K

luvluv:

The reason is that experience has shown us consistently that things that exist leave evidence. There have been many many beliefs throughout the ages without the evidence to support them. They have invariably proven false when held to the light of rigorous investigation. So it is not a person can't be right by holding a belief with no supporting evidence. It's just that the odds of that belief being correct is infinitesimally small.

I think James has pulled a fast one by acting like the argument against God is that there is a lack of COMPLETE evidence. That isn't the atheist's argument. The real argument is that there is a lack of ANY credible evidence for the existence of God.

luvluv

K:

Has reason shown you that you presently have the necessary tools for perceiving the evidence which everything which exists leaves behind? Is it reasonable to assume that the five human sense cover all existent phenomenae? If we could have been rational without having evolved a sense of smell, would we have any reason to believe that odors exist? Wouldn't there be a substantial lack of evidence for such a thing as an odor?

Just as many have been proven right. For instance, Christianity held long ago that the universe began to exist. Science for hundreds of years refuted this notion and yet many Christians believed it despite having no evidence for it. As it turns out, the Christians seem to have been right all along.

This harkens back to my first point. The scientists who lacked the means to perceive the relavent evidence fallaciously assumed that the evidence did not exist. How are we sure that the atheist is not making the same mistake?

You're exagerrating. Suppose I believe, without evidence, that it will rain at some point tommorow. Are the odds of rain really infintesimally small? Really, it might make you feel better to present your case this way, but I don't we know nearly enough to calculate the odds of the existence of God. To do so, again, we would have to be sure that we have access to all the relevant evidence. We simply don't.

He's not pulling a fast one. He never addressed this question at all. He wasn't arguing for any particular God or even any particular belief, he was simply arguing for the epistemic right to believe things which have not produced absolutely certain evidence. God was simply the most relavent example. I'm not 100% sure that James was even a theist.

That's a reach as well, IMHO. The fact that very intelligent peopole believe He exist, and further believe they have contacted him, is credible evidence. If such people would be relliable on any other issue, they could be reliable in this one. There is the teleological argument, which even Hume admitted was a decent argument. So you're loading the dice a little bit on your side, K.

K

luvluv:

Thank you. I'll add that there are other benefits. I am a faithfully committed husband who has never strayed in twelve years of marriage. I don't do any drugs (except caffeine from time to time and an occasional glass of wine with dinner). When I first found myself no longer able to believe in God, I was devastated. But since then I've found life much more peaceful than it was while I was religous. I now know why praying doesn't work. If I want or need something, I know it's up to me to take care of it. The world makes much more sense than it did when I believed someone was in control of everything. These are definitely worth the vanishingly small risk (as the evidence shows) that God actually exists.

If you are still amazed that I would take such a risk, ask yourself why you risk the wrath of Allah. Afterall, as far as evidence goes (and evidence or lack of it is what we're discussing), Allah is EXACTLY as likely as God, Brahma, or Gaia.

luvluv

Sure, but I can see SOMMS point as well with the reasons you cited. I'm sure that you probably don't consider a suitiable explanation for your prayers being unanswered to be something you must not miss, if it is true. Faith is a risk but what you gain must be worth the risk for it to be rational, which is why James said that what you risk faith for must be momentous. Risking meaning and purpose in this life, and the devestation of not being able to believe in God, for a suitable explanation of your prayers being answered, seems a little farfetched. I think the atheist (or to be more personal, you) would need to find a much more suitable subject of your risk for your decision to be an atheist to be truly a risk. Risks are only rational if there is much to be gained in taking them.

I also don't want you to think that what James was saying was that all atheists are atheists because they operate on the principle I must not be taken by this, if it is false. He was only saying that these are two different ways of looking at the world, and neither one of them was in anyway superior to the other. An atheist may simply have a legitimately hard time believing. James' point was that if someone faced with the same evidence did not have a hard time believing, that person has the right to risk believing in God. He really did not have much to say about the merits of atheism, he was only chastising the atheist for presuming to set the standards for the beliefs of others.

Here you're missing that James' states that the option must be live for the believer.

(Though I would argue that the first essential choices is whether or not a God exists. For this choice one must weigh the evidence for atheism and theism. Secondly one must decide which God or gods exist. At this stage one could weigh the evidence for all the competing gods. It is possible that I could decide to risk believing that God exists, and then find that the evidence on which I based that decision more likely fits Yahweh than Brahma.)

K

luvluv:

Technically, without a sense of smell, there is no such thing as an odor, but your point is taken. The five senses may not be enough to perceive everything, but that doesn't mean I should believe everything simply because there is some possibility that it may not leave any detectable evidence.

Do you give the same license to astrologers? How about people who believe reincarnation or ghosts or fairies (yes, people still do believe all of these things)? These could all have somehow evaded our evidence detectors. Does this mean we should believe in them?

It's possible that atheists could be wrong about God. It's EQUALLY possible that you could be wrong about Allah, Vishnu, Thor, and all the other gods that have been proposed. The only wise thing would appear to be to worship every concept of a god ever proposed (and to protect ourselves from vampires and werewolves) so as not to risk the chance that one of them exists without having left any evidence.

