Philosophy - God and scientific evidence.

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Only if you think that belief and disbelief require the same standard of evidence.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not following you. People do have their reasons for believing what they believe and everybody I’ve talked to, including you, will express some beliefs they hold on an emotional level rather than on a factual evidence based level.

So you and I as individuals have our own standards of hard evidence and emotional influence that determines what we believe and why. when an atheists says “There isn’t enough evidence for me to believe.” that’s accurate. If they extend that to there isn’t enough evidence for anyone to believe that’s opinion and inaccurate.

62

[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
I’m not following you.
[/QUOTE]
As others have said, the person making the assertion that something exists has a higher burden of proof. Logically, the default state should be disbelief.

63

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
No, it’s not the same. There’s a difference between saying that someone must accept your belief and saying that someone is wrong. Unless you reject the principle of non-contradiction, then the very act of belief presupposes that others who don’t share this belief are mistaken. If you believe in God, you think that others who don’t believe in God are wrong–surely, it cannot be the case that God exists for some people and not for others. Either He’s out there or He isn’t. Similarly, if I have good reason to believe that the traditional God of Christianity doesn’t exist (and I think I have excellent reason to believe this), then I think that those who believe in God are mistaken, just as they believe that I am mistaken. To believe something, but *not * to believe that those who disagree with you are wrong, is to fail the most elementary test of logical thought.
[/QUOTE]

I see your point and agree. The difference is in the details and degrees. I don’t embrace the traditional God of Christianity either but I count myself a believer. In a discussion with different Christians I would find various details of agreement and disagreement that would change from person to person. So do I think they are wrong or right?

In my response to you I was speaking of god belief. please read my response to Der Trihs IMHO it’s a matter of having your own beliefs, being open enough to realize you have more to learn and may hold mistaken concepts, and then allowing others to do the same. So while you may believe they are mistaken and are willing to discuss the matter it is still inaccurate to say their reasons for god belief are invalid because of the subjective nature of those beliefs.

Note that there are areas where there is ample evidence to refute a specific detail of belief.

64

There’s lots I want to respond to but don’t have enough time this morning. I’ll get to them after work.

65

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Logically, the default state should be disbelief.
[/QUOTE]
Isn’t this what Descartes tried? If your starting point is disbelieving/doubting everything, where can you get from there?

66

[QUOTE=cosmosdan]

So you and I as individuals have our own standards of hard evidence and emotional influence that determines what we believe and why. when an atheists says “There isn’t enough evidence for me to believe.” that’s accurate. If they extend that to there isn’t enough evidence for anyone to believe that’s opinion and inaccurate.
[/QUOTE]

I think what is really being said here is that there isn’t enough evidence for anyone to be logically justified in belief. A lot of people thought Paul was dead, but there is a big difference between raw data and true evidence.

No one is disputing that there are plenty on nonrational reasons to believe, but when we ask for hard evidence, the best we get is the internal experiences of a few people.

67

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
If god changes something in this universe, then it will be indepdently observable in some way.
[/QUOTE]
This statement is not necessarily true. God could make unobservable changes, perhaps at the quantum level.

This suggests to me how an immaterial God, outside nature, could have an impact on the physical world. If “reality” is ultimately an arrangement of particles, or vibration of strings, or whatever the physicists’ latest theory is, why couldn’t a God who was not, himself, made of those same particles or strings or whatever mess around with them somehow?

All this, I admit, is sheer speculation. I wouldn’t presume to claim that it is the case, because I have no way to back up such a claim.

68

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
This statement is not necessarily true. God could make unobservable changes, perhaps at the quantum level.

This suggests to me how an immaterial God, outside nature, could have an impact on the physical world. If “reality” is ultimately an arrangement of particles, or vibration of strings, or whatever the physicists’ latest theory is, why couldn’t a God who was not, himself, made of those same particles or strings or whatever mess around with them somehow?

All this, I admit, is sheer speculation. I wouldn’t presume to claim that it is the case, because I have no way to back up such a claim.
[/QUOTE]

The problem with that is that god in this example is still changing something that can theoretically be observed. We can’t observe those kinds of changes now, but we might be able to in the future. You’re almost making a god of the gaps argument, ‘We cant make scientific observations of this phenomena here, so that’s where god does his thing’.

69

[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
So you and I as individuals have our own standards of hard evidence and emotional influence that determines what we believe and why. when an atheists says “There isn’t enough evidence for me to believe.” that’s accurate. If they extend that to there isn’t enough evidence for anyone to believe that’s opinion and inaccurate.
[/QUOTE]
The problem is many believers–in fact, by definition, all believers–assert on some level that X (being a claim that lacks objective evidence) is True. It is most obnoxious when evangelical types then extend this to mean “You must believe X is True,” and furthermore “You have to live your life by the standards of X,” but even just asserting an unverifiable statement as some kind of absolute Truth (“The universe must have been created by an Intelligent Designer; there is no other explanation for the complexity seen in it,”) is intellectually dishonest. (I use the term dishonest not in the perjorative sense of being a deliberate lie to others, but rather an indentification of fallicious premise.)

