As with many statements of this form, the claim is entirely possible. Whether the claim is plausible or reasonable is a different matter.

A lot depends on what is viewed as central beliefs and what is viewed as ancillary beliefs. Christianity will not likely rise or fall on the basis of Young Earth Creationism, even though YEC is deeply embedded in the present US Christian culture. This is because YEC is broadly understood as a non-essential doctrine.

If dianetics is central to Scientology, and the Space Opera (as literal truth) is central, I think it will remain implausible no matter how long it's around.

I know some YECs who say it is central, and others (seems like the majority) who say it is not. I think this highlights the problem of determining which religions are "crazier". Ignoring the difficulty of measuring craziness*, in the end each group decides whether its teachings pass some nebulous test of plausibility vs mere possibility.

For example, how do you determine that a young earth is implausible? I'm sure a YEC could give a "plausible" response to whatever reasons you give, and the conversation probably ends with you saying, "That's not plausible," and them saying, "Sure it is."

*ETA: also ignoring that each group has different teachings that they consider central

Although we often think of religions like Christianity and Islam to be singular objects, they're really quite varied. It's a very interesting question to consider what holds them together enough that they're generally considered to be sufficiently similar to be the same thing.

It's true that some YECs say that it's central, and I agree with you that they're the minority. And because they're the minority, it's less likely that their perspective will perpetuate.

This is a question that has more to do with the culture than the religion. YEC is implausible relative to the scientific information that's available about the universe. And since YEC is a minority viewpoint and stands against that knowledge, it's simply going to be seen as implausible. It's also a viewpoint that is grounded SOLELY in a particular interpretation of a particular segment of the Bible. That is, without reading Genesis 1 in a particular way, there's basically no other way (currently known) to reach the conclusion that the earth is young, and not even by circumstantial evidence. This simply adds to the implausibility.

(The "evidence" that's presented does not LEAD to the conclusion that the earth is young, but rather SUPPORTS the conclusion that the earth is young. This distinction is a bit subtle, but it's important. Finding examples of fast fossilization does not tell you that the earth was created in a week, but simply explains why it's possible for the earth to be created in a week.)

The problem with a literal space opera is that I don't really see information advancing in a way that makes such a claim more probable. What types of events in the present tense can lead one to be more confident about something that happened quadrillions of years ago?

It seems like that's what he's saying:

I don't think we need to make this that complicated. My position is that all religions are not equally plausible. We judge religions by their claims, which mostly come through some text. I think the Biblical text is more reliable than the texts written by L Ron.

This doesn't mean that the Bible is right, or that Jesus is Lord. I didn't think this was controversial, I assumed everyone thought L Ron was just some guy writing stories, and that the Bible had more weight behind it, even if just historically.

Perhaps not, but fortunately there are lots of people in this forum that can weigh in and correct us. If they are equally plausible, I'm more than open to listen to the arguments.

You have clearly decided that Christianity is plausible where Islam, for example, isn't. What criteria are you using to determine plausibility?

You've had convincing personal experiences (convincing to you), but you do not accord the same plausibility value to the stories told by others who claim similar experiences but who hold contrary beliefs as a result, so there must be something else that you are using to have come to your decision?

We need to clear this up, I don't want it to be a sidetrack. I'm not saying that 'everything' is equally plausible, this is obviously untrue.

I'm thinking that a belief in something the existence of which cannot be proven is as equally plausible as another belief in something that can't be proven. I'm applying this to belief in gods. Once you have some reason to presume the existence of something then it must have become more plausible, but you don't have any good reasons, certainly no better reasons than any of the other religions. So how is your god any more plausible than any other god?

People give their own experiences waaaay more credence than they give other peoples experiences. What is so surprising about this? Why do you not accord the same plausibility value to NRs experiences that you do to your own?

This is an important statement and seems to underlie a lot of what you think you know. It is also completely false. You should take some time and think carefully about everything that you believe you have rationally concluded. Anything that is based in any way on this statement is based on a fallacious reasoning process and should be carefully examined if not discarded entirely.

Ex.
It cannot be proven whether there are alternated universes (ie. a multiverse).

It cannot be proven whether every Black Hole contains a little man with a flashlight looking for the circuit breaker (borrowed from "Big Bang Theory").

These are by no means equally plausible.

