Can you provide some other examples of things you believe rationally without empirical proof/evidence? Maybe the next most important thing you believe on that basis?
Is this a variant of “there are no atheists in foxholes”? If not, I can’t make out what you’re saying and request clarification. If it is, I’d have to ask for a cite for this belief.
I call bullshit on this, myself. Two times I thought I was going to die,and neither time did I abandon reality to embrace fantasy.
There is room between faith and knowledge. This is where science operates all the time. When you come up with a hypothesis you have some level of belief that it is true, since otherwise you aren’t going to waste time trying to support it, but you have to be open to the possibility that it isn’t. In fact you have to design experiments which will falsify your hypothesis. Once you’ve done that and the experiments work you can say it is provisionally true - but even they you won’t claim it as a fact until it gets a lot more support.
Notice the difference with religions where some get dragged into acknowledging that some of their beliefs are incorrect, and some like the fundamentalists won’t even do that.
Pure belief versus supported hypotheses is important when the believer wants to influence the actions of others. Religions - and Catholics are an example - go quickly from “don’t challenge my beliefs, because they are faith-based” to “we need laws against birth control, abortion, whatever, because God says so.” If they were honest they would limit their attempt to drive laws to those who share their beliefs.
IIRC, Isaac Asimov, when he was dying, made damn sure that no religious nitwit would claim he had a deathbed conversion. Kind of like the lies about Darwin.
False deathbed conversion stories have also been spread about Thomas Paine, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, and Stephen Hawking.
The most commonly encountered deathbed recantation story involves Louis Pasteur, who supposedly renounced the germ theory of disease. Except he didn’t (it’s a false tale spread by germ theory denialists.*
I never understood the popularity of the no-atheists-in-foxholes meme. Even if there are nonbelievers crazed with fear at encroaching death who call on God to save them, is that supposed to be a meaningful endorsement of religion?
*Yes, Virginia, such people exist.
Let me backtrack a little by asking a question.
By its very definition, is empirical evidence an absolute requirement for a belief to even be considered rational?
In other words, if there is no empirical evidence supporting a belief, then is that belief by definition irrational?
I ask this because I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher.
At no point while I was pulling wads of flaming vinyl car seats off my limbs while smelling my own flesh cook did I randomly decide to appeal to a god figure. Nor did I do so during the much more dicey and painful recovery period.
I’ve mentioned before that my grandfather had no trouble believing in God before he got anywhere near a foxhole — only dismissing the idea after seeing enough of war to cast aside the word ‘godforsaken’ in favor of, y’know, atheism.
I’m not sure what it proves; but it always seems to strike me as worth bringing up when folks seem to think a quip about atheists and foxholes proves stuff.
I have never seen a τ or μ and might possibly understand what I was looking at on the printout (I think they have charge, so they tend to make spiral tracks) but not why we need to have them in the standard model.
I more or less accept what the researchers have to say because it is interesting, it fits together pretty well, and it is incomplete (I suspect that reality will always hold more mysteries than we will ever be able to resolve). I take it on faith that the physicists know what they are talking about, in part because they are not afraid to discover new things that might break the old things.
Most importantly, though, I have never heard of a D-class white dwarf ordering some guy to stab his firstborn son through the heart upon a rock. The weather on Saturn is fun to read and speculate about, but it has no interest in who I might have had sex with last night.
The existing evidence suggests that the universe does not give a leaping shit about me, or you, or anyone. It is wholly indifferent. When I hear that there is some entity that is inconsistent with the Great Indifference, I am deeply skeptical and need more real evidence.
Because, honestly, there is an elegant beauty to the vast and suffocating nothing out there. We sit in this tiny ephemeral bubble gazing out on it as it calls out to us, and each of us will get to join with it one day. How much more does one need?
Exactly - this life is the one we get - make it important
My father, a lifelong skeptic (at least), when he was in his very last days, playfully asked his nurse if she thought he would be able to get into heaven. I think he was just seeking general approbation for the course of his life (and she wouldn’t have been able to give any reasoned judgment). Anyway, my born-again sister was convinced he was having an epiphany and conversion. However, he lived two or three more days, was fully aware and conscious, and never mentioned anything like that again. I let her believe what she wants, of course, without arguing.
I suspect some find religion in foxholes, and that more agnostics find it there than atheists.
I’m genuinely curious about how common staunchly held atheist beliefs are abandoned during times of stress. It’s a big world, so I assume it happens. (Thinking it over, it happened to a friend of mine.) But I’m guessing it happens rarely among those who lacked a religious upbringing.
My personal suspicion (only based on a few anecdotal cases) is that it depends on how well the person understands the issues. A person who abandoned belief because something bad happened and “how could God let this bad thing happen?” is going to be a lot more susceptible than someone who calmly decides “this whole thing makes no sense, isn’t necessary, and causes actual harm to people.”
I can imagine myself facing death and feeling anything from terror (plane falling from the sky) to resignation (just old age) to relief (painful illness) but I can’t imagine suddenly deciding to believe in, and ask a big favor of, the entity that I dismissed with contempt for (so far) 56 years.
And don’t get me started on Pascal’s wager. What a wanker.
What’s that great line someone smarter than me came up with? Something like “That there are no atheists in foxholes isn’t proof of God, it’s an argument against foxholes”.
The closest thing I can find on wikiquote is
The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”
– Vonnegut
Which also has the illustrative
Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do. But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.
– Doug Wilson
This shows how much religious people struggle with the concept of unbelief. Religion, this quote suggests, teaches that the normal response to otherness is hatred. To them, if a thing is outside the proper bounds of their belief system, it must be despised. To them, atheists think exactly like them, just with a different set of tenets.
I suspect that the dark side of religion has created not a few atheists on its own. And the glossy side appears to be little more than sugar-coating to make the dark side palatable.
Maybe. But those are the very atheists who get converted back by smooth talking ministers who paper over the evil. The ones who can’t explain why they are atheists.
The thing that theists don’t get is that we’re not atheists because some churches believe in stupid things, we’re not atheists because we deny that sometimes religion makes people feel good, and we’re not atheists because we hate god or want to be bad or any of that crap.
We’re atheists because as far as we can see, there is no god.
Easiest thing in the world to falsify, especially since the god in question is all powerful. God is the same as a unicorn or your friend’s secret girlfriend, who no one has ever seen.
It doesn’t make a bit of difference if a religion is all sweetness and light or nasty and dark. Show me a god, or it is all intellectual masturbation.
By the way, thank you for the compliment.
There are probably more than a few people who call themselves atheists that really aren’t - they don’t lack belief so much as reject a specific church without having switched to another one. I knew a person like that - she’d ‘rebelled’ and fallen in with a bad crowd, stopped going to church, got pregnant, had the kid, and left the bad crowd - but didn’t start going to church again right away. (She went back eventually, a few years later.)
The existence of ‘atheists’ like this are probably part of why theists sometimes claim that actual theists are just pretending not to believe: because that actually happens with some people. Just not actual atheists.
Referencing the topic of the thread, I’d expect ‘atheists’ like her to be promptly and thoroughly swayed by a miracle - presuming the miracle conformed to the beliefs that they have tucked away in the back of their minds. This girl wouldn’t turn Catholic, for example, because ‘under the hood’ she was a Mormon.
People in general have a hard time conceptualizing that while some events are quite rare, the shear number of rare things means rare events actually happen with a surprising frequency.
While not quite the inverse of the Monte Carlo fallacy, these ‘miracles’ rarely involve reliable predictions or foreknowledge.
If all you are looking for is any rare event, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are so many rare events that while the odds of a particular rare thing happening is unlikely the chances of a rare event happening are actually pretty good.