This same logic must apply to science and all its knowledge. There's no way of distinguishing whether atoms, molecules, etc. actually exist or whether these are simply beliefs as you put it. — TheMadFool

Yes, there is.

Atomic theory (which is technically a hypothesis or a series of hypotheses that can be falsified) requires that atoms, molecules, and their behaviors actually exist to make sense. If atoms don't exist but we merely believe them to, then when we do testing and try to use real world applications in industry and such, we find out that reality does not work that way. When we try to combine the molecules together based on our belief, if there are no molecules, then we will quickly find out that we can't combine molecules like we should be able to. When we conduct the tests that should confirm the existence of atoms, the tests come up with results that we would not see if atomic theory is true.

There is no observable difference between someone motivated by a false belief in God and a true belief in God. We know that most of the people who practice religion today are wrong about their professed belief just by the nature of religions being exclusionary to one another. The fact that their respective cosmic entity is nonexistent does not prevent people from worshipping it and behaving on their beliefs. Therefore, we know the existence of God is irrelevant to whether God exists.

To emphasize, I'm not attacking the existence of God, I'm attacking the notion that people worshiping God and following the tenets of a religion is scientific evidence for God.

The Christian believes his conception of God to be true and acts accordingly. The Muslim believes his conception of God to be true and acts accordingly. The Muslim and Christian would scoff at your explanation (I've witnessed it firsthand). If what you are saying is true, then Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism are false and you picked option five from my list (Other Theistic Belief).

1. Judaism
2. Christianity
3. Islam
4. Zoroastrianism
5. Other Theistic Belief

These are mutually exclusive hypotheses about the nature of God. If one is true, the others must necessarily be false. However, all these religions have adherents who are motivated by their unique faith and attribute their behavior to their religion. This means at least four of the religions are incorrect. Therefore, people can be motivated by false beliefs, even if those beliefs are about God. If Islam is false, then Muslims are motivated by a false god- they are motivated by a fantasy. Therefore, I've falsified the hypothesis that God is causing this belief, as I've shown how the belief in a nonexistent entity can generate the observation we see.

Can we test these interpretations, or, at the least, collect more data and evidence to further refine them? Science is not my field beyond some research into it for various reasons, like epistemology and having to listen to people talk about the Kalaam Cosmological Argument.

Paradoxes, like Zeno's, have potential answers.

The point is to resolve the paradox by rejecting the premises. Zeno's paradox is not really a paradox per say, but an argument meant to illustrate that changes we observe, such as motion, are illusions. Unless we can illustrate an error in Zeno's thinking in some way, it holds true.

Correction: light is observed in experiments to behave as both a wave and a particle and we have found that applying light as both a particle and wave is workable in our models. Explanations that explain why we see this observation and how light can both be a particle and a wave are hypotheses. At this point, unless you are a physicist who deals with quantum mechanics regularly or would be considered an expert in the field, whatever you have to say is conjecture. I do not like when people bring quantum mechanics and use it to justify whatever bad argument they are making at the time, considering that most of them have never done any experimentation involving it in their lives and probably could not do physics at all. I am not versed in quantum mechanics, so I would suggest we submit to the position of scientists working the field and let them sort it out.

Islam and Christianity are both hypotheses about the overall metaphysical nature of things, particularly about God. They are complete metaphysical pictures. The contradiction is both internally present in both hypotheses and both systems actively exclude the other from being true. Either God has a trinitarian nature or God does not. Either Jesus was full man/full divine or was full man. Islam specifically states that Christianity is wrong, and vice versa; you cannot endorse Islam without saying Christianity is false. There is no wiggle room between mutually exclusive hypotheses.

No. Logic is a systematic way of dealing with propositions and their truth value. You don't get to say a rule of logic is bad or a fallacy is good just because false beliefs might generate a positive outcome.

But, scientifically, they can't, as they are mutually exclusive hypotheses, as they make contradictory claims about God, what God is, and what God has done. The Trinitarian conception of god that mainstream Christianity adopts is incompatible with the Islamic conception of god, whose theology emphasizes the oneness of Allah. Christianity says Jesus was fully divine and fully man, making Jesus the "Son" part of the Trinity. Islam says Jesus was a divinely inspired prophet, but was certainly just a man and could not be God, as this would violate Allah's oneness and uniqueness. Islam claims God divinely spoke to Muhammad and made him the final prophet. Christianity claims God never spoke to Muhammad, making him a false prophet. Both gods cannot be true, so, scientifically, we know that at least one hypothesis, either the Christian hypothesis or the Muslim hypothesis, is false, and that the adherents of the religion are not motivated by God, but by something else. Correct?

