Prove that humans aren't blind to God's existence

[tomspug]

I think all you're trying to say here is that atheism is not an acceptable stance, of which I am very skeptical.

I said no such thing. If I meant that, then it would be logical to conclude that theism is also an unacceptable stance. All I am trying to say is that skepticism and atheism are not synonymous at all.

 

[Magic Man]

Exactly. Although I would have appreciated it if you'd actually responded to the post.

I thought that was the gist of the post. I was trying to keep it simple. Skepticism has to end somewhere, or else you become skeptical about being skeptical about being skeptical about being skeptical...

 

[tomspug]

It depends on the person. Some are more skeptical than others. Some NEED belief, and skepticism only goes so far. There comes a point when you realize that certainty is valuable, whether to help others in their own beliefs, to justify an action, to make sense of your circumstances, etc.

 

[Heneni]

It depends on the person. Some are more skeptical than others. Some NEED belief, and skepticism only goes so far. There comes a point when you realize that certainty is valuable, whether to help others in their own beliefs, to justify an action, to make sense of your circumstances, etc.

Does anybody know of an ancient civilization, ANY civilization which did not believe in a form of deity? It is a human condition that seems to indicate that no matter how remote one civilization was from another, they all seemed to independantly 'come up' with a form of deity. Is it programmed into humans to look for something 'out there'? I think it is. And it wont go away. Even people who dont believe that god exists, had to entertain the idea of god at least for a while, before they made the decision to scrap the idea.

The idea of a super hero 'out there' is especially present in children. Children are more likely to believe in superman than adults. But all adults were children once. No one teaches children to believe in a super hero, they are naturally drawn to the impossible. At some point the child looks for proof that the superhero is real. And then he realises that he is not. But he will always remember those innocent childhood feelings that made him feel so alive. When he felt that he could do and be the impossible. The impossible wasnt something they could not believe in.

If the fact that, when we as children without any training in this regard, had the desire and ability to believe in the impossilbe, I believe that is proof that we are not blind to the existance of it.

Which is why jesus said, let the little children come unto me. They probably still have that sense that impossibility is quite possible.

As adults we have to remember what it felt like being a kid, our willingness and eagerness to imagine the impossilbe is the only way to prove that god exists. Humans are not blind the the possibility that god exists. We just killed the natural instinct in us to go with what we sense inside.

For me, i only need to look at the universe to understand that whatever is keeping it going, and whatever made it, can not possibly be itself. There is a super hero. I can percieve him clearly. And everybody has been born with the natural tendency to believe in the impossible.

 

[Dunemeister]

@Dunemeister: The problem is that default position is completely subjective to the individual.

Maybe, but I've offered an objective reason for the default position to be skepticism about atheism (which doesn't mean, by the way, credulity toward theism).

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

With that in mind, I bring up this question: how can we be sure that God isn't completely evident?

Because God isn't completely evident... hence all the atheists, plus all the theists who believe in the "wrong" gods.

Why is the assumption made that OUR perspective, the skeptic, is unbiased and clear? I don't think you can really be 100% sure, one way or the other, that it is God that is unseen or that it is humans who fail to see what is visible. Every day, there are new discoveries, new aspects of science and nature that we must come to understand, things we were never aware of. Should we not hold then that there may always be more and more that becomes visible that was at one time apparently non-existent?

I acknowledge that I cannot be 100% sure that pranksters will not fill my car with pudding tomorrow while it's unattended. Even so, this possibility is not a factor in any of my decisions today - for instance, I will not be going out tonight to buy a Shop Vac to prepare for this eventuality. I won't even worry about leaving the windows open a bit.

While I acknowledge that I am sometimes wrong and I have imperfect knowledge, I'm also somewhat more certain that the Second Coming won't happen tomorrow than I am that my car will not be filled with pudding.

I don't believe in God. In my mind, that makes me an atheist (and without derailing the thread into a debate over definitions, I consider atheism to be just what the structure of the word implies: "without theism", or lacking belief in deity/ies). Am I 100% certain that God doesn't exist? Well, since I'm not 100% certain of anything, I suppose not... but for all practical purposes, I treat it the non-existence of God a certainty, just like everyone treats all sorts of things, even ones they acknowledge as physically possible (e.g. pudding pranksters), as practically non-existent.

 

[Imagist]

However, as it turns out, 95% or more of the world believe that materialism is wrong and that some sort of theism is right.
They believe that there is another dimension to the world, although there is of course wide disagreement about the details. About 2/3 of the world is monotheistic, and about the remaining third is pantheistic or panentheistic. Of the residual 5%, we can include such beliefs as outright paganism, polytheism, and others, all of which stand as a contradiction to atheism. In short, atheism, taken globally and historically, is profoundly weird, amounting to less than 5% of the entire world's population at the moment (let alone all of history). So if anything, we should be skeptical of atheism as our default position.

