If you’re talking about “having faith” as in “I have faith my car will start with morning”, then yes, but that is not the same thing as theological faith. I have loads of evidence and experience that I can draw on to “have faith my car will start”, whereas “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”.
I like the comparison with having faith your wife, but it also shows the gap of reasoning between you and the post you are responding to, no?
You start by saying
> This may come as a surprise to you but I have "religious" faith because of evidence, not lack thereof
What is that evidence? Are you sure you are not playing on words here? Because faith has positive effects on you?
I like the argument about humility stated in another thread. For me, humility really seems to be the core value of religion that I find helpful.
Another point you make I don't quite understand:
> Certainly the objection would be that that is entirely subjective, but that is where objective arguments can then be laid out in addition to my "experience" of God in my life: philosophical arguments for God, historical arguments for God's actions in time and space, etc
What are these arguments that are not debunked? As far as I know, proofs of God and arguments for His/Its/Her/Their existence are very indicative of the time and author's reasoning system.
But there are none that I know of that have stood the test of time - be it Aquin, Kant, Descartes or whoever else?
To say that the classical arguments for God, e.g. Aquinas' five ways, have simply been "debunked" is completely false. I recall reading Dawkin's The God Delusion in early college and being convinced that these arguments were indeed antiquated. However as I began to read book-length treatments on various arguments (beginning, contingency, etc) I realized Dawkins et al oversimplified the entire enterprise. Are there debates about them? Sure and there always will be. But there are many professional philosophers who consider various classical arguments sound (though they often prefer one over the other, a gradient of "soundness").
> What is that evidence? Are you sure you are not playing on words here?
Putting aside the philosophical (see above), the historical arguments for Christianity and especially the mystery resurrection are what specifically convinced me.
tldr
- The gospels are written within a single generation of the apostles. They were likely written because the apostles and early disciples were beginning to die.
- We have documentary evidence of the gospels being faithful to the original documents. We have a vast number of manuscripts, many more than most any other ancient work, and they all are in agreement with one another (ignoring small copyist errors here and there).
- There are embarrassing stories in the gospels (Jesus' baptism, Jesus' rebuke of family, his inability to work miracles in certain places, Jesus' uncertainty as to the time of his return, the apostles total abandonment of him at his passion)
- There is nothing placed in Jesus' mouth that are reflective of later debates in the early Christian communities (e.g. do we still circumcise?), which one would expect if later Christians were as free to make up stories to fit the "needs" or "meanings" in their community.
- The names of people in the gospels correspond exactly to 1st century census data. If you were born in the 90s, you know a lot of Jennifers, yet there are very little baby Jennifers today. Names come and go quickly in cultures (outside of the true constant ones). There have been studies of the many names in the stories of Jesus and they all correspond to the timeframe expected (30ish AD) based on census data.
- What explains the presence of the woman at the empty tomb? Woman held low esteem in ancient society, yet they are the first ones to learn of Jesus' resurrection. If this story was simply made up, why do we not see Peter, James, and John finding the empty tomb and immediately becoming full of faith?
- After the collapse of faith of the apostles and their abandonment of Jesus at his passion, they all come "on board" with his resurrection and all go to their deaths attesting to this.
- What explains the completely novel concept of a pre-resurrection resurrection? Jesus rose Lazarus from the dead, but this was simply a resuscitation. Jesus' resurrection on the other hand is an eschatological resurrection, which means "end of time" resurrection. He is given a glorified, eternal body that is capable of things unknown to us (passing through walls, suddenly appearing, etc). There were some Jews at the time of Christ who believed in an end-of-time resurrection, but nobody believed that a single person would experience this sort of thing before everybody else. This is a completely novel idea in Jewish thought and for it to so suddenly appear and fully formed within a Jewish "sect" is truly remarkable. Greek and Roman sources fail to explain this as well. The concept of an eschatological resurrection of so foreign that even the resurrection stories have an odd tone to them unlike the rest of the gospels, notably containing zero explicit biblical proofs ("here's where the Old Testament said I would rise") and containing remarks about various people doubting, being scared, etc. NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God is considered one of the best treatments on this.
There's no comparable event in history, and especially not in antiquity. Much of what we take for granted as ancient history comes with far fewer sources.
This is what kind of cracked my atheism and lead me to more fairly evaluate the claims of Christianity. Until that point I'd been a bit of a scoffer, taking for granted the premise that no organized religion could possibly be true.
Discovering eucharistic miracles led me further toward accepting Christianity as true. I still feel like kind of a crackpot mentioning the evidence. But there's strikingingly consistent features of eucharistic miracles, going back to a time where it wouldn't have been possible to fake. They all have a somewhat rare blood type, including ones that were preserved centuries before we knew about blood type. They're all human cardiac muscle. The more recent ones, which haven't decayed and lost evidence, have features that are consistent with someone undergoing extreme physical stress. They also have features that are consistent only with living tissue, even for samples that have been sitting in tap water for months or years.
See this book: https://www.amazon.com/Cardiologist-Examines-Jesus-Stunning-...
To clarify one thing: I haven't even read Dawkins' books.
My stance on "proof of god's existance" arguments stems from, among others, a very goos philosophy PhD which I had the fortune to have as a high school teacher for a while (until he quit and went back to scholarship).
His favorite subjects were Thomas von Aquin and Immanuel Kant, both believers in Christian theological "proofs" of various kinds.
I couldn't think of a less flamboyant word than "debunked". To put in other words: all of the proofs of god's existance that I have seeen have turned out to be logical fallacies.
My best friend, who was strongly catholic most of his life, but went on to study phiolosphy, I think concluded the same.
That doesn't mean he's lost his faith completely though. AFAIK he doesn't like to call himself a Catholic anymore though.
Which brings me to another issue, if not the main one, with these proofs:
which god's existance do they aim to prove? Belief in most religions seems mutually exclusive (in a single mind, and without redefining and muddying historical terms), as much as we'd like otherwise.
