The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Originally Posted by SigTerm Let's turn it other way around: what would it take to prove to an atheist that a god exists? As far as I know, any evidence of existence of god can be dismissed as a hallucination, hoax, prank, optical illusion or a something with a purely reasonable explanation that people haven't figured out yet. So, no matter what evidence is present, an extremely stubborn person will be able to dismiss it and say "that does not prove a god exists". On other hand, as far as I know, it isn't possible to prove that something doesn't exist - you can only say that "I have not encountered any evidence of existence of that thing".

Yes, that is correct. There is a movement in the atheist community to stop talking as though there is evidence that would convince us of God or the supernatural. For science to work, you must assume at least philosophical naturalism. To create meaningful explanations of phenomenon requires it. Unexplained phenomenon would only mean something we don't understand yet, and unexplained phenomenon that violated established laws of physics would only mean that those laws must be incomplete or wrong and we need a better theory that can include the phenomena in its explanation.

Originally Posted by SigTerm I do not think that replacing "atheist" with "skeptic" is a right idea.

I disagree. You're talking about cats, and the term "atheist" means nothing in this context unless you're claiming that the cat in the photo created life, the universe, and everything.

Originally Posted by SigTerm If a skeptic never had any experience with cats or had never seen a cat, then the picture won't be enough. As far as I know, when Platypus was first discovered, it was dismissed as a hoax/prank. A person that has never seen a cat could dismiss a picture of a cat in same way.

Indeed. You're reinforcing my point... extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now that the rest of the world has sufficient evidence, the skeptics have been satisfied.

Originally Posted by SigTerm Let's turn it other way around: what would it take to prove to an atheist that a god exists? As far as I know, any evidence of existence of god can be dismissed as a hallucination, hoax, prank, optical illusion or a something with a purely reasonable explanation that people haven't figured out yet. So, no matter what evidence is present, an extremely stubborn person will be able to dismiss it and say "that does not prove a god exists".

It would help if the "evidence" in offer were anything other than anecdotal and extremely subjective. This kind of evidence is never considered sufficient in any other context, so why should it be any different for god?

If you want to know what it would take to prove to me, as an atheist, that a god exists, then the first question would be, which god? There are as many perspectives on what the word means as there are believers. If you propose a god with certain emergent properties, then we should be able to test for his existence through experimentation. The results should be consistent with the theory, repeatable, etc.

For example, if you propose a god who intercedes on the behalf of his believers when invoked through prayer, then a large, double-blind study should show that those who are in a certain vulnerable state who are prayed for would do better than those who are not. The evidence should definitely NOT show the opposite, which would be an argument that such a god with such a property does not exist. And yet, that's what the evidence shows: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html

Here's where the theist steps in with "God works in mysterious ways," and goes into tortured logic to explain why he were hiding himself. Yet if he truly existed, he would be evident everywhere.

Originally Posted by SigTerm On other hand, as far as I know, it isn't possible to prove that something doesn't exist - you can only say that "I have not encountered any evidence of existence of that thing".

Indeed. This is why shifting the burden of proof is a fallacy. The burden of proof must remain on the person making the affirmative claim. Otherwise, we'd be forced to entertain any number of nonsensical theories that are impossible to disprove by design. For instance, if I told you the government had engineered microbes that infect humans and affect their brain patterns in such a way as to make them compliant to certain behaviors, you'd be unable to prove they hadn't.

Originally Posted by SigTerm This means that your position is simply your belief but not necessarily a correct explanation of things. Well, at least in last few years you made some progress.

This statement shows you don't understand the nature of atheism, with a seasoning of arrogance sprinkled in. Atheism is a conclusion based on the currently available evidence. The possibility of new evidence being introduced should always be acknowledged. The difference between conclusion and belief cannot be emphasized enough. You have a belief. I do not.

Originally Posted by reed9 There is a movement in the atheist community to stop talking as though there is evidence that would convince us of God or the supernatural.

In my opinion, aside from overall attitude in the link you provided and the assumption that "atheism" == "science", the problem with this text is that it talks about Christian God, not just any god. At least it looks this way to me. And I always thought that the idea of atheism was that no god(s) exist. It will be significantly easier to prove that there is no Christian God, but proving that "there are no gods at all" is another story.

Originally Posted by SL00b I disagree. You're talking about cats, and the term "atheist" means nothing in this context unless you're claiming that the cat in the photo created life, the universe, and everything.

The cat is used to illustrate the problem with religion. cat == god in this particular example. The text will remain unchanged.

