100% lack of evidence to God

[KWED]

Please explain your faith-based claim explaining how 90% to 99% or more of people are theists/deists. It seems outrageous on its face for you to make such a faith-based claim.

It isn't "faith-based". It is evidence-based.
Studies show that most religious people remain in the faith they were raised in.
Studies also show little movement between faiths.
These are quantifiable facts.

Also not sure where you get the idea that over 99% of people believe in a god. That is also demonstrably false - especially in the developed world or more highly educated/affluent groups. Even Saudi Arabia is 6% "confirmed atheist" (with a further 19% as "not religious), and it's against the law to be atheist there!

In the US, possibly the most religious of all the developed, liberal democracies, "people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%" (Pew Research)

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

OK, but would you agree that sometimes the evidence is personal? If I am blind but I think I understand something, I might say, I see. And so it's possible that what I see is right, even if I were blind.

Yes, some evidence is personal. But that personal experience is not good evidence for anyone else even if it is true.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Precisely. Like belief in some deity.

No .. it is not hard to see that many people find it reasonable to believe in the concept of a creator, divine justice and life after death.
'belief in cultural gods' is not the only factor.

 

[night912]

Please explain your faith-based claim explaining how 90% to 99% or more of people are theists/deists. It seems outrageous on its face for you to make such a faith-based claim.

According to the story of Jesus that's told in the Bible, please explain why the majority of the world's population didn't accept who he claims to be and/or his teachings?

Hint: ad populum

 

[KWED]

A bad argument .. this is purely a "divide and rule" tactic and has no bearing on truth.

How is it a "bad argument"?
It is actually clearly logical and reasonable.
If you have several conflicting, extraordinary claims that contract each other, by definition - "Mine is the only true religion" - then they cannot all be right, by definition.
However, as each of them could possibly be wrong, then logically they can all be wrong as there is no necessity for one particular claim to be right. (There might be no god. And even if there is a god, none of the religions have correctly identified it).

So, given all this, could you explain why it is a "bad argument"?
(Not sure what you mean by "divide and rule tactic". It would seen to be the opposite - categorising all religions the same way. Divide and rule would imply suggesting that one of them is right and the others wrong, and then leave them to fight over which one it is, which I struggle to see applying here in any way)

 

[Nakosis]

Thats the burden of proof fallacy.

Only marked it as funny because I've argue against using the burden of proof fallacy.

I suppose I don't see supporting one's own argument as a burden. It's something you choose to do for yourself.
I don't think you can demand it of others. You either offer it or you don't.

 

[KWED]

No .. it is not hard to see that many people find it reasonable to believe in the concept of a creator, divine justice and life after death.
'belief in cultural gods' is not the only factor.

Indeed. Wishful thinking is another strong motivator in religious belief. What better way to convince the poor and oppressed to put up with their lot than to promise them reward being their wildest dreams, as well as assure them that their oppressors will be made to pay. But not just yet.

Also, millions find it reasonable to believe that the 2020 US election was stolen. However, we know that their belief is complete nonsense.

 

[firedragon]

Only marked it as funny because I've argue against using the burden of proof fallacy.

I suppose I don't see supporting one's own argument as a burden. It's something you choose to do for yourself.
I don't think you ca demand it of others. You either offer it or you don't.

Absolutely.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Indeed. Wishful thinking is another strong motivator in religious belief..

I suppose it depends on what you believe and why.

One could suggest the same thing for not believing in God.
i.e. it's wishful thinking that there is no hell, that is a consequence of our deeds

 

[Mock Turtle]

Thank you for your honest and your great descriptives.

Help me understand?

1) Everyone is born atheist
2) Religion is false, and comes from societal/parental narratives only

Everyone is born ignorant basically - so not believer or non-believer. And perhaps if we didn't educate/indoctrinate children as to religious beliefs we might find an answer to this second one - as to where religious beliefs come from. One would hardly expect all to suddenly be without such beliefs though, given that many are drawn to such and the effects of cultural pressures. They might even be right but at least one has given them a fair chance rather than the stacked deck that often exists.

 

[KWED]

I suppose it depends on what you believe and why.

