Followup: Letters from a Skeptic
Oct 23rd, 2007 by Amanda
I was going to post this just in the comments section of the previous post, but I want to make sure it’s seen. In the next letter Gregory Boyd writes to his agnostic father, he clarifies his argument for the existence of God.
What I was saying about how unbearable it is to be a person in an environment which is fundamentally impersonal was not meant to argue for the existence of God on the basis of wishful thinking. It was rather meant to argue that it is incongruous with everything else we know about the world to suppose that nature could produce creatures which have longings which nature doesn’t itself fulfill. This would be to assume, once again, that the effect outruns the cause, and in a disastrous fashion. If the ultimate canvas against which the cosmos is painted is not personal like we are, then we are very much like fish out of water. We desperately cry out for water, but there never was such a thing as water! But how could such a state of affairs ever come about? Where did our longing for something that never existed, and never could exist, come from?
Buffy seems to have summed up that thought more concisely when she asked,
But if the environment came first and then our desires, which were a response to our environment, doesn’t that imply that we have a desire for God because God existed in the first place?
She’s also quite right when she says that a belief in God is a far cry from a belief in Jesus. I’m going all the way back to the beginning here. If I’m going to overcome my doubts, then I need to rebuild my faith. I can’t just reclaim it, because a lot of my past faith has been foolish and wrong. I can’t build on a bad foundation - it will just crumble all over again.
Amanda,
It really sounds like you are getting your head in the right place. No one can tell you there is or is not a god. Its not provable in either respect.
Buffy,
nice response. The difference of course being, for some reason the object of every one of our other desires is actionable. By this i mean we can get a real thing to satisfy it. If its food, I can find food. If its love or sex or companionship there are 6 billion other people around that I can see and touch who may be able to satisfy that needs (that is a totally sterile way of looking at it, and it doesnt reflect the way I feel about love, only the way i think about love).
I do not think we have any desire for God. We have a VERY strong desire for understanding everything. God was a good model for understanding because it is similar to our family structure that has also been a successful way for us to survive. Its an understandable model. It is a model that allows us to easily explain and ‘understand’ the things we see. Even if we don’t understand something, then God works in mysterious ways.
But it’s a model that is not working very well with a global society. The gods are battling each other or suffering from multiple personality disorders and causing a lot of pain, suffering and death among the lowly people. I wish people would stick to a personal god and debate, legislate, and make their actions for the good of humanity because that is what God wants, rather than the truly unknowable specifics that they think god is commanding them to do. Then we can all speak at the same table, regardless of religion or lack of religion.
tech -
Boyd isn’t saying that we have a desire for God so there must be one. He’s talking about the attributes of personhood - consciousness, rationality, love, morality, and meaning. These are things we have/want. And his premise is that since our environment doesn’t provide for them, there must be something else out there that does.
OK, my comment there was to Buffy’s response, not to the text in general.
In any case I guess I don’t understand this..
what does it mean that the environment doesnt provide consciousness? Its just a presumption to say God provided that. Is nature just rocks and plants and therefore nature doesn’t provide consciousness? Natures is all things geological, cosmosolgical and biological, of course it has provided consciousness, its pervasive in almost every living, non plant thing on the planet (and I’m not yet sure about those venus flytraps LOL).
How can we perceive any need without consciousness? The lowliest ant has reason too (big thing in my way… must go around). Things can even have actions that emote reason without consciousness. For example a plant tries to point its leaves and stalk in such a away as to maximize light exposure. Is this reason? Not at all, its an effect of how the auxin hormone causes plant growth but also breaks down in sunlight. But it sure looks like reason in play.
How does our environment not provide for morality? What happens to our species if we all think its OK to kill each other and kill our family? What happens if we never are altruistic to our neighbors? We are more successful than any other mammal on the planet because of the morality we have, which is independent of any religion (which is why, at a high level, all religions basically teach the same thing). I say mammal, because bacteria and other 1 celled organisms and insects are more successful than we are with respect to sheer populations (well maybe not honey bees). But they have a reproduction advantage we simply can not compete with.
Can a species proliferate without love? Of course it can! Can it populate the plaent more than us without love? Of course it can (and does). Does love make us have advantages over other mammals, probably. More accurately our emotions, all of them, help us win out. They make decisions for us when all the data is not in.
It continues to be an argument from incredulity. He can’t beleive that these things arise on their own, therefore they didnt.
tech…in regards to reason in the world around us…Many years ago the belief was that animals were simply dumb beasts with no real reasoning skills, relying purely on instinct. That view continues to lose more and more ground in the face of science.
I am not saying that proves a God, just that things aren’t always as they seem or as true as we are led to believe–An argument frequently used against theism, but also quite effective in revealing atheism’s hidden assumptions.
Many years ago the belief was that animals were simply dumb beasts with no real reasoning skills, relying purely on instinct. That view continues to lose more and more ground in the face of science.
This is the beautiful thing about science. As new data comes around, the understanding changes towards more accuracy. Its such a common objection that many theists have: Science was wrong before. But they way you just gently stated it, delineated the exact reason why science works so well.
What hidden assumptions are you thinking about?
I wouldn’t really agree here. Most atheists I know of are “provisional atheists” - if the evidence changes, so will our views.
This could just be selection bias on my part, but I’m not sure how the (very valid) point you raise applies to this brand of atheism. It’s a conclusion not a premise, and the premises it relies on are the same we use to support our belief in (say) gravity.
Please let me know if I’m missing something.
Not necessarily. Desire for God could be a spandrel. This example was presented in a paper by Stephen Jay Gould, which is available on the internet somewhere, but I’m writing this in my lunch-hour so don’t have time to find it. The idea that every trait is adaptive is called panadaptationism, and thanks to Gould et al it’s been fairly thoroughly debunked within the scientific community.
As supporting evidence, I’d point to the non-universality of this form of desire. Speaking personally, I’ve only felt a strong desire for God for about three days in my 22 years of life.
