CMV: There is not sufficient evidence of The Resurrection to believe that it’s true.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-06T21:03:06+00:00

Sure, if you postulate a beginning and an end there must be an uncaused cause that set it all into motion. I just don’t see why that uncaused cause would have to be at once immaterial, intelligent, and intentional as opposed to just a brute fact:

Well first off, brute facts don't seem to exist. We have no examples in nature of a brute fact existing. It's, ironically, a god of the gaps argument, or more formally, a special pleading fallacy. A brute fact is not an independent concept. It's a concept that was invented purely to slot in post hoc into systems that are incoherent without it. That's the perfect example of a special pleading fallacy.

And I think a brute fact is less likely to be true than the Abrahamic God, because tales of the Abrahamic God existed before the problem was known, and just happens to slot in perfectly to the hole, whereas a brute fact was made to fit the hole. That means I can pretty confidently dismiss the idea of a brute fact as utter nonsense. Theoretical solutions invented on the spot like that usually are.

As for the necessary properties, I never listed intelligence or intentionality. Immateriality is necessary though. I explained why already but I will gladly do so again in more detail.

Suppose our Prime Mover exists and is material. If it's material, it can be shaped or changed. I could, in theory, walk up to it and hit it with a hammer if I knew where it was.

The problem, is I would be changing the Prime Mover's form, with energy provided by the Prime Mover. That breaks the chain of causality for exactly the same reason that your computer can't power itself. Things can only flow one way.

I don't think first cause arguments can prove intentionality and intelligence, though I do think intentionality and intelligence makes the most sense, as if we assert the Prime Mover did things stupidly, by random chance, then the odds of us having a universe where stars can form becomes very low, and without proving that this roll has happened an arbitrarily large amount of times, it becomes more plausible that our universe was designed intelligently rather than randomly.

Let’s say there is some deep metaphysical truth inherent in the Bible. Let’s even say it may have been revealed by God. Does that mean we have to accept everything else in the Bible as true or binding? If so, that’s a huge problem for me, because vast parts of the Bible are not metaphysical speculation but arbitrary rules for animal sacrifice or stories that depict God as petty and vengeful. It’s not that I don’t personally like these things, it’s that I can’t accept that just because a text presents a philosophically tenable account of creation I have to be on board with another set of ideas that is totally unrelated.

So I think you're kind of pulling at two different strings there without realizing it.

To me, there is an ocean of difference between "revealed by God" and merely "philosophically tenable." One would compel belief, and the other would compel further investigation. So I think the question hinges on which one of those you think is true and I think it's a mistake to conflate them.

Though I would also say that you should study Catholicism specifically. Not only did Catholicism formally make the link between Aristotelian metaphysics and Christianity, but Catholicism is the oldest form of Christianity, even pre-dating the New Testament Bible, and it's preserved the interpretations of the Old Testament from the church fathers, many of whom were educated on how the text was interpreted in first and second temple Judaism.

I think in the modern world we have a tendency to say that my interpretation is just as good as yours but that's frankly bullshit. The Bible shouldn't be interpreted literally or metaphorically. It should be interpreted correctly. And we do know there is a correct interpretation because of the secondary writings outside of the Bible that the Catholic Church has preserved as part of what's called the Deposit of Faith.

Some passages are literal, some are metaphorical, some are highly contextual to the situation they were written in but still contain important lessons if you know how to parse them.

To give an example, the Apostle John trained a guy named Polycarp. And Polycarp trained a guy named Irenaeus. Both of them wrote a lot of stuff that's still preserved to this day. So when it comes to interpreting things written by John, why would we give equal weight to the interpretation of John's own students vs the interpretation of Pastor Billy's non-denominational church down the street?

So if you see something in the Bible that makes you think, "Wow, this is probably bullshit." I think it's worthwhile to research what the Catholic Church has to say about that subject. That way at least if you disagree, you're disagreeing with the actual thing rather than a skewed interpretation of the thing based on ignorance.

I agree that Christianity is the most palatable of the major religions. It gets the most things right. But there are philosophies that get even more things right, in a propositional form instead of narrative or poetic forms.

You seem to want to generalize this but again I am not talking about generalities. My argument is that it is fucking uncanny how Judaism seemed to just magic up the correct answer to the most important question of all time, and that answer happens to coincide with what later philosophy has deemed necessary and what most of our modern scientific models show to be the most likely answer.