This would be a reasonable argument for the default position being theism if it weren't for the very clear reasons for theism being the norm: that is, evolution explains the idea of god easily as a remnant of a previous evolutionary stage; "dancing with ghosts" as David Sloane Wilson puts it, or "misfirings" as Richard Dawkins says.

If "everybody knows" something, the contrarians hold a preponderance of burden to show that everybody is wrong.

This is not the case. You are merely adjusting "most people hold X opinion, therefore X is true" to "most people hold X opinion, therefore X is most probable." Human beliefs and probability have no provable relation that I know of. However, in my experience, ideas, such as "non-existent until proven existent", which applies to mythical animals, weapons of mass destruction, etc. have a high rate of transference to other similar ideas.

The real crux of the issue is that there are very few cases in which one can prove that something does not exist; is is almost universally easier to prove that things do exist. If god did exist, it should be extremely easy to prove his existence, given that his handiwork is supposedly everywhere.

I think this is flawed logic - the default should be no assumption until an investigation is undertaken and evidence for or against its existence analysed. So it wouldn't be "non-existent until proven existent" it would be "unverified until investigated."

As an ex-Christian who very much wanted to believe in the existence of a god, I have spent years investigating. But years of investigation have turned up no evidence for a god. Without evidence either way, we still need to come up with a base assumption. With a poorly-reasoned base assumption, we would either burn in hell or waste our lives praying to an empty sky, neither of which seems to be a very good alternative. Luckily, the logic is already available: I don't wear armor to work because I have seen no evidence of dragons, so similarly I don't pray in the morning because I have seen no evidence of god.

I agree that if this were a mathematical proof, a base assumption about existence would be a gaping hole in argument. But such base assumptions are necessary to apply to how we live and act.

Can you honestly say that you don't make base assumptions in order to live your life? I sincerely doubt it.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

However, as it turns out, 95% or more of the world believe that materialism is wrong and that some sort of theism is right. They believe that there is another dimension to the world, although there is of course wide disagreement about the details. About 2/3 of the world is monotheistic, and about the remaining third is pantheistic or panentheistic. Of the residual 5%, we can include such beliefs as outright paganism, polytheism, and others, all of which stand as a contradiction to atheism. In short, atheism, taken globally and historically, is profoundly weird, amounting to less than 5% of the entire world's population at the moment (let alone all of history). So if anything, we should be skeptical of atheism as our default position.

I don't think it's particularily valid to lump all forms of theism together as if they actually make up some block of common belief. In reality, many forms of theism are just as much in opposition to other forms of theism as they are to atheism.

What you're doing here is like stating that political party 'X' is likely incorrect because all the other parties all agree that party 'X' is wrong... even if that group of parties runs the gamut from Marxist-Leninists to Libertarians.

Notice, this is NOT an argument of X is popular and therefore true. Nor is it an argument that you should believe X because it's popular. It's an argument about where default skepticism should lie. If "everybody knows" something, the contrarians hold a preponderance of burden to show that everybody is wrong. In our case, everybody knows that atheism is wrong. So the atheist bears a preponderance of the burden to show that the reverse is the case.

The more statistically independent tests you have (e.g. rolls of a die, or participants in a survey), the more likely that the average of your sample will approach the actual average... so, the more people who say "I'm voting for party 'A'" when you ask them, the more likely it is that party 'A' will win the election.

However, this principle only works when the tests are statistically independent. When it comes to matters of faith, there are strong mechanisms that will encourage a person to have the same faith as his or her parents and community, regardless of the truth of those beliefs. If a person is a believing member of their church because they were raised in it and taught it from an early age, then this implies that they are not a believer for other reasons, such as the confirmed truth of their beliefs.

Religion has a tendency to spread regardless of whether or not it's true. Turning your atheism/theism dichotomy around for a minute, you can see this by looking at the beliefs of the world: whatever your pick as the "true" religion, most religious adherents believe in something else. The world is awash in false belief. Given this fact, why should anyone assume that one particular religion that spreads like the others and has no more apparent support than the ones that we recognize are mostly false, why should we assume that one to be true?

Basically, your argument against atheism can be applied to any belief system that's made up of a minority of the world's population... i.e. all of them.

Perhaps a bit more substantially, these facts might indicate that the atheist is blind to what is obvious to everyone else. Namely, that the world is comprised of more than just physical stuff (indeed, some -- a larger proportion of the world than that claimed by atheists -- argue that the universe of matter is actually illusory!). There's something deeply spiritual about it. It's either spirit itself or is incompletely described by appeal to physics and chemistry and their derivatives, as useful as those descriptions have proved to be.