Let's try something more direct.

Which of the following do you believe:

1. Judaism
2. Christianity
3. Islam
4. Zoroastrianism
5. Other Theistic Belief

If you do not want to say, you do not have to. Just make sure you have one picked.

I think the claim:

there is no good reason to reject dualism as a metaphysics — Metaphysician Undercover

only works if the rejection is on mechanical grounds alone. By inverse, this means that we cannot use arguments against physicalism that amount to "your metaphysics are weird and has mysterious elements". Physicalism might pass Occam's razor better than dualism. This is why arguments like the p-zombie argument are important to dualism- if we do not need to appeal to something other than the physical, or even appeal to some other type of monism, then it seems redundant and unnecessary to posit some other substance. There may be a general problem with this though, because as @tom pointed out, dualism might be moving goalposts continually smaller and may suffer from a "god-of-the-gaps" style reasoning. At one point in time, I could imagine that dualists might have argued that chess and number of the things computers can do today were uniquely mind-based activities. You mention creativity. However, I would not be surprised if over the next few decades we see machines getting rapidly better at producing art that passes an artistic Turing test, therefore eliminating the need to appeal to a non-physical substance to explain creativity.

we can move toward assessing the benefits which dualism offers. These include a rational approach to the existence of freewill, intention, and human creativity, as well as an empirical approach to the nature of time, the past being distinctly different from the future. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is where what I alluded to in another post starts to come to light: we are less interested in analyzing the merits of the mind-body problem as a unique issue and are more interested in what we can get out of it.

Then please tell me in what way one could provide evidence/proof that an entity exists? — TheMadFool

Scientifically:

If we can directly observe the entity, well, we can look for the actual entity itself. If I want to prove that there are sharks, I find an actual shark and document its existence.

If we cannot directly observe the entity, then we must do what I described before: we have to first set up conditions that would falsify the hypothesis we have ("This entity exists") and must falsify the other hypotheses that would serve as alternative explanations for our observations and potential evidence of "this entity exists". The point to nail home is "falsify": we have to show why the other hypotheses cannot work and are not true. We cannot appeal to intuition and say "that hypothesis seems less likely than that one". For the observation of "people perform certain behaviors and religious practices in the name of God", please refer to my previous example of Christianity and Islam that shows why we do not need some conception of god to exist in order to explain the observation.

You have that intuition because, as I explained in my original reply, we are biologically programmed and/or socially conditioned to desire to respond to violence with more violence.

To again emphasize, a large part of why I avoid vengeance is that I do not believe people to be morally responsible for their actions in the way retributive justice requires them to be.

You keep saying that, but you never actually addressed a single one of my criticisms.

I am addressing your conception of science. If you have a decent hypothesis for an observation, the hypothesis, by definition, will explain why we see the observation. Furthermore, science throws out hypotheses that are not falsifiable, as they are pragmatically unable to be used and including them would lead us to have to include any possible statement, no matter how absurd (for example, it would allow defendants on trial for murder to say "An alien created a body double that did the murder. You can't prove it false, so you must find me not guilty."). Simply positing a hypothesis and saying it explains our observation doesn't mean anything on its own in science.

Let us look at the observation you initially provided:

People show certain behaviors (acting certain ways, refraining from certain foods, dress, and activities, performing certain rites and activities like reading holy texts, etc.) that they attribute to God.

What are the hypotheses we need to consider? Honestly, I'm having a hard time formulating a testable hypothesis for your position, so I'll simply go:

H1) God exists and indirectly causes people to believe in God, therefore causing people to behave on those beliefs (our observation).

We can consider this against the opposing hypothesis:

H2) People believe in God, therefore causing people to behave on those beliefs (our observation).

The main and obvious difference is that H1 requires God to exist, while H2 is indifferent to the existence of some conception of god. In order to show God exists scientifically, H1 must be true. Scientifically, in order to show H1 is true, you must falsify H2, and vice versa. In order to falsify H2, you must illustrate why H2 cannot account for some other observation that H1 explains. In order to falsify H1, I must show that the actual existence of God is irrelevant to the belief fueling their behavior.

