100% lack of evidence to God

[muhammad_isa]

Given that the various beliefs contradict each other, they cannot all be right.

I think he means that they can all be right in as far as the concept of the One God actually exists.

Naturally, you will wish to capitalise on the fact that the creeds are not identical. Nevertheless..

 

[KWED]

..so you claim that people are being "unreasonable" if they believe in God .. just because it can't be empirically demonstrated?

If something cannot be detected, has no measurable effect on anything that can be detected, and is not required for any know explanation:
1. how is that any different to "nothing"?
2. why is it reasonable to insist that something actually exists?

You are entitled to your opinion.

As are you, but as JP Moynihan famously said "People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts".

 

[KWED]

Or they can all be right, so please back up your faith-based claim here.

Don't be silly.
A polytheist religion and a monotheist religion cannot with be right. Once necessarily excludes the other.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Most people do not believe in "Ghosts, alien abduction, fake moon landing, 9/11 inside job, The Big Steal, etc, etc." Nearly everyone believes in God. Can you name anything other than God in the known universe where there is universal belief "despite the evidence"? You cannot.

But do you not think that the history and power of the churches over the ages has had an impact here, besides the education that most get as children? It does actually take some courage and determination to take a look at such - at one's own religion, and religions in general - so as to release oneself from their grip. Many don't want to do this, and many find the task difficult - quite understandable given the complexities involved and the age of much of the material one has to look at.

 

[KWED]

Most people do not believe in "Ghosts, alien abduction, fake moon landing, 9/11 inside job, The Big Steal, etc, etc." Nearly everyone believes in God. Can you name anything other than God in the known universe where there is universal belief "despite the evidence"? You cannot.

Firstly, they don't all believe in the same god, so you are not talking about "nearly everyone".
Second, argument ad populum. Popularity is not an indicator of truth.

The reality is that "nearly everyone" irrationally believes in something, even if it's that they will win the lottery or that person at work fancies them. Religion has just had a massive head start and been given favourable terms by society for millennia.

 

[KWED]

You've not read in the Bible that many are called but few chosen?

That seems a bit mean. Why call them if you are going to reject them, especially if you are omnipotent. Sounds like a bit of a dick move.

 

[KWED]

So everyone is born atheist but when they grow older, teach myths to their children, because . . .

No. Everyone is born without any notion of religion. That are then taught it by family and community, and the cycle continues.

Adam and Eve had a source to discuss the issues with.

There was no "Adam and Eve". Fact!

 

[KWED]

Just a short time ago in human history there was nothing in a room with us that we didn't see. Now we know the room is filled with a whole array of objects and energies and even life forms, that we can't see. And these are just the phenomena we know of, now. How many more might there be that we are as yet completely ignorant of?

So silly analogies about invisible elephants don't really mean anything, anymore. Because it turns out the world is full of invisible stuff. Some of it so strange and bizarre that we can't even imagine it.

"God" just isn't that strange of a possibility.

So you believe that until a claim has been conclusively disproved, we should assume it is true?

 

[KWED]

He's generally a divine command theory adherent. If God does it, it's just, and work back from there.

I prefer to call it the Nuremberg Defence.

I saw a nice example of this on The Atheist Experience, a cable show out of Austin, Texas.

Host Tracie Harris said, "You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, 'When you're done, I'm going to punish you' .. If I were in a situation where I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That's the difference between me and your God."

Christian caller Shane answered, "True to life, you portray that little girl as someone who is innocent. She's just as evil as you."

This is how such beliefs corrupt moral judgment. The believer is forced to find a reason why what appears to be cruel or unjust is actually not that, and so decides that the victim must have deserved it. That thinking pervades Old Testament mythology. Man finds himself in a world red in tooth and claw, exacting out a living by the sweat of his brow as women die in childbirth, realizes that God could have given man paradise, and so invents a story that He did, but man disobediently threw it away, making it just for God to condemn man to this hard life. Likewise with the flood story and Sodom and Gomorrah. It's all justified however horrible the alleged acts of God were because man deserved it for sinning.

Indeed. Both the atheist and the religionist realise that "god" is a monster. We just have different ways of dealing with that.

