:dubious: You obviously don’t know if he’s coming or going.
Then how are you defining “simplicity”? Now we’re caught up in the sophistry Loopydude mentioned. “Magic” is a plenty simple answer. It requires no deep thought or inquiry or investigation of the world, nor much intelligence to understand. You just don’t want to believe it, so you claim it’s somehow not good enough.
I can’t fault you for that, as I agree with you. But so many otherwise-rational peopledo believe in the theological equivalent of magic that I think the concept should be taken seriously as a phenomenon affecting human behavior.
I didn’t misread it at all. The problem is that, like Diogenes the Cynic you are fundamentally unwilling to acknowledge that religion can explain anything. The debate is settled to you, so arguing for the other side is irrelevant.
Like I posted to DtC, I agree with you both about the deficiencies of religion. But you haven’t proved those deficiencies in any empirical way, because you can’t. As you pointed out, they are different animals. And that is also why I agree that Occam’s Razor has no bearing on religious matters. It is a logical tool, while religion is immune to logic.
It doesn’t really matter in the long run though, because Western societies have chose to live in a world (mostly) governed by logical principles instead of superstition. Even the way we are discussing this proves it–why else do we keep trying to apply logical arguments to religion? Only because we believe in the power of logic so strongly. All I’m saying is that while logic explains our world better in many ways, it is still an artificial human construct designed to apply meaning, like language or mathematics. Like Jesus’ Resurrection, it only has meaning when applied to philosophical concepts if you believe in it in the first place. Once a person has made the fundamental choice of which psychological path to follow it’s damn hard if not impossible to cross back over. For the majority of hummanity this choice is never consciously made, but is a result of where and when they live.
Stanley Fish explains all this in much greater detail in the essay I linked to in my first post on this thread. He made a believer out of me.
I didn’t say there wasn’t potential for such evidence. There may well be. There may well be evidence for the existence of God that could convince a skeptic; some skeptics claim to have been convinced by such evidence.
Let me try to be clear. Here are some things I believe:
There are a lot of people who believe in God, or hold other religious beliefs, without having good reasons for their beliefs.
There are a lot of people who believe in God, or hold other religious beliefs, who do have good reasons for their beliefs.
Some of those good reasons could justifiably be referred to as “evidence,” but they are not what a scientist would think of as scientific evidence.
Some of the reasons people have for believing are so personal and subjective that it is difficult to know, especially from the outside but also from the point of view of the believer, whether those reasons are trustworthy or delusional.
Other reasons are more objective. Some people find these reasons convincing, others do not. None are universally convincing or conclusive to everyone, or even just to everyone who has an open mind. The same could be said about reasons for disbelief.
Everyone believes things (including “God is real” or “God is not real”) for a mixture of reasons, some rational and some irrational. I suspect the irrational reasons play a larger role than most of us realize or are willing to admit. Irrational reasons for believing something are not necessarily bad ones, but they are less trustworthy, and less useful when trying to convince someone else.
First of all, let me say I absolutely love Dawkins. Nothing makes me happier than to watch him refuse to pull his punches against theism in a country which can be so sanctimonious in its religiosity.
But I always find his weakness is not so much an evangelical streak as a *puritanical * streak. He finds it hard to tolerate belief in anything that is “untrue,” which I find as unnuanced and puritanically harsh a sensibility as not being able to abide sex that is non-procreative.
Yes, people are tempted to believe in God, because it is a wildly comforting belief system which fulfills so many psychological needs, (and there, dangermom, is a very simple explanation why people become religious late in life. I don’t see any intellectual difficulty with that fact). I, as a pretty strong atheist, have to admit I don’t quite fathom atheists who say they are never tempted to believe. I am constantly tempted to believe in a higher, loving and ultimately redemptive omnipotent being who promises eternal life to both me and those I have loved and lost. I mean wouldn’t it be nice?
Clearly, no matter how strong the temptation, or however many “god-shaped holes” are being filled by belief, that doesn’t make it true. But truth isn’t everything. I think sheer realism will force you to admit that most people just want to believe, like they want to have sex. And I’m not sure there’s really anything wrong with that. We can’t all be sufficiently comforted and awed by the elegance and complexity of the universe. Some people just need a more accessible story. And I think that’s ok.
Why should this be difficult to understand or process? I’ve never encountered an atheist who thought it was the least bit extraordinary or mystifying that adults could fall for scams. If you think that atheists are troubled or surprised by such an ordinary phenomenon, you are mistaken.