I can easily falsify H1. We know that there are adherents of mutually exclusive religions that behave in different ways and believe in different conceptions of God. The god of Christianity has Jesus as full man and full divine and does not have Muhammad as a prophet. The god of Islam does not have a divine Jesus, but rather a prophet Jesus and a prophet Muhhamad. Christianity and Islam have different practices, theologies, and gods. Only one is right. Therefore, I know that there is a group of people who belief in a god that does not exist. However, does the nonexistence of their god prevent people believing in it and practicing its tenets? Clearly not. Therefore, H1 is false. God's existence is not required to explain the observation of religious practices and belief, as people can act on false beliefs. Therefore, H2 is true.

Now, H2 does not state that God does not exist. God may exist and may interact with humans in some form, thus causing those beliefs to emerge. People might be completely justified in their belief in God and may even be correct. However, the existence of God is not required to explain the observation; mere belief is all that required, regardless of the actual existence of God. Therefore, observing people behaving a certain way and attributing it to God is not scientific evidence for the existence of God.

I do not really like using the word justice because of how closely related it is to feelings of revenge and vengeance. I prefer to think of justice as something related to the "just" state of things. To me, the just state of things has nothing to do with punishing people for their wrongdoings because they committed a wrong and deserve punishment, but, rather, the just state of things is about protecting society at large, promoting stable communities, healing injuries, fostering forgiveness, and setting the criminal to become a more just individual.

Again, I agree with that assessment to a degree. I find arguments directly confronting dualism that amount to "your metaphysics are weird and has mysterious elements" to be poor. However, I generally do not like arguments that revolve around relatively new physics concepts given that, as @Arkady mentioned, we know that our current understandings of modern physics, quantum mechanics included, do not mesh together and are currently incomplete. Yes, there may be some interpretations that allow for immaterial causes to influence material causes, but unless we have reason to believe those interpretations over others, I do not see the point here.

Just because you are using the same logic in the scientific method on the existence of God does not mean you are doing science. — FLUX23

Nitpick time:

I don't think this is the scientific method at all. There has not been an establishment of how to falsify the hypothesis, why the observations cannot be explained away by another hypothesis, or even a proper way of looking at cause and effect, i.e. science looks at the effect, observes it, and does testing to falsify other competing hypotheses for this effect until only one likely canidate remains, while this is an argument for increduility for a cause, then cherry-picking data from observations and making them fit into the hypothesis.

I've appeared to have misunderstood your initial point. My bad.

(1) the mind is res cogitans.
(2) the body is res extensa.
(3) mind and body interact.

I don't think this analogy potrays the entire picture. The total mind-body problem, at least as I was taught, contains four premises:

(1) the mind is res cogitans (immaterial).
(2) the body is res extensa (material).
(3) mind and body interact.
(4) res cogitans and res extensa cannot interact.

Dualists deny premise four.

The assumption is that causes and effects occur in space and time. Descartes defines minds as not being located in space and time. According to Descartes' definition of mind, minds can't be causes or effects. Interactions imply causation. So, Descartes' definition is wrong. In order to explain mind-body interaction, minds must be located in space and time. If minds are located in space and time, then Descartes' definition of mind is false, and dualism is false, too. — quine

You put the problem right there in the first sentence. You assume (hold to be true for no reason) that causality can only occur in space-time, which can be argued against not only by mind-body dualists, but by anyone who has any conception of something beyond the physical (or even a conception of the physical that goes beyond space-time). So, I guess theism is assumed out the window.

Descartes' solution is also false. Pineal glands themselves are extended in space and time. Minds that are not extended in space and time cannot be moderated by pineal glands that are extended in space and time. — quine

Descartes is publishing around the mid-1600s. I think attacking the whole pineal gland thing is pointless.

I agree with you if we are talking generally, but people (in my experience, usually dualists) try to use their viewpoint on the mind to defend a viewpoint on something that matters (free will or the existence of non-physical objects). It usually is not argued for intially, but is a careover or a requirment for another belief.

That very well maybe the case and I honestly think lines like this are worth talking about and arguing for. I actually am on the physicalist side. My overall point is that the argument in the OP is bad and that, until such a time comes in which the physicalist account can deal with its own mechanical problems, we should avoid using arguments against dualism based on potential unexplained/weird mechanical issues.

