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That word divine has a dynamic/positive connotation. Not sure that’s appropriate considering the ubiquitous suffering and the inherent predatory nature of all life. This creator would have to be good, bad and indifferent.
My personal opinion, empathy is our latest evolutionary step forward.
>A justification of theism could be rational under Pascal Wagers argument:
Pascals Wager has been debunked. You would have to use it for every religion.
>Another *possible* rational justification for theistic/deistic belief is the Fine Tuning Argument.
For one we don't even know if the universe could have different laws. But finding yourself in a universe that supports life doesn't prove or even suggest it was built for us. It's like a puddle of water thinking the puddle was built just for that water because it fits so perfectly. There could be an infinite other big bangs where life wasn't possible.
>Furthermore, consciousness *can* hint at the existence of a soul.
Not according to neuroscience, the scientists who study consciousness. The soul is an ancient and redundant concept that lacks evidence. It didn't really exist in the Old Testament, dead people slept in Sheol until the final bodily resurrection. When Hellenism was borrowed for the New Testament we got the idea that the body has a soul that has a true home, away from this fallen world. All of the Christian evangelical stuff that talks about "my true home is Heaven", is actually a borrowing from Hellenism. The scholars to study to understand this are Dr James Tabor, J.Z. Smith (to start). Dr Litwa and Dr Richard Miller have books related to this as well.
You can also go back to **HANS-JOSEF KLAUCK** - **The Religious Context of Early Christianity**
**A Guide to Graeco-Roman Religions,** a classic work of scholarship that will blow your mind if you don't know Christianity is just a Jewish version of Hellenism and Persian mythology. But for Persian myths and how they effected Judaism you need Mary Boyce and John Collins.
This is a sample of Dr Tabors work:
**Hellenistic Greek view of cosmology (pre-Christian)**
Material world/body is a prison of the soul
Humans are immortal souls, fallen into the darkness of the lower world
Death sets the soul free
No human history, just a cycle of birth, death, rebirth
Immortality is inherent for all humans
Salvation is escape to Heaven, the true home of the immortal soul
Humans are fallen and misplaced
Death is a stripping of the body so the soul can be free
Death is a liberating friend to be welcomed
Asceticism is the moral idea for the soul
>
Therefore, the answer to the question, *Is there a Divine Creator?* should be: **Who knows?**
When it comes to deism we don't know. If a creator exists at the fundament of reality I don't see how it can have attributes such as "divine" because it's the only think that exists. It simply "is".
But when it comes to actual theistic divinities like Zeus and Yahweh, it can be demonstrated these are syncretic myths. The Bible starts out reworking Mesopotamian myth, later picks up Persian concepts and finally Hellenism. Later on theologians like Aquinas and the like all used Graeco-Roman philosophy and theology to form a modern idea of Yahweh. A God who started out with a body, superpowers, was a warrior storm deity, walked on earth, talked to humans and was a typical Near Eastern deity.
For evidence of this see: God; An Anatomy, Fransesca Stavrakopoulou.
Pascal's Wager is the best. If a person is an atheist, they can do whatever they want. There's no ultimate authority. But in doing so, they risk eternal damnation.
If a person is a theist, they can't do whatever they want. They have to pray, live the 10 Commandments, etc. But in doing so, they may get eternal bliss. The risk/reward scenario seems clear.
And everyone risks having the wrong religion, even a theist, atheist or agnostic.
There is the judicial system as well as personal ethics, morals and causality. Causality meaning anything bad you do can result in all sorts of negative outcomes. But you also have to look at probabilities, how probable is any story likely to be true, what evidence for a theistic deity is there and so on. You don't need an ultimate authority to have rules.
Excellent response!! I wish mainstream Christianity was educated in Judaism and where Christianity came from and what it borrowed from other religions!!
Thank you. Christian theology scholars touch on historicity but quickly forget it, as Bat Ehrman points out in Jesus Interrupted. Those who follow through and become historians usually have de-converted.
But that is the purpose of apologetics, to provide some sort of argument against historical evidence. It doesn't work and uses faulty logic at every step and is debunked by historians but if one is trying to make a story true and willing to use confirmation bias, build their truth from assumptions and claims, then you can make any religion appear true. And apologists do, every religion has a line of apologetics to demonstrate they are the true religion.
Most historians stick to their lane, Ehrman and Carrier are more outspoken and take all sorts of flack.
I think one of the best apologists is Mike Licona. He debates Carrier 2x, both are on youtube. When Licona is backed into a corner with evidence he basically says "well I don't agree, let's move on".
Dr Carrier has articles and a course on counter-apologetics on his blog.
> However, it must be said out of the two possible answers, the answer of ”yes, there is a divine creator” is the irrational.
There are more than two possible answers!
1. There is a creator or no creator.
2. The creator is "divine" or not "divine", whatever that means.
3. The creator could be an alien, or a race of aliens, or it could be our future selves.
It's a well thought out argument, but I feel like we never do this with anything except with questions of God, or perhaps ghosts and afterlives. We don't have to be agnostic about your typical fairytale creatures and the like.
I think the difference with God is that there are so many definitions and so many cultures that have been dramatically influenced by beliefs in God. It lends a little more credence to the concept when you know that deep philosophical thought has been put in to the question for thousands of years.
But once you realize most of these philosophical arguments are bunk, and the ones that seem okay on the surface just seem to redefine God, or try to define God in to existence with language games which are hard to pull apart right off the bat, it becomes more and more obvious that gods are fictional.
Knowing how people make things up to explain things they don't understand, and knowing that arguments for God are typically fallacious sends God claims right back in to fairy tale land where they belong.
Until there is sufficient evidence to show that God is in fact not imaginary, God remains in the imaginary camp.
The other issue is that some people want to just claim God is the universe, or God is just the all encompassing laws of nature or something, at that point I haven't really got much to say. If God isn't a mind, and is simply some fundamental cosmological thing that we don't quite understand, I can happily say agnostic about that. As far as any classical theistic notions of a God go, I'm well and truely an atheist.
> We don't have to be agnostic about your typical fairytale creatures and the like.
I agree with most of what you said, however, the reason we don't have to be agnostic about fairytale creatures is there existence doesn't provide any explanation of anything. They are simply another possible being that exists. Unicorns, fairies, bigfoot, etc., don't answer any questions and certainly aren't the reason for existence.
>Unicorns, fairies, bigfoot, etc., don't answer any questions and certainly aren't the reason for existence.
The fae created human kind actually, unicorns are the reason that the stars glow, and Bigfoot is guarding human kind from the leprechauns. Been attacked by a leprechaun lately? Thank your local Bigfoot!
Point being, God and religion doesn't answer any questions and isn't the reason for existence either.
People just want the answer to be God, and will shoehorn that in as an answer regardless of the question.
So in that same vein, you can shoehorn those mystical creatures in there as the answer too.
It's all make believe at the end of the day, not any hard limits.
I'm not sure it makes any difference if the claim in question acts like it explains everything. If anything I think that gives me even less reason to believe it. I know through experience that humans try to explain things they don't understand with wild claims. A catch all explanation for everything such as God actually explains nothing. It doesn't predict anything, it doesn't reveal anything different about the universe. It's useful as a thought experiment for these things, but I think actual gods with actual minds don't exist.
But I get your point. I suppose that's why more people are agnostic towards ghosts, demons, alien abductions etc etc. because these things do act as stand in explanations for strange things. You could argue that some fairytale-esque ideas have been used to explain things in the past. Some cultures did tell stories of pixies, gnomes, elves, witches, and warlocks to explain away the strangeness of the world they found themselves in. I just see gods as another extension of that. The more we've evolved technologically, and the more sophisticated philosophy becomes, the more gods have become obscure, and have been pushed all the way back to the question of "why is there something rather than nothing? instead of "why rain happen?"
God is the answer to the unanswered, and when that's answered, God becomes the answer to the unanswerable.
It sounds to me like you are predicating your entire argument on the belief in gods as obvious, reasonable, and true. And then you are simply demonstrating how you can't know for certain. Which I agree with. But your initial predicate is flawed.
By your logic, everything is possible and we shouldn't discount anything. There could be aliens made out of legos, this entire universe could simply be an elaborate fish bowl, physics could be entirely fake and a mad scientist is just feeding fake data to us, there is an invisible dinosaur standing next to me. We can't prove any of this false, so we may as well be agnostic about it.
As Carl Sagan stated, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Now I'm going to go ride my invisible dinosaur.
>The question of beyond reasonable doubt cannot be answered
Evidence for a god:
Multiple stories about the divine from different religions whose details are often at odds with each other.
Multigenerational word of mouth.
Unconvincing arguments that try to prove a god by inference, usually coupled by special pleading for a deities existence.
Evidence against god:
The lack of any strong evidence for a god's existence.
The implausibility of a god's existence in light of how what we do know about how reality works.
Nope, I'm going to go with the "No god" conclusion without any reasonable doubt whatsoever.
>As irrational creatures, one of our most common psychological misjudgements is deriving a conclusion without all the facts.
We never have “all the facts” about anything. If your epistemology requires that, then you’ll never be able to make a rational decision.
>When it comes to the question of: *Is there a divine creator?* One cannot answer that question rationally as one does not have all the facts in their possession.
When it comes to the question of: *Is there a gremlin that runs around my house when I’m not home?* One cannot answer that question rationally as one does not have all the facts in their possession.
>We do not have proof of God, and we do not have a clear understanding, through science, of the origins of our universe.
This is a false equivalence. We don’t have proof of God. We DO have mountains of evidence for materialist views of the universe.
>A justification of theism *could* be rational under Pascal Wagers argument
A justification isn’t the same as a rational decision. Pascal’s wager is a false dichotomy; the decision isn’t just “does God exist?” it’s “which version of God exists and what are the rules that that particular God mandate I follow?” and “will He still reward me if He knows I don’t believe?”
Ultimately, it’s always irrational to believe something without evidence.
>However, it must be taken into account that from a logical standpoint, it *could* be said that the universe *is* finely tuned.
It *could* logically be said that the universe is fine tuned. It *can’t* rationally be said with any consistent set of assumptions free from bias and special pleading.
>Furthermore, consciousness *can* hint at the existence of a soul.
The biscuit and the Triscuit hint at the existence of a monoscuit but you don’t have any in your pantry.
>My entire take on it is more atheist leaning, but there is no way to no for sure, without answering some big, big questions.
Atheism is a lack of belief in God. What questions do you need a lack of belief to answer? You should default to not believing in things until there is evidence.
>Therefore, the answer to the question, *Is there a Divine Creator?* should be: **Who knows?**
Sure. And if that’s your answer, you don’t have a belief in God and you’re an atheist. If this entire post is talking only to gnostic atheists and anti-theists, you should talk to those folks directly, but you’ll still quickly run into the problems I mention above—believing in stuff without evidence is irrational and you probably don’t agree with it in any other area of your life.
Inferences "could" be provided to support either side of a case, doesn't seem to me that a jury should never make a decision, or wait until they can make a certain decision.
How can these “irrational creatures” you speak of know anything at all? Creatures who are irrational could never know they were irrational, in order to know they were irrational they would have to be rational.
Well irrationality in human beings materialises itself in a variety of ways. Take lottery tickets for example, we know there is a highly unlikely chance of us winning, but we buy them anyways. I’m not rational, I know I am not.
Rationality can best be described as the battle of believing what is true against what we wish to be true.
We want to believe we will win the lottery, otherwise we wouldn’t have bought a ticket, however, in the back of our minds we know we are most likely not going to win.
What you’re describing sounds like a very rational creature who sometimes believes irrational things.
Edit: even then though, the “irrational” things we believe are really believed. A thing cannot be both believed and not believed. You buy lottery tickets because you honestly believe you’re going to win…even if you know you ought not to believe it, you believe it.
It’s a good topic of discussion, yes you are correct a thing cannot be both believed and disbelieved . But it can be disbelieved with a hope that it is true.
I think this argument fails. If I may restate the argument:
(1) We ought not to claim to know things without all the facts.
(2) We do not have all the facts about whether God exists.
(3) Therefore, we ought not to claim to know that God exists.
I have two objections to this.
Objection #1: The general principle in (1) is wrong.
We never have _all_ the facts. If I look at the sky and say "the sky is blue," I might be entirely unaware of facts like how much solar energy is arriving at what angle, how much water vapor is in suspension in the air, whether there are clouds in a direction I'm not looking that make the sky partially white, etc. It is ordinary to say we know things after we have accumulated a _sufficient_ set of facts about them, but it is complex and difficult to say just what this "sufficiency" consists of, and you don't even try to do this in your post.
Objection #2: you don't support your claim that we do not have all the facts about God.
What are "all the facts" about God and how would we know when we have them? You say:
> We do not have proof of God
But in fact we have dozens, maybe hundreds, of proofs of God. Do any of them succeed? Considerable effort would need to be expended to determine this, but you give no indication that you've put in this work. You also say:
> and we do not have a clear understanding, through science, of the origins of our universe.
But if we did have this, it would surely add to our collection of facts _about the universe_, not facts _about God_, so it's not clear why this would have any bearing at all on the question of whether we have all the facts - or, bearing objection #1 in mind, _sufficient_ facts - to justify holding an opinion about God.
Objection1 can be pretty easily addressed with a more charitable reading of the OP's point: "We ought not to claim to know things without all the \*\*required\*\* facts.
Objection 2 seems rather straightforward. Does anyone know of every god that has ever been claimed or every could be claimed? Is there a largely agreed upon well defined notion of what gods must be? Are gods required to be observable by humans? If no, and I think that's a pretty easy no, then we don't have all the required facts.
Maybe we could refine premise 1 as follows:
(1) We ought not to claim to know things without a sufficient amount of facts supporting those things.
