Philosoft

Look again. He uses the word "logical" colloquially. The sentence immediately before contains the passage, "the mechanics of how santa could function were beginning to bother me." From this, it certainly appears to be an evidential argument first, in which case induction is commonly used by humans to draw a concusion.

I certainly would never tell you to "stop being logical" but your argument that sabalseed is not entitled to hold a belief based on an inducted conclusion is without merit. Because of the ways in which God is commonly defined, we atheists lack an airtight deductive argument for non-existence. So we generally have to make the best inductive arguments we can.

Enough sidetracking. I'm not trying to prove a proposition. I'm trying to justify a belief.

Make up your mind, Albert. Am I trying to ingore logic altogether or am I trying to plead the case for logical induction? Hint: neither.

No, you haven't. You have not erred until it is known that the next person is not a student. An inducted conclusion is not a priori an error; the method of induction is logically invalid but the possible conclusions are not necessarily false.

Did you read the same OP I did? This is what sabalseed wrote: How do you get from this to "his parents lied about the existence of Santa Claus, ergo, they lied about the existence of God"?

But this doesn't appear to be what he meant.
I would like nothing better than to deductively prove God's non-existence, but the particulars of God's alleged extra-universal existence seem to render that a lost cause.

Selsaral

One of the points I make over and over here (because I find it so compelling) is that it is an obvious condition of human nature to be religious. Scientology is my favorite example. This is clearly a scam, run by ruthless crooks (I personally know several people who have had their lives essentially ruined by the scientologists for deconverting), but it gains converts. Many of the converts are 100% positive it is correct. Now when we look at other religions, especially ones like christianity that all of us (even atheists) who grew up in christian societies were indoctrinated with, they seem familiar because of that indoctrination, just like any other cultural trait. For christians, they see christianity as perfectly natural, but other religions such as hunduism or shamansism as bizaare and laughable. Scientology is a great example where you can get beyond your preconceptions and see this truely absurd religion being practiced with all seriousness by total converts. It drives home the fact that human beings clearly believe in crazy shit (religion), even in cases of the most absurd religions like scientology. You don't need a 2000 year old religion with millions and millions of converts to convince you the religion is legit. Anything will do. Even when the religion is clearly fake, absurd, ridiculous, people STILL fall for it. This clearly shows that even in the complete absence of supernatural phenomena to reinforce a religion, and in the face of the absurd nature of the religion and constant successful debunkings of it, human beings will STILL be religious.

The reasons why humans are religious are varied, and include things like the classic anthropological explanations such as dreams and drug experiences reinforcing the existence of an alternate reality. A modern theory by an anthropologist argues religion has a functional value, as it provides unification and solidity to a society which would have serious survival advantages, particularly 2-10 thousand years ago. You can also get into the psychology of it, how basically all religions give you control over the world (a common example is being able to pray to your deity to change things for you), how many give you eternal life, absolute morality etc. Furthermore there is the nature of our consciousness (the voice in our head, how language is related to how we think, how the hemispheres of our brain work together - or don't etc) and the fact that we like to think, explain things, etc.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Selsaral,
Yours is a smart post. I like to give credit where credit is due.

I disagree around the edges, of course, as I am a theist. But the thrust of your assertions are right on. It can be summed up with these words of your:
I know you don't mean to be making an argument for God by design, so I'll make it for you. Everything that is our nature or the nature of other creatures turns out to procure pragmatic life-sustaining benefits. If, as you say, it is our nature to worship God, then you can be assured that worshiping God will be good for us. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic 2/10/03

Albert Cipriani

Dear Philosoft,
You assert:
Neither a validly deduced or invalidly deduced conclusion is necessarily true or false. A true conclusion always depends upon true premises.

For example, I can validly deduce a false conclusion from a false premise:
Every plane is a tree. [FALSE]
Every polygon is a plane.
Ergo, every polygon is a tree.

Or, I can validly deduce a true conclusion from a false premise:
Every tree is carbon based.
Humans are a species of tree. [FALSE]
Ergo, humans are carbon-based.

Philosoft says that the conclusions we draw from induction, are not necessarily wrong until they are proved to be wrong:
Well then, what good is induction if the supposed conclusions one can draw from it can be arbitrarily overturned by events? The whole purpose of reasoning is to keep us from being tossed and turned by unpredictable events.

Sab has used induction to arrive at his atheism. What will it take for you to recognize that this methodology is not a methodology at all, but rather, a conditioned reflex, a kind of autonomous behavior. Must Sab die and finds himself before the judgement seat of God, before he and you can admit that his atheistic induction was a species of non-thought?