One could suggest the same thing for not believing in God.
i.e. it's wishful thinking that there is no hell,

Not really the same. It would mean that you do believe there is a god, and a hell, but live in denial (a bit like smokers who are convinced they won't get cancer). Atheists do not believe there is a god or hell.

that is a consequence of our deeds

Ironically, the religionist believes there is no consequence for their actions - as long as they repent and believe.
The serial child murdering, torturing rapist will go to heaven if they genuinely repent - so if they aren't apprehended by the police during their life they get off scot free.
On the other hand, a teetotal, vegan, celibate, pacifist doctor who volunteers for disaster charities their whole life goes to hell because they have read the Quran and dismissed it as ancient superstition, and is horribly tortured for eternity.
Where is the justice in that? Are the consequences reasonable? Do you really think that is how things should be?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Thank you for your honest and your great descriptives.

Help me understand?

1) Everyone is born atheist

Technically yes. I don't see how it could be any other way.

A baby that doesn't even have the awareness to recognize its own limbs as its own certainly doesn't have the mental capacity to hold the concept of a god in its mind, to say nothing of actually accepting that concept as true.

That being said, we seem to have innate characteristics that, while they serve us well in lots of ways, lead us astray on things like gods:

- a tendency to favour type 1 errors (false positives) over type 2 errors (false negatives).
- an overactive tendency toward attribution of agency (i.e. when you hear the leaves of a bush rustle, you'll sometimes think it's an animal when it was only the wind).

Take those two factors and throw in some post hoc ergo propter hoc and counting the hits/ignoring the misses (e.g. "I prayed for rain and then it rained, so my prayer must have worked... and all those times I prayed and it didn't come true, I must have just been doing it wrong") and I think rhat gets you 90% of the way to the organized religion landscape we see today.

2) Religion is false, and comes from societal/parental narratives only

No, not all religion is false.

Some religions - e.g. the UUs and some Quakers - tend not to have factual claims in their doctrines that can be evaluated as "true" or "false."

I'd say that it's only revealed religion that tends to be false, and even then not on every point: I mean, if a religion says its god told humanity "don't eat rotten meat," I'm not going to say that doing this is a good idea.

3) People are generally rational except when it comes to outrageous claims that give our lives meaning (God only, really, most people don't believe in other things irrationally)

Ha! Heck, no.

I gave an example in my last post of how people are irrational that has nothing to do with religion: we're really bad at estimating risk and expected benefit for rare events. This is how lotteries stay in business, for instance.

We are irrational a lot of the time. It's just that on most things, when our understanding is wrong, reality occasionally slaps us in the face to drill that point home.

When it comes to most religious beliefs, though, the belief system is set up in a way that it includes nothing falsifiable - no opportunity for reality to slap you in the face and say "no, your understanding is wrong; look!" ... so there's nothing keeping our normal tendency toward irrationality in check.

4) 1-3 explains how 90% and up are deists/theists

My corrected version, combined with millenia of social pressure up to and including executing non-conformists and yes: this explains the prevalence of theism.

Why is 1-4 more likely than "Most people believe in God except a very few, because God exists and is in our consciousness/zeitgeist)"?

I'm not sure what you mean. It seems like you're saying something like "we believe God exists because we believe God exists."

... but it seems like you're arguing that belief in God comes from God. A few thoughts on that:

- this sounds like a claim that, if true, could be demonstrated. Good luck.

- I would hope we can both agree on all the ways that humanity tends to be irrational. I think it's pretty clear that this irrationality (along with other social trends that we probably both agree exist) is sufficient to explain theism, so I'm not sure why we would need to look for other explanations.

- I assume you aren't arguing that belief in Thor comes from Thor, or belief in Quetzalcoatl from Quetzalcoatl, so it seems like you're still conceding that false belief in gods can arise on its own; you just see your god as an exception. Personally, I see no reason to see your god or your beliefs as special.

 

[PureX]

I agree that this happens, however, you cannot truly believe something to be true unless you are convinced by the evidence.

