My previous post was something of a hijack, all I meant to say is that I’m not actually convinced that fear of death is as big a motivator as it’s often assumed to be.
I speculate that the origin of the afterlife concept was largely about wondering (and hoping) that deceased loved ones still exist somewhere, somehow.
I concur. Like you, I rarely think about my own death, though I had a near heart attack 6 years ago and got a cardiac stent, so I could keel over any minute. But I’m much more concerned about the well-being of my loved ones, especially my parents, and I fear their loss.
ETA: I don’t think that this side discussion is a hijack. It discusses one possible explanation for believing in God, which is on topic.
I don’t think it’s useful to generalize from Christianity to all religious experiences.
That’s certainly true, and earlier I wanted to make the same point, but the way the thread title is phrased, I assumed that we’re talking about the god of the Abrahamic religions.
Actually I’d suggest that your statement is not how beliefs work, though it is how simple binary realities work.
It is correct that one of those two things must be true but far too often people think that if you do not accept a claim of extra-terrestrial intelligence then you must, de facto, believe that there is no extra-terrestrial intelligence.
It is a very common error when talking about beliefs, claims and the burden of proof.
I wasn’t saying that you either have to believe that it does or believe that it doesn’t. It’s possible to believe neither (I, for one, am agnostic on the issue.)
Pretty much all major religions have some sort of afterlife.
Many of the oldest ones did also.
From the way it was written It seemed as though you were suggesting you must fall in one of those two camps. If that wasn’t what you meant then good to clarify it.
Also. useful to stress that such statements are very commonly made even if yours isn’t one of them. (e.g. people thinking that “atheist” means that you must believe that gods defintely don’t exist)
Just a couple personal observations. For background, I was raised a Presbyterian but the family stopped attending church when I wad a teenager and I never went back. I am 60 and have never belonged to any church.
When was single and had a steady job, there was a coworker that I cared deeply about. She wss transferred to a new position with a boss that did not respect her. I told her to get another job even though it ment I would not see her anymore. That weekend, I went to a shrine, lit a candle, and prayed fot her to be happy. In a week, she had a new job. I doubt that my prayers had any effect but it was an effort on my part, however feeble. I very seldom pray before or since.
Many years later, i was still working and married with two kids. My wife went to Christian schools and het faith was unshakable. She was diagnosed with ALS and I was her full time caretaker for four years as her body slowly failed. She believed in God to the end and felt hat if her belief wss strong, it would keep her alive. The family was forbidded to speak of her death until she died last year. If I get to the Pearl Gates, the angels will have to hold me back or I will give the person responsible a black eye. It would have destroyed my faith if I had any. During this time, I was active on ALS sites on FB and was struck by how many patients and caregivers put their faith and trust in God to help them deal with the disease. Maybe because there is little that can be done. I have to wonder why God came to my family and struck down the believer and left me healthy.
Strictly speaking, that’s not what agnostic means. You can believe in ETs or you can lack belief in them (with believing they don’t exist a subset of this class) but lacking belief is not agnostic.
Now, I’m aware that agnostic has been used as a weasel work by atheists who think that saying they haven’t made up their minds will result in less hate than admitting to a lack of belief. But it is really about knowledge. For ETs, I think we can all believe that we don’t know if they exist now but can eventually know if at least some exist.
?? Are you differentiating between “believe” and “know”? That’s not unreasonable; the religious people who called themselves Gnostics did not consider themselves to “have beliefs” or to be “believers”, they considered themselves to be folks who “knew”. But in general, agnostic is used to mean “does not actively hold any beliefs regarding God and God’s existence due to not knowing one way or the other”.
Huh???
I don’t know if extraterrestrial intelligences exist. I believe they do without any evidence, just extrapolating from what I know of life and the universe. Seems likely. And our uniqueness unlikely. I have scarcely better than zero confidence that I, personally, will eventually know as a fact that they do indeed exist.
Did you mean we collectivey as a species will eventually know as a fact that they do? Certainly that’s a lot more likely than me as an individual gaining firsthand knowledge. But I wouldn’t say it’s guaranteed.
That’s the problem with believers in general. You get no fewer or more luck than anyone else. If you pray for your team to win, you’re also praying for the other time to lose. Does God, if there is one, okay favorites. I quite doubt it. Still, it doesn’t stop me from praying anyway when I lose my keys.
I’m sorry to hear about your wife. That must be hard to accept.
