Unless atheists can give an account of why naturalism is true, their arguments against God all fail, and they are left with agnosticism at best.
My essay "How to Respond to a Supercilious Atheist" generated many responses from atheists and agnostics. Some were courteous, some were hostile, and a few were even supercilious. But none even came near to adequately answering the fundamental challenge to the atheistic establishment that I articulated in "Supercilious Atheist."
Indeed, the public arguments of the so-called "New Atheists," and their admirers and imitators, are based on a fundamental error of thinking: As I showed in "Supercilious Atheist" (and summarize below) they assume atheism, but do not prove it. And given that the worldview by which they judge God to be nonexistent is illogical, and therefore necessarily false, I propose that the New Atheists be given a more accurate label: New Sophists.
And let's be clear what's at stake. This is not just a matter of what individuals believe, as important as that is. As I argued in "Liberalism 101," the system of thought commonly called "liberalism," by which I mean the entire worldview of the Left, has de facto control over America. Liberalism is not just an irritant; it expresses the deepest convictions by which our leaders make decisions and form our society. And liberalism is based, philosophically at least, on the nonexistence of God.
For according to liberalism, even if God exists, nothing certain can be known about Him, and therefore He might as well not exist. Call it functional atheism. And with no God to guide us, mankind becomes the supreme being, i.e. the supreme authority on truth and morality, in which case liberalism's campaign to remake society is legitimate.
In other words, if there is no God, then liberalism makes sense. And if God does exist, then much of liberalism is invalid. This is why most of our public policies are based, indirectly at least, on atheism. For example:
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The increasingly successful campaign to legitimize homosexuality. After all if, under atheism, we think homosexuality is ok, then it is ok.
- The near-total absence of any restraints on abortion. After all, under atheism, man is just a physical body, in which case the barely-formed fetus cannot possibly be a person deserving the protection of the law.
- Mass immigration. After all, if it is not true that, as the Bible says, God deliberately formed mankind into separate nations, then it's perfectly ok to flood our nation with non-assimilable foreigners, if we think that there is some immediate advantage to be had.
In general, liberalism holds that because there is no creator God, things do not have fixed natures and there is no God who has authority over us. Therefore mankind is radically free, and any social change the majority wants is ok. To be sure, atheists are free to support traditional ideas and ways of life if they choose, but they are also equally free to implement radical change. And the one who is radically free usually does not gravitate toward traditional ways, but instead toward the sort of revolutionary change that liberalism aims for.
Atheism, then, (functional or actual) is the intellectual foundation of liberalism, and so publicly discrediting atheism is, philosophically at least, the first step in publicly discrediting the liberalism that is, in fact, dissolving Western Civilization, including America.
To be sure, theism does remain strong among some individuals and private groups, and vague "God talk" is still popular among politicians. Furthermore, public policy decisions that accord with theism are occasionally put in place, at least until the ACLU swings into action. But overall, atheism-based liberalism rules society. The ACLU is not fighting uphill against an entrenched enemy; they are suppressing rebellion against the ruling order. Furthermore, the policy decisions that accord with theism are made because of a residual allegiance to a mostly-gone theistic tradition, not because of a principled adherence to a living and consciously-believed theistic worldview. True conservatism, therefore, must challenge atheism.
In "Supercilious Atheist," the challenge to the atheism that is (indirectly) the dominant way of thinking in America was, in summary, as follows:
Aggressive atheists claim there is no evidence for God. Therefore, they say, an intelligent person has no choice but to withhold belief in God. Note the wording: "withhold belief." Many atheists define their position not as being certain that there is no God, but as simply not believing, even as they concede that a God may, in some sense, really exist. They may be more accurately called "non-theists," but I will use traditional language, and call them atheists.
However, the atheists' position is obtained not by evaluating properly the evidence, but instead by interpreting the evidence according to a philosophical system that is guaranteed to produce atheistic results. Viewing life through atheist-colored glasses, they see atheism.
Of course, atheists don't see it that way. For the aggressive atheist, the philosophical system he uses to interpret the evidence he observes, his "worldview" for short, is not just one among many possible worldviews. No, his worldview is the way things obviously are, and theists, who refuse to acknowledge reality, appear to him to be either stupid or wicked.
In fact, the most common type of response to my essay from atheists was to say, in effect, "This guy is an idiot; everyone knows there is no evidence for God, because only evidence provided by the five senses is valid." Ah yes! The old "everybody knows" argument!
Many atheists also complained that I had not provided an actual argument for God. But it was obviously not my intent to give a proof of God's existence. The entire point of my essay was that the typical atheist cannot properly assimilate the evidence for God because of his false worldview, in which case there would be no point in presenting this evidence. First, we must remove his atheist-colored glasses, and then we can show him the evidence.
In the West, at least, most atheists have a worldview that is some variation of a philosophical system commonly called "naturalism." Naturalism literally means the belief that "nature" is all there is, and this basically means materialism (the belief that only matter and its properties really exist) and empiricism (the belief that all knowledge must be based on sense perception). For a naturalist, God cannot exist, because only the physical exists. Also according to naturalism, even if God existed, we could not know it, because we cannot know anything that is not based on what we perceive with our senses.
For example, theists point to miracles as evidence for God. And the atheist responds that no miracles have happened, or at least, there is no reason to think that they have. But how does the atheist know that all accounts of miracles are unbelievable even before he examines them all? Because of his naturalistic worldview, according to which no supernatural exists, in which case miracles cannot happen. In brief, the atheist knows miracles are no evidence for God because he knows no God exists to do them. This is circular reasoning, i.e., illogical thinking.
And it all hinges on naturalism. But my challenge is that naturalism is not true just because it seems true to the atheist. Naturalism has to be examined and justified before it can be believed, because other worldviews are possible. Therefore one cannot just dismiss the evidence for God because it seems weak when interpreted naturalistically. After giving a brief summary of an argument that naturalism is false, "Supercilious Atheist" provided a link to an essay giving a more complete argument.
(The problem with naturalism, in a nutshell, is that it is fundamentally a negative doctrine, holding that there are no supernatural things and no non-sensory-based knowledge. But you cannot just assume that something does not exist, because an unknown could be anything, including existent. You need some sort of evidence that X does not exist before you can dismiss it. Furthermore, it is illogical to believe that all knowledge must be sensory-based, because sensory data can never prove that all knowledge must be sensory-based.)
With naturalism under a specific indictment, one would assume that thinking atheists would attempt a logical validation of the naturalism that is the foundation for their confidence that God does not exist. To date, though, there have only been weak responses to this challenge. Atheists assert, often in very colorful language, that naturalism is obviously true, but in my experience they rarely make a significant argument for why it is true.
And this is only to be expected. In order to validate naturalism, one would have to consider the possibility that naturalism might be false, and then show that even with this possibility, the best interpretation of the various facts of reality is that naturalism is true.
In other words, one must take off the atheist-colored glasses if one is to verify that they provide an accurate picture. But naturalistic atheists have little practice thinking in a way that makes the supernatural an actual possibility, so they generally cannot do it.
Kelly O'Connor of the atheistic apologetics organization "Rational Responders" provides a representative response to my essay. Her essay "How to Respond to a Supercilious Christian" attempted to give a relatively comprehensive rebuttal of my argument, and I encourage you to read it before reading my response to her below. When you read it, note that O'Connor devoted most of her essay to rebutting my alleged arguments for God, even though I had given no such arguments. Also note that she made no attempt to validate naturalism. She simply assumed that only evidence based ultimately on sight, sound, smell, taste and touch can possible be valid.
Here are excerpts of a comment I posted at her website in response to O'Connor's essay:
Dear Kelly:
[My] essay's main point, to which you did not respond adequately, is this: Any [knowledge] you know, you know because you have validated it in some way, and all validation takes place within a definite worldview, i.e., comprehensive philosophical system based on certain axioms. But since more than one worldview is possible, and since man is capable of being mistaken even about his premises, one must have some sort of justification for his worldview.
(In retrospect, I would modify the above claim in one way: it seems that we can know a few things without formally "validating" them. For example, we can know what we ate for breakfast without having to validate it within a specific system of axioms. But knowledge about God does not fall into this category.)
You said:
The only evidence that exists is physical, material, verifiable, and falsifiable.
And also
…the use of scientific methodology to determine the validity of anything is necessarily going to have some starting point and then system of experimentation. That is all we have with which to work…[Italics added]
I use the word "naturalism" to describe the worldview you call "scientific materialism," and these comments are naturalistic beliefs. And the arguments you give all presuppose naturalism, so I'll assume you are a naturalist. But how do you know that naturalism is true?
You also said:
…an axiom is just something that is self-evident.
But something is not self-evidently true just because you believe it is. I have given an argument why naturalism is not true, and therefore you cannot just say "it's obviously true, and that's all there is to it."
You also said:
…most people that I know would respond with the criteria [for knowing if there is a God] being objectively verifiable evidence, and that we know this method of validation to be the most accurate due to hundreds of years of making advancements as a society thanks to the scientific method.
Of course, "objectively" means truly, but how do you know that "objectively verifiable evidence" must be naturalistic evidence? If there existed a non-physical God, his existence would not be detected with the senses, and yet He would nevertheless really exist. The argument that "society has advanced due to science" is not a compelling one. Aside from the fact that social change is not advancement just because you say it is, most of science does not assume that there is no God. It only assumes that the physical universe operates according to natural law the vast majority of the time. For most (if not all) of science, naturalism need not be posited. You have not justified naturalism.
And the point of [my] blind man analogy was simply this: Just as the blind man would not be justified in disbelieving in color because he cannot perceive it, the fact that God is not detectable scientifically does not prove that He is not there. There may be other means of detecting Him.
In fact, you take the position "the supernatural may exist, but until we see scientific evidence for it, we can safely ignore it." [To begin with], you said:
We don't know for sure that [a supernatural explanation] couldn't be the correct explanation…
And in other places, you clearly specified that you will only accept naturalistic evidence. So you require naturalistic evidence before you will believe in the supernatural, in exact analogy with the illogical blind man of my analogy. You need to stop being inconsistent, and either disbelieve in the supernatural, or else admit that it may exist, in which case you cannot dismiss its existence based only on naturalistic science.
I must interrupt my comments addressed to O'Connor in order to make sure you don't miss what's happening here. There are two key ideas to know if you want to have a proper understanding of the argument between atheism and theism. Most important is the main point of my "Supercilious Atheist" essay: you cannot just assume that naturalism (or any other worldview) is the correct way to think. You must test your worldview.