But there is all kinds of 'evidence', and we both can and do seek out the evidence that supports the conclusions that we want to (and often have already) arrive at. And this is as true for the theist as it is for the atheist, because we all do it. Ask a theist to define his God's 'personality' and you will find their answer bears a striking correlation to the person you asked: an angry man worships an angry, vengeful God. A weak man worships an all-powerful, controlling God. A selfish man worships an uninvolved, forgiving God. A violent man worships a violent God. And a loving man worships a kind, loving God. Likewise, ask an atheist about the nature of "God" and they will rail against everyone else's conception of God because they have never developed one of their own. They either adopted someone else's in the past and found it didn't work for them (of course), or they just never gave it any serious thought.

My point is that we find what we look for a great deal of the time. And we don't find what we don't look for, too. So we can tell ourselves that the evidence determined our conclusions all we want, but the truth is that we only looked for and accepted the evidence that conformed to what we already were inclined to believe.

No matter how you go about evaluating the evidence. You choose your epistemology, not your beliefs.

They are not separable in the same way that perception and conception are not separable. Everything we "see" is being seen through the lens of everything else we've ever seen. Everything we seek to find "true or false" is being held up to everything else we've ever found true or false; to see to which it complies. Our brains are a giant 'self-perpetuating bias machine'. And when we don't understand this, and don't remain skeptical of ourslves, that machine owns us.

Your beliefs stem from your epistemology which you do choose. This is why I changed my beliefs about a God based on the same evidence. The evidence stayed the same but the way I evaluated the evidence changed that led to me becoming unconvinced. I did not choose to not believe, my goal was to actually confirm my belief in God.

Then you were 'played' by your own bias. Because the solution was not to "believe in", anything, but rather to remain skeptical, and therefor always able to choose a change when it's needed.

Nope. I actually was looking for ways to confirm my God belief and during that process I realized my beliefs were based on a flawed evaluation of the evidence.

An "evaluation" of the evidence by what criteria? This is the real question. And the answer is by YOUR criteria. By the criteria of who you are and how you see the world. So of course, if you adopt someone else's "God" it's not likely to function very well by your criteria. Because it wasn't your God-ideal. "God" is an ideological lens through which we can choose to see the world. But like a pair of glasses, if we put on a lens that was designed to improve someone else's view of the world, it's not going to be very likely to improve our own. We have to find the lens that works best for us. Instead, you put on someone else's lenses and when they didn't work, you assumed all such lenses are 'bogus'. It's a very common mistake given that religions keep trying to tell us that one God-ideal fits all people. THAT is bogus!

I don't know how a God would convince me it exists.

That's not how it works. No one needs to be convinced of anything. It's simply an option. And it can be a very powerful, effective option for people if they can figure out how to make it work for them.

I acted on faith for 18 years. Faith is not a reliable path to truth. What can't you believe by faith? If the god of the bible exists, then He should be able to provide the evidence of His existence that I would convince me. If God chooses not to then why should I believe?

No one is pursuing truth, because we wouldn't know it if we stumbled on it. What we are all pursuing is value, not truth. Specifically, functional value. We want to be in control of our own fate as much as we can be. And faith can be a very powerful tool for us in that regard, but we have to learn how and when to use it, and how and when not to. Faith without skepticism is dangerous. And faith without discernment is insane. But faith combined with instinct and intuition, and an appropriate degree of caution can take us far further and faster than laboriously sifting through big piles of contradictory and inconclusive "evidence" ever could.

But faith is NOT "belief". That's rule #1. Faith is a deliberate choice.

 

[Polymath257]

No .. it is not hard to see that many people find it reasonable to believe in the concept of a creator, divine justice and life after death.
'belief in cultural gods' is not the only factor.

That people believe it to be reasonable doesn't make it reasonable if it isn't based upon reason.

But, yes, cultural beliefs seem to be the primary component (not the only one, I agree). But you don't find many theists in societies that don't promote theism.

 

[Polymath257]

I suppose it depends on what you believe and why.

One could suggest the same thing for not believing in God.
i.e. it's wishful thinking that there is no hell, that is a consequence of our deeds

The atheists I have known and talked to spend no time at all worrying about hell. They simply don't believe it is a real thing.

That isn't wishful thinking; it is deduction based on available evidence.

 

[muhammad_isa]

The atheists I have known and talked to spend no time at all worrying about hell. They simply don't believe it is a real thing.

That isn't wishful thinking; it is deduction based on available evidence.