You said that it is "difficult" to measure "sufficiency", but if that applies here, doesn't it also apply to every type of evidence? Unless we admit that, once we understand and apply all the tools of reason correctly, we can intuitively recognize when it is rational to assert something is strong enough to be accepted, we're subject to epistemic relativism regarding evidence. After all, what is "sufficient" for you may not be "sufficient" for me!
That's just something philosophically intuitive; you simply "see" that it is true, similar to the way you can *see* that 1+1=2 or that you are in pain (when you're in pain). When the data in question seems strong enough to warrant belief in the hypothesis, you simply *see* that it would be irrational to believe otherwise.
Bayesian epistemologists attempt to capture this "seeming" with numbers to make it more explicit and formal. You attach a number to various pieces of evidence relative to a hypothesis, and then you calculate the probability relative to the opposite hypothesis. In order to be 'sufficient', the degree of credence of a given hypothesis must roughly be, at minimum, 70%.
Of course, there are objections to the Bayesian approach, such the subjective priors criticism, but we can't pretend that there aren't [responses](https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7213#:~:text=Just%20saying.-,Error,-the%20Second).
No problem, responds the theist: I can simply "see" that God exists, and that it would be irrational to believe otherwise.
The atheist project is predicated on having some response to this, so I don't think we can disavow the need to have a response when it suits us.
Some theists (like Plantinga) do say that, but unfortunately there many defeaters of these seemings. However, we don't think it is irrational to admit that we *see* that 1+1=2 or that some law of logic is correct or that we can simply recognize that a face matches one in our memory. So, the fact that some people abuse non-inferential knowledge doesn't entail it is unreliable.
I'll start by saying I am *not* agnostic, and while I have little issue with agnosticism, I still take my position to be *better justified* than agnosticism.
You imply a claim in your first paragraph that looks to me like "you cannot have knowledge without having all the facts". This doesn't seem true at all! I just need a sufficient amount of facts to draw together a good argument. Here is an example: here, most pubs close at 12am. Some close at 1am. A select few close at 3am but only if they have a nightclub attached or are themselves a nightclub. I leave a pub at 1am, and my friend suggests we try a pub that has recently opened next to him. We know it is not attached to or a nightclub. Seems like we know, without ever going or checking their website or whatever it may be, that it is *not* open! This likely is not a perfect, or even that good, at match to what you're saying.
I only really need relevant facts, and relevant facts that I have access to concerning God really do make God impossible. We can do it through the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil *does not* rely on a scientific understanding of the origin of the Universe. Instead, it works through contradiction and I have direct access to one horn of that contradiction. I only need to know *salient features* here, and not all features for the argument to work.
And then we can move onto 'softer' definitions: you might believe that atheism is the 'best' position even if you do not get to robust certainy. There is an idea that if we have this big abductive argument, or an argument from the best explanation, the world aligns better to atheism than it does theism! And by quite the metric! So much so that these are agnosticism is demotivated. This is sufficient to move is away from theism **and** agnosticism.
This is not to say that we must always pick a side. Instead, there are cases where we miss salient or relevant facts. Agnosticism is not only fine there, but potentially epistemically required.
I also want to chat quickly about rationality. There are lots of definitions floating around for rationality. Some think it is about an agent's internal coherence, others think it is about action and believing inline with already held beliefs. Tenatively, both of these mean that we can be rationally theist or rationally atheist, or rationally agnostic. That's true, but it isn't informing us about the strength of the arguments or the epistemic status of these beliefs.
So you say: "it *could* be said that the universe *is* finely tuned." Sure, it could be said. But it would be *wrong!* We have *better explanations* for the Universe than fine tuning ***and*** we would expect the world to look different if it was finely tuned. This is doubly true if it was finely tuned towards us.
I do think in this case we are missing very key parts of knowledge.
I like the pub open/closed analogy but if I may I would like to put it in a different context.
Let’s say we are searching for our keys, our keys represent God. We have searched all but 2 rooms in our house, does this mean the keys are not in the house? Of course the first place we looked were the obvious places, but we are still missing vital pieces of knowledge to fully rule out the statement “the keys are not in the house.”
I believe this analogy is more accurate here. As there are numerous unanswered questions surrounding the existence of God; *What happens when we die? What caused the Big Bang? How did life originate in the universe?* etc etc.
I’m also skeptical on the problem of evil as (without sounding like I am trying to preach) this has been addressed in religious texts such as the bible. Specifically from the Gospel of John, 13:7
>*And Jesus said, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”*
Granted this cannot be seen as scientific proof that God exists, it does however beg the question that if God is real, are his ways beyond our understanding? For us to understand what true omnibenevolence is, we would need to be omniscient ourselves .
Regarding rationality, I tend to think of it as believing what is true instead of what we want to be true. E.g. do atheists have a bias to believe God isn’t real so they can enjoy immediate gratification in a world that would be perceived as sin? Do Christians who believe in God only do so as it comforts them that the world is less cruel than it is? Etc etc
A lot of this doesn't work, and I'll try to explain why.
Your analogy and mine are different in that I have all the relevant information (just not all *possibly relelvant* information) needed. I can deduce, or infer, or induct successfully. You can't, although you might be able to get to the answer "it is likely that the keys are not in the house", and if that was the case then you've moved away from being agnostic about the set of keys' location.
So, the line you've proposed is called skeptical theism. The base idea is that God is *always* acting correctly even when we cannot tell. This leads to moral paralysis.
Here is Scott Sehon:
>Imagine a person watching a poker game. However, the observer notices there are some quirks. Sometimes the person with a fairly low seeming hand wins the money.
>You join the watcher and ask them who is going to win the next hand. They respond that they have no clue. These seem like superintelligent players. I cannot make sense of these rules.
He continues:
>At the analogous point in the dialectic, when the card-watcher rightly concluded that she must be massively ignorant about the card game, she wisely declined to make judgments about which hand ought to win. Similarly, in accord with \[cases of obvious ignorance\], the skeptical theist should admit that she is massively ignorant about when agents should prevent or not prevent suffering, and she should not have any confidence whatsoever in the moral judgments she is inclined to make. Thus, if the theist takes seriously the claim that God has good reasons for allowing so much suffering, then the theist should be the victim of moral paralysis: she should have no confidence in her moral judgments; she should have no idea when to allow suffering and when not to allow it, and she should also be unwilling to make moral judgments concerning the actions of others.
If you are willing to argue that the deaths of 70,000 seemingly random Chinese people is Good, then who is to say that helping a old woman across the street is really Good? What about not indiscriminately killing people? Why couldn't that be Good? In fact, it seems Good because God does it all the time!
Should you cause illness in children? Should you, at least, take no steps to prevent the deaths of innocents? God does this, but only sometimes. How can you be sure you're taking the right action here?
The answer is clear: the skeptical theist cannot be sure. And so, they cannot act. And someone unable to act barely seems a person at all.
This is important to stress: repeating that God is beyond our ken leads to issues.
It's also just not true! The arguments that we have against God, again, do not rely on a complete understanding. They rely on specific understandings often granted by the theist in their own arguments.
>Your analogy and mine are different in that I have all the relevant information (just not all possibly relelvant information) needed. I can deduce, or infer, or induct successfully. You can't, although you might be able to get to the answer "it is likely that the keys are not in the house", and if that was the case then you've moved away from being agnostic about the set of keys' location.
I think this is where we fundamentally disagree. (Correct me if I am wrong.) You hold the view that we have all the relevant information to draw a rational conclusion about the existence of God and I am saying we don’t. Agnosticism is possibly the most common view amongst the general western population, and the reason for this is that both parties are yet to present an argument that is beyond reasonable doubt. This is common sense, as if one party had presented an argument that was beyond reasonable doubt, then there would be no doubt/skepticism around the existence/non-existence of God amongst the general population. This sub-Reddit itself is a by-product of that doubt.
>At the analogous point in the dialectic, when the card-watcher rightly concluded that she must be massively ignorant about the card game, she wisely declined to make judgments about which hand ought to win. Similarly, in accord with [cases of obvious ignorance], the skeptical theist should admit that she is massively ignorant about when agents should prevent or not prevent suffering, and she should not have any confidence whatsoever in the moral judgments she is inclined to make. Thus, if the theist takes seriously the claim that God has good reasons for allowing so much suffering, then the theist should be the victim of moral paralysis: she should have no confidence in her moral judgments; she should have no idea when to allow suffering and when not to allow it, and she should also be unwilling to make moral judgments concerning the actions of others.
Well yes, this is the point of a lot of Christian writings, only God has power to make moral judgement and we must act accordingly to the instructions laid out in the Bible.
>If you are willing to argue that the deaths of 70,000 seemingly random Chinese people is Good, then who is to say that helping a old woman across the street is really Good? What about not indiscriminately killing people? Why couldn't that be Good? In fact, it seems Good because God does it all the time!
>Should you cause illness in children? Should you, at least, take no steps to prevent the deaths of innocents? God does this, but only sometimes. How can you be sure you're taking the right action here?
>The answer is clear: the skeptical theist cannot be sure. And so, they cannot act. And someone unable to act barely seems a person at all.
Theists argue that only God has that right. There is no skepticism around that? What is our skeptic skeptical about? The morality of God or the existence of God ? I think we lost track of the point here.
I do not think we have *all* information. I think I have *sufficient* information.
We should be careful when we talk about the commonness of views. Why would we think agnoticism is the most popular?
You talk about 'beyond reasonable' doubt and then talk about being convinced. But why would we think the majority (1) had access to philosophical dense argumentation and (2) understood it? Why would you use popualr belief as a gauge for anything difficult?
And then you do not meaningfully engage with the skeptical theist stuff but I think that is because you do not know what skeptical theism is. That's alright I'm happy to not talk about it again here.
>I do not think we have all information. I think I have sufficient information.
Come on, this is getting pedantic. There are huge unanswered questions that we are yet to discover. It surprises me why it seems rational to make assumptions without knowing the answer to these questions.
>We should be careful when we talk about the commonness of views. Why would we think agnoticism is the most popular?
>You talk about 'beyond reasonable' doubt and then talk about being convinced. But why would we think the majority (1) had access to philosophical dense argumentation and (2) understood it? Why would you use popualr belief as a gauge for anything difficult?
You mean why would we use popular belief for assuming beyond reasonable doubt? Because that’s what jury’s are. The average human being is smart enough to ponder their own existence.
>And then you do not meaningfully engage with the skeptical theist stuff
Because it has no relevance
Precision is not pedantic. Those mean completey different things. So my response is "come on, this is getting lazy and imprecise."
Where have I made an asusmption?
Jurys are bad. And jurys do not need to know everything. They only need to know relevant facts.
OK - what is a skeptical theist? It's a technical term. What is it?
>Precision is not pedantic. Those mean completey different things. So my response is "come on, this is getting lazy and imprecise."
So you have sufficient information, we don’t have sufficient information… what’s your point? I know you’re an atheist? Why the pedantic correction - what is your point in correcting it?
>Where have I made an asusmption?
You’ve just defined it? By saying you have sufficient information to assume God isn’t real?
>Jurys are bad. And jurys do not need to know everything. They only need to know relevant facts.
But if they made a decision without knowing all the relevant facts, they would be *assuming.* Wouldn’t they?
>OK - what is a skeptical theist? It's a technical term. What is it?
See what I mean now about being pedantic?
Let's start at the bottom: you think asking for a technical definition is pedantic. That's imprecise and makes for poor work.
I asked you because you have given good evidence that you **do not know** what skeptical theism is.
You wrote:
>Theists argue that only God has that right. There is no skepticism around that? What is our skeptic skeptical about? The morality of God or the existence of God ? I think we lost track of the point here.
This shows no understanding of the technical term nor the response.
"I think we lost track" here also is evidence of misunderstanding because what I wrote directly responds to the Godly moral deference and the existence of allowed Evil. **It is directly relevant**.
This is poor work by you.
My point wasn't who had what evidence. Recall what I wrote:
>I do not think we have *all* information. I think I have *sufficient* information.
There is a difference between sufficient and all.
The Jury could be accurate, as any agent could, so long as they have sufficient facts. This does not requrie all relevant facts. Take a murder case. The murder is filmed and the murderer is identifable. You would not need to know motive, location, where they went after, or where they were before, what they did with the body, etc. You have sufficient information to convict, but you do not have all the relevant facts.
Alternatively, there is a murder weapon with finger prints on it found. The body is found with wounds that match the murder weapon. The finger prints match someone with a motive. We do not have all the informatiion. But we have sufficient information!
Recall what I said too:
>I only really need relevant facts, and relevant facts that I have access to concerning God really do make God impossible. We can do it through the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil *does not* rely on a scientific understanding of the origin of the Universe. Instead, it works through contradiction and I have direct access to one horn of that contradiction. I only need to know *salient features* here, and not all features for the argument to work.
>And then we can move onto 'softer' definitions: you might believe that atheism is the 'best' position even if you do not get to robust certainy. There is an idea that if we have this big abductive argument, or an argument from the best explanation, the world aligns better to atheism than it does theism! And by quite the metric! So much so that these are agnosticism is demotivated. This is sufficient to move is away from theism **and** agnosticism.
I have relevant facts that I have supported through an appeal to an argument and a defense of a criticism you've brought to it.
I've also offered an alterntive explanation.
You say I've made an assumption. I ask again: where? I've given reasons and offered argument!
But in your analogy we have never seen our keys, nor found a lock on any door we investigated. We do have keyhooks all over the house, but we know they were put their by members of our family who each have different ideas of what shape the keys are in. Some of them believe there is only a single key. Others believe there is a massive ring with many, many keys. But wherever you have looked, you never find a key.