Originally Posted by SL00b This statement shows you don't understand the nature of atheism, with a seasoning of arrogance sprinkled in.

Maybe. However:

Originally Posted by SL00b Atheism is a conclusion based on the currently available evidence.

Your definition of atheism is uncommon, so I have a good reason to believe it is an incorrect one.
The most commonly encountered definition of "atheism" is "rejecting idea of god". It says nothing about relying on the currently available evidence. If your belief is "relying on evidence", then it should be named differently. AFAIK "skepticism" is pretty close to that.

Originally Posted by SL00b For example, if you propose a god who intercedes

In my opinion, a being that has power beyond human capabilities, can manipulate physical world and supposedly laws of the world could be called a god. However, there is a problem - if such being exists, and it is sentient, omnipotent, all-knowing and does not want to be found by humans, then you will never find it. By definition such being will be able to predict your every action and alter results of any experiment you would make (possibly while still fulfilling some of the prayers IF such being is meant to fulfill prayers), so you will not be able to register it in any way. Another problem is the assumption that such being exists within our physical world and not outside of it. If you remember any emulation software (dosbox), then in such situation program doesn't really "know" it is being run inside of "fake" environment. If relationship between a god and our world is same, then you also will not be able to register it unless the god wants to be discovered.

Originally Posted by SL00b You have a belief.

I'm agnostic. I know that I have not encountered a proof of existence of a god, and I have not encountered a proof of non-existence of god. I also had a few events that had no obvious reasonable explanation. So I cannot say if there is a god/supernatural or not. However, if there is a god I would prefer not to mess with it.

Originally Posted by SigTerm Your definition of atheism is uncommon, so I have a good reason to believe it is an incorrect one. The most commonly encountered definition of "atheism" is "rejecting idea of god". It says nothing about relying on the currently available evidence. If your belief is "relying on evidence", then it should be named differently. AFAIK "skepticism" is pretty close to that.

Again you reveal that you don't understand the nature of atheism. There is a continuum of beliefs about god, and that's true even among atheists. What you refer to here as "atheism" is commonly referred to as hard or positive, which is a minority position among atheists. What you refer to as "skepticism" is the common form of atheism.

Originally Posted by SigTerm I'm agnostic. I know that I have not encountered a proof of existence of a god, and I have not encountered a proof of non-existence of god. I also had a few events that had no obvious reasonable explanation. So I cannot say if there is a god/supernatural or not.

You'll have to forgive my mischaracterization of your beliefs, as the arguments you've offered so far seem to be in defense of theism. However, I've often found that, when pressed, self-professed agnostics reveal that they have some sort of a belief in a god, and your "few events" allusion, plus the nature of your previous arguments, lead to me believe that's the case here.

Ultimately, the common understanding of agnosticism is a nonsense position, because the question of atheism or theism is not a question of the nature of ultimate truth, it's a question about your personal beliefs. "Do you have a belief in a supernatural being?" is a question that can only be answered yes or no. You can't not know if you have a belief.

Therefore, agnostics fall into two general categories: atheist agnostics, and theist agnostics. An atheist agnostic does not have a belief in god, but acknowledges that the possibility exists that he's wrong, however remote. A theist agnostic typically believes there is such a divinity, but his nature can never be truly known.

I am one of the former, but we typically call ourselves atheists rather than agnostics, because that term is more accurate. I suspect you're a member of the latter.

Edit: And now, having seen your new paragraph, I can see that the theist agnostic position is exactly the argument you have entered. I was correct in my previous statement: you have a belief.

Originally Posted by SigTerm In my opinion, aside from overall attitude in the link you provided and the assumption that "atheism" == "science", the problem with this text is that it talks about Christian God, not just any god. At least it looks this way to me. And I always thought that the idea of atheism was that no god(s) exist. It will be significantly easier to prove that there is no Christian God, but proving that "there are no gods at all" is another story.

What constitutes a "god"? What are its defining features? The point of the article is that the concept of god itself is fuzzy. If you start to nail down an intelligible definition, then it becomes easy enough to disprove the specifics. If it is outside of nature (whatever that would mean), but interacts with the natural world, then the alleged interactions can be examined and studied. If those interactions are what we might call the laws of physics, for example, then the universe looks the same to us whether or not there is a god. If they break the laws of physics in a consistent way, then its still indistinguishable from a purely naturalistic explanation, but we have to rework our conception of physics. If it breaks physics in a random and unreproducible way, then you might have something, but in that case, how can we assess the evidence to determine if that something is there?