If desire for God was indeed adaptive - if it directly increased an organism’s survival chances - then I’d most likely be dead by now. Since I’m still happily alive, I conclude that desire for God does not directly improve an organism’s fitness within the modern environment. Hence probably a spandrel, or possibly an evolutionary vestige that only made sense in some ancient environment.
Lifewish,
The question is: What do we mean by “desire for God?”
I think if you define that in terms of every person having a recognizable desire for a very specific kind of God, some people may never think of themselves as havinhg had that desire. However, if that statement is broadened to a more general desire to know and understand the purpose of the world/universe, and the purpose and worth of an individual person’s life, I think it would be fair to say that most people have felt that or pondered it on some level.
For someone who has no specific religious beliefs, it might be better to say a desire for the transcendent.
re: hidden assumptions—that physical matter is all that there is and the only guiding principle in the universe, that evidence only qualifies if it can be measured in a scientific laboratory, that self-awareness and morality are simply mechanisms produced by natural selection, that first cause is irrelevant. just some of my thoughts about it
re: hidden assumptions—that physical matter is all that there is and the only guiding principle in the universe, that evidence only qualifies if it can be measured in a scientific laboratory, that self-awareness and morality are simply mechanisms produced by natural selection, that first cause is irrelevant. just some of my thoughts about it
I like your thoughts here. And I can totally see how these are viewed as assumptions. But lets think about them a little bit.
Materialism (you first point) may be viewed as an assumption. But it is the result of evidence. I wish there was a good link that I have found about what is evidence. The best I have found is this, but it is still not good enough, however the book it came from is a good start.
If there is no evidence for a model why do we beleive it? Materialism is a result of assuming nothing, and then finding what there is. You let things into the boundary of “what is” if there is evidence for it. You throw out things from inside the boundary (world is flat, bloodletting is good), if more and better evidence refutes something inside. So there is this God model that wants to get in. Fine, irrefutable evidence is all that is needed, with lack of evidence not being evidence at all. God of the Gaps does not get passage through.
so far the only thing supporting God are anecdotal evidence (I got healed!), incredulity (everything is so complex), confusion between causation and correlation, and other fallacies.
None of this refutes a god. Things waiting to cross the border may in fact be true. Relativity took a while before it was let in. Same with open heart surgery. The period table of elements. These all suffered the same burden as God. But with evidence, predictive ability, and so forth, we acknowledge the reality of these things.
No thinking atheist will say “There is no god, its impossible”. as lifewish pointed out, we just need evidence for it, rather than the word of people from a species who have specific area in their brain to recognize faces, who have an innate inability to comprehend statistical phenomenon, and who have a long tradition of making up stories.
Evidence does NOT need to come from a lab. That was a straw man. There are no black holes in labs, there are no hurricanes in a lab, macroscopic evolution doesnt happen in a lab, dinosaurs were not discovered in a lab.
However all of these things are either predicted (black holes, DNA), or discovered due to evidence which is generally in abundance around us. Things in our surroundings were measured, and either they didnt fit old models (like relativity not matching newtonian physics), or there were no models to explain it at all and something had to be created (like ball lightning).
Self awareness and morality being a product of a natural process, i guess its an assumption. But what is the alternative? It would be an assumption based on something else that is an unverified assumption.
Who says first cause is irrelevant? Not knowing what a cause is doesn’t make it irrelevant. It just makes it not understood. But it doesnt mean that we can’t measure what happens after something has occured. If there is a car crash, do I need to know why someone was in the wrong lane to see the results of being in the wrong lane? Should I look to find out why that person was in the wrong lane in the first place? Of course, but if he is dead we may never know. But we can still asses and respond to the damage.
Its a very good thing to require evidence before we act or react. If we as a population actually required evidence of WMD in Iraq, we probably would n ot be in this and could have focused on something the world was with us on. We would never have gone into Iraq on the sole remaining excuse they have (Saddam was a bad guy). There isn’t time when having evidence for both understanding and action is bad for you. There are plenty of time where it is not possible to attain it, and you have to go with your gut. But given equal weight, going with your gut will always average out to be worse than going with strong evidence.
OK… but if “desire for God” can be reworded in that fashion, that rather undermines the alleged connection between desire for God and God’s existence. At most, it would only imply that transcendence exists.
As techskeptic said, most of these are not in fact assumptions; rather, they’re conclusions. For example, you mention the idea that morality is produced by natural selection. I’m currently reading an excellent book called “The Origins of Virtue” by a science writer called Matt Ridley on this very subject.
It’s a long book, but the short version is: we don’t just assume it. Instead, we try to produce predictive models of morality and test those models. We also do computer simulations of various “moral strategies” and see how they fare in various environments.
For example (page 23 of TOoV) a scientist called David Haig noticed the existence of resource-related conflicts between mother and child after birth. In many cases, the child wants more food than the mother is willing to give.
This sort of thing is accounted for within the selfish-gene model by the fact that the mother’s genes are aiming to have as many kids as possible (which means that some resources have to be kept back for other offspring), whereas the child’s genes are just trying to make it as strong and healthy a baby as possible. This difference arises because the child would only share about half its genes with any siblings. Based on this model, Haig was able to make the novel prediction that embryos too would make a determined effort to “steal” resources off their pregnant parent.
It turned out that this was completely right - issues like high blood pressure during pregnancy are actually a result of embryos using hormones to try to divert more blood through the placenta. See page 23 of TOoV for half a dozen other examples - none of which would have been discovered if it weren’t for the model of kin selection (one of the two key concepts in evolutionary morality).
Considering what a fuzzy, imprecise subject biology is, the fact that we can make strong predictions like this is nothing short of miraculous. And we’re still barely scratching the surface of all there is to learn here.
Taking a step back …We all have a desire for some kind of philosophy of life. For some this will involve a fundemantal belief in God and a fairly rigid following of rules. For others it involves a spiritual search for the truth and for others it resolves itself in a reliance on scientific methods and a humanist outlook.
Now much is dependent upon our definition of God. For some (fundemantal Christians for exacmple) the definition is very narrow. But suppose we focus only on Jesus’s words that God is Love, and consider that every time we feel love of another then we feel God in us whether we even believe in God or not.
