Daniel Mocsny On How Religions Re-Invent Themselves (Funny But True!)

By Daniel Mocsny: There is an amusing video on YouTube in which a gentleman makes physical-comedy type of error - he trips on a treadmill at the gym and gets thrown off - and then quickly recovers and carries on nonchalantly, as if to wordlessly declare, "Yeah, I meant to do that."

Religions work like that. The old religions began in the pre-scientific world, in which even many educated people freely commingled empirical claims with fantastical ones.* Most likely, ancient thinkers thought this way because their lived experience showed them the sorts of things that usually happen, and they reasoned in commonsense ways, but they lacked the modern scientific knowledge that we live in a universe governed by physical laws, so they did not appropriately constrain their notions of what could happen.

Fast forward to the modern world, and religions are like the guy who falls off the treadmill while checking out the hot girl in the gym, then tries to cover his error by breaking into a set of pushups, now that he's on the floor. "Yeah, I mean to do that." Religions are festooned with cognitive fossils - embarrassing markers of erroneous pre-scientific thinking - and struggling to paint them as all part of some master plan.

* Richard Carrier describes how ancient historians oscillated between paragraphs of sober, well-referenced claims of historical events, and paragraphs filled with absurdities. From Richard Carrier, “Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable,” in The Christian Delusion, ed. John Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 291–92:

SEEING MIRACLES FROM THE OUTSIDE Fifty years after the Persian Wars ended in 479 BC Herodotus the Halicarnassian asked numerous eyewitnesses and their children about the things that happened in those years and then wrote a book about it. Though he often shows a critical and skeptical mind, sometimes naming his sources or even questioning their reliability when he has suspi cious or conflicting accounts, he nevertheless reports without a hint of doubt that the temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated armaments, lightning bolts, and collapsing cliffs; the sacred olive tree of Athens, though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm's length in a single day; a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon; a horse gave birth to a rabbit; and a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish!

Do you believe these things happened? Well, why not? Herodotus was an educated man, a critical historian, and he consulted eyewitnesses, and he clearly saw nothing to doubt in these events.1 So why should we? If you're smart, reasonably educated, and honest, you'll have to admit your doubts here are rather strong. And I'm sure if someone came knocking on your door, insisting these things were true, you'd defend your doubts as entirely reasonable. So think f or a moment what you'd say to them. I bet you'd come up with several good rules of thumb about what kinds of stories to believe or doubt. You'll say, for example, that these sorts of things don't really happen because nothing like them happens today, certainly never when you're around. Cooked fish don't rise from the dead. Rabbits don't pop out of horses. Temples don't defend themselves with miraculous weather and floating weapons. The oceans do not selectively drown blasphemers. And tree limbs take much longer to grow than a single day. You know these things because of your own experience, as well as that of countless other people, especially after centuries of scientific research. But you also know people lie, even if for what they think is a good reason. They also exaggerate, tell tall tales, craft edifying myths and legends, and err in many ways. As a result, as we all well know, false stories are commonplace. But miracles, quite clearly, are not.

So what is more likely? That miracles like these really happen, while you and everyone else you trust, including every scientist and investigator for the last few centuries, just happens to have missed them all? Or that these are just tall tales? I think the latter. And I suspect you agree. But that's just one rule of thumb we all live by. Your doubts become stronger when you can't question the witnesses; when you don't even know who they are; when you don't have the story from them but from someone else entirely; when there is an agenda, something the storyteller is attempting to persuade you of; when the witnesses or reporters are a bit kooky or disturbingly overzealous. And so on. We all think this way, and rightly so. Any of these factors will call into question the stories we're told, and many apply here. We don't really have any of Herodotus's stories from the witnesses themselves, we don't know who exactly they are or how trustworthy or level-headed they were, we don't know what age nda they might have had, we can't question them, we don't even get to hear anyone else question them-nor do we hear from anyone who was also there and might have seen things differently. For all these reasons and more, we rightly dismiss such wonders as fan tales that simply aren't true.

We could even let religion start with something simpler, something any child can do, such as switch channels on a TV by using a remote, but with religion not using the remote. All religion would need to do is modulate a low-power infrared beam appropriately.

In most areas of life, we like to test things by using simple tests before we try more demanding tests. For example, if you're worried about a bridge falling down, you don't start by sending a fleet of heavily loaded trucks across first. No, you'll likely start with something lighter, like sending a cat across. If the bridge can hold up the cat, maybe try tossing some sandbags onto the bridge. And so on.

But when it comes to religion, faith, the power of prayer, etc., that rule goes out the window. Various brands of Christians trust Jesus to save their supposedly immortal souls, when their same faith cannot change the channels on the TV. Or flip the light switch. Or do much of anything else that an average person - even a child - can easily do. Why do people trust God for the hardest imaginable task when God routinely fails to do the simplest tasks?

When medical science fails, Christians will pray for God to heal the patient. But the same God cannot even make you a sandwich. If you want the sandwich, you'll have to make it yourself, or pay or plead with someone else (some actual person who exists) to make it for you. You can plead all you want for God to make the sandwich, but if you wait for God to make it, you'll probably starve before that happens.