Liberty

Ah, another classic. Incredibly flawed, of course: http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/nogod/pascal.htm http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Pascal%27s_Wager http://infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/arguments.html#pascal

This is one of the most ridiculous cop outs I've ever seen. Oh, when science is against me, I simply brush aside science, the best system devised by humanity to figure out what is true and what is false, which obviously works... And building machines? Do you even know what science is? It's a way of testing hypotheses, simple as that. God is a hypothesis, and if there's no good evidence to support it, there's no reason to think its true. Please tell us what. You are misreading it. Otherwise, the supernatural would include anything we don't understand. Was quantum mechanics supernatural before Niels Bohr came around? What is meant instead is exactly what I said a few posts ago. The laws of nature are what they are regardless of whether we know them or not, so even 10,000 years ago, gravity wasn't supernatural. Don't confuse the map with the territory. As far as we understand it, it doesn't transcend the laws of nature, no. The laws of nature are what they are, and we are still discovering them, but we haven't found a message from a deity in the microwave background radiation or anything that doesn't add up like that. Again: Not understanding something isn't evidence that it's magical. For magic to exist, you need evidence of magic, not just something you don't understand so people can pretend there's magic in there even if they have no evidence. You're using human intuition. It doesn't work on the cosmological scale. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with physics on that scale of time and space and energy. In the same way that quantum mechanics doesn't seem to make sense yet works and is provable by experiment, and that Einsteinian relativistic mechanics is also extremely unintuitive and still works (GPS systems use it every day), the big bang doesn't have to make sense to you. There doesn't need to be anything before or even time, though there might be. We're working on it, but nothing we've found about it is evidence of the supernatural. Big bang can be singular or cyclical, whatever, but like gravity before we understood it, that doesn't make them not part of nature. If the last refuge of the religious is vaguely implying that not having an answer to every single thing that goes on in the universe means there's a god, it says more about their lack of credibility than anything else. That would make the world totally different. But I'd have to figure out which god it is and what he wants based on whatever evidence made me believe. What if it's a malevolent god? What if he wants me to pray 5 times a day? What if he thinks women are inferior and slavery is ok? Let me ask you this: What's falsifiable about your belief in god? What would be different in the world if there's no god? I haven't explored it? I think I know more about it than you do, quite obviously. Historical evidence that a guy existed has nothing to do with him being a god. How many times do we have to say that? Oh, and it's funny how you even misunderstand the dragon analogy and took it so literally. I wasn't saying there's no evidence that a guy named jesus existed, or the many guys who wrote the bible decades later, filling it with attrocities and dubious morals (remember evilbible.com?). I'm saying there's no evidence that any of it is magical, supernatural, godlike, just like there's no evidence for dragons. You turned this into: "but there's evidence for a man named jesus" rather than "but there's evidence that he's a god". And if you find the resurrection easy to believe without evidence of it, I still have that bridge for sale.

???

To be fair, that's up for debate. Atheism can either mean 'a lack of belief in deities' or 'a belief in the lack of deities'. Bertrand Russell said about this: I guess you're talking to the ordinary man :) . Yes, if I was to be very precise and formal about it, I would describe myself as an agnostic. Richard Dawkins said the same thing about himself. But by that standard, I would also be agnostic about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Leprechauns. At some point, in ordinary discourse, you can just call yourself and atheist and say you don't believe in santa claus and people know what you mean :)

Are you saying that as a religious person you've followed the laws of physics to build a bridge yet still believe? Because that's really not what I was talking about. I was saying that people use one standard of evidence for their belief in how the universe works, and another one for other things, like building bridges or GPS satellite systems. But it should be the same. There's a great anecdote about oil engineers working in the middle-east. They were doing maintenance on equipment, and realized that it had never been maintained until they came around. They asked some of the locals why, and they said "god willing, it'll keep working". They were basically saying that whether the machinery kept working was up to god, since god controls everything. That might seem ridiculous, but they were actually very consistent in their beliefs, even if they are wrong about how the world works. It's the religious people who use rational thought in some aspects of their lives but not in others that are inconsistent. Almost everything is based on uncertainty when you get right down to it, but it's not because things are uncertain that the probabilities are 50/50 or anywhere near high enough to be worth taking it into account. Right now, what I know makes me think that the probabilities of god(s) is negligible. What I know makes me think that the probability of the earth orbiting the sun in an ellipse is very very high. What are the reasons that make you think that the probabilities for deities are high enough to be worth seriously considering? Saying "it's uncertain" doesn't really mean much, and trying to deflect arguments with that uncertainty isn't something that follows logically. What makes you think that the chances that there's one or many gods are higher than the chances that dragons exist? Why are the chances high enough to be worth changing your behavior and thoughts? If your beliefs aren't backed up with logic, facts and evidence, they're just made up and you are deluding yourself. Same for people who believe in alien abductions just because they really like that story despite the lack of good evidence.

