Shared Delusions of God

Great Debates
41

What’s to prove? The definition of delusion is “an erroneous belief that is held in the face of evidence to the contrary”. People who have been dead for three days don’t come back to life, the evidence clearly shows. It just doesn’t happen…except to Jesus, right? (ooops, forgot Lazarus) Tell you what, I’m going to play it safe and try not to die early, in case I don’t happen to rise up from the grave 72 hours later. If I see somebody do it, maybe I’ll change my mind. People can’t walk on water or levitate…unless they’re Jesus, correct? Last time I saw anybody get on the water, they sank. And nobody has ever demonstrated in medical practice that you can spit in dirt, rub it in a blind man’s eyes, and restore his vision, have they? Actually, I think that would probably just hurt a lot. Having gotten foreign shmutz in my eyes, the evidence clearly supports this assumption. So, there you go. I provided a bunch of examples of things people said Jesus did. The evidence is clear: Nobody these days does any rising from the dead or multiplying bread loaves or any of that. Sounds like a load of rubbish, actually, and all evidence points to this. But people believe it! That’s not delusory? What is, then?

I guess I misunderstood. Since you brought up miracles, but provided no other criteria to judge the nature of Christ’s divinity, I figured the miracles were supposed to mean something. A lot of people say that the angel Moroni came to Joseph Smith and helped him find a new scripture, engraved on golden plates, and left there by Native Americans, who are actually the descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. So, this makes Jospeph Smith more noteworthy than some other guy off the street who says he’s been speaking to God and wants to take me to the new Zion? Because somebody else thinks so too?

I did, and I answered all of your questions to the best of my ability. So, could you please adress the paradox of conflicting faiths and how one should judge, if without concrete evidence, between them? You say these ideas are worth investigating? I asked you about such investigations. What, in the way of evidence, might they reveal?

42

First, let’s get one thing straight. Atheism is the lack of belief in any gods, not solely the belief that no gods exist. Thus, to convince me that atheism is not reasonable, you need to provide me with some convincing evidence or arguments for yours or any god. There might be some god that made the universe for a race that went to heaven 10 billion years ago, and who actually showed up. The universe remaining is just the leftovers after the main act went down. Who knows? I can’t disprove that god. Can you?

Now, to consider your request, first please let us know exactly what are the characteristics of the God we are supposed to be disproving? If it is the deity of Jefferson, we can’t do it, since that God has had nothing to do with us. If it is the god of the literal Bible, who made the earth 6,000 years ago, then disproving him is trivially easy. (And we’re talking scientific proof here, which involves a preponderence of evidence, not mathematical proof, right?)

Is it the God of the Exodus that never happened. Is it the god who claimed, as Jesus, that he’d be back before those hearing his words tasted death? The god of the Pope for whom Adam and Eve are just a metaphor? (Clever guy, he.) You see, theists are damn hard to pin down about this, and without a very specific god to disprove, the request is obviously absurd. I’m not asking for a full definition of god, of course, just enough stuff so I can tell what he supposedly did.

43

I don’t think it’s fair to compare belief in God with belief in leprechauns or gnomes or invisible pink unicorns. Gnomes or leprechauns, if they exist, are part of the universe. They are entities existing within the created and/or naturally occuring world. God, on the other hand, is outside the universe and is the creator of it. It’s like the difference between Hamlet believing in ghosts, and Hamlet believing in Shakespeare.

44

Well, if that’s the case, disproving leprechaus ought to be easier than God. After all, it is theoretically possible to search the whole world for leprechauns, but not the whole universe for God.

Here’s the rub: If I gave you a specific definition of either, and you found no evidence for it, e.g. leprechauns live behind rainbows and keep a pot of gold, you might say I was disproven, having looked behind all the rainbows you could find, and not found any leprechauns. I could play tough and demand you look behind every rainbow for all eternity, but that would be an unreasonable burden of evidence to put on you. If you tell me what goes up must go down, I shouldn’t force you to throw a ball into the air for all eternity to prove it to a reasonable degree. I’d say common sense plus a few carefully crafted demonstrations should suffice. So, you spend ten years leading a worldwide, multinational, multiperson search behind rainbows. No leprechauns, or pots of gold, for that matter. Very well, I must concede that it is highly unlikely leprechauns exist, especially since I can’t find one reliable source to back up the claim that these little people are around. I heard some folklore, asked you to give it a look, you did a thorough job, and came up empty. If I’m not one to be deluded, I’ll say: Fine, it looks as if there are no leprechauns. Call off the search.

But what if I said: Ahhh. So the stories about leprechauns weren’t entirely accurate. That’s OK, it’s just allegory. There is still Truth in the leprechaun, and I still believe they exist. Look harder, and elsewhere; perhaps look within yourself for the leprechaun. You will find Him there, maybe. I’d say if you were non-delusory empiricist, you would consider my shift in belief to be irrational. You might wonder if no proof would be sufficient to shake my faith in the leprechaun.

