Question for atheists and theists alike!!!

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Question for atheists and theists alike!!!

(24 posts) (14 voices)

Started 2 years ago by Little_Bird
Latest reply from UrsaMinor

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Atheism

Little_Bird
Member

This is a very difficult question to explain.

It seems quite clear that there is not 100% proof of God's existence or Christ's divinity. (At least none that I have found thus far and I am not really holding my breath). I think Atheists, obviously, agree with that statement and I would say, in general, Christians (possibly followers of all religions) would agree as well.

My question is how "possible" does a creator have to be for you personally to take the "leap of faith" into believing in a creator. (To make this easier lets leave Christ out of this and just say a Deistic creator) For instance. If you found it 50% possible that there were a creator, would you be willing to take the rest of "blind faith". Or 75%. (which is leading into the "likely" zone). I feel like, since there is no 100% proof, and there never will be, at some point everyone (if they HAD to believe) would be willing to accept some faith somewhere. I am just interested to hear what you guys think personally.

This worked a lot better in my head. Maybe percentages isn't the way to go.... If this doesn't make sense we can just forget it...

P.S. this isn't like a trap where at the end I say that a creator IS 50% possible or something. (Hopefully you all know that about me by now haha) I would say, at the minimum a creator is 1% possible. I think we can agree on that. I also think we all can agree that a 99% "leap of faith" is pretty much out of the question.

Posted 2 years ago #
Jeremy
Member

Percentages are not a good way to look at this. When it comes to important issues I don't make "leaps of faith". If there's a decent possibility of something being true (and it's an important issue) then I'll look for confirming evidence. I'm quite open to looking for evidence of a creator, though it's also plainly obvious to me that the Judeao-Christian god is just a myth like all the others. I'm going to assume you don't consider there to be a 50% chance that Zeus is real.

Let me ask you a question based off your first paragraph. If you acknowledge that God's existence is not empirically provable, do you believe it's fair and just to punish people for eternity for not making that leap of faith?

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

If you could quantify the probability of God's existence that precisely, it's fairly easy for me to say how I would react to that information.

Below 30%, I would doubt that God existed but remain open to the possibility that he does. The less probable, the more doubt. Below 5%, I would reject the existence of God as too improbable.

Between 30 to 70%, I'd consider it too close to call and withhold judgment. I'd consider anyone else making a definitive statement on the topic either way to be deluded or engaging in wishful thinking.

Above 70%, I would suspect that God exists but remain open to disproof. The more probable, the less doubt. I'd definitely use it as my working assumption that God exists, and above 95% I'd declare myself to be a believer.

Posted 2 years ago #
Nzo
Member

@LB - For the possibility of a creator to rise, evidence has to be shown. If we were to wind up with evidence, then believing would no longer be a "leap of faith" as the very definition of the phrase is "to believe something that is intangible, unprovable, and without empirical evidence".

I disagree with your %1 possibility that there is a creator. With the given evidence, the possibility of a divine creator, the way anyone on this planet thinks of one, is effectively %0, (think %O.OOOO - hundreds of zeros - 001). The realm of fictitious imaginative possibility, where anything at all, imagined by anyone, has a infinitesimally small chance of existing, somewhere in the billions of galaxies out there, is where yhwh, allah, miracles, mermaids, FSM, and russell's teapot all reside.

Posted 2 years ago #
Nzo
Member

To prove a deistic god would be the very difficult, as any proof for him would wind up merely becoming an observed phenomenon that would be studied until it was understood. Even if it was never understood, the idea that a deistic god created it would still be in the above percentile.

Since a deistic god is also known as an "architect", think of this. In the original movie of The Matrix, you had deja vu, people who were unbelievably fast, and "agents" who took over people's bodies. We observed this, people inside The Matrix probably observed this, but none of us came to the conclusion that there was one "architect" that made it all. We merely figured that the laws of nature could be suspended for those with special powers or authority. While we all know from the next movie that there IS an architect, think of all the people still in The Matrix who have seen "glitches" that wouldn't conclude that the architect exists.

Posted 2 years ago #
Popeye Kahn
Member

I think the problem is that there's no way to assign percentages to such a thing - not in this universe, anyway.