What I am trying to say is that how can we know that our desire for God is not actionable or even if we feel a desire for God when we can’t even agree on a definition of what God is. If you make the definition wide enough even Dawkins believes in God.
I’ve heard this before, and yes, perhaps i am a literalist or just thickheaded, but i truly don’t know what this means:
But suppose we focus only on Jesus’s words that God is Love, and consider that every time we feel love of another then we feel God in us whether we even believe in God or not.
Is god an entity or not? Love is clear. Its a amazingly strong emotion that i feel for both my wife and my daughter. Its related to similar emotions that I feel for my parents and friends, and even humanity as a whole (but perhaps not some of the individuals within that group). It drives many of my actions and reactions, even in the face of reason (like the urge to pick up my child and hold her, even if she is manipulating me by crying for no reason). It instills the feeling of jumping in front of a bullet or a train in order to save them. It makes me cry when I see other parents who lose their children (or even watch Law and Order: SVU). It makes me hate people who endanger other people. It brings unlimited joy to me every time I hear my daughter gurgle, laugh, puke or poop (only love can do that!). That is just a brief list.
Where is an entity in all of that? Where is the need to get anything out of any book? You may as well say, God is Food and we all need food, therefore we all need god. If god is necessary for these things, why do atheists and hindu’s have the exact same emotions as monotheists?
BTW, buffy
if you define God as love. good for you. thats cool. I wish more people would.
Lifewish…can transcendence exist outside of the supernatural? If one is a materialist, then what exactly would one be transcending to? If there is a supernatural, transcendent state of being…what is it and where does it come from? Follow that path long enough and the concept of God is not hard to find.
Christianity has a tension within it between God–creator of the Universe, above and beyond our comprehension, and Jesus–God coming near in human form, familiar and graspable.
So at the same time, God is Love, but He also has a form of personhood in Jesus and in the way that he is depicted as interacting with human beings.
Semantics…..an assumption is a conclusion reached with little or no evidence, or lined up with an already accepted narrative.
Marc Hauser wrote a book called Moral Minds, in which he concludes that all human have relatively the same moral code within them, and will make almost the same choices regardless of religious beliefs and demographic background. He sees this as proof that morality must have evolved, because all humans have it. Rather then say…”hmmmmmm…all humans have some form of morality across the board. Kind of like a conscience.” He is fitting his findings into his already decided narrative that everything humans are comes from evolution and natural selection.
The same thing happened when scientists repeated ad nauseum that the appendix served no purpose, but was merely a vestige of our animal ancestry when we were eating shoots and leaves all the time. I remember hearing that all through high school.
Of course, now the new theory is that wasn’t at all true and the appendix is a safe harbor for the bodies good bacteria, still useful in the present-day human.
Its funny Hausers book is cited by dawkins also for the same reason. His studies of moral dilemmas was very interesting.
“Rather then say…”hmmmmmm…all humans have some form of morality across the board. Kind of like a conscience.” “
OK so everyone has the same morality and the same conscience regardless of religion or lack of religion. arent they essentially the same thing?
How does this lead to a presumption of natural influence? How does it provide any evidence of something non-materialistic at all? how is it presumptuous to take the data at face value (all humans have the same morality irrespective of religion) and assign a natural reason for it (because this data flies in the face of every religions claims to exclusive righteousness). When people of every single religion and no religion have the same set of morals, how does that give evidence that religion provides anything at all to our moral structure?
It only provides evidence that everyone has it. Nothing more. The only reason to assign the the cause of that strong consistency between all the members of our species is because its the best, most predictive, most evidentially reinforced model we have for how life came to be as it is.
The evidence for evolutionary processes are all over the place, and not just in fossils themselves, but where the fossils lie in our geology. there has never been conflicting evidence to this. Further it has predictive value as DNA was essentially predicted to be required for the evolutionary mechanisms to take place. No it is not assumption, there is tons of evidence from multiple sources that show that these processes exist. We cna even use the model to our own advantage creating or modifying life to meet our needs better. We see it happeneing not just in microscopic scale with the flu bug changing every year, but in macroscopic scale as humans evolve better immune systems, elephant get shorter tusks, and so forth. With all this evidence for these processes why would we then go and assume that living things are around because of something that can’t be measured in any way, can’t be proven, and who speaks only through random interpretation of texts and emotions?
now the new theory is that wasn’t at all true and the appendix is a safe harbor for the bodies good bacteria, still useful in the present-day human
I had not heard this. It leads me to a couple of questions i’ll look into (like do chimpanzees have appendixes?) however, once again, how does this lead to any evidence or conclusion of anything supernatural and unmeasurable?
All it says is, once again, new data arrives and we make hypotheses, and we test them out, making our models more accurate, every single time. Where does the implication of the supernatural come in?
My point is not to debunk science. I love science. My point is that science is about data. Belief or disbelief is about the interpretation of data.
re: a conscience….the Christian view is that all people are made with a conscience. They might not believe in God, they might not like God, but they have been made in a very specific way so as to sense God/The Divine/something-larger-than-themselves when making choices and decisions. It is also why we call people without this type of conscience, sociopaths–people who think only of themselves and seem unable to empathize or make decisions based on how it will impact others.
It always goes back to First Cause. Every argument will eventually wind up at the beginning of the Universe. What you do with that beginning, and how you explain it, will set the course for all of the thought systems that take shape and direct a person towards or away from belief.
Why do atheists and hindus have the exact same emotions as monotheists?
…because maybe you don’t have to be a Christian or believe in God in order to experience him…
In the same way that Jesus saw the Good Samaritan as being closer to God than the the righteous Jews who passed by on the other side. The GS was motivated by love and compassion.
A modern parallel (actually sometimes used) would be an atheist helping out a fundamantalist Christian.
Please bear in mind it’s not ‘you need God in order to feel love’, it’s ‘God IS love’.
Terri
I truly enjoy your comments.. Let me ask this:
It always goes back to First Cause. Every argument will eventually wind up at the beginning of the Universe. What you do with that beginning, and how you explain it, will set the course for all of the thought systems that take shape and direct a person towards or away from belief.