It's this argument all over again: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=711

I think RLK makes a good point.

Even science is not setting out to "prove" but rather make predictions based on a steady state model of reality.

I agree, specifically in the cases of CoS and LDS, that some religions are less plausible than others.

But allow me to play Devil's Advocate for a moment. I think two arguments against this jump out immediately:

1) Each member of any particular religion is going to say theirs is more plausible than the others. Each group naturally wants to be the arbiter of the plausibility of its own beliefs, and can come up with reasons that any particular belief of theirs is entirely plausible. But if Catholics say they're in a better position to judge LDS beliefs (say, because they haven't been indoctrinated into those beliefs), then they open themselves up to Muslims saying they're the better judges of Catholic beliefs, etc.

2) We're closer to the origins of these younger religions, and the stories of their formations are better known. In 2,000 years that may not be the case. If the stories of the fraudulent behavior of Hubbard and Smith are lost to time (and vigorous PR campaigns by the CoS and LDS) then they'll be on a more equal footing with Christianity, and maybe it won't be so clear anymore.

If significant parts of the OT were written during the Babylonian exile, for political reasons, and thousands of years after they are claimed to have been written, are they more plausible than the writings of Hubbard and Smith? Is a fiction concocted "to cement a national identity" less fraudulent than "for personal monetary gain"?

Plausibility is not the only measure that is used in the context of religious beliefs. For some, plausibility doesn't even enter into consideration at all (especially those whose beliefs are more grounded in their immediate culture).

I also don't think that it's true that Catholics are a better judge of LDS beliefs, or any general framework that claims an external perspective is necessarily a better one.

Again, it's possible. Is it plausible? I don't think so. The difference is that more information is regularly gathered in the modern context compared to the ancient context. LDS has actively been trying to whitewash elements of its history, and it's not really succeeding. The problem is that the written record is actually relatively robust, especially compared to ancient history.

I'm not entirely sure that "fraudulent" is the right framework. We do know that people passed along information from generation to generation about personal and cultural (and national) identity. That it might have taken a long time for it to be written down is not immediately an indicator that it is fraudulent.

There are similar situations in other questions of ancient history. For example, in China the earliest records date back to something like 1200 BC. But there are references to culture back as far as 2000 BC. We can assert that those records were probably written at some level to discuss "national identity" (though I'm not sure it was written to "cement" it). Do we assume it's fraudulent simply on that basis? Probably not. But we can still question its accuracy.

I'm going to pull this out of order because I think it addresses my main point. If I'm a CoS or LDS I'm going to say "Who cares what you think? You're not privy to the sacred understandings passed down by Moroni/God/Smith/Hubbard (or for more mainstream Christian religions, "personal revelation"). Besides, you've been brainwashed/indoctrinated/suppressed by your apostate/cultic religion..."

As an aside, I wonder why you think it's not plausible. In 2000 years, if CoS became as widespread as Christianity is today, you don't think it could plausibly rewrite history enough to hide LRH's hucksterism and later insanity? Or are you saying it's not plausible that CoS could ever become as powerful as Christianity is?

If you think CoS could never rival Christianity because of modern record-keeping, I'm not sure--maybe. On the one hand it seems a reasonable conclusion. On the other hand, we humans seems to have a powerful ability to ignore information that is widely available. (My daughter's school is going through a whooping cough outbreak, and only two of her classmates had been vaccinated against it. I also recently had a fruitless conversation with a niece about vaccinations. She rejected the idea that the anti-vax report that came out years ago was a fraud. "That's what Big Pharma wants you to think." Mic drop.)

So what is the measure and who does the measuring? You seemed to be implying earlier that some teachings were less plausible, but isn't that from an external perspective (the scientific community addressing the age of the earth)? And doesn't adding the modifier "necessarily" just open us up to picking and choosing when external sources should be heeded? All us old-earthers think the scientific consensus should be considered, while young-earthers don't.


No, of course not, but I think you're answering a specific case with a generality. The theories regarding the authorship of parts of the OT are that the existing material was heavily edited in order to tell a new narrative in which historical accuracy (if there was even any to start with) was unimportant, yet most Christians today accept these stories as either completely or largely accurate.

We might generally excuse incorrect origin stories as mistakes, rather than frauds, but isn't that difficult to do in the case of religions claiming inspiration from the Creator, with promises of God-given accuracy?

