Evidence that God is real

kx000 said:
You say you believe.
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Yes

But but but since you have not answered the questions I asked I am moving to disbelief

If you wish to have my belief to be realised please answer questions put to you

Not just my questions, but other posters questions, which you seem to have ignored, a la Jan style

:)
 
Xelasnave.1947 said:
If you are naughty does that mean you were doing nothing?
People defend themselves saying they were doing nothing ...how can that be?
Breathing is something so they lie.
The word nothing should be removed.
Alex
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Should disbelief be removed?
 
Yazata,

It's nice that you're trying to help the theists and all, but I was hoping that they they would say something about the evidence for God that they think is most significant.

While we wait for them to come up with some suggestions, I'll reply to your post.

Yazata said:
From post #7:

1. The cosmological fine-tuning arguments. This one appears to me to be a recent (last few decades) eruption of the traditional design argument in new ostensibly scientific guise. But I'm put off by how it's dependent on what I consider highly speculative theories of mathematical physics, incomprehensible to laymen and hence a matter for religious-style faith.
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We've had entire threads on the fine-tuning argument. In this context, I'd recommend reading Viktor Stenger's book The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.

One major problem with the so-called fine-tuning arguments regarding physical constants is that advocates of fine-tuning rarely allow the constants to vary as a set. Rather, they insist on altering only one constant at a time, while keeping all the other constants the same. It seems very likely that the overall phase space in which all the relevant constants can take values such as would produce a universe suitable for complex intelligent life is a large one. If that is true, then arguments as to the extreme improbability of finding the particular set of constants we find becomes far less persuasive.

2. The class of more traditional cosmological arguments, derived from Aristotle by way of Aquinas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/

This class of arguments seems to me to revolve around a whole class of unanswered metaphysical questions. (How did reality originate? What is the source of its order?) It doesn't really point to a theistic-style deity unless one introduces the deity as an additional premise which would seemingly render the arguments circular.
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The argument that starts with "Everything must have a cause" and then goes on to create an ad hoc exemption for God is fatally flawed, in my opinion.

3. Religious experience. This class of evidences has the advantage of being exceedingly empirical, assuming that we allow 'empirical' to range over all experience and not just sensory experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_experience

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-experience/

This class of evidence faces serious epistemological difficulties in my opinion. (But so does mathematics, and atheists love mathematics.)
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Serious epistemological difficulties is right on the money. That people have subjective experiences that they interpret in the context of religion is one thing. It does not remotely follow from this that God exists. Besides, there are scientifically plausible explanations for many such experiences, which do not need to invoke God.

As for mathematics, I think that's a separate discussion. Nobody claims there is a God of mathematics, apart from those who claim there is a God of everything else.

4. Miracles. A great deal depends on what we interpret this word to mean. Strong Humean violation of the natural order interpretations make the reality of miracles hard to demonstrate (certainly by science, whose methodological naturalism always assumes the existence of natural explanations), while weak interpretations weaken the inference between the miracle and a deity, unless that premise is initially added, once again rendering the argument circular. (The young couple who think of their new baby as a miraculous answer to their prayers aren't committed to believing that the baby is a violation of the laws of nature, nor does their thinking of their baby as a miraculous answer to their prayers logically imply the existence of a deity.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/
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I agree that "miracles", as reported, are not persuasive evidence of God.

That leaves us with problem cases like mathematics and the laws of physics themselves. It still isn't clear what kind of reality those have or precisely how human beings know about them. Which suggests that the natural/supernatural boundary might be a fuzzy distinction.
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I don't know how you could argue that mathematics or the laws of physics are supernatural. Physical laws are, of course, amenable to physical investigation. The "laws" of mathematics also seem to be amenable to appropriate kinds of investigation. My personal opinion is that both kinds of laws are, at least in part, human constructs - ways of making sense of the world that we have invented. I'm somewhat inclined towards instrumentalism rather than realism in this regard, and there is a philosophical discussion that can be had.

Regarding evidence of God from nature, the goal of the cosmological arguments seems to be to point to unanswered metaphysical questions whose answers don't seem to lie within the natural realm (as defined above): The reason why anything exists at all, the source of cosmic order and so on. In other words, the physical world doesn't seem to be a closed system so much as an unanswered question. Throw in an implicit assumption that everything has an explanation, define 'God' as the missing explanation, and there you are.
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God of the gaps, in other words.