It is a deduction that assumes that this reality that we find ourselves in,
is all there is.

One cannot "deduce" the truth of that one way or the other .. it is not about scientific observation, and I would have though that obvious.

 

[Polymath257]

It is a deduction that assumes that this reality that we find ourselves in,
is all there is.

No, that is not an assumption. It is a conclusion based on the lack of evidence and using the most simple explanation of what evidence we do have.

One cannot "deduce" the truth of that one way or the other .. it is not about scientific observation, and I would have though that obvious.

A conservative approach to speculation (which this is, in the absence of evidence) is not to assume something exists without evidence for its existence. If no evidence is possible, then there is no reason to think it to be true.

But again, the fear of hell is a religious preoccupation, not one that atheists are typically subject to.

For myself, it is simply not on my radar as a reasonable possibility.

 

[blü 2]

It is a deduction that assumes that this reality that we find ourselves in,
is all there is.

One cannot "deduce" the truth of that one way or the other .. it is not about scientific observation, and I would have though that obvious.

It's to do with human psychology, no?

Every culture we know of has devised supernatural beings to explain the world, and luck, and birth and death, and so on.

Despite what they say, the shaman is the oldest of professions, followed by the priest.

 

[muhammad_isa]

No, that is not an assumption. It is a conclusion based on the lack of evidence..

You cannot reliably conclude that something unseen does not exist, because it can't be seen. That is circular reasoning.

It is still an assumption .. based on the principle that physical reality [ this universe ] is all that exists.

If no evidence is possible, then there is no reason to think it to be true.

That is false. There is reason to believe it to be true, otherwise nobody would believe it.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

You cannot reliably conclude that something unseen does not exist, because it can't be seen. That is circular reasoning.

If you really believe that, then I welcome your participation in another thread:

Monotheists: why only one god?

... but here's the thing about this sort of argument: there are only four possibilities:

1. God exists and you had justification for belief in him.
2. God doesn't exist despite you having justification for him.
3. God exists and you didn't have justification for belief in him.
4. God doesn't exist and you didn't have justification for belief in him.

You're describing God as "something unseen," which I take to mean you're ruling out the first two possibilities.

... but think about what's left: either way, your beliefs are based on nothing. Either way, major tenets of your religion are false. Even if you get a coincidental hit on God, your opinion isn't reliable; we would have no reason to think that any other belief you hold about God is going to be correct.

So would you really comsider possibility #3 a "win"? From my perspective, it would be a major loss. Not only that, but the God in possibility #3 is irrelevant - he has affected humanity in no perceivable way. He is indistinguishable from #4: a God that doesn't exist.

Personally, I don't care about splitting hairs between #3 and #4. I am perfectly fine with treating a God that's indistinguishable from a God that doesn't exist as a God that doesn't exist.

 

[rational experiences]

A human scientist said I gave one word the symbol by letter explanation title GOD.

My theism a human theist the scientist.

I said the reason held form was held was by this motion G swirl O circular heating cooling spltting gases DD O.

Human Scientists God explanation that God is everywhere by that motion.

So theories non stop by his thought agreement what type of God cosmic or earth God will destroy life.

As he agrees himself position one natural was with huge reactions cosmos plus earth owns it first. God then shows a human who is God. Says his science human teaching. A huge release of mass.

Human says why God doesn't exist as nor should machine invented science. That over a long human life technology chosen was destroying what the cosmic space pressure had held. GOD.

G O D.

So science said to science there is no GOD as the entity ....it's just a human explanation thesis.

The same as don't look at anything egotists as we don't need any explanation about why anything other than a human exists.

The answer to an intelligent human is because it does.

So today you have a theist theorising a human entity suddenly popped up out of earths tombs or was an alien in out of space. First as direct a whole human. Both positions they want as the machine status.

Not a thesis places the human as sciences New thesis. Who says if I can work out either or both positions God by my term I will have contact control by machines to your exact location. Humans.

And believes what the claim is.

Yet their machine direct to earth popped up out of it.

Trees wood said science biology popped up out of earth.

It's why science said science destroyed life as wood trees popped up out of earth. Not humans.

So no man is God and God isn't God either it's mass anything.