I think I simply need to work on how I articulate what I think, perhaps 'cannot be proven' is not the right phrasing. There's a difference between what is possible and what is plausible. Both your examples are possible, both are not equally plausible, as you agree yourself.

Now, why is Jehovah plausible where Allah is not, or more plausible? Both are possible but that's clearly not enough on which for you have made your decision, something made one more plausible than the other. How have you chosen one and denied the other?

Sure. You can always say that regardless of what is being claimed. But this irrelevant to the point I was making. I was addressing (2), not (1). The claim of (2) had nothing to do with the claims of the religion per se, but the projection of 2000 years into the future.

I'm saying that at this point in history, it's unlikely that anyone will be able to successfully whitewash the present tense events. Information in written form is simply far too available compared to ancient history. We don't have a situation in which only a small handful of people hold the information.

Even if CoS becomes powerful, I don't think it will be able to exert its will to rewrite history. On this point, I would like you to clarify what you mean by "as powerful as Christianity is." Christianity is powerful in what sense in this context?

There's a difference between ignoring information and suppressing/hiding information. Relatively small segments of the population being ignorant doesn't make that knowledge disappear.

This probably a local clustering phenomenon (in order for so many students to be not vaccinated). I think that nationally, the rate of vaccinations is still at least 70%.

What I mean is that people don't think about all of their beliefs in terms of plausibility. There are a lot of culturally embedded beliefs that people accept, but NOT on the basis of having done a plausibility heuristic and concluded that the belief plausible, but rather that the belief is simply accepted.

The modifier has nothing to do with picking and choosing external sources. Rather, I'm saying that there's no good argument that can claim that one perspective is better than another in the complete abstract. (Specifically, I was responding to the idea that Catholics are better to evaluate LDS claims because they're NOT LDS, and the chain of reasoning associated with that.)

You're making a characterization error here. YECs don't claim that scientific consensus shouldn't be considered. Rather, they're saying that scientific consensus is not correct. Those are two very different things.

You have to parse your words carefully here. The OT spans a huge range of history, and some parts are more historically verified than others.

Again, you need to parse your words carefully. You're taking a very broad brush to a wide range of concepts and claims. You need to be a bit more specific about the things you're trying to address.

However, it looks like your claim merely begs the question. That is, you're assuming that divine inspiration is already likely a fraudulent claim, so that claims of divine inspiration are similarly likely to be fraudulent.

You're right. My mistake.

I tend to agree. I'd say it would be very unlikely.

I should have said 'as powerful as Christianity was'. I'd say from Constantine to Gutenberg, at the least, the Christian Church had the power to easily control its narrative. (For example, once its doctrine was codified, if a large cache of scrolls was discovered that turned many of its central teachings on their head, the Church would be able to destroy and/or reinterpret anything it wanted.) It had enormous political power, a monopoly on the dissemination of information about itself, and state-sanctioned authority over interpretation.

My point was that if we gave Cos or LDS that kind of starting advantage, it seems very likely this thread would be titled "Why do Scientologists [the mainstream] believe Christians are crazy?"

I agree, but my experience is that they will switch to considering plausibility--at least in a lay, unsophisticated way--when comparing their beliefs to others'. If I'm a religious person considering my own beliefs I might just accept them, but when comparing them with a different [religious] belief system, I need to establish the superiority of my beliefs, so I try to argue for the plausibility of my beliefs or the implausibility of theirs. (Yes, this can apply to non-religious people, as well.)


I agree, and doesn't that makes the question in the OP unanswerable as anything but every group pointing fingers at each other?

Using Catholics and LDS was just an example to avoid excessive use of pronouns. Substitute Catholics/Christians/Muslims/LDS/CoS wherever you like. I was making the same point you just made.


I think my meaning is made clear by the context of the paragraph. I'll grant that 'considered' was a poor choice of words--it felt clumsy to repeat the use of 'heeded' and I counted on a charitable reading from you.


Why do I have to parse my words so carefully? Because someone might not understand them--they might think I'm oblivious to the fact that "the OT spans a huge range of history..."? Or is it because someone might nit-pick them to death, grasping at ridiculous trivialities like "the OT spans a huge range of history..." to argue for argument's sake?