Why does it have to be explained. Explaining requires a conclusion about what happened. Most atheists will say “we dont know” and right now that is the case..we don’t know. We may come up with some theories.. perhaps they may be testable one day. Religious people will fill that gap and pretend to know the unknowable “God did it”. Who is providing the presumption?
Buffy,
I realize I must seem dense. But “God is Love” still doesn’t make sense to me. God is a driving emotion? do you pray to hunger, anger, and joy also? Is god an entity or not? Is love an entity in this scenario? Why dont you capitalize Love?
Tech,
That’s the point isn’t it? Materialism is predicated on the idea that matter is all that there is. So the question then becomes, where did matter come from? What was there before there was matter? If one says that matter has always existed and is neverending, immortal…it starts to sound suspiciously like God. Omnipresent…no beginning, no end….beyond explanation and comprehension.
hmmm
If theories are formed in science on the foundational idea of materialism, with nothing more than an assumption that it is true, then those theories are going to be lacking a great deal. In certain sciences this will not present a problem such as physics, biology, chemistry. It is the quest for a unification of these ideas into a larger scheme where things begin to break down. It’s the quest for the “theory of everything” that has been unfulfilled….which makes sense if materialism is untrue.
So, if we have a philosophy of life, or belief/disbelief system based on a certain interpretation of data that derives it’s meaning based on an assumed theory of the Universe and it’s make-up, how much can it be trusted?
If one says that matter has always existed and is neverending, immortal…it starts to sound suspiciously like God. Omnipresent
It does? Where is the willful, omniscient, conscious entity, who you talk to part? Again that assumes matter was always there (or the energy was). It assumes time itself behaves the same way as we perceive it on this planet. it assumes something without data. We just don’t know. To assign it to something or someone is the step that requires the assumption.
I don’t understand the “assumed theory of the universe” part. The only assumption you keep mentioning is assigning the beginning of the universe to a god, which has its own identical assumption about it (where did god come from?). Instead of putting it in the box of “we don’t know yet”, you are putting it in the box of “God did it”, a box that keeps getting more empty with time.
The set of theories we have have for how life evolves, the atom behaves, non-determininistic events happen, etc etc, all have strong evidential basis, and good predictive value. how much can it be trusted? More and more, as it gets more accurate with time and new information. But science is relatively moralless. Because we CAN clone doesnt mean we SHOULD clone. But does God tell you if we should or shouldn’t? Of course not. is cloning good for society? Well that is where our debate should be, a godless debate, otherwise we will simply have christians and raelians fighting each other over literally nothing and the debate can not progress. I can think of many cases where cloning oneself may be an acceptable scenario (assuming the technology is perfect), it doesnt mean everyone will do it. Why would they? Everyone doesnt do IVF now because its not as much fun, its expensive and its harder.
GMOs is another area that is a perfect example of this (and one where we generally were able to keep the discussion godless). Both sides had really good arguments for and against the introduction of GMO food into our food supply. ITs now in our food supply (I guess someone won!). At this point, almost anyone is capable of producing GMOs, but there are strong restrictions on doing so.
There is an assumption in your post that because we have a scientific explanation for something that it is moved from the “God” column to the “not God” column. I have never really understood this. Just because we understand DNA, physics, and electro-magnetism…or any other scientific principle at work in the Universe, how does that take it from the “God” column. IT seems to assume that if we can understand something, then it must mean that God is not involved in it. It takes a view of God as a genie in the bottle who only pops out to blink his eyes and magically do things that can’t exist in nature.
That is not my view of God. Sure, I believe that God can do anything He wants to, but He doesn’t go around breaking the laws of nature–laws he created and formed–just because He has nothing better to do. Even the miracles found in The Bible are very specific events and not run-of-of-the-mill, daily experiences for the people involved in them.
Science takes nothing away from God. Science is about the “how” things work. God is about the “why”.
There is an assumption in your post that because we have a scientific explanation for something that it is moved from the “God” column to the “not God” column. I have never really understood this.
Well only because of the situation that you talked about before, that is always goes back to the start. You choose to say God did it, I choose the say, we don’t know yet what caused it, becuase we don’t, there is not evidence for any theory about the cause of the universe.
From that point on, as you are saying, you god kept his hands out of the batter, so if we cant prove there was an omniscient, omnipresent enitity weho can control every single electron in the universe, and we say that he is sitting back and watching, why bother with that at all?
so yeah, when we explain something, we see the mechanism by which it arises, this goes for lightning and thunder which is sufficiently out of the “god box” to evolution which truly ought to be out of the god box by now.
I don’t have long to respond to everything, so I’ll limit myself to throwing a few felines among the columbidae.
Heck yes. I studied maths at uni, and some of the deep theories that you find at the roots of mathematics provoke a “spiritual” response in me. For example, the last section of this wikipedia article nearly made me fall off my chair the first time I read it. It’s just… wow. I can’t even describe it.
I guess the difference between us is that I don’t think this transcendent experience is reified: I don’t think it need be reflected in the world outside my own head. That’s an almost alchemical way of looking at the world.
The alchemists used to think that heat was a substance (phlogiston); nowadays, we’re pretty sure it’s a behaviour (vibration of molecules). They used to think that thought was a substance (the philosophic mercury); nowadays, we’re pretty sure it’s a behaviour (firing of neurons). Similarly for life (elixir of life), light (e.g. extracting sunbeams from cucumbers), and probably a whole range of other stuff. Of course, they were wrong (to a greater or lesser extent) every time.
Same with transcendence. It can have a great, life-changing effect on me without ever being “real” outside of my own skull.
You’re not contradicting me here. For example, the “assumption” that there’s no such thing as the supernatural is based on the diligent research of parapsychologists the world over for centuries.
Similarly, we’ve been looking for evidence - any evidence! - of God’s existence for millennia. All we’ve come up with is a long (and ever-growing) list of bad fallacies. That means I can validly say that God doesn’t exist to within experimental error.
Wrong. Completely, dangerously wrong. Science is not about data. Science is about deriving models from data (”interpreting” data) and comparing those models on grounds of predictivity and parsimony.
