” You sought out evidence to support your belief instead of trying to disprove it to see if it would hold up, like a scientist. ”
1. If I would do this I would never go to this website discussing this with you. Assume good intentions.
2. As you said, for infinitesimal prior probability no evidence is enough. That is what I am arguing here. If I get persuaded that probability is indeed infinitesimal, all my evidence are nothing. I can see resurrection of the deads and still it won’t be enough then.
3. I can blame the same thing on you. I am not going to guess but there are so many stories of atheists who became atheists just because God didn’t do what they asked. “I do not want to deal with such God that does not do what I want, therefore there is no God.”
Ok, let us go back to our business if you don’t mind.
″ If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that reliably produced good results, instead of these obvious fallacies, I would have a much harder time dismissing the proposition as a fraud. ”
First, could you review the previous comment to see if you agree with the logic, and if not, what do you disagree in particular.
Second, if you agree with this logic, you should acknowledge that there is not negligible prior probability that miracles exist in principle. You can claim that they are rare, and each time you do not observe the miracle you can say it is even more rare.
Third, if you acknowledge that the miracles can happen, it is worth looking at the cases when someone claim them to happen in particular. If you have large organised religion (like Catholic, Anglican, Russian churches for example) you very often have special commitee (usually with scientists inside) that check if the miracle that people claim to be miracle, is indeed miracle. Very often they found it to be hoax or natural effect, but sometimes they acknowledge that this is indeed miracle. Other religions may also have miracles, as well as just something outside religion, but there may be no developed institution of miracle verification.
If I would do this I would never go to this website discussing this with you.
A fair point. But I still think you are compartmentalizing.
for infinitesimal prior probability no evidence is enough.
It’s never enough for induction, performed correctly. But an a priori deductive argument maybe could work. I’ve heard theists attempt these arguments, but have not found them convincing.
I can blame the same thing on you.
I am trying to find cruxes, not blame. I would rather leave our identities out of it and examine the question as objectively and impartially as possible. But your epistemology is extremely relevant in this case. It’s the rights of Mortimer Q. Snodgrass again. I don’t think the God hypothesis has enough going for it to even justify raising it to our attention. If we had started with a good scientific epistemology, this would not even be a question. Instead we started with a biased indoctrination, and have to dig ourselves out of it.
I am not going to guess but there are so many stories of atheists who became atheists just because God didn’t do what they asked. “I do not want to deal with such God that does not do what I want, therefore there is no God.”
It’s the availability heuristic again. Who have you heard these stories from? It’s probably not the atheists themselves! You can’t trust the clergy to be honest about this topic. They believe atheism is damnation, and so must present it as a sin. But for those raised atheist with a scientific worldview, believing in God seems as silly as believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
In my case, I was raised as a believer. My perspective changed due to an accumulation of a number of factors. The Problem of Evil was apparent to me in childhood. It introduced a doubt that I could not resolve. The biblical creation story also didn’t align with what I read of science as a child.
When I expressed my misgivings, my church told me that God was a God of Truth, and the teachings of the Church could not possibly contradict the Truth, once it was properly understood. So I withheld judgement until I could learn more. I held both the religious and the scientific worldview in my mind at once, in the hope that they could eventually be unified. I was compartmentalizing, but I was conscious that I was doing so. I could speculate and philosophize in either religious or scientific modes, and I knew which was which. I saw the fruits of science. Computers and rocket ships and vaccines. I had church-related experiences I could only describe as spiritual. Surely they both had to be true?
I studied my faith in depth. I was warned of the sin of pride. I was uncertain how to interpret that, but after study, concluded that the problem with pride was an unwillingness to learn from error. I resolved to always be honest with myself. God was a God of Truth, after all, so honesty could not be wrong. I learned to think more critically. I found many satisfying answers, but my doubts on these points, and more, only deepened. There was evidence against the faith, that was for certain. Doubts remained, but abandoning my faith would mean damnation and I could never convince myself it was false beyond a reasonable doubt.
