Why it is silly to look for evidence of God

[wynn]

Sometimes the people who believe that things that don't exist do exist can be pretty scary. Like when they drive airliners into tall buildings and stuff. That can ruin your whole morning.

How do you know what they believe?
And how do you know that what they believe in doesn't exist?

 

[michael_taylor]

Nobody suggested that kind of conclusion.

Then what was the meaning of "nothing to fear neither from God, nor from theists" ? If understanding your proposed definition of a god would assuage any fear about how theists might act on their beliefs, you must necessarily have already concluded (or at least decided to act as though you had concluded) that the two statements you made genuinely did follow.

So you did present exactly that, implicit in your statements. That you affect not to recognise it is irrelevant. It is the meaning of your words.

 

[wynn]

"If atheists would just consider the usual definitions of "God" (notably: omnipotent, omniscient, all-attractive, all-wise, the Supreme, the source/origin, the controller etc.), they'd see that there is nothing to fear neither from God, nor from theists."

Non-sense, it has been the ACTIONS of theists that has created the most misery and death in this world for hundreds and thousands of years.

If you don't believe in God and His justice,
then how do you explain wars, violence, famine, etc.?


If you believe in the Theory of Evolution, then everything that is, all plants, all animals, all humans, everything everyone does, the weather, including religion, theists, theism, and wars, violence, famine, etc.,
is simply due to evolution.
So where's the problem?

A good explanation or theory is one that sets your mind at ease.
If the Theory of Evolution doesn't set your mind at ease, then maybe it's not such a good theory after all.

 

[wynn]

Then what was the meaning of "nothing to fear neither from God, nor from theists" ? If understanding your proposed definition of a god would assuage any fear about how theists might act on their beliefs, you must necessarily have already concluded (or at least decided to act as though you had concluded) that the two statements you made genuinely did follow.

So you did present exactly that, implicit in your statements. That you affect not to recognise it is irrelevant. It is the meaning of your words.

You are projecting, and very forcefully at that.



When it is said that "God is in control of everything and everyone" that includes you too, not just the theists.

Atheists sometimes believe that they effectively exist in a separate universe than the theists.

It's because of this sense of separation that the usual definitions of God don't assuage the atheists' concerns.

 

[michael_taylor]

You just don't read what is said.

I did read it. And I'm quite sure I understand what you wanted to express, and what effect you felt it should have, but I don't believe it.

I don't judge whether something is real the same way you do, so is it any surprise that a statement that seems convincing from your point of view seems nonsensical to me? It seems like childish wishful thinking embellished with endless rationalisations and cynical rhetoric.

 

[michael_taylor]

If you don't believe in God and His justice,
then how do you explain wars, violence, famine, etc.?

Nature.

If you believe in the Theory of Evolution, then everything that is, all plants, all animals, all humans, everything everyone does, the weather, including religion, theists, theism, and wars, violence, famine, etc.,
is simply due to evolution.

Not factually accurate. One of the ways you reveal your ignorance is through these over generalisations.

A good explanation or theory is one that sets your mind at ease.
If the Theory of Evolution doesn't set your mind at ease, then maybe it's not such a good theory after all.

Then you may as well become addicted to intravenous diamorphine and lay in your own shit telling yourself you're king of the world. Take that as either example or metaphor as you will.

As a point of principle, I'm not at all interested in your attempts to define theories in terms of a spiritual or emotional "good". The measure of a theory is how well it predicts and explains the observable universe. Everything else is irrelevant to the development of theories, and only relevant to how those theories are put into practice (if that).

 

[Grumpy]

Techne

Well, classical theism is affirmed by Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Pagans thinkers such as Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna and Plotinus respectively. Classical theism affirms at least the following:
1) If God exists, God exists necessarily, in other words, God could not have not existed.
2) If God exists then He has no limitations, God is not limited in perfection, in power, in goodness and in knowledge.
3) If God exists then nothing can come into being or continue to happen without God creating it and sustaining it in existence.

Affirmed? Logic without evidence is mental gymnastics, nothing more. All that this "affirmation" shows is that given the assumptions of the author(necessary?)one can make a case, but without evidence that the assumptions are valid it proves nothing. This arguement is so chock full of assumptions it is rendered meaningless.

Knowledge gained via our senses (empirical knowledge) and knowledge gained via intellectual abstraction all contribute to the theist's view of reality.

