Some people have mysterious experiences, which they feel natural science can’t explain in a way that corresponds to their altered perception of reality.
Not that I expect our guest-du-jour to stick around to have his ignorance fought but he is asking for two very different things. Belief in God is not belief in a literal interpretation of religious texts, which contradict each other and themselves. For the latter, I have no good explanation.
That said, people are religious because they were raised that way. People believe in God because of personal experience. They are very different things.
Knowledge of God is a purely personal experience. There is no testable hypothesis, no proof, no faithometer minimum acceptable reading. When you see God, you recognize Him.
A lot of people who believe in God are not religious (raises hand). In fact, I personally believe that someone who knows God must separate himself from religion, as that is the work of man, flawed and destructive of one’s relationship with God.
And I believe that the vast majority of religious people don’t believe in God. They just haven’t bothered to engage themselves to discern their faith. Their faiths remain unchallenged and, as such, they are not true faith, just an expression of cultural bias.
I mean those of us who worship the metaphysical God.
The fact that you don’t know how insulting that is, is evidence that you don’t really understand what you’re saying.
In a sense, yes. But you wouldn’t say that there’s no distinction between the sun and a tennis ball just because both are round and yellow.
That’s a temporal fallacy (typical of metadata inferences). It may be true in a snapshot of time, but Europe, for example, was quite religious just a generation or two ago. Your premise fails to account for the change. There are (and have been) many other counterexamples as well.
Religion has its faith, and science has its confidence. They are not the same because they do not study the same thing. Why you think this is somehow “convenient” is unclear, because frankly it would be exceedingly convenient if science could examine any analytical thing, like the rules of arithmetic or the existence of God. But it can’t. It examines only physical things.
This is actually very close to the correct answer. At least, it is what is observable. Unfortunately, these observations do not — and cannot — tell us whether the brain is conjuring up God or God is stimulating the brain.
But, see, I think that’s what frustrates me, at least. You [Theists, generally, not you specifically] get this feeling, this sense, and think it means something, that it’s something that exists outside of your brain, objectively.
I don’t mean to be insulting here, but to me it sounds a lot like a delusion, albeit a culturally acceptable and encouraged one, and it frightens me that over the course of history, so many decisions have been made, and there’s been so much, both public and private policy made on behalf of that feeling.
Not to answer for Poly, but speaking for myself, I agree with you. Of course, two things should help to allay your fear: (1) people have as well done horrible things throughout history without any invocation at all of any god; and (2) I think the “feeling” you mention is a result of the new understanding. If it were only a feeling, it would be no differrent from a drug. Feelings are essentially electrochemical activity in the brain.
If I may be truthful, I had you in mind as I typed that part of my post. Good to see you’re not slacking.
Forgive me for misrepresenting you, but it seems that you are compartmentalising faith and science as I described, and yet I see no justification for your assertion that they each deal with their own separate ‘domains’, nor can I see any justification that science can not examine non-physical things, or even any evidence that non-physical things exist outside scientific scrutiny.
I fear that we may be headed down a head-bangingly frustrating path where neither party sees eye to eye, a feeling I’ve experienced in other similar threads in which I have refrained from posting. I don’t begrudge your faith/religion/belief in God, I just can’t for the life of me grok this whole ‘Faith deals with non-physical, science deals with physical’ bisection.
Let’s say that there did exist a meta-physical ‘zone’ that scientific scrutiny could not penetrate. Imagine we are in a dark room. Science is the box of candles that let’s us illuminate the room and discover the contents. We learn that the scary noise is caused by a hamster in a cage. We learn that the comforting warmth we feel is provided by a radiator situated against the wall. We can learn many things about the room by picking things up and examining them.
Now, enter you. You say that there is an attic above this room that can not be seen with our candles, can not be accessed physically (there’s no hatch), but can be interfaced with something called ‘faith’. By using this faith, you believe that you can access this attic and see the contents. You can see a sentient being in the attic looking down at the room, and you call this God. I am in the room with you and say that, God or not, there is no evidence, justification or inclination to believe that there is an attic above us, nor can we even begin to speculate who or what would inhabit that attic. You say that the attic is outside the realm of what we can understand using our normal method of candle-light and picking things up and shaking/opening/tasting them. But it’s definitely there.
Now, enter a third person. He expands on what you have said. Not only is there an attic above us accessible through faith, but a basement below us that is accessible by, let’s say, laughter. I can’t interface with the basement with my candles of science, nor can you interface with your faith, but this guy says that he is capable of knowing that the basement exists through his laughter. The basement is a third compartment, full to the brim of candy canes. These candy canes are what keeps the God in the attic alive, and they teleport to him when he needs them.
