diana

Good morning, Alistair.

You asked if faith can come out of a conviction that the evidence is true. Because the terms we're using here are unavoidably fuzzy (faith and evidence specifically), it might help us answer this question if you give us a specific example of what you view as faith coming out of a conviction that the evidence is true.

I'm thinking our answer, to a man, is going to be "no," but that doesn't really help us communicate exactly why. It should help if we can study some of your evidence--and I assume here that it will be acceptable to all--then determine whether it can reasonably be argued that that evidence supports the conclusion you've reached better than any competing conclusions.

A picture is worth a thousand threads.

d

diana

Well-spoken, Asha'man.

Someone else (buggered if I can remember who) used to be fond of saying simply, "The desire to believe is reason to doubt."

This is why double-blind studies were invented--to avoid skewing the results of any study in favor of the convictions of the researchers. The fact that researchers go to such lengths to avoid giving even nonverbal signals based on their own beliefs concerning the outcome of any given experiment is testament to the pervasiveness of confirmation bias.

But how does one go about ruling out confirmation bias when it comes to one's own beliefs? C'est tres difficile.

d

Asha'man

I think you've missed the point. Atheists have no problem with belief, and will happliy acknowledge belief in most anything except a God.

What many atheists believe is an obscenity is groundless belief, unsupported belief, irrational belief. What we have a problem with is not simple belief, but faith. Faith is when you hold a belief without any supporting evidence, or despite opposing evidence.

As I posted earlier, I believe in the general accuracy of modern science, but I have a great deal of supporting evidence, so my belief is not irrational. However, most believers in god cannot point to any such evidence, claiming nothing but faith is needed.

A few theist believers will point to evidence, but it is always a feeling, an emotional reaction, an internal voice. This evidence is always internal to the believer, it cannot be observed by anyone external to the believer, and is therefore worthless as objective evidence.

Furthermore, this internal evidence is very poor evidence, it supports the existence of the feeling only, but there is no reason to assume that it is caused by any type of supernatural being. When theists talk about feeling the Spirit move them, I don't doubt that they are moved, I doubt that the Spirit had anything to do with it.

Other theists will point to miracles as evidence. But they cannot produce an actual miracle, their evidence is always extremely suspect. It happened over there, to someone else, a long time ago. Or it's something that could easily have happened entirely through natural causes. No evidence of a miracle has ever stood up to unbiased, objective, knowledgeable scrutiny.


To address the question of the opening post, evidence of god must be objective, it must exist for all observers equally, and be subject to verification. It also must be personal, meaning that I must be one of the verifying observers. I cannot accept merely a report of evidence, a story or an anecdote.

The type of evidence offered by theists never meets these two criteria, so I believe that no such evidence exists.

Bosun

No, I would say that disembodied minds are also outside our experience. Whatever one might say about the creator is that it must be "disembodied". Embodiment is a physical term. Surely the creator of physics is not physical itself.

Really? How many universes have you observed? I am not sure that the creator is able to disturb the natural regularities of the universe. Who knows? Could be, but probably not. I am not a beleiver in miracles.

Actually, we have touched on this. Mostly by ignoring it . The creator of the creator is simply not a subject amenable to the slightest speculation. The big bang, the singularity, is a barrier beyond which we cannot possibly go. The only thing we can speculate on is the cause of that creative event. What exists outside of time-space and mass-energy other than the putative creator of our time-space and mass-energy simply isn't a subject that can be dealt with.

Bosun

diana

We cannot help what we believe?

I agree, provided we've never been presented with a conflicting theory and have not yet developed the ability to think critically.

I'm speaking of the faith of children, here, specifically. I think children who are told by their parents that God exists and loves them and created everything have neither critical facilities nor exposure to competing ideas, and thus simply believe. I don't think they can help believing.

But at some point, they will learn to think, at least to some degree. They are also quite likely to be exposed to different ideas. At this point, provided their original belief is based upon no more evidence than the new, competing idea, they must choose to maintain it.

I also agree that opinions are rarely changed. I suspect this has far more to do with ego than with memes or "the product of our culture" excuse, though.

d

GPLindsey

Regarding the original post, I have my own pet axiom on this, which applies to atheists, Christians, and everyone else: The amount of evidence that is needed to convince someone of something is inversely proportional to that person's desire that it be true. For a fundamentalist Christian, three people in a room who say they feel the presence of the Holy Spirit is enough evidence to convince him or her that the Holy Spirit is indeed there. To convince them of Evolution, however, you would need to produce every possible gradation of fossils showing evolutionary change, refute every screwball creationist criticism that can be dreamed up, etc. Atheists are at the other end of the spectrum, although I don't think we are wedded to evolution so much as to a naturalistic explanation for the Universe. I would abandon support for evolution if a better scientific theory came along, but a religious or "intelligent design" theory would require a much higher mountain of evidence for me to support. As a matter of human nature, I think it is only possible to be truely impartial and weigh the evidence for something completely objectively when a person doesn't have a stake or interest in the outcome.

As an atheist, I would indeed require a significant amount of evidence that would convince me there was a God. I would imagine it would require such an awesome display of supernatural power that either God was really manifesting himself or I had gone insane. Such an event might be waking up one morning to hear the Hallaluah chorus blasting into my windows, seeing the sky filled with a Heavenly Host of angels, and watching every news channel cover Jesus's descending from Heaven, and G.W. Bush offering him an immediate tax cut. Jesus could then show us all where Iraq's WMDs are!

Bosun

Please do not confuse me with a theist. True theists would kick me out of their club. But you raise some interesting points.

I disagree that evidence of god has to be objective and exist for all observers equally. It is something like a work of art. Most folks regard the Mona Lisa, for example of an item of sublime beauty. When I saw it in the Louvre, I was not so moved. But that doesn't mean that my non-belief in it's beauty does not make it otherwise.

I like Einstein's take on this when he said, "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 languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. 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 the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

Bosun

Asha'man

However, probably more than half the people on this board are ex-theists. We also have a list of II members who deconverted during their time here. Clearly, opinions do change, and some as the direct result of conversations like this.

fishbulb

This is a bad analogy. The claim that the Mona Lisa is beautiful is not an objective one. Beauty is a subjective judgement, though there are things that are nearly universally regarded as beautiful and those that aren't. If you don't see the Mona Lisa as a beautiful work of art then, in point of fact, the Mona Lisa is not beautiful to you--regardless of what anyone else thinks. The claim that god exists is an objective claim. Either god exists, independently of whether or not anyone can perceive it, or it doesn't. A thing can't exist to someone but not to someone else, though it can be perceived (correctly or incorrectly) to exist by some people and not by others.

In science, all evidence is objective. Anything based on subjective interpretation, which is non-reproducable, or which can only be perceived by people who believe certain things does not count as scientific evidence. Anyone who applies the rigorous standards of science to the question of the existence of god requires scientific evidence in order to be convinced. (For this reason, science cannot answer the question: is the Mona Lisa beautiful, though it can attempt to determine why certain people judge it to be beautiful.)

Of course, not everyone applies those rigorous standards. Some people do not apply them at all, and others apply them sometimes but at other times they accept a lower standard as proof of something. Usually, an individual's desire to believe that a claim is true has an effect on the level of critical scrutiny applied to that claim. But that is a matter of our ability to willingly deceive ourselves into believing what we would like to be true, and has nothing to do with what actually is and isn't true.

copernicus

Diana, your Heinlein meme is exceeding its authority. See http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/q101182.html.

Another interesting quote from Clarke: