The Existence of God

_db

The holidays are rolling around, and for many, this means a heightened religious life. In light of this, I would like to start a general discussion about the existence of god. I will start.

I think I would consider myself an agnostic with regards to the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, creator of the cosmos. I used to see myself as an atheist but have thrown that away because I feel it relies on a kind of faith that it criticizes theism for holding. If you were to ask me in public, though, what my "theological tendencies" are, I would say I am an atheist just because it's easier and also because I don't really live my life in perpetual anxiety regarding the existence of a deity. In this sense, I suppose I am an agnostic atheist.

Why I hold this position:

The Cosmological Argument does not lead me to accept the existence of a deity, merely the plausibility of a First Cause.

I can't take the Ontological Argument seriously. Furthermore, to connect the C and O Arguments, I don't really think it's possible to prove the existence of something by reason alone. I am especially interested in hearing your thoughts on this because I feel like it would be a contentious topic.

The Teleological Argument makes god seem weaker than he should be. By saying "look at how fine-tuned the universe is!", you are implying that god had to follow a rule book in creating a universe. If you are arguing for a programmer of a simulationist universe, then this makes sense. But for an omnipotent being, having rules to abide by doesn't make any sense. Additionally, the "fine-tuning" is awfully poor in various areas of the universe.

Outside of these three objections against the arguments for the existence of god, I also have some arguments that I personally think cast light against the existence of god:

1.) The Problem of Evil: There are so many refutation attempts at this, I haven't even looked at all of them. Some of them claim evil doesn't exist. Others claim evil exists because we have free will. All of them cast doubt on the wisdom of god. I still haven't gotten a good explanation of natural disasters or why god decided to make life so cruel. Why did god make suffering even a thing? Why make our bodies temporal; why not completely spiritual?

2.) A perfect deity does not need to make anything. Why did god make the universe?

3.) An omnibenevolent, personal deity such as the Western, Abrahamic god, is incoherent with evolution. At what point did he become active in the process? And why did he make it such a conflict-ridden, destructive scheme? Why are our bodies imperfect?

4.) The history of man is filled with myths and legends to explain the unexplainable. We had to satisfy our curiosity and anxiety (a leftover from evolution; false positives). We see patterns in nature where there aren't any. We see causality and meaning behind things that have none. God is merely a placeholder for what we do not know. The world is filled with a diverse set of religions, all claiming to have the truth. Different question here, at what point does philosophy become religion?

5.) Religious acts, such as rituals and ceremonies, are superstitious and cast major doubt on the character of god. What kind of god not only allows, but wants and most often than not demands that people worship it in an irrational manner?

Those are my thoughts that have come to mind thus far. I would like to hear your input and your own views on the existence of a deity.

Soylent

I do not believe in God because God has never given me a reason to believe, and absent of reason, there is no wager to be made that suggests belief is a better bet than nonbelief.

For all the alleged inconsistencies and incoherence of a deity, if said deity compels belief then I presume I would have no choice but to believe. I am not compelled to believe, so I don't.

Cavacava

↪Soylent

Well, there is always Pascal's Wager.

I don't think there has ever been a civilization or society with no religious practice. There must be something about being human that inspires us to seek out reasons,ways of living, beyond our apparent situation. Even after we have reached the conclusion that god cannot rationally exist., we still argue his existence. All the rational proofs of god's existence are labored, none satisfy.

Maybe god exists in the same way the self exists, not in actuality, but in virtual reality.

Soylent

↪Cavacava

Pascal's wager is disingenuous in the way it favours theistic belief over nonbelief. For instance, it doesn't consider the harm that might come from belief in the wrong deity, or if belief held as a result of a wager disqualifies any potential benefits. Pascal's wager strikes me as a tool for fence-sitters that want a reason to believe and have manufactured that reason.

Cavacava

It is pragmatic, not "disingenuous" unless you consider pragmatism disingenuous. What do you mean by the "wrong deity", how can there be a "wrong" in this discussion.

I don't like Pascal's wager either, but it a rational alternative, and rationality does not have to be sincere, just reasonable.

Soylent

Theistic deities that are the sorts that the wager are meant to point towards are anthropomorphized beings with personalities. A deity that has no personality (i.e., no interest in our action) has no pull on the wager. So we must populate the wager with the personality of whichever God we are placing a bet on, and we can definitely get the personality wrong.

Cavacava

Yes, we wager prudentially. If there is no benefit, then why bother? I think that it t is the possibility and uncertainty surrounding life after death that makes the wager tenable, regardless of the deity(ies) involved.

Soylent

It's only tenable because it ignores the possibility that God is malicious. I'm not even sure there's a good reason to say any currently worshipped God is not actually devious and malicious aside from a supposed promise from that deity, but if I were a malicious deity, then I would promise that I was not malicious. It's the oldest trick in the book of malicious deities.

