If you did visit there somehow, you certainly wouldn’t find people moaning about how their laws of nature prevent them from existing, which is sort of the point. Only in a universe with life-enabling qualities could you find people awestruck by the uncanny coincidence of it all. Which to my mind makes it not so uncanny.
That’s exactly what finally convinced me of theism.
What would be the point of violating the known laws of physics on such a massive scale? For those who find God an unnecessarily complex hypothesis, such that by Occam’s Razor any other explanation of any phenomenon is preferable to supposing that God exists, a mass hallucination would be a preferable explanation. After all, the laws of physics could not possibly have been suspended, could they?
People rising from the tomb thirty-six hours after having been tortured to death violates the known laws of biology, by a long way. So - if we’re so inclined - we argue that he wasn’t dead in the first place, or that the story of his resurrection was made up, or that he never existed at all. This is simple to those of the modern scientific age, who can describe in biological terms which our ancestors two thousand years ago did not know exactly how it is impossible that anyone should rise from the dead. People who try to walk on water sink. People can only feed five thousand hungry people if it turns out the five thousand brought a packed lunch along after all, and the “true miracle” was getting them to share. We can explain away any account of a miracle we like. We could do the same even if the miracle was five minutes ago.
I’ve heard Sam Harris compare this reason to someone who believes on faith that there is a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his back yard. Upon being asked why he believes this, he says “because I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my back yard.”
Which is why we’d like the miracle to have persistent effects in reality that can be observed at a later date, and be observed by large numbers of people. Any momentary-then-gone miracle could be explained as a mental hiccup, but not one that sticks around. We want that for any objective proof of anything, though; the reason we want ‘big proofs’ of God specifically is so that we can rule out it being something other than god (or something worthy of being called a god, anyway) that caused the miracle. Sure, god could make it rain, but then again, it might be clouds doing it. We’re fairly sure clouds can’t move stars around though.
The point of “violating the laws of physics on a massive scale” (though moving stars doesn’t necessarily violate the laws of physics; it would just require LOTS of power and ability) is to prove that it’s actually god doing it, not some other ordinary thing.
Regardless, this tangent probably should be returned to the other thread where it belongs.
To provide a sufficiently convincing demonstration. As I just said.
Perhaps you are confusing me with some other posters who said that ANY phenomenon must have a more convincing explanation. I specifically posted to point out that I DO NOT hold that view. And I provided an example to demonstrate such. No, the laws of physics cannot possibly be suspended. Except by God, hence, my example.
Now as to the rest of your post, I agree with you that my proposed scenario does leave some wiggle room for ‘it was all superduper aliens through processes we are not yet ready to understand’. That is why I do not consider the scenario ‘definite, all-conclusive, end-of-discussion’ proof of the existence of God, simply ‘pretty good evidence’ that will do unless we later have reason to question it. Which is what the scientific outlook is really about. In the parallel thread I elaborated a bit on where I was coming from with this example. I guess if you haven’t read that, you may be imputing ideas to me that I do not have.
We cannot know without any shadow of a doubt that the atomic hypothesis is correct. We simply know that a hell of a lot of evidence, and theoretical structure, points to it being a good explanation of the behaviour of matter. The moving stars scenario would give me cause to consider the existence of God as reasonable as the existence of atoms.
And as for the ‘mass hallucination’ thing… I did not mention observations from the New Horizons probe for shits and giggles, you know!
ETA: so yeah, begbert’s just pretty much said everything I wanted to say! And I agree let’s move this to the other thread. Oh one thing to begbert: I think it WOULD violate the known laws of physics. Special relativity: think how fast those stars would have to be moving!
Oh I don’t think I really did this justice. I think there’s a big difference between explaining away moving stars with ‘mass hallucination’ or ‘unknown super-technology’ on the one hand, and explaining away loaves and fishes or the resurrection on the other. It is true that atheists like me (and probably most theists) do not accept the loaves+fishes/resurrection as literally true. But it’s got a FAR simpler explanation-away. It’s this: they were four books, written long after the event, by four people, one of whom was just copying from the others. There’s no reason to believe any of that to be true.