You can't prove a negative. The real, formal argument of atheists isn't really: "We know that no god(s) exists", it's "we don't see good reasons to believe in god(s), we looked at the supposed evidence and arguments in favor and found them lacking". Religious people implicitly agree with this approach because they see no reason to believe in Zeus or Odin or Esege Malan or Kamuy and so they don't, they don't wait for proof that they don't exist. Atheists just go one god further. As I said earlier, if some solid evidence for god(s) came up, I'd be the first one to change my mind. Same with alien abductions or whatever. So far I don't see good evidence, but if that changes, hey, that's fine. I want to be on the side of reality, believe in what's real. Believing in things for no good reason isn't a good thing to me. So far I see a lot of evidence for a mechanistic world, and nothing convincing for one with god(s). If that changes, I'll update.

There are definitely costs. If reality is a certain way but your mental model of reality doesn't match it (nothing is 100% perfect, but you can be closer or farther away), you won't be thinking as effectively as you would if you had a more accurate map of the territory. Since all your choices and actions are derived from how you think, your whole life is changed. Religion has a cost, because if you really believe, you have to do and think what whatever religion you follow tells you to do, things you might not do otherwise. People who pray for a cure instead of going to the hospital might be dying because of their religion, for example. I, for one, am glad that engineers follow the laws of physics when designing something rather than leave it up to god to make it work (Inshallah, as the devout muslims say). A religion that imposes not costs whatsoever (even if just in time and energy) on the follower is basically the same as no religion at all. Unless it's just a custom made up religion where the person just says that god wants whatever they want, which is another kind of problem... You can't have your cake and eat it too.

I think that what you are saying is incorrect. The burden of proof I'm talking about isn't some legal or traditional thing just for the sake of it. I'm talking about the logical burden of proof; if you claim something, it's not up to others to disprove it. If I claim that I can read minds, or that I can fly, is it up to you to come up with evidence that I can't? Of course not. Atheists don't have to prove that god doesn't exist. They're just saying that they have found no reason to believe in any particular god (zeus, odin, thor, the christian god, etc). There's a lot of things that you don't believe in that nobody has proven don't exist, no? You just have never seen anything that convinced you (and I don't just mean seen with your own eyes, I'm talking about the broader meaning, including research and experiments by others). I'm sure you're an atheist about most of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist for that very reason, yet there's no conclusive proof that apollo and vishnu don't exist.

Oh, I'm not really expecting a real-time conversion to happen. I've been around the block enough to know that. It's more a weakness of mine. I have a hard time extirpating myself from these discussions, probably because I like thinking about thinking and feel there are probably at least a couple of lurkers out there who get something out of these discussions (might not have been exposed to some of these ideas before, etc). I know it's not very productive, but it's like a train wreck, I can't look away :-\

I don't think that's the real issue. Religious people have no solid evidence, and the burden of proof is on them. To me it's about how to think, which is a more interesting and broadly applicable thing. If people used even just the standard of evidence required to build a bridge to their beliefs about the universe, the world would be very different. But people are brought up to believe that religion is a kind of separate thing, and the normal rules of thinking shouldn't apply to it, which is BS. Virgins births and drinking some dude's blood in transmutated wine? Don't ask.

So why doesn't it? We're fine tuned for the universe because we evolved in it, the universe isn't fine tuned for us. Religious people assume that humans couldn't have been otherwise, so earth must be made for us. But evolution has shown us that we could be different. If the universe was different, we'd be different, or we wouldn't exist. But since we do exist, it's the anthropic principle (we're here talking about it, so obviously we're in a universe where we can exist). There are an almost infinity of different stars and planets. What are the chances that none of them, over billions of years, had what happened on Earth happen? It would be more surprising to have no life anywhere (in fact, maybe life is common among galaxies, we just don't know, it's not like we've explored much of the universe)... So not so fine tuned... Supernatural doesn't mean "hasn't been explained by science yet", it means "can't be explained by science". The prefix "super" means that it's above the natural world, out of it. I don't understand what you mean about the Higgs Boson having a model. At some point no model for it existed. So? We must not confuse the map and the territory. At some point no model for the big bang existed either, and then we had a theoretical model for it, and then we found background microwave remains of the big bang (we have evidence for it, just like the Higgs Boson). There are other undiscovered things that we don't have a model for right now, and someday we'll have a model. Doesn't make them magic or evidence for anything. Just not yet known.

