Hypothetical: If we assume God does not exist, is theism unreasonable?

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

Imagine reality not as a clockwork machine that was wound up once and left to tick on its own, but as a living, a breathing piece of music that is being composed right this very second.

That’s how I see God.

As something you’re imagining, do you see the problem? Look at the word imagine there, right next to reality, do you not see how incongruous those words are?

@Aluneth

That’s how I see God. He is a vast, sentient mind, extremely powerful and deeply benevolent, who didn’t just kick start the universe billions of years ago and walk away. Instead, he is the active, moment by moment reason that anything exists at all.

No, that’s how you imagine “him”, that’s not how “he” is, for that claim you would require something more than unevidenced imagination.

@Aluneth

Here’s one interesting part: nothing happens automatically. When you hold a ball out and let go, it doesn’t fall because of some blind, mechanical force called “gravity” that forces it down. In fact, at every single nanosecond, every tiny, unfathomably small slice of time, God is actively making a fresh choice.

So gravity doesn’t force things “down”, and it is explained as an entirely natural phenomenon, by a scientific theory (two in fact) that neither evidence nor require any deity. All you have added is a bare unevidenced claim? Occam’s razor….You then went on to make claim after claim, and nary a shred of evidence for any of it. So we can go back to my answer to your thread question, about whether your belief in a deity is rational. I quoted wikipedia:

@Sheldon

Wikipedia explained this rather neatly:

A belief is considered rational - “when it is based on adequate evidence, logical reasoning, or reliable cognitive processes, making it properly aligned with the truth rather than wishful thinking or bias.”

Now do you honestly think the string of question begging assumptions in that post represents a rational belief by that criteria? If so substitute anything for god, and explain what your argument loses objectively, and why?

@Walter

Was it not you who introduced the question of what constituted a rational belief into this thread?

The answer to that question seems to be that theistic beliefs are irrational.

But if you didn’t agree with how we arrived at this answer you’ve had ample opportunity to question how we did this. You could have challenged us at any point along the way. Or if you’d like to do so now, then please have at it.

We could start by asking what logic is, and what purpose it serves, I am happy to give it a try, though I am an uneducated dullard:

Scope: Logic is a method of reasoning that adheres to strict principles of validation.

Purpose: To quickly identify and discard, weak or poorly reasoned arguments, and thus avoid creating, using and / or believing the same.

If anyone broadly disagrees with that I’m happy to listen?

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

He is not bound by any rulebook, duty, or outside force. He does exactly what he wants, when he wants, and what he wants, ultimately, is goodness.

So much for the belief being rational, you just placed your imagined deity outside of the rules or principles of logic. How would one falsify the existence of such a deity btw? And I seem to be repeating myself, but what evidence supports the existence of such a deity?

@Aluneth

If there’s no public proof that I have a stone in my pocket, my stone doesn’t cease to exist; the same applies here, whether there’s direct public proof of God or not is irrelevant to his objective existence.

A false equivalence fallacy, since we know stones exist, they are objectively and nomologically possible, again the idea your belief is rational is undermined with almost every argument you make containing this sort of fallacious argument. Though of course rational argument would only be a bare minimum starting point, you’d still have to evidence a deity exists or could exist for the belief it exists to be strictly rational, something, anything, beyond the bare assertions you keep reeling off.

[Sheldon]

@Sheldon

@Aluneth

not a direct empirical reading.

It is precisely that, it is observed when the brain is functioning, when the brain stops functioning we can no longer observe that consciousness.

1. We can empricially test whether a brain is still functioning.
2. We can empirically test whether consciousness is still present, as it was before the brain stopped functioning, or whether it has disappeared.

No assumptions or inferences have been made there?

[Walter]

It doesn’t work like that, Aluneth.

You made a positive truth claim… God objectively exists.

That’s not claiming there’s a stone in your pocket, which is not direct empirical evidence of it.

That’s claiming that there’s direct public evidence of the stone’s existence.

