The whole angle from which the makers of the movie are coming from bothe

rs me. Specifically, it looks like they fell for the very same logical fallacy t
hat often inspires religious belief itself--/post hoc, ergo propter hoc/ (correl
ation does not imply causation). Many deeply religious people I have talked to,
known, loved, and trusted, have told me some story about how they, too, were ske
ptical at one point--and then some event happened that, to them, clearly had the
hand of God behind it. What I was told ranged from stories about would-be murde
rers and rapists deciding to leave them alone, people not falling off a winding
mountain trail on a religious pilgrimage, or just simply being the only person t
o have survived from his childhood neighborhood. The problem with all of these p
eople's beliefs about the pattern of, or a certain event in their lives, however
, is that they jumped to the assumption that "something higher" intervened or wa
s on their side, or so on.
Before I sound like I'm effectively denying all human observation, obvio
usly, correlation does, lots of the time, tend to imply some causative effect. T
ake, for example, a rock. You drop a rock, it falls. You drop it again, it still
falls. So, given this information, and what we know about the world, it's proba
bly safe to say that dropping a rock would cause it to fall. But if this is tru
e, then why do I deny that practically every other occurrence would follow a si
milar pattern? The key, I think, lies in information, or rather, how little of i
t someone would have.
Take, for example, the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which lud
icrously asserts, by means of a graph that only contains the estimated number of
pirates in the world and global temperatures, that pirates cause global cooling
, since a decrease in the number in pirates over time corresponds to an increase
in global temperatures. Granted, if all the information we had about the climat
e, and indeed, the world at large were just the number of pirates and the averag
e world temperature, and if we had absolutely no knowledge of thermodynamics, or
of greenhouse gasses, or of chemistry, or physics, or meteorology, etc., then w
e would indeed be inclined to suppose that pirates may indeed influence global t
emperatures!
But we don't! Why? Because we know better. We don't believe that pirates
cause global cooling because we know of the existence of greenhouse gases, that
the Earth's atmosphere helps keep the energy imparted by the sun from escaping
into space, because we have made predictions that say all these things, and beca
use the predictions have agreed with observation and experiment! Because we have
more information, we are more inclined to not assume causation exists due to a
correlation that, based on our knowledge, has nothing to do with the weather!
So, while all of the people I mentioned before certainly went through ha
rrowing experiences, certainly experienced great relief, and certainly experienc
ed events so improbable, that one would be inclined to say that they could not h
appen without a cause outside the mundane consequences of the emergent propertie
s of configurations of subatomic particles--they had absolutely no reason, excep
t instinct--the very aspect of human nature that logic aims to correct--to belie
ve that there was some cause outside the set of normal causes that we encounter
each day, since theres no way to prove it!
So, when I was watching the video, I was just scratching my head the ent
ire damn time. Yes, all of this stuff is, according to the Christians and Muslim
s, supposed to form a continuous narrative. Yes, a lot of this, were it true, wo
uld be highly improbable indeed--except by divine intervention. And yes, assumin
g that the different religions actually make some valid statements about reality
, then, yes, I'd say that the whole idea of trying to unify their narratives int
o one would provide deep insight into the world. But most of this is not objecti
vely provable!
If it isn't, then why make a movie about this? If it isn't, then why sug
gest propositions that are unprovable and can only lead to faulty reasoning, fra
gile worldviews, and suffering? (Fine, I didn't explain /why/ that is--I don't h
ave room!) I cannot find a logical reason to accept the movie's, and therefore f
ind myself extremely annoyed at it. If they didn't intend to suggest all sorts o
f spiritual meaning, and instead wanted to provide just a comparative look at th
e three Abrahamic religions, then why didn't they just do without such a fallaci
ous framing device in the first place? (Probably has to do with the intended aud
ience--you're gonna peg most of the English speaking world if you assume they're
a follower of one of the Abrahamic faiths, I guess... But a good idea should be
able to stand on its own without needing an enteric sugar coating to make it go
down more easily.)
(Post-script: It's not like I can't appreciate religion, or that I can't
find there's interesting components to it, or anything--I feel quite the opposi
te! But whatever we do reason about religions still has to agree with reality--a
nd I want to keep it that way.)