But the other key point is this: Most atheists will eventually say the following: "Sure, a supernatural realm might, in some sense, exist. But since we have no direct, naturalistic experience of it, we cannot know anything about it. And therefore we might as well assume naturalism, and therefore atheism."
This is probably the strongest case that can be made for atheism. The atheist is saying, "Theism goes beyond the tangible and the mundane, so it is fraught with danger, intellectual and otherwise. Let's see if we can get by without it."
I sympathize to a certain extent with this view. If the supernatural is unknowable, then it's a threat, because if we cannot know it, we cannot protect ourselves against its dangerous elements. Furthermore, there is a great deal of charlatanism associated with religion and the supernatural. Why not see if we can, rhetorically speaking, eliminate the supernatural?
But is it really true that we cannot know anything about the supernatural? How, in general, do you know that something cannot be known? It would appear that you cannot know that something cannot be known unless you consider it to be a real possibility, and then investigate it.
And actually we do have a sense of the supernatural, because we have a sense of the natural, and of its limitations. We observe that purely material processes do not generate the information required to turn mere chemicals into life, so why should we assume this did happen in the remote past, as the Darwinian evolutionists insist? We know that we are conscious, and that matter does not spontaneously generate consciousness. Why should we assume such generation occurred in the remote past? Scientists tell us that the universe has not always existed, and we know that this effect requires a cause that would have to be prior to the universe, that is, prior to the existence of matter. Something literally super-(i.e., beyond the) natural is needed to explain these things.
The atheist says: "All of these things can be accounted for naturalistically." But how does the atheist know it can? Only by assuming that all causes must be naturalistic, not by proving it. It is impossible to prove that all causes must be naturalistic.
Not only that, but naturalism (as indicated above), is logically contradictory, and therefore false. Not only is it impossible to prove naturalism true, it is possible to prove it false!
I quoted O'Connor as saying that a supernatural realm, which would be a realm not detectable with the senses, might exist. But then she immediately said ". . . but unless we see scientific evidence for it [i.e., evidence provided ultimately by our senses], we can safely ignore it." She is literally saying, "The invisible man may exist, but until I see him, I won't believe!"
The typical American atheist is so unaware of her naturalism that it is difficult for her to avoid this sort of illogical thinking even when it is clearly pointed out to her. If you are undecided between atheism and theism, I urge you to study this issue carefully, and ask yourself "Who's being irrational here?"
My post continues:
The basic argument for God is this: with a naturalistic worldview, we cannot adequately account for all that we know to be true, for example, consciousness, objective morality, [and] the creation of the cosmos. We can certainly know that these things exist, because their existence is pretty much self-evident. Or, to put it another way, we know intuitively that we really are conscious, that some things would be wrong even if the authorities said otherwise, and that something other than the cosmos would have to have brought the cosmos into being. [Here,] "intuition" means: "Our ability to know some things directly, without having to engage in some sort of proof by gathering and analyzing evidence."
We know that these things are there, but what can adequately account for why such things are there? Until you can give a persuasive account of why naturalism gives a better explanation of all known phenomena, not just some, naturalism is suspect.
And I would add to the last sentence, "Especially when a more consistent and rational worldview, i.e., Christian theism, is available."
My post continues:
The naturalist responds, "Yes we can adequately account for these things naturalistically." Or at least, he says, we can explain most of them, and anything not explained will either be explained later, when science has progressed, or else is not explainable even in principle.
In this connection, you said:
…at this time, there is no evidence for … a [supernatural] being and no need to appeal to one.
Well sure, a naturalistic explanation that sounds plausible to the naturalist can usually be found, but how does the naturalist know it is the correct explanation?
Only by examining his worldview. And unless you can give an account of why naturalism is true, your arguments against God all fail (all of your arguments I've seen are based on naturalism), and you are left with agnosticism at best. Real agnosticism, that is, not the agnosticism that is just a disguise for atheism.
I have given elsewhere more detailed arguments against naturalism. There, I argue that naturalism is contradictory, and that it cannot account for some of the basic facts of reality. So you need to give a better answer to the following question: why do you believe naturalism to be true? Don't refer to success, or to other authorities: What is your evidence?
I have yet to receive an answer from O'Connor to my main question: How do you know that your naturalistic worldview is true? At her website, some of O'Connor's fans, but not O'Connor herself, responded to the comment I posted by simply asserting, without attempting a proof, that naturalism is the proper way of interpreting all phenomena.
But an assertion is not a proof. Since I have provided an actual argument that naturalism is not automatically true just because it seems so, and since I have also given specific arguments against naturalism, I would say to an atheist: An actual argument always trumps a mere assertion. So the ball is in your court. Can you vindicate your naturalism? If you cannot, you should continue to be rational, which will require you to admit that some sort of super-naturalistic worldview must be true. That being the case you will finally be capable of thinking rationally about God.
Oh, and American society need not be dominated by atheistic liberalism, either.
Alan: A very thoughtful essay.
My own contribution to this debate is to separate out discussions of God from a discussion of religion or religious tenants. Though related, the two are not necessarily the same. Religion A may or may not “get it right” when speaking about/for God, but their success or failure has absolutely nothing to do with proving or disproving the existence of God. God is what he is, regardless of whether man got the facts right or wrong about His existence.
Having said this, let’s look at the relationship between the Declaration of Independence — which invokes God-given rights as the foundation for creating our government — and the US Constitution, which provides the direct, legal-political framework for all laws made within the United States.
What is important here is the fact that the Founding Fathers credited God with bestowing inalienable rights in all man, and these rights in turn justified rebellion against established authority. Therefore, in creating policy or passing laws from this Constitutional basis, the debate isn’t whether to have a God-based morality insert itself into our law-making process. It’s already there. The question is how to do this so that one specific religion does not gain an unfair institutional advantage over other religions. And, furthermore, how to recognize the appropriate limits of this God-based morality when making our laws.
Limiting the practical application of a God-based morality in political life is not the same thing as denying any role for it in political decisions. This confusion arises because of the relativistic justifications all sides of this debate have brought into the political arena. Atheists want to deny a role for a God-based morality at any point in the law-making process, while Christian activists want to insert God (or more specifically, their concept of religion and the tenets of their faith) into our public institutions.
Moral Relativists are like the French at the United Nations. They’ll trot out the name of God to sell a Yugo or oppose a policy they don’t like. But otherwise, they’re perfectly fine having God remain an ethereal being that each individual seeks guidance from according to their personal preferences. However, should any of this personal communication from God spill over into the public arena, like the ACLU defending the Constitution, moral Relativists would rather see an immoral law passed legally than a moral law imposed on the people unlawfully.
The initially confusing thing about this last statement is that these relativists are indeed right about not imposing a private morality on the public no matter how odious the issue. This even applies to situations where this private morality and universal moral code are identical (such as abortion), but the law allows this immoral activity to continue. Morality — even the “right” morality — cannot be imposed in a constitutional republic. It must be willingly embraced by the country through its institutions and practices, or the unintended consequences may far outweigh any short-term good. Efforts to promote prayer in public schools, regardless of how pure the motives of its advocates may have been, led directly to the success of moral Relativists in establishing abortion on demand as a national “right.”
What has allowed elective abortion to supplant slavery as a national indignation is a combination of factors such as self-interest, rationalization, hidden agendas — but something else too. Those who took the “moral high ground” in sparking this debate had their own set of vested interests and hidden agendas. Beginning with prayer in public schools and other public institutions, they took key provisions of the Declaration of Independence and substituted their own religious preferences for “God” so that paying homage to “Jesus,” not following a God-given moral code, became the focus of their efforts.
Because of this approach, moral Relativists were able to seize the debate and frame their core issues in a deceitful way. Since Religion A claims to speak for God, and the Constitution forbids the state to establish an official religion, then both Religion A and the God it speaks for must be completely removed from the secular world. This logic prevailed because the Constitution is not the Declaration of Independence, and drawing inspiration and support from God is not the same thing as making laws that reflect God’s rules as expressed by a particular religion. It didn’t matter if what Christians believed perfectly matched 95% of the beliefs of every other religion. The Constitution, though inspired by God-given rights, was still man’s law. And man’s law did not permit the establishment of an official state religion.
By hijacking God and linking Him to a battle to promote their values, not only did the Christian community lose their fight, it allowed the notion of “God” — the basis for their claim — to be wiped out with it. This then led to an even more determined fight to infuse “politics with religion.” Relativists became even more relative to prevent their opponent’s success, and as the Relativists carried the fight to its relativistic extreme, atrocities like abortion on demand became the law of the land.
This, ultimately, explains why a concept like abortion could take hold and flourish in a society that condemns human right abuses, and even passes laws against cruelty to animals, but it will allow a healthy 20-month old developing child to be killed without the same level of due process it demands for suspected mass murders and captured terrorists.
[I lay all this out in more detail in http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/08/25/what-kind-of-car-would-jesus-drive-to-take-his-girlfriend-to-an-abortion-clinic/ ]
But is it really true that we cannot know anything about the supernatural? How, in general, do you know that something cannot be known? It would appear that you cannot know that something cannot be known unless you consider it to be a real possibility, and then investigate it.
Just a few definitions separate us, really. I define the supernatural as the ‘unknowable’. A clarifying example: “Think about the difference between the notion of the ‘powerful alien’ (a staple of science fiction) and the notion of a ‘god’ in a religion. What’s the essential difference between them? In the stories, they both do amazing, astonishing things. But a powerful alien is (ultimately, eventually) comprehensible – often in the story humans are able to figure out some way of duplicating its powers, or interfering with them, etc. Gods, though, are beyond what humans can do, and there’s no point in trying to figure out why or how they do what they do.”
Naturalism boils down, essentially, to the notion that everything is ultimately comprehensible. A clarifying question: “Maybe there really are some [unknowable entities] out there. But… how would you prove it? If we encountered a real, honest-to-goodness ‘miracle’, what evidence could you possibly present that it was caused by a god and not a powerful alien?”
Another quote: “Think about all the things that have been confidently declared to be supernatural that have turned out to be perfectly explainable and comprehensible. (I’ve listed a few here.) Early in human history, practically everything was considered to be the direct result of supernatural forces, but over time more and more things have moved to the ‘explainable’ column. (BTW, it’s worth pointing out that so far as I can see, nothing has ever moved the other way, from the ‘explainable’ to the ‘supernatural’ column…)”
You provide a list of a few such things. “We observe that purely material processes do not generate the information required to turn mere chemicals into life, so why should we assume this did happen in the remote past, as the Darwinian evolutionists insist? We know that we are conscious, and that matter does not spontaneously generate consciousness. Why should we assume such generation occurred in the remote past? Scientists tell us that the universe has not always existed, and we know that this effect requires a cause that would have to be prior to the universe, that is, prior to the existence of matter.”