There is no knowledge that can be gained by intellectual abstraction alone(except knowledge about how to use logic, maybe). It can only be called knowledge if it has all three of the legs of inquiry, evidence, logic applied to that evidence and testing to confirm the validity of the logic(wash, rinse, repeat). And that knowledge must be falsifiable, given new evidence or better understanding or failed testing. And all of it must be repeatable by any other person(no spiritual revelation allowed). Without all three legs the argument isn't worth the paper it's written on.

To the theist a naturalistic account may mean that the existence of something that just is necessary being itself, whose essence is its existence, that is intelligence analogously speaking, that just is good and is purely actual is perfectly compatible with explaining and having naturalistic accounts of natural events.

Pure, unvarnished gobbledegoop, non-sense, hocum. You assume it is necessary, you assume it's properties and attributes and you run around in circles chasing your assumptions trying to convince yourself that your invisible friend is a reality. You have no evidence that your assumptions are valid therefore you know nothing about the necessity or any attributes of the assumed being.

Causality for the theist

The only possible cause where a deity MIGHT logically be involved is at the beginning, the Big Bang, the First Cause. The BB was a singularity and we can probably never know anything about what caused that event, but everything thereafter can be seen to follow the laws that came into being at that time(plus a bit of uncertainty coming from the Quantum). If you want to believe(as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and many more of our Founding Fathers did)that some deity was the cause I have no way of disputing that, though I doubt it. Deities were our way of explaining everything in the world only as long as we were ignorant of the processes of Nature. Once it was understood that thunder was not caused by Thor's hammer Thor didn't stick around long, your necessary deity is not so necessary anymore, either. We have better explanations for all the things that deity was thought necessary for, unless you are saying the Universe itself("That entity for which no greater can be conceived")is that Deity(ala Spinoza and Einstein), but I doubt that, too.

Grumpy

 

[michael_taylor]

You are projecting, and very forcefully at that.

A veritable fount of twee cliches and overused rhetorical devices as always. Psych-101-isms aside, perhaps you could explain why?

When it is said that "God is in control of everything and everyone" that includes you too, not just the theists.

Or rather, it would include them if god weren't made up.

Atheists sometimes believe that they effectively exist in a separate universe than the theists.

It's because of this sense of separation that the usual definitions of God don't assuage the atheists' concerns.

If you understood the people you were talking about to even a superficial degree that statement would have seemed as ludicrous to you as it did me.

 

[Techne]

Affirmed? Logic without evidence is mental gymnastics, nothing more. All that this "affirmation" shows is that given the assumptions of the author(necessary?)one can make a case, but without evidence that the assumptions are valid it proves nothing. This arguement is so chock full of assumptions it is rendered meaningless.

I don't remember making any argument here for the existence of God. I was merely pointing out what classical theism entails and who where classical theists in the past.

There is no knowledge that can be gained by intellectual abstraction alone(except knowledge about how to use logic, maybe). It can only be called knowledge if it has all three of the legs of inquiry, evidence, logic applied to that evidence and testing to confirm the validity of the logic(wash, rinse, repeat). And that knowledge must be falsifiable, given new evidence or better understanding or failed testing. And all of it must be repeatable by any other person(no spiritual revelation allowed). Without all three legs the argument isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Here again we need to be very specific about definitions. I think I can be satisfied with intellectual abstraction as knowledge.

I can have evidence e.g. change happens.
I can have inquiry e.g. I want to understand why things change the way they do.
I can intellectually abstract necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings. Call them atomos.
I can further intellectually abstract that all change is the arrangement and rearrangement of these necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings.

With this knowledge I gained via intellectual abstraction I can then further go and look at the evidence. I can have further inquiry, I can set up new experiments to see of there really are necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings. There is no evidence at present of these atomos (not to be confused with atoms). But I still have the knowledge of atomos and it is as a result of intellectual abstraction. I can then go further, even if there is no evidence for atomos, and use logic and further intellectual abstraction to see if it even logical to posit a reality where all change is described as the arrangement and rearrangement of atomos in a void.

The way I see it, this would satisfy as legitimate knowledge.