Originally Posted by SigTerm I'm agnostic. I know that I have not encountered a proof of existence of a god, and I have not encountered a proof of non-existence of god. I also had a few events that had no obvious reasonable explanation. So I cannot say if there is a god/supernatural or not.

But do you consider the propositions to be on equal footing? Do you think it's equally likely that a god exists as not?

Originally Posted by reed9 What constitutes a "god"?

See this post (#1308), 5th paragraph.

Originally Posted by reed9 But do you consider the propositions to be on equal footing? Do you think it's equally likely that a god exists as not?

I cannot measure possibility of existence of a god in general - I do not have enough data.
However, in my opinion it is less likely that Christian God exists and it more likely that Christian God doesn't exist.
If a god exists and can be discovered, then in my opinion such being either sadistic by nature, or it is non-sentient, or it possesses non-human intelligence(read "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem), or it is absent-minded, or it doesn't care about human race at all (given the size of universe, that won't be surprising), or it operates on different speed than humans. Unless there are means of signing a peace treaty with it, controlling it, destroying it, or making sure that it won't ever notice human kind, interacting with such being should be avoided at all costs.

What constitutes a "god"? What are its defining features? The point of the article is that the concept of god itself is fuzzy. If you start to nail down an intelligible definition, then it becomes easy enough to disprove the specifics. If it is outside of nature (whatever that would mean), but interacts with the natural world, then the alleged interactions can be examined and studied. If those interactions are what we might call the laws of physics, for example, then the universe looks the same to us whether or not there is a god. If they break the laws of physics in a consistent way, then its still indistinguishable from a purely naturalistic explanation, but we have to rework our conception of physics. If it breaks physics in a random and unreproducible way, then you might have something, but in that case, how can we assess the evidence to determine if that something is there?

So what if I ask why physical laws exist at all or why they work the way they do? Don't bother bringing in some more fundamental law as an explanation. That would be explaining how, not why, it would be causality, not reason or purpose. And that is where you go wrong: you frame the question in the terminology of a discipline (science) that is totally unfit for answering questions of reason and purpose because it discards them pragmatically. Of course, you could argue that physical laws simply exist and that they are the way they are because that's the way they are - chance, not reason. I'm afraid that makes me think of the good old christian invention to patch the holes in its own theories: if there is something that is not covered by the theory, it's really due to the fiery dude who had a bit of a tiff with the Boss.

Originally Posted by jay73 So what if I ask why physical laws exist at all or why they work the way they do? Don't bother bringing in some more fundamental law as an explanation. That would be explaining how, not why, it would be causality, not reason or purpose. And that is where you go wrong: you frame the question in the terminology of a discipline (science) that is totally unfit for answering questions of reason and purpose because it discards them pragmatically. Of course, you could argue that physical laws simply exist and that they are the way they are because that's the way they are - chance, not reason. I'm afraid that makes me think of the good old christian invention to patch the holes in its own theories: if there is something that is not covered by the theory, it's really due to the fiery dude who had a bit of a tiff with the Boss.

The laws of physics were not handed down from above. Neither are they rules somehow built into the structure of the universe. They are ingredients of the models that physicists invent to describe observations. Rather than being restrictions on the behavior of matter, the laws of physics are restrictions on the behavior of physicists. If the models of physics are to describe observations based on an objective reality, then those models cannot depend on the point of view of the observer. This suggests a principle of point-of-view invariance that is equivalent to the principle of covariance when applied to space-time. As Noether showed, space-time symmetries lead to the principles of energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum conservation--essentially all of classical mechanics. It also leads to Lorentz invariance and special relativity. When generalized to the abstract space of functions such as the quantum state vector, point-of-view invariance is identified with gauge invariance. Quantum mechanics is then just the mathematics of gauge transformations with no additional assumptions needed to obtain its rules, including the superposition and uncertainty principles. The conservation and quantization of electric charge follow from global gauge invariance. The electromagnetic force is introduced to preserve local gauge invariance. Although not discussed here, the other forces in the standard model of elementary particles are also fields introduced to preserve local gauge invariance. Gravity can also be viewed as such a field. Thus practically all of fundamental physics as we know it follows directly from the single principle of point-of-view invariance. -Victor Stenger (emphasis mine)

Eh? Did you even read my question? Why, not how...

