Arguing for the theist point of view for a moment (I’m aware of the irony of playing Devil’s advocate for God), Christians would say not only is the evidence for their religion supplied through word of God transcribed in the Bible, and the appearance and feats of Jesus, but that evidence exists ‘all around us’ - the beauty of nature and complexity of the universe (hence why science can be used as a theist tautology - new discoveries simply mean the God is more brilliant than we thought).
As for why God deigns to rain down tsunamis and AIDS on his loved children, mysterious ways, we cannot know the mind of God, etc.
As my OP (and you) state, Atheists do not take this to be evidence - tsunamis and AIDS are not divine judgements, but weather phenomenon and actions of microscopic virii, etc. But what would you take as evidence; what would be the ‘tipping point’ (theists having a ‘tipping point’ for belief that exists now, for example)?
I’m not really sure that this question posed to atheists makes a whole lot of sense because the evidence that may convince someone who doesn’t believe in God of his existence is entirely dependent upon his nature. Thus, without establishing what perception of God you’re asking about, you’re basically asking them to concoct a god and then explain what would convince them to believe in that particular god.
I do think that this is fully relevant. As a person of faith myself, I really can’t imagine anything that would change my mind because, quite simply, I can’t undo the experiences or the thoughts that have led me to a point where I’m convinced of God’s existence. I could, however, conceive that my understanding of his nature is completely wrong. For instance, if a time machine were invented and I were to go back in time and see that some of the fundamental parts of my faith are indisputably wrong (Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, for instance), it would be all but impossible to remain a Christian.
That said, my belief in the underlying nature of the creator, his relationship to creation, and my relationship to him, would remain largely unchanged. I would still believe in his existence at that point, I just wouldn’t believe that Christianity was correct. In fact, to this point in my life, I have rejected some common beliefs of Christianity (such as the trinity, which I don’t believe has a biblical basis), and I’ve also found some interesting corollaries between Christianity and other non-Abrahamic faiths. However, I don’t believe that any of this contradicts what I hold to be the fundamentals of Christian theology, so while I may have non-traditional beliefs, I still am one.
So to answer the OP and this question more succinctly, I don’t think could exist that would convert me to atheism; I do, however, think it is possible, however extraordinarily difficult, that evidence could be found that would compel me to convert to another religion.
At which point (or even before), the partner would be conscious in my book. Just because he lives in the Matrix doesn’t make him a P-zombie any more than a real robot can be a P-zombie.
Why “faking”? Why not simply “achieving”? Personally I don’t discriminate (which is why I think the P-zombie debate is actually separate to this one).
And of course such a simulation appears monumentally difficult, to us. But heck, I can see someone slipping on a pretty convincing VR suit on my sleeping body in my lifetime. Give it a million years or so, I would imagine they’d get most of the glitches straightened out.
I’m willing to believe in the existence of God. All it would take is evidence. But I haven’t experienced any such evidence that isn’t contradictory or can’t more reasonably be explained by other more likely causes. So belief in God requires faith which if God exists he has apparently chosen not to endow me with.
Half Man Half Wit’s question is very salient to the debate, I welcome perspectives on it.
I’ve heard debates with theists where it is stated that for Christians, the undeniable and scientific verification of the discovery of the body of Christ would undermine their faith fatally.
For atheists and theists; would circumstances written in the scripture of another faith being carried out to the letter be enough? For example, the Koranic ‘Qiyamah’, judgement day, coming about exactly as described?
You can not undo your thoughts. But that is not shared experience. Your personal delusion does not reach the level of proof for the rest of us. This god has had thousands of years to show man it exists. If it is so damn important for him to have man grovel before him, he could achieve it is seconds. So far nothing. I suppose there is a need for people who can not handle the obvious truth, that this is all there is, have to find a way not to face it.