And mind-body indentity theory has the hard problem of consciousness and the notion of how physical matter, in some forms, produces consciousness and minds while it does not in other forms.

Perhaps. The mind and body are clearly linked, that is for sure. The question is how. The OP presented an argument.

Again, the argument I intitially presented is a dualist parody arguing against physicalism. Both the OP's argument and the parody I presented rest on an increduility of the opposing position, pointing out that the other side has not shown and has not presented a way in which the mind works. For the dualist, the physicalist has physical matter somehow produce the mind and consciousness, the mechanics of which has not been illustrated. For the physicalist, the dualist has two different substances on different modes of existence interact, the mechanics of which have not been illustrated.

My point is that the arguments null each other out and that we should appeal to other arguments for and against dualism/physicalism, like Occam's razor.

Yes, minds clearly interact with bodies. You are assuming that immaterial causes cannot interact with physical causes, i.e. you are assuming your premise.

Yes, it's modus tollens.

However, I was talking about the premise:

If mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal, then mind and body cannot interact. — quine

Why should we accept it as true?

How? Please assert how you falsified and/or demonstrated how the substance dualist is false.

Descartes says that the essence of mind is thinking. He claims that the essential feature of body is extension. It implies that Descartes thinks that mind is beyond space and time. Anything beyond space and time cannot interact with something in space and time. — quine

This is the entire crux of the problem. The dualist clearly believes that the immaterial, non-spatial mind can interact with the material, spatial body. They reject the notion that this interaction is prima facie wrong until proven otherwise. The dualist thinks the mind is obviously not material, and holds their position to be more likely than a physicalist notion of the mind.

Dualist response:

Clearly, the immaterial substance of the mind and the material substance of the body do interact, as we can clearly see observe them doing so.

I'm not endorsing the argument that I presented. It is a bad argument. However, it is bad in the same way that the OP argument is bad. They carry the same amount of weight. Pretty much, both are arguments from ignorance: the negating premise in the modena tollens is simply asserted because the creator of the argument does not hold it to be true.

The problem is not that dualism fails to explain so-and-so, but that dualism defines mind and body not to interact one another. — quine

Dualism specifically defines that the mind and body do interact with each other.

My argument against physicalism (and possibly some of variants of dualism, such as emergent dualism:

1. If physicalism is true, then physical matter produces the mind and consciousness.

2. It is not the case that physical matter produces the mind and consciousness.

Therefore:

3. Physicalism is false.

Christians believe that to take an innocent life is immoral. In their minds, the conceptus (I'll use this word to describe everything inside the womb from conception to birth) has a soul and is therefore given the status of person. To say that it is okay to kill the conceptus in the womb because their soul will be safe is akin to saying that it is okay to kill an innocent person who follows Christ because their soul will be safe. Based on my experiences with the matter, I would venture to say that Christian ethics tends to avoid consequentialist style ethics in their justification and reasoning about killing.

There is a philosopher (Don Marquis) who does argue along the lines as listed above. The reason why it is wrong to kill a person is that we are denying them the life and experiences they would have experienced if they were not killed. By the same vein, to abort the conceptus is to deny the life and experiences that conceptus would have one day had. There are a number of problems with this position, so I do not know many who accept it.

Don Marquis is important to note though because he indicates the range of positions on abortion. I would say the consensus for a position on abortion is much stronger among people who identify as Christian than those who identify as nonreligious. The nonreligious have a wide range of thought on the permissibility of abortion. Generally, it comes down to either the conceptus not reaching the moral status necessary to override other moral concerns, the permissibility to kill in certain circumstances extended to abortion, or some combination of these two lines of thought.

The issue is that the old traditions of foundationalism (DeCartes and the like) suffer from problems. Even the more permissive inductive versions of foundationalism are fraught with problems.

The problem can be traced back to the notion of justification. Normally, we require some sort of justification to say we know something. The intent of justification is to reduce error in our beliefs. For example, we want evidence that reduces the possibility of error and closes off alternate possibilities to what appears to be the case. However, there is no number that shows how well we are justified, or even what cut-off number would be permissible. In other words, there is no exact science in epistemology once we go beyond the realms of established scientific, mathematical, logical, or statistical methods. Even then, there are problems, particularly that the foundations of these fields' epistemologies are always in question. Further, as some have commented, some epistemologists demand a level of rigor to hold knowledge such that even if we accept their epistemological systems as sound, most people do not know basic facts about there day-to-day life.

