[forrestbrazeal]

"Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."

- from the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

I take this quote to mean that most people's idea of "apologetics" (arguing to convince people that the facts of Christianity or some other religion are true) is kind of pointless. You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally. LLMs don't help with that at all.

[intalentive]

>You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally.

While you might be right, Christianity in particular is based on truth claims, including specially the resurrection, so the Christian tradition places special emphasis on rational defense. Apologetics is not just a means to persuade others; it is also a means to persuade oneself.

Edit: Responses say that all religions involve truth claims. True, perhaps I was imprecise. I only mean that the Christian case is especially stark. St. Paul: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain." I'm not aware of another faith tradition that considers itself to hang upon a single boolean.

[swat535]

Actually, as a Christian (Catholic), I 100% agree with your assertion. While all regions claim truth, Christianity really centers itself on this idea.

In fact, this is repeated over and over again, so much so that I've lost count of the number of times I've heard the following during Homily: "In Christianity is not true, and Christ was proven to not have been risen, we should stop practicing it".

You quoted Saint Paul which is great and one can find plenty of other examples such as Lewis's trilemma: "Lord, Liar, Lunatic". [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma

[thrance]

All religions are based on "truth claims", Christianity is nothing special in that regard. Ask a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew... They all have their professions of faith, and fervently believe their teachings are the truth.

[jabl]

> Christianity in particular is based on truth claims

As opposed to...? I'm not aware of any major religion that openly admit their teaching is made up BS. All seem to claim to know "the truth".

[collingreen]

They claim to know the truth but the reasoning behind it is different between religions. I'm no religious expert but I'm very familiar with Mormonism and they push really hard on the idea that faith is intentionally separate from truth and you learn about the truth of the church by meditating on your feelings and experiencing frisson, not via logic. Yes everyone has their mythology and Mormonism has its share of things the prophet says God says but it is very different than the Christian apologists that try to reconcile the Bible with things like astrophysics and other observed phenomena.

[ensignavenger]

"faith is intentionally separate from truth"

Do you have a citation for this? I am reasonably familiar with Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and I don't think I have ever heard this before?

[collingreen]

I'm no religious scholar but I've had a LOT of conversations with Mormons with various levels of training (regular folks, bishops, missionaries) about why parts of the story don't make logical sense or aren't internally consistent. The common answers are in the expected range from the standard "god works in mysterious ways" to "if you could prove God was real it wouldn't take faith and the point of the human existence is to find faith".

The Mormon church, of course, has its wings of scholars trying to find evidence to support their origin stories (like looking for their god's original home planet or buying ancient South American temples to hopefully find something supporting the story of white peoples in the early Americas) but they also fully lean in to the idea that humans are inherently fallable and human reason isn't as powerful as faith and feeling. I think this is well demonstrated by the ritual of "bearing one's testimony" in church which is always ways you FELT the holy spirit or by the modern forgiveness (and embracing of) the clear corruption and deception of the original prophet Joseph Smith (like the demonstrably false book of Abraham, for example).

This isn't even supposed to be judgement of one way over the other - I'm just describing the very strong difference between Christian apologists like the author (who want the true truth the right way) and other kinds of proselytizing (that are more supportive of "any road to the right answer").

[ensignavenger]

None of this seems to indicate a belief in faith being "intentionally separate from truth".

[paulddraper]

Means that it rests on claims of real-world events.

As opposed to Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, Jainism, etc.

[pitpatagain]

It still seems like a meaningless distinction, Buddhism also rests on claims of real world events: the Buddha is a historical figure, the story of his enlightenment being a factual happening is key to the belief system.

There are ways of interpreting and practicing Buddhism in which this is less important (eg modernist, psychological, western), but that's also true of Christianity (eg the Jefferson Bible, Unitarians, etc).

[gunian]

>You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally

"poofy guy in the sky doesnt care about war or rape or torture because someone ate an apple. sent his kid in the form of a human. kid was killed/human sacrificed. that saved all humanity. this doesn't stop rape, war, torture but it saved humanity"

the brain has to do some gymnastics to deal with dissonance

[heyjamesknight]

/r/atheism is leaking again.