There is evidence that it will rain tomorrow. History has shown that rain is a possible weather pattern that occurs somewhat frequently. Now if you believe that it will rain gold coins tomorrow, that is a belief without evidence - and its odds are vanishingly small.

We also don't know enough to calculate the odds of indectable malevolent alens who wish to enslave us. That doesn't mean we should believe in them.

I agree that it's perfectly acceptable to believe in things without complete evidence. We do it all the time. I disagree that it makes sense to believe in something that has as little supporting evidence as any of the god concepts proposed to date (except maybe pantheism or deism) unless that belief is held solely because of how it makes the holder feel.

There are a great many intelligent people who believe in Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Does this count as evidence for their existence? If the average IQ of the followers of Hinduism is greater than that of the followers of Christianity, will you switch religions because of this evidence? Ramanujan was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He claimed that his local goddess, Namagiri, wispered the formulas in his ear. He was unquestionably a reliable mathematician. Did that make him reliable in religious matters?

K

luvluv:



This is true. For me personally, I don't consider my atheism to be any sort of a risk at all. I'm also not a strong atheist (although I sometimes tend to lean in that direction). So I am not a good candidate as an example. I just wanted to point out that not all atheists reject God because they want to lead a life of "sin".

I've already granted you that point. However, I'm sure you're aware that it applies equally to astrologers and pyramid power enthusiasts. I've never claimed that people don't have the right to believe these thing. I've never even tried to change a single person's mind about the existence of God - except here, an atheist web site. However, that still doesn't lend any iota of legitimacy to the underlying beliefs.

Isn't this just saying that any belief is rational if the believer believes it and wants to believe it? I can see how this can be argued, but it still says absolutely nothing about the existence of God, Allah, Brahma, vampires, or the IPU. As far as I can tell, this boils down to, "if someone believes something momentous and enjoys that belief (it's somehow live to them), then they should be allowed to believe it - regardless of the belief in question".

luvluv

K:

It also means that you should not dogmatically rule out the possibility of the existence of anything simply because of a lack of evidence.

You're still not quite getting it, K. James was not trying to say we should or should not believe in anything. He was simply saying that it can be rational to believe in something we do not have complete evidence for if what we are believing in is live, momentous, and forced. If the rewards you get from believing in the existence of ghosts and or fairies makes it worth your while to risk believing in their existence, then that person's risk to believe (not the belief itself) is justified.

I don't see how a belief in ghosts and elves could be momentous according the criteria James establishes however, which stipulate that the rewards of believing a certain proposition must obtain in this lifetime even if the proposition turns out to be false. A Christian, for example, gets to live with a sense of ultimate meaning and purpose which is denied the atheist. This sense of meaning and purpose is momentous, it is a definite advantage gained, even if the belief turns out to be false. I do not know what a similar benefit of believing in elves and fairies might be, unless one conceives of the elves and/or fairies as God.

I think this is wrong, and I've tried explaining why parenthetically above. It is perhaps true that there is equal possibility that the supernatural exists as there is that it does not exist. As you admit, a Deistic or a Pantheistic notion of the divine (like Spinoza's) would be very hard to dispute. But I do not think that every God concept has equal probability. If one god is said to be omnimalevolent and omnipotent, and one god is said to be omnipotent and non-personal, there is a greater likliehood that the latter god exists given the evidence.

There are in my mind two seperate questions. 1)Does the supernatural exist or not? 2) If so, what is the nature of the supernatural? My will might have a great deal to do with my answer to the first question, and my reason and experience primarily responsible for the second. The simple decision to believe in the supernatural does not make all god's equally likely. The belief that the supernatural exists (and by supernatural I mean only things that cannot be explained by totally natural processes, not the spooky or ethereal) does not at all commit one to the belief that everything that is claimed to be supernatural exists. It is possible for one conception of the supernatural to be far more reasonable than another. But you are attempting to make theistic belief guilty by association. A belief in a Deistic God, for example, is far more reasonable than a belief in pixie faries. You would not spend very much time on a website that debated the existence of pixie fairies, because the notion is probably so absurd to you that you wouldn't waste your time. Yet you are here debating the existence of God with me and spending a considerable amount of time doing so. So it would seem that you obviously do not think a belief in the Christian God is as silly as a belief in pixie fairies. (I doubt you'd have much truck with anyone who believed in pixie fairies at all).

You're kind of making this up, K. You cannot supply odds for the existence of things you do not have the ability to accumulate evidence for. How would a 15 century astronomer have gone about the business of calculating the odds of the existence of a black hole? You have a desire to draw an inference that in humility you have no right to draw. You want to say that it is unlikely that God exists but in honesty you can't possibly know that. How many hundreds of millions of things and processes and events exist right know that we don't know anything about? How would you calculate the probability that any of these things exist?

K, I love you to death and you're hands down one of the nicest people on this forum. But you, my friend, are butchering James' argument. How could a belief in these aliens be momentous. What exactly is to be gained in this life from believing in indetectable malevolent aliens, if it happens to not be true?