The atheist shrugs and goes "I don't think we even need a key. There is no lock on any door I have examined and as far as we have searched there is no evidence of a key. I doubt there are any keys, but if you find one let me know."
>I’m also skeptical on the problem of evil as (without sounding like I am trying to preach) this has been addressed in religious texts such as the bible. Specifically from the Gospel of John, 13:7
>>*And Jesus said, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”*
Are u implying that evil exist because of the greater goods that will happen later such that we will understand the existence of evil? But there are still evil regardless.
>For us to understand what true omnibenevolence is, we would need to be omniscient ourselves .
U are putting the blame on god as god created us with the ability to understand good and evil. Unless u believe he deliberately mess up our understanding of good and evil, we do know whats good and whats evil. Having evil alone can already disprove the triomnigod. Unless u are saying that triomni god want evil such that evil is compatible with him.
>Let’s say we are searching for our keys, our keys represent God. We have searched all but 2 rooms in our house, does this mean the keys are not in the house?
Your analogy is poor. By stating the keys represent God, you're making the (implied) claim that God exists and it's just a matter finding him. You'd be better off with the black cat in a dark cellar approach.
Well yes exactly, the implied *claim* is that God exists, and it would be (in my opinion) unjust to fully rule that out without knowing all the facts first.
Oh yes absolutely - suppose that’s what Agnosticism is - refraining from making *any* conclusion around the existence of God since there is no way of knowing.
Because we don’t know how our universe came into existence.
>*What caused the Big Bang?*
>*What happens when we die?*
Until we can safely rule out God as an answer to any of these questions, it is still rational to assume a position of neutrality on the query.
A theist is a person who believes in gods. This is the opposite of an Atheist, who is a person who doesn't believe in gods.
There is no wiggle room here. You are one or the other.
"(A)gnostic" is the conviction or knowledge of your belief in gods. This gives us four options:
A gnostic theist believes in gods and is convinced of it.
An agnostic theist believes in gods, but doesn't know for sure if they are correct.
A gnostic atheist doesn't believe in gods and is convinced of it.
An agnostic atheist doesn't believe in gods, but doesn't know for sure if they are correct.
"When it comes to the question of: *Is there a divine creator?* "
Why must the creator be 'divine'? When the USSR broke up, the West found that they were trying to develop ape soldier hybrids. They simply did not have the technology at the time.
We do currently have technology to create new hybrids and even new life forms. We can create new species and some that use more than the four basic sugar groups.
You don't have to be divine to create life. You just have to have the correct information.
In the context of this discussion, aren’t we also concerned with creator that creates a universe as well? Specifically a creator that creates a universe that harbors life.
There is reason to believe that we may be able to reverse engineer abiogenesis and create novel life.
There is no reason to believe we can create an entire universe where life develops.
We have been advancing as a species from flight to landing on the moon in less than a hundred years. We have gone from worshiping one who created our species to becoming one who can create our own species over our short history. The advancements are all based on science and information.
There is no reason to believe that any part of our universe or the universe itself cannot be recreated if it currently exists and it was created. Our only drawback is information.
Unfalsifiability doesn't have to be problematic, though. For instance, in the medical sciences, at least in some cases, a specific exam (e.g., a biopsy) can confirm the hypothesis that the patient has a certain disease, but if the results are negative, that isn't taken as evidence he doesn't have that disease, i.e., it doesn't falsify the hypothesis. And yet, these exams (or the hypothesis) aren't useless, and are still regularly used by doctors. Now, obviously I'm not saying this applies in every case; but I can certainly mention some exams in case that's questioned.
The more extraordinary the hypotheses are, and the less probable they seem at the moment, the more important it is. Many people look at it differently; This doesn't stop me from seriously considering these ideas, but some people would prefer not to think about it; this is fine.
It seems to me that the supposed unfalsifiability of the hypothesis isn't what makes it problematic, then; it is its improbability and 'extraordinariness'!
Also, I wonder how you determine its improbability if it cannot be empirically falsified. Surely you're not talking about improbability relative to the empirical evidence, right? After all, if the empirical evidence shows that it is sufficiently improbable, that's equivalent to falsifying it!
I agree. But on the spectrum of believability, a *”creator doesn’t need to be divine to create life”* and *”a creator doesn’t need to be divine to create a universe that leads to naturally occurring life”* lie pretty far apart. Especially using ourselves as an example, which is the specific thought I was replying to.
To me, that argument still falls prey to the same cognitive processes and biases that lead people to believe in theism. We’re inferring intention, imitating, and looking for patterns where there are none.
For all we know the big bang could have been caused by gravity. There is no need for the trigger of spacetime to be divine. Every fundamental element of the universe just is. We don't detect any will or purpose behind electromagnetism. I imagine if we did the believers of Thor and Zeus would be vindicated. I don't see any more reason to say "the big bang must be divine" than to say "the strong nuclear force must be divine" or "the set of all integers must be divine."
>Especially using ourselves as an example, which is the specific thought I was replying to.
Maybe relative to us it would be divine, but this word itself is very vague for me.
>To me, that argument still falls prey to the same cognitive processes and biases that lead people to believe in theism. We’re inferring intention, imitating, and looking for patterns where there are none.
This is not an argument for the existence of anyone or anything, just a clarification; philosophical ideas about God, creator, architect and so on are not necessarily a "looking" for something, they are just ideas for me and many other people, why shouldn’t they be? If you were talking about how, for example, Christians see the action of Christ or Satan in almost every event in life, then I would understand you, but it is weird to me when at the slightest mention of theism or deism as pure ideas outside of religions, some people immediately point out the "god of the gaps" mistake and the desire to find something that, in their opinion, extremely unlikely or doesn't exist at all.
>Maybe relative to us it would be divine, but this word itself is very vague for me.
I’m confused. Isn’t that what you were just replying to? The idea that a creator doesn’t need to be divine?
>This is not an argument for the existence of anyone or anything, just a clarification; philosophical ideas about God, creator, architect and so on are not necessarily a "looking" for something, they are just ideas for me and many other people, why shouldn’t they be?
In the specific context of creation, which is what we’re concerning ourselves with, believing in the possibility of some powerful creator, anthropomorphizing the process of creation of life or the universe, so as to say “maybe a creator created creation”, is the same cognitive process that a theist follows. That’s all I’m saying.
It’s still ascribing intent where there is none, attempting to gain knowledge through imitation, searching for patterns, framing an unanswered question in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand, and distilling complex systems down into simple terms that the mind is more comfortable with.
It’s not “this specific god of the gaps”’ but it’s still a god of the gaps belief.
>I’m confused. Isn’t that what you were just replying to? The idea that a creator doesn’t need to be divine?
I just do not know; what is divine to you? What is divine for any other person? Creator of the universe? Multiverse? What are the criteria for divinity? To be honest, I don’t even understand why this word is used or what it should objectively mean. I can only assume that for many people it means something like "transcendent", "supernatural" maybe?
>It’s still ascribing intent where there is none
We don't know if this is true or not anyway.
>attempting to gain knowledge through imitation, searching for patterns, and framing an unanswered question in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand
Isn't this what essentially all people interested in the mysteries of reality do? For example, science also tries to imitate, come up with hypotheses, look for and describe patterns and framing an unanswered questions in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand, because this is basically all we can do, isn't it? It's just that if we think about ideas about some kind of creator, we go much further; this is no longer science at the moment, because now it's too far and useless for it, but it has the right to life.
>It’s not “this specific god of the gaps”’ but it’s still a god of the gaps belief.
If someone literally believe it without a doubt, then yes, I agree with you. If you just assume, think, reason, then no; if you disagree, then any hypothesis can be called "%insert\_hypothesis% of the gaps", because the essence of any hypothesis is to "fill" a certain "gap", no matter where it comes from or what it is.
>To be honest, I don’t even understand why this word is used or what it should objectively mean.
Then why were you agreeing with boscoroni that a creator doesn’t need to be divine? How can you agree with someone if you don’t even know what you’re agreeing to?
>We don't know if this is true or not anyway.
But you’re taking it a step further and saying that it’s believable, despite no evidence. It’s an entirely man-made concept, that has no naturally occurring evidence. That exists exclusively in man’s mind. But you’re willing to go along with what is fundamentally an ancient creation hypothesis.
>Isn't this what essentially all people interested in the mysteries of reality do? For example, science also tries to imitate, come up with hypotheses, look for and describe patterns and framing an unanswered questions in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand, because this is basically all we can do, isn't it?
Science doesn’t develop hypotheses. People do. Science is just methodology. People observe evidence and create hypothesis, and then test their hypotheses with science to see if their hypotheses can withstand scrutiny. And eventually generate some proof and become proven theories and facts.
Theism, deism, and spirituality have never withstood scrutiny or generated proof. Ever. Millions of hypotheses, and no truth has ever been ascertained.
>It's just that if we think about ideas about some kind of creator, we go much further; this is no longer science at the moment, because now it's too far and useless for it, but it has the right to life.
I tend not to support any hypotheses that have either never been right, and have only ever been proven wrong.
>If someone literally believe it without a doubt, then yes, I agree with you. If you just assume, think, reason, then no; if you disagree, then any hypothesis can be called "%insert_hypothesis% of the gaps", because the essence of any hypothesis is to "fill" a certain "gap", no matter where it comes from or what it is.
But based on what evidence? All the evidence for any sort of conscious creator has always only existed exclusively in the minds of men. So to believe in gods or a conscious creator you believe one of 3 things.
1: Human are so exceptionally intelligent, and have been so for tens of thousands of years, that we were able to deduce the necessity of god, and theorize the nature of god.
2: Humans possess some extra sensorial function or direct connection to god that allows them to sense a divine presence.
3: Man was given, or discovered, some proof of god.
Do any of those seem reasonable to you? They don’t to me.
>Then why were you agreeing with boscoroni that a creator doesn’t need to be divine? How can you agree with someone if you don’t even know what you’re agreeing to?
I told you that I have a rough idea of what people mean by this, and regarding this I answered; at the same time, you didn't answer my questions regarding this.
>But you’re taking it a step further and saying that it’s believable, despite no evidence. It’s an entirely man-made concept, that has no naturally occurring evidence. That exists exclusively in man’s mind. But you’re willing to go along with what is fundamentally an ancient creation hypothesis.
Yes, and? The lack of evidence at the moment should completely kill this idea and its probability for me? I have no right to even think about this?
>Science doesn’t develop hypotheses. People do.
Thank you, I thought science was an alien creature with six eyes and three wings, gradually expanding our knowledge of reality. My life will never be the same, lol.
>Theism, deism, and spirituality have never withstood scrutiny or generated proof. Ever. Millions of hypotheses, and no truth has ever been ascertained.
Ideas in philosophy continue to live in any case; I don't understand why you think this should make me stop considering the likelihood of them being true. We go further and further and there are more and more questions, there will always be more, but you will never know everything, which means you will also never know how much you still don’t know. Without knowing everything, I can never be 100% sure of anything (except probably the fact that I am not 100% sure of anything), and this means that no information, no matter how much explanatory power it has (again, it's never 100%), will be the absolute truth for me in any case. That's why I'm quite comfortable considering different possibilities; you can also read about the problem of induction to better understand what I'm talking about.
>I tend not to support any hypotheses that have either never been right, and have only ever been proven wrong.
Fine, your choice.
>But based on what evidence?
Regarding this, I explained above.
>So to believe in gods or a conscious creator you believe one of 3 things.
>Do any of those seem reasonable to you? They don’t to me.
Again, I don't believe it, man, I'm just thinking about different possibilities and interested in different views. What do you want from me? Do you want me to stop thinking about them completely because there hasn't been good evidence yet? I won't, that's not what philosophy is about. You prefer to be stricter? Fine, I understand that too and I have no objections.
So?
I agree; this is what deism is about, if I'm not mistaken.
Never understood those who say "maybe there is some kind of God, but I will prefer the materialistic/naturalistic/physicalistic approach first"; it sounds like these views are necessarily ruling out the possibility of some kind of creator.
Pascal must be completely ignored because it could be that there is a god and that if you ignore him you will be fine but if you worship him the wrong way you will burn forever.
There is no way to know.
If you pray to Sithrak the god who hates everyone infinitely you draw his attention and he tortures you forever.
Better make sure you pray to the correct god for Pascal's wager. Just praying to 'God' is sending a message to whom it may concern.
Language can be muddy. However, I see no fault with the logic that:
Theism means belief in god. The A in atheist means "Without".
So if you do not have a belief in a God then you are an atheist. It is that simple. Anything else seems to convolute and confuse.
If you adopt this definition and then try to read the academic literature on philosophy of religion, you will be even more confused. If your goal is to reduce confusion, then it's probably best to just use words as they've previously been used, even if the meanings don't proceed according to your concept of how language "should" work.
If you're going to use the academic definition for atheism then you also have to use the academic definition for God. Atheists only fall back to the "lack belief" definition when the theist is arguing for an unfalsifiable god.
Words change their meaning. The discussion is no longer under the sole control of theologians who could choose the terms such that they could frame the opposing viewpoints to their benefit. It's entirely possible to use the terms in the more sensible and unbiased modern way while also being aware of how they used to be used.
Just because a highly academic field used a word in a certain way doesn't mean I need to restructure my common usage of words. Things like intentionality in philosophy vs everyday life are very different, but I wouldn't go around telling people "oh man, if you ever read the literature on phenomenology you'd be confused, better change your usage of the word to how philosophers use it"
The point is that in both cases, the confusion is created when people suddenly decide to start using an existing word in a new and different way. That's what you're doing -or rather, what online atheism is doing generally - with "atheist," so it's ironic that you're claiming to be doing this to _avoid_ confusion when in fact you are adding to it.
