A pastor tells his flock three things to ask an atheist. You don’t even have to read it to know that a lot of stupidity will follow. But I’m game, give it a shot, believers, and ask me those three things — I’ll try to answer through the incredulity and laughter.
What do you do with your Guilt?
What guilt? I don’t have any guilt at all about imaginary things, so I’m not at all distressed by imaginary Eve eating magic fruit in a fantasy land. When I do feel guilty about wrongs done to real people, I try to make amends to them — casting the debt onto the shoulders of a 2,000 year old dead guy really doesn’t help at all.
What about you? Do you think it’s enough to pray silently and ask Jesus to forgive the bad things you did to real people?
Where did the Universe Come From?
I don’t know. We’ve got a long chain of natural, material causes going back over 13 billion years, though, and a wealth of detail revealed by science that has no foreshadowing at all in your holy books. I think it’s more reasonable to go with the validated methods and predict that we’ll find a natural process at the beginning, with no need to prestidigitate a Deus ex machina into existence.
So…where did your god come from?
Can you prove there is no God?
Nope. But there is a long list of things I don’t believe in — fairies, leprechauns, demons, ghosts, winged monkeys, Donald Trump’s hair — and I don’t need to ‘prove’ their absence, it’s up to you to give me evidence that they exist. I’m willing. Show me some verifiable, credible evidence that the Loch Ness monster actually exists, and I’ll accept it. In the absence of anything but badly done fake photos and enthusiastic tourism boards, though, it’s sensible to disbelieve.
On this one, the ball is in your court. Show me evidence for your god that doesn’t trigger a sneer on my face.
I’m also going to suggest that you get a smarter pastor, one who can actually come up with good questions that might challenge an atheist.
What a terribly lame set of questions. I’m surprised that the question “if man is descended from apes, why are there still monkeys?” wasn’t among them.
Holy crap. No, it’s not fair. The universe isn’t a fair place. The best we can do is try to make life as fair as possible for the living (so there’s still hope that Bush and Cheney will see the inside of a prison cell).
For the third question, in particular, the first response needs to be, “Define your terms”. Specifically, they need to define what traits they claim “God” has. If they go with a non-interventionist deist creation entity, eh, acknowledge that you can’t prove that there’s no Absentee Sky Daddy who never checks up on us. If, OTOH, they refer to, well, any particular supernatural entity actually worshipped by human beings, then you can usually show some aspect of their scripture that doesn’t mesh with reality.
Holy crap again, the comments…
I don’t have faith that the sun will rise. I know it will because I’m still here and any event that would stop the sun from rising would mean either the sun is gone or the earth is either gone or has stopped revolving.
I don’t have faith that the plane will land. I know it will thanks to gravity. I’m confident that the science behind the engineering that enabled it to fly in the first place will also bring it down safely – barring some catastrophic failure. Then it will still land, just not safely.
I don’t have faith that the plants we planted will grow. That’s why I’m out there watering, weeding, and fertilizing.
None of this requires faith, for crying out loud.
@2: Moreover, if Hitler or Stalin accepted Jesus on their deathbeds, then they get off scot-free anyway. Instead, Jesus (in some sense specified by a bunch of soteriological gobbledigook) gets punished for murdering millions of people. It’s a bait-n-switch: Everyone deserves eternal torture, but Christians get to exempt themselves from it while still enjoying revenge fantasies about other people.
From the article: The atheist might say that they don’t believe in God but the Bible says that they actually suppress this knowledge.
Aaaaaaand the standard calumny that actually we know there’s a God; we’re just in denial. Because the Bible says so. Fuck you, Pastor.
Holy shit. The comments are getting worse…
My eyes can’t roll any further back. How miserable do you have to think life, humanity, and the world is to have these thoughts?
Okay, I’m done with the comments. My brain is starting to melt…
I can’t take any more. It’s getting painful.
Can’t say I really have anything to ask this pastor. His ilk have wasted enough of everyone’s time; he’s not getting that much more of mine.
Sad life that, though. Pestering honest people with such shallow unthinking doubletalk…
He mentions guilt. I wonder if he ever feels any for that?
Ah, another sufferer of Capitalizing very Important Words. I guess they think it imparts gravitas or something, I mean, Gravitas.
#3 Yes I can. The bible says nothing is impossible for God in multiple places. Russel proved there’s no such thing as omnipotent over a century ago. If nothing is impossible for God, can God make an immovable object? If it’s immovable, then God can’t move it either.
Good question, Did not know Guilt was an object with which something can be done. Guilt is an emotion that I experience when I did something I myself disagree with; an inconsistency of behavior, that I want to keep hidden. What do you do? Just pray and the guilt will vanish in a puff of godmagic?
oh, guilt is imposed upon one for doin something others disallow, so guilt can be removed when they forgive you. how does that happen with that skygod person? when you pray for forgiveness do you hear words whispered in your ear saying “you are forgiven, guilt is lifted.”?
and, urp, uhgh,
Why do you ask that question? do you assume I have guilt for some transgression, by default?