“Emotional influence,” while we are all subject to it, is not a rational standard, and it is well understood that emotions frequently cause us to make decisions that are utterly irrational. (The also allow us to make decisions when data is incomplete or to complex to break down to basic principles, so they are very useful in an intuitive, pragmatic sense, but they don’t constitute a standard of objective reasoning.) To return to the analogy with quantum mechanics, the basic predictions and results are testable, and thus the overall theory is justifiable via the scientific method. The various interpretations as to what is going on to cause “waveform collapse” or whatever functionally equivilent alternative your preferred interpretation offers up, on the other hand, are not at all scientific; even the best of them assert their “truth” in terms of being sufficient to provide for an explanation of QM behavior, but not necessary or exclusive, and not capable of being uniquely falsified; indeed, many interpretations are actually a result of showing that two or more interpretations are equivilent and thus identical. The upshot is that most physicists focus on doing the math–which works–and save the interpretation business as idle chatter after a tiresome afternoon of cranking away on matricies.

The person making a claim, particularly one that extends well outside the realm of extant knowledge, bears the burden of demonstrating it in a fashion sufficietly objective to persuade skeptics. Appealing by emotion and rhetoric–as effective as they may be in a marketing sense–does not equate to making rigorous, testable arguments for your proposition, and if one is limited to doing the former, it’s only fair to say that their position is far less likely, in a practical, materialistic sense, to be true or even approximately accurate.

Stranger

70

sorry I am late and trying to take a different tack on this one from the current course of the argument so far.

Miracles don’t have to be supernatural. I am sure that if we had a time machine and could go there to examine the miracles with all our modern tools, gadgets and minds, they would have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Ditto for modern miracles. I worked at a shrine where they had a wall full of crutches and wheelchairs of people who had prayed for sanation and had gotten it. So what if the miracle was mediated by some medicine?. Can’t it still be God’s work?

71

[QUOTE=enigm4tic]
right: but this isn’t what keeps happening in these threads. Liberal and others tend to act as though they have a proof that works for other people, and argue from a position that makes every other the position have the burden of proof, even though we have a preponderance of the evidence, because they’re treating them as given positions.
[/QUOTE]

The conclusion I’ve come to is that in areas where there isn’t enough evidence to know beyond a reasonable doubt, such as , God is or isn’t, then coming down on either side of that argument is is fine. Either side insisting the other side should see it their way, when there isn’t sufficient evidence, seems pointless. A healthy discussion about why we believe as we do and an examination of the details can be fruitful though.

72

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
This statement is not necessarily true. God could make unobservable changes, perhaps at the quantum level.

This suggests to me how an immaterial God, outside nature, could have an impact on the physical world. If “reality” is ultimately an arrangement of particles, or vibration of strings, or whatever the physicists’ latest theory is, why couldn’t a God who was not, himself, made of those same particles or strings or whatever mess around with them somehow?

[/QUOTE]

Yes, and some types of theistic evolutionists claim God made changes to genes to cause us, in a way indistinguishable from chance. None of this can be falsified, and all result in a universe which is indistinguishable from one without God.

I’d like all of you “invisible” theists to think about this - if it is true that the Universe has a god whose interactions with it, and with us, are invisible and undetectable, how did this God meme come to exist? Doesn’t the claim for the existence of God stem, at its root, from a human interaction with God? Are you claiming that all these interactions are false, but there is a god anyway?

If so, do you agree with atheists that the concept of God came from purely natural causes, such as a desire to explain natural phenomena or the need for a big Daddy or Mommy looking out for us? Or do you think something else was happening.

It seems to me that a lot of posters need a god, either culturally or emotionally (and I’m not belittling this need) but realize that the evidence for this or any god doesn’t hold up. We thus get very confusing justifications for god.

73

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Yes it is. It’s independent observation of events and drawing conclusions from the observations. No interaction of any gods were observed, so interaction of god is not a valid conclusion. If god changes something in this universe, then it will be indepdently observable in some way.
[/QUOTE]

Scientific method requires a bit more than simple observation.

Burden of proof from either side of the argument, is required only if one party is trying to convince someone else to think as they do. Subjective evidence may is not always reliable but we all use it along with objective evidence to make our judgment calls. IMO that makes it a valid reason for the individual to believe as they will , but not valid for convincing others.