Here it is: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang But even if we knew nothing about it, it would have nothing to do with a god until we found evidence for it in that research. Evidence of a god is about god. Lack of evidence about something is just evidence of lack of evidence about that thing. Logic 101, no? But even when we do figure it out fully, people like you will say that it has nothing to do with god anyway, just like how when we figured biology out, people who said that the mystery of life (elan vital) was the proof of god just switched to something else. And when we showed that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, making our planet not so special (even the sun isn't special -- there's a zillion just like it), people switched to other things... When we showed that thinking is taking place inside the brain, not in an out-of-body soul, people switched... In quantum mechanics we do have sub-particles appearing out of nothing just from energy and moving backwards and forward in time. It's very natural and quite well understood by physics, even if weird to our intuition. Big bang can be weird too and still entirely natural, without higher intelligence involved (in fact, it's much weirder if there's an agent involved because you then have to explain that agent). The god of the gaps argument just pretends that any thing still unknown is proof of something specific, while in fact all it means is "we don't know yet", just like all the previous "we don't know yet" that have since been elucidated without finding a ghost in the machine. In fact, logic would tell us that if the religious view was accurate, the more we'd learn about the universe, the more we'd confirm it, but instead it's exactly the opposite that has been happening with all the old arguments falling one by one. Fine tuning argument was always weak on many levels, and even moreso since we've realized that planets are a lot more common than we thought just a few years ago: http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.ca/2012/07/problems-with-fine-tuning-argument.html I so feel like this now: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

I'm sorry, it's like we're not even speaking the same language. You can't even understand a word's definition. According to you, the Higgs Boson was supernatural until recently. I'm out.

Wow, if you have that ability, good for you. Personally, I can't believe things that I don't think are true, and my standard of evidence is higher than "I wish things were this way", "I've read something eloquent about it" and "some smart people think that way" (how about all the smart people who don't think your way, uh? Can't you use selective appeal to authority to justify almost anything without evidence?). I can't decide to believe in the supernatural when all evidence points against it anymore than I can just decide to believe in alien abductions or young earth creationism. The day that there's solid evidence for it, I'll totally change my mind, because I want to believe in what's real. But without any evidence, no reason to. You really don't get it, uh? It's not because someone doesn't believe in magic (which is basically what religion is) that they can suddenly do anything without being constrained by a conscience and morals... You must have been quite the psychopath when you were an agnostic or an atheist or whatever you called yourself, if you really think that without a big security camera in the sky it's a free for all and nothing matters. It matters to people, that's who it matters to, and through empathy we can know how it feels to wrong others. It's empirically true that there's a very large segment of the population that labels itself "non-religious" and they aren't any worse than the rest (about 1/5 in the US; "The study also found that "[t]hey tend to be more educated, more affluent [..] than those with active faith"), and there's a large portion of those officially counted as religious who just label themselves that way out of cultural inertia but they never pray, never read religious texts, never go to church, they are basically non-religious, yet they aren't amoral sociopaths. Your theories don't match reality that way either.

FTFY.

More rhetoric, twisting what I said, and never countering any specific arguments... Look, I have physics, biology, cosmology, and everyday experience of how things consistently happen in the world showering me with gigatons of evidence that things work a certain way (seen any supernatural lately?). You have 'proof' by desire, the god of the gaps, appeal to authority, and some old books written by people who thought the Earth was flat and that magic was real and no concept of journalistic reporting of the facts as they were. You'll say: "Oh, but these sciences don't prove that god doesn't exist!" Indeed, and neither do they prove that invisible dragons don't exist, but they don't have to. The burden of proof is always on the person making an extraordinary claim. You can never prove a negative, yet you can't live your life as if all unprovably false things were real. If I claim that there's an invisible dragon in my garage or a magic teapot orbiting Jupiter, it's not up to you to prove that there's none, it's up to me to prove that there is one. So when religion comes up with any evidence that is remotely convincing, anything other than mental contortions based on premises that are rapidly passed over as givens but are actually not solid at all, I'll reconsider. In the meantime, I see no reason to believe in any popular god any more than I see evidence for me to believe in zeus or thor or odin (gods that you don't believe in either, I assume - you still haven't said why). btw, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Artificial_abiogenesis "In the 1950s, several experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey verified that the natural formation of amino acids, components of DNA, and other organic compounds out of inorganic materials was possible under the atmospheric conditions of Primordial Earth."

