People believe in God without evidence.
This is simply not the case. People believe in God even though they cannot repeat their results in a lab. That is completely different from lacking proof for themselves. It may have been proven to them, but the task is too monumental for them to prove it to others.
Erek
What does the inability of a believer to repeat results in a lab have to do with the nature of God? Aren’t you really asserting something about the nature of the believers; that is, that they are unable to prove God to others?
Erek doesn’t have to prove his belief in God to me or I to him. Others are skeptical and Erek is questioning or attempting to undermine their skepticism.
Ok it should be a fundamental mistake about the belief in God. That would be more accurate.
What I am saying is that there is this idea that many people hold that people believe in God without evidence. I dispute this, many people believe in God based upon direct experience, and cannot necessarily repeat the experience, much in the same way that I cannot prove the existence of the color red to someone who is color blind. This however, does not mean that MY belief is irrational. Proving God is kind of like that elusive “theory of everything”.
Erek
Look at the title of the OP. What does undermining skepticism have to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God? I am not asking him to prove anything; he is the one who introduced the topic of proof. I am merely suggesting that text of his post refers to the nature of the believers rather than the nature of God.
You seem to ignore that I reframed my poor title choice when you brought it up the first time.
Erek
I suppose what may be happening is different definitions of ‘evidence’ are in play. In a scientific inquiry, a phenomenon that only ocurs to one person does not constitute evidence.
A direct experience of God would be a revelation. It is evidence that is compelling enought to convince you, but surely you understand that no one else would necessarily feel that way.
I think that it would be quite easy to prove to a color blind person that red exists. Is it your contention that we can only believe what we see?
I should have previewed. Sorry.
That’s not the issue. Belief is an internal state, so your testimony to your belief is sufficient evidence of it, lacking counter-evidence. What we’re talking about is evidence for the existence or nature of god. I can both accept that you believe in god while not believing in god myself. No contradiction there at all.
many people believe they have been abducted by aliens based on direct experience. Do they have the same or less reason to believe this than god-believers?
Our direct experience is notoriously unreliable. When I’m tired in a meeting, I hallucinate all sorts of things, but I filter them out. A person believing they have had direct experience of either an alien or a deity needs to look for confirming evidence. Did you learn something that you did not know that could be checked? Is there physical evidence of the experience? If not, then the hypothesis that your mind is playing tricks on you might be more likely than that god or a gray spoke to you.
Your experience might be normal, but believing that it maps to an external reality might indeed be irrational.
You cannot hunt or search for God . You cannot see hear taste smell touch God. You cannot test for God. You cannot know God We exist because of God. God just is.
So how come I don’t believe in God, if God just is?
Isn’t it existential theory - if you believe something exists, then you see it and if you don’t believe it, you don’t see it?
How should I put this? We exist because your mommy and your daddy loved each other very much …
Actually, I believe that is the very definition of irrational.
I can accept belief in God as a metaphore or a feeling or intangible concept. The problem is that people’s beliefs tend to turn God into this all powerful bearded man on his throne in heaven characterature. If you believe hard enough and pray hard enough and treat the Bible litterally enough, he will take an active role in the events of your life. Sole survivor of a bus crash? God was watching for you (but not, apparently the other 45 passengers). Lost your job? God will provide (apparently not with a job though).
I’m somewhere in between. I object to people placing God outside themselves as you do. Some distant all powerful father figure who dishes out punishment and reward from his perfect set of rules {which, despite their perfection, make very little sense} I think what mswas is talking about are those personal expiriences and epiphanies that are very real subjective evidence of …something more. The use of the term God has become more of a metaphor for me as well, as well as prayer to that God. It’s a tool to help focus my thoughts on whatever that mysterious something more is as well as a handy in conversations with believers.
Is the evidence measurable?
Is it replicable?
If the answer to either is no, then the evidence cannot be used to test hypotheses and drive results. Consequently, it ain’t evidence.
This does not mean that it is normatively bad for people to believe or that there is no personal utility gained from doing so. It simply keeps this issue out of the realm of scientific inquiry, where, without measurable and replicable evidence, it does not belong.
God, by definition, cannot be proven to exist using the tools of science. Science deals only with natural phenomena. If God were to be proven to exist using scientific methods, He would no longer be God. He’d be just another natural phenomenon.
I would put it htis way: God is man’s invention in order to explain the unexplained. As humans understand more and more about the natural world, God gets pushed further and further into the distance (time and space). We’ve gone from: “God is the guy who hurls lightning bolts” to “God was the spark that generated the big bang.”
No one is claiming it SHOULD be taken scientifically. The issue is that it’s equally unscientific to claim that someone else’s experience is not real. They have had it proven to them, they have seen the evidence, people will have lot of evidence to TELL others about, but they might not be able to produce the evidence. If there was a murder, and I saw the bloody knife, and I ran off to call the cops, the murderer could return to the scene grab the bloody knife and go, and I could NEVER reproduce that evidence. Doesn’t mean that evidence is not there.
It is the condescending idea that people’s direct experience isn’t necessarily valid. Lot’s of people have direct experience that someone proved something to them using a bunch of facts and figures, and they think they can reproduce it. How do we know their direct experience of reproducing something in a lab is valid?
All anyone knows is from direct experience, it’s is a conceit to think that science is any different. The experience of having something proven to you scientifically is the same as any other direct experience. If someone is deluded about the nature of God in such a way that it makes their entire life a delusion, then how come people who believe what has been proven to them by science is not a delusion that has deluded their entire life?
So the issue is that the person experiencing God isn’t believing in a vacuum of evidence. They are believing without the ability to reproduce that evidence. This isn’t even a subtle distinction, it should be glaringly obvious to anyone who likes to hold critical thinking skills in the highest esteem, yet this is a common mistake people make.
I am asking for skeptical consistency, which people on this board in particular rarely have. You have people who are part of the “Rational Club” who think that their membership in this club somehow makes them rational, as if they repeat the rational mantra over and over that they will suddenly become rational. If you point out that they are irrational, they will defend rationality as though you were attacking rationality. It is perfectly rational to believe in God if God has come down to you and shown you that he exists. It is perfectly rational to be skeptical when someone tells you a story that you have no proof of. It is completely IRRATIONAL to believe they are wrong because they lack the ability to prove it to others.
I’ve flown in an airplane. If you’d never known what an airplane was, I might tell you about this experience, and you’d be skeptical. That doesn’t mean that I am irrational for believing the direct experience I had of flying in an airplane, even if I have no way to prove to you that airplanes exist.
I’m arguing for true skepticism, not this faux skepticism that is so common on these boards.
Voyager I have no reason to doubt that a person was taken by UFOs nor do I have reason to believe them. Therefore I remain skeptical. For me to form an opinion, one way or the other without proof, would be anti-skeptical.
My question to you would be, if direct experience is unreliable, then how do you know really if any of the things that were ever proven to you actually were?*
*Finds it funny that Descartes who taught us not to trust our senses also thought that “I think therefore I am” proved the existence of God.
Erek
My knowledge of physics is pretty spotty, but I’m pretty sure it would be no great trick to prove the exsistence of the color red to someone who is colorblind. It’s a wavelength of light with a specific frequency, which would be trivially easy to replicate in a labratory setting. All you have to do is isolate that wavelength and tell the colorblind person, “Light within this frequency range is what we refer to as ‘red.’”
As for the actual point of this thread, I think mswas has assmebled himself another fine collection of straw men. When one says, “You can’t prove that God exsists,” I think it is generally understood that what is being said is, “You can’t prove that God exsists to me.” Which the OP has already admitted. Knowledge of God is entirely personal. There’s no real point in trying to convince someone else of his exsistence, because God will either choose to reveal himself to that person in some way on his own, presumably leading to belief, or he will not, in which case the efforts of the believer to proselytize comes off as delusional. Belief in God is not something that can be shown through argument or experimentation. In that sense, it is irrational: it doesn’t come through rational thought, but through faith, which is more akin to emotion. Doesn’t make it any less valid, on a personal level, but when it comes to discussions of an ethical/moral/social nature, it renders him impotent as an effective argument. If you can’t prove the exsistence of God objectively (i.e. rationally) than there is no reason for me to accept him as a predicate for any particular mode of behavior.
No, it’s not unscientific to say the experience isn’t “real”. That’s what sceince IS-- making observations that can be repeated. If it’s only “real” for a given individual, then we’re not dealing with science.
You need to divorce yourself from mixing science and religion. You can’t say that God is real (in the scientific sense) to you, if you cannot convey that reality to another person. You believe in God. Fine. But your belief is not scientific-- it’s based on faith.
God is actually the simplest thing to prove in the world. It is cognitive dissonance that people like to hold up in the political struggle between science and the church that gives people the difficulty to understand that God most definitely exists.
Lets say God is purely a meme. This is wholly irrelevant, because you live in a system that contains MANY MANY MANY people who DO believe in God, and they affect what you do, what you think, what you believe through a magical act we like to call “relationship”. The thing is that there are a certain type of people who want things to be reduceable to convenient number systems and bullet point lists, so much so that what is right in front of their face is obscured. If a large percentage of the populace believes in God, it is deterministic as to how society functions. It’s that simple. There is a force called God, and to deny it is puerile, because you are being affected by it while you are denying it. You have entered INTO this discussion, therefore God is affecting your life right now. God the meme that is.
There is a war for consciousness and it’s a pure power struggle, nothing more. Neither side is more right than the other, it’s only about the struggle for control of the political will of the collective consciousness. By the same token, you’ll get the odd person who will deny the concept of the collective consciousness. The most frustrating thing is that they cannot appreciate the delicious irony of arguing against a collective consciousness on the internet.
Something that I have found characteristic of most atheist debates is that atheists are resisting what they see as a control mechanism. They are disputing something’s existence in order to not be controlled by it. Of course anything one is resisting is controlling them. I don’t buy atheism because the very word atheism has ‘theism’ in it. If the concept of God did not exist, then there wouldn’t be any way to be opposed to it. God exists because it is a powerful meme that is given power by the will of many people, who choose to give it power. In the end it is a metaphor, an attempt to understand the system in which we exist, and a way to understand our ability to affect that system’s form.
Erek