I'm a materialist who says things like: "Based on the frequency of the self-reports, the 'god-shaped hole' is clearly a real phenomenon." (1)
How do you distinguish if you are making people mad because you are making bad arguments vs. making people mad because you are piercing the veil of their tribal biases?
(1) - (And therefore, any mental states which people have experienced resulting from the "god-shaped hole" are clearly within the range of normal behavior in the evolutionary heritage of Homo sapiens. Therefore, the feelings associated with religious faith and hope are merely the birthright of human beings, whether or not one believes in a particular deity or is a materialist. I cite myself as a datum.)
I don't really think I'm going to make anyone mad. Tribal biases are way too strong for that.
"God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty. Materialism allays those fears the same way that belief does. Any position on that spectrum is as valid as any other.
Spirituality, the reckoning with of the profoundly unknowable, is equally doable by both materialists and by believers, and I often see people who proclaim themselves as uber-materialist and hyper-critical of religious idiocy, go whole-hog with their own forms of myth, legend, priesthood, and dogma.
If materialists read the Bible with the same reverence that they read Shakespeare with, they'd see why their positions are so silly. David and Goliath is a phenomenal read on the dynamics of ego and courage. If Shakespeare had been born in that day, he'd have been on the committee writing the Bible.
It's just that the Bible is so old that you need to actually understand history to really grasp it. Of course, there's an entire industry of people devoted to making it accessible. Religion deals with far, far, far more than just the stuff of belief.
My position on materialism vs everything else is that since all positions on the spectrum are equally likely to be true, and there are far more positions on the spectrum that aren't materialism than that are, then materialism is vanishingly unlikely. Reductionist scientific reasoning is a poor tool to parse the metaphysical landscape with. More realms than just the physical can be conceived of without even having to consider the supernatural. These realms need to be unified somehow if we want to avoid the illogic of dualism.
"God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty.
Sorry, I agree with much of what you write above, but this in particular strikes me as a non-sequitur. There is a nihilism which can come from the certainty that a human is but an insignificant blip and from the certainty that the sun will burn the Earth into a dried out rock, if not de-orbit the planet completely. The "God shaped hole" is often deemed silly by the materialist tribes. Why, in particular? I think it's because it's so often used in silly bumper-sticker rhetoric. The existence of such needs -- which can go beyond even the question of life, death, and a (fictional) life after death -- is something which human beings, materialist or otherwise, should acknowledge and examine, or ignore at their peril.
Religion deals with far, far, far more than just the stuff of belief.
Indeed. And so does the "God-shaped hole." I think belief is where many of both the religious and the materialists get themselves stuck, unproductively. I'm confident that there is no afterlife. However, given the arc of history, and the utter unpredictability of today's world to our ancestors of a thousand years ago, even someone who understands Thermodynamics has reason for unspecified hope.
My quibble with "God-shaped hole" is not with the hole part, but with the God part. God is a very very recent idea, only having been around for the last few thousand years. Deity existed in many, many, many different forms before the monotheists took over. That could perhaps have been better explained.
But it doesn't take much to reach a conceptualization of God. I believe in a universe that's bigger than the physical aspects of it that we can see and experience. Given that even in our own universe, self-organization and sentience were able to evolve, there's no reason not to believe that sometime before our universe existed, a powerful being evolved to guide existence. When time frames literally stretch out to infinity, anything's possible.
Our universe could be just one in a countless procession of similar universes. The idea's even taken seriously by the scientific establishment. With this groundwork laid, over unimaginable numbers of universal iterations, there's more than enough room for God.
How do you distinguish if you are making people mad because you are making bad arguments vs. making people mad because you are piercing the veil of their tribal biases?
(1) - (And therefore, any mental states which people have experienced resulting from the "god-shaped hole" are clearly within the range of normal behavior in the evolutionary heritage of Homo sapiens. Therefore, the feelings associated with religious faith and hope are merely the birthright of human beings, whether or not one believes in a particular deity or is a materialist. I cite myself as a datum.)