What’s obvious is that you didn’t answer my questions.
I asked **Der Trihs **several questions about his claim that there is no evidence for God. You volunteered a response that didn’t address those questions, and then you say it was “obvious enough”, and, again, you don’t address the issue of “no evidence” vs insufficient evidence.
Okay.
Based on your response, it seems that not only is there “no evidence”, there can *never *be *any *evidence for God.
Is that right?
Indistinguishable, you are I think right in your assessment of my initial point - there is no ability, by way of evidence, to conclusively confirm or deny the existence of God or gods as the broad concept seems to me to be nonfalsifiable. And “proving” God deductively boils down to the single step: Postulate one- God exists. The small points are that it is indeed a rational process to accept postulates and those who argue over which postulate is true in such cases as this, where no significant evidence exists or is really even possible, are doomed to talk past each each other. As you put it, there is no external criteria for truth in this case, so all we have are our postulates. What I have may have confused you with was by inarticulately expressing the thought as well that objective reality of god(s), even if it wasn’t intrinsically unknowable, is less important than how adaptive a belief is anyway, and that it is rational to hold a belief that is adaptive even if objective reality at some point in the future demonstrated conclusively that the belief is inconsistent with objective reality.
Bryan I am curious about your contention that reports of personal experience are not evidence. Do you believe that scientist can study pain? Isn’t pain a reported personal experience? Personal reports are not perhaps the highest quality evidence, but to dismiss it as no evidence at all is too far.
Der I think you keep confusing individual religions with the general concept of a god-postulate. Humans are humans with all of our glory and all of our flaws. Whatever tools exist to create society can be exploited by some for great harm. If it wasn’t religion it would be something else - it is just the flip side of the same coin having rules that allow societies to exist that the same process can be a tool of oppression.
Catchy, we seem to stuck in semantic sidebar. Yeah, Spinoz’a immanent non-interventionalist God was described by some as no God at all. That why he was excommunicated from Judaism. Also an objective moral code can exist without a god who will dole out rewards or punishments for compliance or infractions. Nevertheless the only point is that immanent != interventionalist and theism is to me and others the broadest of the terms available meaning only a belief in god or gods in any form.
Half yes I recognize your point (which is your ongoing thread’s basic premise). I merely posit that your position makes sense from the POV of one who does not already accept any god postulate. From that epistemology’s POV it makes the most sense. From the other’s epistemolgy’s POV it does. Both will conclude self-servingly.
It’s just that there’s no good reason to accept a ‘god postulate’ from any other point of view other than having already accepted it. You’re trying to assert an equivalence you haven’t shown to exist; in my thread, I’ve tried to illustrate that this equivalence actually doesn’t exist by starting out from the – as I think – reasonable premise that there’s no good way to prefer any faith-based view over another.
In other words “No one is perfectly right, so it’s okay that my religion is wrong!”
There are degrees of rightness and wrongness and some beliefs about the nature of the universe are more wrong than others. Believing the Earth is flat is more wrong than believing the Earth is a perfect sphere.
I would argue that we should strive to make our models as accurate as possible while making allowances for human falliability. Most religions don’t seem too worried about how accurate they are. Which is kind of weird, when you think about it … .
No actually, it’s that people have different pieces of the puzzle.
Well believing the Earth is flat is based on the knowledge of the time. Based on what they were capable of observing. Nevermind that the idea that the Earth is flat is generally overwrought. Not as many people believed it as people like to report today.
Sure, I agree with you. As for religion’s accuracy, generally the atheist doesn’t even know what is being observed. The atheist judges religion by it’s lowest tiers without bothering to understand it’s higher knowledge. It’s blown of as irrelevant, so generally, you don’t even know what the beliefs you are judging as incorrect atually believe. Religion is far less concerned with judging the material world. Which is why religious people are generally capable of accepting science, as the vast majority do. Atheists like to think that science is their thing, but it’s not. There is a very vocal minority that lashes out at science, but it’s generally a minority. The rest of it is about the moral life of the person. Christianity for instance is all about seeking out and uprooting the deep-seeded hate deep within. That is something that is almost completely absent from the considerations of atheists who are trying to judge what Christians see and do not see. As an Evangelical friend of mine (who incidentally could hold his own in a discussion of science, but will happily admit his limits) like to say, it’s not apples and oranges, it’s apples and wombats.
Angling to be eaten first, are we?
Standard Defense of Religion # 137-A : “It’s all those scummy humans fault !”
People do bad things in the name of religion because the religion demands it, and because religiousity requires and produces habits of thought ( such as faith and belief in souls ) which are hostile to moral behavior. Not because humans are perverting something harmless. And it’s interesting that the same people who make arguments like yours never hesitate to give religion credit for good behavior.
Of course not. We live in a universe with no evidence of God, because there isn’t one. A god that actually existed could leave plenty of evidence.
We know what’s being observed : nothing. And religion doesn’t have any “higher knowledge”. Why should any atheist take seriously claims of such things that the believers can never produce ?
No, it’s no tiny minority; the majority of Americansfavor teaching Creationism for example. Why ? Because America is a Christian country, and therefore dedicated to ignorance and delusion. The believers are constantly lashing out against science, because science is a tool for discovering the nature of reality. And religion is and always has been and always will be the enemy of truth.
:rolleyes: Because it’s blatant nonsense. Christianity has always SEETHED with hate. It acquired its present position of power because of its unrelenting hostility to everything but itself; by genocide and conversion by the sword and censorship and lies. Not because of any desire to eliminate hate.
