DarkBronzePlant

And even in this case, I'm sure that prior satisfaction with renting movies that "everyone has said is brilliant" would have given you good evidence that, in all likelihood, renting another movie that everyone liked will again bring you movie-watching satisfaction.

critical thinking made ez

I think that bd-from-kg would have a good argument if the "belief" he refers to has been defined as "Beliefs based on objective evidence". Which he did not make in this argument.

I think that his argument would be false if the Belief he refers to is based on subjective and/or objective evidence.

Example: Jamie_L's argument of Santa belief would be belief based on subjective evidence while the belief that our house will standing when we get home is based on objective evidence.

[ January 07, 2002: Message edited by: critical thinking made ez ]</p>

Amen-Moses

I don't have a problem at all with this form of "Evidence", the vast majority of people DO NOT believe that christianity is true therefore I am quite happy to accept this evidence of it's falsehood.

(btw you can replace the word christianity in the above sentence and find it still holds for almost all subjective human beliefs)

Amen-Moses

Jamie_L

bd-from-kg's first post made me reconsider my OP a little. I agree with critical thinking made ez's qualifier that a lot of people believing is evidence, but maybe not necessarily good evidence. I also think there are differences between believing in the capitol of Ohio, which is built on my confidence in various sources of information which have added to my knowledge over the years.

Maybe the second part of bd-from-kg's first post goes on to express my feelings in a way I wouldn't have thought to express them: that even though a lot of people believe in something, it doesn't mean you shouldn't approach it as skeptically as anything else.

However, I would nit-pick one thing from another of bd-from-kg's posts: "Now obviously the likelihood that a given proposition will be believed by the great majority of people is higher if the proposition is true than if it’s false." I'm not sure this is obvious at all. I can think of many instances in which large numbers of people were convinced of things that were not true. This can be due to anything from intentional deception to lack of information to fear to wishful thinking.

Jamie

theophilus

Where have you ever seen these arguments advanced as proof of God? I would like to know specific examples.

Typically, these arguments are advanced AGAINST atheist assertions that belief in God is merely a cultural construct.

theophilus

Great! I will believe that you don't exist until you can provide "evidence to demonstrate" that you do.
Evidence must exclude the assumption that you exist, e.g., use of the term "I."

[ January 07, 2002: Message edited by: theophilus ]</p>

Demiurge

Not so great, theophilus...

After all, where do you stand on the supernatural beings that other people believe in, but you don't? Santa, dragons, leprechauns, and so forth? Other gods like Vishnu, Shiva, Zeus, Odin, and on and on?

Clearly you don't assume they all exist, until evidence to the contrary is produced. And you don't believe in them simply because other people have believed in them. A great number of people have believed in a great number of things.

So what! you say.

I agree, but I am just saying "So what!" to one more supernatural entity than you are: the particular god you believe in.

The argumentum ad populartity is one of mere convenience. You wouldn't use it, if you were in the minority. It wouldn't mean anything to you. In fact, it may very well have been the case that early Christians had to argue against the popularity argument, because they disagreed with the more numerous Jews and pagans. In the early years, the Christians believed they had the truth and the majority of people did not. They didn't think it was evidence that they might be wrong, just because the majority of people held beliefs different from them.

Well, we atheists feel the same way. We think the truth is that there are no supernatural entities, spirits or ghosts, that those things are all made up. And it doesn't matter to us that the majority of people disagree with us. That point alone doesn't have any weight with us.

[ January 07, 2002: Message edited by: Demiurge ]</p>

DarkBronzePlant

theo,

Let's examine this a bit, shall we? What do you have evidence of? Surely, you have good evidence that I exist in some form or another. You are communicating with another person, are you not? I mean, you aren't writing and responding to yourself in this conversation. You may be communicating with an artificial-intelligence program, but to our knowledge, none this sophisticated yet exists, and none is employed on the infidels.org Website. So in all likelihood, you are communicating with another person. Furthermore, the person you are communicating named him/herself "DarkBronzePlant" on this forum. So you have strong evidence that a person who sometimes calls him/herself "DarkBronzePlant" exists.

I could tell you right now that I am a 75-year old woman who lives in Tokyo, Japan. In fact, let me do that. Theo, I am 75 years old, a female, and I live in Tokyo. You have no good evidence that this is true, do you? That simple fact that I say so might be a little bit of bad evidence of my 3-quarters-century-Japanese-womanhood, but nothing that ought to really convince you, right?

On the other hand, I could fly you out to Boulder Colorado, show you my house, my mortgage papers, my driver's license and birth certificate, and then you would have pretty good evidence that I am a thirty-year-old male who lives in Boulder, Colorado.

I'll tie this back in with two points: 1. I don't give a rat's ass whether you believe I exist or not, and 2. with any belief, it's up to everyone to decide what kind of evidence is good evidence -- and many of us here just don't think that "cuz lots of other people think so" is good evidence.

theophilus

Very interesting but, again, I don't, haven't and won't use this argument.

Best.

Jamie_L

The two points in my OP are things I read here in the Forums. Point 2 is (or was at some point) the focuse of a formal debate between Gundur and Metacrock, with Metacrock asserting (if I understood him correctly) that the an innate belief in God was a sign that God created us to believe in him - or something similar.

Jamie