Your statement makes no sense whatsoever, since all I am asking for is fact and evidence. Until something of substance is put on the table, I don’t consider the question unknowable-I consider it a waste of time.
You claimed that the universe is evidence of a creator-what did you mean by that?
It would help if we used the same definition of “theory”, though. I prefer to use the scientific definition when speaking of matters of science and evidence.
I don’t believe that Czar is the flip side of a creationist, since he is relying on facts and evidence and not speculation, while creationist are, by their very nature relying on faith and speculation to inform their opinion. Certainly I think that at this time it’s an ‘unknowable question’, but there is zero evidence for a divine creator, while the math and observation from science can fill in many, if not all of the answers as to how the universe got to it’s present form, how it was in it’s early development back to nearly the original Big Bang (which wasn’t very big and didn’t bang :p)…and as science continues on, those gaps that a potential God or gods can hide in get narrower and narrower. Granted, we might never know about how the conditions of the pre-universe aligned (though science can do INFORMED speculation on this as well, though it might never be beyond speculation), and can never completely rule out a divine creator, the flip side to that is that such a creator will ever be mere speculation. Unless, of course, said creator does other tricks in THIS universe, which, thus far, there is no hard evidence for.
That goes on the list of “10 Best Question Ducks”
Personally, I’ve never liked duck all that much, and even the top 10 would probably not be good eats from my perspective. But I generously concede that some folks just like duck, so MMV.
I’ve never questioned the goodness of duck.
Or anything fried in duck fat.
I’ve never had question duck, to be sure, but to me duck has always been a bit fatty (usually that’s a bonus in my book, but not with duck for some reason). As I say though, MMV, and my wife loves the stuff.
ETA: That said, I think duck is actually a good indication that there wasn’t a divine creator…if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck (even a question duck) it must be a duck. If the universe can be shown both mathematically and through observation to follow rules and laws that don’t necessitate divine intervention then it quacks like a duck. Q.E.D. really…
Why a question duck? Why not a question chicken?
Simple really…if it looks like a chicken and clucks like a chicken and walks like a chicken it COULD still be a red jungle fowl. No question…
Except you can’t discuss ducks in an echo chamber.
To paraphrase…QUACK, DAMN YOU!!
(Ok, that’s actually a direct quote, but I just love paraphrasing…and it was my emphasis)
Change my opinion about what? I suspect I would continue to be a supporter and advocate of both science and religion.
ETA: And ducks.
The OP was not intended to spark the same old arguments about “Is there a god?”. The intent was to hear thoughts about the discussion as it was presented in the podcast. To me, the most interesting part of the discussion was near the end when the arguments seemed more about personal spirituality than specific religious beliefs. It seemed to me that Tyson and Reverend Martin were almost in agreement about science but semantics pointed them in opposite directions. Did no one else get that impression?
(Personally, I prefer chicken to duck. But that’s just me.)
People don’t seem to realize, especially religious people, that there’s a huge jump between “hey, I made an argument that some sort of creator is possible or even in my opinion likely” and “This is my religion, this is God’s holy book, here’s his prophet, here are his rules, here’s how he responds to prayers, here’s how interacted with people in our history”, etc.
Religious people just try to argue something, using philosophical arguments rather than evidence (Hey, there has to be something, right?!) and just assume that if they can somehow get you to think that maybe some sort of power is out there, some sort of creator, then somehow their specific religion is right.
But they never lead you from “Here’s some signs that lead me to believe there’s a creator” to “The creator is named Bob. He demands that you wear silly pants on Tuesdays and that you can’t have sex until your third marriage or you won’t be allowed to enter candyland when you die” - their own religion is so ingrained in them that it doesn’t even occur to them to try to justify their specific flavor - they assume that if they can get you to believe in some sort of creator, then naturally you’ll just accept their whole religion.
But vague philosophical arguments for a creator support a deist position at best. They don’t support a Christian anymore than a Muslim or another religion with a creator.
So all we’ll end up getting is some navel-gazing bullshit about the nature of knowledge, and how you can’t be sure there’s no god, therefore Bob exists and you better wear silly pants on Tuesday! Religious people have made and refined these arguments for hundreds of years. It’s extremely unlikely one of them is going to make some sort of new, novel, or compelling argument.
Their arguments never provide evidence, or provide explanations as to why their particular god is the best way to fill in the gaps of our knowledge of the natural world, or any of the sort of processes we would use when we actually genuinely attempt to figure out the mysteries of the world around us. Instead, they’ll just get generic arguments about the nature of knowledge that could be used almost as well to justify the existence of Leprechauns or fairies.
So I might be convinced of some particular aspect of the sociological and ideological merits of religion - perhaps someone could convince me that it has a more positive effect on the world than I think, or that a particular religious philosophy is less contradictory or backwards than I thought - but it’s very unlikely that bringing out the tried and true philosophical dicking around to convince us that anything can be true is something I’m going to find compelling.
You know what would be way more compelling than a million ways of saying “Man, there’s probably something out there. We don’t know. Therefore [my religion]”? Show me an actual miracle where the laws of physics were broken. Show me a reliable study that shows that people who are prayed for recover from cancer 70% more often than similar people who aren’t.
Show me something other than exactly the sort of stuff you would expect to see if all religions were not true but there were people who sincerely believed them and wished to make up arguments for them. Because the world we live in is exactly the world you would expect to see if there was no god-like entity that interacted with us, but people believed there was. Exactly.