Otherwise it would be scientifically valid to say that the universe was created last Thursday, with all its contents possessing the appearance of age. After all, it would only be another interpretation of the data…
Actually it’s moved from the “we don’t know” column to the “we have some idea” column. The reason for your confusion is that apologists often confuse “we don’t know” with “goddidit”.
Lifewish,
Somehow that wikipedia article didn’t have the same effect on me.
I think there is something seriously wrong with you.
Lifewish,
The problem with the example you gave about a Universe that appears to have age…is that it is an interpretation without data. It’s one thing if there is interpretation with data, quite another if there is no data. You wouldn’t call your example science. It could be a scientific theory if there were evidence or examples of other things that seem to have age, but really don’t. So, I don’t think it qualifies as a good example for your point.
Science is initially about research, data, and gathering information. Conveying the meaning of the data is sometimes more art than science, especially if you’re not working in hard sciences or dealing with biology in which multiple factors and forces are occurring. Science gets it wrong a lot of times, not because of what the data says, but in the theories about what the data means.
That does not mean that one explanation is as good as another, but simply that the certainty and force of conviction held can sometimes far outpace the correctness of a particular interpretation.
Tech,
That makes sense if belief in God is stipulated with the idea that every natural occurrence happens magically and is part of His very pro-active will. An example might be that lightning comes from Zeus getting angry and throwing a temper tantrum, resulting in fiery bolts. Discovering that lightning is in no way tied to angry tantrums by a Greek god would definitely exclude that belief.
However, scientific understanding need not get in the way of belief in God. The Bible makes no specific claims about the way that nature occurs. You have Genesis and the account of creation, which is usually a stumbling block to scientists, but that is only if you take the account in a very limited, literal way.
Outside of the repetition that God is the creator of the Universe, The Bible doesn’t give supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon. The only exception would be for miraculous events, which are noted simply because they could not normally occur in the natural world. But, there are no Zeus examples where God claims that volcanos are caused by demons fighting, or migration is caused by angels driving the birds away..etc.
So, for me, science does not detract from God in any way. If anything, it fills me with awe and wonder at the complexity of everything in the Universe, from the group of thousands of ants building an underground home in my front lawn, to the meteor shower every August near where I live. It doesn’t hurt my faith but strengthens it.
I wish I had answers to all your questions about God and love. I’m not sitting here saying I know everything, I’m just sort of thinking aloud. I don’t really think of God or Love as an entity though, more a type of energy.
Buffy,
I’m just trying to understand what you mean. I have heard teh God is Love thing before and didnt understand it then, and still don’t. If God were love, we wouldn’t be having a conversation. We would all be in agreement as God and Love would simply be synonymous.
But God is not that, is it? While risking presumption (but totally accepting any correction you want to make), God guides you..God answers your prayers and/or purposefully doesnt answer them (how convenient). God made everything there is and judges who goes into heaven and hell, both of which he created also (and can’t be seen or measured either). God is not a laid back emotion, nor is he just some form of energy to be found somewhere. By all accounts, God is a thinking, feeling, nurturing being with control over every single electron in the universe, but we cant see him.
If you are deciding that God is some other type of entity, an energy form (BTW, which I like, very SF!)…OK, but there should be evidence for that too. Evidence that is not explained by simpler, more common reasons.
Terri,
I fully appreciate and share your infatuation with science. I think I fully understand your sense of awe of all the God created. I share the same sense of awe, just without the god part.
I also agree that scientific exploration need not get in the way of God. Great.
The HUGE problem I see is the other way around. God gets in the way of science all the time. Maybe not from people like you, but from many many people. Why are we still arguing creationism, something with no data for, and tons of data against? Why are we arguing Global warming? Why are we fighting and killing each other over abortion? Why are we fighting an killing each other over whichever deity?
(BTW, when I say ‘we’ I dont mean you and me, I mean humanity)
Its because we are desperately trying to hold on to an old, unsupported model of the universe. this sort of marriage to old inaccurate models is why people cling to nonsense medical ‘cures’, try to chelate their autistic kids, follow astrology, numerology, phrenology, etc etc. Old models are bad in general, but we cling to them. God belief is another symptom of this clinginess, but it is stronger one because unlike homeopathy, water dowsing and astrology, we can prove without a doubt that they are nonsense (but even in the face of this, people will still believe). The God model is a strong one because you can not prove a negative, you can only accept data on the positive (which is why the God believers must provide evidence for God, their God over all the others, if we are to live our lives as a species around God existence).
As you said, it all goes back to first cause to justify any other thoughts on any subject. And while tons of data reinforces a big bang theory, there is virtually no data to say what was before that because we as humans refuse to look at things other than in linear transience. But we know this is not the case everywhere. Time essentially stops near black holes (to the observer). time does weird things in gravity wells. why would time be anything like we experience it now at the time of the big bang?
Hmm.. I dont have a wrap up paragraph. You are not scary to me. Fundies, of any faith (stop it! atheism is not a religion) are scary. But more than just looking at fundie nonsense, I worry about the general state of what we take on faith (like invading Iraq: Saddam didnt have a chance when the rhetoric was -he must prove he doesn’t have WMD…how do you do that?) and what we do with actual data (the earth really is warming, we really are causing it, no, we won’t all die because of it).
Somehow that wikipedia article didn’t have the same effect on me. I think there is something seriously wrong with you.
This is entirely possible. But if William Blake was allowed to see the world in a grain of sand, I’m allowed to see enlightenment in an equation. So there.
The problem with the example you gave about a Universe that appears to have age…is that it is an interpretation without data.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Last-Tuesdayism is an interpretation without data. The usual terminology for this is that last-Tuesdayism is unparsimonious. The only last-Tuesdayist models that are compatible with the data are those that give the same results as old-Earth models - in which case, why not just go with the old-Earth models?
Similarly, the only theist models that are compatible with the data are those that give the same results as atheist models - in which case, why not just go with the atheist models? In your phrasing: God is an interpretation without data.
