Only on the details (“was the car red or blue”), not on the accident itself happening.
Since car accidents leave physical evidence, let me alter the analogy somewhat. Suppose the question at issue is whether a man ran down a particular street at a particular time of day. Ten people were on the street that day. All ten reported that a man ran down the street, but they all differ on certain details (jacket color, hat or no hat, etc). Is that sufficient reason to say that a man didn’t run down the street? Isn’t the better interpretation that a man did run down the street, and that the fallible eyewitnesses are simply misreporting the details of what they actually saw?
N.B.: Once again, I’m not of a mind that one should accept deism on the say-so of any one person, or any group of people. That’s not the point of the analogy. The analogy is a response to Voyager’s post on scientific measurement – the point being that discrepancies in self-described spiritual experiences would not invalidate the concept of the spiritual experience itself. **
The original question remains unanswered (at least as far as I can tell): Why do some so-called “skeptics” demand empirical proof of something before they are willing to believe it, except when it comes to their religious beliefs?
The closest thing to an answer I think we have seen is from Dewey, who has basically said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that the supposed existence of God is unique within the subset of supernatural phenomenon in that it cannot be proven either true or false, whereas other supernatural phenomenon can be proven false. Therefore, the normal rules of skepticism do not apply.
I continue to maintain, however, that this is a very limited definition of God that is not widely held by those who claim to believe in God. God, to most believers, is more than simply an unseen force that can interact with you on the spiritual plane but is unable to have a direct effect on the physical world. To the vast majority of the world’s Christians (most of whom are Catholic), for example, God is a being that physically created the earth, parted the Red Sea, sent down his only-begotten son to die and be resurrected for our sins, inspired the words of the Bible to be written down and preserved, etc. These are actual claims that can be subjected to empirical analysis and falisifiability. And yet, many so-called “skeptics” refuse to apply empirical analysis to their religious beliefs.
Personally, I’d like to see some responses from people other than Dewey – people who believe in God as he has traditionally been described over the centuries, and not some new-age cop-out that redefines God so narrowly that empirical logic cannot be used to even discuss the concept of his existence.
Nice work, godzillatemple. I only have one quibble: Dewey’s God can still be logically analyzed – it’s just that he doesn’t like the result.
Which I think is the answer to the OP’s question: skeptics want God to exist; while they may have opinions about other issues, they generally don’t have a personal emotional investment in them. Humans need gods.
Ah, but in the case of religious beliefs, the anology would be more like the following. Suppose the question at issue is whether a man ran down a particular street at a particular time of day. Ten people were on the street that day. Three people claim that they saw a man run down the street (one claims he was a tall, skinny 50-year-old caucasian man wearing a red jacket; one claims he was a short, fat, 18-year-old black man in a blue jacket, and one claims he was a red-haired Irishman wearing nothing at all). Six people state that they were watching the street carefully the entire time and didn’t see anything. The tenth person says he has been instructed by the gnomes in his underpants not to divulge what, if anything, he saw that day.
Is that sufficient reason to say that a man ran down the street that day? Isn’t the better interpretation that a man didn’t run down the street, and that certain of the so-called witnesses were either completely deluded or simply misremembered or misinterpreted what they saw and when?
Well, technically, they didn’t claim to see, hear or feel the invisible man as he passsed by. Instead, the invisible man (who, by the way, is not pink and doesn’t have a single horn growing out of his forehead, thankyouverymuch) touched their soul as he ran by. You’ll just have to take their word for this, I’m afraid. And as for whether the sensation of having one’s soul touched can be explained by any phenomenon other than the aforementioned invisible, silent, and intangible man, well, it doesn’t matter since I believe what I want to believe because I believe it, and that’s good enough for me!
The only argument I’ve ever heard about Edward when challenged with fake-outs is “you’ve got to really believe yourself for it to work.” But even that is easily falsified – get an unedited copy of the tape from any given taping of Crossing Over. I’d wager good money that Edward is dead wrong on many of the “true believers.” Or get one of his audience plants to come clean.