Of course, it turns out that the boundary between ‘mere chemistry’ and life is a little fuzzier than many assume. The Big Bang may not have been the ‘beginning’. And the more we learn about how the brain works – the less of stuff that previously was considered ‘unknowable’ – the less room there is for a soul to be around. You come perilously close to committing what I term “Haldane’s Error” (see the quote in my first post on this site here.
Naturalism is, in this sense, simple reason – a blind man can use his reason and the evidence available to him to deduce the existence of radiant energy such as light (just by feeling the warmth of the sun or a fire, for example), and can sense different frequencies of vibration by hearing (or, in a pinch, touch). More detailed experiments can reveal that radiant energy also displays frequencies. Voila, color. Naturalism doesn’t deny the unknown – indeed, it acknowledges it quite openly. What it precludes – or a least rejects as philosophically useless – is the unknowable.
For things like (a full theory of) consciousness, or the origin of the cosmos, why can’t we say, “we dunno, yet“? (The ‘first post’ I linked to above tackles objective morality.)
It’s hard to have a discussion when the term “supernatural”, “religion”, and God” are used interchangeably.
Religions require God or a gods, but God’s existence does not depend on religion. God exists or He doesn’t exist regardless of whether man can directly prove His existence through human observations, human senses, and the limitations of the human mind. An ant’s brain can’t embrace the concept of planets and star systems, but that has nothing to do with whether other planets and stars exist.
Moreover, if “supernatural” is something that is simply “unknowable”, ["I define the supernatural as the 'unknowable'"],then then the position/speed of atomic particles as described in quantum mechanics is supernatural.
There’s no value in arguing for the “proof” that God does not exist, any more than there is in asserting that the lack of human observation and understanding is “proof” that God doesn’t exist. If you want to believe that human logic and reasoning as described by the blind man example in Comment 2 is all that we fundamentally need to know the ultimate truth of a thing, far be it from me to tell you you’re wrong. I’m sure in some people’s judgment the blind man can distinguish between UV light, infrared light, heat from a stove and heat from the sun, and all the variations and permutations inbetween to answer any questions he needs answered — except, of course, who created it all. There’s always a space alien theory to cover that; until one asks who created the space alien?
That’s not the logic of naturalism at play. That’s the logic of logic at play.
In the end, these discussions are nothing but a series of parallel conversations with each side using terms in a way that mimics, but does not completely embrace, what is being said by the other side.
Dr. Jackson – The position/velocity of a particle is not ‘unknowable’. That’s just “using terms in a way that mimics, but does not completely embrace, what is being said by” particle physicists. If QM is correct, then what it actually states is that a particle doesn’t have a definite velocity or position, just a probability range of being observed in a particular set of states.
That’s the difference between what I’m actually saying and how you’re reading it. What would you characterize as the essential difference between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, if I may ask? A caveman might attribute a recovery from a stopped heart as ‘supernatural’. Why would he be wrong in the case of a defibrillator but right in the case of a saint laying on hands?
As I said in the page I referenced, “Accepting that there are things that we don’t know is not the same as accepting that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know.” That is what I’m talking about when I talk about the supernatural.
(As to the question of “who created it all”, well, (a) why is saying “we dunno, yet” indefensible, and further, (b) why can’t we ask, “why do you assume ‘who’” rather than “what”? and (c) “why do you assume that created is the right word to use?)
>just a probability range of being observed in a particular set of states.
Probability isn’t certainty. Certainty is precision. Precision is knowability. Imprecision is less than knowability Anything less than knowability is “supernatural”. I’m just using your definition of the term “unknowable” as it relates to your definition of “supernatural”. [["I define the supernatural as the 'unknowable'"].
By the way, what you see as “probability” may in fact be perfect predictability — and would be seen as such if the human mind was capable of grasping it. Just because man can’t completely know or understand something due to the limitations of the human mind, doesn’t mean that it lacks perfect predictability and order. That hubris, not logic.
As for “who” rather that “what” created the universe, I’ve never assigned God a specific status, other than God is the creator of the Universe. What I think God is, or isn’t, is irrelevant.
By saying “we dunno” who/what created the universe, you are implicitly allowing for the possibility that “God” could be the answer. However, you absolutely refuse to acknowledge the possibility that God exists. This is because you keep on mixing discussions of religion with a discussion of God [your caveman/saint example]. Knock down the straw man that saints cure heart attacks, and you think you’ve somehow said something profound about the existence of God.
I can’t prove God exists, other than by using logic to answer the question logically that something created the Universe. And since the ultimate practical definition of God is the creator of all things, then God is an acceptable explanation for me. [And once again, God is not Jesus, Allah, Budda, Jehovah, etc. God is God.]
What I object to is any theory (naturalism or any other) that automatically assumes that since God is not scientifically measurable, God therefore does not exist.
God gave us a mind and the ability to reason to understand the workings of his creation —to the extent humanly possible. It’s kind of silly to think that because we can figure out how some things might work, we’ve somehow disproved the notion that God created them in the first place.
Oh, and I use the word “created”, as in “God created the Universe”, because using logic to think logically, something doesn’t create itself. That is, unless that something is God, which/who/what by definition always existed.
If it makes you feel better to think that the Universe itself is God instead of relying on saints and cavemen to grasp the concept, go for it. What you or I think is irrelevant anyway to the ultimate truth of the issue. I don’t define God any more than you do.
The salient point is whether you will acknowledge that something gave rise to and ordered the universe and everything in it, or whether you want to maintain that the Universe just decided to exist by itself one day, and create immutable laws of nature to go with it.
Saying “I dunno” is a cop out. I dunno a lot of things, but my (or your) lack of direct, personal knowledge does not render those things real or not. There are logical implications of every position.
I believe that something (God) created the universe. You call this supernatural, and equate it with saints curing heart attacks.
You think the Universe just decided to exist one day (assuming there were no space aliens around to create it), and you call this science.
My supernatural has more logical consistency and inherent credability than your science.
Probability isn’t certainty…
Which would almost make sense, except you’re relying on translations into colloquial English of concepts expressed in mathematical terms. Science doesn’t use jargon to be obfuscatory, and asking to “express something in simple terms” is usually misleading… because the expression in scientific jargon actually is usually the most precise and concise way to express the concept. English wasn’t constructed to talk about QM. It’s like the old saw that asks “Could God make a triangle with four sides?” The question itself is ill-posed.
Just because man can’t completely know or understand something due to the limitations of the human mind, doesn’t mean that it lacks perfect predictability and order. That hubris, not logic.
How do you tell if you “can’t completely know or understand something”? What practical difference does the concept make? That’s the question I’m asking…
However, you absolutely refuse to acknowledge the possibility that God exists. This is because you keep on mixing discussions of religion with a discussion of God…
A concept with no distinguishing features is no concept at all. Why do you call it “God” – and thereby bring in all the historic baggage accreted onto that word – while at the same time claiming to dispense with all the baggage? Why not call it, say, “X”, or “Alpha”?
Defining something as the “something that created the Universe” doesn’t mean anything in particular, until you start actually pinning the concept down to the point where you can start making positive statements about it.
(There’s also the question of whether the universe was “created” at all. We’ve never seen mass/energy created or destroyed. Infinite regresses are not intuitive… but basically nothing about the universe has proven to be intuitive once we’ve wandered out of the savannahs of Africa, not even the shape of the planet we live on. Hell, even that we lived on a planet. You accuse me of dismissing concepts a priori…)
It really does seem to me that asking “What created the universe?” is as premature, for now, as asking “What directed that lighning bolt to hit there – Thor, Zeus, or Seth?” was before the 1700s.
The key point I’ve been making all along here – that I’ve made before – is that assuming something is beyond human comprehension – which is what you, too, are doing with the concept of ‘supernatural’ since you explicitly use the phrase “limitations of the human mind” – can never be justified. It’s a useless concept. All we can really divide things into is “stuff we think we understand” and “stuff we’re still working on understanding”.
Great discussion. Excuse me if I quote myself, arguing against atheism in a discussion elsewhere:
“I believe I have a statement and a question, each of which
back any atheist argument into a corner.
1) The statement is one which I have seen versions of elsewhere. I’ve
used it in debate with atheists; the result has been a kind of
outrage, with a wild-ish accusation that I am being illogical, without
any demonstration of said illogic. My suspicion is that in these
occasions I’ve pointed to an inherent limitation to empiricism, and
that my antagonists simply cannot think beyond empiricism.
To the claim that we see no empirical evidence of any God:
Empiricism requires an object that is passive toward the
experimenter’s procedures. Given any object that is, by definition, of
higher technological (broadest sense) capability than the
experimenter, that object’s determinable qualities (such as existence)
are completely *trumped* by the question: Does the object wish to
permit itself to be observed? The answer to this, from our
perspective, is at best a coin flip – 50/50. And in this situation,
empiricism *fails*.
*Empiricism can make no reliable statement concerning any object of
higher technological capability than the experimenter.*
2) The question:
Where is the triangle?
I believe it is commonly understood that there exists no such thing as
a perfect (actual) triangle in nature. Yet so much in nature is clearly
generated by the triangle. What I’m thinking is that there is no way
to answer this question without conceding the existence of a *noetic* (mental or conceptual)
realm. The claim that the triangle, not present in nature, simply
*does not exist* seems untenable (perhaps I’m wrong here). The atheist
temptation is to claim something like “abstraction but no existence”;
I’m going to say, If something has no existence, it will not be
generative of things in the material universe.
Given the existence of a noetic realm, the whole atheist (as distinct
from agnostic) position pretty quickly falls apart.”
Empiricism can make no reliable statement concerning any object of higher technological capability than the experimenter.
Perfectly true, but then… so what? Empiricism doesn’t address that, Occam’s Razor does. There are a literally infinite number of possible omnipotent (or at least more-potent-than-us) entities that could be hiding in your left eyebrow right now, using their mojo to mask their presence. Which ones do you believe in, if any? If, by definition, there is no possible way to detect them, that specifically means that there is no way to tell the difference between a world where they exist and world where they don’t. A difference which makes no difference is, well, no difference.
Once you start postulating that such an entity (or entities) actually affects something we can observe, though… then we start getting into the realm of empiricism. At which point, we can start making emprirical statements about it, even if incomplete. (Newton’s physics didn’t explain how gravity acted at a distance, it simply recognized the effect and described how it behaved. The ‘how’ had to wait until Einstein, who raised new questions…) Note that all religions I’m aware of actually do posit such effects, if only effects on the initial conditions of the universe.