However, scientific understanding need not get in the way of belief in God.
I completely agree. Similarly, scientific understanding need not get in the way of last-Tuesdayism. However, the scientific method is inimical to them both, because the scientific method includes the concept of parsimony.
But, there are no Zeus examples where God claims that volcanos are caused by demons fighting, or migration is caused by angels driving the birds away..etc.
Really? What about the many cases where Jesus cures people’s ailments by driving demons out of them?
Well, there are also many examples where Jesus heals people without any reference to demonic activity…withered hands, lame legs, blind eyes, fevers, leprosy. So, most illnesses are not depicted as being tied to a spiritual cause.
I won’t go into the whole “demonic” thing because it would have to be based in a discussion that has the existence of the supernatural as a given, which you don’t concede.
However, I will say that the miracles listed in Scripture are notable simply because of the very fact that they defy natural law….thus the term “miraculous.” They are definite, limited interruptions in the natural universe, usually performed to portray or convey a particular spiritual truth.
Sometimes, when people read Scripture, they are left with the impression that God was constantly going about doing all kinds of weird, crazy things because they are reading the compilation of thousands of years worth of experiences and stories. They forget that hundreds of years would go by without any “notable” events happening.
For Christians, that can sort of warp our sense of reality and create expectations for some sort of constant flow of excitement and “wow” moments from God, leading to disillusionment and questioning. Sometimes I wonder, though, if that has more to do with our expectations of what God “should” do rather than understanding the point of it all.
(and yes…I fully expect you’ll jump on the “warped sense if reality” bandwagon!
)
I will say that the miracles listed in Scripture are notable simply because of the very fact that they defy natural law….
Is this the same Terri I was talking with before? Do you see why that might be a weird thing to say?
The miracles written about in Snow White (magic mirror, etc) also defy natural law, but I dont see anyone praying to her. Don’t even get me started with the hilarious miracles Dr. Seuss’ characters do!
I only sort of doubt that Jesus ever existed. He may have. His mom most likely had an affair or was raped… What is the best way to hide that fact? He may have been a good guy, and preached peace, love, and understanding. Walk on water? Heal leprosy? Resurrect? LOl, come on.
We have the capability of sending information around the world instantly. We can send video, audio, and data simultaneously. We can make thousands of copies, of both digital and written data in minutes, copies that are completely indistinguishable from each other. And we still get gossip, inaccuracies, fables and “big fish that got away” type stories.
And you want to believe a text that was written, copied by hand, by people who may or may not have been able to read or understand the language it was written in, centuries after the events that they describe? Texts that have been clearly manipulated, mistranslated, and mistransliterated (because we can compare modern texts to preserved texts)? Its preposterous. The story of jesus and the Pharsi’s doesnt apear in any text before 900AD, and we should believe the Jesus made a party better by magically turning water into wine? Is it not more likely that he just found some wine or someone with wine?
The only miracles that we have experienced as a species are those brought to you by science. High life expectancy. Pictures of other planets! A map of the universe! Pictures of individual atoms! What would jesus have said if you told him we could leave one place and appear on the other side of the world in 1/2 a day? That is miraculous.
So… you do believe that supernatural, uninvestigatable* forces are behind some (small**) proportion of illnesses? And yet you still claim that your beliefs are in accordance with current scientific understanding?
Again, though, you’ve hit the nail on the head with your remark here: once you accept the supernatural, this kind of garbage becomes plausible. The line between “good” religion (that agrees with scientific conclusions) and “bad” religion (that invents its own competing models) is practically meaningless once you accept the basic axioms of almost any theistic belief system.
I’m not saying that you do or should believe in demonic possession etc, just that it’s at least as well supported by scripture as many of the things you do believe. If you accept the Bible as an authority, you have no solid grounds for disagreeing with anyone who does believe this nonsense.
Well, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I have no grounds to protest about anyone else having a warped sense of reality
* Is this even a word? Meh, you know what I mean.
** When I next have too much time on my hands I’ll count up the ratio of demonic to nondemonic healings by Jesus in the Bible.
Of course I believe in the supernatural. God is supernatural…I believe in Him…ergo I believe in the supernatural.
I do not believe that every bad thing that people do, think, or say is related to demonic powers or supernatural influence of some sort. We actually left a church that was starting to place way too much emphasis on that kind of thing. They were looking to demons as the cause of everything bad that happened in people’s lives or caused serious addictions and emotional issues.
I think you need to do some research on this aspect of your argument. Most scholars believe the New Testament gospels were written somewhere between 50 and 70 AD…..not centuries afterward. Most of the canon of Scripture, which includes the epistles of Paul, Peter and James…and also Hebrews…were written by 100 AD.
Think about this. How many “new” history books are written about administrations 10-20-30 years after the events have happened? Maybe people couldn’t write about things until after their government changed, maybe there wasn’t a need to disseminate the information until later. You wouldn’t read a book like that and assume that everything in it is a complete fabrication. You might think that the author is writing about his/her perspective of the events, but there would be no reason to assume that everything in the book was a complete and utter lie.
We read documents from thousands of years ago all the time and don’t assume they are false in their entirety. The assumption that the texts were manipulated requires the belief in a vast conspiracy theory that the leaders at the time had the power and foresight to do such a thing, which simply doesn’t line up with what the first century church was like. They had no power, no money, no influence. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later that the church came into any political favor.
As far as Jesus’ miracles, I am not sure how to have a conversation with you on this particular subject, because it requires a certain familiarity with Scripture and the motifs that occur throughout the whole of Scripture…with which I am not sure how familiar you are.
I believe in Jesus. I believe in His divinity. I believe the message of Christianity.
That makes no sense to you as part of an argument about science and God. But my points about science and God have been only to convey that I do not think they are mutually exclusive.
Now, we are treading into territory about my experiential relationship with God, something for which I can offer no proof of other than my own word and testimony. This is the crux of the conversation that becomes difficult. I can say what has happened to me, what I have experienced, felt, been a part of, and witnessed, but it will have no particular meaning for you.