"Proving" something like "there is an entity or cause of effect that is more powerful than any entities or causes of effect that we know" is not a proof of the existance of any particular human-defined "God".
To actually encounter God is completely different, which is also why I found the historical arguments far more effective for me in my journey as we have in Jesus, so we are told, the God-Man making Himself known to us. We get to see God. I personally became very convinced of the historicity of the gospels after about 10 years of intensive study, having started out as somebody who enjoyed them as "myth".
Yet this God is also peculiar: He suffered complete desolation on the cross. And here I find myself in this strange life, full of trials and sorrow, and I see Christ as fully explanatory of how suffering and hope possess meaning. I encounter Christ in these moments as I know that Christ doesn't remove suffering but transforms it. He doesn't take away my crosses, he makes them light and even, dare I say, full of love.
> There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
> Therefore there must be a God.
> (You either see this one or you don't.)
- Dr. Peter Kreeft (https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/20_arguments-gods-ex...)
Bach, man, if you look at my HN comments you'll probably see Bach mentioned at least 10% of the time. His music is unlike anything else out there: all individual parts unique and interesting yet everything forming a unified whole, constantly, across every single measure. You can listen to a cello line and be fully entranced and then listen to a violin going at the same time, likewise love it for itself, and then have the ability to then listen to them simultaneously and hear the harmonies. Every other composer I've listened to has a "dominant" section/theme, for example let's say the violins are playing a melody and the cellos are acting as a harmonic filler. It's beautiful, but listening to the cellos by themselves could be pretty boring. But with Bach, every single instrument is doing something enjoyable at the same time.
It sounds pathetic but sometimes I think his music has saved my life at a certain point. The fact that all voices are always "singing" makes it also very enjoyable to practise his music.
Even in mathematics all proofs depend on axioms in some way. And axioms are statements considered to be universally true without proof.
Is the bar for proof in this case set higher than for a mathematical proof?
What is proof anyway?
> A proof becomes a proof only after the social act of “accepting it as a proof.” This is as true for mathematics as it is for physics, linguistics, or biology. The evolution of commonly accepted criteria for an argument’s being a proof is an almost untouched theme in the history of science. In any case, the ideal for what constitutes a mathematical demonstration of a “nonobvious truth” has remained unchanged since the time of Euclid: we must arrive at such a truth from “obvious” hypotheses, or assertions that have already been proved, by means of a series of explicitly described, “obviously valid” elementary deductions. [0]
Do we have any true 100% proof for anything (where we don't rely on some assumption that we consider true without a proof)?
[0] A Course in Mathematical Logic for Mathematicians (2010), page 45
But if you want to relate this to mathematics, I think you should aim for more rigor. What definition of god you are even aiming to prove? Or accept as an axiom?
And mathematical axioms are expected to be "self-evident", true! E.g., "if P is true, P is not false".
Discussing these foundations of reasoning is interesting. But your conclusion sounds to me much like "we can't know anything and thinking is futile". The "100% proof" is a strawman — nobody demands one for God, as it is already impossible to perform a "100% proof" of the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun. As far as my feeble mind understands, this is not how science works.
Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago.
Proving that something does not exist ist rarely possible outside of abstract mathematics.
But it is not possible to describe God in purely mathematical terms either, right? At least not without straying far from any concrete monotheistic religion.
At best we can agree that God is one of infinitely many theories which are impossible to prove or disprove. Which makes it something for which "theory" is not even the right word.
But the more serious you take some religions, and the more you go back in time, this is not what religion was all about.
Religion is not only inner peace and positivity.
It has been the foundation of ethics, I guess — which is important to me, again! And I would not argue that ethics can be "logically proven".
But religion also often demands obedience, and used to make very concrete statements about what is true or false in the physical world.
Only the increased possibilities to prove some of that wrong (e.g. praying can defeat physics and cause miracles) led to today's, more fuzzy definitions of Christian faith, step by step, over the course of centuries.
Of course I acknowledge that this is a matter of interpretation and any single religious person can choose to ignore organized religion and such claims — as long as they are allowed to.
> Do we have any true 100% proof for anything (where we don't rely on some assumption that we consider true without a proof)?
I am trying to interpret your comment in a more charitable way, but it just seems to me like a classic logical fallacy that would "prove" anything and basically makes any rational argument futile.
If God is an intangible abstract concept without a measurable, tangible relation to the physical world: fine! If it is also not a well-defined abstract concept that allows itself to be proven or disproven: also fine!
But then what's left is emotion, ideas, human thought, ethics. Those are powerful and important parts of civilization.
But we have then left any logical argument about "proving god's existence".
And it has been consensus for a long time that these arguments are futile, for the exact reasons discussed here.
Pretending otherwise is what mads high school phiolosophy classes unbearable when there were to many zealousl religious students and a bad teacher. It derails into either woo rhethorics or a shouting match.
And this is why I said that studying these proofs is an interesting intellectual exercise, and sometimes tells a lot about the societal context.
But no, these are not proofs in the sense of a falsifiable scientific methodology.
What proof do you seek? You mentioned before "proof of god's existance". I doubt that is even possible. If it were, religion would be a science and faith would not be needed.
The better aim would probably be to seek for proof that the existence of god is possible. And then, if there is any possibility that any claims made by religions could be true. And then go from there.
> Discussing these foundations of reasoning is interesting. But your conclusion sounds to me much like "we can't know anything and thinking is futile".
Yes, for the first part, but your extrapolation in the second part is not what I concluded at all.
It's just that we need to know the tools we use and their limitations.
You agreed that we need axioms. Next step would be to define what kind of axioms would find acceptable.
You said it needs to be "self-evident" and gave an example of "if P is true, P is not false". The law of non-contradiction. But is that enough? Do you reject the concept of superpositions in quantum mechanics as not possible? Defining what we can accept without a "proof" could be the key.
You listed many good and interesting points. I agree with many of them. But sometimes I would say you jump to conclusions too fast with too many assumptions. Eg:
> it just seems to me like a classic logical fallacy that would "prove" anything and basically makes any rational argument futile.