I will always enjoy a good, honest and informed discussion about religion, but I don’t see it as much use other than an intellectual exercise. In my experience, theism or atheism are both highly experiential positions about what is fundamentally an unknowable question. And by that, I mean, if asking a theist about why they believe in God, they may or may not have a particularly good argument, but in the end, it comes down to some personal experience. Similarly, it seems that atheists either completely lack those experiences, or attribute them to other natural phenomena.
Ultimately, as far as we can tell, we’re confined to our own universe and we can observe that it follows certain laws. Logically, it seems equally ridiculous to posit that these laws are fine-tuned by a divine mind as it does to argue that out of countless, possibly infinite, possibilities, it happened upon this particular arrangement. The existence or non-existence of God does nothing to help give us a useful answer to this question. Even if God did create everything that, in and of itself, does nothing specifically to tell us what his will is, what his purpose in creating us is, or how we should relate to any of that knowledge. Similarly, if he does not exist, while we can then assert there there is no divine purpose or will, it gives us no clue in how we should actually determine what our purpose should be. These are derived from structures we’ve built around these ideas.
The only time these sorts of discussions ever seem to have any effect on someone else’s opinion, is if someone happens to cite a personal experience that aligns in a particular way to a listener such that he latches onto that person’s explanation for it.
And I say all this as someone who does believe in God, I don’t believe there exists any evidence that will convince anyone else that I can present. I can relate my personal experience, and in cases I have, I’ve even had atheists have similar experiences and explain why they felt differently about what that experience meant.
Which is just another way of saying that you don’t have enough evidence to prove the existence of the deity you believe in…but that is not what is being asked for. If you have any actual evidence whatsoever, put it on the table to be looked at. Give a person a reason to even consider the possibility.
On the other hand, if you have absolutely no actual evidence, restating such a fact as “I don’t have enough evidence to convince you” isn’t really, shall we say…kosher?
You could say the same thing about ghosts or UFO encounters or bigfoot or a thousand other things that people believe in that lack evidence. It’s only religion that gets this special social privilege where believing invisible and infinitely-subtle and unprovable and yet omnipresent and infinitely powerful entities control our lives is somehow a reasonable position and is an equally merited position compared to not believing in those things.
Would you give someone the same weight and respect if their personal experience told them that Leprechauns exist and steal our socks? And act as though someone who didn’t believe in Leprechauns just believed differently, not that their position was superior?
Human experience is obviously flawed. The very fact that the world can have contradictory religion with sincere adherents proves this. Even if you believe that one particular religion is correct, all of those that conflict with it cannot be true. And yet there are sincere people who believe in those false religions, who dedicate time to studying their philosophy and even make arguments as to why their religion is correct.
If person A says “I know there’s a god. He’s a big bearded lumberjack in a blue hat who created the Earth 1 million years ago, he hates gay people, and there are no other gods”, and person B says “I know there’s a god. She’s a cute girl in a slinky purple dress, she loves gay people, she created the Earth 500 million years ago, and there are no other gods”, and person C says “we have no reason to suspect either of these things are true”, are these really equally meritorious positions? None of them are more likely to be true to reality, it’s just a matter of personal experience?
Given that we know that human experience is flawed, and that humans will create gods even in the absence of gods (the multitude of religions is proof of this - some must be false religions), isn’t it far more likely, given that none of them actually have any evidence beyond this flawed human experience, that none of them are true rather than that one happens to be true and hundreds of others false?
This is a cop-out. You don’t go so far as to say “you wouldn’t believe any evidence anyway!”, but do you recognize that there could be evidence, right? There just isn’t.
Not a shred of evidence to pick your god over any other god, or over non-belief in any god.
It’s not as though it’s merely a philosophical position that God is unprovable. Most people believe in a God that interacts with our world. He created us, he answers prayers, he does all sorts of stuff. In any of these actions, there could be evidence. If there was a booming voice in the sky all over Earth, and everyone heard it in their native language, and it said “Hey, God here, what up?” that would be evidence. If people of a certain religion never developed any diseases and lived to be 150, you’d surely consider whether they’re on to something. If God occasionally snatched up babies into the sky who were about to be hit by a car and floated them to safety, that would definitely be a piece of evidence towards his existence. And if a god were indeed interacting with the world on a regular basis, as people seem to think, you would expect these sorts of evidences.
So if the operative phrase in what you said is “any evidence that I can present”, perhaps you’re right. But certainly there is evidence that could be presented, if it existed. The idea that atheists are these grumps that are mad at god and wouldn’t believe in him (yes, religious people often think we’re somehow mad at an entity we also don’t believe in) even if we were shown proof is just a cop-out. It lets them dismiss the issue of the lack of evidence without considering it.
I’m a-theistic in the same way that I’m a-leprechaunism or a-belief-in-ghosts. Show me a leprechaun or a ghost, let me examine it to make sure it isn’t some sort of illusion, and now I’ll believe in it. Show me some compelling evidence for your god, and I’ll believe it exists too.
So yes, you’re right, there’s no evidence you could show people to convince them, because you simply have no evidence. You would laugh off a nutter who tried to use the same logic on you to convince you that their belief in leprechauns is real, but believe the same completely baseless beliefs wrapped up in the social institution of religion is not subject to the same examination.
On the subject of evidence I have little to add over and above what SenorBeef has stated so elegantly and eloquently, bravo sir.
The one request I would have, before we even start considering the validity of evidence, is for those who do have a belief in a god or gods to at least have the common decency to define what the entity is under discussion. If you can’t/won’t even do that then any further discussion, evidence or not, is utterly irrelevant.
Definitely this. If you can’t show that the evidence you present points to the deity you worship, you shouldn’t have any objection if it goes into a file marked “Evidence For The Existence Of The IPU”, or any other deity that springs to mind.