So where or what is this objective and direct public evidence of God’s existence?

Please present it.

[Walter]

Oh and please stop using the word proof in this context.

Proofs only exist in mathematics and in logic. The empirical sciences do not employ proofs - they obtain evidence. That’s why theories and hypotheses based upon empirical evidence can be overturned and refuted by new evidence.

Whereas a proof in mathematics can never be overturned or refuted by any body of evidence. It stands for all time unless it can be shown that the proof itself was faulty in some way. Which could only be done if the assumptions the proof was based upon were faulty or that its internal logic was faulty.

So, in the context of the stone in your pocket or the existence of God, if you are dealing with empirical evidence, then you are not dealing with proofs. The two are mutually exclusive. These links might be helpful to you.

Common Misconceptions About Science I: “Scientific Proof” | Psychology Today United Kingdom
Science doesn’t prove anything, and that’s a good thing | The Logic of Science
Scientific Proof Is A Myth
There’s No Such Thing As Proof In The Scientific World - There’s Only Evidence
The Fallacy of the “Scientific Proof” | by Stefan Schroedl | Science and Philosophy | Medium
What Is a Proof? | Live Science

Thank you,

Walter

[CyberLN]

@Aluneth

“It” is kind of dehumanizing

Your god is human? To avoid dehumanization, one should apply the male gender to their god?

Whenever I hear someone referring to their genderless god as he, it tells me that they are probably misogynistic. They may think they are not so. They may claim they are not so. They probably are so.

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

The New Testament in particular is in my opinion even more important and accurate than the Old One.

The canonical gospel myths are anonymous 2nd hand (at best) hearsay, written decades after the events they purport to describe. They also make unevidenced untestable and unfalsifiable claims about “magic”, and hail from an epoch of extreme ignorance, superstition, and credulity.

If one believed those claims then one would have no objective criteria for disbelieving any other such unevidenced hearsay, beyond simple bias, forget being irrational, that’s the definition of a closed mind.

Explain to me why you disbelieve The Legends of Hercules are true? Assuming you do.

[Aluneth]

3 things:

1. Before the printing press, most people did not have a Bible on their desk at home and lacked direct access to scripture. Writing materials were expensive or cumbersome to obtain, and you needed human scribes to copy manuscripts manually rather than machine printers. Even if you miraculously handed a book of Scripture to an average Joe, literacy rates were much lower than today. The whole “everyone has a Bible on their desk at home” phenomenon is quite recent, enabled by the printing press. Direct access to scripture was mainly for some clergy members and perhaps richer folks, not for the average Joe. The closest things to scripture that the average Joe encountered were stained glass in the church, church art like paintings, and watching plays.

2. In the past, people did not trust historical claims based on personal textual criticism; rather, they trusted that God guided the living Church and community, and the Spirit they could connect with in the present moment could testify to its accuracy. For many of them, the Spirit was indistinguishable from what you call “physical perception.”

3. Most of the stories in the gospels and the overwhelming majority of lessons and values do not reside in historicity. Many of Jesus’s parables openly used fictive characters, counterfactuals, or hypotheticals, but that does not mean the concepts they illustrated were not true. A great deal of their value resided in symbolism, deeper lessons, and philosophical and theological thought exercises. All of them hold regardless of whether the historicity is literally true. Even if you could empirically prove with certainty that Jesus never existed physically, it likely would not change much in that regard.

Why do we believe moral truths? That is a good question: why should we use our intuition and reasoning to derive moral truths? Should we only accept moral truths that are empirically measurable with a spectrometer?

Why do I actively disbelieve or lack a belief toward the literal physical historicity of stories from other religious traditions? Because I do not care that much about historicity. I look at the author’s purpose for the text and whether they teach accurate philosophical, moral, or theological truths; that is what I mainly look at. If they pass the bar, maybe I can think a bit more about historicity if they explicitly claim it and truly intend listeners to take it as physically and literally true, and if they consider it important. Still, there is no guarantee that I would believe in historicity, but I could consider it, depending on the specifics. If their philosophy, morality, and theology are complete crap, however, it does not take much effort to reject historicity; it is just the next logical step.