Just with the ‘go back and redo’-trick, it seems to me that a faked consciousness would be trivially easy: you say something, he says something, you either believe he’s conscious, or not. If you don’t, redo!, have him say something different, until you believe that he’s conscious. The other’s utterances could even be completely random, in this case, since there always exists a finite-length answer that doesn’t betray his p-zomboid nature. Surely, such a simple generator of finite-length speech acts is nothing that could be called conscious in any way.
However, perhaps you might then claim that the consciousness doesn’t reside in the utterance-generating script, but in it + whatever it is that decides whether or not to roll back, to which I would reply that you’re simply required to press a button after each exchange, and rollback happens when you press ‘not conscious’, whereupon you might claim that you could simply lie, prompting me to say that you’re also connected to a lie detector, one that actually works as advertised, which you could then call out as the seat of consciousness, etc…
But I would seek you not to, since that’s more or less the point I’m trying to make: whatever I think up to detect the fakery in the simulation, might conceivably be subverted by the simulators, which in turn I might attempt to uncover, causing a need for more fakery, etc., locking me and the simulation in the same circle of attack and parry as hypothetical you and me were in the last paragraph; hence my remark that I see faking a coherent world as a task on par with faking conscious behaviour.
Certain things come to mind. For example, in “Contact” it was eventually discovered that there was a message embedded in pi. Something verifiable to everyone who could do the calculations.
So yeah, get to the trillionth place of pi, and suddenly it turns into the Torah, or whatever? That’s gotta make you stop and think. That points to the existence of some entity that fine-tuned our universe simply to send us a message.
What sort of entity that was, hard to say. But it would prove that our universe was designed by something. Olaf Stapleton’s StarMaker. But The StarMaker doesn’t have to be much like what human beings have imagined about God or gods
On a different level, suppose we find proof that human beings were designed? Note that this is a different level than the StarMaker, since any sufficiently advanced alien could design a living organism. And our relationship to the human designer doesn’t need to be anything like “worship” or even reverence, or even fondness. We can easily imagine aliens building themselves a slave race, or being general bastards despite being our creators. Literature is full of examples of creators being unworthy of their creation. Frankenstein might be able to create life, but what obligation does that impose on the monster he created?
On another level, I’m reminded of Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Jesus on Mars”. Astronauts go to Mars, and find a guy claiming to be Jesus, who can do various miracles. They bring him back to Earth, and “Jesus” begins bringing about world peace and so on. Of course, the main character astronaut is pretty skeptical about the whether this guy really is Jesus, or what that even means. But he decides that it doesn’t matter whether “Jesus” is really divine. Because of the physical and immediate good “Jesus” does, he becomes a follower of “Jesus”.
So a god who can do miracles or magic might be worth respecting, following, supporting and/or befriending, even if such an entity isn’t the creator of the universe, or the world, or life, or human beings. If the goddess Athena appeared, I might become her follower not because she was capital-G God, but because she did things I approved of. Or Aslan. I might not worry to much about what Aslan was, as long as I was convinced that Aslan was good.
Now I just realized that I haven’t talked about souls and the afterlife, and so on. I guess that’s because I’m so convinced that there’s no such thing that I can easily imagine the existence of a God or god or gods, but still wouldn’t believe in any sort of afterlife. And vice-versa, despite how intertwined the concepts have grown in Christian theology.
I would disbelieve in myself before I would believe in god. Any god that seeks to convince me cannot make some personal journey to me, create some miracles, then go back and hide in the clouds. I could convince myself that I was going crazy before there was a god.
The god that could convince me would have to be long-lasting and affect the entire world. None of this “I’m going to appear to you, and maybe a close friend and that’s it” thing. God would have to announce his presence, create miracles and do “impossible” things, and then stick around to make sure we’re not all having a mass delusion. The world would basically have to change and accept the fact that god is here to stay before I could be convinced of his existence
Assuming we’re talking about god as a creature that can intervene or care about what people do, its existence would have to be understood by all, in the same way, as sure as we understand that we breathe and blink. All those who believed in other forms of god substance would have to smack themselves in the forehead and say, “whoa…I was way off on that one!” and there would be no further debate on the subject. Ever.