Do you deny that specific religious belief is mostly cultural? Are you trying to say that cultural has nothing to do with it? Is it just a coincidence that most people raised in Muslim cultures are Muslims? I don’t really understand what you’re getting at. So a few people here and there become enamored of other cultures or traditions when they grow up. So what?
Being raised without religion does not mean that an individual has been taught how to think critically about religion or that they can’t be vulnerable to predatory evangelism.
I think you’re tilting against a strawman characterization of atheists. What atheist says that all adult converts are stupid? I don’t think they’re necessarily stupid, but I do think that the reasons for their conversion are never based on logic or evidence. It’s always an emotional decision, never a reasoned one.
I think you’re misunderstanding the characterization. All theistic belief is empirically baseless but that doesn’t mean the people who hold such beliefs have to be stupid. There is obviously an emotional component to religion which overrides reason. maybe it’s that genetic component that people are talking about lately (“the God gene”). If there is such a gene, I don’t have it (thank God) but I can still recognize that most humans are driven by some sort of reptilian impuls to placate magical spirits. That doesn’t mean the impulse is rational or that I should be surprised when intelligent people fall prey to it.
What about gravity does religion explain? Why is that even a subject where religion would come up any longer? Actually, what natural phenomenon does the tradition of any religion provide an accurate description of? I think the answer is none, and my understanding is non-fundamentalist theists agree with this. The fundamentalists are quite simply wrong, and there’s no getting around it, if they say their mytical creation narratives are accurate accounts of natural history. Calling them metaphors is just a cop-out, IMO, but at least non-fundamentalists admit the obvious. If you’re telling me the Bible, for instance, somehow “explains” anything about the natural world in a manner comparable to General Relativity’s application to questions about gravity, I’d have to say it does not, in any way, and among rational people its application to such a subject is now completely obsolete. As for the other matters to which religion is applied, what can be said about them? Nothing definitive (we’ll ignore bald assertions to the contrary), so far as I can tell, so there’s no way to apply Occam’s Razor to them. They are, outside of faith, simply beyond the realm of such comparison, and for one who lack faith, they remain permanently open or vacuous questions.
What Occam actually said is that entities should not be multiplied beyond their necessity. In other words, if ity is not necessary to posit a given solution, them it is not logically preferrable to do so. If anything can be explained without magic (and nothing in the universe has ever been discovered which cannot), then it violates the Razor to posit magic.
Mopreover, there is nothing simple about “magic” or “God.” In point of fact, those are not even explanations but just place fillers. Each concept would require so much explanation in themselves (What is magic? what are its properties? How can it exist in the natural universe? etc.) that it cannot be logically justified to hypothesize them when perfectly reasonable natural explanations already exist which do not multiply entia. Hypothesizing “God” to explain something is no more logically preferable than hypothicizing that goblins hid your carkeys.
I haven’t read downthread yet, so I suspect some of this has been said already, but the difference between these two positions is that there are an unlimited number of things we can believe in without evidence - is it foolish to not believe in all of these? In any case, the atheist position is more that it is foolish to act as if a non-evidenced thing existed, and even more so to try to convince others it exists.
Here you are tarring theists with rather a broad brush. There are plenty who are quite capable of practicing science quite well while still believing, and did not attack science at all. I knew a Bell Labs supervisor who was a nun.
Atheists only attack those parts of religion which contradict science with science. So even that is incorrect.
I hope theists read books on atheism just as atheists should read some books on religion. An argument is stronger if you know the opposition. I hope it is convincing - I was convinced once about 35 years ago. (Actually the Bible did it.) I’m interested in seeing how abrasive Dawkins actually is - he is not nearly as much so in print, I’ve found, as when arguing in sound bites - but he did quite well with Colbert.
And why is a theist saying nonbelievers will go to hell (even if said sadly) non-abrasive while an atheist saying believers are wrong is abrasive?
It’s not clear to me how the relative complexity of magic is even relevant. One will find if one tries to describe or manipulate gravity with magic that it doesn’t work. I cannot even apply Occam’s Razor because magic and Relativity are in completely different catagories, i.e. the former fails every test on the phenomenon of gravity, and the latter passes. If both worked equally well, and for the sake of argument magic was simpler somehow (I can’t even imagine such a world, but let’s just say), then this would be a reasonable discussion to even have.
The point of the razor is not “simple to say” it’s “don’t complicate explanations by introducing entire new classes of things and explanations when the existing ones can do it.” Positing the intervention of god or magic introduces a GIGANTIC new can of conceptual worms. Just because it’s easy to say “poof” doesn’t mean that it’s easy to conceptually justify it. Occam’s Razor says that introducing such a thing compounds your explanatory problems rather than solving them.