Love The Atheist Experience, btw. Dillahunty et al literally roll their eyes at some of the apologist arguments that are phoned in with such conviction and confidence. Often amusing, always informative.

 

[KWED]

Except that our "reliable methods" are still very limited. And the likelihood of there being more and much stranger phenomena in the room with us remains a very strong possibility. That's the part you seem to be keen on ignoring, here. In your mind you pretend that science rules out "God", when in fact it only bolsters the possibility.

The problem with this argument is that people have been testing for god for thousands of years. It's not like sub-atomic particles that were not even imagined until recently. But when they were, people calculated their existence (of the through necessity) and developed tests to detect them. And we found them.
God is still undetectable after many centuries of world-wide, concerted effort to find something we "know" is there. The scientific discovery analogy does not fit.

If god was a scientific hypothesis, it would have long been dismissed as too unlikely to warrant consideration.

 

[KWED]

Well, there is more than what is apparent: ultraviolet light, radio waves, ultrasound, neutrinos, atoms, etc. None of those is apparent, but we know they exist.

I meant apparent in the "detectable" sense. I don't think anyone still uses the "can I see it?" principle.

 

[KWED]

I think he means that they can all be right in as far as the concept of the One God actually exists.

Erm, most gods are not monotheistic.

Naturally, you will wish to capitalise on the fact that the creeds are not identical. Nevertheless..

Indeed, Islam and Hinduism differ only in the minor details. Similarly the Greek Pantheon and Mormonism are pretty much interchangeable.

 

[PureX]

It is not as true for the critical thinker as it is for the faith-based thinker. The former actively learns to not do that. I've noticed in a few true crime stories, the detectives will refer to training they've had to suppress preconceptions when investigating and learn to evaluate evidence dispassionately. They understand the importance of bringing this principle to the process, as does the experiences critical thinker. I'm sure a little tendentious occurs anyway, but with multiple detectives all trying to minimize such a thing, their investigation becomes more objective and less dependent on observer bias.

The problem is the depth and breadth of the "preconceptions" that we use to determine what evidence is, and how valid it is. And how much is required to then overcome our inevitable bias. In nearly all your posts you write as if evidence were some objective existential phenomenon that you simply have to be willing to let lead you to a true conclusion. But it's not. It's a totally subjective determination based on what you determined to be "evidential" in the past. And in your case that's almost entirely material. That's your overwhelming reality-bias: materialism. Other people will determine other kinds of things to be evidential based on whatever their particular 'reality-bias' is. And it's ALL valid evidence depending on the reality-bias being used to determine it being valid evidence.That's all of us, and you, too. It's also happening in science, and philosophy, and art, and religion. Each method of investigating reality has it's own criteria for valid evidence, and for valid reasoning, that then become their own innate bias.

Now look at your comment again. Yes, we probably all do it, but one tradition actively seeks to minimize that, ...

They ALL actively seek to minimize it. They just use different methods and criteria for doing that, and for determining if they've succeeded or not. "Evidence" is subjective, TO IT'S CORE, because it's all being determined by US. And we are the subjects causing the subjectivism. You think science is more 'objective' because it uses similar (materialist) methods and criteria to what you use to determine evidential validity and reasoning. But that in itself is just another big fat bias rendering itself unbiased. That method works OK when we dealing with very physical, functional questions. But it's useless and worse when dealing with more existential, conceptual, and universal questions. Philosophy tends to be the 'go-to' methodology in that realm of inquiry, but it becomes useless and worse when confronted with fundamental, existential irrationality. Because it's so heavily invested in the necessity of formal logic. And so on. All of our preferred methods are both based and ineffectual outside the narrow parameters of their 'reality bias'.

You keep making this claim that faith takes one further than strict empiricism. Every time you do, I ask you to say what that method has revealed to you that you think would be of benefit to others if they would just relax their standards for belief. And you never have an answer to that. So why should it be believed that there is any merit to taking that advice?

Faith and intuition are both based on trust and action, not on knowledge and explanations. You want it all explained to you in advance, but it doesn't work that way. Sometimes we have to make a choice and take action without knowing why or what will happen. In fact,we do this a lot in life. And we humans have an innate ability in that regard, because acting on faith and instinct tends to be much more holistic, quicker, and often more effective than science or philosophy. This is the realm of being better suited to the artist. A methodology marked by a combination of practice and courage, rather than plodding study and laborious experimentation. or endless debate and usually inconclusive debate. The artist just follows his desires and trust in his instincts.