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

In the past, people did not trust historical claims based on personal textual criticism

That’s not how historical claims are assessed now, there is a strict criteria, HERE, is a link to a good explanation of the broad criteria. Note the following under source criticism:

1. When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?
2. Where was it produced (localization)?
3. By whom was it produced (authorship)?
4. From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
5. In what original form was it produced (integrity)?
6. What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?

Even as an historical account the canonical gospel myths score very poorly here, and this is a bare minimum, and certainly don’t represent an evidentiary standard for extraordinary supernatural claims for magic.

@Aluneth

they trusted that God guided the living Church and community

A circle reasoning fallacy if ever there were one. Again this suggests such a belief is not rational.

@Aluneth

For many of them, the Spirit was indistinguishable from what you call “physical perception.”

Well physical perception alone, can be woefully unreliable without objective corroborating evidence. We can also objectively test and verify physical perception in this way, which no one has ever done for any spiritual claim.

@Aluneth

Most of the stories in the gospels and the overwhelming majority of lessons and values do not reside in historicity.

Since they are anonymous and written decades after the events they purport to describe, we can’t know whether the claims are true, as alone they represent a very low evidentiary bar, the lowest I’d say.

@Aluneth

All of them hold regardless of whether the historicity is literally true.

I don’t believe this, but please do offer an example and explain why it ‘holds’ as you put it?

@Aluneth

Even if you could empirically prove with certainty that Jesus never existed physically, it likely would not change much in that regard.

Again I am extremely dubious, you seem to be offering a subjective personal opinion, but omitting qualifying words like I think, or personally, or in my opinion. You might as well be telling us your favourite colour for all the objective value we can attach to such a claim.

@Aluneth

Why do we believe moral truths?

Who is we? I don’t believe morals are objectively true, they all ultimately rest on subjective opinion, or biological imperatives, but please do offer an objectively true claim, I’ll bet it either is - or rests on - a subjective opinion / preference.

@Aluneth

I do not care that much about historicity. I look at the author’s purpose for the text

As far as the canonical gospels go, we don’t even know who wrote them.

@Aluneth

it does not take much effort to reject historicity; it is just the next logical step.

I don’t think you understand what logic is or what it is meant to achieve? I defined it’s scope and purpose above, given you predicated this thread to question the rationality of a belief, I can only infer you have already decided the answer, and simply came here to convince us, and not to debate the question with an open and objective mindset. This is reinforced by the way you keep ignoring responses, to preach your subjective opinions at us as you have done here again with a string of subjective opinions and claims that are offered without any supporting evidence or even compelling argument. This is a debate forum, not a venue for anyone to preach their beliefs.

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

Strictly for the sake of argument, let’s assume God does not exist.

Now, if someone believes something that turns out to be false, does that automatically make them irrational?

Lets try one more time then.

1. In order to asses the rationality of such a (any) belief, the assumption it is false is not what is required, since it is not necessarily irrational to be wrong in a belief

2. It is irrational to hold a belief that is based on fallacious / poor arguments and a low / insufficient evidentiary standard.

NB nothing that violates any principle of logic can be rational, basing any argument on - or using - a known logical fallacy, is by definition irrational. As a bare minimum…

Ipso facto, you need to provide your strongest argument, and best evidence, before we can assess whether we think that belief is rational.

NB Your rock analogy above, as one example where you argued two claims / beliefs were the same, when in fact they were a false equivalence, since we know rocks are objectively and nomologically possible, and don’t know this for deities, is an example of basing an argument on a known logical fallacy.

Again from my previous, since it pertains directly to your OP question, yet you ignored it:

Wikipedia explained this (rational belief) rather neatly:

A belief is considered rational - “when it is based on adequate evidence, logical reasoning, or reliable cognitive processes, making it properly aligned with the truth rather than wishful thinking or bias.”