In short, you are 180 degrees wrong about the application of the Razor.
Here is a simple illustration of the point:
I hardly said all. But don’t you think it is more likely for someone to convert to a religion when surrounded by it than to one with few if any representatives? My daughter was exposed to lots of Mormon things because there are so many around here. She was not the slightest bit interested (having my rational genes) but one of her friends did convert. So I see nothing odd or insulting about my statement.
There are plenty of things that go on in the brain which are side effects of things which do have an evolutionary purpose. As for God being unproveable - the nonexistence of God is unproveable, but the existence of God is certainly proveable - at least to the level we use in a court of law or even above. Consider the events of the Exodus. If that happened now, it would convince me. Some theists use this “God is unproveable” mantra to excuse the fact that God has oddly enough not given us evidence of his existence. And don’t tell me evidence undermines faith - the Biblical God and Jesus had no problem providing plenty of evidence.
Or pagans converting. But how disapproving are they? Many religions don’t feel they are exclusive. In any case, once you have one type of god belief the very effective
Christian marketing message (who cares what god you worship, but ours keeps you from hell) might work. I’m really comparing nonbelief with belief, though. One set of friends of ours has wandered through several religions. Nonbelief is out of the question for them, they need something, they’re not sure what.
‘The Babel Fish,’ said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, 'is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which ahs supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel Fish.
'Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
'The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist say God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
’ “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
’ “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
’ "Oh, that was easy, " says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
'Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central them of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps it Up for God.[right] – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy[/right]
Looks like Dawkins is just cribbing from old friend and fellow athiest/author the late Douglas Adams.
The principle of Lord of Occam’s Razor isn’t that the least complex solution is the best, but rather the one with the fewest gaps of logic and knowledge is generally favored. For instance, assigning the existiance of the myriad of species to a Biblical Creation is certainly a very simple and easily communicated explanation, whereas abiogenesis and evolution via natural selection is hideously complex and convoluted. However, natural selection can be explained and explicitly formalized via observations, a few stock principles of biology, and an application of statistics and game theory. The Creation story, however, requires an enormous leap of faith with no intervening rationale and not only unsupported but factually-contradicted claims. Occam’s Razor favors Darwin even with his thousands of pages burbling on about the lifestyles of barnacles, much to the dismay of people who don’t want to read more than one book in their entire life.
This is the critical argument against organized or formalized religious movements. It’s not simply that they believe in a Creator of some shapeless form, but rather that they believe in a particular God (or, lest we exclude the panthiests, a set of gods) who is, typicallly speaking, involved in the daily goings on of the world and occasionally asserts Himself by burning random bushes, throwing clay tablets with various and sometimes contractory priniciples around, turning people into stone for displaying natural curiosity, killing the firstborn of every family, and generally behaving in a capricious and destructive fashion like a six year old boy with over an anthill. To observe that this doesn’t really seem to square with either the claimed benevolence or nor the interests and activies one would think an omnipotent being would be up to (e.g. building new worlds, molding exotic new species, making intricate artistic patterns out of planetary nebula) is understating it. Most gods worshipped by men act like petulant children.
I have to say of all of the various pantheons the Hindu gods have the best stories, while Buddha seems to have cornered the market on fun. Overall, though, none seem to have merit in terms of actual explaining the behavior of the natural world in any way except in retrospect (“Oh, yeah…that tsunami destroyed the villiage because Ghohallah willed it,”) whereas the science-based approach to things is to collect actually facts and observations and piece them together into a theory which can be used to predict future discoveries or actions.
This in no way disproves the general notion of a supernormal, omnipotent, behind-the-scenes intelligence that is responsible for making all of the mechanics of the Universe run smoothly, nor does it seem likely that there is any method of disproving the same. There are, however, many falsifiable and demonstratibly false claims made by specific religions (including and most specifically Christianity), and the refusal to acknowledge and accept these errors and the nullificaiton of many of the fundamental claims made by members of the religion, along with dogmatic support for alleged events (virgin birth, transubstanciation, whathaveyou) without a shred of evidence and which seem manifestly unlikely is what feeds the umbrage Dawkins feels (and I share) against religion; it is a deliberate, conscious decision to be irrational in a very fundamental and life-altering way, often to the detriment of society.