What I’m thinking is that there is no way to answer this question without conceding the existence of a *noetic* (mental or conceptual) realm.
Er… only sort of. One doesn’t have to go whole-hog into Platonism to accept the notion of different ontological levels. Does a waterfall or a tornado exist as such, or are they things that water and air do?
Given the existence of a noetic realm, the whole atheist (as distinct from agnostic) position pretty quickly falls apart.
That, however, needs to be fleshed out. How, exactly?
You guys are truly verbose, but let me try to tackle a few things here. First, Alan opposes naturalism and ties it with liberalism. This is an error akin to insisting on prayer to Jesus in schools. Some conservatives, such as Ayn Rand and her followers are atheists. I fact I’ve met many who claim to be Objectivists, but were really just atheists who were uncomfortable saying so directly. They use many of the same arguments as the naturalists described here.
Second; PEJ writes “It’s kind of silly to think that because we can figure out how some things might work, we’ve somehow disproved the notion that God created them in the first place.” To that I say: Absolutely!
A few years ago, I attended some meetings held by an Objectivist discussion group. At one meeting, the question of belief in God was the subject. We were asked to answer with a raising of hands if we believed in God. I was the only one to raise my hand and I was surprised by the reactions. One fellow asked me for my proof. My reply was that I could not prove anything to him and that it was only necessary for me to know for myself. Of course I have proof, through revelation, but I am sure you would not accept such proof because it does not fit your paradigm.
And lastly: RI writes “Why do you call it “God” – and thereby bring in all the historic baggage accreted onto that word – while at the same time claiming to dispense with all the baggage? Why not call it, say, “X”, or “Alpha”?”
To me the word God is simply a convenience. X, Alpha, Omega, Thor, Zeus, or Seth make no difference. I would even accept that symbol used by the singer formerly known as Prince. I bring no baggage that is created by man, only the witness of my own experience.
Raymond, as I said before, these discussions usually end up as parallel conversations.
You have no problem using colloquial English to state “I define the supernatural as the ‘unknowable’”, and back that idea up with a scientific analysis of space aliens! But when it comes to the common sense observation that “probability isn’t certainty”, it’s rejected by you because I’m relying on “translations into colloquial English of concepts expressed in mathematical terms.”
Reality to you is only what can be scientifically measured. For me, the concept of love is as real as the concept of a soul or the belief that God created the universe. I can’t scientifically prove that love exists (as opposed to simple biological imperatives or a variant of human lust.) But I and everyone else on the planet know the difference between biology and love, even if there is no scientific test to prove it.
The truth about the existence of love is not dependent on man’s ability to define or measure it scientifically. Just as the truth about the existence of a creator of the Universe (God) is not dependent on man’s ability to define or measure that scientifically. Truth exists independent of whether we can measure or fully comprehend it. But thanks to our God-given ability to reason, we can be aware of its presence.
Which gets back to my central observation. For all your supposed scientifically-inspired analysis, you still can’t explain how nothing creates something, except to be absolutely certain it isn’t God. And you can’t understand how reality can transcend the limitations of the human mind — or even understand how the human mind can have limitations — but I’d bet you’re willing to accept the fact that even if my dog’s mind isn’t capable of grasping astrophysics, it proves nothing about the fact that stars and planets exist.
Human beings aren’t the reason for reality. They didn’t create it, and they — and they alone — don’t determine what is real and what isn’t. Thanks to our advanced minds (relative to a dog’s) we can figure some things out that Fido can’t. But the ultimate truth of an issue isn’t dependent on man’s ability to grasp it. Just as a car is more than the sum of its individual parts, truth is more than a scientific-method understanding of each constituent element; particularly when there’s still the question of what created it all.
[If it makes you feel better, you can call God, the creator of the Universe, "X" or "Alpha" as you suggested. I don't think God really cares what you call Him. If all it takes to disprove atheism is to refer to God as "Mr. X" or the "Alpha God", then we can all save ourselves a lot of wasted time debating. Somehow, though, I think this won't satisfy you and others who hold out the equally valid (in your mind) possibility that the universe just up and decided to create itself one day because, in the words of the New York State lottery, "you never know".]
Once again, I believe that something (God) created the universe. You call this supernatural, and equate it with saints curing heart attacks because you continue to disprove or reject the existence of God by referring to man’s invention: religion.
Instead, as a rational human being, you think the Universe just decided to exist one day (assuming there were no space aliens around to create it), and you call this science.
My supernatural has more logical consistency and inherent credibility than your science.
Everyone is agnostic. The word is useless.
Gnostic refers to knowing. Agnostic simply means not knowing.
Nobody, not theist or atheist can know for certain about the existence or non existence of a deity.
If we are honest, we are all agnostic.
Anyone who says he/she knows for sure is either a fool or is lying.
Words – Mere Muffled Muted Metaphors Mocking Meaning
By Marilyn LaCourt
In Time Magazine, November 13, 2006, Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said religion answers the why questions, the meaning of life questions.
This is how Collins finds the meaning of life. First he says, “God could have activated evolution…” So far he sounds like a 19th century deist, content to leave it at that. But then he goes on, “with full knowledge of how it would turn out”. When asked, about belief in the virgin birth and the resurrection, he answered, “if you believe in a God that is outside of nature, why couldn’t that God invade the natural world with miracles?” And, “I don’t think it’s God’s purpose to make everything absolutely obvious to us. It would not have been sensible for Him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal His role in creation.”
Let me see if I have this right. Collins believes there is a God that created the universe, a belief for which there is no reliable evidence, and he knows that his God thinks, what his God thinks and that his God would not do something that wasn’t sensible. Oh yes, it’s all based on reason. It seems to me he reasons that if he were this God of his, this is what he would think and do. I guess once you take that leap of faith anything goes. Sounds more like making meaning than it does like finding meaning to me.
Michael Shermer, author of “Why People Believe Weird Things” says, and I agree, we’re asking the wrong questions. “What meaning does the universe have? None.” He goes on, “A star is just a blob of plasma. Of course it has no meaning; it’s just atoms doing what they do under heat and pressure. So the meaning comes from what we put into life, what we make of it.”
Many smart and foolish people spend all their years on earth searching for the meaning of life, assuming there is one. Others understand and accept that we make our own meanings; we collectively adjudicate social reality, cultures, and religions.
We use language to make meaning, individually and collectively. We use words in an effort to understand and be understood, to deceive, to predict, and to control. Language is a living system created and recreated by people. We are both constrained and freed by our language.
We’re born into a culture with a language that shapes our reality. It’s been said that we cannot have an experience for which we don’t have words. The language we’re taught shapes the meaning we attribute to our experience. At the same time we continuously change our language to fit our experience.
The difference between the dictionary and the Bible is that the dictionary is a living work in process; it reflects the constantly changing meanings we attribute to the words we create. The Bible, on the other hand, is the final word. But then, God did not write the dictionary.
A student of mine once said to a fellow classmate, “The Bible speaks dead language, as dead as it can be. First it killed the infidels and now it’s killing thee.”
Sometimes words appear to take on a life of their own, and let me tell you, we have a bully on the block. The word ‘faith’ is shoving the word ‘trust’ out of the neighborhood. There are no shots fired, and there are no broken bones. The bullying is subtle, coercive, political, subversive, and insidious.
Faith and trust used to share equal status in our language. Older dictionaries clearly differentiate between these words. The word faith was used to describe how a belief is accepted without evidence, and the word trust was used to describe how a belief is accepted based on probabilities and evidence. Newer dictionaries blur these distinctions and today’s thesaurus suggests that the words mean essentially the same thing.
In the current political climate it is forbidden to criticize the bully faith. Recent polls indicate that atheists are the most hated minority in our country. Why? Because we don’t have faith and we don’t accept faith’s baggage, religion. Faith good. Doubt bad. Trust, a useless word, rendered impotent by faith and with it respect for atheists has been kicked out of the realm of probabilities.
As faith gained status as a good buzzword used by politicians, mainstream Americans began rolling it off their tongues as automatically as they say under god in the pledge. Unfortunately, the faith and trust words are used interchangeably by nearly everyone, even by atheists.
Recently I heard a friend of mine, an atheist, say, “I have faith in my son. He is a good person.” I have no doubt that this friend trusts his son based on evidence and probabilities, but the word faith rolled off his tongue quite casually.
‘Faith’ is a powerful bully that theists use to discredit atheists. A seemingly harmless little word is used to deceive and control. School board members accuse scientists of having faith in evolution. In one step, with one little word, they position evolution and creationism/intelligent design in the same science classroom, each having equal status.
I cringe whenever I hear someone say, “I have no faith in our current administration.” We have plenty of evidence upon which to base our lack of trust, and the probabilities indicate they will continue to operate in the corrupt manner to which they have become accustomed. Faith has nothing to do with it.
There are atheists who would like to clean up our image as the most hated minority in the country. They say, “Look, we’re not so different from you good people of faith. We believe in some of the same things you do”. Saying stuff like that has theists jumping up down, pointing fingers, and saying gocha. “See you do have faith, and atheism is just a different religion.” In the words of Rodney Dangerfield, “We don’t get no respect.”
Of course atheists have beliefs. What atheists don’t have is faith.
How do we hold some beliefs without knowing? First we must carefully separate the Siamese twin words named believing and knowing.
I know and I believe the cars have stopped at the red light and allowed me to cross the street safely only after I have reached the other side of the street unharmed. I believe without knowing the cars will stop and allow me to cross safely based on probabilities. It’s trust, not faith that gets me from one side of the street to the other. Faith requires neither probabilities nor evidence.
I trust certain people based on their track record or on their reputation. I don’t know that my husband will never cheat on me. I believe that he won’t because experience tells me he is a person who honors his commitments, a person who understands the risks of STD’s, and he has a 30-year track record for being true to his marriage vows. I do not have faith in my husband, I trust him.
For an atheist, belief is the acceptance that a statement is probably true. We cannot know that a statement is actually true without concrete evidence or until after the event.
While the word faith has become the bully on the block, agnostic is the disingenuous wimp. Thomas Huxley did us no favors when he coined the word agnostic because a useless concept has been given status and power it doesn’t deserve. Gnostic means knowing. Agnostic means not knowing, plain and simple. The Gnostics claimed they had secret knowledge about the supernatural. Huxley claimed to have no such knowledge. The Gnostics claimed to have knowledge and hinted at evidence to support their claim, but nobody has ever produced such evidence. That is unless Dan Brown’s fiction about Mary Magdalene being the pregnant wife of Jesus turns out to be true. Still there is no evidence that Jesus was god in the first place. Knowledge of a supernatural can only be claimed through belief without evidence, faith.