So the common atheist demand that God present "himself" for inspection by mankind's physical senses (that he be visible in the sky or something, like the flying saucers in Independence Day) would seem to contradict that sort of transcendence. (Which many religious traditions insist upon.) The cosmological arguments avoid that difficulty by arguing that physical reality (the realm of the senses in principle including all the possible instrumental extensions) requires an explanation beyond itself, an explanation of a different sort.
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Theists tend to believe that God has ongoing effects in the world, and that such effects can include physical effects. Typical theist descriptions of God do not have God as a mere absent Creator or Provider of Laws, but as a present and immediate agent - a person with very human-like traits and behaviours.

Discussion of God's supposed ongoing physical effects on the world brings us back to the topic of miracles. All other suggested effects are apparently below the level of empirical verification.

What about the purported objects of religious experience? Practitioners of yoga, Muslim sufis and Christian religious contemplatives sometimes claim to have tapped into some kind of higher reality. It's usually something ineffable, something that can't be described in words or conventional concepts. They take those kind of experiences as evidence for their various religious beliefs.
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Secular practitioners of meditation report experiencing the same kinds of feelings as the religious ones, but they interpret things rather differently.

That's exceedingly empirical in its way, assuming that we allow the word 'empirical' to range over all experience and not just sensory experience. One of the things that struck me about early Buddhism was exactly that, how empirical it is. Don't believe just because a teacher tells you or because you read it in a "scripture" somewhere, or because you concocted it as a result of a chain of reasoning. (The famous Kalama sutta.) Withhold final judgment until you actually experience it for yourself.

While at first glance that seems to be entirely subjective, the yogin might argue that if you devote years to yoga practice then you can experience it too, that confirming evidence is available to anyone who puts in the effort. Which isn't unlike science really.​
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I agree with you. In some ways, it's like a recipe. If you do this, then you will experience that. Mind you, learning to do this well might take years of practice, just like any other skill.

Experiences that come from meditation are bit like the feelings that come from creating art or music. You can tell somebody how to play a musical instrument, but they won't really be able to have the full experience of what it is to create music without a lot of practice.
Scientific evidence is exceedingly arcane, perceptible only to a chosen few. But scientists argue that anyone who pursues years of university education and then gets access to the right research group, can have these confirming experiences as well. Or at least access to the data sets that confirm hypotheses after elaborate chains of inference are applied to them.
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Science is a different recipe for gaining a different kind of knowledge. However, both science and meditation are inherently empirical. Do this, and you will find that. Not so different.

But an extra layer that is often added to meditation actually has nothing to do with the experience itself. It is the religious overlay: if you have this kind of experience it means God is talking to you, or you're One with the great cosmic reality, or whatever. It's almost like a value judgment - that the thing isn't enough in itself, but must be shored up with unevidenced mumbo-jumbo.
 
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(continued...)

That might indeed be the minimum qualification for being an atheist, atheism's defining characteristic.

But atheists typically go well beyond that in real life. Atheists will typically insist that atheists have good justification for their belief that there is no God.
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I'm not sure what your "typical" atheist would look like.

From what I read on the internet, it would seem that the the majority of thoughtful atheists do not believe there is no God - a point that they spend quite a lot of time making to theists on internet forums. Rather, they do not believe there is a God. The reason usually comes down to lack of evidence. Which brings us back to the thread topic.

Many of them will omit your 'probably'. They will typically insist that conversely, there is no good justification for belief in the existence of God. Or divine beings or transcendent realities, or something.
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I don't know about good justifications in general. I can think of many reasons somebody might think it is good to believe in God. I am concerned here only with whether the belief can be justified with regard to evidence.

One of the profound problems with atheism is that it's typically blurred together with anti-Christianity. Divine realities are conceived in very Biblical ways. You haven't lived until a room full of atheists start spouting Bible quotations at you as if they were protestant fundamentalists, which many of them probably were until they lost their faith. (I'm not and never was a Christian, so Bible quotations don't move me. The Quran is just as dim.)
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Since the Enlightenment, atheism has primarily developed in the context of Christianity. Most outspoken atheists today still live in predominantly Christian countries, if for no other reason that than they risk persecution if they are outspoken in this way in other countries. Christianity is a familiar and easy target for many atheists.

I'm most emphatically not an atheist in that image. I consider myself an agnostic in Thomas Huxley's original sense. I feel that I'm constantly surrounded by mysteries that not only do I not have the answers to, I strongly suspect that no one does. I'm fascinated by the philosophy of religion, not because it offers me something to smash and feel superior about, but because it presents no end of interesting problem cases on the epistemological and metaphysical margins.
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I'm more interested in religion from a psychological and anthropological perspective. In general, I am fascinated to find out what people think about things and why they think as they do. The reasons that people believe in Gods are many and varied. It is particularly interesting to me that the main reasons seem to have very little, if anything, to do with there being good evidence for God's existence.​
 
No wonder the universe appears fine-tuned, it is a result of existing tuned properties. It could not be other than what it is.