Says who, and for whom? I’ve heard this before and it seems like a slogan without much weight. Beliefs based on subjective evidence should be held provisionally , with an acknowledgment, that there is more to discover and we may be wrong. That doesn’t make them invalid or illogical. That makes them mine different from yours.

74

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Ditto for modern miracles. I worked at a shrine where they had a wall full of crutches and wheelchairs of people who had prayed for sanation and had gotten it. So what if the miracle was mediated by some medicine?. Can’t it still be God’s work?
[/QUOTE]

If the medicine did the mediating, then it wasn’t a miracle.

The problem with this argument is that you’re just tacking god on where you have no evidence for him. Someone was cured, therefore god did it. If you know the medicine did the healing, then why say anything about god? It’s unnecessary, we already have a good explanation. If you can show an instance where there was no medicine involved, and that god did do it, that’s different. But until you can show that gad actually did it, you can’t say that he did.

75

[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
Scientific method requires a bit more than simple observation.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, it does, but I didn’t feel like writing up a research proposal for the purposed of this thread.

If it isn’t able to convince anyone, how can it be considered evidence?

That certianly doesn’t sound like religion to me. I don’t think I ever once heard a hymn that went ‘we might be wrong, we’ll need to find out more’. Isn’t that whole point of faith? Knowing you’re right even though you don’t really know you’re right?

Of course it makes it illogical. You’re not talking about some really subjective issue like whether chocolate is better than vanilla. You’re talking about religion, something people base thier morals on, try to legislate, kill for, die for. ‘God exists’ isn’t subjective, it is or it is not true. Same for ‘god answers prayers’ and ‘god wants me to kill that heathen’.

Using subjective evidence is fine when you’re just ordering ice cream. But are you really going to base your world view, your morality, your behavior on it? Especially when you can do it using actual evidence?

76

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Miracles don’t have to be supernatural. I am sure that if we had a time machine and could go there to examine the miracles with all our modern tools, gadgets and minds, they would have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Ditto for modern miracles. I worked at a shrine where they had a wall full of crutches and wheelchairs of people who had prayed for sanation and had gotten it. So what if the miracle was mediated by some medicine?. Can’t it still be God’s work?
[/QUOTE]
Not to be offensive, but this is a sloppy, spurious argument. It removes any necesssity, or indeed, observational evidence for any kind of intervention, but still maintains the existence and involvement of a deity just under the covers, aping every action and being accorded responsibility without performing any manifest work; instead of “God of the Gaps” it’s “God of the Fog.” If it can be accomplished by purely explicable, conventional means, it’s not a miracle; it’s knowledge and technology.

Stranger

77

Although I could take the easy way out and go for the examples of the many healings that have happened when doctors have given all hope on a patient, the always present probability of a procedure or treatment failing, or the patients opened to find out that the tumor is gone, I will stick to the case of patients with perfectly treatable conditions who receive treatment and are cured (and skip the probability that all treatments have for failure).

Isn’t a miracle the working of God? why would a god who created the laws of the universe have to suspend them? Why would he need to act outside those laws?

There is a spanish saying: “A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando” literally translated as “Praying to God but hitting with the mace”. It means, ask of God what you want, but work to make it happen. You can pray to win the lottery but buy the darned ticket!

All the steps are there in the example of our aspirin swallowing headache victim. There was a desire for something, a communication to God asking for it, an act of faith (taking the aspirin), and a favourable result. That God chose to use acetylsalicylic acid to work his deed is what you would expect from a reasonable god. There is no need for claps of thunder and smiting of firstborns to cure a headache.

That John Doe B took the aspirin with water instead of a prayer and also got cured, makes it a different phenomenom, but one that doesn’t take away from John Doe A’s miracle.

As usual, I find that the objections to an omnimax god, come from expecting him to be showy, capricious and bound to meet every man’s whim on command. God does what God does in the ways God wants and there is no way for us to understand or explain God’s ways. As usual (for me, that is), I believe in an unfalsifiable omnimax God that is beyond explaining. If it can be measured, it is not God. Of course that I have nothing to show for it as proof to a non-believer, but I just feel I need to address the beliefs of those who expect God to be the juvenile monster of the Old Testament. That is not a God.

78

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Isn’t this what Descartes tried? If your starting point is disbelieving/doubting everything, where can you get from there?
[/QUOTE]
You go with the evidence, logic, and Occam’s Razor. We don’t have any way of absolutely proving that the external world or other people exist, for example, but that’s the simplest explanation for the consistancy and complexity of those things. It can’t be proven that gravity is not an illusion, and everything is not actually being made to move in accordance with gravity’s rules by the will of God; but Occam’s Razaor says we shouldn’t include an extra feature like a god without evidence.

