Let’s say that tomorrow we all wake up to 100% irrefutable evidence of the Truth. The Truth is so beyond our feeble, immature consciousness that we can’t even fathom of fraction of it. Until tomorrow, when–for whatever reason–we are finally able to see reality for what it is and the obviousness of it causes us to let out a collective “DOH!”
As an agnostic, I will be shocked and shaken up like everyone else. But I will probably not be embarrassed or apologetic. I will be able to find comfort in the fact that I never bought the hype or purported to know stuff that humankind would have no way of knowing. For the scientific ideas that the Revealed Truth debunks, I would argue that the available facts supported those hypotheses pretty well. They were our best “stabs” at explaining the nature of the universe. And yet and still, I never treated them like they were anything more than just good guesses. I have never professed to knowing anything 100%.
Can believers of any persuasion say the same thing? Can religious dogma be defended as humankind’s “best stab” at explaining the universe? Why wouldn’t a believer, especially a very vocal and ardent believer, NOT be the least bit embarrassed?
Who would you rather be in the room with when the Truth is revealed? A believer or a non-believer?
It would be revealed to us in such an impressive way that no one who is sane could deny it.
Imagine if we all started having the same exact dream night after night–a dream that grants everyone with profound insight, awareness, and understanding. Through some mysterious force, everyone would be brought to the same consciousness simultaneously. It’s like one moment we thought the world was flat and that the sun travels around the Earth and then the next moment, we all realize how totally wrong were and HOW COULD WE HAVE BEEN SO STUPID!
There would be a few people who would deny the new consciousness or try to concoct sinister theories to explain the massive paradigm shift, but the Truth would be so overwhelmingly evident that their voices would be written off very soon.
Bullshit! All it takes is a little bit of ignorance and a moderate lack of intellectual curiosity.
Even for the well informed and intellectually curious, it is not that there are any truly compelling arguments for the non-existence of God out there (although getting around the Argument from Evil may call for some fairly strenuous intellectual gymnastics).
I don’t see why they should feel embarrassed.
Would atheists feel embarrassed for ever disbelieving in God if tomorrow God suddenly was like, “Surprise, I really do exist”? I don’t think they should. People are just trying their best to make sense of the world based on the information available at the time.
I think there are probably a lot of believers who would admit that they could be wrong but find enjoyment in their beliefs.
The True Believer might find himself overwhelmed and consumed in cognitive dissonance. Common reaction: Double-down and become an even more entrenched True Believer.
This phenomenon has been studied in doomsday cults.
Leon Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult (Wikipedia page) in the 1950’s and observed this. He then developed the theory of cognitive dissonance which he described in his books When Prophecy Fails (1956) and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957).
if someone showed up and began performing miracles, most agnostics and atheists would jump on board when shown that there was no known scientific explanation.
For those who subscribe to religion, a Truth that shows there is no god can be attributed to the work of Evil, Satan, etc. It’s that those people are more stubborn or ignorant, but that there have been hundreds of years of work devoted to defending the faith and countering arguments. They’ve already worked out the logistics of how to respond when such Truths are revealed, they shall not be swayed.
Agnostics may be comforted to know that there is a path that can be followed to bring eternal peace and it’s all been laid out. I think that most Believers would be depressed to find that no intermediate will make them rich or happy. Their piousness and suffering will never be rewarded, and bad people will never be punished. That’s a major bringdown, I wouldn’t want to have my mind blown like that.
It is very difficult to imagine a situation where God existing can be disproven 100%, it would seem to actually require a god to do that. But OK, let be fair and play along a bit.
I have heard it commonly said of non-believers if they were shown proof that God exists, God meets them or something like that, some common reactions would be they would doubt their sanity, et checked for mental illness, etc. And it is because it would contradicts their world view. So a non-believer would look for logical explanation that can exist in their world view.
While a believer would look to explanations in their world view, that of demons/satan, evil spirits, and also the possibility of mental illnesses as they have the benefit of spiritual and medical explanations.
So all in all it boils down to if it’s going to change anyone’s world view, first logical explanations within one’s world view will be looked at before one would be willing to accept they were wrong. One big difference is the believer’s view is logically impossible to prove wrong, while the non-believers view can be logically proven wrong. So while a non-believer can logically become a believer, a believer can not logically become a non-believer. IMHO.
A aside I feel it far more likely for a believer to realize he is wrong and believe in a different god then to shift to a godless view in the face of ‘evidence’
Like most of these thread, the majority of the answers are from non-believers making fun of us.
Assuming “the Truth” means no God in any manner, or spirits: In my case no embarassment at all. Sadness, a sense of refocusing my life, especially knowing that many of the ideas i had about good and evil were wrong in the sense of those concepts not being fixed and unchanging.
No, I wouldn’t go around murdering blind orphans or cheating on my wife.
If the truty were ever irrefutably proven the athiests would end up being the embarrassed ones. I know with absolute certainty that some kind of higher power exists, I have no clue what his plan is or the roll he plays. I have absolutely no concept of what he might be but I know we could not exist without him ( or her or it).
I have my doubts as to how long civilization could last without a belief in him. Without God man will have to assume a postion of full authority and responsiblity for mother earth and its population, scary to think how it might be managed if done for the betterment of mankind.
No offense, but I daresay that that’s terribly naive. Some would change their minds, but it’s safe to say that many would say something like “There must be some explanation. We just haven’t found it yet.”
I don’t think so. If there truly were an all-powerful god, it would be able to do so many impossible tasks in such rapid succession that there could be no other answer.
If something turns a bus into a hippopotamus before your eyes, created pink rain, then made it fall upwards, then levitated you 20 feet off the ground, all in the space of 30 seconds, do you really think that there could be a scientific explanation for that? With millions of people as witnesses, there could be no doubt.
I am convinced that a force that could create the universe from nothing would be able to do something that would knock you off your feet and make you an unqualified believer. You currently have a scientific explanation for things and many of those laws are thought to be immutable. If all of those theorems were modified in a rapid space of time, there would be no doubt.
I believe that monkeys will fly out of my butt first. But if a higher power really wanted us to believe, and to behave ourselves, I think an overwhelming amount of humanity can be knocked into shape in less than an hour.
If you’re talking about something that tries to prove the existnce of God, I think most athiests & agnostics would suspect mind control rather than the existence of God at that point. Alien mind control, even.
And if you’re talking about an event that might convince all those who believe in God that there is no God, how exactly is simultaneous, multi-lingual, identical dreams supposed to accomplish that, rather than reinforcing their faith?