Once upon a time (actually, for some it’s still true today), if you asked someone who God was, a common response might be “He is the Creator, who made the world in six days, and rested on the seventh; on the sixth day he made man from the stuff of the Earth, and from Adam’s rib made woman to be his companion.” I might point out the vast amount of epirical evidence to the contrary. You might opt to be deluded, rejecting all evidence presented, no matter how solid, as does the fundamentalist. You might, like most people, eventually have to concede that your original understanding of God was myth, and not to be read as literal history. However, chances are, if you’re like most people, you won’t give up on the idea of God. You’ll just shift the goal line a little so that God now fits within the current world view.

And so it goes, ad absurdum. As each new concept of God falls in the face of sceptical inquiry, a new one slips out through the loopholes. The faithful know damn well this is how they behave, but when the sceptic calls their recalcitrance delusory, the faithful have the termerity to claim agnostics are arrogant.

It doesn’t matter where God is. Can God be defined? If not, what use is the concept? It can mean anything you like, so long as it’s humanly impossible to demonstrate otherwise. Hence any demand on the part of the faithful to disprove God is a rigged match. It’s a poor show of logical smoke-and-mirrors that vaporizes under the light of even the merest scrutiny. This is arrogance, it’s rational scepticism and normal common sense when applied to any concept but that of God.

45

The last sentence should read “This isn’t arrogance…”

46

I have another approach to this problem from Loopydude’s. While god might be outside the universe, any god but that of a Deist has interacted with our universe, whether by parting the Red Sea, whispering in your ear, or impregnating virgins. If God inspired the Bible, how come he didn’t get it right? Why did Jesus think disease was caused by demons? I think Carl Sagan once wrote that he’d be more convinced by stories of UFO contacts if the contactee brought back checkable information that science does not know yet. Same is true of those claiming to have contact with god, either now or in the past. How come what they come up with is exactly what they’d think based on the state of knowledge of the culture?

So the outside the universe argument is a poor one indeed.

47

Again we have the problem of understanding the difference between “some” and “all”. I was responding to the quote:

which clearly asserts that all faith is delusion–that there is no God.

Your second sentence disproves your first–agnosticism is a reasonable logical view, but atheism requires as much faith (if not more) than theism.

48

Which is precisely why I gave the definition, which you seem to have ignored. I cannot prove the god I mentioned does not exist, but it would be absurd for me to believe in him. There are more gods in more religions throughout even human history than we can count or imagine - why is it sensible to put the burden of proof on anyone to disprove them all?

Suppose you set your Wayback machine to the time of Galileo, and tried to explain quantum theory to him. Since you would have absolutely no experimental evidence to show him,he might well consider you deluded, and for good reason, even though you were speaking the truth.

So if you tell me god exists because you had a really vivid dream, and you had no other evidence, and you acted on this, I might well find you deluded. If proof of this god ever appears I will be happy to admit I’m wrong - my atheism rests on evidence and logic, not on faith. The challenge stands - provide a reasonably precise definition of your god, and we’ll see if that god(i) can be disproved. Don’t ask me to disprove god (j), for j = 1 to infinity.

49

I have to admit I am myself more comfortable with the term “agnostic” because I can’t say for sure there is no God when that’s impossible by definition. What I’m very confident of is that all former and extant religious traditions fail the test of verifiability and/or veracity when scrutinized rationally. Hence, there’s no good reason to follow any of them. Whether there is a God or no, all present information on the subject has so far proven spurious when testable and ambiguous at best when not.

There is apparently nothing of additional use that can be said about God, presently. We await more data.

50

Since we can never really know how energy and matter came to be in the beginning. There is no way we can know whether a higher intelligence exists or not. Theists look at the world and say such beauty and order must have been created by Higher Intelligence (God). Atheists look at the world and say it must have evolved from random circumstances.

Both positions are positions of faith, since the truth is unknowable.

But some people say they have experience God, most near death experiencers are certain He exists. They have “talked” to Him and felt His love for them. There are veridical NDEs that show strong evidence of life after death.

What are we to do? Some will follow logic, rational thought as such, to look for evidence of God. Others will use their feelings, intuition, and experiences to look for Him.
I believe we should use both logic and intuition to search for the presence of higher intelligence, it just seems more honest that way.

The real problem is most have already made up their minds one way or another, and are not really looking for truth any more. They are only looking to validate the beliefs they already hold.

We can still get along, in our ignorance, by respecting the views of others and not calling them delusional when they disagree with us. After all, none of know what we are talking about.

Love

51

Neither can we know whether goblins or invisible unicorns exist. Just like any other supposed being (such as God), I’ll believe it when I see the evidence.