[StefanBatory]

as militant as that sub is; I can't feel but understand them

that subreddit makes a looooot more sense when you treat it like you'd treat exislam or exmormon, people who were intentionally hurt by the church, both Catholic one and local Protestant

[heyjamesknight]

In my experience frequenting those boards as a former atheist, the vast majority of the militant atheist types were harmed more by their inability to compete in the standard hierarchies of society than they were by any particular Church or faith.

Most of them are angry at "The Man"—God just happens to be "The Man" at the very top.

[StefanBatory]

I get your perspective and I will admit there are surely cases like that - I still wouldn't say it's a vast majority.

Though that raises a question. For example if you were a LGBT person in Deep South and abused over that, who is to blame? Every individual who did that (unfortunately, in the name of religion), or the Church culture who allowed for that to be norm?

And anger over church. I'm Polish, and I'm bi. The most well-known bishops were politically hand-in-hand with the previous ruling party. I would hear in public state media how I'm a part of "rainbow disease" that's infecting the country. Church would often buy land for 1 (!)% of the price. At which point can I say that it wasn't just a few bad apples, but the whole structure who allowed for things to be that way?

[gunian]

haha don't know what that means / is but shout out poofy guy in the sky got better PR than the barons :)

dude created rape, torture and human sacrifice and gets less negative press than Trump and Elon

[MisterTea]

> sent his kid in the form of a human.

Jesus is God. Don't ask me how to explain it from a theological standpoint but from my understanding: God decided he wanted to better understand the NPCs in his HumanSim(TM) game so he straps on a VR headset, enters the game via a virgin birth hack, gets killed, then rage quit. Hasn't been seen since so likely started a new game on some other planet.

[gunian]

SV waiting for the HumanSim IPO

[joshuamcginnis]

> Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

This is a self-defeating statement. The statement itself is a claim about God. If it is true, then it contradicts itself because it asserts a truth about God (namely, that no truths can be defended about Him). This undermines its own premise.

[tines]

No, it's a second-order statement, a statement about first-order statements. It's not subject to itself.

[joshuamcginnis]

If it's not subject to itself, then it's claiming an exception to its own rule, which makes it self-defeating. A universal claim about truth can't exempt itself without contradiction.

[tines]

A statement about statements about X is not a statement about X and therefore doesn’t apply to itself.

[handfuloflight]

The distinction between "statements about X" and "statements about statements about X" doesn't resolve the contradiction here, because the original claim makes a universal assertion about all possible true statements about God. By its own terms, it must encompass both:

1. First-order statements about God

2. Second-order statements about statements about God

3. All higher-order statements as well

Put differently: The claim "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense" is asserting that there exists no level at which defensive truth claims about God are valid. But this assertion itself constitutes a defensive truth claim about God—whether at first, second, or any other order.

The attempt to escape via orders of statements fails because the original statement's scope explicitly covers all truth claims regarding God, regardless of their logical level. If it didn't cover all levels, then it would no longer be claiming that "nothing true can be said"—it would instead be claiming "some things true can be said, just not first-order things," which is a fundamentally different claim than the original.

So by attempting to exempt itself based on being "meta-level," the statement has already conceded that some true things can be said about God from a posture of defense (namely, meta-level things)—which directly contradicts its own absolute claim that nothing true can be said.

This is why universal claims about the impossibility of certain types of statements are often self-defeating—they cannot consistently exempt themselves from their own scope without undermining their universality.

[tines]

> But this assertion itself constitutes a defensive truth claim about God

You seem to be asserting this without any proof, or at least none that I can follow. The assertion itself is a "defensive truth" about "truths about God," not about "God." I'm not sure how you are justifying considering "truth about [truth about [truth about [... X]]]" as the same thing as "statement about X".