I was just trying to make an argument about the need for axioms. We need things that are considered to be universally true without proof to proof anything.
and:
> Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago.
That statement could be considered a logical fallacy. But I agree with you that there is nothing to gain in discussing statements like "thinking is futile".
We need to be aware at all times that logical systems, scientific method, etc. are human made tools that are fantastic, but still have limitations. We need to know when they are applicable and when they are not. So that we can notice, if we are abusing them in any way in order to reach our conclusions. (And to set realistic goals/expectations of what, how and with what confidence we can conclude something.)
Just one thing, I want to elaborate on what I meant here:
> > Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago.
> That statement could be considered a logical fallacy. But I agree with you that there is nothing to gain in discussing statements like "thinking is futile".
I don't see why you say that "Philosophy of science has moved on from this a long time ago." relating to "100% proofs" would be considered a logical fallacy?
What I was aiming at is the fundamental principle of "evidence" in the context of sciences, and the philosophical underpinnings of "empiricism".
Claimed "evidence" for the metaphysical idea of God, particularly the Christian God, if I understand correctly, was the origin of this discussion.
And unless someone can up with a falsifiable definition of God, it just is muddying the waters and derailing discussion IMO to use scientific terms in relation to non-falsifiable ideas.
It is an entirely different matter to me to honestly ponder the human condition, ethics, the foundations of civilisation, and the values of religious belief. It is also interesting to consider "what can I know" and to realise that a "closed" scientific world view is in fact not in accordance with scientific principles.
Still, I don't see how it would make sense to equate religious beliefs with mathematical axioms.
If you allow me to take a step back to your OP I was first responding to, in order to try to clarify the basis of my arguments.
There you spoke of theological "proofs" and made sweeping statement how "all turned out to be logical fallacies" / "debunked".
I asked questions about general foundations of reasoning. The aim was to discuss what is a "proof" in philosophy? To make it easier to see how hard this fundamental question really is, I first moved to a more well defined domain like mathematics. Our discussion then moved into a different direction, but the original point I was trying to get to was how shaky are foundations of definitions of things like "proof" and "logical fallacy" in philosophy. With enough freedom in interpretation, any philosophical proof could probably be interpreted in a way that it could be treated as a logical fallacy.
But yeah, while it's fun, this kind of discussions can get really long. And HN is not really an appropriate place for this. There are some things that I think are simple misunderstandings, but I'm not sure how I can clarify/communicate them succinctly enough to fit them here without turning this into a way too long post. Anyway, it's been a pleasure chatting with you.
What I meant was
- the commonly accepted scienfic method regarding the physical world says that we technically always work with hypothesises, that must allow themselves to be proved wrong. We can never be "100% sure" from a strict philosphical standpoint. This is the basis of modern science, we instead discuss theories that allow for themselves to be proven wrong, which conversely means that they allow to predict physical measurements.
- Then there's maths, which indeed is closely tied to the basic logic also underpinning the scientific method. Maths has axioms. These need no proof. Axioms are classified by their simplicity, usefulness and shall not contradict each other. A particular religious faith is not usually considered similar to the usually used mathematical axioms, at least that's my perception.
(edit: and there is of course the whole fun world of incompleteness and decidability, but I consider this a sub-topic of maths, philosophy and CS)
I'm pretty sure this definition comes from atheists. I think it's a strawman. I don't know any religious person who thinks they believe without any evidence.
I get from that that faith is where your confidence in the logical conclusions of your belief gives you impetus to turn your hope into action.
Faith isn't to do with why you believe, its to do with what you do with that belief, and the separate question of why you believe of course involves evidence.
No, that is simply what follows from having faith as is demanded of adherents. Faith in itself does not mean that. Faith is to fully believe by choice, and if one does, then it necessitates that they do what is demanded of followers.
This is a constant thing we see among religion argument.
I do agree with you that “faith” is often defined in this way, but it is absolutely not the definition we are discussing.
Well yeah, because it's in the Bible that way, and a lot of the people you're talking about are Christian.
It's fine for people to have different definitions of things as long as they agree when arguing. But just as I'm not talking about your definition of faith when you say 'faith', you're not talking about my definition of 'faith' when you say 'faith'.
If you want to talk about 'belief absent evidence', I agree that's a bad thing, so there's probably no argument there. Furthermore, I think the vast majority of religious people think they do have evidence for their belief and don't agree that they have 'belief absent evidence'.
Perhaps they're using the word wrong, but that's not a real area of disagreement.
“Well that’s where you have to have faith”
That’s not even counting the types of “evidence”. Like “ nature is beautiful” and “bananas fit in your hand and angle toward your mouth”.
You are not actually omniscient, it only seems like you are, and you have faith in your perception (as you have been taught to by the ideology you were raised in).
I sent an observation that is consistent even among some of the most stringent bible believing people.
A possible remedy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
They key flaw in your model of reality (or in your ideology's terminology: reality) is the inconsistency between "always" and "some".
That is what faith is by definition. You can't redefine the term, whether you have faith or not.
Subjective experience is not empirical evidence i.e. evidence, colloquially used. Even on the individual level there's a willful interpretation involved. They might play the semantic game of calling it evidence, but it isn't.
And then the chapter goes on to give examples of people who had faith—none of which did what they did or believed the way they do because of anything describable as what would count as evidence in science, or a court of law.
This is not to say that the faithful are irrational or even that they are wrong. The faithful have good reasons to believe as they do, but those reasons are not confirmed by evidence.
Why is this so important? Well, what do you do when all the evidence says you are doomed to fail? Or that there is no way out? Do you give up? Or does your hope, as Hebrews says, consist of things not seen?
If the faithful insist that their faith is confirmed like any other belief is confirmed, they will miss the whole point of faith, and when the time comes that they need that kind of faith, they find they don’t have it.
Here is the difference for me: A teacher has two students, and she firmly believes they both can succeed in her class, and in life.