Michael

↪Cavacava

The point is that Pascal's Wager doesn't address the situation where two conflicting religions each claim that a belief in their respective Gods ensures eternal paradise after death and a disbelief of their respective Gods (or belief in other Gods) ensures eternal hell after death.

How do I use Pascal's Wager to choose between Yahweh, Allah and some possible unrevealed God, for example?

Cavacava

Yes, we wager prudentially, if there is not benefit then why bother. I think It is the possibility and uncertainty surrounding life after death that makes the wager tenable, regardless of the deity(ies) involved.

↪Cavacava The point is that Pascal's Wager doesn't address the situation where two conflicting religions each claim that beliefs in their respective Gods ensure eternal paradise after death and disbeliefs in their respective Gods (or beliefs in other Gods) ensures eternal hell after death.

How do I use Pascal's Wager to choose between Yahweh and Allah, for example?

Not sure how your statement follows from mine.

Michael

↪Cavacava

You said that the wager is tenable due to the uncertainty surrounding life after death. I explained that it isn't because there's no way to wager in favour of one God or another. Believing in one God (who could be a false God) is no better than believing in no God.

Cavacava

↪Michael

And I don't think this matters. It is the Ideal one can believe in or not, whatever it might be, the Ideal that supports life after death that supports the wager.

Michael

↪Cavacava

Of course it matters. The decision matrix that provides one with an incentive to choose one way or another fails to apply when the number of options increases to account for two conflicting Gods. If I believe in God A and I'm right then I get eternal pleasure but if I believe in God A and actually God B exists then I get eternal hell. And then there might even be a God C who rewards atheists and punishes theists, so one can't even argue that believing in a God is better than believing in no God.

The wager neither proves the existence of (a) God nor provides a good reason to believe in the existence of (a) God.

Cavacava

↪Michael

The decision to believe or not to believe in god, is no guarantee of eternal salvation. The concepts of heaven and hell, each support the concept of the possibility of life after death, which I think can be the only basis for accepting the wager.

Michael

↪Cavacava

But the basis of the wager is that in terms of probabilities and payoffs it is more practical to believe in God than not believe in God. But this is undermined by the probability of a conflicting God. Therefore there is no basis for accepting the wager. That there could be life after death provides no incentive for believing in God A, God B, or no God.

Cavacava

I think practical value of the choice lies the life one leads, not in this or that particular god. We all want explanations for our situation and we all have to make a choice, either there is an explanation or there is not. The believer chooses a god, because it makes sense of their life and death, the non-believer does not see answers in the proposition of a god.

_db

↪Soylent

Say you can pledge allegiance to ten kings who are all at war against each other. If you do not pledge allegiance to a king, the victorious king will chop your head off. If you pledge allegiance to a defeated king, the victorious king will chop your head off. Either way, your head gets chopped off unless you proved your allegiance to the victorious king. So it's better, ultimately, to take your chances with at least any king than to just sit back and do nothing. That's Pascal's Wager today.

Soylent

↪darthbarracuda

That analogy fails though, because it ignores the possibility of allegiance hating kings that chop off heads for pledging allegiance to them. So we have to consider that pledging allegiance and not pledging allegiance can both result in having your head chopped off. What should I do then?

_db

↪Soylent

True. I suppose I hadn't considered that. Although most gods in our history haven't been that type.

Thorongil

I used to see myself as an atheist but have thrown that away because I feel it relies on a kind of faith that it criticizes theism for holding. — darthbarracuda

You would still be a weak atheist, though. What you seem to be objecting to is strong atheism.

_db

↪Thorongil

Is that not agnostic atheism? Withholding judgement?

Thorongil

↪darthbarracuda

It is. Agnosticism and atheism are perfectly compatible.

_db

↪Thorongil

Cool, then we are on the same page.

Soylent

Although most gods in our history haven't been that type. — darthbarracuda

I don't know about that. A God that allows the Holocaust might be that type of God.

jorndoe

The Cosmological Argument does not lead me to accept the existence of a deity, merely the plausibility of a First Cause. — darthbarracuda

This class of arguments (prime/unmoved mover, first cause, kalam, cosmological, ...) seems the most commonly used for justifying such belief out there. Don't have any numbers though. Maybe it's part of a curriculum or something.

1.) The Problem of Evil — darthbarracuda

In my experience, some simply dismiss these with some hand-waving, and leave it at that. :)
The "free will" defense is brought up for the problem of evil, and the "greater good" defense for the problem of suffering. I'll go as far as to call it predictable; perhaps such defenses are listed in a Catechism.

As for the "greater good", you could equally defend omni-malevolence, and life as we know it is just foot work towards the "greater bad". >:) Or you could defend omni-indifference, towards whatever, nothing in particular. Or... In that sense it's arbitrary, though, admittedly, it does show that the problem of suffering is not a purely deductive argument.