Your supposed god is so “good”, he made everyone guilty to begin with, just to forgive them later? Sounds a little egotistical to me. “I forgive you for existing, thank me now!” is what I hear from that imaginary guy in the sky, from your words.
What do you do with your Guilt?
What, in particular, do you think I feel any guilt over? In regard to the guilt I do feel, I try to: a) identify the real cause; b) try to understand and learn from whatever action of mine (if any) I feel guilty for; and c) try to make amends, or at least apologize, to whoever was wrongly harmed by my actions.
Where did the Universe Come From?
Gee, tough question. It definitely came from something, or someone. And that brings us to the next question, where did the place or entity that the Universe came from, come from? Turtles all the way down perhaps?
Can you prove there is no God?
Actually, yes, in much the same way we’ve proven, for all practical purposes, that there are no zombies. Can you prove there is only one god?
re Tabby @4:
“faith [gobbledeegook]”
quibbling (not at you Tabby, just at the comment you blockquoted@4). There is a difference between “trust” and “faith”:
– Trust is belief based on prior evidence.
– Faith is belief with zero evidence.
see the difference? I didn’t think they do. ask more questions, those 3 in the OP are not enough. give us moar.
What do you do with your Guilt?
What is this “Guilt” with a capital-G you’re talking about? Some generalized idea of guilt that comes from your own beliefs? If so, you need to define it and prove it’s a valid concept before asking me manipulative insinuating questions about what I do with it.
Seriously, this sound like a question Nancy Grace would ask some poor sod on her show. And the only valid answer to such a question would be “What the fuck are you trying to insinuate here?”
I tried the “where did you god come from, then?” thing 39+ years ago in public school when the whole classroom including the teacher were confronting me after discovering I was an atheist.
“He didn’t HAVE to come from anywhere, HE’S GOD!” they yelled to me, as if the question itself was obviously ridiculous.
When the topic has come up since, they always say the same thing.
Same way they constantly claim that something they have said “proves” the bible – they just can’t logic. They don’t get the definitions of words. You can’t pierce the bubble.
Answering their questions is pointless, because the questions are asked with no intention of listening to the answers. They are asked with no real need to be addressed to anyone… they are asked as a way for the questioner to puff out their chest, to reaffirm their own belief.
Yeah, Jafafa, that’s about the level at which all of those evangelists think: grade-school kids shouting down dissent with whatever words they remember from their parents. Either religion stuck them at that developmental level, or they stuck themselves there using religion as their excuse.
Ah, the pastor giveth — and the pastor taketh away:
Uh huh. Big surprise here. People usually ask questions of the other side so they can debate and argue within the normal framework of a mutual search for truth. I don’t mean “argue” as in “quarrel,” but argument in the philosophical sense, with point and counterpoint. Both participants are at least theoretically prepared to be persuaded.
This pastor however appears to recognize that this may not be a good idea. His shallow questions are I think mostly “gotcha” moments which are best imagined by the believers themselves. Approaching an actual atheist — particularly an ‘intellectually-engaged’ one — is likely to be tricky.
Thus the warning to back off if it looks like the two of you are starting to become engaged in a — oh dear — debate. That’s a red flag. Anything other than a hit ‘n run goes against the validation of faith, faith, faith as the best method of drawing proper conclusions. When push comes to shove, religion isn’t supposed to make rational sense. There wouldn’t be any special virtue or distinction in being a believer if it did.
But hey, I welcome these nice little encouragements to break out of the self-reinforcing bubble of mutual agreement in a tightly-knit closed-minded community. The more they ask stupid questions, the more likely they are to get snappy answers.*
(*Bonus points for recognizing the reference.)
typos… it was 30+ years ago. I’m not THAT ancient…
“Where did the Universe Come From?”
Well, when a mommy universe and a daddy universe love each other very much…
Jafafa Hots @16
I love how creationists argue that life and the universe is just too darned complex to just be, but an intelligent monster prone to devastating tantrums who is powerful enough to make everything? They’re fine with “he just is!”
That doesn’t even make sense. What do you do with yours? It’s not a physical thing I can pick up and put in a fucking box, or hand to another person. What the fuck?
This pastor however appears to recognize that this may not be a good idea. His shallow questions are I think mostly “gotcha” moments which are best imagined by the believers themselves. Approaching an actual atheist — particularly an ‘intellectually-engaged’ one — is likely to be tricky.
Like most competent con-artists, religious evangelists choose their marks carefully, and tend to avoid anyone who looks or sounds sharp enough to actually debunk and derail their script. (I’ve seen web-pages specifically advising Christian evangelists how to deal with Pagans — they know their standard manipulative bullshit doesn’t work on us!) Their favorite targets are college students who are not fully mature, away from home, unsettled by the new environment and knowledge they’re suddenly having to process; and who thus have little or no firm intellectual ground to stand on. And they don’t ask questions or use respectful persuasion either — they shout and harangue and hound and call names and pretty much bowl people over with their rigid belligerent self-righteousness, which weak or irresolute people mistake for confidence and resolve.
“What do you do with your guilt?”