1. You have provided no evidence (arguments are not evidence)- so that’s a fail.
2. Your reasoning / argument has been flawed, even fallacious - another fail.
3. Your rationale is demonstrably not reliable, as the result depends on unevidenced subjective definitions that could be applied to any deity (one example) or just about anything could be defined into existence in this way- another fail.
4. Your posts are littered with subjective claims and imagined ideas, so they often appear no more than wishful thinking, and the bias is obvious as they get you no closer to Jesus or Allah, than they do to Zeus or Apollo - again a pretty obvious fail.

Of course no one is obliged to hold rational beliefs, but it is pretty clear from what you have presented here, it suggests it is not rational. However take that definition and offer something that satisfies it, and we can all take a look. If you really care to debate whether the belief is rational?

[Old_man_shouts_at_cl]

As far as I can see the ’ tells’ are so obvious now.

This poster is a a Christian theist , when caught out the response is not, “oh, yes, I will correct” it was "but,“but I’ve always said this” .

It’s a nope from me regarding any sort of argument for a god,gods or deity.

[CyberLN]

@Aluneth

3 things

I read your 3 things and it occurs to me that you are likely afflicted with Euro-centrism.

@Aluneth

In the past, people did not trust historical claims based on personal textual criticism; rather, they trusted that God guided the living Church and community, and the Spirit they could connect with in the present moment could testify to its accuracy.

Please provide the details used to arrive at this rather bold assertion.

@Aluneth

Most of the stories in the gospels and the overwhelming majority of lessons and values do not reside in historicity.

Please provide the details used to arrive at this one as well.

@Aluneth

Should we only accept moral truths that are empirically measurable with a spectrometer?

Who does this?

I’ve more but will leave it at this for now.

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

for the sake of argument, let’s assume God does not exist.

Now, if someone believes something that turns out to be false, does that automatically make them irrational?

The premise of the question seems ok at first, but the misdirection is in the assumption it is false, which creates a sort of false dilemma. As the author likely already knew, or at least suspected, when he cited scientific ideas that later were discarded, as examples of rational beliefs in things that turned out not to be true.

Rationality depends on the evidence and reasoning a person has at the time, not on whether the final outcome turns out to be true.

If a person uses good logic and strong evidence to reach a conclusion, that belief is rational even if hidden facts make it false.

So the assumption the belief is false, introduced in the OP is irrelevant to the question in the OP, as was pointed out at the start, and many times since.

FYI the answer to the question is no, but the question is designed to get the answer the author wanted, by asking a loaded question. The question is also sloppily worded at the end, as it says ‘does that automatically make them irrational’, when it should ask does it make the belief irrational, as one may hold an irrational belief but it would be inaccurate to say the person is irrational.

[Get_off_my_lawn]

@Aluneth

That’s a philosophical position (causal closure of the physical, I think it’s called), not something we’ve discovered empirically. Could you explain why you think this has to be true?

Any and all interactions so far seen involve some sort of physical interaction, either through radiation/radiation interactions, radiation/mass interactions, or mass/mass interactions, and through interactions with the gravitational field. All of these interactions can be observed empirically. No magic (not involving mass, radiation, or gravitation) interactions have been observed, so there is no reason to attribute unknowns to magic. If you have examples of any interactions we know of that are not based on empirical observations, please list them.

@Aluneth

It tries to explain something deep: why there’s anything rather than nothing.

Why must there be a “why”? Asking “why” implies there is something behind it that caused the universe to exist, for a reason. Under the hypothesized conditions in the extreme early universe, one would have to invoke physical theory that is not yet formulated to explain and model stuff, under which our concepts of time and space and causality most likely will break down. Thus, asking “why?” (implying classical causality) does not make sense. Asking “how?” is much better. Invoking a magic man magically doing magic tricks not supported by empirical data has even less explanatory power than as not yet formulated physics theory that we at least have sort of an indication on how it might work. Magic man is thus not an explanation, but rather a distraction.