Then I learned that civil cases were judged according to the preponderance of the evidence, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. In my commitment to honesty, I judged my faith again by this standard. Suddenly, many of the faith-promoting stories I had considered “evidence” no longer appeared that way. They were indistinguishable from no God at all. Once seen, I could not unsee it. Why was God pretending so hard not to exist? So we are less culpable for sins? Then why have a church at all? My faith was shaken (and not for the first time), but still I believed. I resolved to study more, to try and rebuild what I had lost.
In my church, we brethren sometimes minister to the other members, usually in pairs. I was usually too shy to participate, but I had studied enough to know answers from the scriptures. When ministering to one poor sister who was struggling, I went into religious mode and spouted off the relevant doctrine. This happened to be a point I had doubts about. And then the realization struck me: I didn’t believe a word of it. I sounded that confident, and I didn’t believe a word. I had lied to her. And worse I had lied to myself, the exact thing I had resolved not to do. I had so easily broken my commitment to honesty, just by studying doctrine. And if I could do it, so could any of the other members! They could sound so convicted, and yet not know! The testimony of the others I had been relying on may have been founded on nothing but air.
I still had my spiritual experiences, but they had always resisted critical examination. I finally understood that what I thought was the witness of the Holy Spirit, was only those around me interpreting my emotions for me in a certain way. They were spouting off doctrine memorized by repetition, the same as I had done to that poor sister. In another context, the same emotions could have been a witness for a completely different god. My faith was shattered to its very core.
My church regards all others as apostates. I had rejected them long ago. There was nowhere to turn. For a time, I considered myself agnostic. I told my story to a confidante, and she replied with something like, “so you’re an atheist then”. And in that moment, I realized it was true. I’m an atheist. I can’t believe in God anymore, even if I try.
And after reading the Sequences, and understanding Bayes, I realized that the faith-promoting stories I had thought were evidence, and then eventually no evidence at all, were actually evidence against the church. The church had actually been preemptively preaching some of its worst stories, so we would learn to think of them in the best possible light, before we had a chance to hear a more critical presentation from anyone else.
” You sought out evidence to support your belief instead of trying to disprove it to see if it would hold up, like a scientist. ”
1. If I would do this I would never go to this website discussing this with you. Assume good intentions.
2. As you said, for infinitesimal prior probability no evidence is enough. That is what I am arguing here. If I get persuaded that probability is indeed infinitesimal, all my evidence are nothing. I can see resurrection of the deads and still it won’t be enough then.
3. I can blame the same thing on you. I am not going to guess but there are so many stories of atheists who became atheists just because God didn’t do what they asked. “I do not want to deal with such God that does not do what I want, therefore there is no God.”
Ok, let us go back to our business if you don’t mind.
″ If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that reliably produced good results, instead of these obvious fallacies, I would have a much harder time dismissing the proposition as a fraud. ”
First, could you review the previous comment to see if you agree with the logic, and if not, what do you disagree in particular.
Second, if you agree with this logic, you should acknowledge that there is not negligible prior probability that miracles exist in principle. You can claim that they are rare, and each time you do not observe the miracle you can say it is even more rare.
Third, if you acknowledge that the miracles can happen, it is worth looking at the cases when someone claim them to happen in particular. If you have large organised religion (like Catholic, Anglican, Russian churches for example) you very often have special commitee (usually with scientists inside) that check if the miracle that people claim to be miracle, is indeed miracle. Very often they found it to be hoax or natural effect, but sometimes they acknowledge that this is indeed miracle. Other religions may also have miracles, as well as just something outside religion, but there may be no developed institution of miracle verification.
A fair point. But I still think you are compartmentalizing.
It’s never enough for induction, performed correctly. But an a priori deductive argument maybe could work. I’ve heard theists attempt these arguments, but have not found them convincing.