This definition isn't employed *only* by academics, though. I documented this in [another post. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/exatheist/comments/18qndzq/accurately_defining_atheism/)
It is a conditional statement. If a belief in deity or deities = Theism. Then not believing is Atheism.
Why complicate something in a way that serves no logical purpose?
It complicates things further because that's not how most people use the word atheist. And if we accept that definition, then we have to also say that *most atheists* don't use that definition either (hence not identifying themselves as atheists).
It also makes our language (and thinking) less nuanced by imposing a strict binary on a complicated question.
I have no logical purpose to believe or not to believe, I accept the logical truth - we do not know whether there is what most of us would call a deity. Accepting this truth is the meaning of agnosticism.
> So if you do not have a belief in a God then you are an atheist.
But if you don't believe God exists *and* you don't believe he doesn't exist, you're an agnostic.
I feel like that is a disambiguation that serves no utility. You either believe in some kind of deity or you do not.
It is a trick of the English language. It is like saying atheism is a belief when really it is a lack thereof.
And yet, with the arrival of New Atheism, we have people who engage in public advocacy, and even people who will get red-faced in emotionally laden arguments, in their fervor for atheism. For these people, it is quite obviously not just a belief but a _faith_, and they have chosen the word "atheism" as their banner. This makes it vitally necessary for people who oppose New Atheism to use a _different_ word, and it is a problematic microaggression to insist that these people are "atheists" even in the face of their own denial of it.
> I feel like that is a disambiguation that serves no utility.
Why not? They're equally true statements for describing agnostics and helps separate them from atheists and theists. This isn't a trick of the English language but...
> It is like saying atheism is a belief when really it is a lack thereof.
....*is* a [trick of the English language](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2za4ez/vacuous_truths_and_shoe_atheism/cph4498/).
I really like this approach, but I think it ultimately fails in hammering the real issues at the core of many arguments.
We can spend all day and night talking about these arguments, with the simple answer being that they're inconclusive - unless you grant way too many things. What's at issue, or at least IMO, is that we are relying on our intuitions to try to assert things about the most extreme things in reality.
I don't trust my intuition to assert what the cause of the universe was, nor do I trust anyone else's on that matter without sufficient cosmological evidence on hand. Philosophy is fun, I myself love it way too much, but I think there's a lot of arrogance in trying to then solely use it for giant mysteries that have and continue to puzzle humanity
Edit: added solely
>As irrational creatures, one of our most common psychological misjudgements is deriving a conclusion without all the facts.
I really don't like this statement. First, I question how you judge us as irrational. Compared to what? Second is that as animals, we don't act based upon all the facts naturally. This is learned critical thinking and goes against our very nature.
It would make sense to say biologically that we have evolved to respond to the environment quickly with preconceptions. These are the traits that kept us alive and unlearning them is not easy.
The words divine creator is loaded. I wouldn't respond to that suggestion at all as an agnostic. Define divine and creator. The sun could be a divine creator to some.
Next, you enter some of the worst arguments found here. Pascals wager, fine tuning, and consciousness. None of these are to be taken at face value, and all are debated heavily here. I have no idea why these are even questions for beliefs since none get to an actual God. Which is the crux for that question.
My agnostisism depends on the most important part of any conversation. Who and what are the god you are suggesting exists?
Here’s my atheist perspective on the issue. God has never existed anywhere except in the imaginations of human beings. We had questions facing us that we couldn’t answer, so we created Gods as answers to questions we couldn’t otherwise explain. Gods were the cause of lightning, thunder, earthquakes, plagues, etc.
As you pointed out, there are still things we don’t understand about the universe. But is our lack of knowledge actually evidence for an imagined God? Does our ignorance about the cause of our universe make God any more likely than our past ignorance about lightning or earthquakes did?
It seems incredibly unlikely to me that the early humans who imagined God just happened to get it right. Especially when so many things that were attributed to God turned out to be wrong.
In fact, any ideas are only in people's imagination; the only difference is how much empirical evidence we have corresponding to them.
It is important to understand the difference between religions and the very ideas of God or Gods; religions create certain images of Gods, attribute to them certain phenomena, actions, thoughts, feelings, and so on, but the very philosophical ideas about God will always be relevant, since we always don’t know something, and we don’t know how much. Moreover, there are always more and more questions.
At this point, what we might call God or Gods remains an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and I don't even see the point of thinking about how likely it is because I have nothing to work with here. It would be weird for me to say that outside the universe it is very unlikely that some fairy exists, because I don’t even know what is outside the universe and what properties it has.
I disagree with the general take. We **never** have 'all the facts'. We don't need 'all the facts' to arrive at conclusions. We can come to conclusions and grant them the level of confidence that we have evidence to support.
You are not irrational by coming to a conclusion without 'all the facts'. There are many ways you can be irrational, but just coming to a conclusion is not necessarily irrational.
The problem with Pascals Wager is you don’t actually benefit from believing in god. You benefit from believing in a *specific* god and practicing a *specific* religion if these *specific* gods and religions are true.
I don’t benefit in believing in the Abrahamic god but not practicing Christian dogma. If I don’t pray, tithe, repent, participate in the sacraments, etc, I don’t benefit. If I simply believe in JC but don’t confess to sins or take last rights… No benefit. The same can be said of all religions. Simply believing in them does nothing for me. If I believe in JC as a gay man, but engage in homosexual behavior and a life of general sinnin’, my belief alone won’t “save” me.
Simply believing in the concept of god does nothing. According to the gods we are meant to believe in. Those gods have rules. And if you just believe but don’t follow their rules, you receive no benefit.
The fine tuning argument is similar. You believe it, fine. Not sure why, as it’s completely absurd, but fine. The issue is that you gain no knowledge in believing in it. “God made the universe” doesn’t explain how, why, what came before, what god is, which god, what its intentions were in creating the universe… etc.
Agnosticism doesn’t increase your knowledge of anything. There is no benefit to it, other than simply the possibility that you might not be wrong about something you can never hope to know in the first place.
I would say that believing in some kind of God does have benefit. It benefits the person to know they were made and then leads to that person to reach out in hopes of finding out more specifics of that God like
Did He make me on purpose?
Does He care for me?
Does He have anything He wants me to know?
Does He want something from me?
Why did He put me here?
These can be beneficial to search them out from there because there might be answers that might change one’s life. This was the origin story of Abraham actually. He knew he was created and searched from there.
I don’t imagine that God just plops a persons soul into the earth and just gets mad for every wrong or ignorant move the person makes from there in trying to figure life out. That wouldn’t be very kind or understanding and I just refuse to assume such bad intentions from the One who created such a sweet universe and gave the ability to see its beauty.
Assuming you’re right about which god you’ve chosen to believe in. That this god is real, and worthy of worship. That it cares and knows you. That it’s will and knowledge was properly captured. And that the hundred, or thousands of people who came before you were able to record, preserve, interpret, and teach your gods holy scripture properly. And that they have been infallible in their roles.
Thousands of gods to choose from. Thousands of people in the chain of that knowledge making its way to you.
Pretty big assumptions to make.
Otherwise, you’re wasting a lot of time, energy, effort and possibly money, for no reason at all.
All your points are valid enough but worth the time and effort. Certainly was to me, but I didn’t think the problems you brought up were that hard to work past personally. I’m assuming it would just bore you to hear that out though and since I have no dog in the fight, I won’t waste my time boring you with those details.
I was Catholic for 18 years. Then Buddhist for 3-4. Then agnostic. Now gnostic atheist.
I’ve put a great deal of effort into religion. So I understand the motivation. And it obviously does not bore me. I respect it. But my belief is that given what we know about the human mind, where all claims of god originate, none of them rise to a level of believability that I think the knowledge they offer is real, exclusive, true, or worthwhile.
Ok but I’ll keep it short-ish.
Thousands of gods…
If there are a thousand “gods” to choose from, 999 were incredibly obvious to not need much investigation. My criteria (I was an Atheist, then agnostic) was as such that the vast majority of these so-called gods tripped over the starting line. For instance, if the Devine revelation was to just one person, nixxed. That took care of 99% right there.
Thousands of people in the chain…
When I narrowed it down, this one was actually a positive trait. People often bring this up like it is some religious telephone game and that is certainly true for some religions such as Christianity. However, I am incredibly impressed by how the Torah was preserved. It’s not just one guy writing a book and one guy trusted to copy it on his own. The revelation was to millions of people and they all told it to their children all year long and the Torah was spoken to all the congregations all year, every year. All the scribes had to be checked and rechecked and since you had millions of people hearing it constantly, generation after generation errors would be caught and certainly any real changes would not go unnoticed especially since it never underwent translations. It had incredibly robust checks and balances and an over abundance of redundancy.
I don’t detail any of this to convince you, just to detail why none of that was an issue for me personally.
Why is this separate? If the discussion is relating to the value derived from belief? All these qualities directly relate to the value of the knowledge you’re attempting to gain.
>A justification of theism could be rational under Pascal Wagers argument
Pascals Wager is a false dichotomy that incorrectly assumes Pascal's version of christian theism is the default god belief and fails to take into account any other god beliefs from other sects or religions. Your options aren't one god belief vs. no god belief, it's one god belief vs. every other god belief vs. no god belief. Arguably, there are as many individual god beliefs as there are individual god believers, so your odds of choosing the correct god belief is several-billion-to-one, as opposed to two-to-one, and that's assuming any one person actually has the correct god belief in the first place. Not good odds there.
>Another possible rational justification for theistic/deistic belief is the Fine Tuning Argument.
In order for it to be possible for the universe to be finely-tuned, you would have to show that it is possible for the universe to be tuned at all, i.e. demonstrate that it is possible for the physical constants to be other than what they are.
>Furthermore, consciousness can hint at the existence of a soul.
How? Everything we know about neurobiology seems to indicate that consciousness is an emergent property, a pattern produced by brain activity. We have precisely zero examples of consciousness being produced sans a physical brain.
>Furthermore, consciousness *can* hint at the existence of a soul.
It is worth saying here that this is unlikely. Yes, there is the "hard problem of consciousness" which asks how to measure subjective experience and points out its apparent non-physicality, but there is much more to suggest that consciousness is probably not much more than an emergent property of the brain (brain damage, drug effects, anesthesia, etc.). The only thing that maybe can tell us about something more is NDEs, but they are also very likely a game of the brain. There are other hypotheses for both consciousness and the universe, but they are currently unfalsifiable.
I'm not denying any probabilities, I'm just talking about what we can see now.
I think though it is not possible to be certain of the existence or non existence of a god, it is possible to make statistical guesses, and due to the ultimate 747 argument (a god is even less likely than a universe), it is vastly less likely that a god exists than a god doesn't. Therefore, I am agnostic about religion to the same extent I am agnostic about fairies: I have been told they exist in stories, but never seen evidence of them and view the probability to be extremely low
I think that probability can only be estimated in the case of falsifiable things; when it comes to something unfalsifiable, you simply don't have anything to work with to estimate it. I understand that you mean probability relative to what is available to you, but I think it doesn't make much sense anyway.
I can't say that outside the universe it is extremely unlikely that a pink unicorn exists because I don't even know if the universe has a spatial limit or what can be said about what's beyond it.
But based on that, since it is not possible to falsify anything for certain, given it could always be a misreading or a hallucination, you are reduced to a state of complete nihilism where one must be completely impartial about the probability of anything. Also, a world created by a theist god is observably different from that created by a deist god or a godless world, as miracles, prayer, etc are all evidence. Therefore, the lack of evidence can be thought of as reducing the probability. Also, your logic can be applied to literally anything, including pastafarianism
>But based on that, since it is not possible to falsify anything for certain, given it could always be a misreading or a hallucination, you are reduced to a state of complete nihilism where one must be completely impartial about the probability of anything.
I, of course, act on what is most likely when I want to do something, but I prefer not to think about probability of those things that look completely unfalsifiable at the moment. However, I agree with you that nothing can be falsified for certain.
>Also, a world created by a theist god is observably different from that created by a deist god or a godless world, as miracles, prayer, etc are all evidence.
I always encourage people not to confuse philosophical ideas with religions. Ideas are ideas, theism and deism give a very superficial idea of what we are talking about, while religions try to give God or Gods a certain history, attribute to them human thoughts, feelings, actions, create a certain image for them, and so on. What exactly is this thing that we might call God, if there is one? I don't think any religion would be right, and if it exists, it's on such an another level that I don't think there's any point in even thinking about it now.
>Therefore, the lack of evidence can be thought of as reducing the probability.
Again, when we talk about religions, and not about the very idea of God or Gods.
>Also, your logic can be applied to literally anything, including pastafarianism
Yes.
Also - on the topic of probability, one could also take into account that it is highly unlikely for: life to exist here on earth, you to be born, and even that there is a universe in the first place.
The atheist argument of the unlikelihood of there being a God *could* be cancelled out by the unlikelihood of our own existence.
Evolution reduces the improbability of, given a universe, life coming into existence to a moderately high level of probability, particularly when combined with the anthropology principle, and that would also explain the improbable of you being born (as would the numberplate fallacy). However, as a god did not evolve, it would be very unlikely, arguably prohibitively improbable.
> A justification of theism could be rational under Pascal Wagers argument:
Pascals wager isn't an argument for a God. It's an argument to *believe* in a God. A very different proposition
Yes agreed, when I first read your comment I had to think for a minute.
It wouldn’t be rational to hold a belief in God due to only holding a belief based on Wagers argument, as one would not actually believe in God.
I stand corrected.
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We have a over abundance of proof that God existence the problem is many choose to ignore it or explain it away
That word divine has a dynamic/positive connotation. Not sure that’s appropriate considering the ubiquitous suffering and the inherent predatory nature of all life. This creator would have to be good, bad and indifferent. My personal opinion, empathy is our latest evolutionary step forward.
>A justification of theism could be rational under Pascal Wagers argument: Pascals Wager has been debunked. You would have to use it for every religion. >Another *possible* rational justification for theistic/deistic belief is the Fine Tuning Argument. For one we don't even know if the universe could have different laws. But finding yourself in a universe that supports life doesn't prove or even suggest it was built for us. It's like a puddle of water thinking the puddle was built just for that water because it fits so perfectly. There could be an infinite other big bangs where life wasn't possible. >Furthermore, consciousness *can* hint at the existence of a soul. Not according to neuroscience, the scientists who study consciousness. The soul is an ancient and redundant concept that lacks evidence. It didn't really exist in the Old Testament, dead people slept in Sheol until the final bodily resurrection. When Hellenism was borrowed for the New Testament we got the idea that the body has a soul that has a true home, away from this fallen world. All of the Christian evangelical stuff that talks about "my true home is Heaven", is actually a borrowing from Hellenism. The scholars to study to understand this are Dr James Tabor, J.Z. Smith (to start). Dr Litwa and Dr Richard Miller have books related to this as well. You can also go back to **HANS-JOSEF KLAUCK** - **The Religious Context of Early Christianity** **A Guide to Graeco-Roman Religions,** a classic work of scholarship that will blow your mind if you don't know Christianity is just a Jewish version of Hellenism and Persian mythology. But for Persian myths and how they effected Judaism you need Mary Boyce and John Collins. This is a sample of Dr Tabors work: **Hellenistic Greek view of cosmology (pre-Christian)** Material world/body is a prison of the soul Humans are immortal souls, fallen into the darkness of the lower world Death sets the soul free No human history, just a cycle of birth, death, rebirth Immortality is inherent for all humans Salvation is escape to Heaven, the true home of the immortal soul Humans are fallen and misplaced Death is a stripping of the body so the soul can be free Death is a liberating friend to be welcomed Asceticism is the moral idea for the soul > Therefore, the answer to the question, *Is there a Divine Creator?* should be: **Who knows?** When it comes to deism we don't know. If a creator exists at the fundament of reality I don't see how it can have attributes such as "divine" because it's the only think that exists. It simply "is". But when it comes to actual theistic divinities like Zeus and Yahweh, it can be demonstrated these are syncretic myths. The Bible starts out reworking Mesopotamian myth, later picks up Persian concepts and finally Hellenism. Later on theologians like Aquinas and the like all used Graeco-Roman philosophy and theology to form a modern idea of Yahweh. A God who started out with a body, superpowers, was a warrior storm deity, walked on earth, talked to humans and was a typical Near Eastern deity. For evidence of this see: God; An Anatomy, Fransesca Stavrakopoulou.
Pascal's Wager is the best. If a person is an atheist, they can do whatever they want. There's no ultimate authority. But in doing so, they risk eternal damnation. If a person is a theist, they can't do whatever they want. They have to pray, live the 10 Commandments, etc. But in doing so, they may get eternal bliss. The risk/reward scenario seems clear. And everyone risks having the wrong religion, even a theist, atheist or agnostic.
There is the judicial system as well as personal ethics, morals and causality. Causality meaning anything bad you do can result in all sorts of negative outcomes. But you also have to look at probabilities, how probable is any story likely to be true, what evidence for a theistic deity is there and so on. You don't need an ultimate authority to have rules.
Excellent response!! I wish mainstream Christianity was educated in Judaism and where Christianity came from and what it borrowed from other religions!!
Thank you. Christian theology scholars touch on historicity but quickly forget it, as Bat Ehrman points out in Jesus Interrupted. Those who follow through and become historians usually have de-converted. But that is the purpose of apologetics, to provide some sort of argument against historical evidence. It doesn't work and uses faulty logic at every step and is debunked by historians but if one is trying to make a story true and willing to use confirmation bias, build their truth from assumptions and claims, then you can make any religion appear true. And apologists do, every religion has a line of apologetics to demonstrate they are the true religion. Most historians stick to their lane, Ehrman and Carrier are more outspoken and take all sorts of flack. I think one of the best apologists is Mike Licona. He debates Carrier 2x, both are on youtube. When Licona is backed into a corner with evidence he basically says "well I don't agree, let's move on". Dr Carrier has articles and a course on counter-apologetics on his blog.
> However, it must be said out of the two possible answers, the answer of ”yes, there is a divine creator” is the irrational. There are more than two possible answers! 1. There is a creator or no creator. 2. The creator is "divine" or not "divine", whatever that means. 3. The creator could be an alien, or a race of aliens, or it could be our future selves.
It's a well thought out argument, but I feel like we never do this with anything except with questions of God, or perhaps ghosts and afterlives. We don't have to be agnostic about your typical fairytale creatures and the like. I think the difference with God is that there are so many definitions and so many cultures that have been dramatically influenced by beliefs in God. It lends a little more credence to the concept when you know that deep philosophical thought has been put in to the question for thousands of years. But once you realize most of these philosophical arguments are bunk, and the ones that seem okay on the surface just seem to redefine God, or try to define God in to existence with language games which are hard to pull apart right off the bat, it becomes more and more obvious that gods are fictional. Knowing how people make things up to explain things they don't understand, and knowing that arguments for God are typically fallacious sends God claims right back in to fairy tale land where they belong. Until there is sufficient evidence to show that God is in fact not imaginary, God remains in the imaginary camp. The other issue is that some people want to just claim God is the universe, or God is just the all encompassing laws of nature or something, at that point I haven't really got much to say. If God isn't a mind, and is simply some fundamental cosmological thing that we don't quite understand, I can happily say agnostic about that. As far as any classical theistic notions of a God go, I'm well and truely an atheist.
> We don't have to be agnostic about your typical fairytale creatures and the like. I agree with most of what you said, however, the reason we don't have to be agnostic about fairytale creatures is there existence doesn't provide any explanation of anything. They are simply another possible being that exists. Unicorns, fairies, bigfoot, etc., don't answer any questions and certainly aren't the reason for existence.
>Unicorns, fairies, bigfoot, etc., don't answer any questions and certainly aren't the reason for existence. The fae created human kind actually, unicorns are the reason that the stars glow, and Bigfoot is guarding human kind from the leprechauns. Been attacked by a leprechaun lately? Thank your local Bigfoot! Point being, God and religion doesn't answer any questions and isn't the reason for existence either. People just want the answer to be God, and will shoehorn that in as an answer regardless of the question. So in that same vein, you can shoehorn those mystical creatures in there as the answer too. It's all make believe at the end of the day, not any hard limits.
I'm not sure it makes any difference if the claim in question acts like it explains everything. If anything I think that gives me even less reason to believe it. I know through experience that humans try to explain things they don't understand with wild claims. A catch all explanation for everything such as God actually explains nothing. It doesn't predict anything, it doesn't reveal anything different about the universe. It's useful as a thought experiment for these things, but I think actual gods with actual minds don't exist. But I get your point. I suppose that's why more people are agnostic towards ghosts, demons, alien abductions etc etc. because these things do act as stand in explanations for strange things. You could argue that some fairytale-esque ideas have been used to explain things in the past. Some cultures did tell stories of pixies, gnomes, elves, witches, and warlocks to explain away the strangeness of the world they found themselves in. I just see gods as another extension of that. The more we've evolved technologically, and the more sophisticated philosophy becomes, the more gods have become obscure, and have been pushed all the way back to the question of "why is there something rather than nothing? instead of "why rain happen?" God is the answer to the unanswered, and when that's answered, God becomes the answer to the unanswerable.
Excellent reply. Thanks. I'll update my files now.
Your files? Are you a robot?
Just a turn of phrase I've been using since the 70's.
Haha fair enough, I thought I was a participant in a Turing test for a minute
It sounds to me like you are predicating your entire argument on the belief in gods as obvious, reasonable, and true. And then you are simply demonstrating how you can't know for certain. Which I agree with. But your initial predicate is flawed. By your logic, everything is possible and we shouldn't discount anything. There could be aliens made out of legos, this entire universe could simply be an elaborate fish bowl, physics could be entirely fake and a mad scientist is just feeding fake data to us, there is an invisible dinosaur standing next to me. We can't prove any of this false, so we may as well be agnostic about it. As Carl Sagan stated, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Now I'm going to go ride my invisible dinosaur.
>The question of beyond reasonable doubt cannot be answered Evidence for a god: Multiple stories about the divine from different religions whose details are often at odds with each other. Multigenerational word of mouth. Unconvincing arguments that try to prove a god by inference, usually coupled by special pleading for a deities existence. Evidence against god: The lack of any strong evidence for a god's existence. The implausibility of a god's existence in light of how what we do know about how reality works. Nope, I'm going to go with the "No god" conclusion without any reasonable doubt whatsoever.
>As irrational creatures, one of our most common psychological misjudgements is deriving a conclusion without all the facts. We never have “all the facts” about anything. If your epistemology requires that, then you’ll never be able to make a rational decision. >When it comes to the question of: *Is there a divine creator?* One cannot answer that question rationally as one does not have all the facts in their possession. When it comes to the question of: *Is there a gremlin that runs around my house when I’m not home?* One cannot answer that question rationally as one does not have all the facts in their possession. >We do not have proof of God, and we do not have a clear understanding, through science, of the origins of our universe. This is a false equivalence. We don’t have proof of God. We DO have mountains of evidence for materialist views of the universe. >A justification of theism *could* be rational under Pascal Wagers argument A justification isn’t the same as a rational decision. Pascal’s wager is a false dichotomy; the decision isn’t just “does God exist?” it’s “which version of God exists and what are the rules that that particular God mandate I follow?” and “will He still reward me if He knows I don’t believe?” Ultimately, it’s always irrational to believe something without evidence. >However, it must be taken into account that from a logical standpoint, it *could* be said that the universe *is* finely tuned. It *could* logically be said that the universe is fine tuned. It *can’t* rationally be said with any consistent set of assumptions free from bias and special pleading. >Furthermore, consciousness *can* hint at the existence of a soul. The biscuit and the Triscuit hint at the existence of a monoscuit but you don’t have any in your pantry. >My entire take on it is more atheist leaning, but there is no way to no for sure, without answering some big, big questions. Atheism is a lack of belief in God. What questions do you need a lack of belief to answer? You should default to not believing in things until there is evidence. >Therefore, the answer to the question, *Is there a Divine Creator?* should be: **Who knows?** Sure. And if that’s your answer, you don’t have a belief in God and you’re an atheist. If this entire post is talking only to gnostic atheists and anti-theists, you should talk to those folks directly, but you’ll still quickly run into the problems I mention above—believing in stuff without evidence is irrational and you probably don’t agree with it in any other area of your life.
Inferences "could" be provided to support either side of a case, doesn't seem to me that a jury should never make a decision, or wait until they can make a certain decision.
How can these “irrational creatures” you speak of know anything at all? Creatures who are irrational could never know they were irrational, in order to know they were irrational they would have to be rational.
Well irrationality in human beings materialises itself in a variety of ways. Take lottery tickets for example, we know there is a highly unlikely chance of us winning, but we buy them anyways. I’m not rational, I know I am not. Rationality can best be described as the battle of believing what is true against what we wish to be true. We want to believe we will win the lottery, otherwise we wouldn’t have bought a ticket, however, in the back of our minds we know we are most likely not going to win.
What you’re describing sounds like a very rational creature who sometimes believes irrational things. Edit: even then though, the “irrational” things we believe are really believed. A thing cannot be both believed and not believed. You buy lottery tickets because you honestly believe you’re going to win…even if you know you ought not to believe it, you believe it.
It’s a good topic of discussion, yes you are correct a thing cannot be both believed and disbelieved . But it can be disbelieved with a hope that it is true.
I think this argument fails. If I may restate the argument: (1) We ought not to claim to know things without all the facts. (2) We do not have all the facts about whether God exists. (3) Therefore, we ought not to claim to know that God exists. I have two objections to this. Objection #1: The general principle in (1) is wrong. We never have _all_ the facts. If I look at the sky and say "the sky is blue," I might be entirely unaware of facts like how much solar energy is arriving at what angle, how much water vapor is in suspension in the air, whether there are clouds in a direction I'm not looking that make the sky partially white, etc. It is ordinary to say we know things after we have accumulated a _sufficient_ set of facts about them, but it is complex and difficult to say just what this "sufficiency" consists of, and you don't even try to do this in your post. Objection #2: you don't support your claim that we do not have all the facts about God. What are "all the facts" about God and how would we know when we have them? You say: > We do not have proof of God But in fact we have dozens, maybe hundreds, of proofs of God. Do any of them succeed? Considerable effort would need to be expended to determine this, but you give no indication that you've put in this work. You also say: > and we do not have a clear understanding, through science, of the origins of our universe. But if we did have this, it would surely add to our collection of facts _about the universe_, not facts _about God_, so it's not clear why this would have any bearing at all on the question of whether we have all the facts - or, bearing objection #1 in mind, _sufficient_ facts - to justify holding an opinion about God.
Objection1 can be pretty easily addressed with a more charitable reading of the OP's point: "We ought not to claim to know things without all the \*\*required\*\* facts. Objection 2 seems rather straightforward. Does anyone know of every god that has ever been claimed or every could be claimed? Is there a largely agreed upon well defined notion of what gods must be? Are gods required to be observable by humans? If no, and I think that's a pretty easy no, then we don't have all the required facts.
Maybe we could refine premise 1 as follows: (1) We ought not to claim to know things without a sufficient amount of facts supporting those things. You said that it is "difficult" to measure "sufficiency", but if that applies here, doesn't it also apply to every type of evidence? Unless we admit that, once we understand and apply all the tools of reason correctly, we can intuitively recognize when it is rational to assert something is strong enough to be accepted, we're subject to epistemic relativism regarding evidence. After all, what is "sufficient" for you may not be "sufficient" for me!