When asked, “Do you ‘believe’ in God?” in my opinion, those who answer, “I’m agnostic,” wimp out. They are disingenuous; they don’t answer the question as asked, or perhaps they are simply ignorant about the formal meaning of the word and its concept.
The question is; do you believe in God? Not, do you know God? They are being asked if they have faith; do they believe something for which there is no evidence.
When asked, “Do you believe in Thor?” most people, theists and atheists, answer, “No”. We don’t have a word for not knowing Thor because, nobody knows Thor, and nobody claims to know Thor. There is no evidence, and the probabilities of Thor’s existence are nil. The same is true for God. Who knows God? Nobody knows God. There is no evidence to date. In that sense, everybody is agnostic regardless of what they claim to know. The word is useless.
Theists honestly say it like it is. Belief in God requires faith. A word that clearly differentiates between believers in God and those who do not believe in God is atheist. The preface a means not. For example, an atheist is not a theist. Theists believe there is a God, without evidence. Atheists do not believe without evidence. Contrary to what some claim, atheists are not against theism. If and when there is evidence to support the claim that there is a god, atheists will trust the evidence and believe there is a supernatural.
There’s a difference between believing something exists and believing something is valuable, something to be achieved. Of course we good atheists believe in all the good moral stuff good people of faith believe in, freedom, love, loyalty, justice, charity, etc. These are values we embrace, something positive to be achieved. We do not believe in God, gods, fairies, ghosts, heaven, hell, or being coerced into good behavior out of fear.
I like to think an atheist is a person who believes in telling the truth and taking responsibility for our deeds, both the good and the bad.
Sometimes we make mistakes by believing something because we reason there will be a positive outcome based on evidence and probabilities. Sometimes we call the shots wrong and we lose. Cars sometimes hit people, even when they cross with the light. However, acting on faith (without evidence) is always a mistake even when we get lucky and the outcome is the one we were seeking.
Reason is a sticky wicket of a word. Richard Dawkins and other scientists use the word reason as a noun meaning the antithesis, the opposite or the antonym of superstition, delusion and religion, eg., unfounded conclusions based on faulty evidence. I’ve checked dictionaries and thesauruses and to date, I can’t find an antonym for superstition or religion listed. Perhaps if the word is used frequently, and in prominent places, as a noun and the meaning attributed is the antithesis of religion and superstition, it might find a home in the company of antonyms in future versions of those reference sources.
In the mean time, however reason, or reasoning, the verb, is commonly used to represent thinking, problem solving, and making meaning. In the verb sense, many religious people reason as well as the most knowledgeable atheist. Nobody could fault Collins for his inability to reason. The problem is that his reasoning begins with faulty premises. Once you accept the premise that life has meaning, you reason that you can find the meaning. Once you accept the groundless premise that God created the universe, once you take that leap of faith, anything goes. “Why couldn’t He have worked miracles? Why couldn’t He have given us a road map?”
Reasoning can take us down a slippery slope. Alister McGrath states in “The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World”, “The belief that there is no God is just as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is a God.” McGrath reasons, “If “faith” is defined as “belief lying beyond proof”, both Christianity and atheism are faiths.” Therefore atheism is a religion.
Yes, and atheists have faith in evolution. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? I guess some folks reason that you can have it both ways.
Atheists would do well to take a lesson from scientists and engineers who would not think of communicating with each other about a theory or a bridge without coming as close as possible to a precise definition of terms that is agreed upon by all who participate in the conversation.
Trust is a good word. We should use it. Agnostic is a useless word. We should dump it. Knowing and believing are not Siamese twins. Believing something exists or something is true is different from believing in something valuable, something to be achieved. Reasoning, the verb, should begin with premises that are probably true based on evidence.
However muffled, muted and mocking they are, words are still the best tools we posses if we want to understand and be understood, to live and let live in some measure of harmony with other human beings. Let’s hope we can come close enough for all practical purposes.
PEJ writes: “Human beings aren’t the reason for reality. They didn’t create it, and they — and they alone — don’t determine what is real and what isn’t.”
I agree with most of what you said, but I beleive that the world is, or was, created for man, by man with the assistance of God. Not really man, but souls that were missing something and went to God for help. God suggested that the missing component was “Free Will” and they said “Yes, that’s true. What should we do?” The rest is history, so I’ll leave it to you and the space aliens to fill in the blanks.
Lacourt. Another great example of why it is meaningless to discuss the existence of God by discussing religion. They are not the same things.
“Empiricism can make no reliable statement concerning any object of higher technological capability than the experimenter.
———————————-
Perfectly true, but then… so what? Empiricism doesn’t address that, Occam’s Razor does. There are a literally infinite number of possible omnipotent (or at least more-potent-than-us) entities that could be hiding in your left eyebrow right now, using their mojo to mask their presence. Which ones do you believe in, if any? If, by definition, there is no possible way to detect them, that specifically means that there is no way to tell the difference between a world where they exist and world where they don’t. A difference which makes no difference is, well, no difference.”
First, Occam’s Razor is no law of physics; it doesn’t even approach that status. It’s simply an intellectual hygiene for scientists, hewing them to scientific method. Applied to a discussion about deity, it quickly becomes circular thinking.
More crucially, there certainly ARE means to detect them: revelation, insight, yoga, and other entirely spiritual experiences. As recorded in holy books and human experience since the dawn of time. It’s simply that those means aren’t empirical. There’s plenty of evidence in those holy books that deity prefers to engage human beings selectively, individually, and for the purpose of our edification – NOT to satisfy our curiosity about the contents of the universe. That the universe, when observed empirically, behaves in accordance with this (ie, we cannot empirically detect deity) is a telling consistency.
About “a difference that makes no difference”: here you run up against the evidence that suggests that religious people flourish, when compared to the irreligious, whether measured in terms of happiness or (more objectively) *demographically*.
Given deity’s proclivity to reveal itself to individual human beings, it makes sense that the study of human beings (those who accept deity vs. those that do not) is an apt, and indeed, sole appropriate empirical measure of deity’s presence. Not unlike our detection of certain heavenly bodies based upon their effect upon other, nearby heavenly bodies. One can make statements such as, “The difference between a world in which they exist and a world in which they do not can discerned through a perusal of the demographics of Utah vs. those of white Europeans.”
I chose the term “beings of higher technological capability” rather strictly. It points to a fissure between reason and empiricism. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Carl Sagan knows that reason dictates the presence of billions (and billions!) of intelligent life forms, many of which must certainly exceed our capacity. Yet we have empirically detected none. Likewise, God(s) have been reasoned to exist since at least Plato. With none “detected.” What’s wrong here? What does Occam’s Razor say about our failure to detect advanced alien civilizations?
————————–
“What I’m thinking is that there is no way to answer this question without conceding the existence of a *noetic* (mental or conceptual) realm.
Er… only sort of. One doesn’t have to go whole-hog into Platonism to accept the notion of different ontological levels. Does a waterfall or a tornado exist as such, or are they things that water and air do?”
Yes. A waterfall and a tornado both exist as such. You’ll find no triangle.
“Given the existence of a noetic realm, the whole atheist (as distinct from agnostic) position pretty quickly falls apart.
That, however, needs to be fleshed out. How, exactly?”
Because it demonstrates the *existence* of an *intangible*, of something in itself undetectable. The existence of something beyond phenomenological detection. Concede that, and you concede the ground upon which Gods walk.
Does the Pythagorean theorem *exist*? I will say, yes, it does. But you can’t see it, touch it. Existence has realms beyond the physical.
Ivan – “It’s kind of silly to think that because we can figure out how some things might work, we’ve somehow disproved the notion that God created them in the first place.” To that I say: Absolutely!
And to that I say: Thankfully that’s not what people actually say. The problem is that people – even scientists – have always come up on the limit of what was then known, and invoked God’s direct action. Only, later on, it was discovered that that didn’t need direct miraculous intervention. But, beyond the new boundary, surely God was acting… until the next advance in understanding.
As I noted, I’m not aware of anything that’s gone from the “explained” column to the “supernatural” column. The flow seems to be all in one direction. Can you provide a counterexample?
That doesn’t mean God doesn’t (or gods don’t) exist. It just means that, historically, it’s seems like God’s domain always seems to be “stuff we don’t understand yet”.
To me the word God is simply a convenience. X, Alpha, Omega, Thor, Zeus, or Seth make no difference.
My question was addressed to Dr. Jackson – and still has not really been answered. Since he claims to want to separate out the ‘existence’ question from the ‘properties’ question, and religions are all about the ‘properties’, I can’t understand why he uses the same word to refer to both concepts, muddying the waters.
> To me the word God is simply a convenience. X, Alpha, Omega, Thor, Zeus, or Seth make no difference.
> My question was addressed to Dr. Jackson – and still has not really been answered.
Raymond: you need to hone your reading skills.
Comment 11: If it makes you feel better, you can call God, the creator of the Universe, “X” or “Alpha” as you suggested. I don’t think God really cares what you call Him. If all it takes to disprove atheism is to refer to God as “Mr. X” or the “Alpha God”, then we can all save ourselves a lot of wasted time debating. Somehow, though, I think this won’t satisfy you and others who hold out the equally valid (in your mind) possibility that the universe just up and decided to create itself one day because, in the words of the New York State lottery, “you never know”.
It’s always interesting to see modern day atheists/”scientists” challenge the notion that God exists. They do this by pointing to aspects of religious philosophy or theory, showcasing any doubt about the accuracy of that belief, and extrapolating from this the conclusion that God does not exist.
Einstein, just to pull a random name out of the hat of a guy who considered himself to be a scientist, framed the issue this way. “Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. The firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing himself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God, which may, therefore be described in common parlance as `pantheistic’ (Spinoza). “ Einstein, The World as I See It, London, 1955, p. 131.
***
More on this from http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.htm :
Einstein was often asked, “Do you believe in God?”, to which he sometimes replied “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being”. “By God”, Spinoza wrote at the very beginning of his Ethica, “I mean a being absolutely infinite-that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality”. Proposition XV of the Ethica stated: “Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”
Einstein certainly held, as his constant appeal to God showed, that without God nothing can be known, but what did he really mean by his appeal to Spinoza? Once in answer to the question “Do you believe in the God of Spinoza?” Einstein replied as follows:
I can’t answer with a simple yes or no. I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things.
***
Einstein saw the wisdom of believing that a “higher order” — let’s call him “Mr. X.” — created the universe. He understood that this discussion gravitates toward/inspires discussions of religion, but is not religion in and of itself.
For Spinoza, God was synonymous with nature. [Thus my offer to Raymond in comment #6 “If it makes you feel better to think that the Universe itself is God instead of relying on saints and cavemen to grasp the concept, go for it.”]
