But not the idea that the subjective God is all there is. Your comparison of God to curiosity or love doesn’t work.
The idea that we experience God spiritually, the inner person, in a subjective manner, rather than as an external being is pretty widespread. I do realize that many people see God as an external being and heaven as a literal place. A few even believe in literal streets of gold. It’s goofy to me as well. There are plenty of believers who don’t see it that way.
I was saying the spiritual experience that believers equate with God is personal and subjective. It’s not always about objective reality. All people reach some conclusions and make choices based in part by subjective experience. That’s how being a human works. We assert that love exists and is real even though it has no clear definition and is unfalsifiable. No believer should assert that the testimony of their subjective experience is evidence for anyone else in any objective sense. Others can weigh the described experience against their own and come to their own conclusions.
Or metaphors or mythology. Isn’t scientific truth progressive. One discovery leads to another and the refinement of the details of a hypothesis change based on new information.
I see the search for spiritual truth the same way. Individuals and societies grow and evolve so that the image of angry sky god becomes less accepted. Still too accepted IMO but I’m willing to work on that.
It may be that as humans evolve and grow the very idea of God will be discarded but we can’t know that and it sure won’t happen anytime soon. As we explore the nature and boundaries of our consciousness who knows what we may discover.
Hey, if you can get religion completely divorced from the physical world, to the point where it’s inconceivable that intelligent design appears in a science class or impossible for legislation to get passed restricting access to abortion or birth control, or ridiculous that churches don’t pay taxes, i.e. religion gets tucked away in some private unobtrusive corner so a citizen who is not religious doesn’t have to adapt to those who are as opposed to the perpetual reverse, I’m cheering for you.
Faith is flawed because of its initial assumptions to the same extent that mathematics is flawed for depending on axioms. Whatever justification one has for using any particular axiom, it cannot by definition be justified using mathematics.
Exactly. This is why we say religion is based on faith, not evidence.
For most people of faith, the religious boot-strap problem is a matter for theologians. That doesn’t remove the problem for religion, just as it doesn’t remove the problem for science.
No, the justification for religion is based on personal, subjective experience. You may not base any beliefs on that kind of experience, but many people do.
Try again. I have a PhD in physics. I know for a fact that there are no laws of physics that even address the issue of whether or not God exists, let alone provide evidence against. Perhaps there is another science that addresses the existence of God. Care to go into the details?
That may matter to some people, but my faith is not based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Even if we accept this, we’re discussing the paradox of faith, not of any particular religion. You need to generalize your arguments.
Science can only address questions that are testable. It can’t do much for questions like “What is the purpose of my life?”.
This is exactly right. Science is a wonderful process; I’m a scientist, I love doing it. The fact that it can’t address untestable claims is its strength. That’s how science broke free of questions of metaphysics and natural philosophy that kept leading efforts into untestable questions. Take a claim, is it falsifiable? If yes, science can attempt to answer it, if not, chuck it.
But those unfalsifiable claims and questions unanswerable with evidence still exist. So people come up with their own solutions, based on their own experiences. That is the essence of faith–belief with evidence to answer important questions that science can’t tackle. Their answers are subjective; if they’re objective, the questions would’ve been answered by science.
I agree somewhat. Science should definitely be left to the scientists. (Except for publicly funded science–the public should have some say over what direction research takes, but then the scientists should have complete control. No mucking with results.)
I’m also opposed to legislation enforcing morality. But that is a political question, and I won’t attack the source of someone’s politics. If someone wants to use their religion as a source for their political stances, I don’t think it’s right to attack the religion, but only the politics.
Correcting meaningful typo.
A five-minute edit window is useless when the board can’t respond that fast.
I hear ya :).
At the same time, I’d make a slight nitpick: faith is not so much belief without evidence as it is belief without a certain kind of evidence. I’m not exactly sure how to define that kind of evidence. Empirical, maybe? Falsifiable? Evidence that other parties can view?
Some folks have what they experience to be a personal conversation with Jesus, and it is that evidence that leads them to conclude that Jesus is God. That is evidence of a sort, even if it’s not the sort of evidence that is usable by the scientific method.
Daniel
Incidentally:
The first is true by definition - it’s not an assumption. Anybody who “disagrees” with this is merely positing a different logical system with a different definition of “~” - which is fine, but doesn’t change the rules in the original system.