I use it to become a better person, by allowing it to remind me of the terrible things I have, or could do to others. Oh, I’m suppose to feel guilty because I deny the existence of the big G. If that’s the case, what do you do with your guilt about Santa Claus.
“Where did the universe come from?”
Don’t know, but from the smattering of physics I’ve picked up, the bible is a dubious source. It doesn’t really seem to describe the beginning of the universe, and there’s not a skerrick of mathematical equations in all of it, much less genesis.
“Can you prove that there is a God?
Can you prove that there’s a big foot? Not that proving big foot would prove god, so don’t get your hopes up. But the reason I ask is that I have the same reason for not believing in god as I do in Big foot. There’s no corroborating evidence for either. The things I’d expect to find if big foot existed (scats, fur samples, Big foot game hunting companies) don’t exist. Nor do I find these things for the almighty.
And even if there were a god, I’d be loathed to worship him. There’s far to much suffering in pain in the world. Most of which is attributable to It.
That guilt question is the stupidest one. I try to fix the problem and apologize to the person I’ve wronged. If they forgive me the guilt is wrong. If not, then I continue feeling bad for a while.
Thumper, I agree. What the fuck?
Oops, that should say “the guilt is gone“, not “wrong”.
many here have thought about this for a long time. By this I mean religion. Given that there is no demonstration of the reality of a god actually existing religion is by default as well as proclamation irrational, faith is an emotion and not rational.
So faith is an emotional experience. What is the nature of this emotion? It seems to me to be a combination of other emotions maybe most of them. Is it the emotions that are the “problem” or is it how they are taken advantage of by priests for their own benefit of power and authority?
Am I making any sense?
uncle frogy
yes. these are not questions that require answers. these are those questions we classify as “rhetorical”. No answers required; just stuff to “think about”.
For example, question #2: is left unanswered. With a full paragraph refuting atheistic answer of “big bang”, while not providing any kind of alternative. Not even the faithist answer of “God is eternal and HE made it”. He just throws in a few random bibble quotes as his evidense [sic]. Just nuthin, saying big bang is also faith and if you said that about anything else you’d warrant a psychiatrist. Never realizing he’s saying it about himself. If you ask someone where the chair they’re sitting on came from, and they said “God gave it to me”; I’m pretty sure even that pastor would call a psych about that response.
Well, of course, as long as the Bible says so…. What are guilty Christians supposed to do, if they don’t believe the book’s claim that I believe in a God? Do all good non-guilty Christians believe that everyone else is a good non-guilty Christian who doesn’t need to be converted? Why does it seem like there are so many terrible Christians who believe that not everyone is on the same page (but secretly don’t believe that, because everybody’s a good Christian)?
That’s a real puzzle. But it might account for why apologists’ arguments seem so incredibly unconvincing. Of course they are: that was deliberate. This is just a weird and meaningless game we all play to pass the time.
We don’t know that nothing existed before the BB. You can learn this by actually learning about the physics itself, not by reading about a person who said something.
No, not right. We don’t know. As far as anyone can tell at this point, there is no contradiction, whether the world was finite in the past or infinite in the past. We just don’t know. Maybe we never will.
That doesn’t follow. None of it. But we can be pretty sure the whole universe isn’t like a chair.
And a great deal of faith is impossible, I guess… technically. It is somewhat surprising that “impossible” things are those which require lots of the opposite of that thing. But we know that Christians don’t have any, and the Bible has established that deep down everybody agrees. So there just isn’t enough faith to go around to make any of these hypothetical atheists of which you speak. I’m sure somewhere in the Bible it says faith is really, really bad — and that’s why everyone is actually good — so it all works out. I’m not sure how I know the Bible is right about that, but I do like good things, so that must be the case.
Why ask this? Who are “they” — the people who can’t possibly exist, based on some bullshit technicality that you just made up? You were idly speculating about logical paradoxes before, but now they’re being strewn about freely. They’re all over the fucking place now, because you keep saying more and more nonsense.
No, it’s not fair. We apparently have a different idea of “justice” though anyway. Torturing them in hell, for example, wouldn’t be a way to get anything like that.
Morality is something real, not absolute. Making a factual statement doesn’t imply you’re making an “absolute” statement. If there were any such absolutes and there were a god, how exactly are those two things supposed to fit together? Are they both supposed to be magical? Or what?
Fallacy of Argument from Consequences. Proves nothing.
Besides which, if their god existed, all Hitler and Stalin have to do is believe jesus is god to be saved. Faith is all it takes to get into heaven in most of the Protestant versions of xianity. (For Catholics it is faith and good works. This difference is so important to them that they still believe most Protestants are Fake xians.)
Xianity isn’t a source of morality. They have a get out of hell free card and use it often.
Funny how all those Christians, so eager to dispute and discredit atheists like PZ and his regulars, haven’t shown up here to follow up on that dialogue they wanted to start. These are THEIR questions, so why aren’t they here to ask them and hear our answers?
Maybe they can’t get here because they all lost their bookmarks to PZ’s site…
What do you do with your Guilt?