1. The first student has a history of getting good grades, has engaged parents, secure home, etc. The teacher takes this as EVIDENCE that the student will succeed.
2. The second student has always gotten very bad grades. He gets in trouble a lot. His parents are disengaged and have trouble keeping food on the table. Nevertheless, the teacher has an unshakable belief that this student can succeed. In complete contradiction to every piece of objective evidence. Because she has FAITH in the kid.
There is a huge difference between those two ways of coming to a belief. This difference should not just be glossed over. Both kinds of ways of coming to believe are essential to human existence.
Sometimes, the apropos thing to do is throw out all the evidence. Sometimes the most rational thing to do is have the courage to keep going by faith.
Abraham is in that list, and is elsewhere described as the paragon of faith. Yet in Genesis 18/19 Abraham is said to have met and talked with God, and discussed the destruction of Sodom, which Abraham then witnessed immediately. Abraham's faith was not a belief in a God he had never seen.
Likewise Cain, Abel and Noah are in the Hebrews 11 list but Genesis says they spoke with God before they exercised their faith.
In Hebrews 11 the "things unseen" are elaborated as the creation of the universe and the future fulfillment of God's promises (almost entirely the latter). They're unseen not because there is no evidence for them, but simply because the faithful people did not live to see them fulfilled.
"Faith is belief without evidence" is a trope widely believed by Christians and atheists, but that's not the faith being promoted in Hebrews.
It's true that the people discussed in Hebrews 11 were said to have met and spoken with God. But, unless I'm missing something, the chapter still seems to say that present-day believers must have faith in a God they've never seen; verse 6 says that anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists, which to me implies that they haven't met him as the early believers did. So this still seems to require some kind of leap of faith, beyond the evidence available to us today. I'll leave it at that, since we clearly disagree.
A person could have a well-founded belief in God without seeing him as Abraham did. What if someone in the early church had seen apostolic miracles and talked to an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus? Would it still be a "leap of faith" for them to believe in God and his promises? I would say not. So I don't think verse 6 "requires some kind of leap of faith" in the sense you're using it.
I think such a person would still need faith, per verse 6, to put their justified belief into action in critical moments, e.g. at a moment when they're facing persecution for following Jesus.
Now, how much of a "leap of faith" is required given the evidence really available to believers then and now... that's the big question about which we presumably disagree.
If you saw somebody walking around healing people, and he claimed that all known religions were false, and you should start worshiping this new god, would you do it?
Or would you just think this has to be some kind of magic trick/scam?
Yes, and one of the things Abraham did was take his kid out for a human sacrifice--because he saw god in a dream.
Its one thing if you and I were talking with God, while a bunch of guys in lab coats were doing experiments trying to verify whether it was God or just some kind of magic trick.
But there's no sense of the word "evidence" in which a dream is evidence that God wants you to kill your kids.
> things unseen
i.e. things we do not gain knowledge about through our sensory organs, i.e. not empirical evidence. Hebrews is rather poetic, at least in my favorite English translations, but I don't think it could be any clearer that faith doesn't come from sensory experience in the way empirical evidence does.
> but that's not the faith being promoted in Hebrews.
People wonder why I care so much about what Hebrews says about faith, given that I'm an atheist. The reason is this: if you think faith is the same thing as evidence, then sooner or later, when you really need a good reason to ignore all the evidence which makes you feel like you are doomed, you will need the kind of faith which gives you things to hope for, even though the answers are as yet unseen. When (not if, this eventually happens to everybody) that happens, I hope you find you have the right kind of faith too see you through.
The person of faith believes evidence in the form of 1st person subjective experience is sufficient to justify their beliefs.
The person of science believes evidence must meet a fundamentally different set of criteria.
There are two different language games being played, with each player insisting their ruleset is the right one.
> The person of science believes evidence must meet a fundamentally different set of criteria.
Ironically, these two claims are themselves are both faith based, necessarily - those who make such claims do not have access to the fact of the matter on either of these (because it is not possible to attain), thus the mind injects predictions (based on its training) into the individual's stream stream of "reality", and the individual falls for it (as their culture has taught them to).
Science even teaches this stuff, which makes the whole thing even more hilarious.
The Rationalist community (SSC, LessWrong) has an excellent approach to it (too bad they also forget their scriptures): ~"we are not rationalists, we are aspiring rationalists".
Meanwhile: how many innocent Humans died around the world today while us super smart Westerners are living it up in a state of unrealized delusion and unearned decadence?
Faith in the ultimate analysis has existence independent of evidence.
If you believed animals are sentient and ought not be harmed at all, then you wouldn't harm them. But those actions that follow have no bearing on the meaning of belief or faith (where the latter can be distinguished as being a "willful" belief).
I have "faith" in the sense that I don't think most scientists are faking scientific papers. I have faith that when the NIH publishes a study it's usually accurate. I have faith that physics and mathematics is a good way of modeling the world.
The reason I say "faith" is because conceivably I could dispute every paper and try and replicate it on my own, and try and go through elaborate proofs to make sure every mathematical theorem is correct, and I think there might even be value in that, but I also have a life to live. At some point, I have to put my trust into others and just hope it works out, and usually it does.
Of course, this falls apart, there's been plenty of cases of scientists faking data, the NIH and CDC have gotten stuff wrong before, and plenty of things in physics have been proven wrong either mathematically or experimentally, so of course it's not a perfect system (nothing involving trust ever is), but I will acknowledge that way I live my life involves something that could be considered "faith".
I took the latter path until I realized there was nothing left but hot air and wasted time.
If it turned out that a paper was using fudged data, or the results were measured poorly, or that the math being used to crunch something was incorrect, I would like to think that I would be willing to readjust my position on it and go where the latest research points. Einstein proved that Newton's "laws" of physics were really just really good approximations, and I think the vast majority of physicists were willing to adjust accordingly.
If it turned out tomorrow that Type Theory was shown to be unsound or something, I'm pretty sure I'd just concede that I was wrong to believe it, and then move onto whatever revised framework came along to replace it. I wouldn't just tune out all contrary perspectives and vehemently insist that "no type theory is always right and I have faith!!!"
