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Comment by nathan_compton

4 days ago

I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious. But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different notions of belief as if they were the same.

I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief, which I think is kind of dumb.

Historically, in the West at least, the ability or inability to reason one's way to the existence of God determined whether you needed to rely on faith or not.

https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/docum...

  • Nice, paragraph 5 and he's already into "evolution is fiction and commies love it."

    • You didn't read closely enough. He is condemning the notion that evolution explains the origin of all things (as ridiculous as that sounds...it was a kind of ontological darwinism; no reasonable person holds this opinion today).