I disagree. Specific examples don't seem the least bit necessary, but if they were, the context gives enough clues that I trusted most readers to understand what I was getting at:

OT writings... thought (by many) to have been written during the Babylonian exile... which many modern believers think were written centuries earlier... claiming to record histories... thought (by many modern scholars) to have been written for political reasons... of cementing a national identity after the exile.... and which many modern believers think are historically accurate... but are not...

... is pretty clearly talking about the Deuteronomic writings, without needing to consider books or specific passages. Your response was to use China as a rebuttal, which ironically is a broader brush than I used, given that up to that point we'd been talking about divinely-inspired histories.


No, I didn't assume that. I was talking about divinely-inspired writings that turn out to be fraudulent. Consider a "divinely-inspired" account of a Jewish revolt, but one that was minor enough that a lack of corroboration in Roman histories is not surprising... I don't assume that to be fraudulent.

N_R said: I wondered, among other things, how we measure that. If the Book of Mormon, the Quran, and the Bible--all claiming to be divinely inspired--all contain statements that are historically and/or scientifically incorrect, how can we say one is more plausible than the others? Surely we don't just count hits and misses, do we?

Exactly this. I'm not seeing any arguments or reasons that make one more plausible than the others, only a desire for it to be the case, an application of faith rather than reason.

The existence of any particular god is no more plausible than that of any other god, it seems. NR is using the credibility of the author to diminish Scientology whilst simply accepting the origins of the bible as credible, but, given that it was written in a time of great ignorance, superstition and mysticism, that should make it less credible and the claims it makes less plausible.

This is the opposite of what you had said, which is why I interjected. Two unproven concepts can be viewed as having very different plausibility. You do have a burden of proof to demonstrate that they are equally plausible if that is your assertion.

Jehovah and Allah are two different names for the same monotheistic Abrahamic God. The difference between Islam and Christianity is in the rules for living that they provide. For a variety of reasons both cultural and ethical I strongly prefer the tenets of Christianity.

L. Ron Hubbard is easily demonstrated as a liar and a charlatan in areas unrelated to Scientology. Given that, I am quite comfortable in dismissing him and his ideas without much examination. If you want to make the case that I should give Hubbard more respect, then feel free. But you need to address him and his concepts. Simply stating that I have to give them respect because I have respect for the tenets of Christianity is inadequate. Remember that you have now conceded that I do not have to grant them equal plausibility simply because neither can be proven.

I don't think this is true. You say that as if there was a single-minded "church" that simply dominated everything for 1000 years. There was a lot of ebb and flow during that long span of time.

The reason that people think CoS is crazy is because of the nature of the claims that are being made. If somehow we swapped one for the other, and CoS was still saying that there was a space opera quadrillions of years ago and that dianetics is real, they would be marginalized in the same way as they are today. If they abandoned those claims and switched to a metaphorical concept or something like that, they would have a better chance.

One thing that people tend to do in their analyses is assume that people from more than a couple hundred years ago were mostly idiots. And that somehow, they just mindlessly accepted things as they were without questioning or challenging things. I think that's just a poor reading of both humanity and history.

You're coming at it from a very modern perspective. This is not true for other people's perspectives. Post-modernist viewpoints don't really care as much about comparing beliefs for "establishing superiority." Not everyone feels the need to try to "win" something in their own minds about who they are or what they believe.

It depends on what you're willing to accept and it depends on your desired outcomes. Because the reality is that people from different backgrounds can and do get together to discuss things and find agreement or disagreement between their views. And people are persuaded in different directions. So it's not as if the positions that people hold are immovable objects.

You have to parse your words carefully because the viewpoint you are criticizing is more nuanced than your language allows. If you oversimplify someone else's perspective and defeat that simplified version, then you've created a strawman.

A few points:

1) The parsing of "divinely inspired" histories and histories in general is a fairly artificial distinction as far as the quality of the histories is concerned. It also creates a VERY narrow category of consideration. So narrow, in fact, that it contains basically parts of the Old Testament and maybe a couple other things. This leads to all sorts of errors in analysis. I still claim that your emphasis on "divinely inspired" is a lot of question-begging.

2) Deuteronomic passages is a tiny slice of the Old Testament. My point here is the same as above, in which your language must be sufficiently nuanced to address the actual issue. You're making a claim that consists of maybe 5% of the Old Testament, but you're saying it in a way that makes it sound like you're talking about the entire Old Testament.

