Since it's inconceivable that everything on TV is true, then everything on TV must be false!
Seriously what terrible quote from a terrible chud.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Everything on TV is false. It's curated. It's edited. It's commercialized. There is not a single thing on TV that fully represents an experience as if it were not on TV.
Without trying to defend him here ( not my goal ), that is a pretty weak analogy.
“Everything on TV” is not a zero sum game. For one thing to be true, it is not necessary for everything else to be false. There is little dependency between the content on one channel and another.
Looking at his own cultural religious tradition, the major religions say contradictory things and say that they are the truth. Islam and Judaism both reject that Christ is a God whereas it is pretty important to the Christians that he is. They cannot all be right. That is clearly what he is saying.
Although, taking a step back, many religions throughout history require faith in the Gods they profess but not necessarily a rejection of other Gods. That seems to be a more recent thing.
If it was not required to reject the Egyptian Gods to accept the Norse ones, then his reasoning falls apart and your analogy becomes valid.
Here is a better analogy: since it is inconceivable that all the runners will win the race, the most reasonable conclusion is that they will all lose it.
Better yes, but we are not quite there.
A race happens in a point of time, then it is resolved by verifiable evidence
Irrelevant. The point of these analogies is to demonstrate the logical fallacy 
Terrible comparison. Other than propaganda like right-wing "news," TV clearly delineates what is fiction and non-fiction. Religions all claim to be true and contradict one another.
Isn't it just as likely that one religion across c all of human history was right than absolutely none from like a 'logic' standpoint?
I'm not a religious person, but the conclusion that all are wrong because all can't be right is just bad logic and doesn't follow from the premise.
Since it is inconceivable all scientific theories are correct, the most logical conclusion is they are all wrong.
Almost. That is almost what Science says. It does say that most theories are probably wrong and certainly any that have been shown to contradict known evidence are. The ones that are not known to be wrong should be treated skeptically ( not cynically ). In practice, all we can do is work with the best that we have so far. They are the “most correct” even if they turn out to be wrong.
Like another commenter though, the problem with your analogy here is that not all scientific theories try to describe the same phenomenon and so they are not all mutually nullifying ( as the original quote proposes religions are ). Newton’s Laws do not support or nullify evolution whereas the Jews and Christians cannot both be right about Jesus and, if either of them is right about the rest, then the Norse certainly got it wrong.
I dislike it when people argue science vs religion though. The standard for science is evidence. The standard for religion is faith. They are almost opposite concepts. One is not invalid because it does not adhere to the other. Comparing them is at best not useful and pehaps deliberately misleading.
A person truly without religious faith is probably agnostic. Most atheists I have talked to have quite a lot of religious faith ( arrived at absent evidence ). They are just not honest about it. Richard Dawkins for example wrote a completely political and anti-Science book called The God Delusion and did not even seem to realize that he was arguing for faith over evidence. It is filled with stuff like “I believe” someday science will answer every question. Our current math and science excludes a great many answers in principle ( not just unknown but unknowable ). So his opinion is not rooted in evidence. “I believe” is of course self-evidently a statement of faith. “Science” can be what you call your religion whether you add in the Flying Spaghetti monsters or not.
Apologies. I kind of went off here. Not a criticism of the comment above. I just like science and would rather people not mislabel their political or “faith-based” opinions as scientific assertions.
Again, you can't have multiple competing ideologies be correct concurrently because some are going to conflict, but if at least one matches reality then your concept ( again from a logic standpoint ) is bad.
I mean yes, but that logic is pretty awful. By that logic, there's no way creationism and evolution could both be right, so they both must be wrong.
Edit: yes yes I fucking get it. This was just me being pedantic about some guy's statement, no need to get your fedoras in a knot.
Again, not a great equivalent to what he said.
If you mean creationism to mean Christian doctrine then you do not get the mass nullification effect. If you mean creationism to mean all creation myths then of course you do. However, as soon as you add evolution it changes things because there is evidence for evolution and it “is predictive” and therefore testable. That means that you are not relying only on the existence of incompatible alternatives for nullification. This breaks his premise.
It is not a particularly great statement. But all the alternatives here in the comments seem to miss what he was saying.
The “logic” of his statement is that there are many incompatible religious options presented. The incompatibilities mean that they cannot all be right. The number of options serves as the “evidence” for wrongness. Without independent evidence to support any given option, the weight of evidence against it ( the combined likelihood of the other options ) is greater than the evidence for it it ( single option ). You could make the argument for each alternative individually until all have been eliminated.
You cannot do this if evolution is an option. It has more evidentiary weight than the aggregate evidence of the alternatives. Evidence wise, it is logical to take evolution as valid and reject the others. Remove evolution and the remaining portfolio of creation myths is left with no clear winner ( and hence the likelihood that they are all losers becomes logical ).
Evolution is an observed phenomenon studied for over a hundred years. Creationism is not. Your comparison is erroneous.
"The most reasonable conclusion..." meaning absent all other evidence, the only conclusion that has any merit is that all creation myths are wrong.
Yes. I know. This isn't an actual comment about creationism and evolution. I'm talking about how "there's disagreement, therefore everyone's wrong" is a horrible line of thinking.
It's not just the disagreement, it's the fact that there's no evidence for any of their contradicting claims.
We're dissecting the logic of the quote, not arguing against evolution.
Indeed. But the quote is specifically referring to religions. Applying it to anything else is disingenuous unless he ever applied it to anything else (because it is indeed a flawed premise).
You only need to worship 1 thing in this world.
The Stanley Cup
The tennis one or the hydration one?
As a religious/spiritual person I agree, and I don't see how that's a bad thing. In science we understand that our models are all wrong, and only the next most accurate representation of a part of reality until a newer discovery or testing allows us to make even more refined models.
All religions can benefit from an application of the scientific method.
Except most religious people think the scientific method is another religion.
[Citation needed].
No it isn't. Unless you live in a bubble.
There are a lot of religions in the world.
This argument only really works against non-syncretic religions, and there's a whole lot of syncretic ones. It makes sense it would resonate to a British atheist though.
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