The second is not an assumption - it’s the result of generations upon generations of observation, and in fact science itself is merely a documentation of those observed principles of reason that the cosmos is obeying. If the cosmos suddenly stopped obeying them, large chunks of science would stop being true too, of course.
The third and fourth statements are also not assumptions - they’re both things that each human learns by observation as a child growing up. Each person’s sensory inputs report an extremely consistent picture of the world, a picture that includes what appears to be other people who appear to be reporting similar sensory observations of the world to us, and who even appear to be telling us about scientific systems which can be used to make predictions about what sensory inputs we’ll have later. (“If you do the mental thing that make you sense that your hand is letting go of that rock above your foot, a moment later you will sense pain in the area of your senses that presents itself as being your foot - that’s gravity!”) This consistency is observed, not assumed, and we do science based on these observations.
And if suddenly our observations started reporting something else, in a way that demonstrated that any of these “assumptions” were not as we’d previously observed them to be, we’d promptly adapt the science accordingly - assuming we were capable of doing anything, that is. (If our senses start going completely mad I don’t imagine we’ll be doing much science.)
So what does your God do? It is a pitiful deity indeed who is bound to natural laws - in fact one indistinguishable from a powerful alien. If you believe in the survival of the soul (whatever that is) after death thanks to god, you are definitely believing that god goes beyond natural law.
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Haven’t we agreed that faith is not based on evidence? What does it matter then, what the nature of the Bible is?
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But your god belief didn’t come from nowhere. Whichever god you believe is a product of your environment, unless you had some direct revelation - all of which is evidence. The faith part comes in from believing that the god belief is true without enough evidence to be rationally convincing.
My point can be extended to any religion with any sort of scriptures.
Now, it is possible to believe in a deistic god from first principles. but this yields no moral guidance or theology beyond the very existence of that God. It’s hard to go further that this without knowledge of what specifically you believe.
What problem does math have with its axioms again? It doesn’t mind that it doesn’t apply to any reality where its axioms don’t hold. All of mathematics is a big old conditional statement : if you observe in your reality that these axioms apply, then look at all this other stuff you also automatically know! It doesn’t assume that the axioms are true in your reality or situation - that’s for you do determine, before you can safely use the system.
Religion isn’t the same way. It’s not “If god exists, and is benevolent, and has a judgement day, and whatever else you’re faithing about, then go to church and be a good person and pay tithing and all that”. It’s “God exists! There’s a judgement day! And all this other stuff - it’s all true! (Trust me!) --so you’d better go to church and be a good person and pay tithing and all that!” It assumes that the axioms are true, and then of course everything else is assumed as well - all based on jack squat. This is precisely not what is done with mathematical axioms.
It’s not an analogous situation at all.
As you can probably tell from my prior post to Left Hand of Dorkness, I don’t think that science has this bootstrap problem. So, in case I missed it, could you demontrate where science has this problem? If you’re going to try to give religion credibility by equating the two, that is.
I base all sorts of ‘beliefs’ on personal subjective experience. I believe that I’m hungry (when I’m hungry) based on such experience. I believe I dream when I sleep based off of such experience. That sort of thing.
However believeing that there’s some big wide external real god thing with great power and whetnot is not justified by any dreams or mental hiccups I may have. So I don’t believe stuff like that, because I’m not into making heckuva big leaps based on flimsy, probably-inapplicable evidence. But that’s just me.
So? Making up stupid crap based on overinterpreting inner experiences doesn’t answer the question any better than reading answers out of your alphabet soup. It’s better to be intellectually honest and just figure out a purpose that’s consistent with actual reality, and not “wishful thinking internal dream reality”.
It’s true that science doesn’t answer the unanswered questions. Faith, on the other hand, is as good as making it up whole cloth, or letting somebody else make it up for you (and thereby manipulate you). Better to actually think about it and determine your answers that way. Read some philosophy maybe. Or just get used to some things not having clear answers and stop worrying about them. You waste a lot less time that way.
True, but the ideal scientist will be actively looking for evidence to falsify as well as support his hypothesis. That’s the critical difference between science and religion. No matter how much a scientist, or company, has invested in a new drug, they do placebo trials to falsify the hypothesis that the drug cures better than people can cure themselves. No matter how many millions of bucks get invested in development, the drug gets tossed if it doesn’t pass (with help from the FDA.) The equivalent would be Ken Hamm looking honestly at evidence for evolution and closing down his museum. Some religionists may decide they are wrong, but religions never do.
I don’t know the meaning of truth in John. I observe that in Christianity, at least, truth is defined as the basic creed, and does not begin from scratch.