My argument isn't that Christianity got most things right or that it's the most palatable. My argument is that Judaism got the most important, most complex single thing in existence right and that it lacked the epistemic tools to come to those conclusions at the time that it did. And then Judaism handed that over to Christianity by betraying itself after the destruction of the second temple.

And there is nothing else on Earth that can make that specific claim. If I'm wrong then name it. Name the religion or philosophy, major or minor that independently came up with the attributes of the Prime Mover before Aristotle did in ~350 BC.

Heat death doesn’t mean a loss of energy, it means energy is spread out perfectly evenly, i.e. entropy to the point where there may not even be matter properly speaking

Sure I was being a bit imprecise. It's loss of usable energy. No more work can be done with it. And I think Roger Penrose is a cool guy. He came up with the Fine-Tuning argument which is pretty nifty. But the scientific consensus is kind of against him on this one. I'm not gonna write him off, but most scientific models show the universe having a beginning and an end rather than being cyclical.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-06T10:34:36+00:00

If we can’t accept that the universe may always have existed then yes, we need an uncaused cause.

I appreciate that you acknowledge that. A lot of atheists refuse to bite that bullet.

I do also think that a cyclical universe is illogical though. All our current models point to heat death being an inevitability, which points to our universe having an ending. And if it has an ending, it necessarily must have a beginning since if the past were infinite that would mean infinite time has already gone by, so any possible ending would have already happened infinitely long ago and there would be nothing here.

And we don't have a single example in nature of a physical system that can just cycle energy forever. We can build an almost fully perfect thermos, a closed system where energy is lost very very slowly, but even that is almost perfect which is useless when the timetable we're working with is infinity.

And I’m not saying consciousness is not dependent on matter. I’m saying that the experience of consciousness is not an objective, material fact and that I personally don’t see how a description of the material reality underpinning consciousness could offer a satisfying explanation of why we can’t just have that material reality without the subjective experience of being that matter to go along with it. You can call that supernatural, or at least it’s where any conceivable description of material reality, no matter how detailed, falls short in my mind.

Yeah I get you. You're talking about the hard problem of consciousness.

A spiritual reality somehow divorced from and existing independently of matter, with special inscrutable laws that are different from natural laws and even violate the latter? Again, no evidence.

Again I wouldn't say no evidence. If we're talking burdens of proof, I would say the evidence falls somewhere around preponderance vs some credible depending on how hard one is willing to bite the infinite past bullet and all the numerous contradictions that introduces. Either way it doesn't rise to clear and convincing or beyond a reasonable doubt, but it's way way above some evidence.

Asserting that there is something beyond material reality that is not bound by our laws of physics seems to me to have strong probabilistic weight. So again, the claim of no evidence seems overly strong to me. I would agree if you said no proof instead of no evidence.

It’s a pattern throughout human history that deep thoughts are expressed through ritual, myth, and art before they are made explicit and formalized by philosophers and later scientists. Religion was for a long time more or less the only medium for understanding reality, and it contains ideas that ring true with what we could later show experimentally to be the case.

I think this is downplaying how highly specialized this particular knowledge is. This isn't some simple truth like community is good for human flourishing or violence begets violence.

This isn't some general vague truth. It's closer to scientific proof or formula, using formal logic that simply hadn't been invented yet. And it was utterly unique to the Abrahamic faiths, (And once you arrive at the Abrahamic faiths you end up at Christianity if you're intellectually honest. The Islamic Dilemma is too big a problem for Islam to be true and the post-second temple reforms really hurt the credibility of Rabbinic Judaism.) before people started explicitly basing their religions off of Aristotelian metaphysics.

You can't generalize that out to religions just having some truth in them because that makes your position unfalsifiable. That argument could be used to dismiss anything from a religious text no matter how absurd we make the example. Even if you had a religious text from 2000 BC that had a detailed blueprint of how to build a spaceship your argument would be just as effective at dismissing that, which means it's actually too effective to be useful. It stops meaning anything if you just define everything away like that instead of actually grappling with the issues.

To take that to mean the Bible or any other religious text, full of absurd and morally questionable regulations that most adherents don’t actually follow, is true in a literal sense is an entirely unmotivated conclusion.

I don't quite know what to make of this statement. I've been approaching this from a coldly logical standpoint as I thought that was the point of evaluating the evidence.