I have a suggestion as what you can do with your imagining of my “Guilt”…
Sigh.
God of the Gaps. It was dumb thousands of years ago and hasn’t improved with age.
Yes, we humans have chased your god all the way to before the Big Bang. And he is about to be evicted again. By the Multiverse.
Most modern Cosmology models imply a Multiverse. And god is getting his toys and cats together and preparing to move again.
PS Fundies don’t believe in that god anyway. They believe in a god who has a thing about knocking up virgins, occasionally wanders around earth in a human meat suit and hates gays, scientists, Democrats, gun control, and Moslems.
Most Apologetics are stupid for a reason.
They aren’t aimed at converting normal people. They are aimed at keeping the faithful victims from thinking.
They aren’t reasons to believe. They are rationalizations to believe.
Besides WL Craig, the most laughably weak ones were from CS Lewis. His jesus Trilemma was Fake, there are at least six alternatives. Jesus, liar, lord, lunatic, myth, mistake, misattribution.
We can’t dump it on an imaginary sky fairy named jesus.
So we try to minimize it and correct our wrongs now, not after we are dead.
To take one example, I don’t feel much guilt for being a xian for 45 years. But OTOH, I’m spending the rest of my life not being a xian and cheering as the religion slowly shrinks down small enough to go drown in a bathtub.
Can God find an English word that rhymes with orange?
sporange.
“For rhyming demons, nothing vexes quite as much as ‘orange’.
It’s not precise, but in a pinch, I often go for ‘whore binge’.” — Etrigan
I don’t see how that makes a difference. For a long time, a lot of theists thought the world was infinite, in some sense or another (and some still do). That didn’t pose any major problems to claiming a god was responsible for creating it, as well as intervening in it whenever/however that god wanted. Characterizing a god as a “first cause,” that there’s some temporal relationship which the god was in, by doing something literally before the world existed in order to make it, is only one possible way they could imagine it, not the only way. If you put a wrench in that plan, with any evidence at all (of course there is no evidence of a multiverse), they can still fall back to the other sort of option, because none of it’s based on empirical evidence that pins them down, into having only one specific concept of a god or another. Many do switch back and forth between saying a god caused everything and is “outside of spacetime,” without worrying much about whether either of them is right or whether those are internally consistent.
It’s also not clear how (or if) the multiverse would help us explain anything about our own universe. It may be true for all I know (or something about it is on the right track), but where does that really get us if it is?
I wonder if this Pastor is engaged in a dog-whistle conversation with his flock and his ‘loyal’ readers. As you all have demonstrated, the questions don’t move any of us to doubt our atheism. In fact, thinking about them tends to strengthen it. So maybe these three questions are intended to keep people in the fold. Keep the sheep in the flock.
Orange
/technically correct, the best type of correct
@39: Yes, this has to be seen primarily as preaching to the choir (as also are most of Ken Ham’s fulminations). Not that there aren’t a few shallow thinkers who left church when they hit adolescence because it was boring, and took to styling themselves atheists because it felt edgy, but never really thought any of it through, and a decade or so later hear crap like this and fall for it. But probably not all that many.
Honestly, people in general do this. For reference see scientists who deny that there is any sexism keeping women out of those fields. They’ll acknowledge a numerical disparity but then their curiosity just evaporates at that point and they’re fine with “that’s just how it is” as an answer, when they wouldn’t be for any other topic. Human brains constantly work to protect our preconceptions. That’s why science and formal logic are even things in the first place.
I think my brains just fell out of my head attempting to read that….
I’m all for “simple” questions, but not simplistic questions.
What is guilt? Does it relate to my relationship to other people? If I’m concerned about my relationship to other people, then I suppose I should do something about that.
Who says that the universe is anything other than an abstract collection of all things we know about? And, if matter and energy is neither created nor destroyed, then I cannot imagine “it” came from anywhere!
What’s a ‘god’?
Tabby Lavalamp @7
Thanks for braving the comments over there, I don’t think I could have read through them without wanting to tear my hair out.
Are these people so miserable that the only reason they have for getting up each day is the promise of an afterlife? I mean, seriously, by their reasoning, why would you ever read a book? You know the book is eventually going to come to an end, and there’s not going to be an “afterbook” that you can keep reading for eternity, so why bother? And I guess none of us should ever go to a party, go see a movie, watch a TV show… we should never do ANY of the things that make life fulfilling and meaningful, because all of those things are just going to end eventually, so what’s the point? What a sad, joyless attitude!
@45
Miserable might not describe them, but maybe the promise of an afterlife is a compelling reason for living with pain, fear, sorrow.
Elephant!
He’s God and he can do anything. So he can make Orange and Elephant rhyme.
Okay, I got nothing that everyone else hasn’t said a million times and well. Well, okay… “First cause”: it’s okay to pseudo-mystically believe God exists outside space and time but that is *not* a solution to a logical conundrum. If this is a logical paradox for atheists (cosmology implies it isn’t after all but it is a *really* *really* hard and difficult concept [why on earth should we have assumed it’d be easy]) then it is a logical paradox for everyone. Magically avoiding the loophole with a “beyonder” isn’t a logical solution. It’s just taking your ball and refusing to play. Which is fine but it’s not winning. It’s avoiding playing.