I look at the evidence, and the evidence shows evolution is how the current forms of life on Earth came into being.

Faith is not based upon logical proof or material evidence. Evolution, on the other hand, is based upon these things.

There is strong evidence that they believed they talked to God. This could actually be God, or it could just be dying neurons in the brain firing off causing hallucinations.

Judging by your posting history and website, I’d say you rely exclusively on the latter method instead of the former.

If you manage to get conclusive evidence of this higher intelligence, I’ll be the first to cheer you on. I certainly haven’t seen it yet.

It’s quite ironic hearing this from you. I recall the thousand post trainwreck last year regarding the validity of psychics. As I remember, we skeptics posted exactly what kind of proof it would take for us to alter our beliefs. We asked you what it would take to change your mind. You refused to answer and you called us “meanspirited”.

52

Theists believe there is considerable evidence of a higher intelligence at work in the world. The best evidence being “intelligent design.” They say randomness does not produce such order, only a “director” could put all the pieces in the right places.

Whether evolution took place or not doesn’t address the existence of God. God could have created the world by evolution, after all evolution happened by choosing the better “whatever” and not in random fashion which indicates intelligence. One doesn’t exclude the other. This is not a logical argument to prove God doesn’t exist.

Of course faith is based upon logic, people don’t usually decide to have faith in a lamp post to help them through life. Now, the logic may not meet with the approval of others, but logic is very much involved in all faith.
Evolution may be based on logic also, but no real proof, just like religion. So I say again Theists and Atheists believe in their positions by faith.
I don’t believe I talked to God, I know I talked to God. For me the experience was clearer than anything I experienced before. There are some things we can know through experience. Such as what we ate for breakfast, we can be pretty sure of that. That which comes to us by experience is very convincing.

Yes. it is possible to mistake certain perceptions for others, yes, I know that.
But there are millions of people who say they have experienced God in some way.
Can millions be wrong with first-hand experience, I don’t thing so. Here the opponent points out that millions of people once thought the world was flat, and other times millions of people have been wrong. However, if you look at the statements closely you will discover the millions of wrong people never really experienced their beliefs, they were told the world was flat, etc.

So, if you use this argument please chose something that can really be experienced by millions of people in a first-hand situation.

I use a great deal of logic in my spiritual life, if it doesn’t seem logical, it probably isn’t, but there are times when logic fails, such as the bumble bee.
I am proud of the thousands of posts generated by that thread. For the most part I refrained from anger, and name calling. I offered controlled studies done by scientists and my opponents offered only opinions and theories. I called the other posters “meanspirited” due to the hundreds of personal attacks they launched. These attacks having nothing to do with the debate at hand.

I would like nothing better than to have an independent, unbiased study done of that thread listing the posters and their contributions to the debate.

Love

53

Randomness does not produce order, but there are many non-random mechanisms that do, such as natural selection. Intelligent design is hogwash - give me one thing that cannot, in principle, have come about by natural means.

Correct. The fact that evolution happened does not say anything about God in general, only about that god who created all the animals 6,000 years ago.

Define proof. People shouldn’t believe in evolution, but accept it as the best explanation for observations. No faith involved at all.

Cool. Next time you chat with the Lord, ask him if P=NP, and ask for either a proof or a counterexample. Otherwise I believe with a perfect faith that you’re blowing smoke.

54

So you’re looking for Erdos’s God, are you?

“If I see a really nice proof, I say it comes straight from the Book . . . God has a transfinite Book, which contains all theorems and their best proofs, and if He is well intentioned toward those [mathematicians], He shows them the Book for a moment. And you wouldn’t even have to believe in God, but you must believe that the Book exists.” -Paul Erdos

55

This is a pretty good example of what the OP is getting at. Statements like these leave open only two possibilities:
(A) God does, in fact, exist, or
(B) You are deluded.

Anyone who doesn’t accept (A) must agree with (B). (In fact, it’s possible for both to be true: that even though God exists, what you thought was an experience of God actually wasn’t, or that you ar mistaken/deluded as to the nature of God. But it’s not possible for both to be false.) When I pray to God, expecting God to hear and possibly do something in response, if there is no God who hears prayers then yes, I am deluded.

But there are many other things I believe that I might be deluded about, some of which I’m guessing many atheists also believe:

[ul]
[li]That I have free will, and can make choices that are not just the inevitable consequence of the universe up to that point.[/li][li]That what I am experiencing right now is actually real life, and not just one long dream or hallucination by someone living in a completely different reality.[/li][li]That life is worth living.[/li][li]That some actions are good while others are bad, in a sense that goes beyond just “I don’t like them.”[/li][li]That I can trust my brain, at least to some extent, to perceive, reason, and remember correctly.[/li][li]That it actually matters what I believe, or what I do, or in fact that anything at all matters.[/li][/ul]
I don’t think there’s any more conclusive evidence or logical proof for any of these things than there is for the existence of God, but I believe them. But if any of them are not true, then it would be fair to call them delusions.

