Isn't God just a Projection of our Culture? Tim Keller at Veritas [2 of 11]
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- university events • life's hardest questions • relevance of Jesus Christ
www.veritas.org...
You believe in Jesus, but isn't that because you were born in America? What if you were born in Madagascar? Wouldn't you hold different beliefs? Martin Bashir cross-examines NYC pastor and author of "Reason for God" Tim Keller.
Over the past two decades, The Veritas Forum has been hosting vibrant discussions on life's hardest questions and engaging the world's leading colleges and universities with Christian perspectives and the relevance of Jesus. Learn more at www.veritas.org, with upcoming events and over 600 pieces of media on topics including science, philosophy, music, business, medicine, and more!
Christianity is all over the world.
So is smallpox.
I've only watched this clip involving these two individuals, but Tim Keller comes off very winsome, articulate, and humble, while I found Martin Bashir abrasive and arrogant. Kudos to you, Dr. Keller!
@CorndogMaker Rules of evidence, evaluation of eye-witness testimony, weighing of experts are central e.g. to courts of law. Ted has no evidence rather than your assertion.
How do you know someone "gave" me a belief?
Tim Keller doesn't claim every bit of knowledge comes from culture, he just claims the imperious claims of rationalism are culture bound. He and coreligionists are not alone in recog this, the legacy of the failure of scientific utopianism shown by the horrors of the 20th century.
The reason relativism is self refuting is when you apply it to everything then even relativism itself is relative. I, along with the worlds anthropologists who study the movement of cultural influence by the state of local religions, realize that total relativism is not the case because some things can be observed and repeated no matter where you live. You CAN partition truth into fact and folklore with evidence everyone can see.
Also poorly thought out given the fact that Madagascar is like 60% Christian. It was one of the more religious countries I've ever been to.
really...I just was there....and it seemed to be a normal amount of Christians....nothing more....
@CorndogMaker Tim Keller is right. A conflicting plurality of religions, theories or any other thing does not prove the falseness of all. At its heart, relativism is either scoffing or a failure of nerve.
And to say belief is socially transmitted says nothing of its genesis or validity.
How much of our knowledge was gained by our personal work in a lab? How much of our knowledge of history comes from test tubes?
You are focusing on that aspect but that isn't what I am addressing. Religion being true or false is not the point. Religion using a separate type of logic from The fact that religion comes from the culture, is the point. However that fact is is evidence that religion is false.
Why can't he answere whether homosexuality is a sin or not the same way he asnwered this one???
"No, and here's the reason why"
Thus saith the Lord vs intellectualism.
It's nonsensical to think that someone needs to embrace all of relativism in order to recognize the clear and demonstrable fact that religion is an expression of the culture. This fact is one of the basics of anthropology. You're pigeonholing me into a an extreme party to dismiss everything else. Again, for Aristotle there was no science, he was talking about overall ways to view the world.
Martin Bashir Mentions how religions are a product of culture and Tim calls this observable fact "religious relativism" please note that he is not talking about the views of philosophical relativism on their own, just the fact of "religious relativism" which even he himself must agree with. He then wrongly asserts that the fact that religions are based on culture, is itself based on culture too and they are both equally evaluated in that regard, this is wrong.
The fallacy is that relativism affects all things equally. Religious relativism and religions aren't on the same footing. The statement "trees grow" is not affected by relativism but "sushi is yummy" is. The knowledge that religions are socially constructed and are largely restricted by cultural boundaries is observable to anyone, just by learning about different cultures. Someone living on Mars could fly over the earth and discover religious relativism without even having a name for it.
I am not dismissing Aristotle at all, I am dismissing the context you are quoting him in. He was talking about relativism as an overall philosophy. Aristotle said nothing about religion being culturally based. You can partition things into truth and folklore, why is that hard to understand? You can fly on a magic carpet \ you can fly on an airplane, they are partitioned into two separate groups; fantasy and reality. One is real and ones not. One is proven and ones not.
You said that you can't separate religion from other facts. Religion makes unverifiable claims and the scientific method makes claims that are testable, results based. You can cut religion into the realm of wishful thinking and superstition by investigating claims where they are falsifiable with an objective methodology. The claims which are unfalsifiable and put forth no positive evidence, should be discarded until evidence is put forth. Religion is a projection of culture, reality is not.
Pastor Keller is asserting that if any belief is relative then all beliefs must be relative and therefore relativism must not be valid. His mistake is that his argument is based on the premise that relativism is binary: either it's true everywhere are not true at all. This is incorrect. It is entirely logical that one's religious beliefs could be constructed from social constructs but then for one to detect this relativism based on something other than social constructs (like logic, for example). There are more reasons than one to believe something.
You said that Muhammad was a real person and that it was an example of *religion making a falsifiable claim. in the same manner, Forest Gump makes a falsifiable claim. The burden of proof is on the ones making the claim so the body of Jesus vanishing to some other realm is not true by default if a body is not paraded about Jerusalem. You can't go from 'The default is that his body was not paraded about Jerusalem' to 'the body disappeared into heaven' without a middle step.