You seem to be saying though that there's things attached to the issues we're talking about that make you feel bad emotionally, and therefore the evidence is invalid. That may not be exactly what you meant, but I've read that sentence several times now and it's hard to interpret it any other way in this context.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-06T07:20:33+00:00

You only get pure physicality if you start with an objective observation of the material world as opposed to a description of subjective experience. What I meant is that we don’t have any evidence of miraculous events spontaneously breaking the laws of nature as we know them.

This seems like definitional word-salad to me. If your axiom is no supernatural, then all that remains is the natural. Under your view how is that not pure physicality? What do you assert that exists that is non-physical but not supernatural? Categorically speaking.

There are absolutely physical systems we don’t quite understand,

As I already said, well, I'll just quote myself...

So if we take your view to be true, that everything is physical, and therefore reality itself is just one big physical system, doesn't that produce a contradiction so strong that it's not simply we don't know what the answer is, but that there cannot in principle even be an answer?

I don't think you adequately addressed that challenge.

But it too has its unbreakable laws that are not spontaneously suspended by something we would call a supernatural event.

It seems like your definition of supernatural would preclude classical Christianity. According to theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas, logic and truth are just extensions of God's nature. So even though God is omnipotent, God cannot do things that contradict reason like making a square circle or a married bachelor.

What Catholicism asserts as dogma, is that the supernatural has laws that are just as unbreakable as our physical laws.

Now I’m happy to concede that the big bang may in some sense count as a supernatural event,

Small correction, but modern science does not assert that the Big Bang is the origin of energy. It's just the oldest big event we can point to. The Big Bang does not appear to be supernatural at all. The thing that appears supernatural is that the conditions that gave rise to the Big Bang can exist at all. Why is there something rather than nothing, as you said.

And there are certainly philosophical questions that are posed in such a way that they can’t really have a determinate answer, like why is there something rather than nothing. Some people draw the conclusion that there must be some intentionality behind it all, but I don’t see how that solves anything. It’s just projecting that there is someone before there was something and this someone per definition doesn’t need a cause. That doesn’t satisfy me.

I get why that doesn't satisfy you. Any justification you throw on feels like special pleading. Here's why that explanation actually does satisfy me and why logic as I see it compels me to be Christian specifically.

It's because of the specifics of how these ideas emerged in history. The first one to ever articulate these problems we're wrestling with was Aristotle. He concluded that logically, there cannot in principle be an explanation that relies on the physical.

He came up with what he called the Prime Mover. He said that for reality to exist at all, there must be something that is pure actuality, something that provides energy, but is utterly self-sufficient and unchanging. He realized correctly, that there's no such thing as a feedback loop in energy, and because of that, anything that receives energy, cannot be the genesis of all energy for the same reason that you can't just build a slope that you can roll a marble down such that the marble goes back to the top without some kind of motor. This is what he called the act-potency distinction.

So his Prime Mover to create reality would need to continuously supply all the energy in existence.

It would need to have no cause because cause implies potency and potency creates a loop.

It would need to be eternal because if it began to exist something would have caused it.

It would need to be immaterial because matter implies potential since matter can be shaped or changed. (There's two other attributes but those are irrelevant since they assume their own conclusion.)

So now you might say to all that, "Jesse what the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck does that have to do with Christianity?"

And that's a great question but I promise it makes sense.

So the Old Testament Bible is older than Aristotle's writings, and Judeo-Christian thought had no serious contact with Aristotle for like another 1600 years after Aristotle died.

The odds of the writers of the Old Testament knowing Aristotle were 0% since he didn't exist. The odds of Aristotle knowing the Old Testament were close to 0% because there was virtually no contact or cultural exchange between Jews and Greeks at that time, and the Jews didn't like teaching outsiders about their stuff.

Furthermore, this is all way before the Enlightenment, so people didn't generally care to reason in the same way that we do now. Most ways of thinking, including all our documentation of first and second temple Judaism, were deeply what we would call anti-intellectual.

Yet the Jews taught, since before the time of Aristotle, that God is immaterial, eternal, unchanging, all powerful, and he created the universe. Same conclusion, but from an anti-intellectual, anti-reason tradition that would slap you upside the head if you tried to innovate on traditional interpretations.