That ain’t much but … well … we’ve all done this a million times.
What do you do with your Guilt threw me for a loop though. Funny. Funny guys.
I keep it on a shelf.
It’s good for conversation, over a cup of tea.
Yeah, a cup of tea…
Well you have to admit that after-parties are way better than parties.
But if the after-party never ends, you can only go to one. That’s clearly not as good as lots of parties and after-parties. Also, if experience is any guide, I’d want to get a little bit of sleep eventually… because I can want finite amounts of things like sleep (or sex or kids or whatever), which is enough to do the job.
Three questions for theists.
1. What if you are wrong?
There are (according to Wikipedia) about 4,200 current religions. There are probably tens of thousands of religions that are no longer practiced. Your religion was most likely passed down (read: indoctrinated) by your parents. You didn’t pick from 4,200 based on the most likely to be the one true religion. So, if you picked the wrong horse you are screwed. For an atheist however, it is a win-win situation. We don’t expect to exist in any form after death so if we die then wake up in your religions hell, or any hell for that matter, we have won. No matter how bad that hell is, it is better than non-existence.
2. What are you planning to do for eternity in your afterlife?
After a thousand years or so you are bound to be thoroughly bored with shuffleboard and scrabble. All heavens are different but all heavens will be really boring places. Think about it, you’ve got ETERNITY to fill and you not only cannot do in heaven what you could do on earth (sex, coveting etc) you can’t even enjoy the sense of uncertainty that is the spice of life on earth, e.x. your god already knows who will win next years Super Bowl. And what about solitaire, will you win every game?
3. Are you completely clear on what gets your ticket to heaven punched?
I get the impression that your religion is a moving target. Are you sure you are keeping up with the latest releases? That coveting you did a few years ago may no longer get you bounced from heaven but what about that thing you did in high school?
—What do you do with your Guilt?—
I try very hard not to do anything that is going to make me feel guilty later. And should I misstep, I apologize and attempt to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Why, what do you do with yours?
—Where did the Universe Come From?—
Do you mean existence as a whole, or the universe in it’s present form? The universe in it’s present form is the result of a chain reaction of events. The very formation and ultimate death of the universe may itself be a part of a series of chain reactions. Why does it matter?
—-Can you prove there is no God?—
Can you prove there is not an invisible monster standing behind you? But I’ll tell you what – define your terms, and yeah, I probably can. I can certainly prove the biblical god doesn’t exist, shall we start there?
Show me evidence for your god that doesn’t trigger a sneer on my face.
Trick question: our esteemed host always has a sneer on his face.
After all, he’s an atheist, isn’t he?
Can you prove there is no God?
Can you prove your God is not just fiction, a made-up story?
The guilt thing reminds me of someone I haven’t thought about in many years. She was the girlfriend of an acquaintance who offered to let me stay at her house while I was in town. At one point she said, “I know that sleeping with John is wrong.”
I said, “Then why do you do it? I try not to do things I think are wrong. Of course, I don’t think that you, as an adult woman, are doing anything wrong by sleeping with an adult man, but that is just me.”
I try not to do things I think are wrong. I sometimes, without meaning to, hurt people’s feelings or cause damage in some way. I try to make up for it and am more careful in the future. So no, I don’t feel much guilt and it rarely lasts long, because I don’t deliberately do things I think are wrong. That guilt you think we suffer, pastor, is a product of Christianity. The truth will set you free.
http://faithinthenews.com/3-things-to-say-to-an-atheist/
So, you’re calling me a liar? I guess we cannot have a production conversation.
I don’t know if the Universe has a beginning. If it has a beginning, I don’t know if it has a “cause”. I only understand causation in the standard Hume sense, and so I do not understand what a “cause” might be which is outside of time.
Also, the “absolute law of causality where everything must have a cause” is not fundamental to science. Ever heard of quantum theory? Particles just pop into existence all the time without any apparent rhyme or reason.
Science doesn’t need determinism. Science works just fine with purely statistical models of events ala modern quantum theory.
This idea that everything needs a cause is IMHO a result of a Platonic style of thinking, and it’s actually ass backwards compared to modern philosophy of science.
For example, the “absolute law of causation where everything has a cause” might be correct for describing events in space-time, but it may also be inappropriate to discuss the “cause” of space-time (whatever the hell “cause” means in that context because I sure as hell don’t know).
Under the colloquial meanings of the words, yes I can. The deist god is of course entirely untestable and unobservable, and thus it’s an entirely uninteresting question. However, conventional human notions of god, such as the Christian god, have a plethora of novel testable predictions which have been tested, and the tests have uniformly come back as wrong, and so the proper conclusion is that god does not exist. For further reading, please see Carl Sagan’s “garage dragon” parable.
The same kind of scientific evidence that there is no dragon in my garage.