Do you think it’s necessary that they exist at the same time as we do? Given an infinity of time, it’s possible that ETs may have existed long before we came along or will exist long after humanity is finished. No reason to assume they’ll be around at the same time as we are.
We’re not communicating.
Voyager posited that
Divide that into ‘now’ and ‘later’:
now: I think we can all believe that we don’t know if they exist
but later: we can know if at least some exist
The only way I personally can know for sure that at least some exist is if I encounter direct evidence of their existence. In my lifetime.
I’m already believing it to be true — that falls into the “now” part. I don’t know from firsthand experience that they exist. I just believe it anyhow.
What’s the point of believing it? It’s something that’s possible but we have no evidence of. Why not just leave it at that? Why take the step to belief?
If you limit yourself to what you know for sure, and don’t act on the unconfirmed assumption that anything else is also true, you end up unable to construct a viable model of what is reality in order to operate from it.
In this particular case, your mileage may vary and there don’t appear to be many consequences one way or the other, and I take your point. But in formulating a supposition about ETs or the lack thereof, either we’re not the only intelligent species to have arisen in the 12+ billion year old universe, …or we are. Not that I have to pass a test or guess correctly to win a free vacation in LIsbon or whatever, but I do tend to formulate theories, models of the universe in which I live. In this case I believe intelligence is an emergent quality in life, and will have manifested often in various ways, and that we’re one example of it as opposed to being unique in all of the universe.
Exactly what “believers” tend to assert about their faith in God.
I don’t think anything you’ve said makes it critical for you to come to a conclusion one way or the other.
“i don’t know” is often the most intellectually honest answer to give though it is a tragically underused one.
It certainly doesn’t stop you further investigating the area in question.
Of course being pattern-seeking apes we all want to have explanations and a simplistic, incorrect but superficially satisfactory answer or a position of ill-founded certainty is often more appealing to us as a species.
As long as it does’t present an evolutionary dead-end for us such explanations can be remarkably persistent.
Hence religion, superstition and all manner of supernatural and similar modes of thinking.
To add to this, one very common way that “agnostic” is also used in relation to the ability to gain knowledge that confirms or denies a proposition.
e.g. A deistic god can be defined in such a way as to be forever closed off from the human ability to detect and know anything about.
I (and I’d argue pretty much anybody) would be agnostic about such a god.
However there are other gods that (when anyone actually bothers to define them) are contradictory to the point where we can say “no, that god doesn’t exist” and take a gnostic position.
For intelligent alien life I think one can legitimately take a position that the numbers, distances and time scales involved are so huge that realistically we may never be able to know anything about alien life. I suppose that could be labelled “agnostic” and I have some sympathy with that view.
I don’t dissent with that.
I would agree with that as well.
“Believe” is often the wrong word, or is at least stuck with a lot of the wrong connotations. Consider your basic solipsism. You do not know that the entirety of what you believe to be basic sensory input from your eyes, ears, nose, fingertips, etc is truly that and not something your bored brain has invented. This is a concept that occasionally seems profound to someone the first time they entertain it and become aware that they can’t accumulate any evidence against it. But most of us quickly lose interest in it as a serious conjecture because if it were true, there is no meaningful way to move forward with the assumption that it is true, whereas there are options if we assume (without evidence) that what we’ve regarded as sensory input thus far in our lives is what it seems to be. So we continue to act on the assumption that it is so. That doesn’t have to be a “belief”. One can recognize and admit that they do not know if life is but an illusion and that reality is that (for example) we’re just laboratory specimens in some exotic space alien’s lab and all apparent sensory input is actually artificially created by the Matrix, or whatever. But without “belief”, one can still choose to proceed in life on the assumption that it isn’t the case. We’re allowed to have axioms.
I don’t “believe in God” in the sense of being sure that I’m not wrong. I’m theistic for reasons loosely and roughly comparable to choosing to act on the assumption that the apparently real is indeed real. I proceed in my life on the assumption that there exists volitional choice in this universe and that I am a participant in it, that it is not, actually, a clockwork cause-and-effect domino-chain in which no entity or creature at any point makes decisions or engages in actions because they so chose, but instead only because a bunch of non-conscious processes determined that they would. It’s not precisely the babytalk version of God, a gauzy transparent bearded male in the sky who, like Santa Claus, knows if you’ve been naughty or nice; but it is compatible with a lot of real, serious theological exploration so I use the word ‘God’ and I commune with God and am part of God as a genuinely theistic person. I might be wrong; it’s not the kind of thing I can prove or disprove with evidence.