I acknowledge what I consider to be "deep spirituality" in the universe, but I do not consider it to be any sort of god. I don't think spirituality requires belief in God at all.

 

[3.14]

You say god is true, a sceptic says prove it, but noone has come up with anything solid yet

They say there is no god, a sceptic says prove it, but there also unable to prove it

The sceptic says: wel if there is no proof to support god on i would deny it but since there is also no proof to support him not existing i will continue believing there is no god but keeping my mind open to new developments

 

[Lux rationis]

See, here's the thing, though. I see God all around me. I see Him in my life, in nature, and in the lives of others. Now, an atheist would automatically write me off as being wrong. But a SKEPTIC would take both MY perspective and an atheists with a grain of salt. How can you REALLY tell who is an authority on seeing God? My belief is not justified by my belief and neither is his.

Not really. One of the basic tenets of ontology (the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of existence and the distinction between empirical existence and conceptualized existence) is that reality must be based on mutually-shared observation. If I hold an apple in my hands and put it in your hands and you can see it and feel it and taste it just as I can, then we can agree that it exists -- the sensory perception is mutual. But if I hold a magic apple in my hands and put it in your hands and you can neither see it nor feel it because the magic apple only reveals itself to those who are of the True Faith, then the jury remains out as to whether the apple really exists or whether I have constructed my belief in the existence of the magic apple out of concept or inculcation.
The fact that you believe in something that you take to be God, does not mean that it is God -- the ancients, for example, took stars to be tiny pin pricks in the fabric of heaven -- or that the god that you construct from your intuitive fiat is the only one or the correct one. The confidence of your inner knowledge is no more compelling than that of others who deeply believe in the marrow of their bones that Allah, Brahman, Gaia or no god at all reigns supreme. Intensity of conviction is no bellwether of sound ontology...just ask the survivors of Jim Jones' "People's Temple".

 

[tomspug]

You say god is true, a sceptic says prove it, but noone has come up with anything solid yet

They say there is no god, a sceptic says prove it, but there also unable to prove it

The sceptic says: wel if there is no proof to support god on i would deny it but since there is also no proof to support him not existing i will continue believing there is no god but keeping my mind open to new developments

You say that God is false. A skeptic says "prove it".

 

[tomspug]

Because God isn't completely evident...

I don't think you really understood my post. The question is: what if God is completely evident, and that humans willfully ignore him? You can use the exact same arguments to defend a theist position to defend an atheist position.

The truth is that atheists do NOT have logic on their side any more than theists do. They are both subject to their beliefs based upon experience. Why is an atheists perspective more valid than a theists perspective? Why is it that we will accept the experience of someone who says that they have never experienced God, yet we reject the experience of someone who says that they have? Think about it. What exactly is the difference? I'm really not sure.

If you think about it, God will always be considered to logically not exist, because when an atheist becomes a theist, his experience automatically becomes invalidated. He/she has crossed over some threshold where they are no longer allowed to contribute to the debate.

And about "seeing" God. There are an infinite number of examples I could give to break apart your argument. An scientist would not be able to see micro-organisms if they refused to use a microscope. You would never know the sky existed if you never looked up. You can look at a Magic Eye and never see the picture, even though its their. You could be color blind. You could be blocking out memory. You could willfully close your eyes. You could be insane. The list goes on. The fact is that their are an infinite amount of unknowns vs. a finite amount of knowns. And you can't logic your way out of that fact. There is ALWAYS the possibility that what is not perceived is, in fact, perceivable, and that what is not known can become known.

 

[Dunemeister]

I don't think it's particularily valid to lump all forms of theism together as if they actually make up some block of common belief. In reality, many forms of theism are just as much in opposition to other forms of theism as they are to atheism.

Yes, agreed. The point of the rather broad division I made is to emphasize that most of the world believes that there's more to the world than physical stuff and that the "more" isn't merely ephiphenomena. It's just as real or even more real than the physical stuff.

What you're doing here is like stating that political party 'X' is likely incorrect because all the other parties all agree that party 'X' is wrong... even if that group of parties runs the gamut from Marxist-Leninists to Libertarians.

Not at all. I've only argued that X is believed by so few people that the most responsible epistemic stance to take with regard to X is skepticism unless and until X can show that its defiance of popular wisdom is justified.

Religion has a tendency to spread regardless of whether or not it's true.

Bollucks. There may be things false in every religion, but it doesn't spread despite its truth. Rather, it spreads because it contains a great deal that IS true. To deny this requires nothing but old-fashioned prejudice.