Pure, unvarnished gobbledegoop, non-sense, hocum. You assume it is necessary, you assume it's properties and attributes and you run around in circles chasing your assumptions trying to convince yourself that your invisible friend is a reality. You have no evidence that your assumptions are valid therefore you know nothing about the necessity or any attributes of the assumed being.

Not really no. There are various arguments (or proofs if you want) that attempt to establish the existence of God. Aquinas' 5 ways for example use change (1st), causality (2nd), contingency (3rd), degrees of being and transcendentals (4th) and final causality (5th) as premises in proofs that can in principle demonstrate the existence of something that just is necessary being itself (3rd), whose essence is its existence (2nd), that is intelligence analogously speaking (5th), that just is good (4th) and is purely actual (1st) and that is what classical theists call God. These arguments just fall within a greater scheme what can be labelled as natural secondary causes, powers etc. And the system as a whole is just normal and natural for the theist.

The only possible cause where a deity MIGHT logically be involved is at the beginning, the Big Bang, the First Cause.

Again, definitions here might cause us to talk past each other. Classical theism does not need a universe that has a beginning. In fact the arguments for the existence of God don't even rely on a universe that has a beginning.

The BB was a singularity and we can probably never know anything about what caused that event, but everything thereafter can be seen to follow the laws that came into being at that time(plus a bit of uncertainty coming from the Quantum).

If, for arguments sake there is no event before the big bang, all it would imply is that it had no per accidens cause. This does not imply that it had no per se cause.

If you want to believe(as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and many more of our Founding Fathers did)that some deity was the cause I have no way of disputing that, though I doubt it. Deities were our way of explaining everything in the world only as long as we were ignorant of the processes of Nature. Once it was understood that thunder was not caused by Thor's hammer Thor didn't stick around long, your necessary deity is not so necessary anymore, either. We have better explanations for all the things that deity was thought necessary for, unless you are saying the Universe itself("That entity for which no greater can be conceived")is that Deity(ala Spinoza and Einstein), but I doubt that, too.

There is a difference between saying something is a necessary being and saying something is necessary for something.

 

[Grumpy]

wynn

If you don't believe in God and His justice,
then how do you explain wars, violence, famine, etc.?

What? Wars, Human nature. Violence, ditto. Famine, lack of food(from any number of causes). God and his justice are irrelivant and redundent.

If you believe in the Theory of Evolution, then everything that is, all plants, all animals, all humans, everything everyone does, the weather, including religion, theists, theism, and wars, violence, famine, etc.,
is simply due to evolution.
So where's the problem?

I don't believe in Evolution, it is a fact, it happened and is happening as we speak, but our theories explaining that fact are...er...evolving as we gather more evidence and reach better understanding, but what the heck does that have to do with the weather? That would be meteorology. Theism grew out of our monkey mind wanting explanations of the world, that's why most primative concepts of gods were associated with natural phenomina such as volcano gods, or sun gods, or gods of the ocean or the thunder. Many early tribes saw god in every tree or river. Wars and violence are human nature, man has never needed gods to fight the "other". Famine is a natural occurance, just like rain and wind, needing no other explanation.

A good explanation or theory is one that sets your mind at ease.
If the Theory of Evolution doesn't set your mind at ease, then maybe it's not such a good theory after all.

A good explation or theory is one that explains all of the evidence in a coherent fashion and allows one to predict the future behavior of the process involved, my feelings of ease or unease have nothing to do with it. If it was ease of mind we were going after then knowledge of atomic fission would be counterproductive. The theory of evolution is a good one because of it's explanatory power and usefulness, not because it is mind balm. Often what we learn is troubling, but blissful ignorance is not a valid option, nor is faith based "knowledge" or dependence on the protection of a non-evidenced deity. Our very survival is dependent on real knowledge, not divine revelation.

Grumpy

 

[Grumpy]

Techne

Here again we need to be very specific about definitions. I think I can be satisfied with intellectual abstraction as knowledge.

I can have evidence e.g. change happens.
I can have inquiry e.g. I want to understand why things change the way they do.
I can intellectually abstract necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings. Call them atomos.
I can further intellectually abstract that all change is the arrangement and rearrangement of these necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings.

With this knowledge I gained via intellectual abstraction I can then further go and look at the evidence.

