You Don’t Believe in the First Place

Interesting conversation between Scott Adams and Stefan, in the early minutes before they get into the politics.

I like Adams, but he’s inaccurate in the self-assessment of his childhood religious beliefs, which he describes at around the 1:20 mark. He didn’t necessarily decide to not believe. He didn’t believe in the first place because he had already decided that no non-natural force could intervene into the natural domain. A huge giveaway is Adams’ insistence that any god should find a “better way” to send a message. That may be true of some conceived gods to be subject to human’s epistemic frameworks, but the God of the Bible prefers to work however He wants.

Another inaccuracy: it’s not as though any ancient Jew—not even the writer of Jonah himself—didn’t think the Jonahic fish narrative wasn’t fantastical. People knew fish don’t normally swallow people, knew how food was digested, or knew that people need breathable air to live. The Jonahic narrative is out of the ordinary because God is out of the ordinary—infinitely so. If there weren’t a few weird events in a collection of books about God dealing in the natural domain, I’d be very suspicious.

But one very good assertion by Adams: humans operate very irrationally. Living “by reason and evidence” is impossible since we we’re not oriented to do so. Not at all. Our hardware can’t even handle the software download, much less the installation.

4 Comments

  • Ed Hurst says:

    I’ve read some of this stuff in recent weeks; Adams’ political commentary cracks me up because he says things people don’t expect. Trump is winning because he taps into the feelings of the majority, versus everyone else trying to tell them how they should feel.

    • Jay says:

      The bureaucrats and talking heads are so DASHED that we’ve been thinking differently all along. What are they going to do?

      I’ve only listened to half the conversation so far. I liked what I heard so far.

  • I guess I don’t really know much about Molyneux or Trump or even Libertarianism in general … but my intuition finds the Donald’s appeal to Libertarians to be surprising (especially for people like Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux).

    • Jay says:

      Trump appeals to nationalists primarily, and there is a good deal of overlap between nationalism and libertarianism. Globalism is a big issue now and libertarians I think have found allies in people with strong nationalist tendencies.

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