What we all think is irrelevant anyway to the ultimate truth of the issue. I don’t define God any more than anyone else does. What I DO do, is acknowledge that the universe has a creator, and did not simply decide to come into being by itself.
While Einstein and I can agree on this, Raymond can’t.
This is what we call in political science arguing a point from a “hidden agenda”. There is nothing that can be said to Raymond that would allow him to form the same conclusion Einstein did, and that tells you everything you need to know about Raymond’s position.
You have no problem using colloquial English to state “I define the supernatural as the ‘unknowable’”, and back that idea up with a scientific analysis of space aliens!
Please quote my ‘scientific’ analysis of space aliens. I didn’t realize it was publishable.
This stuff usually devolves into parallel conversations because I state pretty clearly what I think, and then other people ignore that and tell me what I actually think. Case in point: But when it comes to the common sense observation that “probability isn’t certainty”, it’s rejected by you because I’m relying on “translations into colloquial English of concepts expressed in mathematical terms.”
You specifically brought up ‘unknowability’ in the sense of QM, and I specifically pointed out that that doesn’t work because QM is, well, very weird and “common sense” doesn’t apply. “Particles” aren’t really particles (or waves), and (assuming QM is in fact an accurate description of reality, and it works to many, many decimal places in every area we’ve managed to test so far) don’t have a position or velocity in the English sense of the term. It’s no failure to not know about something that doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, I’ve been very clear that by “unknowable”, I mean unknowable in principle, “beyond the grasp of human understanding.” Not just in this discussion, but here and here, both of which you’ve seen before. (Indeed, the phrase “beyond the grasp of human understanding” is from the former, and I know you read that, or at least you replied to it.)
For all your supposed scientifically-inspired analysis, you still can’t explain how nothing creates something, except to be absolutely certain it isn’t God.
Here’s a prime example of someone telling me what I think rather than actually reading what I write, since I have never stated that at any point. Indeed, I have explicitly stated the opposite. (Feel free to produce a contrary quote of mine – there’s a $15 donation to the charity of your choice at stake if you’re successful.)
What I have stated – very clearly – is that it’s not even settled that the universe was created. From our limited experience – as I, y’know, explicitly said in this discussion here – mass/energy doesn’t ever seem to be created or destroyed. It meets every experimental test we could can come up with for something ‘eternal’.
Here’s another example of me being very clear, specifically to you, specifically about this issue: And, for at least the “1001st time”, Dr. Jackson, I do not assume “that the universe simply exists, needs no beginning”, and I can’t imagine how much more clearly I could possibly state it. What I have (repeatedly) said is that I don’t know how or if the universe arose, and I’ve seen no compelling reason to think anyone else knows, either.
I would call myself “agnostic” on this point, except that “agnostic” has the connotation of being unable to ever know, that the question is undecidable. I think that we might eventually have enough data to test various hypotheses, including “universe was created” and “universe always existed”. I think we just don’t know yet.
And you can’t understand how reality can transcend the limitations of the human mind — or even understand how the human mind can have limitations…
Another example of being told what I think rather than reading my explicit statements. I’ve admitted openly that there may well be things we can’t understand. Let me quote from that same work you replied to: “Now, it may be true that there exist subjects that actually are unknowable, and therefore not amenable to scientific inquiry, but the above examples would seem to urge caution before making confident pronouncements on that score. Personally, I’m not convinced there’s ever a time to declare something ‘unknowable.’ If one decides that something is ‘unknowable,’ one will stop trying to understand it.”
My actual point is not that the “unknowable” cannot exist. My actual point is that the notion has no practical utility whatsoever. Even if it’s true… that’s useless to us. Another quote: “How does one, in practice, distinguish between something ‘currently unknown but comprehensible’ and something ‘forever unknowable?’… From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can’t conclude that it’s unknowable. It might be, but it might also be the case that you just didn’t happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt.”
Like technologically advanced aliens living undetectably in our eyebrows, the notion of “beyond human comprehension” is worthless. All we can ever do is try to understand things. Some things we’ll figure out. Some we won’t, but we’ll never, ever be able to tell what things we “can’t understand”, versus “don’t yet understand”.
(I decline the invitation to rehash our discussion about love from before.)
Dr. Jackson – Here’s the actual question: “Since he claims to want to separate out the ‘existence’ question from the ‘properties’ question, and religions are all about the ‘properties’, I can’t understand why he uses the same word to refer to both concepts, muddying the waters.”
Seriously: Since using the term “God” is only going to sow confusion among the people you’re ostensibly trying to reach with your distinction, why persist in doing so?
If it makes you feel better, you can call God, the creator of the Universe, “X” or “Alpha” as you suggested. I don’t think God really cares what you call Him.
See, there’s the thing. You’re trying to work on an existence proof. (Consider – a man starts climbing a mountain at 9am, and reaches the peak at 5pm, then camps overnight. The next day, he starts descending leisurely at 9am, and reaches his starting point at 5am. It’s easy to show that there must exist a point on the mountain and a time where the man was in exactly the same point at the same time of day. However, without a lot more data we only know such a point exists, we can’t say anything about where and when that point was.)
You think you’ve got an existence proof (though I obviously disagree, for all the reasons I’ve pointed out before). Even if you’re right, it says nothing whatsoever about the traits of that entity. Essentially every religion in history’s consistent with it (including the polytheistic ones), as well as all kinds of other hypotheses.
It’s like people have long believed in the Midline, where the guy was at the same point around noon each day, halfway up the mountain. But while you’ve proved there was a common point, calling it the Midline brings up a lot of other ideas (noon, halfway up the mountain) that just aren’t established by that proof.
If you’re actually trying to convince people, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t first worry about getting to “Alpha”, and then work on showing (by other considerations) that gee, “Alpha” probably has this trait, and that trait, and interestingly, these are traits commonly ascribed to “God” in these types of religions…
It’s not a question about the proof. (Again, I have other problems with that.) It’s a question about your rhetoric (and by extension, your intent).
(Whoops, of course the second one is meant to be “5pm”. Ah, well.)
Raymond: I think I got it.
The universe didn’t create itself. Which means, it needs a Creator. But, we can’t understand what the word “create” means (your Comment #4), so there’s nothing we can really say about the existence of God, because some religions believe things that aren’t scientifically correct (Saints and cavemen).
So, while the universe didn’t create itself, God didn’t either, because there’s no proof that God exists, even if we call him “Mr. X” instead of God. So, all we know is that we exist within a universe that was not created but exists, even though it didn’t create itself, because all we can say is “I dunno.”
Oh, and we can’t discuss whether other things like “love” are real because, well, we don’t even understand what love really is, so how can we discuss it? So like the universe, it simultaneously exists and doesn’t, depending upon which point you need to support.
I think I got it. Now, explain it to Einstein.
Todd: First, Occam’s Razor is no law of physics; it doesn’t even approach that status. It’s simply an intellectual hygiene for scientists, hewing them to scientific method.
It’s a bit more than that. It’s a necessary principle of reason. Without it, you have no way to limit your theories from multiplying without bound. Look at any conspiracy theorist for concrete examples. Dr. Jackson likes to quote Einstein, apparently, so I don’t feel presumptuous in pointing out his paraphrase, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
About “a difference that makes no difference”: here you run up against the evidence that suggests that religious people flourish, when compared to the irreligious, whether measured in terms of happiness or (more objectively) *demographically*.
Correlation does not imply causation. Minorities of all stripes tend to do less well in a society compared to the majority, “demographically”, but that doesn’t mean that minorities are on average inherently unable to do better (or even that minorities are consciously “held down”). It’s also worth noting that these correlations tend to hold regardless of the actual religion involved, even when the religions have radically different conceptions of ‘deity’. A hypothesis that might account for that would be “believing in something is of some benefit (on average), but it doesn’t really matter what”. In other words, the belief provides the benefit, not what’s believed in. All the evidence I’ve seen so far is consistent with that – a large placebo effect, if you will.
What does Occam’s Razor say about our failure to detect advanced alien civilizations?
Actually, several things.
Because it demonstrates the *existence* of an *intangible*, of something in itself undetectable. The existence of something beyond phenomenological detection.
Again, things can ‘exist’ on other ontological levels. But they don’t ‘exist’ in the way physical objects do. The fact that certain postulates have inevitable consequences doesn’t mean that they ‘exist’ as such. Are you talking about a Euclidean triangle, a hyperbolic triangle, or an elliptical triangle?
Consider the set of all possible books that you could write. Some of them you may write; the Vast majority neither you nor anyone else will ever write. In what sense can it be said that they ‘exist’?
Raymond, if it isn’t clear by now, no one believes that you’ve come to your conclusions objectively and scientifically. The big clue is your constant interchange of religious beliefs with the question of whether God exists. You always end up arguing your case against religion (which may or may not have gotten any/all of the “details” about God right). Discussions of religion are not the same things as discussions about the existence of God.
People (even atheists) believe a lot of things that they can’t always prove scientifically. Einstein believed that a higher power was behind the creation of the universe. This didn’t require him to impose Judeo-Christian tenants on his scientific analyses. It was simply an acknowledgment that man has limitations in his ability to comprehend that which the Creator created (see comment 18 about books in the library).
You’re so busy fighting against a straw man — that somehow the Church or religiously-motivated politicians — will quash scientific inquiry, that you can’t even see that I hold this same position on this matter (see my comment #1). But unlike you, I don’t take this to the illogical extreme and actually maintain that we can posit absolutely nothing about the existence of God.
When you profess that we can’t even discuss love without the same level of confusion, and that the best we can say about the origin of the universe is “I dunno”, it rings hollow. We draw lots of conclusions about life and nature from incomplete, even contradictory observations. What distinguishes these from more complete and less contradictory observations are these very qualifying statements. We don’t simply say “I dunno” because we can’t fully understand the workings of QM. We instead talk about probabilities and theories.
And so it is with the existence of God (the question on the table: not what does God look like, what does he think, how does he act or not act, what are His Commandments, etc.). It’s the simple question: do you believe that God (or X or Alpha — the creator of the Universe) exists?
Your answer is no. And thus you begin your analysis from that point. I hold the opposite belief that God exists, and begin mine from that point.
The difference is that I acknowledge my belief. You maintain that yours is not a belief, but simply the outcome of a neutral, unbiased scientific inquiry.
And yet when your wife asks “do you love me?”, I doubt seriously that you engage in an extended discussion about love, agape, phila, or any one of the other dodges you use to avoid answering my questions.