Point of clarification: I never said God couldn’t have an impact on the physical world, only that He does not do so as a matter of course. I think miracles and whatnot are possible but unlikely, and, of course, when it is claimed that they have occured that claim should be tested in accord with similar claims.
This is just humbug on your part. Saying “I saw something invisible” is, by definition, impossible – the term “invisible” means it cannot be seen with the eyes. Ditto for the other descriptors. And it’s irrelevant: no one is claiming to have laid eyes on the Almighty.
As for the rest of you re: the man running down the street – you all need to learn the meaning of the abbreviation “N.B.” and pay attention to text that appears following those initials. **
Actually, this raises an interesting point. I’ve heard it noted several times in here by atheistic posters that man appears to be “hard-wired” to turn to a deity – that man is uniquely inclined to believe in a higher power by sheer instinct.
Well, you guys are staunch evolutionists (a position we share). Where did this trait come from? What survival advantage does it confer on the human animal (or what survival disadvantage would its absence impose)? Birds instinctively fly south for the winter for survival reasons – why is this instinct present in humans?
If there isn’t a God, and there isn’t some other reason for that instinct, then that hard-wiring is useless, the equivelant of male nipples. And male nipples we can at least presume had some past use somewhere on the evolutionary chain. Not so here.
Now I don’t think that is dispositive or anything; indeed, I’m assuming you guys will posit plausible reasons for that instinct’s presence. And of course, for those of you who don’t think man is hard-wired that way, the whole question is moot. But I do think it is something interesting to chew on.
You just described yourself and your beliefs: You cannot prove it, you cannot even properly enumerate it, but you are certain, you believe that God has touched your spirit personally.
Again, why are Edwards’ invisible ghosts, which can only be seen in his mind, any different than your invisible ghosts, which can only be seen in your mind?
-All true. Easy, isn’t it? See how clear that thought is in your mind? Edwards believes in ghosts, isn’t that silly? He’s using it as a shill to essentially extort money from the True Believers.
Now then, isn’t it about time to go to Church, pray to the Holy Ghost and donate to the collection plate?
-So, an intangible, invisible, apparently trans-dimensional being powerful enough to create matter and energy from nothingness with a mere snap of his fingers, who reaches through the veil of space/time to whisper into your ear and yours alone, is not considered a miracle worthy of testing?
TVAA is right, you apparently simply cannot- or worse, will not- recognize the inherent hypocrisy of your stance.
-Non sequitur. You decry those who, as an analogy, mention “seeing the invisible”, yet you have no difficulty with the idea of being touched by the intangible. The nonphysical able to affect the physical.
-You misunderstand. Man is hardwired as a pattern-recognizer and a reason-finder. Our minds, largely unlike those of the “lower” animals, essentially crave knowledge.
We, as humans, want to know the answer. Why is the sky blue? What is beneath the dirt? What makes flowers grow? What is thunder?
In the centuries of early humanity, we had no answers. If you dug down, you just found more dirt. Thunder came from the sky, from all directions. Why?
Someone, somewhere- or more likely, many someones, at many times and places, conceived the idea of gods- all-powerful beings who ruled over all, but lived in the sky, who could not be seen, for their visage was so fearsome a man who looked upon him would fall stone dead.
What proof was there for these gods? Gods apparently had moods, like men. When angered, the sky darkened, lightning flashed and set trees aflame, a thundrous noise was heard, that shook the very walls of the hut.
Um, let’s not piss off god again, eh? Hey God, maybe you want one of my goats? Would that make you happy?
If we did not know about the cycles of evaporation and condensation, or plate tectonics, or microbes and viruses, then what possible explanation could there be? Our minds crave answers- demand them or we feel annoyed, frustrated. If necessary, we will create answers that seem at least plausible to our own minds.
