They had to reject it because any religion with a creation myth specifically says how the god created people. To accept an alternative story would reject the notion of the book as truth.
The religious are not looking for answers, they already have all the answers by definition of their holy book or whatever. They’re looking for confirmation bias and reject anything that goes against that.
If I give an ostensive definition, I would say it includes the beings like the Abrahamic god, or Olympian gods, and exclude humans, animals, bacteria, the planet we live on, and objects we handle in our day to day lives. I’ll tentatively draw the line at any being that is not bound to the laws of physics as we understand them today.
Why exclude humans, animals and bacteria? How about Sun? Jesus Christ? God-King Jayavarman II? A cat? Very small spirit of tiny stream? A holy stone (stone is not a human, nor animal or bacteria, a lot of stones were worshipped in various forms and meanings in history)? A tree chewed by pilgrims? Invisible Hand of the Market?
Incredibly arbitrary definition again constructed to wriggle your way from any concrete statement.
I don’t think OP is asking about the existence of humans, or animals, or any other physical entity. If they were, you can trivially say that you exist, and therefore god exists. That’s unless you want to go into ontology and question what it means to “exist”, which I’m pretty sure also isn’t what OP intended.
I didn’t asked about OP, i asked YOU to define it and you are weaseling out of it continously, you cannot even answer why did you exclude humans, animals and bacteria from your definition, while humans and animals have been historically worshipped in many cases.
I’m trying to help OP reach an answer to their question, therefore the definitions I’m working with are the same as that of OP. What I personally believe should be categorized as a “higher being” is irrelevant because if it’s different from OP’s definition, it won’t help them reach their desired answer.
If we had the technological power, would humans run simulations of universes with Planck length precision? Obviously yes. So extrapolating from our one and only example of intelligent life (us), it seems like intelligent life enjoys stimulating universes. If our reality were the result of that kind of project, and the engineers lived outside the laws of physics, I would call them higher beings. And they could be as hands-off or as interventionist as they pleased.
any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity
Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.
Occam’s razor doesn’t mean that the simplest explanation is always true, but rather that it’s usually the most likely to be true.
Using simplicity as a measure of how likely something is to be true always felt a little anthropocentric. How do we determine that something is simple if not via the systems and abstractions that are easy for human minds to comprehend?
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They had to reject it because any religion with a creation myth specifically says how the god created people. To accept an alternative story would reject the notion of the book as truth.
The religious are not looking for answers, they already have all the answers by definition of their holy book or whatever. They’re looking for confirmation bias and reject anything that goes against that.
If you’re talking specifically about the Abrahamic God, sure. But if it’s about the existence of any higher being, then there’s no contradiction here.
You even used the incredibly nebulous term “higher beings”. Define it.
Anything that you would call a “god”.
If I give an ostensive definition, I would say it includes the beings like the Abrahamic god, or Olympian gods, and exclude humans, animals, bacteria, the planet we live on, and objects we handle in our day to day lives. I’ll tentatively draw the line at any being that is not bound to the laws of physics as we understand them today.
Why exclude humans, animals and bacteria? How about Sun? Jesus Christ? God-King Jayavarman II? A cat? Very small spirit of tiny stream? A holy stone (stone is not a human, nor animal or bacteria, a lot of stones were worshipped in various forms and meanings in history)? A tree chewed by pilgrims? Invisible Hand of the Market?
Incredibly arbitrary definition again constructed to wriggle your way from any concrete statement.
I don’t think OP is asking about the existence of humans, or animals, or any other physical entity. If they were, you can trivially say that you exist, and therefore god exists. That’s unless you want to go into ontology and question what it means to “exist”, which I’m pretty sure also isn’t what OP intended.
I didn’t asked about OP, i asked YOU to define it and you are weaseling out of it continously, you cannot even answer why did you exclude humans, animals and bacteria from your definition, while humans and animals have been historically worshipped in many cases.
I’m trying to help OP reach an answer to their question, therefore the definitions I’m working with are the same as that of OP. What I personally believe should be categorized as a “higher being” is irrelevant because if it’s different from OP’s definition, it won’t help them reach their desired answer.
If we had the technological power, would humans run simulations of universes with Planck length precision? Obviously yes. So extrapolating from our one and only example of intelligent life (us), it seems like intelligent life enjoys stimulating universes. If our reality were the result of that kind of project, and the engineers lived outside the laws of physics, I would call them higher beings. And they could be as hands-off or as interventionist as they pleased.
Sure that’s a valid defintion, albeit a super specific one and it directly exclude all (or almost all) known forms of religion on Earth.
Which part is directly excluded?
Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.
Could be, but evolution makes God redundant, and then it is the whole simplest explanation thing that kicks in, right?
Occam’s razor doesn’t mean that the simplest explanation is always true, but rather that it’s usually the most likely to be true.
Using simplicity as a measure of how likely something is to be true always felt a little anthropocentric. How do we determine that something is simple if not via the systems and abstractions that are easy for human minds to comprehend?
If you squint real hard, the first creation myth in Genisis is pretty close to evolution.