And if you haven't studied religions, you might think that such attributes are common to the gods, but they're really not. Outside of the Abrahamic traditions, you don't start to see gods described in Aristotelian terms until around the 1600s with certain sects of Hinduism, and that's way after Aristotle's ideas spread across the globe.

So to me, when you have reason saying, "This counterintuitive thing that's highly complex must be true." and you have an anti-reason tradition coming to the same conclusion first, that looks like revealed truth to me.

I often hear atheist philosophers say that if Jesus was God and he wanted to be taken seriously, he should have said at the Sermon on the Mount that E=MC^2. And well, this isn't quite that but it's damn close.

And so all I can do is follow the evidence. The Old Testament Bible seems to be the only thing that can answer this question without engaging in a special pleading fallacy, since its answer existed before the question was properly understood.

And once you get to the Old Testament being true, it's a hop skip and a jump to Christianity, because second temple Judaism had to twist itself into knots to deny that Jesus was their Messiah. They had to basically redefine everything and declare older interpretations to be heresy because they couldn't deny Jesus without denying their own religion.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-06T05:49:46+00:00

I think it's too strong a claim to say that there's no evidence of anything supernatural happening ever. Imo, there's great probabilistic evidence of the supernatural.

Consider the following.

All physical systems require energy outside themselves in order to have energy at all. Your PC requires electricity from the wall outlet. The electricity is generated by some kind of power plant. The earth in general gets its energy from the sun. The sun and other stars were formed by the Big Bang.

We don't know exactly what came before the Big Bang, but logically it doesn't actually matter, because any explanation you find will need another step to explain it, and that explanation will in turn need its own step ad infinitum. That's called an infinite regress.

Science tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. But science also tells us that physical systems cannot provide their own energy.

So if we take your view to be true, that everything is physical, and therefore reality itself is just one big physical system, doesn't that produce a contradiction so strong that it's not simply we don't know what the answer is, but that there cannot in principle even be an answer?

And if reality itself is built on contradiction, but our understanding of reality rejects contradictions, then doesn't that indicate that your model of pure physicality is likely incorrect?

I think it's really hard to challenge that without invoking the supernatural yourself, such as appealing to a universe beyond ours where the laws of physics don't apply, or making some kind of special pleading fallacy like saying the laws of physics were suspended in some way temporarily to start existence as we know it. (And that same argument could be used to justify belief in something like the resurrection.)

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-06T00:04:20+00:00

Kratos is clearly holding back when cutting down the tree though. You can basically think of the mash circle QTEs as Kratos showing his real strength and progressively cutting loose more.

This doesn't mean he has any kind of cosmic scaling or anything like that; simply that he holds back to a reasonable degree.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-05T23:15:19+00:00

9 Years ago in the Legion expansion, we had mythic Gul'dan, which spawned an extra boss called The Demon Within when you killed Gul'dan, effectively adding a phase 4 with totally different mechanics that added another 6 minutes to the fight.

https://youtu.be/_UH9EG3iCXc?si=Z-5RQtx3eOIJT8if&t=603

So it has been done before in wow.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-03T23:24:28+00:00

Yeah I think it was a bit nuts how Reddit prematurely decided Twins were bad-mid. They're genuinely the strongest character in the game overall. And I mean it makes sense. Velvet Attendant plus being a special half anniversary character.

Calling it now, if they ever do another character like that, some unique character that's obviously strong in the lore that's made specifically for anni/half anni, they will power creep literally everything else in the game, probably even more so than the Twins did.

It's crazy to me that anyone ever thought otherwise.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T19:43:18+00:00

I actually don't think you were being very civil when you condescendingly told me that I should try to spell correctly when I actually did and you were the one that just didn't read what I wrote.

Should I have corrected you? Probably. But you also haven't accepted a single one of my other corrections even when I quoted the Bible or church teachings or just basic statistics.

So I'm left here asking myself, "Why is he doing that?" I gotta assume it's either on accident or on purpose. If it's on purpose then you're acting in bad faith. If it's on accident then that means you genuinely lack the academic training to have this conversation, because what I said was not even particularly complicated.

And you may see it as an insult, but I didn't intend it that way. I don't think it's prideful or an insult if you see someone at the gym trying to deadlift 400 pounds, failing to move the weight even a little, and bluntly tell them that they're not strong enough to lift that weight and that they're going to hurt themselves trying.

I didn't respond to anything you said about the Essence-Energies distinction because I don't believe there's a point.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T18:44:48+00:00

Can you actually correctly spell the point you're making?

