To me that’s a step backwards. Like saying “I have no need for God”.
I prefer to say “That hypothesis is false [whether I need it or not]”
But you’re really saying (assuming the hypothesis is about any god) that you believe the hypothesis is false, since it is not falsifiable.
What I’m saying is the hypothesis that God exists is false.
Also that the existence of God is falsifiable.
I have a problem with the view that “Until evidence for his existence is presented to me I do not believe in God” because you might as well say “Until evidence for the existence of Superman is presented to me I do not believe in Superman”
But I would MUCH rather say “I strongly believe that Superman doesn’t exist because the idea of superman is just too far-fetched to possibly be true”
Which is different, a BRAVER point of view to hold.
That’s where I start from: a position of Ignosticism. That is: Define god in a way that satisfies all believers, be they monotheist, polytheist, pantheist, whatever their culture, background, etc. in a way that all can generally agree on.
It’s hard to ask someone to believe or disbelieve in something if you can’t come up with a general conceded agreement of what it is, assuming we’re asking about a concept that is abstract such as love as opposed to something concrete like a basketball. At least we can show specific examples, empirical evidence if you will, of acts of love. But where does one start doing so with god(s)? Other than probably being the creator(s) of everything there is and (usually) supposed interaction with humans, is little common ground beyond that .
I’m not sure that one can even get past the first example to the next question which is: Why is / are the deity(s) of any one religious belief more likely to exist that another? In other words, prove that Christianity is more valid than Hinduism or that Shintoism is more valid than Deism.
Consensus doesn’t make an opinion correct.
As I’ve said in another topic, I’m an apathetic agnostic, so I’ll keep this concise, if possible, unless I start ranting and am too lazy to edit.
I can’t believe in any particular god, because there are so many to choose from, and I’ve got a good enough imagination to invent more. If not, I’ll just define variables for these unanswerable questions and iterate them. It doesn’t really take that many unfalsifiable variables about beliefs before you have possible gods hiding behind every atom in the observable universe, and since they’re all unfalsifiable, there’s an infinite supply of possible things to damn you or save you or get you dipped in cosmic marmalade and fed to interdimensional fruitbats in order to keep gravity working.
Even if you limit questions to yes/no, you have a billion possible gods to worry about after 30 questions. People go to college for years studying this stuff, so unless the courses are downright non-challenging, there are more than 30 things that any particular god may or may not have instructed or mandated or will punish you for doing, ignoring the fact that there have been LOTS of gods in the past who were believed in just as fervently as the current batches.
Which God? The existence of the god who created the universe 6,000 years ago is indeed falsifiable. The existence of the deistic god isn’t. Some of the more clever modern religions have defined their God to be unfalsifiable - like theistic evolution.
Strong belief is different from an absolute statement about something. Superman isn’t a good example, because there is only one of him - well, before the Crisis, that is, and we know where he comes from. God is an ill-defined term.
The null hypothesis is no god, there is no reason to believe in any god until someone brings a bundle of good evidence, and it is perfectly reasonable to strongly believe no gods exist. I believe that also. But belief is different from proof and knowledge.
Plus, it keeps the theists from saying “prove it.”
It’s the word “belief” that irks me.
I think there is no god. Or: I don’t think there is a god.
I see no reason to think there is a god and my reason stops me from thinking there is one - without reason.
I’m pretty certain there is no god. (But as I said on another thread in this forum, I admit it is possible that I am wrong.)
I don’t see the current conceptions of God being any different than the Viking’s belief in Valhalla and Odin and Thor, or the Roman’s belief in their various Gods, or the Egyptian belief in their various Gods. All were constructs of pre-technological societies, in an attempt to understand the universe they lived it and to be able to emotionally deal with the concept of dying.
Now we know better. We have the scientific method, and the tools with which to peer out into our universe and understand it. We have logic and science and reason to guide our thinking.
I don’t ‘believe’ in God because I have no reason to believe in God. There is no evidence at hand that requires God to explain. There are no anomalies we have found in our search of the universe that can only be explained through divine intervention. There are no testable theories that require a God to exist.
Futhermore, with respect to the Judeo-Christian God, we have plenty of evidence that contradicts the suppsedly infallible word of God as written in the Bible.
Therefore, I simply don’t consider God a factor, just as I don’t waste my time wondering about whether my current cold is caused by tiny dwarves living in my stomach, or whether there’s a face on Mars that signifies an advanced civilization. It’s all created out of whole cloth by the mind of man. Life’s too short, and REAL mysteries too numerous, to waste time believing in human fictions that have no evidence to support them.