I'm rapidly losing interest. Let's just say that I disagree with pretty much everything you've said and have trouble imagining how someone could be truly convinced by those weak arguments (I guess science has taken everything else away that religious people used to say, so now it's all about logically fallacies like proof by desire, platonic concepts that somehow prove something and the god of the gaps), and if you think Occam's razor falls on the side of a deity, it's pointless to try to use reason with you; you try to explain complexity with more complexity, rather than with simplicity, which is what evolution is; it means you don't understand both occam's razor and evolution. Even if you could use god to explain other things, then how do you explain god? With a meta-god? God or god did it is always a non-answer because it doesn't elucidate, it just raises bigger questions. We know how evolution works - a series of simple incremental steps that, over very long periods, lead to complexity. How does god work? As for the existence of matter, we're working on that, but I've already talked about the "god of the gaps" concept -- it's like saying "we don't know thus god", which is retarded because everything we discovered so far that we used to think was supernatural turned out not to be (the sun, planets and stars, life, weather, whatever) and one can never be said to follow from the other. When you don't know something, you don't know it. I'll leave you on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis http://lesswrong.com/tag/seq_evolution/

I think those things are pretty universal, especially in children (and if they were nurtured in them, they'd persist). But even your desire for a god isn't entirely universal; many people claim to have never felt the need. You can go "no true Scotsman"* on me all you want, but it's still no proof of anything at all. Occam's razor: What's more likely, an all-powerful invisible hidden being that never gives us any good evidence of its existence yet more or less runs everything, or a non-supernatural world where our evolved desired for a powerful leader/protector/father figure and our bad intuition for what is real and what isn't (look at humanity before science disproved all kinds of beliefs) are making us want god(s)? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman For emphasis: I really hate how much of the religious edifice is built on things like "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists". How does he know that? Where does he get the information from, truly? Because he can list desires and ways to fulfill them? Oh, that makes it an ironclad law of the universe..? Even if 99.99999% of desires could be fulfilled, and I've just listed a bunch that can't be, it still wouldn't mean that the 0.0000001% left (god) would be true. This is just rhetoric, not evidence.

I'm a bit ashamed to say that I didn't, though I researched it and can't say I found any of the arguments convincing. Even though I usually read a couple books in parallel, my "to read" pile keeps growing rather than shrinking, and I'll admit that C.S. Lewis wasn't quite at the top of my priority list. I'll just say two things: "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists." Is this falsifiable? If so, then it's not true. Then the premise on which the rest is built falls down. Don't we all wish we could fly? Or be invisible at will? Move objects at a distance or speak to others via telepathy? Have infinite strenght, eternal youth, perfect beauty and health, the ability to read other people's minds, walk through walls, teleport, know everything, etc? Second, if you study evolutionary psychology (some good layman introduction texts: The Moral Animal by Robert Wright and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker), you'll see that many adaptations have side effects that weren't directly selected for, but can nonetheless be very powerful. That's why we sometimes see something that is clearly evolved, but we can't figure out what fitness advantage comes from it. Most of the time, it's because a useful adaptation has this side effect. And since we're not fitness-maximizers but rather adaptation-executers (http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/), we still tend to execute those adaptations unless we learn better and consciously reject them. And even things that were directly selected for can be for things that aren't true (our intuition about physics is wrong on many levels -- natural selection only wants our genes to be passed on, not to give us an accurate view of the world -- see the list of cognitive biases and optical illusions that we suffer from). So I can very well imagine that we've evolved in a social tribal setting, and it helped the band survive to all stand behind and pledge allegiance to a strong leader. Mix that in with pre-scientific beliefs in the supernatural (witchcraft, the sun is a god, hearsay about various myths and legends that people supposedly saw) and you get people who make up ever more powerful gods to claim as their leaders, culminating with a unique, all powerful god that can't be topped.

Proof by desire? I've heard that argument often, and it never made sense to me. What's the logic that makes it follow that because we have desires that can't be satisfied, that it means that some magical way to satisfy them exists. How about some things just can't be satisfied? How about our imagination is powerful enough to think of things that aren't real (which you can clearly see by looking at the world of fiction)? We can also dream of un-assisted flying and magic and dragons and other dimensions and superpowers and immortality and such, and that doesn't mean they're real. Seems like bad logic and wishful thinking to me.

It is very possible to believe things that are untrue without being an idiot. Conversely, it's not because smart people believe something that it's true. It's true or false regardless of who believes; even if everybody believes the earth is flat, if people look at the evidence, they'll find that it isn't. It also follows that if an idiot believes in something, that doesn't make it false (ie. if an idiot thinks the sky is blue, that doesn't make it green). I like this way of phrasing it: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. —Eugene Gendlin

http://www.1111comics.me/comics/1111comics-00147-my-religion.png

Yes, of course, that would be solid evidence, and yes, when I was younger, before I learned about how the universe works and was just going along with cultural inertia from my parents. But it would have to be something specific and statistically significant. None of that drawing the bullseye around the arrow after it has been shot crap, ie: "You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God."

The god who does all this? http://www.evilbible.com/

Dude, you didn't even watch it! Oh yeah, by the way - it does mean people get their morality from another source rather than the Bible - God. ;) That people claim miracles are happening isn't news to me (it's always conveniently impossible to verify, or un-repeatable under lab conditions -- there are labs offering big money to anyone who can make anything unexplainable happen there). This is storytelling, not evidence. I have better uses for my time. But I've still got this bridge I need to get rid of!