If a resurrection like event, or a loaves and fishes event, happened five minutes ago, it would be covered by major news agencies over the whole world and would have hundreds of eye-witnesses.
You would say that it took courage to believe that you’ll go to everlasting reward and see all your loved ones after you’re dead? That hardly seems like a difficult choice. I don’t see how courage would be required.
Perhaps he was being threatened by some tyrant, either atheistic or of another religion, who was threatening to kill him* if he didn’t renounce his God? This was a moderately common event in biblical times, right? It’s perhaps the best example of a scenario where courage is required to believe.
And if Jesus did his miracles in the modern day, they’d be considerably more convincing than an old book of myths, but even so not overly convincing, given that his miracles sound very, very much like stage magician’s tricks. Given that I don’t think that every stage magician is Jesus, he’d have to do better than that to convince me–unless he subjected his miracles to intense scientific study, perhaps. You know, letting the scientists control the environment and keep doubles and props out, letting them examine the water and wine, study his corpse, check him over for extra loaves and fishes in hidden pockets…
- Presumably the tyrant didn’t go through with it.
To start with, you don’t have to be a determinist in any meaningful way to be an atheist. I think that uncertainty at the micro level and chaos theory at the macro level make predetermination of anything impossible. If you mean, however, the different between purely physical explanations and spiritual ones, then I can see it. I consider consciousness purely physical, by the way.
Intentionality and consciousness do exist, or at least seem to for us. I’d think a world where there is an omniscient god would be less supportive of intentionality than ours. As for meaning and purpose, what do you mean by them exactly? Is the meaning of something assigned by a god any more significant than meaning assigned by us? Is purpose the purpose of the universe, or of an action? And why are they important, anyway? Is it that you are uncomfortable with a universe without purpose, as opposed to actually being able to demonstrate that purpose exists?
In order for me to stop believing that God exists, God would have to stop existing.
Putting aside the question of whether God exists in the first place, how would you know if he stopped existing? Wouldn’t you just keep on believing, blissfully unaware of his disappearance?
Ouch, this hurt my brain. It was like trying to read a bad track.
So your belief in god is contingent on the existence of god? If you know god exists why do you bother with belief?
For me, it would require a change in history (particularly my own). Or perhaps severe amnesia or brain damage of some kind — although I’m not sure whether that qualifies as a “change of mind” per se.
Then your standard of proof still needs some work.
For us, here on Earth to view the stars rearranging themselves, would have a possible explaination. The atmosphere provides us with all sorts of distortions, manipulate the atmosphere and the distortions could, in theory, look like anything you want them to. This is also not too far beyond man’s ability either, we have been working on manipulating the atmosphere for years. Such a phenominon coule be a man made conjuring trick and with the state of advertisement I could see such a thing at some point in the future.
I don’t think there is any physical event that could, without a shadow of a doubt, convince a man of intelligence and conviction that God exists. The answer would have to be a spiritual event, God would have to touch you up close and personal like in order for there to be a radical change in conviction.
In the same light, as a thiest, there is no physical event that could, without a shadow of a doubt, change my conviction that God exists. It would have to be a spiritual event. Something deep inside what I perceive as my soul that, when I searched it for what has thus far been the foundation of my faith, was simply not there anymore.
That’s it. No theory. No debate. No tragic event. Nothing short of my fountain of inner strength, not just running low or completely running dry, but no longer being there at all.
I do not, in fact, happen to harbor a belief in a God who has thoughts that proceed in a linear fashion (where decisions and conclusions are reached on Wednesday after thinking about them all day Tuesday, etc). The notion of God as “omniscient” or the (implicit) notion of God as abrogating all intentionality unto its Holy Self are (therefore?) kind of foreign to my theology.