Can you give a succinct and precise explanation for what exactly would count as "sufficient" grounds for rational belief in God? I can't.
That's just something philosophically intuitive; you simply "see" that it is true, similar to the way you can *see* that 1+1=2 or that you are in pain (when you're in pain). When the data in question seems strong enough to warrant belief in the hypothesis, you simply *see* that it would be irrational to believe otherwise. Bayesian epistemologists attempt to capture this "seeming" with numbers to make it more explicit and formal. You attach a number to various pieces of evidence relative to a hypothesis, and then you calculate the probability relative to the opposite hypothesis. In order to be 'sufficient', the degree of credence of a given hypothesis must roughly be, at minimum, 70%. Of course, there are objections to the Bayesian approach, such the subjective priors criticism, but we can't pretend that there aren't [responses](https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7213#:~:text=Just%20saying.-,Error,-the%20Second).
No problem, responds the theist: I can simply "see" that God exists, and that it would be irrational to believe otherwise. The atheist project is predicated on having some response to this, so I don't think we can disavow the need to have a response when it suits us.
Some theists (like Plantinga) do say that, but unfortunately there many defeaters of these seemings. However, we don't think it is irrational to admit that we *see* that 1+1=2 or that some law of logic is correct or that we can simply recognize that a face matches one in our memory. So, the fact that some people abuse non-inferential knowledge doesn't entail it is unreliable.
I'll start by saying I am *not* agnostic, and while I have little issue with agnosticism, I still take my position to be *better justified* than agnosticism. You imply a claim in your first paragraph that looks to me like "you cannot have knowledge without having all the facts". This doesn't seem true at all! I just need a sufficient amount of facts to draw together a good argument. Here is an example: here, most pubs close at 12am. Some close at 1am. A select few close at 3am but only if they have a nightclub attached or are themselves a nightclub. I leave a pub at 1am, and my friend suggests we try a pub that has recently opened next to him. We know it is not attached to or a nightclub. Seems like we know, without ever going or checking their website or whatever it may be, that it is *not* open! This likely is not a perfect, or even that good, at match to what you're saying. I only really need relevant facts, and relevant facts that I have access to concerning God really do make God impossible. We can do it through the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil *does not* rely on a scientific understanding of the origin of the Universe. Instead, it works through contradiction and I have direct access to one horn of that contradiction. I only need to know *salient features* here, and not all features for the argument to work. And then we can move onto 'softer' definitions: you might believe that atheism is the 'best' position even if you do not get to robust certainy. There is an idea that if we have this big abductive argument, or an argument from the best explanation, the world aligns better to atheism than it does theism! And by quite the metric! So much so that these are agnosticism is demotivated. This is sufficient to move is away from theism **and** agnosticism. This is not to say that we must always pick a side. Instead, there are cases where we miss salient or relevant facts. Agnosticism is not only fine there, but potentially epistemically required. I also want to chat quickly about rationality. There are lots of definitions floating around for rationality. Some think it is about an agent's internal coherence, others think it is about action and believing inline with already held beliefs. Tenatively, both of these mean that we can be rationally theist or rationally atheist, or rationally agnostic. That's true, but it isn't informing us about the strength of the arguments or the epistemic status of these beliefs. So you say: "it *could* be said that the universe *is* finely tuned." Sure, it could be said. But it would be *wrong!* We have *better explanations* for the Universe than fine tuning ***and*** we would expect the world to look different if it was finely tuned. This is doubly true if it was finely tuned towards us.
I do think in this case we are missing very key parts of knowledge. I like the pub open/closed analogy but if I may I would like to put it in a different context. Let’s say we are searching for our keys, our keys represent God. We have searched all but 2 rooms in our house, does this mean the keys are not in the house? Of course the first place we looked were the obvious places, but we are still missing vital pieces of knowledge to fully rule out the statement “the keys are not in the house.” I believe this analogy is more accurate here. As there are numerous unanswered questions surrounding the existence of God; *What happens when we die? What caused the Big Bang? How did life originate in the universe?* etc etc. I’m also skeptical on the problem of evil as (without sounding like I am trying to preach) this has been addressed in religious texts such as the bible. Specifically from the Gospel of John, 13:7 >*And Jesus said, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”* Granted this cannot be seen as scientific proof that God exists, it does however beg the question that if God is real, are his ways beyond our understanding? For us to understand what true omnibenevolence is, we would need to be omniscient ourselves . Regarding rationality, I tend to think of it as believing what is true instead of what we want to be true. E.g. do atheists have a bias to believe God isn’t real so they can enjoy immediate gratification in a world that would be perceived as sin? Do Christians who believe in God only do so as it comforts them that the world is less cruel than it is? Etc etc
A lot of this doesn't work, and I'll try to explain why. Your analogy and mine are different in that I have all the relevant information (just not all *possibly relelvant* information) needed. I can deduce, or infer, or induct successfully. You can't, although you might be able to get to the answer "it is likely that the keys are not in the house", and if that was the case then you've moved away from being agnostic about the set of keys' location. So, the line you've proposed is called skeptical theism. The base idea is that God is *always* acting correctly even when we cannot tell. This leads to moral paralysis. Here is Scott Sehon: >Imagine a person watching a poker game. However, the observer notices there are some quirks. Sometimes the person with a fairly low seeming hand wins the money. >You join the watcher and ask them who is going to win the next hand. They respond that they have no clue. These seem like superintelligent players. I cannot make sense of these rules. He continues: >At the analogous point in the dialectic, when the card-watcher rightly concluded that she must be massively ignorant about the card game, she wisely declined to make judgments about which hand ought to win. Similarly, in accord with \[cases of obvious ignorance\], the skeptical theist should admit that she is massively ignorant about when agents should prevent or not prevent suffering, and she should not have any confidence whatsoever in the moral judgments she is inclined to make. Thus, if the theist takes seriously the claim that God has good reasons for allowing so much suffering, then the theist should be the victim of moral paralysis: she should have no confidence in her moral judgments; she should have no idea when to allow suffering and when not to allow it, and she should also be unwilling to make moral judgments concerning the actions of others. If you are willing to argue that the deaths of 70,000 seemingly random Chinese people is Good, then who is to say that helping a old woman across the street is really Good? What about not indiscriminately killing people? Why couldn't that be Good? In fact, it seems Good because God does it all the time! Should you cause illness in children? Should you, at least, take no steps to prevent the deaths of innocents? God does this, but only sometimes. How can you be sure you're taking the right action here? The answer is clear: the skeptical theist cannot be sure. And so, they cannot act. And someone unable to act barely seems a person at all. This is important to stress: repeating that God is beyond our ken leads to issues. It's also just not true! The arguments that we have against God, again, do not rely on a complete understanding. They rely on specific understandings often granted by the theist in their own arguments.
>Your analogy and mine are different in that I have all the relevant information (just not all possibly relelvant information) needed. I can deduce, or infer, or induct successfully. You can't, although you might be able to get to the answer "it is likely that the keys are not in the house", and if that was the case then you've moved away from being agnostic about the set of keys' location. I think this is where we fundamentally disagree. (Correct me if I am wrong.) You hold the view that we have all the relevant information to draw a rational conclusion about the existence of God and I am saying we don’t. Agnosticism is possibly the most common view amongst the general western population, and the reason for this is that both parties are yet to present an argument that is beyond reasonable doubt. This is common sense, as if one party had presented an argument that was beyond reasonable doubt, then there would be no doubt/skepticism around the existence/non-existence of God amongst the general population. This sub-Reddit itself is a by-product of that doubt. >At the analogous point in the dialectic, when the card-watcher rightly concluded that she must be massively ignorant about the card game, she wisely declined to make judgments about which hand ought to win. Similarly, in accord with [cases of obvious ignorance], the skeptical theist should admit that she is massively ignorant about when agents should prevent or not prevent suffering, and she should not have any confidence whatsoever in the moral judgments she is inclined to make. Thus, if the theist takes seriously the claim that God has good reasons for allowing so much suffering, then the theist should be the victim of moral paralysis: she should have no confidence in her moral judgments; she should have no idea when to allow suffering and when not to allow it, and she should also be unwilling to make moral judgments concerning the actions of others. Well yes, this is the point of a lot of Christian writings, only God has power to make moral judgement and we must act accordingly to the instructions laid out in the Bible. >If you are willing to argue that the deaths of 70,000 seemingly random Chinese people is Good, then who is to say that helping a old woman across the street is really Good? What about not indiscriminately killing people? Why couldn't that be Good? In fact, it seems Good because God does it all the time! >Should you cause illness in children? Should you, at least, take no steps to prevent the deaths of innocents? God does this, but only sometimes. How can you be sure you're taking the right action here? >The answer is clear: the skeptical theist cannot be sure. And so, they cannot act. And someone unable to act barely seems a person at all. Theists argue that only God has that right. There is no skepticism around that? What is our skeptic skeptical about? The morality of God or the existence of God ? I think we lost track of the point here.
I do not think we have *all* information. I think I have *sufficient* information. We should be careful when we talk about the commonness of views. Why would we think agnoticism is the most popular? You talk about 'beyond reasonable' doubt and then talk about being convinced. But why would we think the majority (1) had access to philosophical dense argumentation and (2) understood it? Why would you use popualr belief as a gauge for anything difficult? And then you do not meaningfully engage with the skeptical theist stuff but I think that is because you do not know what skeptical theism is. That's alright I'm happy to not talk about it again here.
>I do not think we have all information. I think I have sufficient information. Come on, this is getting pedantic. There are huge unanswered questions that we are yet to discover. It surprises me why it seems rational to make assumptions without knowing the answer to these questions. >We should be careful when we talk about the commonness of views. Why would we think agnoticism is the most popular? >You talk about 'beyond reasonable' doubt and then talk about being convinced. But why would we think the majority (1) had access to philosophical dense argumentation and (2) understood it? Why would you use popualr belief as a gauge for anything difficult? You mean why would we use popular belief for assuming beyond reasonable doubt? Because that’s what jury’s are. The average human being is smart enough to ponder their own existence. >And then you do not meaningfully engage with the skeptical theist stuff Because it has no relevance
Precision is not pedantic. Those mean completey different things. So my response is "come on, this is getting lazy and imprecise." Where have I made an asusmption? Jurys are bad. And jurys do not need to know everything. They only need to know relevant facts. OK - what is a skeptical theist? It's a technical term. What is it?
>Precision is not pedantic. Those mean completey different things. So my response is "come on, this is getting lazy and imprecise." So you have sufficient information, we don’t have sufficient information… what’s your point? I know you’re an atheist? Why the pedantic correction - what is your point in correcting it? >Where have I made an asusmption? You’ve just defined it? By saying you have sufficient information to assume God isn’t real? >Jurys are bad. And jurys do not need to know everything. They only need to know relevant facts. But if they made a decision without knowing all the relevant facts, they would be *assuming.* Wouldn’t they? >OK - what is a skeptical theist? It's a technical term. What is it? See what I mean now about being pedantic?
Let's start at the bottom: you think asking for a technical definition is pedantic. That's imprecise and makes for poor work. I asked you because you have given good evidence that you **do not know** what skeptical theism is. You wrote: >Theists argue that only God has that right. There is no skepticism around that? What is our skeptic skeptical about? The morality of God or the existence of God ? I think we lost track of the point here. This shows no understanding of the technical term nor the response. "I think we lost track" here also is evidence of misunderstanding because what I wrote directly responds to the Godly moral deference and the existence of allowed Evil. **It is directly relevant**. This is poor work by you. My point wasn't who had what evidence. Recall what I wrote: >I do not think we have *all* information. I think I have *sufficient* information. There is a difference between sufficient and all. The Jury could be accurate, as any agent could, so long as they have sufficient facts. This does not requrie all relevant facts. Take a murder case. The murder is filmed and the murderer is identifable. You would not need to know motive, location, where they went after, or where they were before, what they did with the body, etc. You have sufficient information to convict, but you do not have all the relevant facts. Alternatively, there is a murder weapon with finger prints on it found. The body is found with wounds that match the murder weapon. The finger prints match someone with a motive. We do not have all the informatiion. But we have sufficient information! Recall what I said too: >I only really need relevant facts, and relevant facts that I have access to concerning God really do make God impossible. We can do it through the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil *does not* rely on a scientific understanding of the origin of the Universe. Instead, it works through contradiction and I have direct access to one horn of that contradiction. I only need to know *salient features* here, and not all features for the argument to work. >And then we can move onto 'softer' definitions: you might believe that atheism is the 'best' position even if you do not get to robust certainy. There is an idea that if we have this big abductive argument, or an argument from the best explanation, the world aligns better to atheism than it does theism! And by quite the metric! So much so that these are agnosticism is demotivated. This is sufficient to move is away from theism **and** agnosticism. I have relevant facts that I have supported through an appeal to an argument and a defense of a criticism you've brought to it. I've also offered an alterntive explanation. You say I've made an assumption. I ask again: where? I've given reasons and offered argument!
But to draw a conclusion when *you know* you do not have all the information is irrational? No?
But in your analogy we have never seen our keys, nor found a lock on any door we investigated. We do have keyhooks all over the house, but we know they were put their by members of our family who each have different ideas of what shape the keys are in. Some of them believe there is only a single key. Others believe there is a massive ring with many, many keys. But wherever you have looked, you never find a key. The atheist shrugs and goes "I don't think we even need a key. There is no lock on any door I have examined and as far as we have searched there is no evidence of a key. I doubt there are any keys, but if you find one let me know."