So you're right; it's not equivalent to religious faith, because religious faith typically involves readjusting your perception of the world to fit with it, while "faith" in science involves changing the data to fit better with the world.
Is a love of peace over violence, freedom over slavery, ignorance over wisdom simply a matter of taste?
Like, I think the best moral code tends to be "try and maximize empathy" as at least for me that seems to usually leads to the best results.
Do I have some kind of objective proof that that's best? No, not really, it's a "feels" based judgement, but I don't think that's a "faith" based thing either, any more than me saying that "Donkey Kong Country 2 is the best game ever" would be.
We can objectively measure how close something is to some moral framework, but the weighting of that moral framework will eventually get subjective. I don't think subjectivity implies "faith".
More equivalent would be where you see enough evidence of faked/false papers being published that you start believing that most papers are faked/false. More equivalent would be you concluding that (e.g) the FDA does not possess either the authority or expertise (or both) to ever correctly make any judgements about the safety of food or drugs. More equivalent would be your deciding that CDC doesn't actually understand how disease spreads and thus should be ignored.
(I'm aware that the latter two examples here sound suspiciously related to specific recent events/trends in the USA, but that's accidental and not intentional on my part)
Divinity just "is". Existence is defensible. Human interpretation is necessarily always incomplete because you can't condense divinity into something measurable. It just doesn't make sense in human terms.
What we can do, and what faith entails, is that we can measure existence piecemeal and trust that it still fits together.
This is an entirely different definition of faith.
But "science" isn't a monolith. Most science is stuff I don't really understand with any kind of intimate detail. Pretty much anything involving chemistry, biology, health, or physics is over my head; I'll try and read the abstract of a paper in those subjects and I feel like I generally understand it well enough, but I don't know enough to actually criticize anything.
If we take the Jan Hendrik Schon scandal from about 22 years ago, I know I would have read the papers and just taken on faith that the paper writer wasn't lying. I'm not equipped enough in physics or chemistry to call bullshit on anything being said in there and I probably would have trusted it. I also would have been wrong.
Now the Jan Hendrik Schon case isn't a great example, because of course he was caught, and it's tempting to say "see! Science is self-correcting!" and I think it broadly is, but at the same we really have no way of knowing how prevalent these cases of fraud actually are. Maybe other scientists are just better at covering up their tracks.
Of course this is getting into the bigger "replication crisis" in science, but I generally believe a vast majority of scientists are honest with their results, and I generally believe the results of their papers are at least truthful, but at some level that's an article of "faith", or maybe just an article of "intellectual laziness" on my end.
I guess I might argue that there's not much of a difference between the two.
I have some bad news for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
The implementation of reality/"reality" is Indirect Realism, but you experience it and (implicitly) assert it to be Direct Realism, due (in part) to the ideology you are "subscribed" to, whether you know it or not.
Your ideology has taught you to respond with (predictable) memes, perhaps we will now get to see them and I will increment my counters.
Oh, in case you "don't know what I'm talking about":
> whereas “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”
You think you are referring to reality, but you are actually referring to the model of reality contained within your mind, the composition of which is what you have been trained on by your culture, ideology, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...
(I could go on and on and on...there is so much for you to learn, if you still have adequate ability.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning
The sad part about Western Civilization, Planet Earth, 2024, is that there are some conceptual spaces (the one we are in right now) where you are "disallowed" (it's complicated) from using science and the scientific method to figure out what is going on, because either of the two are more than capable enough to figure this out on your own....what I am saying can be learned directly from science.
It's the same evidence as there is evidence for ancient Sumerians.
But then maybe you'll say "anything that exists is not evidence, we have to apply scrutiny to that evidence to see if it holds up". And of course everyone's level of scrutiny and what they view as proof and not proof will differ, so that's a road leading to nowhere fast.
Perhaps the simplest proof of a God is that none of us truly live our lives as if there were no God. Many of even atheists don't live as if there is not a moral tally over their lives. They don't live as if their lives were truly meaningless (for if they did, they would see no issue in ending the whole cosmic accident of their own life or the lives of others on a whim). If God didn't exist, the ones who truly don't believe would likely act out much more on their beliefs no?
Bottom line, people are naturally good because that's what gets humans reproducing. No god needed
This flies in the face of survival of the fittest, species fitness, and all sorts of other evolutionary ideas. There is also lots of evidence that humans are not naturally good and that this does not get humans reproducing. The most reproducing man in history, Genghis Khan was not very good at all.
It also skirted around the other point that atheists do not live their lives as if they were meaningless, which they purport to believe.
>"It also skirted around the other point that atheists do not live their lives as if they were meaningless, which they purport to believe."
My life is meaningful to me and that's all I personally care about, I don't care that you think everyone of a particular lack of belief has to have a particular mental state associated with that arbitrary tag.
Firstly, it just seems much more plausible that someone created the universe. If we walked in to the middle of nowhere and saw a beautiful statue, most of us would say "wow, I wonder who made it?" not "wow, what an incredible coincidence that this thing which has meaning to me just spontaneously formed".
Another main reason is that I _feel_ like there is a God, and generally my feelings tell me things. When I feel hungry, I don't think "ah, but that feeling is only an illusion!" instead I go and eat.
I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat.
p.s. I'm not trying to convince anyone here, just putting my thoughts out there in case they are helpful to anyone else.
It seems like you are saying you base your reality on your feelings.
To extend your examples, what do you think when you look up in the sky and see a Goodyear blimp? Do you think 'Wow look at that blimp, what a modern miracle that humans have made things that can fly" or do you go buy tires?
EDIT: I dont mean to detract from or insult your beliefs in anyway. They sound very nice :)
I think I'd probably think both those things :P
I wouldn't say that I _only_ base my view of reality on my feelings, but I don't discount them just because they might be hard to explain.
I think our feelings, as well as our thoughts, should be listened to.