But, to play along, even if I felt the preponderance of evidence were on the side of a supreme being, I'd still be forced to shrug my shoulders and go about my daily business as if god weren't important. That's because - in my mind - theists and Christian theists in particular - really have two large hurdles to surmount. First, they must present compelling evidence that god exists and then they must explain how their comic-book version of a deity is worthy of attention, let alone worship.

At best, the Christian god is arbitrary and capricious, so what is the point of trying to appease him?

Posted 2 years ago #
Mark the Pilgrim
Member

@Little Bird:
"My question is how "possible" does a creator have to be for you personally to take the "leap of faith" into believing in a creator. (To make this easier lets leave Christ out of this and just say a Deistic creator) For instance. If you found it 50% possible that there were a creator, would you be willing to take the rest of "blind faith". Or 75%. (which is leading into the "likely" zone). I feel like, since there is no 100% proof, and there never will be, at some point everyone (if they HAD to believe) would be willing to accept some faith somewhere. I am just interested to hear what you guys think personally."

I had to re-read that twice. In order to quantify something I would think you would need evidence for it. And I would wonder how one would end up finding evidence for a Deistic God under that basis.
But as mentioned before, if there was evidence for something it wouldn't be a leap of faith. But for the sake of a discussion, assuming there was more evidence for God's existence then I would probably say believe in a deity.

A lot of atheists are open to having their minds changed. It's just that the onus is on theists to provide good reliable evidence for the existence of a deity. So far, in my experience, there isn't. I have pretty specific evidence that if a theist were to bring to me I would believe it instantly. Of course it wouldn't make such a malicious God worthy of worship though.

EDIT: I've finally got the hang of those pesky markups.

Posted 2 years ago #
Popeye Kahn
Member

The problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and to date, the evidence for a deity is not even of the ordinary variety.

When biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what evidence would falsify the theory of evolution, he replied: "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian."

Posted 2 years ago #
Nox
Member

51%

If any god had a 51% chance of existing, I'd at least hear him out.

Ok maybe percentages are not the best medium for this. What if we just say, I'd give any god a serious look if it appeared to me that their presence offered a better explanation of some real thing than their absence.

And I don't mean "we don't know how this works so it must be god" (not trying to put those words in your mouth, but this does seem to be the most common argument). What I mean is "this actual thing that we can be pretty sure is real actually makes more sense and is better explained by the presence of a particular deity".

I've already covered some of the biblical issues with the christian god, and why I call him an impossibility rather than a slim possibility. Others in our earlier discussions mentioned a few reasons why any god who actively intervenes in his creation has a few things to explain before he could be taken seriously.

But the god of the deists I'd have to give significantly above a one percent chance of existing.

Gaotu even gets off the hook on the problem of evil and suffering in the world since he never claimed to give a f*ck about things like evil and suffering in the first place. And if he does exist, I wish the guy no ill well.

The problem with Gaotu, and the reason why I stopped calling myself a deist, is quite simply that he doesn't need to exist. His method of creation is to sit back and let everything happen through a series of natural processes. The Universe is the way he designed it because he sat back and let gravity take its course for a few billion years. He designs life on earth by planting a couple single celled organisms and then calling it good with the assumption that the strong would eat the weak and everything would turn out okay.

He leaves no evidence of his existence, but no stories claiming there should be evidence. He leaves no commandments or holy books, and is therefore free of the paradoxes that work against most gods. He makes no real claims beyond existing on some vaguely defined plane and leaving no fingerprints on the plane that can be seen to exist. And of course, being in some unknown way responsible for the first step that lead to life, the universe and everything.

It would be absolutely impossible to prove such a god does not exist. It could even be accurately said that his existence would be consistent with most of what we do know. But how much of a god are you left with.

So I don't really have a problem with considering his existence a legitimate possibility. The reason I put it somewhere below 49% is that it does not really explain anything better than the hypothesis that those natural processes occurred without Gaotu's help. His presence would actually add an unnecessary complication making any theory which invoked him slightly less viable.

Posted 2 years ago #
LRA
Member

For me, evidence of God would have to demonstrate God's existence such that no other competing, simpler claim would make sense (Occam's Razor). God would have to prove his existence and his detectable interference in the natural world in repeatable trials, just like with any other test of the natural world.