Let me just quote Arkady and Marchesky from elsewhere, regarding the "free will" defense:

... there are at least 2 major deficiencies in the free will defense, viz. that it is impotent to explain suffering caused by "natural evils" such as plagues, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc, and also that it presumes that there is no justified suspension of free will, or that the free actions of man must never be impeded in any way, even if only to stop the most abject horror from occurring. That is, a proponent of the free will defense is committed to believing that for God to intervene to stop the Holocaust (or even just to make it one iota less horrific) would be a greater evil than the Holocaust itself. This view is not only absurd from a rational standpoint, but is rather morally repugnant, in my estimation.

It's as if God has an entirely different standard and still gets to be called good. Even though we view it as a major failing that the world permitted the holocaust to occur.

In general, these defenses don't seem believable to me either. The larger array of problems makes the traditional God of theism implausible.

Regardless, happy holidays y'all.

Wayfarer

I am not atheist, although I sometimes think that the God many atheists don't believe in, is also one that I don't believe in. I think that many theists believe in (and consequently a large proportion of atheists, don't believe in) a 'sky-father' god.

Intellectually I am agnostic - I can't claim to say that I know that there is God. But I also believe that the word 'exists' is the wrong word to use for God. Whatever exists, is by definition temporal (begins and ends in time) and compound (composed of parts). So whatever Deity is, is of a completely different order to anything in the phenomenal realm. And it's important to understand that, as a lot of the debate about God, so-called, is really a debate about a kind of sky father figure. Dawkins, for example, plainly thinks of God as being like a vastly powerful cosmic engineer-director, infinitely larger and more complex than the whole Universe - which is why, for him, the idea of God is so laughably ridiculous.

But it's hard not to be anthropomorphic about God, especially for those who have never been trained to think about it. And religious practice is, in some sense, being trained to think about it the right way. That might not even consist of a complicated doctrinal formulation; it might simply consist of singing, serving, praying, listening. But in the absence of that kind of performative understanding, beliefs often do become mythological ideas that have become now disconnected from their cultural milieux that they do appear ridiculous.

_db

An additional question to provoke discussion: how convincing do you find the argument that a supposed "holy man's" (such as Jesus or Mohammad) philosophical beliefs prove their divinity? For example, Jesus was a pretty radical person back in the days of 1st century BCE Roman Judea, and reading the Bible, I have to admit that many of the things he does and says are quiet altruistic, such as buying only two swords so that he will be caught as an enemy of the state. It makes me wonder sometimes how a man could possibly have come up with that many progressive morals while living in a time of crucifixion and stoning.

jorndoe

And religious practice is, in some sense, being trained to think about it the right way. — Wayfarer

It is - being trained to think in some specific way. And, in absence of other training, it can engender narrow-mindedness, which emphasizes the gain from broadening one's horizons. The number of people (e.g. from the US and the Philippines) that outright deny biological evolution, in spite of the overwhelming evidence, is a testament to this sort of thing.

Wayfarer

What I was trying to say was that there's an element of religion you can only learn by doing - what it means in practice might be completely different to what it seems to mean in the abstract. And I also noted that the metaphors in which religions are clothed, so to speak, might originate in different cultural milieux to our own - and consequently, when there is no longer any experiential dimension associated with them, and their cultural references are no longer meaningful to us, then they appear as a grotesque costume drama, something like a bad school play.

As far as the evolution issue is concerned, the Dawkins of this world do no favours for science education. This is because he and others of that ilk draw inferences from the science which are well beyond its actual domain of application. All of their pseudo philosophising on what evolutionary biology means in terms of life's purpose, or the absence of same, is like a mirror image of the kind of fundamentalism that is the only thing that he understands religion to mean. As esteened physicist Peter Higgs said

"What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists, Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind."

180 Proof

Whether or not "g/G exists", theistic - which includes deistic - claims are patently incoherent (à la via negativa) and/or demonstrably false. My philosophical (i.e. "onto-theological") bottom line: atomism - to wit: IF g/G, IF all is [at minimum] 'atoms & void', THEN g/G too is [at minimum] 'atoms & void' maximally, or perfectively, configured, AND THEREFORE g/G is oblivious, or indifferent, to every non-maximal, or imperfect, configuration of 'atoms & void' (e.g. mortals, stars).

Mongrel

IF all is [at minimum] 'atoms & void', THEN g/G too is [at minimum] 'atoms & void' maximally, or perfectively, configured, AND THEREFORE g/G is oblivious, or indifferent, to every non-maximally, or imperfectly, configuration of 'atoms & void' (e.g. mortals, stars). — 180 Proof

Atoms are obviously capable of consciousness, so how does the conclusion follow?

The Existence of God

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