Russell tried to derive all of mathematics from basic axioms. It would be interesting to do the same for religion, distinguishing that which is hypothesized but which is unfalsifiable from that which has evidence in support of it from that which has evidence against it. Historical evidence would have to be evaluated using the best principles of historical research. I predict that many religions would be extremely disturbed by this project.
I’d suggest that this should be “suggest answers” not “answer” since one characteristic of religion and moral philosophy in general is the inability to give final answers. This is not a weakness, since final answers may not exist. Questions that science cannot answer include ones on the purpose of life and what is good.
Now, the difference between religion and moral philosophy is that philosophy gives provisional answers to these questions, while many religions claim to give absolute answers. The absolute answers come from the supposed ultimate authority of God. But, to learn what God says involves first demonstrating the existence of God, and second, demonstrating that God is in communication with those claiming to be speaking for him. Without this, religion becomes no more than moral philosophy with singing. To convince anyone that a religion has access to God requires documentation of the transmission path, which involves claims about events, which gets us back to science again.
Well, the question you asked me falsification conditions for was “How one ought to reason is not determined by how most people in fact reason.” True, all I argued for was that following the statistician’s methods is more likely to get you a correct answer than following Joe Average’s method. What one further needs to prove that one ought to reason like the statistician is a normative claim like, “One ought to reason in ways that result in true beliefs.” Whether normative claims are factual (and hence falsifiable) or play some other non-asserting role is, of course, a highly contentious point. I have a view on the matter (in fact I just got my book contract in the mail today–woo hoo!), but having a view on that matter doesn’t make me particularly special.
You are right that the experiment I gave was misleading in that by itself it doesn’t answer any normative questions, such as “Ought I reason in a way that endeavors to produce true beliefs?” or “How ought I respond to a positive AIDS test?” I think normative claims are verifiable and falsifiable, but through reason and argument, not through experimentation. But of course that is just a statement of my view and not an argument for it. But trust me…I’m right. 
I agree. But as I sort of indicated in my recent reply to LHOD, I think that at least some normative claims are verifiable (although not, of course, through empirical investigation). I can’t say I’ve argued for that view, but I don’t want to hijack this thread into a discussion of metaethics. It would be fun for me, but for everybody else, not so much.
Yeah, I could reword what I said using different a definition for evidence (or belief), but I think I’m understandable.
I think he was trying to say that the use of logic is an assumption.
The God I believe in does not violate the laws of nature. But the laws of nature do not address the soul. Any persistence of the soul, or God’s interaction with, does not violate nature, since nature doesn’t cover that.
I don’t deny that my belief in God does not have any rational basis. Nor do I deny that it is not based on my personal experiences (my environment is certainly a part of that). That’s why I keep calling it faith.
I’m not sure why several of you keep explaining how faith cannot be based on evidence and that it is subjective. Yes. That’s exactly what faith is. We know.
Yes, I understand how mathematics works. The similarly between mathematics, science, and religion is that their starting points cannot be justified within their own frameworks. I’m not saying the frameworks are similar in any othe way.
That’s your own value judgement (and, by the way, is not a falsifiable claim). I don’t have any problem with you choosing that. But don’t expect others to make the same decision.
Using that distinction, I guess my faith would fall more under your moral philosophy than religion term. All of my beliefs are provisional, including my beliefs based on faith.
On convincing others, I think it’s quite obvious that many people are convinced of their religion without scientific documentation. That simply means their faith is not science.
As I noted above, whether moral and other value judgments are fact-stating and verifiable is very contentious and far from settled. But at any rate, I fear that lapsing into epistemic relativism in order to save your position is a counsel of despair.
The use of logic isn’t an assumption. The internal correctness of logic is true by definition. You observe reality to tell you what system’s premises model the reality or system you’re talking about.
Then it’s a false analogy to equate the use thereof, because nobody uses religion as a contained system. They always apply it to reality. With math and science, you have to confirm via external observations that the axioms match your reality or system before you can use them there - the axioms are therefore not accepted unproven. With religion you just buy the claims without proof, period.
The religious analogue to unapplied abstract systems like math and logic are religions that you do not believe in. Like the religion of the elves in Lord of the Rings maybe. If you analyze the religion without attempting to apply it to reality, keeping it purely abstract like we do with math, then you don’t have to prove the axioms - but the minute you do try to apply the religion to reality, to claim that it’s actually real and true, then you have to justify your axioms again. Like science, which does not have a bootstrap problem like religion does, which is why it’s reasonable to use science to describe reality and not religion.
