(a) as I’ve said repeatedly, very few if any atheists actually do that
(b) although many theists do
(c) and it’s far from inherently uncertain… the existence of God could be very easily proven, if it were true.
Find me the person who has claimed to have proven with absolute certainty that is impossible for there to exist a god-who-lives-outside-the-universe-and-never-in-any-way-interacts-with-it-at-all, and I will agree that that claim is overbroad. And then I’ll find you thousands of people who claim with equal certainty that a bearded man who lives in the clouds wants gay marriage to be illegal. And then I’ll wonder what the point of this thread is.
I think… you really need to sit down and actually think about what people are saying, rather than just rifling through posts looking for tiny semantic quibbles you can latch onto. You can’t be this stupid. No one is this stupid. I don’t think you’re reading the posts you’re replying to, so much as just kind of scanning the text.
Well, it depends on the type of god you’re talking about. Most theists believe in a god that DOES interact with the real world in ways that are subject to debunking. So it sounds like you’re cool with us saying that THAT kind of god – the kind most people believe in – doesn’t exist.
So, if I were to say, for example: “God as described by the Catholic church is a complete fiction.” You’d be cool with that, right?
You just want to make sure we don’t make any unwarranted truth claims about a theoretical abstract sort of god that never interacts with the world in any way and that we can never ever experience or observe, correct?
Again, you are assuming that if anyone has one irrational belief then they must somehow be completely and dangerously irrational. The vast majority of people have at least one irrational sacred cow. There are exceedingly few people without any real irrational beliefs, since it takes an enourmous amount of learning and critical introspection to come to hold that viewpoint.
See, this is another place where believers make a huge assumption to support their view- that it stands to reason that the dead would be unable to communicate with the living (after returning to consciousness).
Why should this be so? They’re awake, and probably have a lot to say (“you could have knocked me over with a feather”, “I just flew in from heaven, and boy are my wings tired”, “don’t eat green beef”, etc.) but don’t.
The theistic explanation is that we can’t hear them. The logical explanation is they aren’t there.
And some of their conclusions would be wrong, irrational, silly, etc.
An irrational belief is the belief in something for which there is no evidence of existence. Belief in pixies, fairies, leprechauns, unicorns, hobbits, chemtrails, Glenn Beck’s logical and measured arguments – these are all irrational beliefs because no evidence exists or has ever existed that that these things are or were ever real. If I said I sincerely believe that my destiny is being determined by a box of sentient frozen burritos that look and act exactly like a regular box of frozen burritos, I’d be laughed at – and rightfully so. It’s a patently absurd and irrational belief because sentient burritos – frozen or otherwise – don’t exist, and there’s no way I’d be able to produce one. My insistence on believing otherwise however makes me irrational.
So too is the belief in god. There isn’t a single shred of evidence that he exists, so to believe in him, one must have faith – and nothing more – that he exists. That is irrational.
One’s conclusions that he exists based on circumstantial evidence like images of the Virgin Mary appearing in a grease stain, or Jesus on toast, or even less ridiculous events like the “miraculous” recovery of someone from a disease or illness that was pronounced terminal is also irrational because there’s no evidence that any supernatural phenomena had anything to do with it. On the other hand, it is much more reasonable to assume that such a recovery happened for demonstrable medical reasons, even if we don’t have the means to demonstrate it yet, because we don’t know everything about the human body by a long shot, but it is far more reasonable to assume that there is a valid medical reason for its occurence.
No, I would not. I believe a rational man can honestly believe that there is a god. See post #193 for a truncated rationale therefor.
Put another way…someone I know very well claims to have had a religious experience during open heart surgery. This person happens to be a Ph.D. who taught at the college level for over 30 years, and is otherwise personally known to me to be worthy of respect and trust. This person described the experience to me in considerable detail. This person, to my knowledge, is not a habitual liar or otherwise known for telling fanciful tales. I have no reason to doubt that this person sincerely believes the religious experience took place during the surgery. I did not experience whatever this person did. I have never experienced anything remotely like that. Still, I cannot say with any degree of certainty that this person did not have the experience, nor can I say what caused the experience. Could have been some side effect of various medications. Could have been imaginary. Could have been a legit religious experience. No way to tell for certain.