Non-sequitir. We all live our lives based on non-absolute estimates and guesses. Basically nothing we believe or know is held to absolute certainty. Basically everything we believe and know is subject to future revision.
Fallacious appeal to consequences. There might be no god, and Hitler and Stalin might have “gotten away” with their misdeeds. The universe might just suck. Reality is whatever it is, and it doesn’t care if you like it or not.
In order to make our world into a better place, it is requisite to recognize the world for what it is. Only by learning what the world is can we devise proper plans for making the world into a better place.
I do not understand the question. Is this meant as a scientific question? What sort of test could I do that could distinguish between the truth and falseness of the claim?
As a moral question? Let me put it like this: I am going to work for the betterment of the human condition. I want to make the world into a better place. I want to increase human happiness, safety, material wealth, self determination, etc. If you stand in my way, it may become necessary to use violence against you. It is very unlikely that you are going to change my mind on this central moral premise.
Take from that what you will.
This is just presuppositional word-games. The Münchhausen trilemma exists, and it applies to all formal epistemologies. So yes, your underlying complaint applies to my system of justification, but it also applies to yours.
Actually, you can “prove” that God doesn’t exist by proving that it has the same properties as something that doesn’t exist.
For something not to exist, it means that it must not interact with anything in the universe, and thereby exert no influence on anything in the universe. So, like the garage dragon, if every particle in the universe would be in the same state whether that dragon was there or not, then the dragon is functionally identical to something that doesn’t exist. If any particle is in a different state, it is therefore detectable and can be proven to exist.
Because God’s influence is often defined as “undetectable”, that must mean that it exerts zero force (as an exertion of force would be detectable). Something that exerts zero force can only do so by having no interactions with any particles. Therefore, God is functionally equivalent to something that doesn’t exist.
EnlightenmentLiberal, #56:
I’m not so sure you can say that, at least definitively. The beginning is going to put fingerprints all over the subsequent behavior, and it may indeed be possible to distinguish deist from nothing.
@sqlrob
I can imagine a universe where a deist clockmaker non-interventionist god made the universe and communicated a message. For example, the universe is just a box and the space-time inside the box, I find myself in the box with built-in knowledge of English, and I find a letter inside the box in English, explaining how I was made as a science experiment, to see how a creature like me will die from starvation and thirst inside a box. With enough finessing, I think that scenario can work.
Given my basic knowledge of science, physics, and cosmology, it seems to be extraordinarily hard for any simple message like that to be communicated to us. Perhaps if determinism is true and applies to quantum mechanics, then it could be done. The clockmaker god could set it up so that tomorrow, the random quantum fluctuations will create a simple piece of paper, a letter, for every person on Earth, written in their native language. These letters just “poofs” into existence at the same time for everyone across the planet, and the letter appears in front the person. This entire incident would be entirely consistent with the deterministic laws of quantum mechanics. I could buy that as plausible in this context.
So, I realized this just now. A deist clockmaker god which does not wish to communicate (or one that took care to not communicate) is probably untestable. However, a deist clockmaker god that wanted to leave a message could leave a message, even in a way that is consistent with most or all of our available evidence and knowledge about physics and cosmology.
I think I stand corrected. Thanks!
At least the pastor is honest about one thing: these questions are not to be considered honest questions—they are strictly ϰtian-troll JAQoff material. The reader is instructed to JAQ off with them in front of one or more atheists and bail before he* can be accosted with any non-ϰtian view.
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* It’s gotta be a ‘he’, based on (P|S)aul’s instructions about who he allows to teach.
se habla espol #60
Nice to see you.
How’s things?
Thanks for the welcome, chigau. I’ve kinda kept up with you in the Lounge; I’ll respond there, a little later.
“What i have always wondered is why atheists would have children. It makes no sense, given their worldview. Why create other people and force them to live this life when there is, for them, no hope of anything beyond it?”
If I may, I’m an atheist, with no children and no plans to have children. Sure, I wanted kids, as a young sprog. Surely someone I *spawned* would get me, right? But as an old one (hey, I got to 40, I gots creds) I have to say that massive hereditary medical problems aren’t something I want to pass on to anyone else. I’m a smart cookie, so I can write down acquired or invented knowledge, my specific genetics? Some of them need to go. My big sister, also a smart cookie, and she drew the long end of the genetic stick. I invest in my niece and nephew, because I can, but I don’t want to pass on my own suffering.
What I don’t understand is why Christians would have children. How is it moral to bring beings into this sinful, fallen world, putting them at risk of eternal damnation and torture?
(The Cathars had the right idea.)
@34: Yes, thank you. I read C. S. Lewis as a teenager at the instigation of my parents and the pastor at my church. I remember thinking, “Really? This is the best they got? Really? Really?” And like you, I found several other alternatives to the Trilemma. I have no idea how good he was as a literary scholar, but the weakness of his apologetics makes me suspicious.
I did enjoy the snark of The Screwtape Letters, but as persuasive argument his books are worse than useless, in that they actually hastened my conversion to atheism.