@Aluneth

If your answer is that only empirically testable beliefs count as rational, then I’d like to push a bit: how do you justify that standard? Can you test it empirically? Because if not, then it’s a philosophical starting point too.

Philosophy (or theology for that matter), with all its impressing verbose verbiage in a long and difficult word salad is worthless in explaining shit if its conclusions directly contradict empirical observations. If you claim A but observe B (in direct contradiction with A), and still maintain that A is correct, your hypothesis fails, no matter how many fancy words you use to describe it. Empirical data is king.

@Aluneth

what exactly makes a belief rational?

One possible definition would be that a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. And as for evidence, it all boils down to empirical data in the end. If your input data is shit, your output is shit. Shit in, shit out. Data is king.

[Walter]

@Aluneth

No publicly available direct empirical evidence: you can’t put God under a spectrometer or see “God” directly through a telescope. Whether the public square has directly measured God or not is irrelevant to his existence. If there’s no public proof that I have a stone in my pocket, my stone doesn’t cease to exist; the same applies here, whether there’s direct public proof of God or not is irrelevant to his objective existence.

This argument is a clever piece of sleight of hand.

The stone in Aluneth’s pocket is known to him, but not known to anyone else. So he has empirical evidence of its existence but nobody else does. But, according to him, it doesn’t matter if anyone else knows of its existence or not. To him the stone doesn’t cease to exist. To him it is real.

And on that basis he claims that it doesn’t matter if there is any public empirical evidence of God’s existence or not. The absence of the public’s awareness of this evidence doesn’t change the fact of God’s objective existence.

Can you see the sleight of hand?

He begins the argument by talking about publicly available direct empirical evidence of God and then switches to evidence that only he knows. Then, at the end, he switches back to publicly available direct empirical evidence of God.

But the two are not the same.

You can’t use evidence that only you know about to say anything about what other people don’t know. That’s comparing apples and oranges. If nobody else knows what you know then it can hardly be publicly available direct empirical evidence of it, can it?

Therefore, this is a false and specious argument.

Thanks,

Walter.

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

It tries to explain something deep: why there’s anything rather than nothing.

How can something that is defined as defying explanation, be an explanation?

Miracle - a surprising and welcome event that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws.

[Sheldon]

@Aluneth

If God were the sustaining ground of all existence, I mean really the thing holding everything in being, then the “interaction” wouldn’t need to be a separate signal within the system.

Begging the question fallacy, so not rational, by definition.

[Aluneth]

@Sheldon You’re assuming that if God (and what you call the supernatural) were proven false, I would be devastated. You’re assuming that if I knew and believed the Universe was created by a non-sentient force, it would be the end of me. In reality, however, that wouldn’t disprove or render irrational the substance of such a worldview.

Does it prove that prayer doesn’t work? That gratitude for existence doesn’t work? That teaching morality and ways of living through stories doesn’t work? That trying to connect with “the cosmos” and observe the beauty of existence doesn’t work?

Honestly, it feels like little more than a boring bureaucratic name change. Fine. I won’t call it “God” anymore. But there will still be ritual, still existential questions; nothing really changes. Instead of thanking God for my existence, I’ll thank “Luck.”

You’re forgetting that behind what most people call “believing in God” lies a way of living, a way of seeing the world, and most of it doesn’t depend on God’s literal existence one way or the other.

The reason I believe in a sentient mind creating an ordered universe isn’t because I need that sentient mind to avoid having nightmares at night, oh no! It’s because that metaphysical view offers a more coherent and likely account of reality than a non‑mind creating the Universe.

But if you want to believe that my life would be ruined by a non-sentient force, or that I would have to abandon everything I value, your view is overly simplistic.

