Happy Thinks-giving

Here's something to think about while you're processing all that L-Tryptophan in front of the TV.

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias noted that another blogger had made the case that the very fact that people everywhere believe in a religion is evidence that it's true. As this person said (quoting from Yglesias' piece):

... As soon as homo sapiens developed consciousness, we became conscious of (what seems to be) a numinous reality interwoven with our own; it's just possible, surely, that we started experiencing the numinous because it happens to be real...

OK, that's a pretty good case. We believe in God because He exists.

Ah, but Matt knows exactly where the hole in that argument is. And he hits it pretty hard.

The trouble, I think, is that one thing just about everyone should be prepared to agree about is that most peoples' religious beliefs are false. As you can see in the handy chart I stole from this site, there's just too much diversity in religious belief. Whatever the right thing to believe is, most people don't believe it. At best, you can combine the Christian and Muslim blocks (and the trivial number of Jews) to form a very slight majority in form of some form of monotheism. Even here, though, the folk practices of many Catholics (and unless I'm mistaken, Orthodox Christians and Shiite Muslims as well) has strong polytheistic elements. It's only a kind of rhetorical overreach on the part of atheists -- pitting "religion" versus "not religion" as the key disagreement -- that creates the appearance of a large majority in favor of "religion." On The Uncontroversial Subject of Religion...

Ah, yes, and don't forget, all of them believe they're the one who's got it right. It's not like they're looking at the same thing from a different angle -- you saw what Pat Robertson said. Everybody else's gods are just demons.

Yglesias had more:

There's clearly a significant human predilection for not-supported-by-science beliefs of various sorts -- in the existence of a god or gods, astrology, fortune-telling, alien visits to earth, the healing power of crystals, etc. -- but there's no particular convergence of these beliefs on anything in particular. Meanwhile, on many of the particular question you might ask about religious subjects, atheists are going to be in the majority. Like most people on earth, atheists don't believe that Jesus Christ died for man's sins. Similarly, just like most people, atheists don't believe that Muhammed was Allah's greatest prophet or that the Hidden Imam will return. And, again, like most people atheists don't believe that you'll be reborn on earth after death in a new body.

Ha! He's gotcha there, you have to admit.