EL @56:
No, they really don’t. What happens is that fields fluctuate. Matt Strassler has a nice article for non-experts. The comments are well worth reading as well.
See also Arnold Neumaier’s answer here.
I work through it.
The Universe.
I have no need for that hypothesis.
Oh dear. Another acute case of ellipsisosis.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I agree with Rob Grigjanis. To add on to that… You don’t need to respond to first-cause type cosmological arguments with a counterexample (much less a fake example, like the “fact” that virtual particles exist causelessly). Even if that were true, I don’t think that’s a helpful way of thinking about the issue. Your initial response, about how we can understand causation in a Humean way, seems closer to finding some of the problematic assumptions embedded in first-cause arguments.
Also, if you think about it a little more carefully, it’s contradictory to say on the one hand that some things are somehow tangibly and metaphysically different from other things, in that the former are not caused while the latter are (or they’re not “governed” by laws, while other things are, to give another Humean example). There are no such distinctions, as far as a Humean is concerned. You can talk about the constant conjunction (or regularity) of features of the tangible physical stuff you can observe (which are what people mean by “cause and effect”), or you can talk about the best systems we make to explain such things (in the case of physical laws). What you don’t do as a Humean is say that causes are real stuff out there somehow or that laws are these extra strange bits in your ontology which “govern” (like a political or divine mandate) what happens to the actual physical objects in your ontology. Because those sorts of statements are supposed to be just your manner of efficiently describing or explaining as much as you can about the real stuff in the world, to the extent it seems to behave in this predictable way. They’re not some thing that’s out there somehow, which one sort of object “possesses” or “obeys” while (supposedly) another sort of thing doesn’t.
People historically did and still do talk about “causes,” “effects,” “laws,” etc. usefully and meaningfully, so this isn’t a call to give up that sort of talk entirely (nor is to bring up the issue of whether anything violates causality or physical laws), but I think you’d agree that we do need to unpack what those concepts actually mean if we’re going to get anywhere with them. You may not really be against the sort of Humean perspective I’m presenting here, but I’m saying that I don’t think your example of virtual particles (even if it was the sort of example QM woomeisters suppose) would fit very comfortably with that perspective. It’s very common in atheist apologetics when first causes come up, so you’ve probably just picked that bullshit up somewhere and haven’t really given it much thought.
Anyway, implicit in that is an assumption that some things do exist with an “apparent rhyme or reason,” and it’s not clear how that could be describing anything more than the fact that they exist in such a way that we notice certain sorts of patterns about them. If that’s all you meant, then what could that have to do with the existence of the entire universe? We don’t have regularities to observe about the behaviors of entire universes, nor are we using any of that to explain why there is something rather nothing (or any question along those lines). We’ve just got the one universe, and its existence is just a brute fact as far as anyone knows. Whatever we find out, eventually, the line of regularities and explanations will stop (even if it’s infinite in the past, there’s a multiverse, or whatever). So a decent response is simply “what makes you think this sort of brute fact must be less acceptable than a brute fact that a god exists?” Or you might say “why can’t the explanations stop there — how are we explaining anything more by adding this god?” Or “why is a god supposed to be the exception to this rule you just made up, and how did you even come up with this rule?” They apparently don’t have any good reasons for making assumptions like that.
Come to think of it: Hitler dies by his own hand as the 1000-year Reich he had labored to build was bombed and burned to rubble all around him. It might have been better justice had he been taken alive and made to stand trial, but it doesn’t seem like he got off scot-free either.
About C.S. Lewis’ Trilemma: You know, we can apply this equally to Pythagoras who also claimed he was divine. (He once even hid in a cave for a few days and claimed he was resurrected from the dead when he emerge.) Thus, according to Lewis, there is “no getting out of” concluding Pythagoras was either
a) “a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg”
b) a liar and ” the Devil of Hell” or
c) we can “fall at his feet” and call him the Son of the Gods.
and thus we must never say ” I’m ready to accept Pythagoras as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be divine”.
Now, okay, obviously with Pythagoras he was not deluded, he was lying, and he was not divine and although he was a fantastic mathematician whatever moral teachings he had are all forgotten. But is he actually “the Devil of Hell”? Hyperbole much? And although he was a conman, showman, and charlatan is it really inconceivable he might have spouted a pretty platitude now and then. (Seriously, how hard it is to say “Gee, love your fellow man and that’s the greatest good in the eyes of God” or whatever?)
And why is it “Now it seems to me obvious that He [Jesus] was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God” yet it’s equally obvious that Pythagoras wasn’t and isn’t? What’s the difference in these two circumstances?
I think we can see in a real-life example the fallacy of the trilemma– namely that the mutual exclusivity and extremity of the results are absurdly exaggerated.
Also about delusion. Pythagoras sincerely believe other nutty things such as we shouldn’t eat beans because the spirits of the dead travel through the hollow stalks. Does that make him delusional and insane? No, it merely makes him wrong. So instead of a trilemma we have a quintalemma: lunatic, liar, legend, mistaken, or lord and none of the options are mutually exclusive.