All you give me is more of the good old "how": A leads to B, B to C, etc. It really does not matter how they are connected, whether it is by strict causality or mere statistics, whether one adopts a realist or a nominalist view of science. To couch the issue in those terms is to miss the point completely. It is not a scientific question, it is a fundamental question. It does not ask how one principle derives from another, it asks why there are any principles at all - why not none for that matter? Yes, that is not a question science will answer for you but that is exactly what I meant.

Originally Posted by jay73 Eh? Did you even read my question? Why, not how... All you give me is more of the good old "how": A leads to B, B to C, etc. It really does not matter how they are connected, whether it is by strict causality or mere statistics, whether one adopts a realist or a nominalist view of science. To couch the issue in those terms is to miss the point completely. It is not a scientific question, it is a fundamental question. It does not ask how one principle derives from another, it asks why there are any principles at all - why not none for that matter? Yes, that is not a question science will answer for you but that is exactly what I meant.

Yes, you said "So what if I ask why physical laws exist at all or why they work the way they do?" The answer was not just a how, but an answer to why physical laws look the way they do, ie, we are constrained in our descriptions if we are to describe an objective world from no special point of view. It was perhaps more an answer to the second part than the first. So are you in fact asking why is there something rather than nothing? You would be right, science can't really answer that, because it's not a scientific question. So what? To assume otherwise is to make a category error. It is a philosophical question. Adolf Grunbaum has probably answered it best. There is a pdf of a paper of his, "Why is there a world at all, rather than just nothing?" Unfortunately, his best paper in my opinion, The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology, I cannot find for free. But the first link there has a decent brief summary. Suffice it to say, why should we be more surprised at somethingness rather than nothingingness? Why should we assume the first requires work and the latter is a more "natural" state of affairs?

Yes, you said "So what if I ask why physical laws exist at all or why they work the way they do?" The answer was not just a how, but an answer to why physical laws look the way they do, ie, we are constrained in our descriptions if we are to describe an objective world from no special point of view. It was perhaps more an answer to the second part than the first.

Sure, by why? This is more empiricism to answer a question that is situated beyond empiricism. Why should we be constrained in any way?

Adolf Grunbaum has probably answered it best. There is a pdf of a paper of his, "Why is there a world at all, rather than just nothing?" Unfortunately, his best paper in my opinion, The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology, I cannot find for free. But the first link there has a decent brief summary. Suffice it to say, why should we be more surprised at somethingness rather than nothingingness? Why should we assume the first requires work and the latter is a more "natural" state of affairs?

I'll probably need to read it again but at first sight his conclusion is an unwarranted generalization: by refuting a particular approach to what he calls "PEQ", he declares "PEQ" to be a non-starter in all cases. More fundamentally, it looks like the issue has just been turned on its head: it is now presupposed instead that matter/being is eternal (ontological primitive) and that nothingness is only derivative; the question then becomes not how matter emerged ex nihilo but how it can pass into nothingness. If matter is really fundamental, the latter could be achieved only by an agency that is even more fundamental. And if Mr. Grunbaum is picky about words, why did not he address the other ambiguity in Leibniz's formulation of the question ("why something rather than nothing?"). Does "something" refer to "something" in a general sense - any thing - or a particular thing among many similar things? If it is the latter, then there is a set of states that would include not only "being" and "nothingness" but "nothingness" and a possibly infinite number of variations on being (scholasticism differentiated various levels of being). Such a view leaves room for neither Leibniz's nor Grunbaum's facile dichotomy.

All this philosophical or whatever stuff is way too deep for my ageing-shrinking-left-school-nearly-fiftyone-years-ago-with-no-qualifications-and-aint-done-****-all-with-it-since-brain to follow.

BrianL raises a good point, so in the interest of bringing it back a little...

Originally Posted by jay73 Sure, by why? This is more empiricism to answer a question that is situated beyond empiricism. Why should we be constrained in any way?

Where are you trying to go with this? Let's say you're right, and neither Stenger nor Grunbaum are giving anything but more how. I'm not clear what you're trying to establish? I'm guessing it's that we need God as the source of the why, yes?

^ We need God to put all our sorrow's blames, to throw mud in times of agony, to shout and yell when no human listens to our frustration AND finally to have a relief in case of extreme that somebody is 'somewhere' which/who/that will control all .

Where are you trying to go with this? Let's say you're right, and neither Stenger nor Grunbaum are giving anything but more how. I'm not clear what you're trying to establish? I'm guessing it's that we need God as the source of the why, yes?

Maybe, maybe not. I simply don't trust any definitive answers, whether they are based on science, logic or organized religion.