Not that it really makes any difference, but I have a science background (PhD, post-doc) so am used to thinking about evidence, so I hope you don't get the impression that I'm just too stupid to be an atheist!
I appreciate your respectful reply, though. It's actually fun when you can exchange a few thoughts with people on the internet in a respectful way.
Both columns became full pretty quickly, so I concluded that someone's point of view on God cannot be a case of intellect or integrity. This at least helped me not feel insecure about my beliefs on that front.
One reason why I don't hide my beliefs (although I rarely flaunt them, either) is so anyone else carrying out the same exercise has some more data. They might of course choose to put me in a "stupid believer" category, but that is up to them!
But why? Not asking to be difficult; I'm trying to understand why we should listen to either.
I've learned that my thoughts are often filled with unhelpful nonsense baked into me at an early age by the conditioning of traumatized parents. I've learned that I can change the kinds of thoughts that I have by learning new skills and reframing situations so that the next time I encounter a situation that would lead to unhelpful nonsense thoughts, those are no longer the default reaction. My thoughts aren't me - they're the results of processes in my brain. I've learned that often the most useful thing is to not listen to my thoughts, because they're spinning narratives that simply aren't true ("I'm worthless", "everything is my fault", "<person> must be thinking awful things about me", etc).
Our interpretation of feelings are mediated by thought. Given the susceptibility of thought to conditioning and external shaping, what makes a feeling worth listening to?
To be clear, I'm not saying that thoughts/feelings are never useful or true. We depend on them to make sense of the world and to survive our environment. I'm saying that they're often not true, and this raises the question: what differentiates the useful/true ones from the ones that are not? Simply having the thought/feeling isn't enough.
I went through a period of time in my life when I experienced thoughts/feelings "as me". I felt identical to them. Once I realized that they're appearances in consciousness alongside every other appearance in consciousness: sights, sounds, physical sensations, smells, etc., my relationship with thoughts/feelings shifted. I appear to be closer to "that which is aware" of these appearances in consciousness. When you start observing these thoughts/feelings playing out from a distance, it becomes increasingly clear that they're often just plain wrong, but wrong for understandable reasons (e.g. the anxious brain borne of childhood trauma).
Because our thoughts and feelings are really all we have to go on, when it comes to understanding the world around us.
I don't mean that _every_ thought or feeling should be acted on necessarily, but that they should all be given consideration.
For example, I read somewhere that ~70% of atheists admit to praying in the last year (or something like that. I don't remember the source). I think it's fair to say that the urge or feeling of wanting to pray is common.
Many people would dismiss that feeling with their thoughts, i.e. rationalise why the feeling is really a result of something else etc.
Whereas my take (by listening to my feelings) is that perhaps there is a reason why the urge to pray is a common one, and it might be as simple as something/someone to pray to actually exists.
I am an atheist. I am very strict about the fact I do not believe in a God. My beliefs are strongly based in science, and I also believe Gods are fictionally created by people who need something more in their life.
However saying all that, there have been 3 major personal crisis in my life, and I have prayed in every one of them.
I cant explain it, I dont understand it. But I am hopefully intelligent enough not to close the door on it and let my mind ponder the whys of it from time to time.
JR1427, your comments here have provoked thought. Thankyou :)
I'm not sure that what you describe as "reasons" actually qualify as reasons.
> Firstly, it just seems much more plausible that someone created the universe.
Why is that more plausible? You think that there is "an uncaused thing," which you call "God," and that this uncaused thing created the universe. Why is that more plausible than the uncaused thing being the universe itself? The universe manifestly exists; your idea of "someone" who created it does not (it may exist, but does not manifestly exist in the way the universe does).
> If we walked in to the middle of nowhere and saw a beautiful statue, most of us would say "wow, > I wonder who made it?" not "wow, what an incredible coincidence that this thing which has > meaning to me just spontaneously formed".
This is a variant of a common creationist argument, often promoted by those who prefer the term "intelligent design" to "creationism." But so-called "intelligent design" is just a variant of hard-core creationism.
> Another main reason is that I _feel_ like there is a God, and generally my feelings tell me > things. When I feel hungry, I don't think "ah, but that feeling is only an illusion!" instead I > go and eat.
This conflates two very different senses of the words "feel" and "feelings." Hunger is a biological sensation; your "feeling" that there is a God is not and is a very, very different kind of "feeling."
Consider this: if you had been left alone on a desert island as a child, with no other humans around, you would still feel hunger, because that is a natural, biological sensation.
But you almost certainly would not have the "feeling" you have now that there is a God, and even if you did, that God would even more certainly not have the characteristics you ascribe to it now.
The "God" that you "feel" exists, which has whatever characteristics you ascribe to it, is a social construct. In the absence of a social environment, it is vanishingly unlikely that you would construct a similar idea on your own.
Again, this "feeling" is not at all like hunger: it is a purely psychological phenomenon in a way that "feeling" hungry is not. Using the words "feel" and "feeling" in these two different ways confuses the issue rather than clarifies it.
> I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat.
This is not really even intelligible.
Are you implying that belief that the universe was intelligently designed necessarily implies belief that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, among other beliefs? That doesn't seem right.
My point was just that proponents of so-called "intelligent design" sometimes try to create the impression that it is not itself a form of creationism, but it very much is. Not exactly the same as young earth creationism or any of the old earth variants, but still very much creationism nonetheless.
The basic idea as I understand it is that life exhibits "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved naturally, and therefore must have been created by some "designer." It is the "must have been created" part that makes is fundamentally creationist.
Ah, I see, yes, it does seem to me that most if not all intelligent design proponents are creationists (usually I see creationism being used to refer to young earth creationism). I don't know of intelligent design proponents who deny creationism, that's interesting.
>The basic idea as I understand it is that life exhibits "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved naturally, and therefore must have been created by some "designer." It is the "must have been created" part that makes is fundamentally creationist.