And I still wouldn’t worship it. Because worship is unhealthy.
But I certainly wouldn’t press “conscious” based on one, or even a few, responses. It would take a good hour or more of in-depth discussion, such that sheer statistics would weigh against my non-conscious beer buddy heavily - the veritable simian Shakespeare, if you will. I still think this debate is independent of whether I could confidently see through some chicanery in a Bell experiment or something (which, after all, only requires a fake computer monitor display of results, does it not?)
All that God has to do to convince to me that it exists is to do what everything else does to convince me it exists - consistently and reliably and objectively behave in the manner of an existing thing. This means that there has to be a way to interact with it that always works for everyone in the same way in every test.
Consistency is really the most important thing here. A God that reliably talked to everyone in a reliably detectable way would never ever come into doubt. There might be questions about its specific nature and abilities, and whether it merited worship or whatever, but its existence would not be in doubt.
God would have to appear on Earth for me to believe. He’d also need to perform some miracles. Nothing too extravagant. Turning water into wine or raising his hands and calling a stormcloud to drench a parched patch of earth. God doesn’t need to be funneled through the scientific method; if s/he caused, for example, whole limbs to regenerate in an amputee, I’d go ahead and submit that God exists.
Though I would have many questions for him or her. The most pressing is “Why the secrecy for so long?” In the Bible, miracles were an everyday occurence, Angels here, devil there, talking fiery bushes, walking on water; if Christianity were true (and, deep down, I wish I could believe in it) these things would still be occuring. But they aren’t. This leads to me to the (sad) conclusion that either (a) God doesn’t exist at all or (b) God doesn’t make him or herself available to me. For what’s its worth, I hope you Christians are right and that there is an afterlife - not for myself, but for my loved ones.
Something very simple, stolen from someone else in another one of these threads.
This God thing should write a message some person gives him in the stars. It would be quite simple to prove through trigonometry that the message is not being projected on a screen in orbit, say. Any being that can violate physical laws to this extent and is powerful enough to move stars around on request (and put them back, I hope) is a god for all intents and purposes. Almost certainly not God though.
Whether I would worship this god or pay attention to his moral rules, if any, is a different matter.
Well, granted, but does there, or does there not, always exist at least a branch in the tree of possible responses that would have you judge your opponent conscious? And is it not in principle possible that the simulation just redoes till it hits on that branch? Because then it would seem to me that if you accept the possibility that we are indeed living in a simulation capable of such fakery, then you would have to accept the possibility of philosophical zombies.
See, I think it’s probably never really as simple as this – trying to cover up fakery in the fabric of the world might be a lot like trying to push bubbles out of wallpaper: once you push in one spot, it just pops up somewhere else. The task of covering things up might get out of hand quick, in such a way as to exceed even the capacities of the biggest conceivable computer – similar in spirit to how the task of generating a convincing, but random conversation with the try-and-redo method will eventually exceed all computational capacity, if the conversation is carried on long enough. What I mean by this is, for example, that other results in physics are dependent on the correctness of Bell tests (or any other faked results), and thus in turn themselves would have to be faked convincingly in order not to expose the fakery in the first place – and so on and on.
And some things might simply not be fakable at all – you simply can’t simulate hypercomputation on an ordinary computer, so if faking out consciousness were a supertask requiring hypercomputation, and hypercomputation is in fact impossible as it’s currently thought to be, then there would be no way of faking out consciousness, no matter how intuitively possible it might seem. This is at least a valid possibility, it would seem to me. So, would any simulation be able to convince me that an entity within it had performed a supertask, without that entity actually having performed it? I simply don’t think it’s that much of a given that it could as everyone else seems to.
Going back to perhaps the most intuitive of my examples: god grants me the answer to a yes/no question, and promises to answer truthfully either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. He’s omnibenevolent, so I can trust his promise absolutely; he is omniscient, so he knows the answer to every question; he’s omnipotent, so he’s able to answer any question. My question is, as stated previously: “Will you answer this question with ‘no’?”