-Pattern recognition provides things like the ability to recognize, say, fruit-bearing trees even when they are not bearing fruit. To note that this particular stretch of savannah, with water and grass, will likely be a good spot to get a gemsbok or antelope.
We recognize the change of seasons which tells us when to plant and when to put in some firewood or stock up on bearskins.
Sometimes those patterns are misinterpreted, and they often were when we didn’t have enough information. The very idea the Earth was a globe, that the land was huge plates of solidified planetary mantle that float about on a vast ball of liquid iron was impossible for man to even conceive of for tens of thousands of years, so how does one explain earthquakes?
In our desire, our need to explain the unexplinable, we simply fabricate an explanation- The Gods move the dirt. Gods are immensely powerful, why I saw them wipe out a neigboring village with a vast wall of water many seasons ago. Why do they do it? Why, the Gods get angry with us.
-Is it? I know some people don’t like the cold months of winter and move to a warmer clime, but is this instinct, or is it stimulus/response?
I know people who move toward the cold when winter looms- they enjoy it, for skiing, or snowmachining, or whatever. Is this an instinct or a conditioned response?
-Or the appendix, or “junk” DNA, or the partly-formed but nonfunctional eyes on blind cave fish. What else out there might be merely a leftover from random and unguided evolution?
-Interesting as a side-track perhaps. Irrelevant to the topic, though.
Hmmmm… So you’re saying that God can interact with the physical world after all. He just doesn’t do so. How convenient for God, since if he ever did interact with the physical world his actions (and therefore his existence) would be subject to empirical proof and falsification.
I’m sorry, but either God is wholly outside the realm of physical existence (in which case his existence cannot be proven or disproven), or else he is capable of interacting with the physical world (in which case his existence can be proven or disproven). You can’t have it both ways.
And let me guess… if a miracle is claimed to have been performed by God, and subsequently shown to be not so miraculous at all, this just proves that the person making the claim was wrong and not that God doesn’t exist, right? Again, how very convenient. God exists without a doubt – it’s just that everybody who has ever described an interaction with him was either lying, deluded, or just plain wrong.
Well, you obviously didn’t read my response, in which I specifically stated that nobody claims to “see” an invisible God.
As for it being irrelevant, plenty of people have indeed claimed to have laid eyes on the Almighty. Moses claimed to have talked with God “face to face, as a man would with his friend.” Large chunks of the Christian world believe that Jesus is the Almighty and that plenty of people saw him. Joseph Smith claimed to have met God and Jesus and chatted with them in a sacred Grove in upstate new York.
Actually, it stands for nota bene (i.e. note well) and I did pay close attention to the text that appeared following those initials. To wit:
And when somebody sincerely prays hard to receive a spiritual experience and doesn’t receive one at all, do you say that this disproves the existence of God or simply that there must be “some reason” why the spiritual experience was not received? If John Edwards cannot give me an accurate message from my dead relatives, it proves he is a fraud. If God cannot tell me that he exists in the same way that he has told you, however, it must be my problem and not God’s, is that it?
Again, to say that God CAN interact with the material world is to say that his existence can be verified and/or falsified. But any time an alleged interaction by God is tested and found wanting, the automatic response is that “whoever claimed that was an interaction by God was mistaken.”
A man may or may not have run down a street, an event which happened around 2,000 years ago.
Naturally, all the witnesses are long dead, and only a few wrote about it at that time. Some recalled it and wrote about it many years, even decades later, a few others- who weren’t even there at the actual event- heard the story from a friend of a friend, and wrote about it.
In the intervening millennia, the very languages themselves have died, colloquialisms abandoned, custom forgotten.
But a few documents recording the man running down the street have survived. They’re redacted many times, changed a little here and there to suit modern tastes and local custom, and translated again and again. The stories of several “witnesses”- or transcriptions of after-the-fact recollections- are combined into one story, to avoid tiresome repetition and to make for a more pleasing tale.