Is it possible that you're considering the properties of the truths about X to be properties of X as well? I don't think this is justified. Properties of truths about X come from properties of X. For example, statements about the color of X are not statements about X itself, despite coming from properties of X. E.g. color(X) = color(Y) -/> X = Y.

Recursion doesn't complicate the case here. The original statement made assertions about "statements about God", not about God. For example, the statement "All statements about God are false" is not paradoxical, it is simply false (if we accept the law of the excluded middle). A statement like "Everything I've said about God is false" could very well be true, it's not paradoxical, despite also being part of the set "Everything I've said;" it's just not "about God."

[tines]

In addition to my sibling comment (which I can't edit any more), I noticed earlier that you said

> A universal claim about truth can't exempt itself without contradiction.

But the claim in question is not a universal claim about truth; it’s a claim about truths about God.

[soup10]

The church has a long history of defending and clarifying the principles and practices of faith in a relatively academic way, in a way that would surprise people who believe religion is an anti-intellectual endeavor.

[anon84873628]

I remember reading something along the lines of, Jesuits will have a perfectly ironclad logical argument to any theological point... Assuming you have already swallowed the 1-2 big rocks at the foundation.

[1123581321]

I would say there are both intellectual and felt needs. Apologetics is kind of its own genre of rhetoric and doesn’t satisfy everyone. It can be better to offer to research an objection together, rather than try to win it (more fun, too.)

Religious debates in a friendly setting can also lead to personal sharing that opens someone to emotional or spiritual experiences.

Minimizing intellectual concerns by overriding with an emotional experience does not “work”, not long-term and certainly not over generations.

But there are also people who have few or no intellectual concerns! Caveats all the way down.

[bmicraft]

From an outside perspective, that quote takes on a whole other meaning. Namely, that very few statements about "God" don't have similar but contradicting statements - making it (almost?) impossible to say anything definitive about them at all (from a SAT solver/proving kind of perspective).

[michaelsbradley]

   To many the idea of bringing the intellect fully into action in religion seems almost repellent. The intellect seems so cold and measured and measuring, and the will so warm and glowing. Indeed the joy of the will is always figured in terms of warmth – such words as ardor, fervor and the like come from Latin words for a fire burning: there is a fear that intellect can only damp down the fire. Many again who do not find the use of the intellect in religion actually repellent, regard it as at least unnecessary – at any rate for the layman – and possibly dangerous. One can, they say, love God without any very great study of doctrine. Indeed, they say, warming to their theme, some of the holiest people they know are quite ignorant. Plenty of theologians are not as holy as an old Irishman they have seen saying his Rosary. All this is so crammed with fallacy as to be hardly worth refuting. A man may be learned in dogma, and at the same time proud or greedy or cruel: knowledge does not supply for love if love is absent. Similarly, a virtuous man may be ignorant, but ignorance is not a virtue. It would be a strange God Who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him. It is true that some get vast love from lesser knowledge; it is true even that some get vast light from lesser knowledge: for love helps sight. But sight helps love too.
   After all, the man who uses his intellect in religion is using it to see what is there. But the alternative to seeing what is there is either not seeing what is there, and this is darkness; or seeing what is not there, and this is error, derangement, a kind of double darkness. And it is unthinkable that darkness whether single or double should be preferred to light.
  Indeed light is the joy of the mind as warmth is the joy of the will. But warmth and light are both effects of fire, warmth fire as felt, light fire as seen (and seen by). It seems strange to value the one effect and not the other of that fire by which the Holy Ghost is figured to us. It is an odd delusion that one is warmer in the dark, that one can love God better in the dark.

– Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, 1946

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.58569

[analog31]

There are a lot of good theologians who are uncomfortable engaging in apologetics. It's easy to get immersed in the debate, and turn towards heresy or dishonesty without noticing. This precedes AI.

[joshuamcginnis]

From where are you deriving your sense of "pointlessness"? If there is no absolute standard (such as God), then all truths, including moral truths, are determined by individuals or societies, making them relative.