Well, to be sure, while intelligent design theory is a theory meant to compete with evolutionary theory (what you've just outlined), what the original poster has said isn't necessarily intelligent design theory. They seem to have in mind the fine-tuning argument, roughly speaking that the order/structure of the universe suggests that the universe was designed to be that way. This argument doesn't compete with any scientific theories (except perhaps the multiverse theory, though my sense is that this is a contentious theory among scientists and atheist philosophers alike). But yes, this argument too suggests creationism.
Creationism is part and parcel of theism, though---your original comment seemed to imply that creationism is something obviously silly (as in, silly in a way in which theism is not)? Or am I just not reading you right?
I don't know if any intelligent design proponents deny creationism in all its forms. They hardly can, since what they are proposing is itself a form of creationism. But many try to obscure the fact that it is a form of creationism.
> what the original poster has said isn't necessarily intelligent design theory. They seem to have in mind the fine-tuning argument, roughly speaking that the order/structure of the universe suggests that the universe was designed
It's the same argument, though. Whether it's a "beautiful statue," as in the post I replied to here, or a watch, or a blood-clotting mechanism, or "the order/structure of the universe," the argument is "this thing was clearly designed, therefore the God that I profess to believe in is real."
Doesn't matter whether you call it "intelligent design" or "fine-tuning" or whatever, it's all the same: this thing was "designed," therefore there is/was a "designer" who intentionally created it. It's all creationism.
This is all sort of an aside from my main point to the post I replied to, which is that by equating the fact that he "feels" there is a God with "feeling" hungry, he is using the words "feel" and "feeling" very sloppily at best, and conflating two very different things in a way that confuses rather than clarifies.
Certainly, there are those who use this kind of sloppy language exactly because it confuses rather than clarifies. He may just be a victim of one, possibly many times removed, or he may be one himself. I dunno.
Yes, in the sense that they point towards a creator of the universe. But intelligent design theory is more readily dismissed as anti-scientific nonsense, while the fine-tuning argument is not.
Since your original reply to the original poster was that "none of these reasons are reasons", and you went on to say, re: the design argument, nothing more than "this is a creationist argument", the implication seemed to be that an argument being a creationist one is reason enough to dismiss it. If you were just making a comment that the argument was expressing a belief that the universe was created (creationism), that seems fairly obvious, and I don't have anything to quibble about.
Certainly, there are those, seemingly including you, who would like to use it to "point towards a creator," but I think that in general, they want to point in that direction regardless, and will hang their hats on whatever comes along that seems like it might get them where they want to go.
This is just a fact, no?
The fine-tuning argument is something like, Premise (1) this fact is true, and it must be because of chance, necessity, or design. Premise (2) it is not by chance or necessity. Conclusion: it is by design.
You can reject the premises (probably premise 2), but it's a valid (even if unsound) argument whose conclusion points towards a creator. And its rejection probably warrants some explanation rather than an out-of-hand dismissal.
Again, nothing about (1) itself "points towards a creator." You just seem to wish that it did.
There is, I think, a good case to be made against (2)---for example, an appeal to the anthropic principle, or an appeal to multiverse theory. But this is far from a rejection with no further explanation.
Not particularly.
> it seems that that these constants are what they are is a very low probability event.
Pure speculation.
> we would probably say a coin that turns up heads a thousand times... [is] by design
This is just yet another misplaced, unhelpful analogy similar to many others made by creationists of various stripes. It gets you nowhere.
> it seems that the state of affairs could have been other than what they are
Again, pure speculation.
> So it's not obvious that we can reject (2) out of hand.
Given that it is entirely unfounded, I would say that we not only can, but should.
I think that you just want to get to a particular conclusion and will postulate whatever it takes to get there.
But saying that the constants are what they are not being a very low probability event isn't pure speculation? Saying that the state of affairs can only possibly be what they are isn't pure speculation?
>unhelpful analogy
Maybe so, but I don't see why it's not fruitful to spell out why this analogy is unhelpful.
>Given that it is entirely unfounded, I would say that we not only can, but should.
Does it not warrant an explanation for why things are by chance, or why things are by necessity? An explanation for why things being by chance or necessity is founded? Otherwise, (2) appears intuitive, I can conceive that the gravitational constant could have been something other than what it is, and since I can imagine it, it seems that things could have been this way, and there should be an explanation why they are not. Now, maybe it's the case that conceivability isn't the same as possibility, but I think that warrants being addressed. Or maybe it's that there is an explanation, e.g. that if the constant wasn't what it is, we wouldn't be around to talk about it. But again, I think that warrants being spelled out.
>I think that you just want to get to a particular conclusion and will postulate whatever it takes to get there.
Maybe so, but I think if someone postulates something intuitive but false, regardless of their motivations, it's better to address why it's false instead of shutting down discussion.
Sure .. and here physics has no necessity for a purposeful creator.
Of all the multitudes of parallel universes that can come into existence .. the only ones that have any observers who can comment on what a long shot it is to be in a universe with observers are those universes that have the dice rolled just right for such observers to exist.
The existence of billion dollar lottery winners is not proof of the existence of god, it's strong evidence that multiple lotteries with many entrants exist.
I am not suggesting that that is the case. You are speculating here, I am not.
> I don't see why it's not fruitful to spell out why this analogy is unhelpful.
Not the way it works. Your analogy, your burden.
> Does it not warrant an explanation for why things are by chance, or why things are by necessity? An explanation for why things being by chance or necessity is founded?
I am not speculating that either of those is or is not the case.
You speculate because it gets you to the conclusion that you clearly want. I have no such need.
> I think if someone postulates something intuitive
Your speculation is not actually "intuitive." You describe it that way only because it is to your liking.
> but false, regardless of their motivations, it's better to address why it's false instead of shutting down discussion.
Depends on the discussion. As for this one, I will decline to continue it further.
I don't think that humans are in a very good position to judge the complexity of things. A more intelligent creature might think the universe very crude and simple, and a less intelligent one might think it terribly complex.
From a scientific point of view, I don't think we can judge how intelligent we are, so arguments around complexity don't necessarily help.
