Randy and I were having a discussion and I brought up the question of Jewish Atheism. Which led me to Baruch Spinoza and this:
The breadth and importance of Spinoza’s work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment[3] and modern biblical criticism,[4] including modern conceptions of the self and, arguably, the universe,[5] he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy.[6] His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes’s mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy’s most important thinkers. In the Ethics, “Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely.”[7] Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”[8]
Here is a famous dissertation on eliminating the mind/body duality:
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Looks like I need to read me some Spinoza.
IMO, believers in God maintain their faith in God in these modern times through confirmation bias. For believers, things that favor God or religion count as “hits” towards God’s existence, while things that don’t favor God or tend to put religion in a bad light are dismissed in one way or another and therefore don’t count as “misses” for the existence of God. IOW, for believers, “Heads” God wins, “Tails” God doesn’t lose.
As I re-evaluated my religious beliefs over the last several years, I decided to look at religious beliefs I once embraced like a house. You build a house from the ground up. The foundation for my religious belief house was the Creation and Eden stories. The Old Testament was the first floor, while the New Testament was the second floor.
Somewhere along the line in recent years, I had concluded that the Creation and Eden stories were fables after going back in forth in my mind. Faith dies hard, you see. This meant that the religious belief house I had built for myself all those years had no foundation for the other two floors. IOW, if you can’t find good evidence for God in the first place, none of the other stuff in the holy texts matter as far as God claims are concerned.
The Eden story is critical to Christianity in the eyes of most Christians because without it, there is no Original Sin or Fall of Man. And without OS and FoM, there is no need for Atonement. And with no need for Atonement, there is no need for salvation through Jesus.
This explains why so many Christians are desperate to deny the validity of evolution. If evolution is widely accepted among Christians in the USA, they will see how their theology falls apart.
Catholics don’t deny evolution. I’m not sure how they dance around the Eden story. From what I understand, they claim that once homo sapiens came on the scene, God intervened and gave them souls, or something like that.
I’m sure they have a substitute for Original Sin that manages the keep the theology intact.
May the Schwartz be with you! — Space Balls