I have come to think that people either believe or disbelieve in God, not based on scientific theories, probability, or philosophical logic, but through personal experience. The arguments fall into line with the emotional part of our being. By emotional, I do not mean crying, irrational behavior, but the intuitive part of our selves that guides us….the “essence” of who we are. I would call it a soul…you might call it a personality.
I have more to say…but I have a meeting to get to!
more later if you’re not bored yet!
I tried to email you, Terri, but it bounced back.
As you can see, I fished your comment out of the spam filter.
huh…it looks like the 321 part of my address fell off. I typed it back in there.
Thanks, though, for fishing it out. I was too tired to re-type it all !
Of course I believe in the supernatural.
Why? That is the star5ting point, not the end point. Becuase of this, everything else follows. but this is the point that is bizzarre to me.
hey…wait a minute….are we back to First Cause again? hehe
sort of…
I had to leave and could not give your post the proper attnetion. I am sorry.
I wasnt really talking about first cause, I was talking about a presumption. You believe that supernatural exists, so why stop at God? Why not a giant purple dragon with green teeth made out of jello also? Why just one god and not many? Believing in the supernatural leads to other maladies of human society (i’m NOT saying you do these things…but why not? they are supernatural also)
Paying water dowsers to find water
believing that you should receive no medicine when you are sick
Using astrological charts to make investments
Reading your palm to make personal decisions
obviously I could go forever…The point being once you accept the supernatural, why would there be any boundaries on what you believe?
The problem is not what you do. I don’t care (actually I like you, so I actually do care, but in this case I mean God believers), but it becomes a problem when what you (err God believers again) beleive in affects society. For example there are a bunch of twits who are trying to tell people not to vaccinate their kids, mostly because they don’t understand why thimerisol is actually safe. They also advice to chelate your kids if they are autistic (introducing chemicals into your child body that wont do anything).
The same thinking that brings you beleifin the supernatural brings you beleif, against all data, that AO programs work, that you just have to tell kids to say no to drugs, that the government should pay for investigating crop circles, and that the planet is not warming due to CO2 emmisions.
Further this thinking (belief without data) leads to poor policy on hot topics like gun control, abortion, healthcare, gay marriage, etc etc, becuase we simply get screaming matches of rhetoric of people who just say things because they beleive in it, rather than making bills to gather the data, or using that data. I’d be all for death penalty if someone could actually show that it did anything significant.
you hear verbage “I just think it will…”, or “I feel it will…”, and people gobble it up.
That is why I don’t like the basis for religion, the leap of faith. The indoctrination of that very same leap of faith.
tech…
I agree that people believe silly and sometimes detrimental things.
I understand the visceral reaction to craziness in the name of religion, but it isn’t evidence that there is no God.
Listing the faults of something is an argument based on emotion, not science, logic, etc…which is kind of where I was going in my comment beforehand.
but it isn’t evidence that there is no God
[giggle] There will never be any evidence that there ISN’T a god. If there were that type of evidence then I could ask you to prove that you dont have 5000 dollars of mine.
Thats the whole point, there is as much evidence for a god or gods as there is against it (them), so why choose to believe in one?
I didn’t intend on listing the faults of something as proof God doesnt exist. I was listing the faults of any type of thinking that is comfortable in leaps of faith. I was trying to explain how this sort of thinking does in fact lead to other equally valid (an unproven) methods for healthcare, finding water, etc etc.
So what proportion do you think is related to supernatural influences? Bear in mind that any value above 0 blows your claim to agree with scientific understanding completely out of the water.
Speaking as an atheist, the problem many of us have is: for every Christian testimony, there’s a Muslim testimony that disagrees with it on half the details. For every Christian convinced their God is real, there’s a homeopathy fanatic convinced that zero molecules of poison is a good thing to consume.
I’m fairly sure that their personal experiences are (how can I put it nicely?) not reflective of the nature of things. To me, this discredits the whole idea of “proof by experience” - this form of “proof” is demonstrably wrong a fair proportion of the time. Even if I myself had a vivid religious experience, I hope I’d have the presence of mind to realise that personal feelings, however strong, are not good evidence.
Off-topic, but I thought this article was interesting. Apparently there’s a correlation between religious belief and a tendency to see “faces” in random data (conversely, there’s a correlation between unbelief and a tendency to miscategorise faces as random data).
I think you misunderstand my position on science. I have never made a claim that my religious beliefs are based on science. I have merely tried to clear up some of the conversational clutter surrounding the God/science thing–a topic which splinters into a million different tangents leading away from what usually started the conversation.
Let’s see…so far we have talked about:First Cause, reason in the natural world, materialism, transcendentalism, how science is defined(data/interpretation of data), “moral minds”, miracles, whether The Bible is accurate in any way, what portion of Jesus’ healings are attributed to thwarting demonic forces, and whether experience has any role in belief.
Splinters. Tangents. Threads.
They can be traced back to an original starting point, but each thread has its own life and requires more than a cursory glance to fully explain or express.
Flitting from thing to thing is normal in a blog thread. It’s the way the mind works; a stream of consciousness that leaps from one thought to the next. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it makes it difficult to explain how it all fits together.
I will say this about experience; it must be tempered by a certain amount of reason, but it can’t be totally subject to scientific scrutiny. I can hear you screaming in agony at that comment. Most of our lives are lived based on experience. We make choices and judgments about careers, friends, relationships, politics, and a whole host of other things, not based on scientific data, but on our own experiences and observations.
I see nothing wrong with that.
Where it becomes uncomfortable is when we then say to ourselves, “How do I know that my experience is True?”
“How do I know that what I am responding to is based on fact, and not wishful thinking?”
“How do I know that I am experiencing something larger than myself, and I am not just in need of medication?”
Your answer may be that we have to look for scientific evidence. But, scientific evidence can’t prove to me that my spouse loves me. Scientific evidence can’t tell me what career path will bring me the most fulfillment. Scientific evidence won’t help me find a good friend, or learn how to be accepting of myself.