This is like saying the universe is finetuned for the emergence of hydrogen, but it is hydrogen which is finely tuned by universal potentials, not the other way around......:)
 
Write4U said:
No wonder the universe appears fine-tuned, it is a result of existing tuned properties.
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Which properties are you referring to?

It could not be other than what it is.
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There's no evidence of that, as far as I'm aware.

This is like saying the universe is finetuned for the emergence of hydrogen, but it is hydrogen which is finely tuned by universal potentials, not the other way around......:)
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Hydrogen atoms as we know them can only exist in a universe that has particular values of certain fundamental constants. The question is why those particular constants are observed to have the particular values they have, rather than some other value.
 
James R said:
The question is why those particular constants are observed to have the particular values they have, rather than some other value.
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The constants are what they are

If they were any other value - we would be living in a different type of Universe. What type(s) of differences? Who knows

Guessing we could speculate but that is all we could probably do. Might try to setup a highly unusual environment

But obviously can only use stuff available - which is subject to the constraints of this Universe

Further if other Universes exist with different PHYSICS (which I doubt), in ANY Universe the same unanswerable question remains WHY THESE CONSTRAINTS?

Well not exactly UNANSWERABLE

Answer Because they are

I'm guessing the best we can ever expect to do is break the universe down into its smallest components and see if we could fit them together into any other arrangement

Somewhat like taking a jigsaw puzzle down to its pieces and seeing if we can make a picture of a sunset from a forest scene

Not going to happen

:)
 
James R said:
Which properties are you referring to?
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Mathematical properties .
There's no evidence of that, as far as I'm aware.
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It's not complicated. Specific causal conditions yield specific results.
What we see was not placed in a fine tuned universe. What we see emerged from prior existing universal conditons.
If conditions had been different, reality would have been different.
Hydrogen atoms as we know them can only exist in a universe that has particular values of certain fundamental constants. The question is why those particular constants are observed to have the particular values they have, rather than some other value.
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Of course, but that is due to the fact that hydrogen emerged from the fundamental universal conditions, regardless of any tuning. Hydrogen is the tuned result of universal potential, not the other way around.
If the original conditions had been different we'd have particles with different values.

The universe was deterministically causal to what we see, not the other way around.
The universe is not fine tuned, reality is. Patterns (polymers) are tuned constructs.

There was a time the earth was not tuned for life. Then (with cooling) life emerged a fine tuning of available natural resources, starting with cyanobacteria which produced the oxygen which made it possible for more complex life to emerge and continue to fine tune itself through evolution, until 4.5 billion years produced mankind, the finely tuned organic pattern which is now busily destroying the well tuned balance of its own environment.

The finely tuned universe argument is not even wrong. It never was. What emerged from it was finely tuned to the universe.
 
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billvon said:
Mathematical properties are not characteristic of any universe. They are tools valid in any universe.
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Mathematics are definitely characteristic of this universe. How does order evolve unless an orderly process is followed. IMO, we have named this orderly process "mathematical" in essence and have developed an interpretive symbolic language to assist us in codifying these constant values and orderly functions of the observable universe, the mathematics of the universe.
Did you mean physical constants, like the speed of light or the Planck constant?
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In a sense, yes. Constants are fixed "values". But I do not mean this as "numbers", those are human symbols. But they work, values interact by mathematical mechanics. It is what allowed us to develop the scientific discipline of "physics" in the first place.
The orderly non-sentient information sharing system of universal vales and functions.

The universe itself is a geometric pattern, which is by definition a mathematical construct.
But it is not just the universe which is mathematical in essence, it is everything what emerged from the universal mathematical mechanics.
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The Mathematical Mechanic: Using Physical Reasoning to Solve Problems
Everybody knows that mathematics is indispensable to physics--imagine where we'd be today if Einstein and Newton didn't have the math to back up their ideas. But how many people realize that physics can be used to produce many astonishing and strikingly elegant solutions in mathematics?
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When almost every cosmologist believes they are "discovering" the natural inherent mathematical nature of universal laws that rule the formation of universal patterns, I believe them. Why should they lie about what they believe?
 
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We're starting to drift off topic again. This keeps happening in this thread, probably because there's no evidence of God to discuss.

Detailed discussion of fine-tuning could be had in a different thread, if anybody wants to start one.
 
When W4U says "the universe is mathematical", he means the same thing as the rest of us mean when we say "the universe is emergent from a few basic physical forces".
 
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