Now, how believable and/or accurate is the current story?
Again: because Edwards can be objectively demonstrated to be faking it. Not so with me. **
That’s a cute shot at the church, but since I don’t recall defending any particular faith in this thread, it’s wholly irrelevant here. **
Worthy of testing? Sure. I just don’t think such a test can be devised. **
Not so. I have never claimed to have been touched by God in the sense that my epidermis has come into contact with some manifestation of the Almighty. In this sense “touched” is a metaphor and does not refer to one of the five senses. I would also say my wife has touched my heart, but by that I do not mean she has cracked my chest open and put her hands on the muscle responsible for moving blood.
The example given, of seeing an invisible man, was clearly not metaphoric. It was meant to imply physical sight of the not-visible, clearly an oxymoron. **
Interesting. Would this consistent misinterpretation of naturistic events have any kind of evolutionary impact? Wouldn’t the group that prays that they not be wiped out by a wall of water in the same manner as their neighbors be at a disadvantage to those who instead pack up and move out of the flood plain altogether? **
This actually made me smile, because I realize I didn’t write the sentence that led to it very clearly. Here’s what I should have written, with the change in brackets: “Birds instinctively fly south for the winter for survival reasons – why is [a similar] instinct [for deism] present in humans?”
I was just trying to draw an analogy to how instinct is important for survival in other animals; I wasn’t asking about humans seeking warmer climes. You’ve answered that question, of course, but I wanted to explain why that sentence was there. I can see why it would seem bizarre otherwise.
When did I ever say God was incapable of interaction with the physical? I think I’ve been pretty consistent in only saying He elects not to. You have no reason to act surprised about that.
I’ve also been pretty consistent about saying claims of divine intervention into the physical world should be subject to rigorous scrutiny. I am always skeptical of such claims because I do not believe God is terribly interested in the physical. Thus, I would be very surprised indeed to find an act of divine intervention on the physical that withstands scrutiny. I hold it out as a possibility, but I don’t expect to actually see it. **
Yes, your cynicism notwithstanding. Well, yes for me anyway – again, I don’t expect anyone to accept the divine on my say-so. I know my own interactions with God, and believe them to be real. I don’t know any of the folks who are making claims of the divine, much less know them as well as I know myself. Given the option of believing a stranger is a fraud or mistaken versus disbelieving my own experiences, the former seems the more prudent course of action, for the same reason that, all things held equal, I will take my wife’s word over a stranger’s. **
I was directing that portion of my post to TVAA, not you. **
In which case, they wouldn’t be saying “I saw an invisible man,” they would be saying “I saw a burning bush” (or whatever). I understand the point you’re making (see below), but I thought TVAA’s response was an attempt to toss out some semantical absurdity that didn’t really add anything. **
That’s fine, but it just illustrates the basic problem of testing this sort of thing. How much deviation is acceptable? And if there are oddball outlier responses, is it better to toss them out or does that alone invalidate God’s existence? I mean, we obviously would tolerate some deviation in the description of the man running down the street. And if 19 of 20 neighbors say a man of approximately the same description was running down the street, but the 20th neighbor says instead it was a Mack truck barreling down the street, surely we don’t on that basis discard the possibility that a man was in fact running down the street. I think any such hypothetical study would have virtually insurmountable methodological problems. **
I think there’s a material difference between stating things that are demonstrably wrong and mere silence.
Tell you what, if you can obkectively demonstrate that Edward is faking it to the satisfaction of his followers/advocates then I will become a deist!You cannot do so anymore that I can disprove your God or Santa Claus or any other existential claim.The very best we can do is to show that there are rational, non-supernatural explanations for teh things we invoke gods and psychics to explain and to show that the inference of these things is unwarranted.
You keep on positing that God interacts with your “soul”.This is an unecessary mutiplication of entities and therefore your claim can be delt with in a single swipe from Occam’s razor.