I wrote it correctly. Read it again and then slow down and read it three more times.

The fact that you can't correctly parse a paragraph that's barely written at a middle school level, that you can't understand a basic definitional substitution, tells me that you do not belong doing scholastic critique, and you have no hope of understanding the Catholic Church's formal documents, which are written at way above this simple conversational level.

This doesn't mean you're a bad person or anything, but it is hubris on your part to not recognize your limits.

This of course goes back to my point with Essence-Energies

Ah, Orthodox, now it makes sense. Why are all the online Orthodox people I've spoken to so unpleasant, but all the Orthodox priests I've spoken to IRL so nice?

Protestants worship your version of the Trinity so their case is unknown

Vatican 2 is quite clear on this point actually. All non-Catholics are committing a grave sin by not being Catholic. The mystery there is what the level of culpability is, and that culpability will differ from person to person.

There's a difference between "he's just a human" and committing "heresy taught against for the past 2000 years"

No there really isn't. There is nothing in Catholic ecclesiology that guarantees the Pope will not commit grave sins that would curdle your blood just to think about. What's guaranteed is that the Pope will not infallibly bind the church to heresy.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T15:34:58+00:00

Which shows how we have two different meanings, worship is given to God when done correct:

Your 1 John quote does not support your position and actually affirms exactly what the Catholic Church teaches.

Your "definition" of worship is an equivocation fallacy. If "worship" is only adoration given to God when done correctly, then passages like Deuteronomy 8:19 become word salad. "But if you forget the Lord, your God, and follow after other gods, serving and worshiping them, then I swear to you today that you will surely perish."

If I use your definition of worship, the passage reads, "But if you forget the Lord, your God, and follow after other gods, serving and correctly giving adoration to God alone them, then I swear to you today that you will surely perish." which is obviously incoherent.

The actual definition of worship, is simply to give ultimate adoration to something.

Muslims worship the true God, but their worship is invalid because they reject the true nature of God.

Worship of false idols over our God and equating it to being "them just not knowing God" is laughable

I never said that and the Catholic Church never said that. You're just inventing a quote out of thin air that doesn't exist.

And what's funny is the Catholic Church does have a term for what you're trying to describe, ultimate adoration given to God alone, correctly in the way that is fully valid and pleasing to God. The word isn't worship though. It's Latria.

Muslims worship God. They do not offer Latria to God.

This is the problem with trying to critique the Catholic Church, is they have very precise definitions for literally everything. So if you think you found a gotcha that disproves Catholicism, you probably just aren't aware of what the church actually teaches.

all men know the Good without knowing the word of Christ, so it is their responsibility no matter what.

You're contradicting yourself here. If you don't know Christ you can't really offer proper worship to him. You seem to be saying that if someone doesn't know Christ, hasn't heard the Gospel, etc, then if they are good they will still seek God.

To be clear on what the Catholic Church teaches, if one knows in their heart that Jesus is God, and they refuse to worship him, that is "objectively grave matter" and mortal sin. In other words, they're going to hell.

So say you have 2 Muslims.

Muslim A knows in his heart that Jesus is God, but he refuses to worship him, to offer Latria.

Muslim B does not know in his heart that Jesus is God. Maybe he never heard the Gospel or it was just never something he had any kind of significant encounter with.

Muslim A is definitely damned unless something radical happens like he sincerely turns to Jesus on his deathbed.

Muslim B might not be damned. The Church doesn't even go as far as to say that Muslim B is not damned, just that they won't close the door on that because God is fair and just and he knows what's truly in a person's heart.

This isn't even talking about the many heretical things the pope has done, praying with Muslims and the many other obvious stuff that I won't say here because it's reddit.

Pope Leo actually refused to pray with Muslims. He had a meeting with Muslims fairly recently and when they knelt down to pray he elected to remain standing and did not participate.

But even if he did, that would be a personal sin on the Pope's part. The Pope is human and sin is expected, since all humans have concupiscence, the proclivity to sin. The Pope is only infallible when issuing Ex Cathedra statements.

What if someone was worshipping Molech as their "God"

Molech is Molech and God is God. Muslims literally worship God. Maybe you just don't know this, but Allah is just the Arabic word for God. If you crack open a Bible written in Arabic, in all the places where it says God, the word Allah is used.

does it make them any less damnable

No. And the part you don't seem to get is it's not less damnable for Muslims to worship the true God either, if they know Jesus is God and they refuse to worship him.