I am trying to find cruxes, not blame. I would rather leave our identities out of it and examine the question as objectively and impartially as possible. But your epistemology is extremely relevant in this case. It’s the rights of Mortimer Q. Snodgrass again. I don’t think the God hypothesis has enough going for it to even justify raising it to our attention. If we had started with a good scientific epistemology, this would not even be a question. Instead we started with a biased indoctrination, and have to dig ourselves out of it.
It’s the availability heuristic again. Who have you heard these stories from? It’s probably not the atheists themselves! You can’t trust the clergy to be honest about this topic. They believe atheism is damnation, and so must present it as a sin. But for those raised atheist with a scientific worldview, believing in God seems as silly as believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
In my case, I was raised as a believer. My perspective changed due to an accumulation of a number of factors. The Problem of Evil was apparent to me in childhood. It introduced a doubt that I could not resolve. The biblical creation story also didn’t align with what I read of science as a child.
When I expressed my misgivings, my church told me that God was a God of Truth, and the teachings of the Church could not possibly contradict the Truth, once it was properly understood. So I withheld judgement until I could learn more. I held both the religious and the scientific worldview in my mind at once, in the hope that they could eventually be unified. I was compartmentalizing, but I was conscious that I was doing so. I could speculate and philosophize in either religious or scientific modes, and I knew which was which. I saw the fruits of science. Computers and rocket ships and vaccines. I had church-related experiences I could only describe as spiritual. Surely they both had to be true?
I studied my faith in depth. I was warned of the sin of pride. I was uncertain how to interpret that, but after study, concluded that the problem with pride was an unwillingness to learn from error. I resolved to always be honest with myself. God was a God of Truth, after all, so honesty could not be wrong. I learned to think more critically. I found many satisfying answers, but my doubts on these points, and more, only deepened. There was evidence against the faith, that was for certain. Doubts remained, but abandoning my faith would mean damnation and I could never convince myself it was false beyond a reasonable doubt.
Then I learned that civil cases were judged according to the preponderance of the evidence, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. In my commitment to honesty, I judged my faith again by this standard. Suddenly, many of the faith-promoting stories I had considered “evidence” no longer appeared that way. They were indistinguishable from no God at all. Once seen, I could not unsee it. Why was God pretending so hard not to exist? So we are less culpable for sins? Then why have a church at all? My faith was shaken (and not for the first time), but still I believed. I resolved to study more, to try and rebuild what I had lost.
In my church, we brethren sometimes minister to the other members, usually in pairs. I was usually too shy to participate, but I had studied enough to know answers from the scriptures. When ministering to one poor sister who was struggling, I went into religious mode and spouted off the relevant doctrine. This happened to be a point I had doubts about. And then the realization struck me: I didn’t believe a word of it. I sounded that confident, and I didn’t believe a word. I had lied to her. And worse I had lied to myself, the exact thing I had resolved not to do. I had so easily broken my commitment to honesty, just by studying doctrine. And if I could do it, so could any of the other members! They could sound so convicted, and yet not know! The testimony of the others I had been relying on may have been founded on nothing but air.
I still had my spiritual experiences, but they had always resisted critical examination. I finally understood that what I thought was the witness of the Holy Spirit, was only those around me interpreting my emotions for me in a certain way. They were spouting off doctrine memorized by repetition, the same as I had done to that poor sister. In another context, the same emotions could have been a witness for a completely different god. My faith was shattered to its very core.
My church regards all others as apostates. I had rejected them long ago. There was nowhere to turn. For a time, I considered myself agnostic. I told my story to a confidante, and she replied with something like, “so you’re an atheist then”. And in that moment, I realized it was true. I’m an atheist. I can’t believe in God anymore, even if I try.
And after reading the Sequences, and understanding Bayes, I realized that the faith-promoting stories I had thought were evidence, and then eventually no evidence at all, were actually evidence against the church. The church had actually been preemptively preaching some of its worst stories, so we would learn to think of them in the best possible light, before we had a chance to hear a more critical presentation from anyone else.