Trying to establish the validity of one extraordinary, irrational claim by invoking a second such claim will not get you very far.
Also, no…not all deists are “dim” or unintelligent.Not even all christians fall under this umbrella.I have met several theists who are a damn site smarter than I am, generally speaking.
The point you are continually missing or ignoring is that, even the smartest people on the planet can hold erroneous, irrational, beliefs.You may be a very intelligent person for all I know but as far as this one issue goes(god belief) you are not using that intelligence.As Doc Nickel pointed out we are patern-seeking animals and theists have a large emotional investment in god-belief.Ufologists and conspiracy theorists have a similar investment in beliefs about extravagant government cover-ups.Many cryptozoologists have such an investment in Sasquatch of the Loch Ness Monster.Parapsychologists in ghosts etc…
When rationality/reality clashes with our emotional needs guess which tends to win out?
So, let’s say JE claimed he could speak to the dead, but just stood on the stage and nodded knowingly without speaking. At the end of the show, there is nothing for you to disprove. According to your argument (as I understand it), JE’s claim is now more valid because there is no evidence to disprove. All JE has to say is "The dead spoke to me in volumes, giving me great detail of information on everyone in the audience. There is no evidence because they communicate with me in a non-physical way (even though they are capable of communicating in a physical way if they really wanted to).
You and other reporters of godly communication have had considerably more time to study this than the eyewitnesses did. It’s more like them standing by the wreck for half an hour and then disagreeing if the crashed vehicle were an RV, a car or a motorcycle. If your communication is as brief as your example, I can’t imagine why you don’t consider that this god experience is something you ate. Do you have any criteria for accepting or rejecting other people’s reports of god experiences?
You’ve said repeatedly that “God’s existence cannot be proven.” Now, I would tend to agree with that statement, insofar as it means that you cannot prove something that is false. You, however, seem to think there is some other reason why God’s existence cannot be proven. If not that God exists outside the material plane and therefore his existence cannot be proven empirically, why?
Again, I agree with you that God’s existence cannot be proven (any more so than the Loch Ness Monster’s existence), but that doesn’t mean I think his existence can’t be disproven. Many claims have been made as to what God has done, and many of those claims have been proven to false. At the same time, not a single claim about God’s existence has been proven to be true.
I’ve asked this before, and I’ll ask it again: What grants God special status among supernatural phenomenon as being the only phenomenon that can be legitimately believed in the absence of proof and in the face of counterproof?
If John Edwards claimed to have the ability to talk to dead people, but never actually revealed what the dead people said to him (thereby allowing his claim to be verified or falsified), you would still call him a fraud even though you couldn’t prove it. You would instead simply say that he has offered no affirmative proof to back up his claims, and until he does so no skeptic will believe him.
When it comes to believing in God, however, you refuse to apply the same skepticism. Nobody should have to prove that God does not exist (although there is certainly plenty of evidence to that effect, including the whole “problem of evil” debate, declared miracles that turn out to not be so miraculous after all, prophecies made in the name of God that don’t come true, people who do horrendous acts in the name of God, etc.) for you to be skeptical. It should be suffient that nobody has proved that he does exist for you to be skeptical. And yet, you’re not.
In short, you say you believe in something that has not been proven, and justify your credulity by claiming that it cannot be proven and therefore you don’t need proof.
Again, my goal is not to prove to you that God doesn’t exist. But I think you do the word “skeptic” a disservice if you persist in calling yourself one in spite of being willing to believe something whose existence has not been proven.
Hmmmm… I just noticed that Pashnish Ewing raised the same hypothetical situation about John Edwards not actually revealing what the dead supposedly said to him.
Why should religion always get a free pass? Just because humans have been religious for thousands of years, and just because otherwise brilliant people have held religious beliefs does NOT earn theists any more relief from ridicule than John Edwards, lekatt or the crazy old palm-reader down the street.
Do you have any criteria for accepting or rejecting other people’s reports of god experiences?