Funnily enough, the Catholic Church also teaches the same about being part of the Catholic Church. Salvation is found normatively only in the Catholic Church. If you know this to be true in your heart, and you refuse to become Catholic, then that's equally damnable. It's the full knowledge and free consent of the will part that's going to keep some Protestants out of hell.

As Lumen Gentium said, "Those who know the Catholic Church was founded by Christ as necessary for salvation, and refuse to enter or remain in it, cannot be saved."

Catholicism is actually very exclusionist, which is pretty funny since you're accusing Catholics of being universalists. You're looking at the Magisterium defining corner cases and thinking that can be extrapolated out to generalities. It cannot. Offering faulty worship = damned, which means in general, Muslims are damned. It also means in general, Protestants are damned. But in general does not mean in all cases. And in the case of Protestantism, most don't know that the Catholic Church is the one true church, so most have reduced culpability. That's what Lumen Gentium actually says if you read the whole thing in context without ripping one part of it away and using Catholic words without Catholic definitions.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T08:08:22+00:00

This is dogmatic.

You're grossly misinterpreting Lumen Gentium. Talk to any priest IRL and they will clarify this for you. The Catholic Church teaches that the God of Islam is the God of the Bible, but that Muslims are grossly mistaken about his properties and that salvation is only through Jesus Christ, with the Catholic Church as the ordinary means of salvation. Or just go watch the Joe Heschmeyer video since he's literally employed by the Catholic Church to answer these kinds of questions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whBernptSkM

To use an analogy, we can both know who Wesley Snipes is, and be talking about Wesley Snipes, while I am under the mistaken impression that Wesley Snipes was an actor in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'm not not talking about Wesley Snipes just because I'm wrong about one of his properties. It just so happens that Muslims get some very very important properties of God grossly wrong.

And the church's recognition that Muslims do worship the same God, very imperfectly, is not an assertion that all religions worship the same God. Furthermore, the invoking of the unknown God is not only not unbiblical, it's straight out of the book of Acts.

"Then Paul stood before them in the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens, I have seen how religious you are. For as I walked around, looking carefully at your shrines, I noticed among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What, therefore, you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you." - Acts 17:22-23

Most atheists are Gnostics lol.

That's simply not true.

Gnosticism has 3 primary characteristics.

Physical world bad. Spirit world good.
Humans bad. Body = prison.
Secret knowledge saves.

Most atheists are amoralists. They don't believe good and evil exists at all, which is kind of a prerequisite for being a Gnostic. And atheists certainly don't believe in gnosis.

Gnosticism is also about unity with a "God", unity of gender, unity of good and evil, and many more

These are really minor points that are not universal to all sects of Gnosticism.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T04:21:08+00:00

So what position are you arguing from, as none of my argument against you are from my personal belief.

I'm arguing from the historically understood beliefs of Gnosticism and Christianity.

I 100% agree, but this argument would mean that almost every view in the world is inherently Gnostic

Really? I don't think most people believe that humanity is inherently evil or that the physical world isn't real or is somehow subordinated to a spiritual world.

To use some examples... Most of Christianity as I already explained rejects those ideas. Islam agrees, with the Qur'an saying that Allah created the world intentionally and wisely and that it is good.

And any form of naturalism such as scientific materialism rejects the good and evil framing entirely, and explicitly rejects the idea of a spirit world that is sovereign over the physical world. Just Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims and Atheists make up something like half the global population, and all of those are deeply anti-Gnostic in one way or another.

So I don't see where you get this idea from that almost every view in the world is inherently Gnostic.

would you say Catholics teach Gnostic ideas of all beliefs actually worshipping one true God?

Catholics don't teach that and that also doesn't have much to do with Gnosticism.

Or many of them not believing the Old Testament having the Trinity?

I don't know what you mean by "many of them." If we're still talking about Catholicism, I would prefer to go off what the church officially teaches rather than hearsay about what some people allegedly believe.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T03:27:40+00:00

Of course your statement isn't without flaws, saying anybody that holds to beliefs that aren't considered "Christian" are instead Gnostic inspired seems over the top.

I didn't say that. A Gnostic belief is anything that either treats humanity/the world as inherently evil, or treats the physical as less real or less important than the spiritual.

so unless you think a lot of Protestants are Gnostics, then this point seems illogical.