As for evolution, well, I've seen it happen in the lab. I think it happens, and I think it's plausible that evolution is how all life as we know it today arose. I don't think we have really hard evidence for that yet, and just because a mechanisms _could_ have done something, doesn't mean it did.
I can imagine a that evolution was a tool used to create life procedurally. If I was creating a universe, then I think I would use procedural generation! But here I am slipping in to assuming God created things in the same way a programmer creates games and simulations, which of course is pure speculation.
> I'm not sure that what you describe as "reasons" actually qualify as reasons.
I'm assuming you don't believe in God, so I'd be surprised if you did think my reasons qualified as reasons! But they do for me. I wasn't trying to put forward my best arguments in order to try and convince someone.
> This is a variant of a common creationist argument, often promoted by those who prefer the term "intelligent design" to "creationism." But so-called "intelligent design" is just a variant of hard-core creationism.
I'm not exactly sure what your point is. To be clear, I don't think that God made things with a wave of a wand. There seems to be good evidence for the physical mechanism for the creation of lots of things. I think these mechanisms might be thought of as the tools of whoever created (and presumably architects) the universe. But who knows, I'm just speculating. To be honest, the details of the mechanism of creation don't seem very important to me right now.
> This conflates two very different senses of the words "feel" and "feelings." Hunger is a biological sensation; your "feeling" that there is a God is not and is a very, very different kind of "feeling."
Assuming you are an atheist, then I'm surprised you think there is any kind of feeling _other_ than biological ones.
What type of feeling is my sense that there is a God, if not biological?
Personally I have no clear opinion on what the origins of this feeling are, but all I know is I have it.
> Consider this: if you had been left alone on a desert island as a child ... But you almost certainly would not have the "feeling" you have now that there is a God
I don't know if there is any evidence to back this up, but I'd be interested to hear it.
> and even if you did, that God would even more certainly not have the characteristics you ascribe to it now.
I don't think I really ascribed any characteristics to God.
But I do think it's interesting that different and unconnected people across the world, and through time, very often come to the conclusion that something/someone created the universe.
> This is not really even intelligible.
"I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat." was meant as a metaphor. People often say they "hunger" for things that are not food. Similarly, if one believes that there is a God to hunger for, then God is the food, and to accept this is to eat from God.
I don't need some fear based faith system keeping me in check. Life is hard, difficult, and unfair enough as is without me adding hateful chaos to the mix.
I do find it weird that people need the threat of a punishment in the hereafter to keep their baser instincts in check. I am highly suspicious of anyone who cannot seem to fathom that goodness or morality can be found in something outside of divinity. What may they be hiding under that coat of piety and how many rounds does it hold?
Maybe others do?
And however powerful you think he is, he got his ass handed to him by Chemosh, a member of a Moabite pantheon, after the king of the Moabites sacrificed his heir in a burnt offering to his own god.
I didn't make it up. That's in the Bible.
The Christian god is what happens when you take a fictional character and keep on ascribing to him greater and greater powers because it's easier than describing his limitations. Same thing happened with Superman in the 40s and 50s, really.
But I do. My morality doesn't come from an imaginary being. It comes from my relationships with other people. I don't kill people because (a) it would bring me no joy to do so, (b) would bring me no benefit, and (c) we have laws that prevent killing because societies are more stable when they don't engage in random killings. Societies only get to exist if the people in them find a net benefit in staying alive and having others stay alive. It's amazing how many cultures have existed throughout our history as a species and none of them just went crazy because they didn't believe in some land-locked storm god who forgot about his wife.
The idea that people are just going to go apeshit if they truly believed there wasn't a god is right up there in terms of ridiculousness with all the men in the Republican party and pastors who claim steadfast morality but keep getting caught with minors, women who aren't their wives, and gay men. So I feel sorry for you if you are so inherently immoral that you need to be held back by stories of a man in the sky, but some of us don't live our lives in fear of supernatural retaliation.
And if we're being real, the vast majority of the planet don't believe in your god, including people who claim to be Christian. It's just easier to say that you do so that people will leave you alone.
I think that's a bit simplistic.
I was taught (in a Buddhist context) that "faith" should be interpreted as a kind of confidence. To do meditation (beyond something like mindfulness), you need confidence that you aren't going to explode, or harm yourself. It's like that game of deliberately falling backward, with the confidence that your friends will catch you before you hit the ground. So you need confidence in your teacher and in the teaching.
You gain that kind of confidence based on experience; you don't trust your friends (or your teacher) because you're supposed to; you trust them because they have shown themselves reliable in the past. You don't acquire confidence in a flash, as it were on the road to Damascus; it's something that develops.
I don't know whether the Christian notion of faith jibes with this Buddhist interpretation.
/me no longer a Buddhist, nor any kind of thing-ist.
I never felt as though I could "choose" to believe anything, or not easily at any rate. I could choose not to explore certain data and be satisfied with ignorance (though I try not to) but if something is incongruent with the facts as I understand them, then I can't "faith" my way to believing it.
OK. So in Buddhism (the way I was taught it), confidence or faith isn't something you express; you either have enough to achieve what you're trying to achieve, or you don't. And nobody demands it. But you're right, it's not an all-or-nothing deal.
> necessarily goes beyond mild conviction.
Indeed (although I'm not sure what "mild conviction" means; being convinced of something means you can see no room for doubt). For some kinds of meditation, e.g. some kinds of Tantric meditation, you need something that feels like certainty. It's not about falsifiable facts; it's about trusting, because you have to let go (like falling backwards).
I don't know any evangelical Christians; I think that for them, expressing their faith is part of the deal, and it is expected (i.e. demanded). In that sort of context, I can imagine a pastor or community "demanding" that you hold beliefs that are false to fact, e.g. Young Earth. That's not what I understand by "confidence".
Regarding trust and confidence, I just watched a two-part PBS documentary about Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre; it was an eye-opener. A lot of testimony from people who totally trusted this guy for a long time, despite (what looked to me like) his total charlatanism. He just wanted to be admired, apparently.