There are no gods.
That much is universally true. It is also a truth value of Cosmological Reality… the reality that exists independently of the human species.
That’s why all religious claims are false and all hypothetical statements that assume a god exists are all false by definition.
Drew, as per your previous request, I think your argument can be laid out as follows:
These steps could be spelled out in even more detail, but the above seems sufficient for clarity and accuracy.
The argument as laid out (assuming charitable assumptions regarding the inferences between them) is a valid one. The question has to be whether the assumptions are valid.
You (and I) treat the first assumption as self-evident–but others in the thread disagree.
The second assumption seems like it would be agreed to by everyone, at least.
It might be questioned whether assumption 7 is true–that belief might not be as common as people think. Nevertheless, the argument invites clarification as to just what people do believe about the relationship between belief in God and punishment, so the argument at least moves an important discussion forward from a certain point.
You’ve got this backwards.
A hypothetical with a false premise is true by definition.* (And that’s what you said before, so it may be what you meant here as well.)
*Assuming the hypothetical is well-modeled as the material conditional.
Frylock! You are a master of logic!! Thank you so much for reducing a giant rambling mess to just a few concise lines. This is exactly what I was trying to articulate.
And you are 100% correct that the point of my discussion was to try to elicit people’s opinions on the relationship between God and belief in him, etc.
I would also like to say that I am willing to concede assumption 1 may be more accurately stated as: At least some people are unable to choose their beliefs at will.
Serious question, because I honestly do not know the answer… Is this a logical necessity, or a convention of our logic system?
As a comparison, it is only a convention that the statement “All X are Y” does not necessarily imply the existence of even one X, and yet if we say “Some X are Y,” by convention, this does necessarily imply the existence of at least one X. I’ve been told that a perfectly reasonable and workable logic system could be developed where universal implications do require the existence of at least one antecedent…
Is the same true for a system where hypotheticals with false premises are not necessarily true by definition? Or would this quickly lead to insanity?
Trinopus (attempting to think logically…)
The short of it is: When I say If P Then Q, since I haven’t said anything about follows from not-P, then if P is actually false, I can’t have been wrong when I said If P then Q.
Expanding that into something that maybe makes more sense:
The question of just how to capture the English conditional (“if… then…”) formally is wide open. But the material conditional seems like a good first pass. Let me explain what that means.
You can think of terms like “and,” “or” and “not” as being “truth-functional”. What this means is that for each of these terms, the truth value of the sentences the terms are attached to determines the truth value of the whole sentence containing the term. To illustrate, think about what it would take for the following to be true:
A & B
Where A and B can be any pair of sentences you like, and & means “and.” The sentences A and B can be given either of the following two truth values: True, or False.
So what if both were false. Would ‘A & B’ then be true or false?
Well, if I said “The sky is green and dirt is blue,” I’d be wrong on both counts–and so the entire assertion is itself false as well.
So we could say something like this: F & F == F.
If I said “The sky is blue and dirt is blue,” then I’d be wrong on one count, and right about the other. But since I put ‘and’ between the two claims, the whole sentence is itself false (even though part of it is true). “And” statements are only true when both the sentences joined within them are true.
So we could say something like this: T & F == F
In fact, we can complete a whole table like this:
F & F == F
F & T == F
T & F == F
T & T == T
The only way an ‘and’ statement gets to be true is if both the sentences its made of are, themselves, true.
The table for ‘or’ would look like this:
F v F == F
F v T == T
T v F == T
T v T == T
In other words, an ‘or’ statement is true so long as at least one of the sentences its joining together is true.
(For example: If I say “The sky is blue or humans are reptiles,” then I’m right on one count and wrong on the other–but since I joined them together with an ‘or’ the statement as a whole is true. It’s true that EITHER the sky is blue OR humans are reptiles, simply because it’s true that the sky is blue.)
For “not” it’s easy:
–F == T
–T == F
So far this is very intuitive.
