An Economist's Rational Road to Christianity By Eric Falkenstein
- Most ex-atheists who become deists turn to Buddhism, so I thought I'd be clear why they are all wrong (Robert Wright!).
- I came to Christ via rational inference, not a personal crisis.
- A Rational Argument for Christianity
- Bertrand Russell...discusses many arguments for the existence of God—first cause, natural law—and finds them all logically defective, except the argument from design... He found the theory of evolution adequate to rebut this theory, but a lot has been discovered since then.
- Evolution Just Like Abiogenesis
- from the beginning, evolutionary theorists conceded that the appearance of initial life forms had yet to be explained.
- Just as his grandfather did, Darwin believed that the discovery of the first life form would occur soon.
- The more we learn about the minimum necessary components of life, the more complicated it gets.
- ... The most basic cell requires at least a hundred proteins, each of which has approximately 300 amino acids , and all need to be able to work with each other.
- The inevitable conclusion is that showing how a natural process can create a set of letters used in typesetting does not go far in showing how natural processes create words, let alone novels.[ 4] The origin of life is one of those puzzles that has been right around the corner, for the past two centuries.
- The problem is that natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not how novel tissues arose,
- looking at many thousands of generations of fruit flies and bacteria, we see only a handful of minor mutations.
- microevolution does not imply macroevolution,
- From Deism to Christianity
- after I accepted that a creator exists...I experienced a strange consilience, as various facts all began to make much more sense.
- Things that work as if they are true, are often really true.
- The science behind evolution is essential to understand why it is rational to believe in a creator, and psychology, neurology, and economics tell us about human nature
- In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins wrote that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist... A little knowledge led us away from God, and now a considerable amount of knowledge has led us back.
- Unlike what the atheists say about God turning one off to science, it engaged me, because it is much more exciting to search for patterns if you think they exist objectively, rather than something I merely might be able to convince someone is important. The mathematician, Paul Erdos, used to become excited about determining not just mathematical proofs, but ones that were beautiful: inevitable, concise, and unexpected;
- basic problems of survival, the search for meaning is the essence of being human.
- The Christian Consilience
- Once you accept that we were created, it becomes easier to understand our common drive to find meaning and purpose, because it is more likely that we have an objective purpose
- Love is the only end in itself, and the love of God is the key to any Christian purpose,
- The most profound truth is that some being created us, and that created things have a purpose. Our purpose is hard-wired into our biology, and creates a longing to love something greater than ourselves, and following this simple purpose generates a social optimum via invisible hand.
- Christianity...its bottom-up focus encourages decentralized decision-making and individual liberty. Christianity neither legislates nor demands virtue; it merely encourages
- The modesty that comes from Christianity is not weakness, but rather, a combination of honesty and intelligence.
- A Christian purpose aligns with our nature so well that it is useful to believe and behave “as if”it were true, and in the history of science, many assumptions that were chosen because they worked were later found to be true.
- Una teoria dell'egoismo. Your attitude towards yourself is paramount because we really love our neighbor as ourselves...... those without any self-interest find it much easier to be cruel when acting selflessly...(e.g., ants are selfless animals, yet they are also the most warlike and take slaves)?
- making yourself a better person, not out of narcissism, but rather, in order to look better to someone beautiful who loves you. In contrast, Freudian psychoanalysis centers on fixing oneself for oneself
- the more we thought about ourselves, the more we thought about how others had wronged us. The motivation, the heart, is key.
- The progressive inspired ‘positive’rights for healthcare, food, education, and housing, are claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies.
- Il welfare degrada i caratteri. Goods and services received without struggle—and the sense of insecurity that motivates it— leads to resentment, and this leads to a vicious circle of hating the 1% even more;
- The Bible is prescient in orienting an individual’s focus in concentric circles from him/ herself, to family, etc.,
- In Christianity....assumes that all people are imperfect, that such is the crooked timber of humanity. A Christian does not expect heaven on Earth,
- God.... Compared to his incredible powers, we are incredibly dumb so our greatest objective achievements in science and art are relatively lame... why God is more interested in our faith and love than any other aspect of our character.
- Status. If you find a community of people with a shared sense of purpose, whose values inspire virtuous conduct, and whose relationships provide support, guidance, and encouragement, your life will be better.
- people who attend religious services on a weekly basis are nearly twice as likely to describe themselves as “very happy”(45%) than are people who never attend (28%).[ 16]
- Poor areas tend to be more religious...Relatively prosperous people are also happier, yet within these prosperous cohorts, religious people are happier.... given any level of prosperity, religion increases happiness.
- Coda
- In Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, he writes “the battle [for evolution] is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
- Wars, alas, are not known for their rationality, rather their propaganda to maintain popular support.
- The focus on the will over reason, classical liberalism, classical virtues, love as the primal motive, that humans are by nature base, shows that the New Testament is right on all the issues that really matter.... for creating a thriving society, Christianity works.
- we can infer transcendent forces indirectly, and most of our knowledge is inferential, not deductive. That is, we see a universal desire for purpose, the benefits in this world of living for the next
- If you estimate rationally, there is a sufficient probability (e.g., 73%) that Christianity is true, with this probability it makes sense to act as if Christianity has a 100% probability of being correct. This is because, in any strategy that takes persistence, once you make the choice to do it you should be “all in.”In the words of a famous short green deist, “Do, or do not, there is no try.”
- My previous attempts to create meaning within the secular humanist worldview were not failures because I did not try hard enough, but rather because you need a lot of luck to do this without God.
- I will not find my purpose by adopting the worldview of some village in Costa Rica. That would not work primarily because I have no social connections in such a village, and without those relationships, the whole thing does not work at all, even if it works for them.
continua