There’s simply no logical reason to believe in a god; there’s no evidence that one exists, there’s nothing that demands “God” as an explanation. As well, there’s an infinite number of things that we have no evidence for; out of that infinity, why cherry-pick God to believe in ? There’s no more evidence for God than there is for Darth Vader; why not believe in him instead ?

79

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Although I could take the easy way out and go for the examples of the many healings that have happened when doctors have given all hope on a patient, the always present probability of a procedure or treatment failing, or the patients opened to find out that the tumor is gone, I will stick to the case of patients with perfectly treatable conditions who receive treatment and are cured (and skip the probability that all treatments have for failure).

Isn’t a miracle the working of God? why would a god who created the laws of the universe have to suspend them? Why would he need to act outside those laws?

There is a spanish saying: “A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando” literally translated as “Praying to God but hitting with the mace”. It means, ask of God what you want, but work to make it happen. You can pray to win the lottery but buy the darned ticket!

All the steps are there in the example of our aspirin swallowing headache victim. There was a desire for something, a communication to God asking for it, an act of faith (taking the aspirin), and a favourable result. That God chose to use acetylsalicylic acid to work his deed is what you would expect from a reasonable god. There is no need for claps of thunder and smiting of firstborns to cure a headache.

That John Doe B took the aspirin with water instead of a prayer and also got cured, makes it a different phenomenom, but one that doesn’t take away from John Doe A’s miracle.

[/QUOTE]

It’s easy to do an experiment to determine if God + aspirin + water is distinguishable from aspirin + water. If it is not, then to the best of our understanding God has absolutely no impact on the curing of headaches.

Doctors hardly know everything, and the body is a wonderful thing. Placebos sometimes works. Do miracle cures never happen to atheists? Do the adherents of one religion get cured more often than that of another? Like the man said, crutches may get left at the church, but never artificial legs.

Is the universe where God created aspirin to cure headaches any different from the universe where aspirin just happens to cure headaches? If not, it is poor evidence for any God.

80

[QUOTE=Sapo]
All the steps are there in the example of our aspirin swallowing headache victim. There was a desire for something, a communication to God asking for it, an act of faith (taking the aspirin), and a favourable result. That God chose to use acetylsalicylic acid to work his deed is what you would expect from a reasonable god. There is no need for claps of thunder and smiting of firstborns to cure a headache.

That John Doe B took the aspirin with water instead of a prayer and also got cured, makes it a different phenomenom, but one that doesn’t take away from John Doe A’s miracle.
[/QUOTE]
If I were to describe this as giving God credit for things that happen without his interference, how would I be wrong? In scenario one, the acetylsalicylic acid cures the headache. In scenario two, the acetylsalicylic acid cures the headache. To me, with my limited perspective, there seems to be some basic similarity between the two scenarios.

This reminds me of how some theistic folks pray to thank God for each meal. Never mind that the steps they took to get that meal -earning the money to pay for it, going out and spending that money on food, preparing the food, serving the food- were independently sufficient to bring it to the table, God or no God. But no, in spite of doing nothing to contribute to the meal, he deserves thanks for it. Perhaps he was considering randomly annihilating the chef, and we thank him for mercifully refraining? (“O God in heaven, thank thee for not spontaneously destroying this meal out of evil whim. Please bless my family with similar restraint of your evil whim, so that we may eat again. Please don’t kill me, amen.”)

Now, perhaps I’m misunderstanding you. Perhaps what you’re trying to imply is, that acetylsalicylic is not 100% reliably effective, and that God miraculously ensured that it would work, thus defeating the natural possibility of failure. So, the atheist got lucky in that his natural solution worked, but the theist’s solution though otherwise natural, was assured to succeed.

However if that was the case, there would be a difference in the effectiveness of aspirin on theists and nontheists. This difference in percentage of successes could be observed, tracked, recorded, and studied, to demonstrate a statistically significant different in the effectiveness of aspirin on theists and nontheists. Note that this could be done even if God doesn’t cure all theists; if he cures any significant number of them, his influence could be scientifically detected. The same applies to any other action god performs on behalf of the faithful, that has any effect at all.

So far, to the best of my knowledge, no such differences have been detected. This means that either God doesn’t exist, or God doesn’t do anything, or God deliberately avoids being studied in any way, preferring to leave any theists who might be observed by anyone with a clipboard or a camera to their natural fate. In the third case, God is putting his personal desire for secrecy over his love for his followers. (Perhaps he’s afraid of running afoul of the babel fish proof of his nonexistence. :slight_smile: ) I suppose this is possible, but personally I find it incredible in a deity who was reportedly quite flagrant in his storied past. A more credible (and scientifically supported) explanation is that aspirin works because aspirin works, and no god has anything to do with it.

(On postview, Voyager beats me to it, with 1/10th the words. :smack: )