“Making up stupid crap based on overinterpreting inner experiences doesn’t answer the question any better than reading answers out of your alphabet soup.” - Assuming that there’s any way to subjectively compare answers to big questions, which I think there is, this is falsifiable. Also, since it’s explicitly comparing two completely unjustified ways of reaching conclusions, there seems to be reason to believe it is true. Unless you can prove that applying unjustified interpretation to internal experinces is better or worse than applying unjustified interpretation to the letter arrangements in alphabet soup?
“It’s better to be intellectually honest and just figure out a purpose that’s consistent with actual reality, and not ‘wishful thinking internal dream reality’.” Again, assuming that there’s any way to subjectively compare answers to big questions, which I think there is, this is falsifiable. And I’d say it’s pretty obviously true - nobody thinks you should base your decisions on delusion instead of reality. Religions just (unjustifiedly) claim to be reality, is all.
How is this a value judgement again? (Which is the only basis you give for dismissing it out of hand.)
I don’t think this is accurate. Can you explain?
Perhaps the cosmos has never obeyed them. Perhaps the observations that have led us to believe it has are illusory; perhaps our memories and records of it are illusory. This is a belief held by some Buddhists. Perhaps the appearance of rational behavior in the universe may be explained by a series of coincidences; starting right now, that series of coincidences may unravel. We have no way to determine the likelihood of that occurrence, since it’d throw all our previous results into disarray.
Again, if what we observe is an illusion, then the illusion’s consistency teaches us nothing about the universe, but only about the illusion. Whatever causes that illusion might be totally different from all our perceptions.
There was a very interesting article in the New York Times within the last year (I think) in which a computer science guy argued that if we were exceptionally self-motivated constructs within an exceptionally robust computer simulation, there would be absolutely no way for us to detect that, and all our studies of our simulation would reveal fundamentally flawed results (what we perceived to be a rock, for example, would actually be ones and zeroes on a hard drive). He went on to speculate, not entirely pulling the number out of his ass, that there’s about a 1 in 4 chance that we are such constructs.
Certainly–but they might equally be flawed.
Again, none of this points to a problem with science. Denying it is unscientific.
Daniel
Well, as has been pointed out, I may be misunderstanding you, but: the symbol “~” is given some definition within any given logical system’s definition. By many such logical systems, the statement you challenge is defined to be true by that logical system’s definition of “~”, and thus cannot be wrong. Some people have proposed alternate logical systems with different definitions of “~”, which don’t support the statement you challenged - and in those alternate systems, the statement is indeed false. But that doesn’t change the fact that in the original system the statement is true.
Of course, you may have meant to challenge the claim that one logical system or another actually applies to reality, which is another discussion, but by your use of symbology without much else presented it looked like you were claiming that fact that there are different logical systems with different definitions of “~” was somehow a problem, which it is not.
No fair questioning the senses or appealing to illusion - that’s dealt with in statement 4! One thing at a time! 
If reality has been a series of coincidences it’s been doing a remarkable job of looking like there are consistent rules - so much so that the statistics give very compelling evidence that this is not the case. And even if it is and things suddenly start going completely random, that doesn’t change the fact that there was still a tremendous preponderance of compelling evidence supporting the conclusion “The cosmos operates according to the principles of reason” - so it remains the case that the statement was not taken axiomatically. Even if it does turn out to be wrong.
If all we observe is an illusion then that illusion is part of the universe. And it’s perfectly reasonable to do science on that part of it - it’s perfectly reasonable to do science in a simulation. That our view of the illusion blocks our view of the rest of the universe means that there’d be a lot we didn’t know anything about, but that’s been the case for most of the history of science - maybe someday we’ll find a way past the illusion, maybe we won’t, but that doesn’t invalidate what science we do with it.
And, the preponderance of consistency in our observations is still evidence for the axioms you presented so they’re not taken on faith.
Sounds like an interesting article, and, as a computer science guy and not having read the article, it sounds like he pulled the number out of his ass. That doesn’t sound like something that can be proven either way, except by finding a way to crack through to the outer layer, in which case you wouldn’t give 1 in 4.
Science is about describing and predicting observable reality to the best of our ability - if it does that well, it’s not flawed. Even if it fails to reference the lowest level of reality. (I mean, come on, how much of science is really about quarks directly? Not much? Exactly.)