If God does not interfere in the natural world at all (making it undetectable), which is what the Deists believe, then there is no way to have any confidence that there is a god. The Deists made God a philosophical "prime mover" that got things going, but they reject miracles and other signs of God's presence in the world because of the lack of evidence for these things. While a "prime mover" argument might seem to solve the problem of infinite regression of cause and effect, it does not (because who made God? or is it really logical for God to be eternal/infinite?)

So, if God could be reliably and repeatedly demonstrated to me and to others, I would accept the fact of the existence of God. However, I will never just "believe" that there is a god.

Posted 2 years ago #
Siberia
Member

I'd think about 51% as Nox said would convince me god probably exists.
But as someone mentioned before, whether I believe it exists or not does not imply I would love or worship it as most religions demand. I could very well 'know' a god exists and not want anything to do with it.

Posted 2 years ago #
Kodie
Member

I don't believe god is 50% possible, there are people who do. I know not all agnostics are like this, but reading some things written by some self-identified agnostics is that it seems to them there is exactly 50% chance for god or no god, and are therefore unwilling to commit, and seemingly to me, unwilling to really give that 50% any thought. I think most self-identified agnostics who think about it are also atheists or theists, on the basis that nobody knows. A lot of people here will gladly say themselves are agnostic AND atheists as the terms are not mutually exclusive positions. Theists do not know either. Some do claim to, but we're all agnostic. 50%ers will also think that not choosing a side is the superior position to take. We do not know, therefore, we should not pretend to know anything of the sort. This frustrates me. If god were 50% possible, he'd be 100% possible, as far as I'm concerned. That's not the amount of proof I need, that's just to say that something like a possibility of god existing would be evident or not. As far as having god prove himself to me today, there is still the greater possibility that I'd suffered some mental breakdown and couldn't be trusted to know.

I find the linked site (below) very helpful in articulating what I think and what I'd think to ask about this part of the discussion.

http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/whats-left-to-be-agnostic-about.html
http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/is-god-impossible-or-kind-of-impossible.html

It is funny you ask in percentages as well, statistics are all around us. People are all too willing to believe in god because something that feels only 10% (or say, 1%) possible happened to them. Statistically 10% possible things will happen 10% of the time, that means it could happen to you. "What are the odds!" Magic and miracles have never been witnessed, but events/circumstances that have very long odds (or only seem to) have. The coincidence of this improbable (but not impossible) thing happening to you is statistically non-zero.

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

Statistics? As the saying goes, nine out of ten Americans can't do basic math at all, and the remaining three aren't very good at it.

Every people who can do basic math don't understand probability and statistics. This is why if a coin toss comes up heads ten times in a row, many people would be willing to be a very large sum of money that the next toss will come up tails. In reality, the probability is still only 50%. This sort of reasoning makes it impossible to correctly interpret the significance of probabilistic events in general.

Posted 2 years ago #
Kodie
Member

That's why people are so amazed when the phone rings right when they were thinking of a person that they tell other people. When they narrowly avoid a car accident that happens to someone else, that some outer force moved their foot to the gas pedal.... I heard on some probably unreliable news program that most people driving make 2 mistakes per minute. Eventually, those mistakes are bad enough to crash into something, but most of the time, we avoid the accident, we don't even realize we made a mistake. Mistakes that don't always cause an accident cause people to categorize these errors as not-errors, a perfectly legitimate and safe way to drive - see? No accidents. Nearly 100% of people will claim they are excellent drivers, out of everyone they know, they are confident in being the best driver. Any one of those people as a passenger in someone else's car notices every single mistake the driver makes that the driver still believes they are not making.

Posted 2 years ago #
WarbVIII
Member

Statistics, no matter how good the data used to create them are are very,very malleable in the right hands,and can be used to prove or disprove just about anything..and percentages are probably worse, something that has happened 100% of the time prior to x event does not mean it will always happen( so many examples to choose from here much like Ursa's above, but I will choose this one,) prior to this Sunday the Cleveland Browns had not allowed an opponent to get 30 points in a game this season,15 out of 15 times on the 16th they gave up more than 40. But probability/possibility is another kettle of fish entirely,and when you consider the multiverse as well..a god or gods(or being humans would consider such) probably exist somewhere within it,or at least are possible,BUT in this universe they are excedeingly unlikely. I would suggest that in any universe that has such beings even if you had no concrete evidence for them the laws of pyhsics(or something like them) would show that they were probable there...at least I would think that there would be some evidence within the physical laws of such a universe that something is able to manipulate thaose laws to it's own designs...or there would be perhaps a lack of concrete pyhsical laws at all(if gods exist,and prayer works, that equals magic pretty much etc.). Whereas in this universe that we inhabit the laws that govern it would pretty much say no god/s exist here,nor have they ever. This seems to me logical at least, so no statistics or percentages for me would matter in this universe as to wether or not a god exists, since one cannot.