So, in essence, this is what we have:
[ul]
[li]I say that because we use science to make truth claims about our room, and there is no scientific evidence that an attic exists, let alone that a God inhabits this attic, it makes sense to accept that the room is the only thing, until we see good reason to claim otherwise…[/li][li]You say that, while science is indeed useful for making observations about the room, it is as useful as a chocolate teapot for even noticing the attic, let alone the God in it.[/li][li]He says that, while it is indeed good that we can explain the hamster cage with science, and the attic with faith, we can’t use either of these discrete methods to deal with the basement. If we want to see those lovely red and white candy canes, we use a third system of observation and claim-making: laughter.[/li][/ul]
More and more people come along and adding news rooms with new rules about how claims can be made about their contents.
Why should we crank up to level 2 (your level) and stop there? If we have physical, and you say that there is the negative of it, why isn’t their a Physical3 or a Physical4 or even an UberTruberPhysical89 that is neither physical nor non-physical but somewhere in between? Doesn’t it make sense to stick to our 1 zone room until we see reason to believe otherwise?
How is your skepticism (assuming you would be somewhat cynical) of the third man’s claim to access the basement with laughter any different from my skepticism of your claim to be able to observe the attic with faith?
No, I’d say it’s more that one of those cases lends itself to being scientifically tested (psychics and mediums) whereas the other (existence of God) is by definition untestable.
Plenty of psychics and mediums have been tested and shown (one way or another) to not possess the abilities that they claimed.
You can’t test the existence of God.
So I personally find it very easy to be skeptical of the next person who claims that they can predict the future or bend spoons or whatever, but I don’t ask my friends and relatives to prove that God is real.
“Lack of evidence” is not the same thing as “Evidence against”.
That would be because the sun and a tennis ball have observable properties that are different. You’re comparing Fendaloos to Gindarons and saying they’re different, when neither term is defined in any meaningful way.
Hogwash, prove empircally that ‘thought’ exists.
Right, but according to those researchers Muffin mentioned, the belief in a god that you have is electrochemical activity in the brain.
And I know that people have done horrible things throughout history without invoking a god. People tend to be pretty horrible. But most of the time, when they do horrible things, they’re for reasons I can understand. There’s something rational about taking over a country and taking its stuff, for example. It might be evil, but at least you get something out of it. And generally, when people do it, they know it’s evil…they might not care, but at least they know.
God, it is a great pleasure to discuss this with you. Clarity. Respect. Civility. You bring only the best argument and the best behavior to the table. Thank you for that.
Because there’s no cranking.
People make a similar mistake in approach when they ask why we can’t eventually count to infinity, given infinite time. And that’s because infinity is not the number that’s the highest counting number plus one. Similarly, it is not the case that we begin inquiries with science, and then ramp it up when science fails us. It isn’t a matter of degree, but of bivalence.
Yes, we can say that there is some proposition, X, such that X -> p AND X -> ~p. And we can invent whole logical systems with it. But you choose first order predicate logic to apply to science rather than a multivalent system simply because your conclusions would fall apart otherwise. Such systems have very limited use, usually for the purpose of examining bivalent paradoxes.
Plus, you’re thinking dimensionally, as though the metaphysical were some extending dimension or container of the physical. But it isn’t a matter of where it is, but what it is. And I don’t blame you for that because, as a student or lover of science, you’ve not had a lot of exposure to any metaphysical philosophy besides existentialism. For you, existence is all important. For you, a thing needs coordinates, especially in spacetime but barring that, in some brane that is at least positable for scientific testing.
But God (as I’ve consistently defined Him) has a very different perspective. He and His world are without dimension. Dimension (the mathematical variable that describes a physical coordinate) is a physical thing. It is not the case that God is a dimension or two or trillions above the universe; it is that there is no variable that will localize Him. Thus, He sees everything at once, from the beginning to the end and all in between. For him, the universe has simultaneously not yet begun, is ongoing, and is finished — not over some stretch of time, or even in an instant, but rather, without respect to time at all (another dimension).
Now, back to your example of the candle lit room. Both I and the third person are making claims about the same thing. I may call it an attic and he may call it a basement, but both labels mean the same: “not the room”. Whether he is right or I am right, none of us can determine by your candles because there would need to be something for the photons to hit. Without a quantum substructure, a photon is a useless artifact.
It should not be a surprise that analytical claims require analytical solutions. You will encounter the same futility that you find in your search for God with your candles if you search for proof that 1+1=2. Yes, you can put one candle in the corner and another beside it and count them. And you can do this repeatedly until you satisfy yourself intuitively that one plus one indeed equals two. But all you have proven is that one plus one equalled two at some point in the past (whenever you conducted your experiment). You have failed to prove that one plus one must equal two and metaphysically cannot equal anything else the next time you try. But with five simple axioms, you can easily prove that one plus one will always be two.