Miraculously, god answers my question truthfully with either yes or no. (I understand that most people would not ask this ability of any real conception of god, but hey, we’ve long ago gone beyond the merely abstract…) Could any simulation, running on ordinary computers, fake this? Maybe just change my perception, my memories, such that I have the impression that the question was truthfully answered? That I had just forgotten whether his answer was yes or no? Or that I still know that it was ‘yes’ (for example), but can’t anymore understand why that was a truthful answer? Would that not be somewhat suspicious?
In other words, is the knowledge both of what the truthful answer to the question is, and why it is the truthful answer, possible in any non-miraculous way? And if it isn’t, yet I had it, wouldn’t that mean that this can’t be a simulation?
But I don’t even think that one has to appeal to the miraculous to see through a veil of simulated deception; I think the self-reflective qualities of consciousness are enough to ensure that the effort of upholding a convincing fake eventually exceeds any given computational limitations, much like they ensure that upholding a convincing fake of consciousness via the trial-and-redo method similarly becomes arbitrarily computationally cost-intensive. Both seem equally possible to intuition at first, yet both, I believe, run into problems of arbitrary complexity.
I’m not claiming that I could see through such a deception, or that anyone could do so easily, but consciousness, in a somewhat abstracted way, given a long enough time and workspace, could eventually push the system to its limits, I believe; the question is merely one of resources. Therefore, I think the only way to create such a simulated world is to simulate it coherently, much like the only way to simulate conscious behaviour is to have the simulator be conscious.
I don’t think so. Since you’d have access to the minds of the simulated creatures, you could simply make them not notice any flaws regardless of how blatant they are. You could even give them a compulsion to believe.
Like I said, in principle, a chimp could write the Bible (careful) with enough resets, but the fizzling out of the sun and indeed the universe would almost certainly confound such a task. Even if our Matrix overlords did happen to hit upon such a negligibly improbable ‘jackpot hour’, hey, who says I can’t be mistaken once every trillion years or so?
And if the overlords deliberately put convincing responses in themselves instead of leaving it to chance, then the whole system becomes conscious, a la my preferred route out of the Chinese Room. Or, if they give my beer-buddy more sophisticated response-generating software, he again becomes conscious in short order.
This is actually looking like a nice little philosophical scenario: Groundhog Day of the Dead in the Matrix. I’m sure someone like you could pull together a nifty little dilemma out of it,HM.
Maybe, but I suspect that ‘conscious conversation’ is actually our best test, and scientific experiments are a piece of piss for old Agent Smith to dupe us with. Think -what would you need to actually see before your very eyes to convince you that normal Bell results had been miraculousy avoided? I can’t see the photons themselves, and would rely on a computer screen or other display to tell me them. So just fake the final display, yeah?
Again, what would you have to see before your very eyes which would convince you that such a task had been accomplished? I’d be very interested in a step-by-step screenplay of the episode.
But you’re rather putting words into His mouth, are you not? An omniscient Being would surely add a caveat to his promise: MY CHILD, KNOW YOU THAT SOME QUESTIONS CANNOT BE ANSWERED THUS: THE ONE YOU’RE ABOUT TO ASK, FOR EXAMPLE.
Maybe, but at that level of suspicion you might believe you can see through the Matrix right now!
But it doesn’t need to be fake - it can really be conscious! That’s why the Matrix would be so convincing.
Again, I’d be very interested in exploring this from your actual, in-the-room perspective. Construct your experiment, and I’ll be wily old Agent Smith pulling any conjuring trick in my power (except automatically changing your brain state to “I’m convinced”. That would be like solving a Rubik’s Cube by pulling the stickers off.)
And just to expand on my ‘trillion-year mistake’: actually, I don’t think it is a mistake any more. I think that purely by astronomically-negligible chance, that random software or hardware created a conscious being - the proverbial 747 in a tornado-hit junkyard - for that hour, thus keeping P-zombies safely in thier coffins of impossibility.