The "I think; therefore I am" pretty much is the best we are going to get about our own existence. As the argument goes, I can doubt what I think is true, but I cannot really deny that there is something that is doing the thinking. In other words, by having thoughts, I know that something must exist: namely, my own mind. Of course, there are some doubts about this argument, but I think that it is pretty good against most criticism.

If you are looking for a good, knockdown answer to the problem of external world skepticism, then you are probably not going to find it, as if there was, we would not be having this discussion and skepticism would be considered something only the insane consider.

There are pragmatic considerations, as even though I know the external world may completely be a lie, everything in the past indicates to me that I have to do certain things to persist and that this is the only world I am aware of, so, therefore, I ought to act as if the world I perceive is real. However, I do not find solely pragmatic foundations to be good for epistemology, so I think that this answer is insufficient.

Then you do not understand the original p-zombie argument.

Logically conceivability entails logical possibility. Logical possibility means that there exists a possible world in which p-zombies exist. Therefore, there exists a possible world in which everything is physically the same, except that some of the "humans" are p-zombies i.e. physically identical, but not conscious. Therefore, what we call consciousness cannot be reduced to the physical, and therefore, there exists something beyond the physical, meaning physicalism is false.

Let's put an example to it:

There is our world. Let's call it World 1, or W1 for short. In this world, Chany is a person who has a physical body, brain waves and all that, and is conscious. There is another logically possible world, World 2, or W2 for short, that is exactly the same as W1 except that instead of Chany, there is p-zombie in place of Chany. Again, p-zombies are logically conceivable, meaning that they are logically possible; there is nothing wrong with W2 potentially existing. Let's call this p-zombie zombie-Chany. Chany and zombie-Chany are physically identical: same body, same brain states, everything. The only difference is that Chany has consciousness and zombie-Chany does not. Whatever explains this difference, it cannot be physical, as Chany and zombie-Chany are physically identical. Therefore, we need to appeal to something beyond physicalism to explain consciousness: therefore, physicallism is false.

Leaving aside all the problems tom alluded to with premise two, like sleeping persons and persons in comas:

We need to establish what exactly you mean by "human". I will assume you are referring to persons (in this case, human beings with thoughts of their own), not just the biological bodies of a human based on premise two. I can reject premise one, as under that definition, p-zombies are not human. They are simply animated human bodies that perfectly replicate the physical aspects of a person, right down to their brain waves, but do not possess consciousness.

If you want to argue human in terms of biological body, then premise two is false, as p-zombies would be human and not possess consciousness.

Also, to point out, p-zombies do not need to actually exist; they only need to be logically conceivable.

I never said that I endorse full-blown determinism. I'm agnostic towards determinism being true; the answer is irrelevant to me in so far as I only care about responsibility.

Given that almost all knowledge in inductive in nature, we cannot prove most things absolutely false. We can, however, look at how the universe and our decision making process functions and gather evidence. If we have a bunch of good reasons for believing determinism to be true and no good reasons to believe determinism false, then we can justifiably believe determinism to be true.

I disagree that it is relevant. It has a lot to do with personal responsibility, so if we cannot find a legitimate way to give responsibility in a sound manner, we are left with a couple issues, like what we should do about punishment.

I agree with what you are saying. I would say that lacking proper epistemilogical proof does create a gap in which to deny ontological determinism. A relatively weak gap, but a gap none the less. However, I have had a friend try to argue for free will libertarianism down this line of thought and have read a philosopher (Robert Kane, I believe) who has argued this very notion.

On the second point, and at the risk of derailing towards a free will debate, determinism in decision making creates problems for incompatibilists. Free will libertarians and hard determinists would be looking for the ability to do otherwise (i.e. a way to avoid complete determinism in our actions) and the gap allows this to happen without the need to appeal to some sort of dualism.

I know that we can make probability assignments to quantum events and that there is definitely room to argue quantum events are deterministic, though we lack the ability to properly see the causal relationships. I agree that it is agnostic towards determinism and that it does not truly confirm or deny it. It is just hard to affirm determinism is true when there is something that can possibly defeat it.

However, I admit this may be my personal interpretation brought out by dealing with free will libertarians trying to argue quantum mechanics allows them wiggle room to insert the power to do otherwise. The rest of the world might believe quantum mechanics is obviously deterministic, it is just the case that we cannot clearly show determinism.