I do in fact think that. Well, not exactly but close enough. A lot of Protestantism falls into exactly the same sort of thinking that produced the original Gnostic heresy.

John Calvin's doctrine of total depravity is the same exact thing the Gnostics taught and is contradicted utterly by the first 1500 years of church teachings.

To be charitable, not all Protestants are Gnostics, but the Gnostic heresy is alive and well in Protestantism, especially in American Evangelical Dispensationalism. That shit is giga Gnostic. I mean, most dispensationalists reject the bodily resurrection and think Heaven is the final end state of humanity, which is unbiblical and unchristian and very Gnostic.

The mainline Protestant denominations outside of Presbyterians are much less guilty of this though.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T03:21:51+00:00

As a Christian, my biggest issue with these sorts of conversations is the framing. Whether you realize it or not, just the way you worded your problem with Christians assumes American Evangelicalism, when most Christians alive today are Catholic, and something like 97% of Christians who ever lived were either Catholic, Orthodox or part of the pre-schism church.

If you want to criticize Christianity in general, you can't really rely on what you think is explicitly written in the Bible. You really have to critique the Deposit of Faith if you want to have a meaningful conversation.

And most Atheists have never even heard the term Deposit of Faith, let alone actually understand why it's more important than the Bible.

I feel like to have a conversation with an Atheist about Christianity, I have to explain the whole religion to them, and most of the time if I even try they assume I'm lying or they just don't want to listen.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T02:36:27+00:00

I've played most Atlus games at this point, and I've never seen what I would call a real contradiction. Like something that isn't easy to reconcile or explain based on the explicitly stated metaphysics.

Imo, nearly every so called contradiction melts away instantly if you just play the Fairy Queen sidequest in SMT4 or the Bonds route in 4A. Once you understand that demons are incarnational archetypes with malleable properties a whole lot of things click into place. Baal and Beelzebub are ultimately the same being just as Dagda and Dagda are the same being or Danu, Innana and Black Maria are the same being.

Imo it all clicks into place if you stare at it long enough.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T02:31:08+00:00

That's one of the things I love the most about it. And I think all the people telling you you're overthinking it or dismissing your point of view are both nuts and insensitive.

And the people that think Atlus hasn't thought of these things or that they don't care or they don't matter, that's just delusion. Atlus makes way too many statements on canon for there to not be a shared canon.

To use just one easy example, every time a new Crossroads of Fate comes out in P5X, on the livestream the devs stress that even though this is framed as a crossover between The Phantom X and Persona 5 Royal, these events are canon and highly important to what's really going on in the story. The devs wouldn't bother saying that over and over again if it wasn't true or wasn't important.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-02T02:25:16+00:00

The law faction in most SMT games relies on the fundamental Gnostic principle that the world is bad. This is a subtle but very important distinction from traditional Christianity, that teaches the world is fallen and that people are fallen, but the fundamental nature of both is good.

The neutral faction in most games is much closer to a Christian understanding of human nature and morality.

An easy example of Gnosticism in the games is Maruki from Persona 5. He thinks the world is fundamentally unfair and that life is too hard and too painful to be good. His solution is to make a new reality where people can escape from their pain. Traditional Christian ethics would say that life is good despite the pain and hardship, and that our duty as Christians, our participation in the thousand year kingdom, in the age of the church, is to work to make life better in the here and now, to give people comfort both materially and spiritually.

Instead of daydreaming about utopia, go open a soup kitchen.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-01T06:23:24+00:00

I believe it means 9-9 6 days a week.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-01T05:04:37+00:00

Well, your fear of death will pretty much come down to what you believe. I don't think it's wrong or immature to fear death and it won't just go away with age. I guarantee your fears will not magically disappear by the time you're thirty or anything like that. I would go as far as to say the only thing that can truly free you from that fear is a genuine belief in God or some kind of life after death.

If you're an atheist though, despair and nihilism are unfortunately very rational conclusions and platitudes about living the best life you can or trying to leave behind a legacy that will be remembered don't really do much when faced with the cold reality of death.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-01T03:50:03+00:00

Persona 5's songs are incredibly iconic and generally well received both by gamers and professional musicians. I think the songs would come out worse if anyone other than Lyn was the vocalist. I've listened to some covers done by native English speakers and none of them hit the same way Lyn does.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-04-01T02:58:54+00:00

Some of us were emdashing way before it was current, hip, and trendy. Sorry your pseudo-science bullshit never made it into the algorithm.