You can cut fantasy off from reality. Aristotle and all those guys did not have the scientific method. For them it was a philosophical question. Now we can filter out subjectivity, we know things by repeating them, having someone else do the same thing and get the same results. The only assumption we need to make is that we live in a shared universe. Some things qualify as actual knowledge, some don't. We know that religion is regionally based and comes from upbringing and environment.
..sorry,
..came late to discussion..?
.. which "god" are we talking about..??
He's saying: If you think religious relativism is true then all relativism is true and even your total belief in relativism is itself relative and now you've refuted yourself.
He's fractally wrong. Painfully wrong in every angle. You don't need to become a total relativist to recognize that religion is a projection of local culture, you can see for yourself. And we can actually learn true things with objective methods outside of the culture. I like the improved lifespan and computers we have.
Yes when religion does make verifiable claims they are found to be false. It is true that religions are culture based, this fact does not also come from the culture as Tim Keller asserts. Two peoples who are completely separated from one another will not come up with the same religion because it is not something that can be observed and verified. As an aside, this does separate the claims of religion from verifiable truth claims which could be found everywhere in separate cultures.
Religion is a cultural projection, this is well known, you can use this fact to make predictions, it is results based. Anthropologists use it to help archeologists find missing cultures and human artifacts. By studying the folklore and religion of the peoples nearby, they can trace these stories to earlier cultures and see how they have migrated and where other cultures have mixed with theirs. Any extensive definition of the word "culture" will have the word "religion" in it, they are linked.
Then I see where your misunderstanding is. I have only *ever* said that religion is fiction and *that* is what separates it from truth. That is why equating it to just another method of finding truth, as Tim Keller does, is wrong. Religion is fiction because it's faith claims are not falsifiable (in a practical sense) it does not work to filter out subjectivity, it is at the beck and call of the culture. You accused me of separating truth vs truth, when I was always saying truth vs folklore.
Religion shapes culture and culture shapes religion, yes. They are entwined. They have no way to check if their claims are objectively true outside of the culture, they believe them on faith. I suppose that sometimes they make some faith claims that are, in the strictest definition of the word, falsifiable, but not practically so. Like if I claim that exactly one million years from now there will be pink rain. But you can't fault me for using "unfalsifiable" for things like that.
It's not as easy of a point as you'd think, It wouldn't prove that he wasn't resurrected because the resurrection was supernatural. The thing about supernatural claims is that they have no natural parameters, so he's resurrected in a new body if you want, nothing is falsified by natural facts when you use magic. I think we agree with Tim palming a card with the whole if 'if religion comes from culture then so does the idea that it comes from culture' shtick and that's all I wanted to say. Thanks
Yep one cultural projection is usually opposed by another. new culture can be carved out in different ways. Being persecuted for your religion doesn't make your religion any less a projection of another growing culture. Martyrdom is a popular human concept which is in most religions because it always helps faith claims gain support. When someone we can relate to dies for something, human nature tells us it must be true and meaningful even if it is not.
I am sure you get his point though so it's not poorly thought out. He probably just made a mistake with the country
Was it BF Skinner who said "we are products of our environment " ?
We choose the gods we need....pretty simple and obvious.
Again, total relativism refutes itself but not the religious relativism discussed above. You don't have to believe in an entire philosophy to recognize one aspect of it as clearly the case. Science is results based, your computer works here because it works everywhere despite what the culture says. Science is not immune to cultural influence but it works to filter it out using double blind testing, peer review, falsification and the scientific method.
The worst answers ever.
how
If Jesus was paraded how would it falsify the claim that he went up to heaven? It was a supernatural assent to a supernatural world. Its not absurd to say that the miraculous claims of religion, the things that make it a religion, are left unfalsifiable.They are meant to be left up to faith. Muhammad being real, Jesus being paraded around or not, Israel being real, these have no baring on any of a religion's faith claims.
He makes the false claim that Theories are like religion.Theories are verifiable and make claims which are testable. Religions make claims that are unverifiable and where they are testable have been shown to be false. Theories are repeatable by anyone anywhere and do not need to be believed. Religions are believed by being indoctrinated by ones parents. The fact that religions are relative to their region and culture and are not verifiable is evidence that they are merely cultural constructs.
"If you were born in Madagascar, you wouldn't be a cultural relativist [therefor cultural relativism is self-refuting]"
That's his argument? Seriously. What rubbish.
Cultural relativism is not self-refuting, but self-relativising. At least, that's what Keller says here.
Keller responds in this manner to all the difficult unanswerable questions. I wish he would just say, "I don't know". Instead of playing mental gymnastics and passing it off as a rebuttal/answer.
@@stevenmurray1987 I was waiting for him to say 'i don't why God allows suffering' - and he did say it. (Different video.) Otherwise, are you sure a second effort might not reveal things you missed?
Maybe you have a particular argument or idea we could go over?