A lot of my allegedly fellow atheists say that, but it is not quite true. There is some evidence. The Bible contains various accounts of encounters with god, and with Jesus. Those accounts are evidence. The finder of fact, ie, the reader, is free to assign such weight to that evidence as seems appropriate.
There is also what I’d call a naturalist approach. One can observe the world around oneself and conclude that all that is does not exist by accident. Perhaps it was created in some unknown way by some unknown entity. We do not know how it all started. Maybe Loki flicked his Bic and caused the Big Bang.
Then why can’t a rational man believe that there are elves on the moon?
You keep moving the goalposts to carve out some sort of special exception for religious claims about the nature of reality. It’s as though, by slapping the label “religion” on it, it’s automatically placed beyond the realm of legitimate discourse. So even if someone advances a hypothesis about the nature of God that IS open to falsification, atheists are not allowed to point that out.
So, if an otherwise sane, reasonable person makes any supernatural observation, we must accept it uncritically? What if, instead of having a religious experience, your friend had seen a ghost, or see fairies dancing the garden, or claimed to have been abducted by aliens? Would you then be chastising skeptics for saying flat out that such things don’t exist and don’t happen?
All I’m looking for is a little epistemological consistency here.
You previous said: “Because, barring Divine Intervention, it is not possible to verify or debunk claims of god in the real world. By definition, such an entity, if one exists, does so outside of what we perceive reality to be.”
But if it is claimed that God is manifesting Himself to people during surgery, that’s clearly NOT “an entity that exists outside of what we perceive reality to be”. That’s an entity that impinges upon our reality with some regularity, and leaves traces that can be detected and analyzed. So, like the elves on the moon, it’s an entity about which we can make rational, empirical truth claims.
And those accounts are contradicted by a variety of different accounts from different cultures. We can’t be absolutely certain that ALL religious traditions are wrong about ALL things, but we can be absolutely certain that MOST religious traditions are wrong about MOST things simply because they are so contradictory. Since most religious traditions are wrong about most things, any reliance on such documents for assessing the truth value of a proposition is highly problematic. It’s like claiming you have strong evidence for an assertion because you read it in The Weekly World News.
No. We can walk out to the garden and see for ourselves whether any faerie creatures are present. We can visit the location of the alleged ghost and see for ourselves if we feel compelled to make a saving throw vs fear or death, or whatever it is you save against to avoid aging 10 years. We can review radar logs and look for other evidence of alien visitation.
With the religious experience, we can note the degree to which said claimed experience is similar to other claimed experiences, if any. We can speculate about possible causes of the experience. We can assess the credibility of the witness. What we can’t do is verify what, if anything, actually happened.
Not necessarily. If one god is possible, then more than one such being is possible. Could be more than one “true” religion.
And I wouldn’t say the Jews/Christians/Muslims are flat out wrong about most things. Honoring your parents, not stealing, lying, killing, committing adultery or coveting…all of that seems pretty reasonable to me, and that looks like six outta Ten.
Loving your neighbor as yourself, doing unto others as you would be done unto, I’m generally down with that.
Not so much on the turn the other cheek thing though. I hit back.
Still, as a basic philosophy, there’s not much objectionable there.
The problem is that a bunch of fuckwits seem to run churches, and they confuse the masses with bullshit.
Is the same true for anal probing by aliens? There are lots of people who sincerely believe they have experienced an abduction. Can we “know the truth” about that?
But that’s as true of the ghost in the attic, and the fairies in the garden, and the alien abduction, as it is of the god in the surgery! Clearly in each case, *something *happened which the individual *interpreted *as a particular sort of supernatural event. But how do we judge whether such interpretations are accurate or not?
You say that we can walk out in the garden and see for ourselves whether any fairies are present. Well, we can also go under the knife and see if God appears to us. If you can falsify the fairies by recreating the circumstances of their appearance and noting their absence, why can’t we do the same thing for God? If every time someone had surgery they saw God, that would a very intriguing piece of evidence for His existence. It would be further reinforced if individuals from non-Christian backgrounds regularly had visions of the Christian God. As an atheist, that sort of evidence would give me pause. But instead we have a situation that’s very similar to the situation with the fairies. People walk into the “garden” all the time, but the “fairy” sightings are so rare and inconsistent it’s more likely that they’re just misinterpretations of other types of natural experiences.