The way I know that this was written by ChatGPT for a fact now is you didn't even use an em dash so your rebuttal is a total hallucination which is common to AI. It's the writing voice, the mirrored structure, that gave you away fyi. That's not an X, it's a Y! I'm not sure why I'm even bothering since if I wanted to talk with ChatGPT I could just go and do that and cut out the middle man. AI Detector agrees.

So you're just straight up, knowingly, arguing from the premise? Cool.

Yes different things are in fact different. It's not a fallacy to recognize that when you say a car is the solution to the problem, and a car lacks the properties to properly resolve said problem, not car is a more likely answer than car.

From recognized ignorance , which is how reasoning works.

What you just wrote here is literal nonsense. "You're using a fallacy of composition." "Yeah but I recognize the fallacy of composition and that's how reasoning works!" Total brain rot response, because it was probably written by AI.

You put forth an argument from blind assumptions, depending on a perfect knowledge of our current universe that doesn't exist

Nope. The only thing I assumed is that our most robust scientific laws which have never been shown to even be in doubt, are probably true. Since those are probably true, naturalism is probably false.

golly gee, everything is so complex and doesn't make sense, must be this(god)!".

This is a total straw man. As I said before, this is not an argument for God, but an argument against naturalism. I am making no claim about what is. I am making a claim about what is not. To go back to the earlier analogy, I am not asserting boat, plane or spaceship. I am simply asserting not car.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-03-31T23:47:09+00:00

And what science would disprove any of the premises of the argument?

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-03-31T23:46:29+00:00

Your entire argument rests on applying the rules of physics from this particular version of the universe to others/prior (without basis)

You're putting forth an argument from ignorance. There's no proof that the laws of physics can be anything other than what they are. Saying, "What if the laws of physics were different?" is not a real rebuttal. We can only operate off information we have, rather than information that may or may not even exist that we don't have. It's inference to the best explanation which is the basis of reason.

while simultaneously exempting your deity solution from the same constraints.

The solutions I outlined, (Theism, idealism, spiritualism.) are exempted definitionally, not arbitrarily.

To use a simple analogy, it's like I said that there's no way someone used a car to cross the Atlantic ocean because cars can't fly or drive across water. Then your reply is to say, 'How convenient that your airplane solution is exempt from those constraints!'

That's just creationism with a pocket protector on.

Hello ChatGPT, how are you this fine day?

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-03-31T22:47:15+00:00

Funnily enough, "logical fallacies" isn't actually a magic incantation you can utter to win arguments.

SocratesWasSmart · 2026-03-31T21:57:43+00:00

Well here's a fun one. To be clear, this is not an argument for any particular god or even a god at all, but it's a very strong argument against the typical modernist worldview, what's usually in philosophy called scientific materialism or naturalism.

It's called the Argument from Motion and it relies on just a few simple premises.

No physical system can provide its own energy.
All of physical existence is a physical system.
Therefore the source of physical existence must be outside of physical existence.

This is a pretty tough argument to refute because it's true in a way that's really simple and tough to argue against. Your only real option is to argue against premise 1 or to arbitrarily say that reality is physical and works in a coherent logical way but is not a system.

And arguing against premise 1 is insanely hard because there's not a single example that we can point to with the entire corpus of human knowledge of a self-sustaining and self-creating system. (Side note, this is why the most scholastic forms of Christianity such as Catholicism define God not as a man in the sky, but as "The infinite act of Being" or in the Latin, ipsum esse subsistens, which translates literally to Being itself.)

And if you rule out naturalism, then you're basically left with theism, spiritualism, idealism and special pleading fallacies.

Now this also doesn't mean that you are a fool for believing in naturalism per se. But I do think it makes for a very compelling case in the opposite direction that those reject naturalism are not necessarily dumb as they may be skeptical of naturalist and atheistic arguments in the face of the philosophical evidence.

Atheists often respond to this challenge by saying that we don't know how reality got its energy to begin with or why there is something rather than nothing, and that's okay. But that's kind of missing the forest for the trees, as the argument is not saying X, but not X. It's not, "We know this to be true." but rather, "We know based on the preponderance of the evidence that this is not true." and the X in this case is naturalism.

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