3) There's some question of whether it was "written" or "modified" during the Babylonian exile. Again, your language must be sufficiently nuanced to address the actual situation.

Again, your emphasis on "divinely-inspired" is kind of doing all the work for you without anything else going on. If you dropped the term "divinely-inspired" does you analysis change at all? If not, then why are you using it?

One considers the nature of the claims and the available information, in exactly the same way we would think about the plausibility of virtually anything else. I don't understand the problem.

Mmm, no it's not... it was a clarification. I still think that two things for which there is no proof and no reasonable supporting theory are equally plausible, or implausible. From my perspective, it's as plausible that the little man in black holes with a flashlight is your god, as it is that he isn't. Can you show how these two possibilities aren't equally plausible?

There are degrees of unproven. Some things unproven have credible hypotheses to support their plausibility, others don't, like the existence of gods, or Nessie, or Ghosts. The best argument that I'm aware of for the existence of gods is 'how else did we get here?' and that's pretty weak when used to support a particular version of a particular god. At best it supports a deistic view.

They are quite different versions of that god, they can't both be true, and yet you seem to have chosen between them by somehow establishing a level of plausibility. How did you do that and can you be sure that you haven't simply been influenced by your environment?

So a liar and charlatan can't have stumbled on, or realised, an important universal truth? If there were no liars and charlatans in the Christian faith, and you could prove that the origins of your belief system weren't created or influenced by liars and charlatans, then I guess I could take this objection seriously. Or I could use faith and simply believe what he says, surely you could find no objection to that approach?

You're defining yourself into a little circle again.

If we have "proof" for something, then there's really no question of plausibility or implausibility. That's a very strong statement.

On the level of "reasonable supporting theory" it's really going to come down to what you actually mean by that.

Any concept of a "little man with a flashlight" is tied to our concept of what a "little man" is (human figure) and what a "flashlight" is (device with a bulb and such). None of those things can exist inside of a black hole to the best of our understanding of black holes.

Gods of various conceptions *can* exist based on our concepts, depending on the particular concept of god that is being considered.

It's true that this doesn't "prove" anything, and it doesn't create a "reasonable theory" to support one or the other, but to claim that you can't distinguish between the two is intellectually disingenuous.

Mostly, you're continuing your pattern of not engaging with any actual ideas that are on the table, and trying to win the day by (mis-)characterization alone.

neeeel you are staying true to form here

I agree with you and I think it is a good point. Personal experience is by definition subjective. Everyone assigns greater credence to their own experiences' than to the experiences of others (which is how it should be).

It is worth delineating between facts and beliefs. I don't think NR or people of faiths in general are asserting their religious beliefs should be held as widely accepted fact.

It sounds like you are trying to hold up religious beliefs to the standard of facts and then proclaiming victory.

A considerable amount of religious belief is based on personal experience (especially in Christianity). Things like I felt "x" when I prayed or "x" happened after I prayed.

It is a difficult task to try and convince people they should base their beliefs less on personal experience.

There are philosophical arguments for a god/creator that we are all familiar with. However, I believe these arguments actually contribute very little to the average person's faith. For example, I have never heard someone say they became a Christian after hearing WLC explain the Kalaam Cosmological Argument.

No comment.

No comment.

Other than the tenets of the religion which I have already acknowledged, how they different versions?

Of course he could. He just has an uphill battle to recruit me.

That only part of this that makes sense is the section on the origins. It is nonsense to expect that a religion that exists for 2000 years would never have a member that is a liar or charlatan. If the core of the religion was misdirected by liars or charlatans than you have a possible cause for concern. This is a good part of the reason that my commitment is primarily to the basic concept of Christianity that is summarized in the following statement by Jesus:

Anything that is proclaimed as part of Christianity that is inconsistent with this concept I view with intense skepticism. Anything that is superfluous to it I view as just that.


I am not sure you understand what faith means, so I would recommend against this approach.

However, if you wish to claim that faith has lead you to accept Scientology, than fine. Why would I care?

Nah a desist God is more plausible then Zeus.

Could even stick with different versions of the Christian God. I would say the non Nontrinitarianism existing is more plausible then the Trinity version.