And again, you didn’t say theists were wrong. You didn’t say that. You said it was irrational for someone to believe a mind created the Universe, even when that person considers it to address problems like fine-tuning or philosophical puzzles. Hmm, okay. So we’re all irrational then? We had secret motives and are laughing in a smoky room?

[Walter]

The reason I believe in a sentient mind creating an ordered universe isn’t because I need that sentient mind to avoid having nightmares at night, oh no! It’s because that metaphysical view offers a more coherent and likely account of reality than a non‑mind creating the Universe.

So your belief here seems to hinge on the universe being created. Or at least coming into existence in some way. But did the universe really come into existence?

That’s not a conclusion drawn by science. The currently accepted cosmological model is the Big Bang. Which does not describe the universe coming into existence out of nothing. Instead, if we look here, this tells us the following.

Big Bang - Wikipedia

The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an early state of high density and temperature.

Extrapolating this cosmic expansion backward in time using the known laws of physics, the models describe an extraordinarily hot and dense primordial universe.

And if we look here, we can see why science doesn’t say that the universe came into existence out of nothing in the Big Bang.

Chronology of the universe - Wikipedia

If you look at the Tabular Summary you will see that the ninth listed phase of the universe’s evolution is called Recombination. There are eight earlier phases preceding it. Recombination took place sometime between 290,00 and 370,000 years after the Big Bang event is theorised to have happened. The essential point to understand about recombination is summed up here.

Just before recombination, the baryonic matter in the universe was at a temperature where it formed a hot ionized plasma. Most of the photons in the universe interacted with electrons and protons, and could not travel significant distances without interacting with ionized particles. As a result, the universe was opaque or “foggy”. Although there was light, it was not possible to see, nor is that light observable through telescopes.

This means that the eight phases preceding recombination in the Big Bang model cannot be directly observed. The universe was opaque to all electromagnetic radiation before then. Which means that those eight earlier phases and the Big Bang event itself have never been observed.

They are only THEORISED to have happened, based upon the physical laws of nature as we understand them.

So your more coherent and more likely metaphysical account of reality is constrained to be PURELY THEORETICAL, because that is all science can say about the matter.

Thank you,
Walter.

[Aluneth]

No, I thought about the whole mindless eternal Universe thing or even multiverse thing.

Even if the Universe was eternal (think: the old Steady State theory before the Big Bang), the main thing to watch out for is that we still need to have okay-ish constants and/or okay-ish “initial” setup; if it’s a mess, the whole thing might degrade before time has time “to work through luck,” or this mindless, non-intelligent Universe could have failed to sustain life.

No matter how you look at it, you need to accept it as a brute fact that the Universe happened to be able to be well-ordered without a mind to support the miracle that we later on call life (and joy). Fair enough. Not that bad, many people hold this view. Other people think a mind is more coherent and a better and more likely explanation why the Universe was well set up and well-ordered.

Same thing for the multiverse itself if you believe in it; you gotta believe whatever thing or process runs the multiverse wouldn’t degrade, stop working and fail to create more Universes. Your multiverse machine could end up out of service, with no one present to repair it.

Anyway, you can believe in luck. Many do. We know that life is a lucky gift. Or you can believe in a powerful intelligent mind who is himself conscious made us in his image, which explains why the Universe is well-ordered. Some believe in luck. It’s not a bad thing, maybe random luck might make you appreciate the miracle of your life more. Some people think the Universe came out of a pure mindless process. Lucky you. Millions think and believe the inference to a mind is just too obvious for them.

There’s a reason why so many theists keep saying it: “If even a simple donut needs a baker, why would you think a much more complex, delicate, and miraculous Universe wouldn’t need an intelligent creator.”

It’s so intuitive and easy to understand. But some of us don’t have enough faith to believe the Universe happened to be randomly here through sheer luck with no mind behind it. In the past for dozens of years, I tried to have faith in this, but I just can’t now; it’s my limitation I admit. You guys have strong belief and faith that there’s no mind behind it all; I’m kinda envious but whatever.