Like Einstein, I can believe that God exists and created the universe, and then use the scientific method (the logic of man’s God-given mind) to appreciate how it works to the limits of human reasoning. No adherence to a religious doctrine is required for this.
But unlike Einstein, all you can say is “I dunno”, and that since God cannot be scientifically measured, you personally cannot believe that God exists. And besides, if God exists, you presumably believe that religion will rule science, which is a — dare I say — belief on your part, and not an absolute certainty. Otherwise, why are you always arguing against the existence of God by arguing against religion?
Atheism is not a requirement of scientific analysis, as Einstein showed. It’s only a requirement if you don’t want to believe that there is a higher intelligence than man that gave rise to the universe in the first place.
Dr. Jackson – I’m really mystified.
I’ve said that I don’t know if the universe was created or not. I never, ever said the universe “was not created”. At most, I’ve said that we exist in a universe that may or may not have been created, I’m not sure and haven’t seen anything that can be used to decide the issue yet. I’ve even said that the closest word to my position is “agnostic”. I’m loath to believe your misrepresentation is willful. Perhaps you are simply unable to conceive of someone reserving judgement on the issue?
As I stated in the web page I linked to before:
“I am generally what is called on the USENET newsgroup alt.atheism a ‘weak atheist’. That is to say, lacking any convincing evidence, I don’t believe in God(s). In general, I take the position of not(believe(God)). Obviously I haven’t investigated every religion in detail, but lacking any convincing evidence, I return the Scottish verdict of “not proven”.
On the other hand, of the religions I have investigated, I have specific reasons for rejecting them. In particular, for the traditional monotheistic religions (Judeo/Christian/Islamic conceptions of ‘God’), I believe them to be internally inconsistent and illogical. In these specific cases, I take the position of believe(not(God)).”
I’m aware of the distinction you’re trying to make between existence in general of an entity, and specific propositions about an entity. I have been for at least a decade, but I can show that I’ve been since 2004. This shouldn’t be a surprise to you. I have problems will all the propositions I’ve seen so far (religions), so I can be ‘atheist’ with respect to them. On the general notion of existence of God(s), I’m not agnostic, but sort of “non-gnostic”. I don’t think it’s impossible to know, but I don’t think we know yet.
Let me ask you a question: What if the universe always existed, and had no beginning? What would that mean for your existence proof?
By the way, is the irony lost on anyone that the man who “invented” Occam’s Razor was the Franciscan friar, William of Ockham.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think this guy was an atheist.
So, applying Occam’s Razor to William of Ockham’s own belief sets, is there any other conclusion than God exists?
Oh, Dr. Jackson, you never did answer this question: “What would you characterize as the essential difference between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, if I may ask?”
>I’m really mystified. I’ve said that I don’t know if the universe was created or not. I never, ever said the universe “was not created”. At most, I’ve said that we exist in a universe that may or may not have been created … I’ve even said that the closest word to my position is “agnostic”.
We have another term for this in political science: Weasel words. If you will accept the possibility that the universe was not created, then you accept the possibility that it always existed, which means it … what? It was never created. No creation, no Creator.
I guess depending upon how hyper technical you want to get about the term “agnostic”, you can say it means anything from full blown atheism to a belief in God without an adherence to a formal religion. So, let’s stop the hyper technical word games about love or phila, atheist or just a really-really-really strong agnostic, and cut to the chase.
I haven’t left open the possibility that God may or may not have created the universe. I’ve only left open the questions of the details of who/what God is, because like you, I don’t believe that’s directly knowable by man.
I think you only hold one belief, not the two possibilities you said you embrace (“At most, I’ve said that we exist in a universe that may or may not have been created …”). I don’t think there is any circumstance which you could defend the possibility that God exists, and created the universe.
Have the courage of your convictions, Raymond, a say what you believe. There is no God, period, end of discussion. Which means, the universe created itself, because God is “The Creator of the Universe”.
Of course, I may be wrong. You may honestly hold out the option that “we exist in a universe that may have been created.” If so, let hear your arguments for that proposition. I want to hear how the universe was created without God [a higher intelligence or Mr. X] creating the Universe. [If our universe came from another universe, who created that one?]
And, I want to hear you defend this point in view of your contention that God cannot be scientifically proven, and what you said in comment 7: “assuming something is beyond human comprehension – which is what you, too, are doing with the concept of ‘supernatural’ since you explicitly use the phrase ‘limitations of the human mind’ – can never be justified. It’s a useless concept.”
You don’t believe in God. That’s atheism, not agnosticism as the phrase is commonly employed. No on e is condemning you for your beliefs. This is America, and you can believe what you want to believe. Just don’t tell us you accept the possibility that God created the Universe as a theoretically plausible explanation, when you really don’t,
If the only difference between our positions is that I say “God” and you say “X”, and we both acknowledge that this higher power is the source of all creation (and, like Einstein posited, that higher power is eternal and infinite; i.e. what we think of when we say the word “God”), then like I said an earlier comment, there’s nothing really more for you and I to discuss.
But the fact that you want it both ways (“I never, ever said the universe ‘was not created’. At most, I’ve said that we exist in a universe that may or may not have been created …), makes me go back to the conclusions I raised in Comment 24.
“What would you characterize as the essential difference between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’.
Raymond. The only time I’ve ever used the word “supernatural” is to comment on you imposing that word on a discussion of the existence of God by referring to matters of religious faith.
It’s not a word I use to describe what I believe about the existence of God. Since I take no ownership of the word, my only interest is in exposing the sleight of hand some people employ by using it to discuss religious teachings when the subject matter of a discussion is whether God exists.
If you have any questions about words that I actually use, like “Constitution” “immoral,” “God”, etc., I’m happy to clarify any confusion for you. But please don’t ask me to make sense out of your misuse of language to confuse discussions about the existence of God with saints, cavemen and space aliens.
ROTFLMAO
“And yet when your wife asks “do you love me?”, I doubt seriously that you engage in an extended discussion about love, agape, phila, or any one of the other dodges you use to avoid answering my questions.”
I’m just imagining how far into this extended discussion any of us would get before she said “SO, you DON’T love me, do you!”
I think Mr. X is laughing now too. Maybe that’s why we are here. Sort of Seinfeld reruns for God.
I’m coming in late to the party, luckily. That way I was able to avoid the typical procession of “Raymond Ingles tangents.”
How many times can it be said? God and religion are not synonymous! Mr. Ingles says, “On the other hand, of the religions I have investigated, I have specific reasons for rejecting them. In particular, for the traditional monotheistic religions (Judeo/Christian/Islamic conceptions of ‘God’), I believe them to be internally inconsistent and illogical. In these specific cases, I take the position of believe(not(God)).”
I’ll say again, God and religion are not synonymous!
Have the courage of your convictions, Raymond, a[nd] say what you believe. There is no God, period, end of discussion.
Like I said, “I state pretty clearly what I think, and then other people ignore that and tell me what I actually think.” Oy.
BTW, please cite exactly where I contended that ‘God couldn’t be scientifically proven’. An html link would be preferred if you can manage it, but just the words and a description of where you found it would be helpful. (Hint: All I’ve ever said is that God hasn’t been scientifically proven. See for example here: “It’s not that God is ruled out because It could not be observed, should It choose to act in an amenable manner.”.)
It’s true that I don’t believe Gods exist. But that’s not the same thing as believing that no type of God whatsoever might exist (There is no God, period, end of discussion). I’m as sure as I can be that the Judeo/Christian/Islamic God doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean that I’m convinced that “the universe created itself”.
I actively disbelieve in the Gods of the various religions I’ve encountered. By some definitions, that makes me an atheist.
I don’t think we know enough about universes to know how – or if – they begin. (For an example of a cosmology that doesn’t require an ultimate beginning, I repeat this link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=big-bang-or-big-bounce. Read it.) I reserve judgement there, and it’s not like I’ve made a secret of it. By some lights, that makes me an agnostic.
If my beliefs don’t fit into your classification system… well, so much the worse for your system, I guess.
(Just in case you missed it: Let me ask you a question: What if the universe always existed, and had no beginning? What would that mean for your existence proof?)
Raymond. No one asked you about gods. I don’t believe in Zeus either. I doubt others do here as well.
The question is, as a non-athiest agnostic, do you believe in God?
The question is not do you believe in the Christian interpretation of God, the Jewish interpretation of God, etc. Again, answering questions no one asked you is distracting.
The question on the table is, do you believe in God?
It isn’t how did God create the universe? It isn’t whether God rules over the universe and intervenes directly, benignly, or not at all?
The question, simply, is do you believe in God?
Most people can answer yes or no.
Oh, and because I’m having these Paleocon flashbacks where it took me 9 months to get someone to actually give me a concrete example of a “natural hierarchial social order”, no one is asking whether you can proove that God exists.
The question, simply, is do you believe in God?
I’m interested to know whether a self-described “agnostic” answers yes, or no.
I’ll go first, if you think the question is a trap, and to show you that it can be answered with a yes or no.
My answer is “yes.”
Oh, and again drawing upon my experience with people who avoid direct answers to direct questions, no on is asking whether you ‘allow for the possibility of’ God, or ‘can hypothetically envision what a god may look like’, or any variation inbetween.
The question is, simply, do you believe in God?
Mr. Ingles,
You say “All I’ve ever said is that God hasn’t been scientifically proven.”
Scientifically prove to me that Christopher Columbus existed.
Dr. Jackson – No, I don’t believe in God. (As I’ve said – as in “not(believe(God))”.)
A question for you: Do you think that means that I must therefore believe “[t]here is no God, period, end of discussion”?
(Something to reflect on before you answer. Do you believe that there’s a dwarf planet orbiting our star at about 35 AU?)
Mountain Man – Are you saying that God couldn’t give scientific proof of Its existence if It chose?
I would think that a typical self-described agnostic would decline to answer ‘yes’ OR ‘no’ to the question, and for good reasons. Naturally, Mr. Ingles can speak for himself (and quite well, from what I’ve seen).
The primary reason is that the agnostic probably prizes precision in thought and language, and most especially in communication. For many types of questions, ‘yes or no’ is an inappropriate framing of the question, and thus should be resisted.
If I am a weak atheist (as I think Mr. Ingles described himself), my position might be this: “There’s no evidence for the existence of any God, therefore, I have no reason to believe God exists.” The implicit continuation of the thought, for a weak atheist: “But that evidence might show up tomorrow, so I’ll not make any bold pronouncements that God certainly does not exist.”
Now, the literal answer to the question “Do you believe in God?” would seem to be No.
But the answer–No–is an inadequate, incomplete, and potentially misleading answer, that does violence to fullness of my thinking.