56

How would natural selections know what to pick, what was good or bad, if it was not directed. To be directed implies intelligence, one can not know “good” without knowing “bad”. Until you can disprove Intelligent Design you can’t label it false. That is not logical nor is it being honest. Sorry, the truth is still “we don’t know.” Anything less is just prejudice.

About accepting evolution as the best explanation. Nope, here again this is only prejudice. I can think of a few hundred doctrines, theories, guesses, conjectures and such that someone would want me to accept as the best explanation of “whatever.” I need to be shown some proof first, real proof. If you look up the words belief and faith in the dictionary you will find they define each other. So I will stick with the logic of belief or disbelief in God is an act of faith.

I do not chat with the “Lord”. The word lord implies domination and servitude. This is not a description of God. Talking to God, one asks for direction and wisdom, then gives thanks for the help received, and finally, listens for the answer he knows will come.

Love

57

What gives you the idea that an agnostic like me thinks any of the above are “true”? I’ve considered every one of the bullets above and a whole slew of other things besides. Read any popularization on quantum mechanics, the nature of time, cognitive science and computing, etc., and prepare to feel very small and uncertain about everything. It comes with the territory of being a sceptic. It’s not a “comfortable” frame of mind. In fact, it’s one of constant doubt…about some things. However, again, it’s possible to be a sceptic and get through the day because it’s possible to be confident in some things. One gains confidence through sceptical inquiry, done by oneself, or by others employing the same methods and having their findings subjected to the scrutiny of other sceptics. Eventually, consensus is teased out, plausibility, and so forth. It’s all pretty straigtforward.

As for your points, so far as I know, there’ aren’t many or any straightforward conclusions vis. those subjects. I live my life as if I had free will, an operate under that assumtion, because that’s what it seems like, but I do acknowledge it could all be an illusion. I don’t think that’s the same thing as being deluded. Even the most sceptical agree that the results of delayed-choice experiments don’t preclude “free will”. And besides, if we don’t have “free will”, it hardly matters, right? I have senses; I feel pleasure, and pain, and I have drives; it appears to my psyche that I am a conscious being in control of my actions. If I’m not any of these things, one could, I think, forgive me for looking at the evidence and making the wrong assumption. I hardly have overwhelming evidence in support of the notion that I lack free will. Hence, I’m not deluded, per se. I might be mistaken, but, again, my mistake is not one of faith, but probably because I don’t have good information. I acknowledge that I may not.

58

The answer is, it doesn’t. In fact, if Intelligent Design were real, we would expect to see a lot fewer sub-optimal configurations. In other words, if were were designed, the entity that designed us was one stupid @!#%. Propensity for addiction, cancer, sickle cell, hemophilia. And that’s only in humans…

The reason the suboptimal confiurations are still around is, get this, they havent been selected out yet. Evolution isnt “good” or “bad”, it just is.

Most scientists do not “believe” in evolution the same way that the religious “believe” in God. In science, “proof” means “to have such massive evidence in your favor that withholding provisional agreement would be perverse.” It does not mean logical or mathematical proof.

Thus, it is impossible, and quite unlike the nature of science to produce “real proof”, as you say. It’s tangential to science.

59

I think your post is honest and accurate.

Except there are never just two alternatives.

(a) one can believe God exists. If there is no proof then faith is used.
(b) one can believe God doesn’t exist. If there is no proof then faith is used.
© one can say “I don’t know whether God exists or not.” Agnostic.

There is no room in any of these statements for calling someone delusional.

“I don’t know” is a perfectly good position, one that I take frequently.

An idea, theory, or guess without proof is not cause for condescending remarks aimed at those who don’t happen to believe them. That is logical and honest.

In my experience, never question whether life has any purpose without seeking that purpose to the ends of the earth.

Love

60

As a Theist I don’t believe humans were designed with a propensity for the bad things you list. Actually the body works pretty well until we humans choose to stuff it with drugs, alcohol, and other things that are toxic to it.

I agree evolution is far from over, it is a constant.

In the world of truth and reality proof means proof, not evidence in favor of. Actually there is massive evidence in favor of God and life after death through near death experiences. There are even studies done by scientific groups that back up this evidence. I believe that is proof for God, just as you believe your evidence is proof for evolution. I said before that believe in God and evolution are not incompatible. Higher intelligence may be using evolution to as a method of creation. Whether you or I can judge the “Intelligence” that we know nothing about goes without saying.

When science departs from seeking truth and using real logic, then it is no longer science. That was what I was taught when going to school many years ago.

If science expects the general public to just accept what it gives to them as truth, then we are headed for the “Dark Ages of Science.” I prefer not to go there.

Love