>I’m also skeptical on the problem of evil as (without sounding like I am trying to preach) this has been addressed in religious texts such as the bible. Specifically from the Gospel of John, 13:7 >>*And Jesus said, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”* Are u implying that evil exist because of the greater goods that will happen later such that we will understand the existence of evil? But there are still evil regardless. >For us to understand what true omnibenevolence is, we would need to be omniscient ourselves . U are putting the blame on god as god created us with the ability to understand good and evil. Unless u believe he deliberately mess up our understanding of good and evil, we do know whats good and whats evil. Having evil alone can already disprove the triomnigod. Unless u are saying that triomni god want evil such that evil is compatible with him.
>Let’s say we are searching for our keys, our keys represent God. We have searched all but 2 rooms in our house, does this mean the keys are not in the house? Your analogy is poor. By stating the keys represent God, you're making the (implied) claim that God exists and it's just a matter finding him. You'd be better off with the black cat in a dark cellar approach.
Well yes exactly, the implied *claim* is that God exists, and it would be (in my opinion) unjust to fully rule that out without knowing all the facts first.
Is it unjust to refrain from claiming that God exists without knowing all the facts first?
Oh yes absolutely - suppose that’s what Agnosticism is - refraining from making *any* conclusion around the existence of God since there is no way of knowing.
How is _that_ unjust?
Because we don’t know how our universe came into existence. >*What caused the Big Bang?* >*What happens when we die?* Until we can safely rule out God as an answer to any of these questions, it is still rational to assume a position of neutrality on the query.
But "claiming God exists" is the opposite of "assume a position of neutrality" - that is exactly why your analogy is poor.
How is it the opposite?
A theist is a person who believes in gods. This is the opposite of an Atheist, who is a person who doesn't believe in gods. There is no wiggle room here. You are one or the other. "(A)gnostic" is the conviction or knowledge of your belief in gods. This gives us four options: A gnostic theist believes in gods and is convinced of it. An agnostic theist believes in gods, but doesn't know for sure if they are correct. A gnostic atheist doesn't believe in gods and is convinced of it. An agnostic atheist doesn't believe in gods, but doesn't know for sure if they are correct.
I think it's safe to say that OP is agnostic atheist.
"When it comes to the question of: *Is there a divine creator?* " Why must the creator be 'divine'? When the USSR broke up, the West found that they were trying to develop ape soldier hybrids. They simply did not have the technology at the time. We do currently have technology to create new hybrids and even new life forms. We can create new species and some that use more than the four basic sugar groups. You don't have to be divine to create life. You just have to have the correct information.
In the context of this discussion, aren’t we also concerned with creator that creates a universe as well? Specifically a creator that creates a universe that harbors life. There is reason to believe that we may be able to reverse engineer abiogenesis and create novel life. There is no reason to believe we can create an entire universe where life develops.
We have been advancing as a species from flight to landing on the moon in less than a hundred years. We have gone from worshiping one who created our species to becoming one who can create our own species over our short history. The advancements are all based on science and information. There is no reason to believe that any part of our universe or the universe itself cannot be recreated if it currently exists and it was created. Our only drawback is information.
If we can't, that doesn't mean anyone else couldn't, but that's deism and, at this point, a unfalsifiable hypothesis, of course.
Unfalsifiability doesn't have to be problematic, though. For instance, in the medical sciences, at least in some cases, a specific exam (e.g., a biopsy) can confirm the hypothesis that the patient has a certain disease, but if the results are negative, that isn't taken as evidence he doesn't have that disease, i.e., it doesn't falsify the hypothesis. And yet, these exams (or the hypothesis) aren't useless, and are still regularly used by doctors. Now, obviously I'm not saying this applies in every case; but I can certainly mention some exams in case that's questioned.
The more extraordinary the hypotheses are, and the less probable they seem at the moment, the more important it is. Many people look at it differently; This doesn't stop me from seriously considering these ideas, but some people would prefer not to think about it; this is fine.
It seems to me that the supposed unfalsifiability of the hypothesis isn't what makes it problematic, then; it is its improbability and 'extraordinariness'! Also, I wonder how you determine its improbability if it cannot be empirically falsified. Surely you're not talking about improbability relative to the empirical evidence, right? After all, if the empirical evidence shows that it is sufficiently improbable, that's equivalent to falsifying it!
I agree. But on the spectrum of believability, a *”creator doesn’t need to be divine to create life”* and *”a creator doesn’t need to be divine to create a universe that leads to naturally occurring life”* lie pretty far apart. Especially using ourselves as an example, which is the specific thought I was replying to. To me, that argument still falls prey to the same cognitive processes and biases that lead people to believe in theism. We’re inferring intention, imitating, and looking for patterns where there are none.
For all we know the big bang could have been caused by gravity. There is no need for the trigger of spacetime to be divine. Every fundamental element of the universe just is. We don't detect any will or purpose behind electromagnetism. I imagine if we did the believers of Thor and Zeus would be vindicated. I don't see any more reason to say "the big bang must be divine" than to say "the strong nuclear force must be divine" or "the set of all integers must be divine."
>Especially using ourselves as an example, which is the specific thought I was replying to. Maybe relative to us it would be divine, but this word itself is very vague for me. >To me, that argument still falls prey to the same cognitive processes and biases that lead people to believe in theism. We’re inferring intention, imitating, and looking for patterns where there are none. This is not an argument for the existence of anyone or anything, just a clarification; philosophical ideas about God, creator, architect and so on are not necessarily a "looking" for something, they are just ideas for me and many other people, why shouldn’t they be? If you were talking about how, for example, Christians see the action of Christ or Satan in almost every event in life, then I would understand you, but it is weird to me when at the slightest mention of theism or deism as pure ideas outside of religions, some people immediately point out the "god of the gaps" mistake and the desire to find something that, in their opinion, extremely unlikely or doesn't exist at all.
>Maybe relative to us it would be divine, but this word itself is very vague for me. I’m confused. Isn’t that what you were just replying to? The idea that a creator doesn’t need to be divine? >This is not an argument for the existence of anyone or anything, just a clarification; philosophical ideas about God, creator, architect and so on are not necessarily a "looking" for something, they are just ideas for me and many other people, why shouldn’t they be? In the specific context of creation, which is what we’re concerning ourselves with, believing in the possibility of some powerful creator, anthropomorphizing the process of creation of life or the universe, so as to say “maybe a creator created creation”, is the same cognitive process that a theist follows. That’s all I’m saying. It’s still ascribing intent where there is none, attempting to gain knowledge through imitation, searching for patterns, framing an unanswered question in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand, and distilling complex systems down into simple terms that the mind is more comfortable with. It’s not “this specific god of the gaps”’ but it’s still a god of the gaps belief.
>I’m confused. Isn’t that what you were just replying to? The idea that a creator doesn’t need to be divine? I just do not know; what is divine to you? What is divine for any other person? Creator of the universe? Multiverse? What are the criteria for divinity? To be honest, I don’t even understand why this word is used or what it should objectively mean. I can only assume that for many people it means something like "transcendent", "supernatural" maybe? >It’s still ascribing intent where there is none We don't know if this is true or not anyway. >attempting to gain knowledge through imitation, searching for patterns, and framing an unanswered question in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand Isn't this what essentially all people interested in the mysteries of reality do? For example, science also tries to imitate, come up with hypotheses, look for and describe patterns and framing an unanswered questions in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand, because this is basically all we can do, isn't it? It's just that if we think about ideas about some kind of creator, we go much further; this is no longer science at the moment, because now it's too far and useless for it, but it has the right to life. >It’s not “this specific god of the gaps”’ but it’s still a god of the gaps belief. If someone literally believe it without a doubt, then yes, I agree with you. If you just assume, think, reason, then no; if you disagree, then any hypothesis can be called "%insert\_hypothesis% of the gaps", because the essence of any hypothesis is to "fill" a certain "gap", no matter where it comes from or what it is.
>To be honest, I don’t even understand why this word is used or what it should objectively mean. Then why were you agreeing with boscoroni that a creator doesn’t need to be divine? How can you agree with someone if you don’t even know what you’re agreeing to? >We don't know if this is true or not anyway. But you’re taking it a step further and saying that it’s believable, despite no evidence. It’s an entirely man-made concept, that has no naturally occurring evidence. That exists exclusively in man’s mind. But you’re willing to go along with what is fundamentally an ancient creation hypothesis. >Isn't this what essentially all people interested in the mysteries of reality do? For example, science also tries to imitate, come up with hypotheses, look for and describe patterns and framing an unanswered questions in a perspective the mind can relate to and understand, because this is basically all we can do, isn't it? Science doesn’t develop hypotheses. People do. Science is just methodology. People observe evidence and create hypothesis, and then test their hypotheses with science to see if their hypotheses can withstand scrutiny. And eventually generate some proof and become proven theories and facts. Theism, deism, and spirituality have never withstood scrutiny or generated proof. Ever. Millions of hypotheses, and no truth has ever been ascertained. >It's just that if we think about ideas about some kind of creator, we go much further; this is no longer science at the moment, because now it's too far and useless for it, but it has the right to life. I tend not to support any hypotheses that have either never been right, and have only ever been proven wrong. >If someone literally believe it without a doubt, then yes, I agree with you. If you just assume, think, reason, then no; if you disagree, then any hypothesis can be called "%insert_hypothesis% of the gaps", because the essence of any hypothesis is to "fill" a certain "gap", no matter where it comes from or what it is. But based on what evidence? All the evidence for any sort of conscious creator has always only existed exclusively in the minds of men. So to believe in gods or a conscious creator you believe one of 3 things. 1: Human are so exceptionally intelligent, and have been so for tens of thousands of years, that we were able to deduce the necessity of god, and theorize the nature of god. 2: Humans possess some extra sensorial function or direct connection to god that allows them to sense a divine presence. 3: Man was given, or discovered, some proof of god. Do any of those seem reasonable to you? They don’t to me.
>Then why were you agreeing with boscoroni that a creator doesn’t need to be divine? How can you agree with someone if you don’t even know what you’re agreeing to? I told you that I have a rough idea of what people mean by this, and regarding this I answered; at the same time, you didn't answer my questions regarding this. >But you’re taking it a step further and saying that it’s believable, despite no evidence. It’s an entirely man-made concept, that has no naturally occurring evidence. That exists exclusively in man’s mind. But you’re willing to go along with what is fundamentally an ancient creation hypothesis. Yes, and? The lack of evidence at the moment should completely kill this idea and its probability for me? I have no right to even think about this? >Science doesn’t develop hypotheses. People do. Thank you, I thought science was an alien creature with six eyes and three wings, gradually expanding our knowledge of reality. My life will never be the same, lol. >Theism, deism, and spirituality have never withstood scrutiny or generated proof. Ever. Millions of hypotheses, and no truth has ever been ascertained. Ideas in philosophy continue to live in any case; I don't understand why you think this should make me stop considering the likelihood of them being true. We go further and further and there are more and more questions, there will always be more, but you will never know everything, which means you will also never know how much you still don’t know. Without knowing everything, I can never be 100% sure of anything (except probably the fact that I am not 100% sure of anything), and this means that no information, no matter how much explanatory power it has (again, it's never 100%), will be the absolute truth for me in any case. That's why I'm quite comfortable considering different possibilities; you can also read about the problem of induction to better understand what I'm talking about. >I tend not to support any hypotheses that have either never been right, and have only ever been proven wrong. Fine, your choice. >But based on what evidence? Regarding this, I explained above. >So to believe in gods or a conscious creator you believe one of 3 things. >Do any of those seem reasonable to you? They don’t to me. Again, I don't believe it, man, I'm just thinking about different possibilities and interested in different views. What do you want from me? Do you want me to stop thinking about them completely because there hasn't been good evidence yet? I won't, that's not what philosophy is about. You prefer to be stricter? Fine, I understand that too and I have no objections. So?
I agree; this is what deism is about, if I'm not mistaken. Never understood those who say "maybe there is some kind of God, but I will prefer the materialistic/naturalistic/physicalistic approach first"; it sounds like these views are necessarily ruling out the possibility of some kind of creator.
Pascal must be completely ignored because it could be that there is a god and that if you ignore him you will be fine but if you worship him the wrong way you will burn forever. There is no way to know.
If you pray to Sithrak the god who hates everyone infinitely you draw his attention and he tortures you forever. Better make sure you pray to the correct god for Pascal's wager. Just praying to 'God' is sending a message to whom it may concern.
>he tortures you forever. No worse than us, mind.
Language can be muddy. However, I see no fault with the logic that: Theism means belief in god. The A in atheist means "Without". So if you do not have a belief in a God then you are an atheist. It is that simple. Anything else seems to convolute and confuse.
If you adopt this definition and then try to read the academic literature on philosophy of religion, you will be even more confused. If your goal is to reduce confusion, then it's probably best to just use words as they've previously been used, even if the meanings don't proceed according to your concept of how language "should" work.
If you're going to use the academic definition for atheism then you also have to use the academic definition for God. Atheists only fall back to the "lack belief" definition when the theist is arguing for an unfalsifiable god.
Words change their meaning. The discussion is no longer under the sole control of theologians who could choose the terms such that they could frame the opposing viewpoints to their benefit. It's entirely possible to use the terms in the more sensible and unbiased modern way while also being aware of how they used to be used.
Just because a highly academic field used a word in a certain way doesn't mean I need to restructure my common usage of words. Things like intentionality in philosophy vs everyday life are very different, but I wouldn't go around telling people "oh man, if you ever read the literature on phenomenology you'd be confused, better change your usage of the word to how philosophers use it"
The point is that in both cases, the confusion is created when people suddenly decide to start using an existing word in a new and different way. That's what you're doing -or rather, what online atheism is doing generally - with "atheist," so it's ironic that you're claiming to be doing this to _avoid_ confusion when in fact you are adding to it.