I would therefore decline to answer that question, even if the questioner insists that I must, or even if the questioner confuses my desire for precision with evasiveness. I decline to answer the question in the terms demanded, because those terms seem inappropriate, and fertile ground for subsequent misinterpretation of my views.
In court, they can force you to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, whether or not either answer best conveys your opinion. In science and skepticism, inappropriate binary responses cannot be imposed under threat of incarceration, thankfully.
>Dr. Jackson – No, I don’t believe in God. (As I’ve said – as in “not(believe(God))”.) A question for you: Do you think that means that I must therefore believe “[t]here is no God, period, end of discussion”?
Raymond. No.
I’m just trying to figure out the difference between an agnostic, atheist, weak atheist, and someone who posits that we may actually live in a universe that was created by, well, something or someone or someother. Apparently, holding all these positions lead to the same conclusion. There is no God.
All of which makes me wonder how a man of science (you, not Einstein) can hold the position that, since there definitely is no God, the universe happens to exist? That is, other than to say “I dunno”, but definitely God could not have created it because, well, there is no God to create it. This wouldn’t be a problem if you believed that the universe created itself (thus, in your view obviating the need for God). It’s a pretty silly position to take, but it would be consistent with the no-God foundation upon which it’s laid.
But you get very exorcised when I attach that phrase to your position. So, if the universe exists, but God didn’t create it, then something else created it (or created the “it” that ultimately created it). I’d still call that God, but you’ve stated categorically there is no God (whether we call God God, X, Alpha, or the Big Kahuna.) So I again ask, where did the universe come from, at least in concept?
You say “I dunno” because you can’t measure God and prove He exists, so God cannot possibly be the answer. But no one’s asked you to prove God exists. We’ve only asked you to embrace the concept that it’s possible God exists. To which you reply, he may, or he may not, but I can’t “prove” it, so I (Raymond) will not believe that God is a possible explanation.
All roads for Raymond lead back to the same a-priori position. The only things you believe are the things you can apparently “prove”. Do you believe your wife loves you? Prove it? You certainly don’t believe that there is an existence after death. So this must mean that you believe that existence ends with death. Well, prove that. Prove to me that when you die, you just rot and cease to exist at any level. You can’t prove it, because it’s just a belief. But Raymond’s beliefs, whether they involve love or death, apparently don’t require absolute proof. Only ours do.
As for whether I believe that there’s a dwarf planet orbiting our star at about 35 AU, I believe a lot of things that cannot directly be observed or measured by me, or even by other men and their machines.
I believe that love is real, even though it can’t be precisely measured. I believe that morality is real, and that it can be deduced by applying our God-given logic. I believe that the universe did not create itself, nor just happen to come into existence, or happen to develop laws of physics to regulate it without the actions and guidance of a higher power, which I call God, or, not (not believe (God)).
I believe that a human being is greater than the sum total of his/her constituent points, and that when we die we don’t simply rot and cease to exist, end of story. I believe that science is a tool to peek into the workings of God’s mind, not evidence that God is fiction because we’ve been able to figure some things out.
I believe that there’s a difference between talking about the existence of God and talking about what individual religions believe, and that someone who consistently blends the two has ulterior motives for doing so. That is, unless they’re just plain stupid, which you clearly are not.
So, if you want to tell me there’s a dwarf planet orbiting a distant star, I’m prepared to accept that as a matter of my faith in your God-given application of human intelligence in a field that I have no particular expertise in.
Ozzie: I was not not impressed with the almost perhaps but not quite absence of but still some relevance and marginal presence of thought in your not not answer.
There (not(not)) a lot more for me to say, but I (won’t (won’t))resist, and therefore will refrain from any further comments.
What I think, and why I think it, is pretty clear, and these word games in the guise of furthering a debate are so typical of the way this subject matter tends to go, that there’s no reason to keep repeating myself.
If Einstein can believe in God, so can I. Anyone who has a problem with that has other motives at play in not wanting to acknowledge something so obvious.
PS: Religion is not God.
“Are you saying that God couldn’t give scientific proof of Its existence if It chose?”
No. First I quoted you: “All I’ve ever said is that God hasn’t been scientifically proven.”
I then wrote, “Scientifically prove to me that Christopher Columbus existed.” You will note that the word “God” does not appear in this statement.
Your standard of proof of God’s existence is science. I applied that standard to Columbus.
My request is simple, I think.
Dr. Jackson – It’s official. I have said, phrasing it at least four different ways in this discussion alone, that I do not proclaim definitively that there is no God. You repeatedly, in direct contradiction to my plain words, attribute that position to me.
I’ve also clearly stated that I accept that God is a “possible explanation”, or at the very least one that can’t be ruled out by what we know about universes right now. On the other hand, other explanations (like the universe existing eternally) are equally compatible with what we know. Lacking any way (at present) to distinguish, I reserve judgement – I don’t believe any of them are correct, and neither to I believe that any of them are incorrect.
I haven’t asked for “proof”, in any case. I’ve asked for “evidence”, something rather less demanding.
I think it’s fairly clear who’s playing games here. And I’m afraid I’m not interested in playing that game with you anymore, either.
Mountain Man – I’d say Christopher Columbus, God, and Santa Claus haven’t been scientifically proven.
On the other hand, very few things – if any – are scientifically proven true. Science progresses by proving things false. Ideas that survive lots of tests that would prove them false gain progressively more credibility. Ideas which can’t be tested at all – which make no difference anyone can check – are dismissed as irrelevant.
The theory that Christopher Columbus existed could be proven false in a lot of different ways, none of which have shown up, so it’s pretty credible. Santa Claus and God,… well, there is no observation that can’t be made consistent with those ‘hypotheses’, so…
>>>>>So, if you want to tell me there’s a dwarf planet orbiting a distant star, I’m prepared to accept that as a matter of my faith in your God-given application of human intelligence in a field that I have no particular expertise in.<<<<<
If told me that there was such a planet, I would consider the range of likely possibilities and tend to believe the one that is most likely. If I’m aware he has some knowledge of these matters (maybe he’s an astrophysicist by trade) and the possibility he is lying or delusional seems remote, I’d agree he is likely describing something real, that exists. I ‘believe’ him, because there is reason to do so.
If he told me there is life on that planet, from what I know about the universe, I’d judge him to be guessing. Just because he’s guessing doesn’t make him wrong, it’s just that his guesses don’t have any evidence value and I’ll put no confidence in it.
When the believer tells me there’s a God, I judge him to be guessing. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but he hasn’t supported his assertion with anything at all. His guess is as good as mine, I’m happy to admit, but when he claims his guess is better than mine, he ought to bring some evidence.
My inability to prove him wrong isn’t evidence for his case. My inability to prove (to his satisfaction) that naturalism is the only ground of existence isn’t evidence for his case. Bald assertions that ‘the universe must have been created by somebody’ are not evidence for his case. He is claiming that something specific exists–he needs to support it with evidence or the default position by a reasonable person would be that he’s guessing.
“Raymond. No one asked you about gods. I don’t believe in Zeus either. I doubt others do here as well.”
Actually, I do. I’m what’s known by most Judaeo-Christians and (to my mild annoyance) by most of my own, as a “Pagan.” You’d be surprised how many of us are out there.
My altars are in the spare bedroom.
Christians could find us quite a resource in the debate against atheism, which is so totally skewed against the JC God that it doesn’t often consider alternatives.
For instance, it is not essential to the definition of a God that he be Creator of the universe, and the religious would do well to separate the argument into its components:
1) There is a God, or are Gods.
2) The being under discussion is the Creator of the universe.
This begs the question, if a God is not the Creator, what justifies the distinction, God – as opposed to, say, Advanced Alien? [Note: this would exclude Zeus, who is understood in Hellenismos to be the Demiurge of the Cosmos.
I will posit that *rule* of the Cosmos, including humans, is sufficient for the designation, God (Gr. *theos*).
To argue against such a being, atheism must begin making very difficult claims about the limits of what I will call technology. There’s no necessary reason a sufficiently advanced being couldn’t reduce the contents of the universe to hydrogen atoms and *recompose* it according to his desires.
And – again – empiricism can make no reliable statement about any entity of higher technological capacity than the experimenter. This is simply above empiricism’s “pay grade.”
The thesis of the article, that atheism is necessary to liberalism, is intriguing and seems quite right.
I actually perceive a greater danger than liberalism at work here. The project of militant atheism is to TURN OFF humankind’s capacity to perceive the divine – through shame and banishment. This is why they’re so aggressive, offering, for instance, that for parents to raise their children in their faith is a form of child abuse. Slowly, they work to erect social conditions resembling Soviet psychiatry, in which belief outside what is sanctioned brought the judgment of mental disorder.
This is a profound assault on human dignity, and it must be understood that the real target isn’t God – it’s man. Militant atheism seeks to reduce man to the status of a scientific instrument. In the world being erected, there would be no dignity granted you, alone, with your free conscience. That which cannot be seen by two or more individuals in exactly, objectively, the same way (these are the rules by which science proceeds) is to be considered beyond the pale.
This suggests another tactic against militant atheism: let it be understood as an assault on man, and the free range of his knowing, extending to the intuitional.
Mr. Ingles beat me to it, but I’ll say it anyway. Science rarely aims to prove anything. Scientific theories and hypotheses are supported (or sometimes massacred) by incoming evidence, not proven. That is the logic of the scientific method. It is always assumed that, no matter how well-supported your theory, it could be disconfirmed in its entirety tomorrow, if a contrary observation is made.
The existence of Columbus is well-supported by multiple streams of evidence. That evidence exists in the real world, and is relatively unambiguous. Alternative theories (that his existence is simply a mistake, a tall tale, or a conspiracy) make little sense.
Different sciences have different standards of proof and different methods of supporting theories. Physics is a harder science, and history is softer, but practitioners of both expect that some rules of evidence are followed (for example, that the evidence can be public – seen and verified by anyone).
>Dr. Jackson – It’s official. I have said, phrasing it at least four different ways in this discussion alone, that I do not proclaim definitively that there is no God. You repeatedly, in direct contradiction to my plain words, attribute that position to me.
Raymond. Just for the record, most of your conversation has been about gods and religion, not God.
When you do talk about God (not gods or religion), you want us to believe that “I accept that God is a ‘possible explanation’”, even though “I don’t believe in God”.
So your “possible explanation” is something that you don’t think actually exists. This is absurd reasoning, and more game playing with words.
Well, we’ve now heard from the pagans. Can the wickans be far behind?
And, more importantly, can we accept the Wickans as a possible explanation for the origin of the universe, even though we don’t believe in witchcraft?
Inquiring minds want to know.