By induction, I imagine that the sun will rise tomorrow. I do not dare assert that I “know” it will arise or that I even “think” it will arise. Four billion years of sunrises does not prove or even support our non-deduced belief that it will rise again tomorrow. Tho you and I share the belief that it will indeed rise again tomorrow, I’m humble enough intellectually to know that that belief is without logical foundation. You and Sab apparently are not. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

sabalseed

All of you read that one wrong.Click on my profile and youll see I checked agnostic,which does not deny or accept god.I personally think some form of original cause(God)exists,but I dont think we humans know nearly enough yet to understand it.I do think it most likely theres no afterlife,but Im not certain,and certainly cant proove it.I do know that Harry Houdini said if at all possible he would communicate from the dead,and never did.If anyone could have,it might have been someone like him.I think Carl Sagan had it right.He said he could not disprove that God existe4d exactly as in the Bible,but he could find no proof of it.

Albert Cipriani

Sab,
You say:
This is Deism, which is just another word for functional atheism. A belief isn’t worth the neurons it uses up unless it effects behavior. So if your quaisi-belief in some kind of Original Cause does not result in you praying to that Original Cause or in anyway acting differently, you are a functional atheist.

You say:
After all these years, we humans don’t know nearly enough about life, sentience, or this universe to understand it. Yet that doesn’t stop us from living our lives, making conscious decisions constantly, or rocket-shipping ourselves to the moon. Point is, to be human is to act in spite of our incomplete understanding.

To fail to believe in God or fail to act as if there is a God simply because you don’t know enough about Him or understand what He wants of you is a kind of unconscionable and inconsistent cowardice. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Amos

Very clever Albert. In other words, we did not have to make our own essence to function the way we do, or did we and we just don't know who we really are.

Philosoft

Nonsense. I am well aware that false premises can lead to a true conclusion. What I am not aware of is the relevancy of this train of thought.

Okay.

Great.

Correct. The truth value of the conclusion can be determined independent of the soundness or validity of the argument, as you have shown above.

That's the nature of belief. We rarely have all the facts necessary to make a sound deductive argument, especially about ill-defined things like God. Our minor beliefs get "overturned" all the time as a result of sloppy induction. But insisting we just switch to a purely logical method of belief-genesis is a total non-starter.

And yet we are consistently incapable of preventing this. Why do you think that is?

What is the alternative? I'm fresh out of deductive arguments for God's non-existence and the God-concept still fails to move me, logical or not.

I knew you had an ulterior motive. Thanks but no thanks. I'm not inclined to consider an argument from ignorance any less of a logical train wreck than induction.

Probably wise.

Huh? Oh, wait a minute. This is a really underhanded way to separate your 'light' induction, which is allowable, from 'heavy' induction used by atheists, which is an affront to the purely logical minds (except when engaged in 'light' induction) of humans everywhere. Boo.

It doesn't support a logical conclusion, but it apparently supports a belief.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. I'm just not amused that you think it a worthy pursuit to chastise sabalseed for generating beliefs - from incomplete sets of facts - the only way he can.

Jobar

To fail to believe in [the Invisible Pink Unicorn] or fail to act as if there is [an IPU] simply because you don’t know enough about [Her] or understand what [She] wants of you is a kind of unconscionable and inconsistent cowardice.

You can't tell us what God is, Albert, or I would not be able to make those substitutions. Nothing you can tell us about your idea of God is any more proveable or disproveable than the IPU, or Zeus, or Allah (who is singular and not a trinity), or short big-eyed gray aliens.

Albert Cipriani

Jobar reveals his impiety by sarcastically stating:
If my fathers had:
 believed in the Invisible Pink Unicorn,
 had died horrible deaths for their belief in the IPU,
 had spent countless hours in prayer and in offering sacrifices to the IPU,
 had spent generations building edifices to house the IPU that to this day edify us

I WOULD BELIEVE IN THE INVISIBLE PINK UNICORN. I would do so out of piety. I would do so as a futile gesture to them out of reverence for them in the same way that even you guys might be induced to perform the futile gesture of placing flowers on the grave of a loved one tho you “believe” they no longer exist.

Piety is beautiful as a poem that is not quite understood is beautiful, as a flower that blooms futilely never to be pollinated or bear seed is beautiful. To refuse to be pious out of a false sense of not being able to make sense of it, is to spread a vapid smokescreen over one’s hypocrisy.

The more honest response in explaining one’s unwillingness to respond to the call of piety is to admit that one’s love for one’s forefathers is too weak to extend to them a meaningless gesture that costs you nothing but your cents of phony intellectual pride. It is to admit that one has sacrificed on the altar of a feigned objectivity ALL subjectivity.

But such impious souls have no difficulty in performing other meaningless gestures every day of their life. They’ll wear clothes even when they don’t want to because because. They’ll even be moral when it is in their own best interests not to be moral. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds. Nor does my disgust. – Albert the Traditional Catholic
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