(There can be some surprises with ‘or’ because in normal conversation we sometimes mean it in an ‘exclusive’ sense that doesn’t allow both joined sentences to be true. For example, I might say to my kid ‘You can have milk or juice’ and in the right context it’s clear that I mean they can have one or the other but not both. If we sometimes mean this by the English word ‘or’ this just means that there’s another operation–call it xor for “exclusive or”–which the English word ‘or’ can sometimes be used to denote. Nothing too counterintuitive here–English words often have more than one meaning. Formalizing both the or operation and the xor operation simply helps us clarify which meaning is intended…)
What about “If… Then…”
F –> F == ?
F –> T == ?
T –> F == ?
T –> T == ?
How should we fill in those question marks?
One way to think about it is to ask, what would it take to make the statement false? Suppose I were to say the following:
If everyone gets an A, then we’ll have a party.
What would have to happen in order for me to be wrong?
Suppose everyone gets an A, and we do have a party? Was I wrong? No. So:
T –> T == T
Suppose everyone gets an A, and we don’t have a party? Clearly, in this case, I was wrong. I said if everyone got an A, we’d have a party–and everyone DID get an A, yet we DIDN’T have a party. My claim was incorrect. So:
T –> F == F
Now, suppose that everyone DIDN’T get an A.
Suppose not everyone got an A, and we DIDN’T have a party. Well, was I wrong?
I said if they got an A, we’d have a party–but not everyone got an A. So did I falsify myself when I failed to a throw a party? No, I didn’t–I didn’t say we’d have a party if not everyone got an A. So we have:
F –> F == T
This seems surprising to many at first, but hopefully I’ve explained why it’s more intuitive than you might have thought.
Now, what if not everyone gets an A, and we DO have a party?
Was I wrong?
Well, I said that IF everyone gets an A, then we WILL have a party. But that is NOT to say that if not everyone gets an A, then we WON’T have a party. I said nothing at all, in fact, about what would happen if not everyone got an A. So even if we do have a party, my original claim was not falsified. So we have:
F –> T == T
So the full table is:
F –> F == T
F –> T == T
T –> F == F
T –> T == T
Couple of things to notice.
For one thing, there’s only one way for an if-then to be false: When the first sentence (the antecedent) is true and the second sentence (the consequent) is false.
For another thing, if the antecedent is false, then the whole thing–the conditional itself–always turns out to be true. This seems surprising! But hopefully the above explanations have shown why each line of the above table is, in itself, pretty intuitive. Grabbing a firm hold on that set of intuitions can make the “false-antecedent” phenomenon seem much less surprising than it might have been at first.
What I’ve just done is give the main argument for interpreting English if-then as what’s called the “material conditional.” (The “material conditional” is just the logical operator denoted above by ‘–>’ as defined by the truth table just given.)
I should reiterate that it is not generally believed that the material conditional really does capture English’s if-then. Most people think we need to go to a more complicated system involving possible worlds in order to capture the behavior of if-then, in part precisely because of odd-seeming results like the fact that material conditionals with false antecedents are always true. (There are some, though, who do think the material conditional is perfectly adequate, and that the seeming anomalies like the false-antecedent phenomenon can be shown non-anomalous by a careful explanation of the actual mechanics of the social act of assertion.)
Hope that wasn’t too unbrief. 
Here’s an article from the Stanford Encyclopedia on the subject, which I have not yet read, but which I trust will be worth reading given the source. Section 2 looks to be most relevant to your question.
Frylock: Thanks! Super answer, and I appreciate it.
I guess I was looking for a “non-Euclidean geometry” in an alternative logical system. But I guess that the case F – T > F would lead to absurdities…
(Many, many years ago, I used to play around with the old Wff’n’Proof logic game, but never got any too good at it!)
Trinopus
You just made a statement of fact here. I do not accept it. Unless you prove this fact you assert, I’m compelled to reject the rest of your arguments.