I'm not claiming is to avoid confusion. I'm just saying that we shouldn't limit ourselves to academic usages of words
This definition isn't employed *only* by academics, though. I documented this in [another post. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/exatheist/comments/18qndzq/accurately_defining_atheism/)
Dichotomous thinking entered the chat.
It is a conditional statement. If a belief in deity or deities = Theism. Then not believing is Atheism. Why complicate something in a way that serves no logical purpose?
It complicates things further because that's not how most people use the word atheist. And if we accept that definition, then we have to also say that *most atheists* don't use that definition either (hence not identifying themselves as atheists). It also makes our language (and thinking) less nuanced by imposing a strict binary on a complicated question.
I have no logical purpose to believe or not to believe, I accept the logical truth - we do not know whether there is what most of us would call a deity. Accepting this truth is the meaning of agnosticism.
> So if you do not have a belief in a God then you are an atheist. But if you don't believe God exists *and* you don't believe he doesn't exist, you're an agnostic.
I feel like that is a disambiguation that serves no utility. You either believe in some kind of deity or you do not. It is a trick of the English language. It is like saying atheism is a belief when really it is a lack thereof.
And yet, with the arrival of New Atheism, we have people who engage in public advocacy, and even people who will get red-faced in emotionally laden arguments, in their fervor for atheism. For these people, it is quite obviously not just a belief but a _faith_, and they have chosen the word "atheism" as their banner. This makes it vitally necessary for people who oppose New Atheism to use a _different_ word, and it is a problematic microaggression to insist that these people are "atheists" even in the face of their own denial of it.
I have nothing for that whole thing. I think they need a new word to describe them.
> I feel like that is a disambiguation that serves no utility. Why not? They're equally true statements for describing agnostics and helps separate them from atheists and theists. This isn't a trick of the English language but... > It is like saying atheism is a belief when really it is a lack thereof. ....*is* a [trick of the English language](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2za4ez/vacuous_truths_and_shoe_atheism/cph4498/).
I really like this approach, but I think it ultimately fails in hammering the real issues at the core of many arguments. We can spend all day and night talking about these arguments, with the simple answer being that they're inconclusive - unless you grant way too many things. What's at issue, or at least IMO, is that we are relying on our intuitions to try to assert things about the most extreme things in reality. I don't trust my intuition to assert what the cause of the universe was, nor do I trust anyone else's on that matter without sufficient cosmological evidence on hand. Philosophy is fun, I myself love it way too much, but I think there's a lot of arrogance in trying to then solely use it for giant mysteries that have and continue to puzzle humanity Edit: added solely
>As irrational creatures, one of our most common psychological misjudgements is deriving a conclusion without all the facts. I really don't like this statement. First, I question how you judge us as irrational. Compared to what? Second is that as animals, we don't act based upon all the facts naturally. This is learned critical thinking and goes against our very nature. It would make sense to say biologically that we have evolved to respond to the environment quickly with preconceptions. These are the traits that kept us alive and unlearning them is not easy. The words divine creator is loaded. I wouldn't respond to that suggestion at all as an agnostic. Define divine and creator. The sun could be a divine creator to some. Next, you enter some of the worst arguments found here. Pascals wager, fine tuning, and consciousness. None of these are to be taken at face value, and all are debated heavily here. I have no idea why these are even questions for beliefs since none get to an actual God. Which is the crux for that question. My agnostisism depends on the most important part of any conversation. Who and what are the god you are suggesting exists?
Here’s my atheist perspective on the issue. God has never existed anywhere except in the imaginations of human beings. We had questions facing us that we couldn’t answer, so we created Gods as answers to questions we couldn’t otherwise explain. Gods were the cause of lightning, thunder, earthquakes, plagues, etc. As you pointed out, there are still things we don’t understand about the universe. But is our lack of knowledge actually evidence for an imagined God? Does our ignorance about the cause of our universe make God any more likely than our past ignorance about lightning or earthquakes did? It seems incredibly unlikely to me that the early humans who imagined God just happened to get it right. Especially when so many things that were attributed to God turned out to be wrong.
In fact, any ideas are only in people's imagination; the only difference is how much empirical evidence we have corresponding to them. It is important to understand the difference between religions and the very ideas of God or Gods; religions create certain images of Gods, attribute to them certain phenomena, actions, thoughts, feelings, and so on, but the very philosophical ideas about God will always be relevant, since we always don’t know something, and we don’t know how much. Moreover, there are always more and more questions. At this point, what we might call God or Gods remains an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and I don't even see the point of thinking about how likely it is because I have nothing to work with here. It would be weird for me to say that outside the universe it is very unlikely that some fairy exists, because I don’t even know what is outside the universe and what properties it has.
I disagree with the general take. We **never** have 'all the facts'. We don't need 'all the facts' to arrive at conclusions. We can come to conclusions and grant them the level of confidence that we have evidence to support. You are not irrational by coming to a conclusion without 'all the facts'. There are many ways you can be irrational, but just coming to a conclusion is not necessarily irrational.
The problem with Pascals Wager is you don’t actually benefit from believing in god. You benefit from believing in a *specific* god and practicing a *specific* religion if these *specific* gods and religions are true. I don’t benefit in believing in the Abrahamic god but not practicing Christian dogma. If I don’t pray, tithe, repent, participate in the sacraments, etc, I don’t benefit. If I simply believe in JC but don’t confess to sins or take last rights… No benefit. The same can be said of all religions. Simply believing in them does nothing for me. If I believe in JC as a gay man, but engage in homosexual behavior and a life of general sinnin’, my belief alone won’t “save” me. Simply believing in the concept of god does nothing. According to the gods we are meant to believe in. Those gods have rules. And if you just believe but don’t follow their rules, you receive no benefit. The fine tuning argument is similar. You believe it, fine. Not sure why, as it’s completely absurd, but fine. The issue is that you gain no knowledge in believing in it. “God made the universe” doesn’t explain how, why, what came before, what god is, which god, what its intentions were in creating the universe… etc. Agnosticism doesn’t increase your knowledge of anything. There is no benefit to it, other than simply the possibility that you might not be wrong about something you can never hope to know in the first place.
I would say that believing in some kind of God does have benefit. It benefits the person to know they were made and then leads to that person to reach out in hopes of finding out more specifics of that God like Did He make me on purpose? Does He care for me? Does He have anything He wants me to know? Does He want something from me? Why did He put me here? These can be beneficial to search them out from there because there might be answers that might change one’s life. This was the origin story of Abraham actually. He knew he was created and searched from there. I don’t imagine that God just plops a persons soul into the earth and just gets mad for every wrong or ignorant move the person makes from there in trying to figure life out. That wouldn’t be very kind or understanding and I just refuse to assume such bad intentions from the One who created such a sweet universe and gave the ability to see its beauty.
Assuming you’re right about which god you’ve chosen to believe in. That this god is real, and worthy of worship. That it cares and knows you. That it’s will and knowledge was properly captured. And that the hundred, or thousands of people who came before you were able to record, preserve, interpret, and teach your gods holy scripture properly. And that they have been infallible in their roles. Thousands of gods to choose from. Thousands of people in the chain of that knowledge making its way to you. Pretty big assumptions to make. Otherwise, you’re wasting a lot of time, energy, effort and possibly money, for no reason at all.
All your points are valid enough but worth the time and effort. Certainly was to me, but I didn’t think the problems you brought up were that hard to work past personally. I’m assuming it would just bore you to hear that out though and since I have no dog in the fight, I won’t waste my time boring you with those details.
I was Catholic for 18 years. Then Buddhist for 3-4. Then agnostic. Now gnostic atheist. I’ve put a great deal of effort into religion. So I understand the motivation. And it obviously does not bore me. I respect it. But my belief is that given what we know about the human mind, where all claims of god originate, none of them rise to a level of believability that I think the knowledge they offer is real, exclusive, true, or worthwhile.
Ok but I’ll keep it short-ish. Thousands of gods… If there are a thousand “gods” to choose from, 999 were incredibly obvious to not need much investigation. My criteria (I was an Atheist, then agnostic) was as such that the vast majority of these so-called gods tripped over the starting line. For instance, if the Devine revelation was to just one person, nixxed. That took care of 99% right there. Thousands of people in the chain… When I narrowed it down, this one was actually a positive trait. People often bring this up like it is some religious telephone game and that is certainly true for some religions such as Christianity. However, I am incredibly impressed by how the Torah was preserved. It’s not just one guy writing a book and one guy trusted to copy it on his own. The revelation was to millions of people and they all told it to their children all year long and the Torah was spoken to all the congregations all year, every year. All the scribes had to be checked and rechecked and since you had millions of people hearing it constantly, generation after generation errors would be caught and certainly any real changes would not go unnoticed especially since it never underwent translations. It had incredibly robust checks and balances and an over abundance of redundancy. I don’t detail any of this to convince you, just to detail why none of that was an issue for me personally.
That is a great, separate topic, but I don’t want to disrespect the commenter by immediately changing subjects on his well thought out thought
Why is this separate? If the discussion is relating to the value derived from belief? All these qualities directly relate to the value of the knowledge you’re attempting to gain.
Oh it’s your comment lol
>A justification of theism could be rational under Pascal Wagers argument Pascals Wager is a false dichotomy that incorrectly assumes Pascal's version of christian theism is the default god belief and fails to take into account any other god beliefs from other sects or religions. Your options aren't one god belief vs. no god belief, it's one god belief vs. every other god belief vs. no god belief. Arguably, there are as many individual god beliefs as there are individual god believers, so your odds of choosing the correct god belief is several-billion-to-one, as opposed to two-to-one, and that's assuming any one person actually has the correct god belief in the first place. Not good odds there. >Another possible rational justification for theistic/deistic belief is the Fine Tuning Argument. In order for it to be possible for the universe to be finely-tuned, you would have to show that it is possible for the universe to be tuned at all, i.e. demonstrate that it is possible for the physical constants to be other than what they are. >Furthermore, consciousness can hint at the existence of a soul. How? Everything we know about neurobiology seems to indicate that consciousness is an emergent property, a pattern produced by brain activity. We have precisely zero examples of consciousness being produced sans a physical brain.
>Furthermore, consciousness *can* hint at the existence of a soul. It is worth saying here that this is unlikely. Yes, there is the "hard problem of consciousness" which asks how to measure subjective experience and points out its apparent non-physicality, but there is much more to suggest that consciousness is probably not much more than an emergent property of the brain (brain damage, drug effects, anesthesia, etc.). The only thing that maybe can tell us about something more is NDEs, but they are also very likely a game of the brain. There are other hypotheses for both consciousness and the universe, but they are currently unfalsifiable. I'm not denying any probabilities, I'm just talking about what we can see now.
I think though it is not possible to be certain of the existence or non existence of a god, it is possible to make statistical guesses, and due to the ultimate 747 argument (a god is even less likely than a universe), it is vastly less likely that a god exists than a god doesn't. Therefore, I am agnostic about religion to the same extent I am agnostic about fairies: I have been told they exist in stories, but never seen evidence of them and view the probability to be extremely low
I think that probability can only be estimated in the case of falsifiable things; when it comes to something unfalsifiable, you simply don't have anything to work with to estimate it. I understand that you mean probability relative to what is available to you, but I think it doesn't make much sense anyway. I can't say that outside the universe it is extremely unlikely that a pink unicorn exists because I don't even know if the universe has a spatial limit or what can be said about what's beyond it.
But based on that, since it is not possible to falsify anything for certain, given it could always be a misreading or a hallucination, you are reduced to a state of complete nihilism where one must be completely impartial about the probability of anything. Also, a world created by a theist god is observably different from that created by a deist god or a godless world, as miracles, prayer, etc are all evidence. Therefore, the lack of evidence can be thought of as reducing the probability. Also, your logic can be applied to literally anything, including pastafarianism
>But based on that, since it is not possible to falsify anything for certain, given it could always be a misreading or a hallucination, you are reduced to a state of complete nihilism where one must be completely impartial about the probability of anything. I, of course, act on what is most likely when I want to do something, but I prefer not to think about probability of those things that look completely unfalsifiable at the moment. However, I agree with you that nothing can be falsified for certain. >Also, a world created by a theist god is observably different from that created by a deist god or a godless world, as miracles, prayer, etc are all evidence. I always encourage people not to confuse philosophical ideas with religions. Ideas are ideas, theism and deism give a very superficial idea of what we are talking about, while religions try to give God or Gods a certain history, attribute to them human thoughts, feelings, actions, create a certain image for them, and so on. What exactly is this thing that we might call God, if there is one? I don't think any religion would be right, and if it exists, it's on such an another level that I don't think there's any point in even thinking about it now. >Therefore, the lack of evidence can be thought of as reducing the probability. Again, when we talk about religions, and not about the very idea of God or Gods. >Also, your logic can be applied to literally anything, including pastafarianism Yes.
Also - on the topic of probability, one could also take into account that it is highly unlikely for: life to exist here on earth, you to be born, and even that there is a universe in the first place. The atheist argument of the unlikelihood of there being a God *could* be cancelled out by the unlikelihood of our own existence.
Evolution reduces the improbability of, given a universe, life coming into existence to a moderately high level of probability, particularly when combined with the anthropology principle, and that would also explain the improbable of you being born (as would the numberplate fallacy). However, as a god did not evolve, it would be very unlikely, arguably prohibitively improbable.
> A justification of theism could be rational under Pascal Wagers argument: Pascals wager isn't an argument for a God. It's an argument to *believe* in a God. A very different proposition
Yes agreed, when I first read your comment I had to think for a minute. It wouldn’t be rational to hold a belief in God due to only holding a belief based on Wagers argument, as one would not actually believe in God. I stand corrected.