are. It's ok. We evolved to have gut feelings for our own protection. You believe atheism but you assert agnostism intellectually. You dismiss the evidence of your own behaviour and attitudes to keep up the self pretence that you drew beliefs are exclusively deduced logically from cast iron evidence, but that's just not how humans decide things that they care about at all. It's how they solve maths problems, not how they decide how to treat each other on social media.
I think you really need to come to terms with the fact that you're fundamentally human and accept that you have some beliefs you can't prove, like everyone does.
Remember that you believe in the supremacy of science because your parents and teachers taught you to and told you stories of the empirical method's victory over philosophy for making accurate predictions, not because you preformed some grand comparative experimental study of different philosophies yourself. We believe what we believe because it seems right to us, and we so very very very rarely get out the tape measure and national statistics when we think someone is unusually tall. It's ok to have things you believe that you didn't prove, it's not ok to believe that you prove everything that you think is true; you wouldn't even be able to have breakfast before it was too late if you did.
No, I don't know you at all, all I've got to go on is the way you're behaving in this thread.
If you think that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” isn't condescending and dismissive, your social awareness is extremely low, and I also think your self awareness about your own beliefs is rather low.
You like to assert that you are balanced, but you also like to spend all day calling religious folk unintelligent, illogical and irrational.
Your "have a good night buddy" is as utterly unconvincing as your neutrality.
So after accusing me of everything under the sun in a few comments based on lies, you now claim you don't know me at all. Well if you don't know me at all then stop categorizing me as a democrat and trump-like because you could not be further from the truth. You're not using any logic as evidenced by your random accusations, you're acting purely on emotion because you feel that I am attacking religious people even though you can read the conversations I've had with theists capable of being pleasant in this thread.
The words logical, irrational, and unintelligent are used because that is literally the topic of the post. If that bothers you I recommend you move on and reply to some other posts more relatable for you.
Again, ad hominem fallacies all over your comments because you are not arguing with me because you believe I'm wrong, you are arguing with me because you've projected a personality onto me that is not based on truths. You are the type of person to give religion a bad name because you're unable to hold a converation like an adult and prefer to throw a tantrum if someone's beliefs don't align with yours. Don't waste my time
Uh, the politics was an example of similar debating techniques, I made no assertion about your political viewpoint at all, that's entirely opaque to me.
I also made no assertion about your personality, just that your viewpoint is atheist, and I made no ad hominem about you unless you have contempt for atheists and you consider that me asserting that you believe in atheism is offensive.
I did assert that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” is condescending and dismissive and that if you don't believe that, you need to improve your social awareness, and I absolutely stand by that.
You say that as if it's an external environment that didn't come from your own beliefs about religion. You're the OP! You set the topic yourself! You yourself framed it this way! The self dissociation and lack of awareness of your own beliefs is even more striking than normal here.
I don't believe that you're wrong about lack of scientific evidence on the issue of theism vs atheism at all. I do think you're wrong about whether you're at all neutral on the subject.