And once again, James is not saying that we should believe in them. He is simply saying that if something is live, forced, and momentous one is rational in consciously risking belief in it even if the evidence is not quite certain.

He's basically saying if you've got a woman you love, and she's hurt you in the past and has a pattern of hurting the men she loves, but she comes to you and swears she's reformed, you're risk to trust her is rational if you gain a great deal from being with her. The decision to resume a relationship with such a girl could not be ventured upon on the basis of cold reason. The same may be true of the existence of God. (As a side note, have you ever read any Kierkegard?)

Then you agree with James. (But again, you are exagerrating when you say "solely" because of how it makes the holder feel. I don't believe solely because of how it makes me feel.)

Yes, it does. It isn't very good evidence, as I admitted before, but it is evidence. I'm just saying that your statement that there is no evidence for the existence of any god is a big, big overstatement.

I think it has a lot more to do with it than anyone here will admit. Not necessarily that they want to live a life of total debauchery, but the feeling of not having to answer to anyone. People in our culture (here in America especially) do not like to be under anyone's authority, irrespective of whether or not they would ever do anything to defy that authority. It is a natural side effect of modern democracy. The notion that anyone has the right to tell us what to do, and that we are obligated to obey them regardless of what our natural desires might be, is repugnant to us as citizens of a free state. I like Christopher Hitchens on this point because I believe he is being honest. He is straightforward in saying that he doesn't believe in God because he does not like the implications of God's existence.

Again, that was not James' point. He was only pointing out that evidentialism is inadequate, and he pointed out an alternative route.

No, as I understand it it says nothing about the belief itself at all. Only about the decision to risk believing in it. Taking the example of the girl above, it would be irrational to believe that the girl would not continue to hurt you. But if the girl was your first love, and she made you happy just being around, the decision to risk believing that she had changed would be rational given the momentous joy you gain from her involvement in your life.

And the sooner you recognize that it doesn't intend to , the better this conversation will be.

Basically, but this cuts out a lot more beliefs than you seem to think it does.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Luvluv,
I guess it comes down to personal assessment. For me I don't think the above (free love, drug use, carnality) meet James' momentous criteria. You could still have lots of sex(with wife) and act like a wildman regardless of God's existence. That is...if God existed you wouldn't automatically forfeit this behavior.

On the other hand eternal communion with (heaven) or eternal separation from (hell) God seems more elemental and clearly more momentous than 'In my life I'm going to sleep with 4 women instead of 1'.


What really prompted my reply to K (K feel free to jump in here if you wish) is that James' argument as it pertains here is basically...

I must not miss this if this exists

and...

I must not believe in this if this doesn't exist.

This is certainly the context (faith in the midst of evidentualism...not strong atheism in the midst of zeal) that James' was talking about.

That being said...I don't think strong athiesm fits this very well.


My .02



Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Vorkosigan

James argument has great rhetorical and emotional force, but no intellectual force at all. It does not overcome Clifford's comment, for two reasons.

James' precursive faith allows that if an option is live, forced, and momentous, someone with the priority I must not miss this, if it is true would be completely rational in holding that this option is true ahead of the evidence.

By this argument, it would be rational to hold that young children should be brutally sacrificed to the demon that lives in the Pentagon.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

In addition to being ethically unsound, there is a second problem with James' argument. Clifford said it was wrong. James responded by saying it could be rational. Does saying something is rational defeat the fact that it is wrong? Has James addressed the issue properly?

Vorkosigan

luvluv

Vorkosigan:

I don't think so. I believe that by momentous, James meant that believing something entails a benefit GREATER than not belieiving it, and that this benefit obtains even if what you believe in is false. Belief in God, for example, can imbue one's life with a meaning and purpose even if it turns out there is no God.

It is hard to see what benefits come in this lifetime from believing that children should be brutally sacrificed to demons in the Pentagon which would be GREATER THAN the drawbacks of this action (jailtime, imprisonment,execution). I don't think James' formula can justify every risk, as you and K seem to think. It is conceivable that person could draw a sense of meaning from believing that there is a demon in the Pentagon, so it is perhaps possible that a rational person would adopt this view. But remember please that James is not offering his notion of faith as a method of justifying any particular belief but a defense of the decision to believe despite a lack of conclusive evidence.

Well, firstly I don't think James' notion is ethically unsound it is ethically neutral. At any rate I don't see where evidentialism has any moral superiority to other philosophical positions.

I think James believed that Clifford was being a little over-exuberant in making the claim that believing despite a lack of evidence was wrong. He actually politely corrected him in the essay (I think, or I may be thinking of another book. I'll check on that) and toned the statement down to basically state that one should not believe without sufficient evidence. I think James assumes that Clifford was not actually making a moral statement when he said believing despite a lack of evidence was wrong, but an epistemic one. He assumed that by wrong Clifford meant that it was incorrect to believe without evidence, not morally reprehensible.

In what sense is it morally wrong to believe something without evidence? Suppose that what you are believing without evidence is morally good? Suppose I have no evidence that humans are of everlasting worth and signifigance, would it be immoral to decide to believe that they are?