BTW. I do not believe in gods, but I don’t assert their nonexistence as fact. You just did, so the burden of proof is yours. Have fun…
Oddly enough, most folks who profess a ‘faith’ in the US tend to cherry pick which tenets they adhere to, and cheerfully disregard the rest… So, in a very real sense they do ‘choose’.
For instance, a ‘pro-choice’ Catholic, or a Fundamentalist who call poor people “raccoons”, or those who talk the talk on Sunday and lead a life of total sin the rest of the week, and insist they are still ‘saved’. All have one thing in common, they’ll all be mortally offended if you suggest they might be behaving just a teensy bit hypocritical.
I tend to - rightly or wrongly- judge folks on what they ‘do unto others’. Since only God (or the Gods, Divine Providence, or the Goddess) can read their hearts.
An interesting, fairly rare quote from Mohandas Gandhi: "A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act. " followed by the better known one: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”–
And I’d throw in: “Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.”, and "Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. ", and "Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up. ". – plus "Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause. ", and lastly “It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”
There i think was a man who understood the crux, the foibles and the failings, of religion vs faith vs free will.
Wasn’t clear to me, and I was the one making it.
About two minutes. The process wasn’t all that difficult. I recalled my thoughts on sollipsism, and realized that there was no proof whatsoever that existed. Recalling all evidence to mind, it then was destroyed by doubt. Doubting everything, I was left with the only possible truth: that I was alone, and reality itself an illusion. Getting back was easier. I don’t like the conclusion, and therefore was more able to drop it and have a stiff drink.
However, I’m a very strange person who may not qualify as mentally sound. I have been known to stretch my thinking to possibly-dangerous extremes and do suffer from mental stress, partly as a result of trying to overthink things.
More normal people, I hold, still choose their beliefs, in a slower and saner method of living their lives. Most will choose many if not all the same basic assumptions as their parents and other forefathers, find ing them quite adequate for life.
Ignoring the already-pointed-out fact that you’re incorrect on one important point (a proposition of the form “false => true” is definitionally true), I’m genuinely curious about the implications of your view toward argumentation. If I interpret you correctly you seem to deny the validity of any use of reductio ad absurdum — just as a practical matter quite a relevant portion of mathematics would go poof were that the case.
But aside from that. Allow that it is not raining anywhere around my current location; I should like to make the following argument:
If it were raining outside, the uncovered pavement would be wet.
The pavement is not wet.
Thus it is not raining outside.
Since it isn’t raining outside, am I not permitted that first premise? Given my knowledge about rain, pavement, the evaporation cycle, etc., the suggestion seems absurd. Would you be willing to give up all arguments of this form?
Edit: I am also rather curious how god can be disproven without some assumptions as to what would be true if god did exist. How exactly did you find out that there is no god?
Meaning you miscommunicated.
I’ll post later with an explanation as to why the thing you claim to be doing is conceptually incoherent.
Okay, let’s suppose there is a person who knows himself to have changed a belief at will–he knows that he believed P before, and willed himself to believe -P (which he presently believes)–and knows himself to be able, at will, to believe P again.
As described, such a person doesn’t take his belief that -P to be responsive to the way the world actually is–for he takes it to be responsive to what his will determines his belief to be, independently of the way the world is.
But a belief, by definition, is something that is supposed to be responsive to the way the world is, in at least (but not only) the sense that believing something entails expecting the belief to be responsive to the way the world actually is.
So the person does not, after all, understand himself to believe that -P.
This contradicts the supposition at the beginning of the post.
So the supposition is wrong–there is not a person who fits the description given in the first paragraph of this post.
What if such a person is wavering on the edge, the cusp, of a belief-dilemma. Not so much for really basic things, like “being the only person in the world,” but, say, someone who has very mixed pro-choice/pro-life beliefs. Someone who has heard the best arguments from both sides, and can’t quite make up his mind.