You validate my point. Abstract thought is useless without evidence.
"I can have evidence e.g. change happens."
You've already introduced evidence.
"I can have inquiry e.g. I want to understand why things change the way they do."
Now you have applied abstract intellectual thought to that evidence.
"I can intellectually abstract necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings. Call them atomos."
But do they actually exist? Better test that. It's a hypothesis, but is it valid? Until you can show them to be real you haven't gained knowledge and you never will without testing.
"But I still have the knowledge of atomos"
Not without evidence and testing you don't. As I said, there is no real knowledge available through thought alone. Thought alone gave us Earth, Fire, Air and Water and Alchemy, experiment and evidence gave us the periodic table and chemistry.

Not really no. There are various arguments (or proofs if you want) that attempt to establish the existence of God. Aquinas' 5 ways for example use change (1st), causality (2nd), contingency (3rd), degrees of being and transcendentals (4th) and final causality (5th) as premises in proofs that can in principle demonstrate the existence of something that just is necessary being itself (3rd), whose essence is its existence (2nd), that is intelligence analogously speaking (5th), that just is good (4th) and is purely actual (1st) and that is what classical theists call God. These arguments just fall within a greater scheme what can be labelled as natural secondary causes, powers etc. And the system as a whole is just normal and natural for the theist.

It's still non-sense. Proofs are only valid in math and that is because it is not based on reality but upon an artificial world of rules and symbols, not the real world. Logic alone can prove nothing about the real world.

Again, definitions here might cause us to talk past each other. Classical theism does not need a universe that has a beginning. In fact the arguments for the existence of God don't even rely on a universe that has a beginning.

Classical theism is not knowledge, the arguments are invalid and proof of nothing(except the opinion of the arguer).

If, for arguments sake there is no event before the big bang, all it would imply is that it had no per accidens cause. This does not imply that it had no per se cause.

We can never know, it may have had no cause at all, meerly an unusually large Quantum Fluctuation, maybe. Causality may only apply within the Universe.

There is a difference between saying something is a necessary being and saying something is necessary for something

Just as there is a difference between claiming a being is logically necessary and showing that to be true.

Grumpy

 

[Techne]

You validate my point. Abstract thought is useless without evidence.
"I can have evidence e.g. change happens."
You've already introduced evidence.
"I can have inquiry e.g. I want to understand why things change the way they do."
Now you have applied abstract intellectual thought to that evidence.
"I can intellectually abstract necessary indivisible and indestructible simple beings. Call them atomos."
But do they actually exist? Better test that. It's a hypothesis, but is it valid? Until you can show them to be real you haven't gained knowledge and you never will without testing.
"But I still have the knowledge of atomos"
Not without evidence and testing you don't. As I said, there is no real knowledge available through thought alone.

I guess we just have to agree to disagree here.

It's still non-sense. Proofs are only valid in math and that is because it is not based on reality but upon an artificial world of rules and symbols, not the real world. Logic alone can prove nothing about the real world.

Without logic you can't prove anything. Empirical science does not prove anything it only generates hypotheses and theories and evidence that supports them. This isn't a bad thing, it just is how things are. Remember, theories and hypotheses are intellectual abstractions (real knowledge in my opinion). Also, we intellectually abstract the evidence from our senses and we then see how these intellectual abstractions fit with our theories which, as you know, are intellectual abstraction as well.

Classical theism is not knowledge, the arguments are invalid and proof of nothing(except the opinion of the arguer).

Well here I think we will just have to agree to disagree.

We can never know, it may have had no cause at all, meerly an unusually large Quantum Fluctuation, maybe. Causality may only apply within the Universe.

Well, I see no reason why we need to abandon the principle of causality even if we grant that there are no events before the big bang.

Just as there is a difference between claiming a being is logically necessary and showing that to be true.

Ok...

 

[gmilam]

A good explanation or theory is one that sets your mind at ease.

Bullshit. A good explanation is one that describes the truth. The truth is not required to be comforting.

 

[Enmos]

A good explanation or theory is one that sets your mind at ease.
If the Theory of Evolution doesn't set your mind at ease, then maybe it's not such a good theory after all.

You are joking, right?

Right??

 

[lightgigantic]

Bullshit. A good explanation is one that describes the truth. The truth is not required to be comforting.