Not so. Those are made up words. The various definitions of “god” are coherent. And you are equivocating when you use “god” as the explanation for something unknown interchangeably with “god” as that which is eternal, essential, and necessary.
There’s a reason you use a phrase, rather than a single word, to convey the idea of “belief in God”. You do that because “belief” and “God” are not the same thing. If they were, you would need only one word and not three. Science detects the belief, but not the God.
I know that it can be frustrating not to understand something. But do not fall prey to the very thing you’re condemning. Do not invoke unnecessary entities to explain the gaps in your understanding. Why blame God when the decisions men have made have been their own?
feli8, you may be too new here to know just how often this comes up and gets thrashed out here.
If you were attempting to convince us that belief in God is foolish and unfounded, you’re not going to win over anyone who’s not already convinced. You haven’t said anything we haven’t heard many times before.
If you’re looking for an honest answer to your question, there are some people here who would be willing to try if they thought they’d be given a fair hearing. Some have already posted here. And if you want more, we can probably point you to some older threads.
But the one-sentence answer to your question is: Scientific evidence is not necessarily the only legitimate reason for believing in something/someone.
I highly recommend Gardner’s book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, in which he explains and attempts to justify his beliefs (and disbeliefs) on a variety of philosophical issues, including religious ones, such as why it is not unreasonable to have faith in God.
Why? If I can’t, does that mean that science can’t make a claim for the existence of thought? Is thought forever outside the realm of science?
Thoughts can be measured in the lab, can’t they? Artificial limbs can be controlled through thought, can they not? Is that not proof that thought exists in a physical sense if they can interface with a computer to move a fake finger when somebody is thinking “I want to move my finger”? Even if we can not currently prove that I am thinking about a big yellow taxi with a hot-dog in the glove compartment, is it that much of a stretch to predict that brain-scanning technology will one day be refined enough to pick up the electrical signals of my thoughts and output a big yellow taxi with a hot-dog in the glove compartment? Perhaps a neuroscientist could chime in with some details regarding the physical evidence of thought.
That’s a great recommendation!
And for those with a more scientific curiosity about the topic, I recommend Phantoms in the Brain. VS Ramachandran is a neurologist and neurological researcher whose elegant and simple experiments pioneered the whole field. Of particular interest is this from the book:
Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way “inferior” to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence – the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion – to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.
Can science prove it any more than you can?
Is God?
Nope. Blood flow and electrical activity can be measured. Nobody can prove that electrical activity = thought or generates thought. The best they can prove is that the two are concurrent.
Nope. They’re controlled by electrical impulses.
You can’t prove that it’s ‘thought’ that creates those events.
Even if we cannot currently produce a graph showing God it doesn’t mean that quantum physics (or its successor disciplines) cannot explain to us dimensions or branes or some other as-yet-unnamed phenomenon which will fully account for God.
My point in my challenge to you to prove thought exists was to show you how you believe in things that cannot be touched or measured. Either you do or you don’t. You can’t selectively say ‘well, I’ll believe in non-empirical concepts A, Q, and T but won’t believe the rest of them’.
My other point is that just because early 21stC known science hasn’t a ‘proof’ of God doesn’t mean there will never be one any more than just because early 21st C known science can’t yet produce your yellow taxi doesn’t mean it never will. So to claim that God must not exist because there’s no proof is itself unscientific. Science would never have existed had people not set out to prove concepts that were mysterious/confusing to mortals. Science is about exploring possibility, not certainty.
Those are both Indian dishes. Scrumptious!
Dunno. You tell me. IS ‘God’ outside of the natural, observable universe? If so, and if we can not measure his/her/its effect on the universe, can’t detect ‘God’ at all, and have zero physical evidence of ‘God’…well, then whether or not ‘God’ exists kind of becomes a moot point, no? At that point I’m willing to trot out Occam’s Razor…
A bit more than ‘blood flow’ and ‘electrical activity’ can be mapped these days wrt thought. You’d have to be taking skepticism to ridiculous lengths not to see the corelation these days…or just not up on the latest science.
Um…and is it just mystical/magical or otherwise happy coincidence that they happen to move in the exact way the person attached to said artifical limb is thinking them to move? Prototype artificial limbs that respond to thought patterns are past the Sci-Fi stage these days…I’ve seen some pretty good demos of their capabilities, and it seems far from a happy coincidence that they move exactly as the person they are attached too WANTS them to move. YMMV of course…maybe its all luck or chance.
-XT