The big problem with this, and the reason that the postulate that God exists is different from that of geometries, is that there is no way of reasoning from the postulate to any reasonable conclusion. We’d need a zillion other postulates. We get very different belief systems if we add God loves us, God hates us, God doesn’t give a crap (or even God wants to eat us.) Is God all powerful, or did he just create the universe more or less randomly? Is there one god or many?
If we had a complete set of postulates about god - or at least enough so that we can draw logical inferences from them - we could go about trying to falsify some of them.
There are some versions which are inherently unfalsifiable, like deism. Some are easy to falsify, like God created the Earth 6,000 years ago. Some theists keep piling on postulates - for instance that God made the earth to look old. Logical systems with fewer postulates are clearly better than ones with lots of postulates, especially ones where each new fact contradicting the predictions of the old system requires adding more.
That’s the difference between science and religion. A scientist who responded to data falsifying a pet theory by adding more postulates would never get tenure. A religionist who does gets a Doctor of Divinity degree and a cushy post at a religious college - and maybe eternal fame.
Well, to hurl myself from the semantic sidebar 
how does god affect the “geometry” as per the OP. It would seem that the God that the last several posts have established that you are postulating would have zero effects. This seems to run counter to your initial argument in which a parallel was made between two systems with differing effects (euclidean and non-euclidean geometry.)
So would you mind answering that?
As a case in point, see Thomas Aquinas. He spent his life piling new layers onto an already bloated and unintelligible system, and has become one of the best recognized religious thinkers of all time.
But he spent his life talking in circles and was rewarded for it.
The OP is correct, but extremely trivial.
System A
Assumption: God exists
Rational thought: God exists therefore God exists (this is correct within system of beliefs A)
System B
Assumption: To claim existence of anything requires empirical evidence
Rational thought: No empirical evidence for God’s existence, therefore the existence of God is unknown (this is correct within system of beliefs B)
Am I missing something?
For one, right off the top of my head, it allows an answer to moral relativism. Believing in an objective moral standard to me subsumes some kind of god concept be it even one that may as well otherwise not exist. Without that one can (successfully I believe) argue that right and wrong do not exist other than arbitrary standards selected for by our selfish genes and by societies that have had the most power and influence.
Only if you accept yet MORE unsupported postulates. That your hypothetical God’s opinion qualifies as “absolute morality”. That your opinion of what that uncommunicative God thinks is accurate. That this “absolute morality” is better than plain old human morality. That enlightened self interest and human nature aren’t a good enough base for morality. Just off the top of my head.
Oooo … deep mysteries!
There’s nothing special about religion that makes it any deeper or harder to understand than any other human belief system.
I’m not “judging” religion to be largely incorrect. It’s an easily established fact. Religions contradict each other all over the place. So even if some get some things right, most are wrong about most things.
Take a question as basic as “How do I get into heaven?” Most Christians would answer that you need to accept Jesus as your savior. Most Muslims would answer that Jesus was merely a prophet, not God himself. If you pray to Jesus as though he were God, you will be condemned to Hell.
So clearly either the Muslims or the Christians are woefully deluded about the true nature of reality. One of the central tenets of their religion is dead wrong. Now it’s possible that both of them are wrong, but it’s impossible for both of them to be right.
If Christians and Muslims can get something so basic as “How do I get into heaven?” wrong, why should we trust what theology has to say about ANYTHING? Clearly it’s a flawed epistomology.
Yes, obviously. Your point being?
No it’s just that most people judge without really looking at what they are judging.
This is a fallacy. You’re judging all religion by an arbitrary standard. There is no cohesive category called, ‘religion’, and religions are not in competition with science.
Two different systems. Two different models.
Well it’s possible for them to both be right about some things and wrong about others.
Well there’s that and there’s also the idea that Heaven is somewhere you get into as though it’s a ‘place’ that is kind of flawed. If it is a place, then we can judge it by two different criteria in the same way that you can judge my building which has several entrances. You can get in from two main entrances on two different streets. If I told you one and someone else told you the other would we both be wrong?
Don’t be silly. Religions make claims about the empirical nature of the universe all the time. Many of those claims contradict what we know from science.
At least one of which is dead wrong.
Jesus said “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Mohammed said “Whoever associates others with Allah, then Allah has forbidden to him the garden, and his abode is the fire.”
Which of these teachings is wrong? Or are both of them?
How do you tell which is which? If a religion contains both wheat and chaff, by what criteria do you pick and choose?
If both of you said there was only one entrance, then, yes, you would both be wrong.
No, they don’t. There ISN’T any “higher knowledge” associated with religion. It’s notable that you aren’t trying to defend your claim by actually producing any; just insisting that there is and that atheists aren’t looking.
There is indeed a style of belief called religion. And religion and science are fundamentally hostile to each other, as science is about facts and reason, while religion is about delusion and unreason. They are matter and antimatter.
And only one can be true, assuming that either is. Which is Pochacco’s point; with all those wildly contradictory religions out there, MOST religious assertions must be wrong.
Religions or the religious? Extrapolating complex functions from the terse book of Genesis is problematic, and generally biblical literalism in that regard is frowned upon even by Christians.
Jesus said “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Then maybe one is dead wrong about that part.
I don’t know.
Well I pick it by moral utility myself. But that is heretical to both religions.
Right, but that doesn’t mean we were wrong that the entrance we claimed was an entrance, indeed was an entrance.