Posted 2 years ago #
Kodie
Member

People think "low odds" means "no odds," zero chance of happening by natural means. Yes, they also think something with ordinary probability has lower probability than it does, and also indicates a supernatural intervention. Something like that car accident problem - statistics you can look up will tell you how common car accidents are, or deaths from car accidents as well, that for some reason, people think it is a phenomenon of supernatural intervention when they narrowly avoid one.

If you take a statistical chance of a car accident, take one real car accident, how many people or cars present at the scene narrowly (and define "narrow" here) avoided THAT accident. Probably dozens. In an accident between 2 cars or a car and a person, it is more statistically probable that you would have been one of those who avoided that accident.

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

Kodie, that's exactly what I meant about people being unable to correctly interpret probabilistic events in general.

Posted 2 years ago #
Kodie
Member

It is also important to people to re-assign ordinary inconveniences in their favor. For example, you are impatiently waiting on line with 2 kids in tow, at a Dunkin' Donuts, and you think everyone ahead of you is taking too long asking what's in a jelly donut, and wasting time chatting about the weather with the counter help. Outside, someone pulls into the parking lot too fast and slams into your car. Well, that's a bummer.

So you decide, 2 bummers make a blessing - god made all those people on line take so long, you might have been out there packing your kids into their car seats and all gotten killed if the line was shorter.

WHAT????

That does happen to some people. That almost never happens to anyone. Maybe god is trying to kill you and missed, but he would never "miss," because he's perfect. Statistically, you have almost zero probability of being in a Dunkin' Donuts at any time, even if you go every day for a cup of coffee, or that your kids are usually at school, and what kind of chances you'd have them with you that particular day. The probability is mostly that you wouldn't have been there in the first place, and a coincidence of timing that an accident happens on your car when you are <5 minutes from being in it and driving away so that driver could hit someone else's car.

That's how EVERYTHING happens. Sometimes, they happen to you. Sometimes, they almost do. Why people continue to be amazed at series of ordinary things... they feel special. They are one in 7 billion and the odds of anything specific happening at any particular moment to one person in 7 billion is astronomically improbable. To add up that they happened (100% probability, then) after the fact how improbable it was is cheating. If you were there when it happened, then it was probable enough to happen to somebody - and that's who you are. Somebody.

Posted 2 years ago #
Popeye Kahn
Member

Kodie,
Great analogy. It's like the guy on the news standing with the rubble of his neighbor's house in the background after a tornado. He thinks God was with him to spare his own little sh*t box.

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

Proof that Gawd luvs yu, and your neighbor wasn't really a good Christian after all.

Posted 2 years ago #
Oakley
Member

I'll stick with Occam's Razor. The probability of a rational explanation has got to be vanishingly small to even get my attention.

Posted 2 years ago #
lvngdedgrl
Member

Is it the god of the old testament? I don't really like that god. Is it just a creator who made this place and let it go? That god would probably get my respect for creating something so cool. I can't put a percentage on that, though. I suppose if provable evidence appeared I would give it some weight but you know someone will come up with evidence against.

Posted 2 years ago #
Balstrome
Member

Arthur C Clarke. Any sufficiently advanced civilisation would be considered to be magic.
That suggests that there can be no evidence for a god, that is worth considering.

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

@Balstrome:

The actual quote is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I think Clarke was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek when he stated this. The unspoken corollary is "to anyone who doesn't know how it is done".

If we were to encounter beings who apparently used magic, there are lots of ways of determining whether or not this is actually the case. Technology, no matter how advanced, by definition operates within the laws of physics. Whatever forces were being harnessed to provide the "magical" effects would be detectable at some level, or they could not affect the physical universe. Real magic- or at least anything that I would accept as being real magic- would not leave such traces. Stuff would just happen without a physical cause.

Posted 2 years ago #