No bad, you gave me a good seque for my next post in the series.

“I once had an interaction with a woman on another blog who described Satanic influence that was casting doubt on her faith. I tried to convey to her the absolute peril of subscribing to system where the belief was itself actively compensating for doubts about the belief. To no avail.”

Yeah. In fact, often such a person will be told that the ‘Satanic influence’ itself is proof that her faith is true. Or in other words, the more you doubt, the more you can be assured of the validity of your beliefs. Christian logic is like working in a candied pretzel factory…it all gets twisted, salted, and dipped in chocolate (or carob, as you prefer).

Tacroy:

You make a good point, which is exactly the point Duncan is making, if I’m reading him right. And your analogy of real fathers vs. the ‘Heavenly Father’ is apt enough, even without requiring an exact 1 to 1 correspondence. When statements are made such as ‘God loves us’, and ‘God cares for us’, these mean something in a context we can relate to; a human context. Furthermore, THIS is the God delivered unto the flock through the kind of preaching and teaching that goes on in most Christian gatherings. It’s when the gross contradictions to the GH are pointed out that apologists start waffling. Common sense expectations are qualified away until there really isn’t much of a God left. His apparent aloofness is rationalized through exegetical nit-picking, or reinterpretations of what ‘love’ and ‘cares for’ actually mean. And this doesn’t just go on within the confines of the GH hypothesis. Common understanding is skewered throughout, from justification of internal inconsistencies, to all the other factors which point to the mythical nature of the belief system itself. If a caring, active God were real, the world would be a MUCH different place!

I don’t understand why the simplicity of the GH/MH is so hard to grasp for some. Naturally, there are going to be quibbles regarding the exact way things should work themselves out, but the overall picture is strikingly clear, I think. It would be one thing if we were talking about the Deist’s version of God. Then the only thing anybody would be arguing about would be whether or not we could glean an original designer of the world. But seriously, any of these other theistic arguments could apply equally to any invisible friend you choose, with little to no tweaking.

There was a Christian I knew some years ago; we often talked about these things. One day he walked into the apartment where I was painting some cabinets, and announced “Jim, I don’t believe in the bible or God anymore.” The remaining months that we worked together were filled with conversations about how we had deluded ourselves, and how utterly transparent that delusion was. Believe it or not, it really is a lot like losing the belief in Santa Claus, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense at all. You feel kind of silly for having swallowed such an obvious fraud, maybe a little embarrassed, but…you get over it, and move on.

Hey, reality isn’t always great. In fact, it sucks a lot of the time. But I just believe that a thinking person owes himself or herself a shot at seeing things for how they really are, rather than going on to the end of their days believing in Santa, or other assorted fairy tales. Furthermore, considering the circumstances it’s my opinion that seeing the God of the theistic myth as anything like a truly loving father is a perversion, and an insult to fatherhood.

(I was just proofing and noticed that I said I don’t understand how people can believe in this stuff. Actually, the contrary is true. I am woefully aware of the reasons, and in fact spent several years believing in and promulgating them. Sometimes, I forget).

I’m not sure how you can say that the Myth Hypothesis and Gospel Hypothesis entail identical predictions; the world that results from the Gospel Hypothesis as stated is almost completely different from the Myth Hypothesis.

However, and I thought this is what DD is trying to get at before, you can make the GH look more like the MH, if you are willing to make changes to the GH.

The GH, as stated, consists of the following items:
1. God exists.
2. God is omnipotent.
3. God is omniscient.
4. God is omniphilios (all-loving, I just made up that term and probably didn’t conjugate the Greek properly)
5. God’s love for us was such that He was willing to dwell among us.
6. God died for us so that we may enjoy a personal, eternal relationship together.

If God has only (hah!) those qualities stated in the hypothesis, then the world as we see it today would be much different – we’d see God on the nightly news, as DD has frequently said. In order to make the GH consistent with the observed universe, you must amend at least one of these items, and make it weaker. God can’t show up because that would affect our free will? Well then, that takes out claims 2 and 5 (and implicitly, 3 – there’s no such thing as free will if someone knows every single action you will ever take and thought you will ever have). God doesn’t show up because He knows we’d act like a bunch of spoiled brats? Well then, there go claims 4 and 6.

Any amendment you make to the GH must weaken its claims, if you want it to match reality. Any such amendments bring further complications, which will mean more amendments and more complications, until you have the anemic and restricted God that so many people seem to believe in today – and when real fathers act like that Holy Father, they get thrown in jail.

w.r.t [3]: The wave hypothesis and the particle hypothesis were not by definition contradictory. Nobody saw the connection until Einstein simply because nothing in our “middle kingdom” (as Dawkins puts it) exhibits that duality. The GH vs the MH, on the other hand, start with “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist”, respectively – there’s no way to reconcile them.

w.r.t [5]: The wave hypothesis and the particle hypothesis were not equally consistent with the facts; they were both consistent with their own set of facts, though there was some overlap (the wave hypothesis, for instance, had a really hard time explaining reflection and refraction, and good luck getting interference patterns out of the particle hypothesis). The MH and the GH, on the other hand, are both supposedly consistent with the same set of facts – the world as we see it today.

So yeah. If you have two hypotheses that are mutually contradictory and yet purport to explain the same set of facts, then at most one of them can be true. There’s no way that some other, greater hypothesis can encompass them both – doing so requires that this greater hypothesis explain something that is inherently contradictory.

If I hypothesize that Jack has exactly one apple right now, and you hypothesize that Jack has exactly zero apples right now, there is no overarching hypothesis that can make 1 = 0; either one or both of us is wrong.

If, on the other hand, you hypothesize that Jack has enough apples to make apple strudel, and I hypothesize that Jack has enough apples to make apple pie, we may very well observe pie/strudel duality – Jack could have enough apples to make both pie and strudel, which would be an overarching hypothesis.

Onward then! :p

[1] A true hypothesis, by definition, is one that is consistent with the truth. [2] A false hypothesis, by definition, is not consistent with the truth. [2a] That’s what “true” and “false” mean. [3] Two hypotheses that contradict one another are not going to both be true, because truth is consistent with itself. [4] At most one of them is going to be consistent with the truth. [5] Thus, the only way two hypotheses can contradict each other AND both be equally consistent with the facts is if they’re both false and are equally INconsistent with the facts.

Yes, but.
1. Agreed.
2. Agreed.
2a. Well, in relation to hypotheses.
3. Agreed, but what about apparent incompatibility? E.g. Wave–particle duality* back in the day. They both made valid predictions for different phenomena of light and neither could be falsified, yet they were considered contradictory based on then-current understanding.
4. Agreed.
5. Or they’re both apparently mutually-contradictory yet special cases of a more general hypothesis, as per the example in [3].

–
* Wave–particle duality.
“The idea of duality is rooted in a debate over the nature of light and matter dating back to the 1600s, when competing theories of light were proposed by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton). Through the work of Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa).”