You're conflating the real but as yet undetected with the nonexistent. Yes, people may have been unaware of bacteria or DNA or radiation at one time, but those things could all affect them nevertheless, and with the proper tools, they can be detected.

Do you really think all the mysteries are solved, now, and nothing more is affecting us that we haven't recognized and detected? Because that would be a very bizarre assumption given our history of profound ignorance.

The difference between something that exists, or is real, and something that does not exist is the ability of the former but not the latter to interact with other real things (things that actually exist). Most theists will tell you that gods and the supernatural realm are not detectible by any means. Is it a coherent position to say that something exists that is undetectable not just because the right machine hasn't been built yet to discern its presence the way the microscope revealed bacteria, but because it makes no impact on our reality?

We have no way of knowing what's real and what isn't, or what could be real and what couldn't be. The best we've ever been able to do is presume upon our own limited biases, as I've explained at the top of this post.

 

[PureX]

And until there is actual evidence, there is no good reason to believe anything specific: only that there are things we do not know.

That depends on the results, to us, of holding such a belief. You seem to imagine in advance that any belief that we might choose to hold would have a bad result unless and until it gets ratified by science. That's a VERY bizarre and dark way to think. Not to mention it being wildly illogical.

How does science bolster the idea of 'God'?

By showing us how little we actually know of what exists, or could exist. Thanks to science, the possibilities are almost limitless, now.

There is no evidence of such a being. Many people say there can be no evidence of such a being. So what possible reason is there to believe such a being exists?

There is a TON of evidence, depending on how we choose to imagine such a being to exist.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Do you really think all the mysteries are solved, now, and nothing more is affecting us that we haven't recognized and detected? Because that would be a very bizarre assumption given our history of profound ignorance..

I don't think most people do.
A lot of people would rather believe that this life is all there is.
It is more about the mind than physical evidence.

 

[PureX]

So you believe that until a claim has been conclusively disproved, we should assume it is true?

I think people who "believe" their own beliefs are fools that have fallen pray to their own ego. And I say that to the theists as well as the atheists. Until we have overcome this obsession with our own beliefs we have no business in this kind of a conversation, because we aren't going to be able to understand it.

 

[KWED]

That depends on the results, to us, of holding such a belief. You seem to imagine in advance that any belief that we might choose to hold would have a bad result unless and until it gets ratified by science. That's a VERY bizarre and dark way to think. Not to mention it being wildly illogical.
By showing us how little we actually know of what exists, or could exist. Thanks to science, the possibilities are almost limitless, now.

It is irrelevant whether the result of a claim being true would be harmful or beneficial, if there is no evidence that the claim is true, there is no good reason to assume it is true.

An invisible unicorn that poops an endless supply of magic flavoured Mr Whippy would be wonderful for mankind, but unless the person proposing its existence has some evidence for it, it is unreasonable to insist that we consider it likely simply because it hasn't been disproved.
I'm genuinely baffled that anyone needs that explaining to them.

There is a TON of evidence, depending on how we choose to imagine such a being to exist.

Really? What does this "ton of evidence" consist of? (I'm predicting stuff like "belief" and "lack of disproof" and "what if", etc...)

 

[KWED]

I think people who "believe" their own beliefs are fools that have fallen pray to their own ego. And I say that to the theists as well as the atheists. Until we have overcome this obsession with our own beliefs we have no business in this kind of a conversation, because we aren't going to be able to understand it.

Well, that is your belief, and you are entitled to believe it.

 

[KWED]

I don't think most people do.
A lot of people would rather believe that this life is all there is.

As far as we know, the physical universe is all there is. Even if it wasn't, how would you ever know?

It is more about the mind than physical evidence.

Indeed. Some people value belief over physical evidence.

 

[Polymath257]

I meant apparent in the "detectable" sense. I don't think anyone still uses the "can I see it?" principle.

I have seen enough theists argue that we believe in air but can't see it, so we should believe in God to say there are such people.