Don’t misunderstand what I am saying. This is not the “life is so much happier with belief” argument. Instead I am saying that there are lots of things that can’t be quantified, yet are integral to being human and living life on this planet. Should we stick our head in the sands and say, “I have no scientific “evidence” for taking this particular action, or making this particular judgement, so I’ll just do nothing.”
We could do that….but man, life would be a bummer.
I could understand your incredulity that people would listen to their experiences, yet am intrigued that when talking about transcendentalism, you mentioned that equations filled you with a certain transcendental feeling. You placed value on that experience, stating that it didn’t really matter whether other people appreciated that moment. Is that so different from what I am saying about experience?
That’s the single best summary of the average blog discussion I’ve ever read - kudos
Hehe. I wasn’t actually screaming - I completely agree with you that most aspects of our lives can’t easily be subjected to scientific levels of testing. There’s no such thing as a scientific approach to poker, for example, because as soon as you settle on any one approach someone will figure out what you’re doing and use that info to wipe you out.
So the question is: what is the relationship between scientific and nonscientific methods of investigation?
My response: where the two contradict, the scientific methods take precedence. No matter how sure I am that I’ve seen a ghost, if following the scientific method leads me to the conclusion that they don’t exist then I just have to accept that I was most likely mistaken. No matter how sure I am that homeopathy has cured my illness, if following the scientific method leads me to conclude that homeopathy is a crock then I just have to accept that I’ve been gulled by the placebo effect.
No matter how much my martial arts instructors mutter about chi, if the scientific evidence suggests that it doesn’t exist then relying on it would be extremely foolish. And, no matter how many testimonies I hear from religious people, if the scientific method leads to the conclusion that the universe is Godless then it would be intellectually reckless to accept God’s existence as fact.
As far as I can tell, the scientific method does indeed lead to that conclusion.
To quote my earlier comment:
I stand by that statement. When I have a transcendental feeling about some truly beautiful area of mathematics (”O brave new world, that has such patterns in it”) then that is a statement about myself, my internal mental state, not about the world. This is not in breach of my skeptical principles.
If I said “this theorem is beautiful therefore it must be true”, then I would be breaking the rules of skepticism by assuming that my internal mental state must be reflected in the external universe. I would be making a statement about objective reality based on non-objective data. That would be a mistake, yet that’s what I see Christians do all the time.
But, scientific evidence can’t prove to me that my spouse loves me. Scientific evidence can’t tell me what career path will bring me the most fulfillment. Scientific evidence won’t help me find a good friend, or learn how to be accepting of myself.
Every rational person, theist or atheist would agree with this. You can’t expose every single decision you make to scientific scrutiny because you simply couldn’t get out of bed, there is too much to do, and too many variables. This is where experience helps us, its also where emotion helps us. Both experience and emotion guide us with decision making when all the data is not in.
But both can be wrong and often are (yes, I know the “science has been wrong before” debate starting). The difference between science being wrong before and poor decision making due to experiential or emotional influences, is that experience does not disappear, emotions are often based on experience. Science rejects outdated and less accurate theories.
It is hard to shake the feeling of danger at night if something bad happened to you at night, even if it was only once. It is hard to shake the feeling of God, if something you personally saw as miraculous (read: statistically improbable) happened. Its also hard to shake the feeling of say “water is dangerous” if your parents have told you this over and over again since the day you were born. Same with “God is great, is everywhere and is watching you” if that is all you heard since the day you were born. But that doesnt mean all dark places are dangerous, it doesnt mean water is dangerous and it doesnt mean God exists.
Where there is time or need, the scientific method will always provide a more accurate, predictive, successful answer. That is why it has been the most successful method of understanding the world around us. Once this method was refined (and it literally took thousands of years), the advancement we have been able to make has been truly incredible.
But it required that we removed anecdotal evidence and emotion from the process.
One more thought on your contention: Scientific method (and the evidence required for it) could in fact, help you with a job decision, find out if your spouce loves you, or choose your friends. Why not? Why couldn’t you look at groups of people, see how they interact, see which groups of poeple have the highest number of successful member (money, stability, children, however you want to measure success) and after you study that, then learn what it takes to be in that group. This has in fact been done (not for friendship, but for measuring financial success), just read 7 habits of highly successful people.
Same with love, you can measure tons of evidence of love and conclude love until conflicting evidence comes along(like cheating, beating etc). sharing, giving, intimacy, etc. are all bits of evidence of love. They are tangible, they happen in front of you, they are repeatable and so forth, so yes, scientific evidence is in fact possible to use to evaluate love.
What happens when we ignore the evidence? Why do women keep on returning to a man who beats them (”But I love him!”)? Why do some people decide to stay in friendships where they remain the butt end of jokes. Its eucase the emotional, experiential motivations are wrong, but they are also strong, stronger than reason. Sticking to reason is the harder way, unfortunately.
oops…sorry to flake out on the discussion! Life got busy.
I don’t think I would call that “scientific” evidence. Also, what if your significant other does cheat…or stops giving for a period of time….or withdraws from you? That’s not proof that they don’t love you. Relationships are much more complicated than that and can’t be boiled down to logarithims (did I spell that right?)
I totally get your point about women staying with users and jerks….which could start a whole topic about what love is and how people can recognize it…..but still don’t think “relationships by theorem” would work…but it might sell a few million copies!!
LOL, well could it be any worse of a topic that “he just isnt into you”?
Is scientific evidence that different from evidence? The whole idea is about finding evidence. Strong, causative, repeatable, measurable evidence. The things I mentioned about love were that, they provided evidence for and against the existence of love. The scientific method is not different than this. Maybe it more often includes the use of math and numbers, but the basis is not different.
I wasn’t saying a one night stand means Boom! no love! Its just evidence. Its just like the theory of evolution.. there is tons and tons of data for the theory, and few weak things that fall into “we dont know yet” like abiogenesis, which creationists like to incorrectly mix with it. That doesnt throw out the whole theory in favor of a theory with absolutely no evidence.
While we wait for the next post from Amanda, I wanna see if this old thread (which I really enjoyed) can be reinvigorated.
Did the thread terminate because we ran out of arguments, or just because it dropped off the bottom of the page? Enquiring minds want to know.