Is this a good time for a SDMB agnostic/atheist smackdown? Of course! [1]
Belief, courage and dread
I don’t have an opinion on whether Mugabe of Zimbabwe will remain in power in 2011. It’s not that I think such a question is unknowable at the moment. It’s just that I personally don’t have sufficient information to move to a conclusion.
So I suspend judgment, which is something rather different than B~P, where P is “proposition”, B is “Believe” and ~ is “not”.
However, if I did conduct a careful investigation my conclusion would be probabilistic: I’d lay odds of Mugabe remaining in power based upon his age, his health and the record of tyrants who seek to overturn (or “redo”) lost elections.
Which is to say that while belief may be binary on an emotive level, it is more of a continuum within a decision-theory context.
Ok, what about G-d?
Subjectively (for some reason) I don’t want to get this question wrong: I don’t want to make a decision with a insufficiently strong basis, so I reject BP and B~P, pending a better understanding of the issue.
Metaphysical concepts I don’t understand
The precise extent of G-d’s power and benevolence is a matter of some controversy. But it seems to me that most notions endow Him with a consciousness.
I have very little sense of how consciousness is created: if there were a better model of it, then I might know whether it is necessarily tied to grey matter or whether it could arise from other material or nonmaterial stuff.
Conceivably, we could have a workable model of consciousness within the next 50 years.
I’ve come across a 2nd puzzle. Apparently most (not all) mathematicians believe that math is not created by humanity, but rather exists independently of it. Fractals, in particular the the Mandelbrot set, are a good example of this. Somebody certainly discovered it (though apparently is wasn’t Mandelbrot). But its intricacy is basically without bound: sure, some individual worked out the formula, but the actual image of it (or rather the conceptual graph) follows from the math.
But if math is discovered, and math is not made of matter, what the heck is it? Basically, I would require a taxonomy of what we mean by “Existence”. What sorts of nonmaterial things exist, and how do we assess their evidence?
This problem may be solvable as well. Indeed, there already may be a workable treatment of the issue.
But pending better information, I suspend judgment on the G-d question.
[1] It’s odd how seldom this occurs.
This is one way to define non-existence.
I think the original poster is asking about the differences between the following two phrases: “I do not believe that borogoves exist” and “I believe that borogoves do not exist.” Put that way, the analysis is straightforward. The difference between the two is what is negated: belief in the first and existence in the second. With the first, with no belief, a paraphrase might be that “I do not have an opinion as to whether borogoves exist or not.” But with the second, with no existence, a paraphrase might be that “I know what you mean when you talk about borogoves, but I believe that such things do not occur in reality.” Consequently, if you want to convince a person that borogoves exist, you would respond to the first by teaching them about borogoves–followed, perhaps, by evidence–but to the second by immediately presenting evidence to counter an existing belief.
There’s also “believe in” as a phrasal verb, which could mean an assertion of truth (“I believe in gravity”), an opinion of propriety (“I believe in chastity”), or an expression of confidence in the subject (“I (do not) believe in the President”). But I think the original poster meant to use it in the first sense, which is why I paraphrased above as I did.
In any of these interpretations, the statements are functionally equivalent if there is a belief that borogoves do not exist. When this belief is shared among all participants in the conversation, the differences between these statements may be ignored. And, of course, people don’t expect their language to be critiqued like this in common use, and so there too the differences may be ignored. But the statements may convey different things if the person making or receiving the statement does not have the belief that borogoves do not exist. Context makes all the difference.
I think the context of a statement is particularly important when talking about God. “God,” to me, is shorthand for a set of social realities, even when believing in God is understood to mean believing in a physical entity. (And I am one who believes in God in the physical sense.) God, then, is a context; believing God exists means believing that the world is incomprehensible yet navigable if we follow these guidelines handed down by tradition, while believing God does not exist means believing that the world is navigable if we follow whatever guidelines we can reason out from what we know.* The conclusion is that if you’re having a good discussion with someone but find a dead-end at a religious belief–one of you saying “I believe God requires this answer” and the other saying “I believe God does not exist”–that dead-end can be avoided by examining what implications both answers have in the context of their respective societies. Examine what you (and they) mean, not just what you (and they) say; the same words have different meanings in different contexts, and “God” is an easy context to misunderstand.