The notion of meaning “assigned to” anything, anywhere, ever, to me reeks of denying that any aspect of that meaning has diddly-squat to do with the thing to which it is assigned, and everything to do with the “assigner” thereof. Semantics? Admittedly I don’t think meaning inheres in things to the exclusion of the audience to whom they would have those meanings, either. It’s in the space in between, the relationship. Dunno if that clears things up or obscures them more, but it’s a principle that manifests at many levels. You as an individual are certainly not “who you are” in isolation from the myriad things that have had an effect upon you, and yet you aren’t the sum total of them, a passive process existing only in reaction to external stimuli either. You experience yourself in interaction with world, in interaction with other actors also experiencing themselves in interaction, etc.
I’ve already told you I could embrace an atheistic vocabulary to describe my reality among any atheists who have no problem with the axiom that intentionality and consciousness does in fact exist. So you need not search for hidden clauses by which I’m going to insist on inserting God and other theistic terms into the conversation (I’ll use other words instead).
Actually, I was trying to see if I understood your post correctly. Forget omniscience, determinism seems to subvert intentionality. If we have been conditioned to salivate when we smell a steak, do we intend to do so? I believe in intentionality because I don’t think we live in a totally deterministic world.
I agree that meaning doesn’t inhere to the exclusion of an audience. In fact, a single event can have multiple meanings depending on the viewer. Given that, where does the meaning come from? I can see two possibilities. The first, which I support, is that the meaning comes from the viewer - though this person might decide on a meaning with input from others. The second is that it comes from a god who hangs a metaphorical sign on an event. If this god existed, then any contradictory meanings that people assign would be wrong, by fiat. A weak analogy is to the battle between authors and critics about the meaning of their work - weak because critics get to say that authors don’t understand the meaning they inserted, something you can’t say about god.
I don’t see the internal conversation/interaction as being different in principle from the external one. And where does the internal voice come from but our genetic programming and social programming? But the interesting question is how do we weight and filter our external inputs? Five people can listen to one speaker and get very different things out of her speech, depending on all sorts of factors. We’re very stateful intelligences, so a statefree reaction to external stimuli is clearly a trivial and incorrect proposition.
I’m not sure that I have to make the existence of intentionality and consciousness an axiom, since there seems to me to be good evidence for them. Plus, I doubt you could predict a person’s religious views based on their opinion of this. However I think their opinion of meaning and purpose is crucial. I’ve never done a survey, but it seems to me that those who feel strongly that there must be a purpose to the universe are theists, or at least deists.
Why not? There always seems to me to be equivocation in dicussions about freewill and determinism inasmuch as the theist is (or ought to be) talking about it as it applies to morality, and not as it applies to physics, whereas the atheist is (usually) talking about it as it applies to the world. (Just as you did in your post.)
And so, if God has created an ambiguous moral world where agents like Him and us can make free choices, then it stands to reason that by His own hand He has shut Himself out of possibilities. (Just as He has done in the physical world where He cannot make a square circle or a married bachelor.)
I had switched to talking about meaning here. I think the free will discussion is orthogonal to the meaning discussion. I’m not very hung up on free will, since the world looks like we have free will whether we actually have it or not.
One thing atheism does is say there is nothing but humanly assigned meaning to the universe. I think it is clear that there is human assigned meaning whether or not a god exists. An existent god might tell a mortal that the meaning he assigned was wrong, but, as in the case of the author and critic, the human could tell god that his assigned meaning is not complete in his view. My arms might be too short to box with God, but my mouth is big enough to argue with him.
The rest of your post doesn’t seem to go along with these words. My point was that an author, not having full understanding of his own thought processes, might subconsciously insert meaning into a book, meaning that is picked up by a critic. For instance, he randomly chooses a name for a character which turns out to have meaning. But how random was the choice actually?
Now God must have perfect insight into his thought processes, and cannot be surprised by people reading additional meanings and purposes into his creation. Surprised in the sense of having to admit that the human discovered meaning might be what he had in mind all along. The purpose of the universe is more or less unchanged by the actions of people.