diana

I was just reading up on malookiemaloo's intriguing thread about atheists and evidence, in which he asks a very simple, straightforward question: what would it take to convince you--and atheist--that God really does exist?

I'll get back to that in a moment, but I thought it would be interesting to explore with the believers on the board the converse question: What would it take to convince you that God (or your god of choice, I'm not picky) doesn't exist?

I could see some atheists/agnostics having a bit of fun here, so I'll say up front that I'm looking for serious responses and a serious discussion, so please keep this in mind. Thank you.

d

Bubba

O.K., here goes nothing...


I don't really know if I count as a thiest any more because in my heart I'm basically agnostic, but still open to the idea of a God or Gods and the idea of an intelligent first cause to the universe.

I'd have to say that more evidence for suboptimal design/bad design in the universe and evidence that the universe itself was eternal and without a beginning would push me moire towards outright atheism. I don't know if I'll ever become a real atheist as it were and I don't really care in some ways. Seeing conservative Christianity as irrational and seeing that science/evolution/rational thought gave a much better understanding of the universe than "faith" was very helpful.

However, as I said I still haven't given up the idea that God may possibly exist. Were I to return to a more robust form of thiesm it would probably be alng the lines of "evolution explains our existance but not our sense of morality." I'm not sure that morality would exist in a perfect would of no pain and no shortages and no heartache, so I'm not sure that the existance of morality is a very good evidence for God at all.

Hope this helps start discussion

Bubba

yguy

If enough psychological pressure were applied, as it was to Winston by O'brien in "1984", perhaps I would fold. If the level of contempt I receive on this board increased a hundredfold, OTOH, it wouldn't faze me a lick. Otherwise, as most atheists recognize, proving a negative is impossible.

diana

Ah, yes, but I'm not talking about proof here at all. I'm talking about your faith.

I perhaps was not specific enough in what I meant. My apologies. I'll try again.

What would it take to make you lose your faith in the EoG?

And you had a very interesting response, yguy. Psychological pressure. So, um...you're saying all it would take to deconvert you is for us to capture you and attach a rat cage to your face?

I'm interested in the issue of faith, because...where did you get it in the first place, and since it is based on the desire to believe, what would it take to make you give it up?

I'm looking for specific ideas. What, exactly, could happen that would suddenly convince you that your faith and the being it was placed in was just a figment of your imagination? Anything?

Or are we all at an impasse here? Atheists assume a naturalistic worldview that precludes the supernatural, and theists assume a spiritual worldview that assumes there is something more than the natural.

d

diana

So are you saying it just makes more sense to you to assume a living being who is eternal and without a beginning than to assume matter and energy is eternal and without beginning? Interesting. I see it just the opposite.

You seem to be saying that you have not completely discarded the idea of a God because there are still unfilled gaps in human knowledge. Is this right? (So filling those gaps would eventually erase any possible belief in God?)

d

yguy

The way I look at it, faith in God is something we're born with, but which we learn to doubt through exactly the sort of temptation I referred to, though it almost never takes anything as extreme as physical torture. That is, we don't have any words with which to theorize about God when we're infants, but we know He's there. We just don't know we know it.

So from my POV, you might as well ask how much money you'd have to pay me to let you torture me to death.

diana

I'm afraid I'll need some support for your statement that infants are born knowing God exists.

There are more than enough nonbelievers who have simply raised their children church- and religion-free, and the children eventually, say, saw a family bowing their heads in prayer.

CHILD: Daddy? What are they doing?
DAD: Praying.
CHILD: What's that?
DAD: They believe there's an invisible man who lives in the sky, and they're talking to him.
CHILD (perplexed): Huh? Why would they think that?

So would you say Muslim children are born knowing Allah exists, while Hindu children are born knowing--they have several gods, don't they?--exist? Just like Christian children are born knowing God exists. *

And how can you assert that we know God exists as infants, but "we don't know we know it"?

You're saying that not only are infants born knowing God exists (and we can't ask them, so we have to take your word for it), but they don't know they know God exists anyway (so even if we could ask them, they'd say no). If you want me to take this seriously, you'll need to give me a valid way of falsifying your claim.

d

*And atheist children are miraculously born knowing only the natural world exists.

keyser_soze

Psychologically speaking, the most efficient method of getting rid of a false belief system, is to replace it. But the problem is that you must replace it with a system that has similar REWARDS. You can't easily replace christianity, with a rational model...because it takes away the feeling of community, immortality, and belonging, and only gives the real world, which has NO concern for your personal wellbeing. That is why those who belong to religions, more easily convert to other religions, vs. converting to atheism. It's a wonder that fewer people don't deconvert to atheism, as the odds are against it. Which would also explain why there aren't MORE of us.

The_Unknown_Banana

Perhaps it would be better to first ask whether there actually could conceivably exist evidence which would convince theists otherwise.

I think the answer would be no for most hardened theists.

Bubba

To an extent, yes your right. All I'm saying is that of the two possibilities they are both still possibilities in my mind. I really think that suboptimal design on the non-biological level is probably the best arguement against the idea of a god or gods. Galaxies slamming into each other in space, quasars exploding and wiping out large portions of a galaxy, places like Venus that are so hot and acidic and inhospitible to life, the fact that distances between any other intelligent civilizations in the universe and ourself are probably unbridgeable in our normal space time framework...these are the things which make me question god or the idea of God the most.

As far as creation/big bang cosmology goes, I'm not sure that the universe began at the big bang or that big bang cosmology is correct. While I am not a scientist I'm not so sure that we might have prematurely written off an oscillating universe or an infinite universe that has always been expanding (steady state model.) There are an awful lot of questions (dark matter, etc.) that are still unanswered. I do not choose faith but instead choose science here to find an answer.

The fitness of the universe as a place to evolve life is perhaps the place I would start if I were to argue positively for a God or Gods. However, I think the relevant question is this: does the God of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, etc. exist in a personal way. To that question I would have to say that the evidence is very poor. I don't write off completely the idea however that some iberal form of one of these religions could be correct. Perhaps I should.

As far as a personal faith goes, I guess I'm comfortable with the idea of dieing and becoming in essence "nothing" again. I'm not sure that most religious ideas add to the quality of life here.

In Darwin

Bubba