The context when talking about God is particularly important to me because I use God-as-context, and often do not use the word “God,” when talking with atheists or to agnostics in regards to a subject other than theology, but I use God-as-physical-entity when talking with other people who share my basic beliefs.
In brief: “I don’t believe in God” leads me to wonder “do you care whether God exists?” while “I believe God doesn’t exist” leads to me think “you’ve thought about this and made up your mind,” yet the two statements may be synonymous when heard by someone else.
*My argument against that latter, atheistic approach is that “reason out from what we know” is inescapably bound to irrational tradition anyway, and so is inherently irrational and unreasonable. Preemptively, I do acknowledge that this argument doesn’t lead to the constructive conclusion of God’s existence, that this argument doesn’t found my belief in God (in all three phrasal verb senses), that I don’t expect it to change anyone’s mind on the subject, and also that reason is required even when following tradition.
Minor correction: in the third paragraph, when the second belief (borogoves do not exist) is shared among all participants, the differences between these statements may be ignored because the belief that borogoves do not exist necessarily implies no belief that borogoves do exist.
It does not work to do away with the concept of a god by deny, disproving even, specific religious expressions of the God. Every religion to ever grace the face of the earth could be 100% wrong, yet there still could very well be a creator God.
Finally! Now can you tell me the scientific facts as to how life was created, where the first particles came from (or the energy that formed them) and what happens to us when we die.
Except that fact that we are here. And according to the laws of physics, if you have an event, it must have a cause. So the first cause was…?
I’d just like to add, that I think most defensible position is completely fine as long as it leaves room for: “but I may be wrong”. And that goes for thumpers and atheists alike.
You, of course, have a cite for the law of physics that says that?
I am very uncomfortable with the thinking that God exists, if you use a loose enough definition of God. Using this “logic”, you can state that anything exists, if you just loosen the definition enough.
Santa Claus exists, if we define the spirit that some feel during that season as a collective “Santa Claus”
Superman exists, if we define Superman as the strongest person in the world.
The Easter Bunny exists, if we define the Easter Bunny as the person who fills the basket and hides the eggs.
God exists, if we define God as whatever caused our current universe to spring into exstence.
I see this approach as nothing more than a desparate refusal to let go of mythology by redefining said mythology until it fits the real world.
Sure. But why believe in him? There could be six foot purple bunny rabbits on some other planet (more likely than God) but I wouldn’t want to believe in any.
Where did Sam say we had all the answers?
Repeat after me: “I don’t know, yet. But I am going to try to find out.”
Again: “I don’t know yet. But I am going to try to find out.”
Once more: “I don’t know yet. But I am going to try to find out.”
Now, isn’t that a lot more satisfying than “The God of the Gaps”?
I’m not uncomfortable with that.
It’s generally understood in certain churches that the Bible is not literally true: the [del]founding fathers[/del] biblical authors are thought to be inspired though they necessarily interpret said inspiration within the context of their times. (Similarly the Catholic church notes that any part of the Bible can be interpreted in 3? 5? ways, only one of which is literal.)
Even some fundamentalists (that I’ve spoken with) concede that Biblical times were different in important ways: apparently less developed societies are thought to require flashy miracles to a greater extent.
So a fair amount of wiggle room is built into received wisdom.
…and speaking for myself, I’ll form hypotheses where I have a workable intellectual framework, and suspend judgment in other cases. [sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup]…and reserve the right to recast this particular criteria if it doesn’t bear scrutiny.
I was raised with no exposure to religion whatsoever. I don’t believe in god because the notion doesn’t make any sense. Why would a belief in god occur to anyone? I’m not trying to sound contemptuous or anything, but it really doesn’t seem to merit much consideration. I don’t dwell on the non-existence of a god pretty much the same way I don’t dwell on the non-existence of vampires.
I do think I’m at least a little spiritual, and think a lot about how society has evolved, how we deal with our own mortality and the curses of self-awareness, but I rarely connect these issues to the existence or non-existence of a god.
OTOH, I have a friend who is a very angry athiest, and he is so virulent in his opinions that it seems obvious to me that not only does he believe in god, but he’s really angry with him.
That’s an odd position. In an ancient culture, miracles were all around - the sun coming up, a rainbow, flowers growing, even birth. Today we don’t need a divine explanation for those miracles, so an inexplicable miracle would be very handy for us unbelievers. (Notice they’ve ceded the evidence destroys faith position.) Do they think scientific progress has somehow strengthened the position of theists?