Do religious ideas arise from fallacies?

There are several fallacies that are regrettably easy to commit. I would like to ask what religious notions may have arisen from them.One example is reification: thinking of an abstraction or process as an object or substance. If one asks "Where does the fire go when the fuel is exhausted?", one is treating the combustion process that we call fire as a substance. Is this where the idea of the soul comes from?A related fallacy is personification: thinking of something as a person when it is not. The folk personage of Jack Frost is a personification of the physical process of frost formation. Might the idea of gods arise in this fashion?A particularly insidious fallacy is to ascribe attributes to things that cannot possess them. For example, it is sensible to speak of the hardness and mass of a pebble, but it is not sensible to speak of its joyfullness. Is this where notions such as "meaning of life" come from?Can we find other examples?Might it be that religion is neither true nor false, but rather nonsensical?to admin: this could go in Faith and Belief.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Reminds me more of evolution. Transitionals, hominids and mutations that can overcome inevitable genetic depletion through speciation are certainly reifications, sheer imaginative products of theory or belief.And your entire theory is nothing but a coulda woulda cognitive exercise, an imaginative construct like so much that goes on in evolutionist thinking. Not a fact to be found, nor apparently of any concern. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

How about the existential fallacy?Edited by gasby, : spelling

Interesting. What religious idea might it produce?

I gather that your answer is "no". Fair enough.

It produces the belief that santa lives on the north pole.

When you recite this nonsense, whom do you hope to fool?Mouthing falsehoods wil neither make the facts go away, nor cause any of your opponents to forget them.What's the point? Let's stop this right here gang. Please do not respond to this message. AdminJarEdited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by AdminJar, : stop sniping

You mentioned: as an example of a fallacy. And today, I would agree with you. We have a better understanding of what living means than earlier man, but even now we cannot be 100% sure about what "to be alive" really means.Much of religion is an attempt to make sense of that which often seems sensless. A good example is fire. Folk of the time knew that it could be stored in stones, and when you struck two stones together that had the fire essence a small spark of the essence jumped across from the stone to your tinder.Fire is hot. It burns. But the stones that are filled with fire essence were not hot.Such things are puzzling. Where does smoke come from? Why does it go up? Is fire alive? How does fire live in stones?These are all valid questions.As man struggles to understand the world we live in, understanding itself evolves. Just like life itself, the answers do not have to be the best, to be perfect, but rather just good enough to get by.A lot of the basics of religion were not fallacies, just wrong.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Sad, because what you think are facts aren't.One of the points was to point up the fallacious silliness of the OP. Let's stop this right here gang. Please do not respond to this message. AdminJarEdited by AdminJar, : stop sniping

What about the joyfullness of a duck?Humans have religion, pebbles do not. How does your idea relate to the religion of a duck?

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Off-topic:You might want to put this somewhere other than Faith and Belief. This fourm if fundie-heavy, and fundies have difficulties properly dealing with fallacies. (Rather obvious, as if they could properly deal with them, they wouldn't be fundies)

Thanks for your thoughtful post, Jar.
I don't think of mistakes like these as particularly special. We have lots of ways of getting things wrong. These are just a few of them. My interest in them is the ease with which they can creep into one's thinking.
As you say, in early times, people did not have the luxury of the different ways of thinking about questions that we have.Edited by Woodsy, : Grammar corrected.

Faith, I'm going to propose a new "Is it Science" thread based upon a question I've asked you in response to you saying something like this:

quote:

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And your entire theory is nothing but a coulda woulda cognitive exercise, an imaginative construct like so much that goes on in evolutionist thinking. Not a fact to be found, nor apparently of any concern.

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There are some specific and substantial consequences of your position that I'd like to see addressed.Hope to see you there.

The concept of evolution was derived from a careful examination of evidence. The same is true about the conclusion of earth being old - in which case the evidence was overwhelming with multiple lines of corroborating evidence. Corroborating evidence of which continues to grow in volume today.However, the belief in instaneous creation, young earth, flood are indeed reifications of ancient myths (which btw predate the Bible).Creation, Young earth and the flood were not derived from evidence but from "scripture". If these myths did not exist, science (even Christian science) would have never had concluded they happened based on the evidence.