Such a person might start the day saying, “Okay, I’m gonna choose to put a little more weight on what Pastor Bob said, and put a little less weight on what Nurse Mary said. I’m pretty sure I’m pro-life.” But by evening time, he might say, “I’ve chosen otherwise. I respect Pastor Bob, but I’m going to give Nurse Mary’s arguments more weight. I’m gonna vote pro-choice next election.”
(I actually went through almost exactly this kind of back-and-forth reasoning with California’s “medical marijuana” initiative. I – sort of – chose to be undecided, and, as the days counted down to the election, I chose one side, then the other, pendulum-swinging, but never very far. A sort of 49%-51% belief.)
The difference, I guess, is this kind of belief doesn’t “correspond to the way the world actually is,” as you said above. It is more of a matter of opinion, or even taste.
Trinopus
P.S. just had a thought: can tastes can be “chosen” too? I like chocolate. But, if I had a good reason to choose otherwise – say, to soften my budget! – I could really overdo and binge on really crummy chocolate, stuff myself with it till I barf, and thus induce an antipathy in the flesh. I’d never want to eat chocolate again. Could one do something like this with beliefs? If, say, I wanted to believe in God, I’d go and expose myself to the worst, nastiest, snarling, sneering, jerk of an atheist I could find? The reaction might impel me to a new faith!
An opinion is a belief. (And just like beliefs, they are subject to critical scrutiny, despite what about half of college freshmen seem to think these days… 
)
On the other hand, if by voting pro-life you’re in some sense expressing a “taste” then I’d say you’re not expressing a belief. You’re identifying with a group, perhaps, but that’s not the same thing as believing what the group stands for. To have a belief is to expect what you’re believing to actually be true. But to make assertions based on taste is to make assertions based on something other than what you expect to actually be true. So “taste-driven” assertions are not expressions of belief.
I do think you can habituate yourself into a new belief, just as you can habituate yourself into a new taste–and ftr I’ve said so a few times in the thread. I think doing so is morally repugnant, (whoa!?), but I think it can be done.
But changing beliefs at will isn’t morally repugnant–it’s simply impossible.
Well, shrug… I don’t agree, but let’s move on…
Why would it be morally repugnant? It might be a good thing! Take, say, an old-time bigot, brought up to believe that blacks or gays or women are inferior. But, with the Civil Rights movement, he decides to work to get over it. He fights the fight within his own mind, to reverse the prejudices of a lifetime. Maybe he succeeds…
I’d call that morally admirable!
(My papa actually went through that. He was brought up to believe that blacks were dirty and lazy. It took him a lot of soul-searching to change, and, to be honest, he never completely succeeded…)
Trinopus
P.S. no offense? I’m enjoying this discussion, and I hope my stubbornness is not morally dismaying.
The belief he ends up with is a good one, but the process by which he came to have it was not admirable. He didn’t examine evidence and evaluate his beliefs. This means he was not attempting to track reality when he decided to habituate himself into the new belief. That’s wrong, and I think this “wrongness” has a moral tinge to it. I think there’s a moral imperative to follow the evidence available to you, and that habituating yourself into beliefs that are contrary to your own evidence is a form of dishonesty.
I think the only basic difference between us that youa ssume people are, deep down, rational. I do not. Belief has little to do with reason, right or wrong. While we may hope we do, over time, use our reason to develoop and correct our beliefs, that in now way, shape, or form means that they are so. Belief always starts with an act of will - even if it is no more than a determination to do something differently.
How can you have this stance? Have you ever learned anything from scientific research, or more likely the scientific research of others? Have you never heard the evidence for to contradictory viewpoints and chosen to believe one or the other based on the strength of the arguments? Have you ever believed something and ultimately changed your mind because new evidence to the contrary is presented to you? Have you ever not believed in something because you never even heard of it, and then came to believe in it once you learned something about it?