New Evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology

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It’s true that people are rarely won over by arguments on these questions, at least in the short run.

Sometimes, however, arguments plant a seed which continues to be remembered, and years later, partly because of that seed, a person might come around to a different view. I fully expect that no atheist here is going to accept, or even treat with intellectual respect, any argument for Mind based on the order of the cosmos, in the short run. But in the long run, who knows? I have over my lifetime come around to views that I once fiercely opposed, and sometimes I can even identify particular arguments I read in my younger years which contributed to the change.

Antony Flew is an interesting example. For years he was one of the Anglo-American world’s most prominent atheist philosophers, but he was brought around to belief in God by arguments for design. He certainly had heard arguments for design in his youth, but had always rejected them, but later in life, when he came across a fresh spin on them, he found them convincing. I think of the arguments he rejected as planting a seed, which at least kept the possibility of design alive in one corner of his mind, and the seed was watered by the later versions of the argument, and he was brought around.

Similarly, there might be just one argument for design offered by people here which sticks in the back of the mind of an atheist here, and ten years from now, in a new context, and after the heat and noise from the current culture-war atmosphere has subsided a bit and people can look at these things with more detachment, that argument might suddenly seem stronger and more convincing. Atheists have changed their minds.

And of course it works the other way, too. Believers can become atheists when years later they accept arguments that originally they rejected.

The tendency on sites like this is for participants to try to batter their opponents into submission by argument, as if they hope for a public victory and confession of error on the other side. That’s a strategy with very low probability of success. But if people can eschew the desire for quick victory, they might be able to plant some seeds in their opponents which will bear fruit over a longer period of time.

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On reflection, my experience of people with religious viewpoints is limited and mainly gleaned from internet sites such as this one. Maybe my social interactions are subtly influenced by avoiding contact with the overtly religious. Maybe they’re thin on the ground here where I live.

My main point is that I think the tendency to accept or reject religious concepts is more dependent on emotional makeup than logic.

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I agree with this. Reasoning sometimes plays a role in determining whether or not people believe, but even more often it plays a role in finding arguments to defend a position that has already been adopted out of non-rational considerations. (Of course this is true of things other than religion as well, e.g., ideology.)

If that’s the case, then you are getting a less than adequate impression of religion. On sites like this, you tend to get the most partisan and narrow proponents of religion (and anti-religion) posting, but typical religious life in Christian churches, in Jewish synagogues, etc. is not so polemical; it’s much more constructive.

I’m actually surprised to hear of your limited exposure to religious people, because I had the impression, based on some of your remarks, that you were of retirement age, i.e., about 65 or older. I would have thought that you would have grown up in a world where, even if your family was not religious, a large number of families around you were religious, so that many of your friends, school chums, etc. would have exposed you to an “on the ground” contact with religion. But possibly where you grew was quite different from where I grew up.

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