If that was the case, science would never be plagued by type I and II errors
:shrug:

 

[aaqucnaona]

@ wynn, what YOU consider to be good or what is good for you has nothing to do with whether a theory is true and "good" in science. A true and good theory in science is any theory that fits the data, isn't contradicted by new observations and makes correct predictions. Nothing else matters.

 

[aaqucnaona]

If that was the case, science would never be plagued by type I and II errors
:shrug:

No it would be. Science as a process is free from such errors but scientists are not. So yes, science has had its bad theories, but it quickly put them were they belong, in the dustbin. One only has to see the recent cold-fusion fiasco to see this.

Religion works in a opposite way. The bad theories are justfied by faith and thus the worse a theory is, the more faith it gets. Case in point, scientology.

 

[Yazata]

Well, classical theism is affirmed by Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Pagans thinkers such as Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna and Plotinus respectively.

I doubt if any of these people ever encountered philosophical theology's modern term "classical theist". The phrase may or may not capture some commonality in the thinking of these individuals (I have doubts about Plotinus). But why must we assume that whatever's common to their thinking uniquely captures God essence, or whatever it is? There still seems to be an implicit demand in all this that we accept a particular brand of theology.

Classical theism affirms at least the following:
1) If God exists, God exists necessarily, in other words, God could not have not existed.
2) If God exists then He has no limitations, God is not limited in perfection, in power, in goodness and in knowledge.
3) If God exists then nothing can come into being or continue to happen without God creating it and sustaining it in existence.

That's problematic in my mind. It takes a list of philosophical ideas like necessary being, unboundedness and so on, and then kind of slaps the word "God" onto them.

But isn't 'God' a lot more than that? Isn't God, well... a god? A being worthy of our worship and devotion? A "person" (whatever that means) who communicates with us? A being who responds to sacrifices, who reveals himself and inspires religious scriptures, the master of salvation who determines who goes to heaven or to hell after they die? A being who (according to Christians) performed history's central redemptive drama in/through Jesus Christ?

Where does all that religious stuff ccme from? And what justifies us in using the same word "God" to refer to hypothetical philosophical speculations about stuff like necessary or unbounded being, and to Judaism's, Christianity's and Islam's very specific and highly religious content alike? What justifies our somehow equating all of it as one and the same?

To me, the word "God" looks like a storeroom filled by history's pack-rat, crammed with dusty concepts from many different places and times, that aren't always even consistent with one another.

 

[Grumpy]

Techne

Without logic you can't prove anything. Empirical science does not prove anything it only generates hypotheses and theories and evidence that supports them. This isn't a bad thing, it just is how things are. Remember, theories and hypotheses are intellectual abstractions (real knowledge in my opinion). Also, we intellectually abstract the evidence from our senses and we then see how these intellectual abstractions fit with our theories which, as you know, are intellectual abstraction as well.

The map is not the territory and nothing can be known with absolute certainty, both concepts I have espoused repeatedly on these fora(fori, forums?) Intellectual abstractions divorced from evidence and testing can never lead to knowledge. If you don't test your abstractions against reality you know nothing about that reality. You have opinion, not knowledge.

Well, I see no reason why we need to abandon the principle of causality even if we grant that there are no events before the big bang.

My point is that what we expect within our Universe(with good reason)may be irrelivant or false under other conditions. For example the Universe which emerged from the BB was at the lowest entropy(some say zero entropy)possible. This is not possible within our Universe, there are no conditions within our Universe where it is possible to create zero entropy. Yet there it was, so conditions on the "other side" of that singularity allows such low entropy to come into existence. So we already know that one of the foundations of physics(entropy always increases)did not pertain on the other side, so it is not unreasonable to think the same might be true of causality. Causality is one event following another in the flow of time. Time came into being at the singularity as a half dimension(we can only travel one direction in the time dimension, toward higher etropy, unlike the other three of space), so if the other half dimension exists within the event horizon(any event horizon)causality would be reversed.

 

[wynn]

You are joking, right?

Right??

Not at all.
A good explanation or theory is one that sets your mind at ease. That's why we seek such that set our minds at ease.

To believe otherwise - namely, to believe that the truth, the ultimate truth, is inherently uncomfortable - is to believe that the true nature of all existence is suffering, in its miriad forms. And to believe that the true nature of all existence is suffering, one has either not thought consistently about the matter; or one is projecting the temporary and external (which abounds with suffering) onto the eternal and inherent.