Turning your atheism/theism dichotomy around for a minute, you can see this by looking at the beliefs of the world: whatever your pick as the "true" religion, most religious adherents believe in something else. The world is awash in false belief. Given this fact, why should anyone assume that one particular religion that spreads like the others and has no more apparent support than the ones that we recognize are mostly false, why should we assume that one to be true?

Thankfully, for my argument to succeed, I don't have to advocate for any one version of theism. I'm simply pointing out that atheism is massively weird.

Basically, your argument against atheism can be applied to any belief system that's made up of a minority of the world's population... i.e. all of them.

Sure, if you misapply the argument.

I acknowledge what I consider to be "deep spirituality" in the universe, but I do not consider it to be any sort of god. I don't think spirituality requires belief in God at all.

That's not the sort of spirituality claimed by theists of ALL types. All theists acknowledge that the universe either is or is animated by something non-physical or supra-physical (or however you care to define it). And most of those theists believe that this non-physical element is something we can interact with and detect at some level. Indeed, 95% of the world agrees on this level of description. Atheism is simply bizarre on this account, so if you want to be an intellectually honest atheist, you had better justify your defiance of the wisdom of almost all other humans for almost all of human history.

Good luck with that.

 

[Imagist]

The fact is that their are an infinite amount of unknowns vs. a finite amount of knowns.

For all practical purposes I agree with you here. Where we differ is that you looked at the unknowns and arbitrarily decided that god is there.

You can't counter that with "You arbitrarily decided that god isn't there" because there's nothing arbitrary about it. The logic that god probably doesn't exist is the same logic that we would use for anything that shares similar qualities, i.e. anything completely lacking in evidence also probably does not exist. On the other hand, the "logic" that a god might exist and therefore we should live as theists (ostensibly following some religious dogma) has no similarities in how we treat any other - it is a single, lone anomaly in logic.

I challenge any theist to find another situation where they would believe in something without any evidence whatsoever, to the point of devoting lifelong time and energy to it.

 

[Imagist]

Basically, your argument against atheism can be applied to any belief system that's made up of a minority of the world's population... i.e. all of them.

Sure, if you misapply the argument.

Your smugness is not justified. Please explain how the argument was misapplied.

 

[Dunemeister]

Your smugness is not justified. Please explain how the argument was misapplied.

Well, .9Penguin notes that all belief systems, when compared with minute variants on a belief system, is always held by a minority of people. That's true but trivially so. This is a misapplication of the argument because the argument is only intended to operate on a very broad worldview scale. But it's highly interesting to note, when taken on that scale, that atheism is a puny minority at all times and all places BAR NONE, except perhaps modern Europe for the past few decades (and that shows every sign of changing). Given the fact that at all times and all places atheism is a stark minority, I'd say that it ought not to be the favored "default" position. If anything, theism (taken extraordinarily broadly to cover all belief systems that affirm the existence of something other than physical stuff) ought to be the default position.

 

[Dunemeister]

I challenge any theist to find another situation where they would believe in something without any evidence whatsoever, to the point of devoting lifelong time and energy to it.

Nobody believes anything that way.

 

[Imagist]

Well, .9Penguin notes that all belief systems, when compared with minute variants on a belief system, is always held by a minority of people. That's true but trivially so. This is a misapplication of the argument because the argument is only intended to operate on a very broad worldview scale. But it's highly interesting to note, when taken on that scale, that atheism is a puny minority at all times and all places BAR NONE, except perhaps modern Europe for the past few decades (and that shows every sign of changing). Given the fact that at all times and all places atheism is a stark minority, I'd say that it ought not to be the favored "default" position. If anything, theism (taken extraordinarily broadly to cover all belief systems that affirm the existence of something other than physical stuff) ought to be the default position.

What do you mean by "very broad worldview scale"?

If you mean the entire world, Penguin's point still stands: any one religion is the minority.

If you mean a section of the world, your point is illegitimate because you're simply grabbing a section of the population that represents your views. I could equally say that theism is the minority among atheists. This sort of "selective polling" has no statistical usefulness and no place in debate.

 

[Imagist]

Nobody believes anything that way.

Based on your religion tag, you believe that the Christian god exists, and if you are like the average Christian, you devote a significant portion of your time to activities that are based on your belief that the Christian god exists. Unless you can produce evidence that the Christian god exists, you "believe in something without any evidence whatsoever, to the point of devoting lifelong time and energy to it." The same is true for any devoutly religious person.

 

[PureX]

It's difficult to remain skeptical of one's self indefinitely. For one, it takes practice to achieve that kind of perpetual skepticism. And most people aren't willing to put in the effort when the result is that they must feel perpetually ignorant. I believe that it IS an honest assessment of the human condition, but most of us are very uncomfortable with that, and so will prefer to just pretend that we can know that we are right.