Claiming that many of the events and stated principles in the Bible are merely metaphorical is nothing more than a semantic end-run around logic. “This doesn’t mean what you think it means; it means what we tell you it means.” (We’ll give the Unitarians credit for at least letting you figure out what you personally want it to mean, but that only makes it less dogmatic, not more rational.) As knowledge of the natural world has increased and diminished the necessary role of an Omnipotent Honcho, God has retreated into the gaps. We’re told to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” and have faith that somewhere, hiding behind physical laws, geological observations, and deep field surveys of the known Universe, all of which contradict a substantial part what formerly comprised the Judeo-Christian backstory, there is still some dude with a halo and flowing robes pulling all the levers.
I dunno about you, but it seems like kind of a silly game to me, about on par with Star Wars fan-fiction or Tolkien groupies, save that the latter groups have never, to my knowledge, used their interests to justify wholesale mass slaughter or subjugation. Methinks Dawkins, as abrasive as he is, has a genuine point.
Stranger
First of all, some atheists just lack belief in any god. So those don’t believe what you say they do.
Second, which God? God is ill-defined. Do you say there is no evidence that the God of the inerrant Bible does not exist, despite there being lots of evidence that events did not happen as the Bible said they did?
If you’re talking about a deistic god, then there is no evidence he exists or doesn’t by definition. How about an intermediate god? Well, almost every verifiable statement in the Bible has shown to be false. No census, no Davidic Empire, no flood, no exodus, no Garden of Eden. What is the minimal set of true facts in the Bible that are required to be true to verify god belief?
Then, all the unexplained causes of natural things are getting explained. Thomas Paine believed in God to explain the Solar System - and that is no longer an issue. Then there is the philisophical evidence against god - the problem of natural evil, the incompatibility of omniscience and omnipotence. There is the design of the universe - what god would design a universe where so much of it is useless or deadly to us, and where he had to wait 13 billion years before someone got evolved enough to worship him?
So there is plenty of evidence against plenty of gods. I don’t which god you mean, and if any of this evidence counts against him. But if you develop a model of a world with a god, starting from first principles, not trying to match it to ours, and compare it to ours and to the model of a world without a god, the godless world is much closer to reality.
Jesus Christ.
I would call demonstrable falsehood a rather large gap of logic, so large, in fact, that the application of Occam’s razor is superfluous, if not completely inappropriate, when comparing the false “explanation” with one that has even a measure of accuracy. I can’t use Occam’s razor as a means of selecting competing models when there simply is no competition. The moment a creation myth is falsified, one must either deny the falsification, or apply the myth to different sorts of problems. One must either be simply wrong, or exit the debate entirely. One does not use Occam’s razor to falsify, goddamn it, but to recommend, especially when either explanation has passed evidential testing. I think a good application of Occam’s razor would be using it to make judgements about the promise of the Tyconic or Copernical model of the solar system. At the time the validity of either was most hotly contested, both could be used to make as accurate predictions about the motions of heavinly bodies as was practical in those days. Genesis vs. Standard Model of the Big Bang? There’s simply no comparison. None. Occam’s Razor be damned, it’s beyond apples and oranges.
No, you are 180 degrees wrong in your understanding of what I am trying to say, as are Loopydude and Diogenes the Cynic.
First of all, superstition, by definition, doesn’t require conceptual justification. If it did, it wouldn’t be superstition! As soon as you start trying to mix the language of logic and the supernatural you are wasting your time. Superstition can’t be debunked by arguing logically with the superstitious, and science cannot be undermined using theological arguments on logical thinkers.
For some reason posters in this thread are hung up on Occam’s Razor, but as I’ve already said, logic tests like the Razor have no application to the fundamentally illogical within the illogical’s own set of values. I might as well say fornication is bad because God forbids it. If you don’t believe in God, than why should you care what he might think of fornication?
The Razor has been around for 600+ years, but religion is still with us. How do you explain that? Obviously Occam’s Razor does not cancel out the benefits people derive from religion. uglybeech has a point.
In addition to this list, one must remember that atheism is lack of god belief, not justified lack of god belief. An “atheist” for a while might be pissed off at a particular church, and not have any other reason to lack belief. Another reason for believing is fear. It appears that some theist tried to convince both Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov that it was time to accept god while they were dying. Theists seem to like the fantasy of the atheist seeing the light at the last minute - for instance the Lady Hope myth about Darwin. I’m sure it happens sometimes - glowing angels may be easier to face than nothingness for some. Doesn’t mean it’s true, though.
I’ve already linked to a definition. If you want to re-word it to fit your thesis better, you are on your own.