@Rob Grigjanis and consciousness razor
I believe I agree. I partially mispoke. I confused “causation” with “determinism”.
Having said that, I think the Platonic notion of causation is incompatible with non-determinsim, whereas it seems to me that the Humean notion of causation is compatible with non-determinism. I remain open on this point.
@consciousness razor
I was trying to get to some of those very same points. I didn’t talk about it better earlier because I didn’t want to spend much time on it, and because I simply didn’t have my thoughts together at the time. I think I agree with everything you just wrote.
Donald Trump’s hair exists, just not on his head.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I’m not sure what you mean by “the Platonic notion.” I’m having trouble remembering any places where Plato himself said much of anything about it…. Are you using “Platonic” in a looser sense, about the sort of abstract or a priori way others talk about causation? I’m not objecting to that, but I’m not sure if that’s what you mean.
Also, maybe this isn’t important to your argument or your whole worldview or whatever, but there’s no need for QM to be interpreted indeterministically. Two major competitors in quantum interpretation land, De Broglie-Bohm (my own favorite) and Everett/Many-Worlds (riddled with problems), are deterministic theories — but both obviously say very different things about the world. Whatever their issues (some of which are probably part of any quantum theory), you at least have to admit those are realistic theories which spare us some of the quantum woo nonsense of Copenhagen or Quantum Bayesianism or others of that ilk. And they’re not so ugly or implausible (as I see it), like some other indeterministic collapse theories (e.g., GRW) which actually do manage to put together a whole theory without the old-school bullshit. So it doesn’t seem right to ignore them as some of the most viable candidates we actually have.
But of course you don’t need QM to start worrying about the use of statistics or indeterminism or chaos or whatever, because those things are all over the place in the sciences. It does seem there’s a more general problem with how any of it could fit in a non-Humean framework.
Good. These things can be a confusing mess, and it’s hard to be careful about what exactly the issue is while still saying something that’s fairly succinct and clear and comprehensible to others. I probably didn’t clarify much for a lot of people, but hopefully the point isn’t too obscure.
“What do you do with your Guilt?”
That depends.
What precisely am I supposed to be feeling guilty about?
If it’s something I can make amends for (or that requires me to make amends), great, I’ll fix it to the best of my ability (and probably throw in a peace offering of some sort).
If it’s something silly or stupid that I shouldn’t feel guilty about, or can’t do anything about, I’ll try to bury it with food.
If I’m supposed to feel guilty about not believing in a certain god or not following a certain religion… no guilt there.
“Where did the Universe Come From?”
*shrugs* I don’t know, and I don’t know that it matters. What matters to me is that we’re here now, people are suffering now, and I don’t see a whole lot being done to alleviate that suffering. Plenty of praying, sure, but I don’t see a lot of actual, physical help going on.
“Can you prove there is no God?”
…can you prove that Pluto is not made of hash oil?
My response is very forward.
If you have the honesty and integrity to put up strict conditions for your imaginary deity that allows for it to honestly falsified, then based on evidence to date I little doubt your deity will be shown to be false.
Barring that, the burden of evidence is upon you to provide positive evidence for your imaginary deity, physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Essentially something equivalent to the eternally burning bush, where you shut the fuck up and point to the location.
If you can’t put up a falsifiable definition, and you can’t point to the evidence required, you with prima facie evidence acknowledge your claims of a deity existing are lies and bullshit, and you have no honor and integrity. Your choice cricket, but it is put up or shut the fuck up time for your presuppositional claims. Only after your deity is verified will your questions not be laughed at as presuppositional fuckwittery.
cr @74:
Well, there’s no need for loud screaming to be interpreted as “summat’s wrong”, either. Just a powerful suggestion.
Exactly what woo are you referring to? There’s not even a consensus as to what Copenhagen means, but there has been a lot of bullshit written about it. Luboš Motl summarizes the fundamental principles nicely;
So where exactly is the “woo” there?
Oh, and by the way;
Rob:
I’m not seeing anything powerful. This is off-topic, so maybe the Mended Drum is a better place to continue at some point.
That’s not too satisfactory then, is it? People don’t have a consensus about what the fuck Heidegger was saying either, and that’s not a powerful suggestion that he was doing good physics.
My impression has been that Luboš Motl doesn’t do anything nicely.
Is it a physical theory which tells about the real world? If not, is it pretending to be that sort of theory but trading that in for lots of irrelevant bullshit? Sounds a bit like woo already. And actual newage quantum-woomeisters are parroting exactly this kind of bullshit, because that implies their woo (have you seen What the Bleep, for example?), even if most of the scientist proponents of theories like Copenhagen (nowadays) don’t go that far themselves.
What’s an observer? What’s a measuring device? What does “essentially classical” mean? Why exactly aren’t we saying they’re “essentially quantum mechanical” if QM is actually true and a theory about the real world? For that matter — before they get tossed in to the pile with the other ill-defined terms — what’s macroscopic or microscopic? Why is there any need to talk about any of these “rules” or “principles” in the process of simply laying out a fundamental theory of physics? Shouldn’t there be something in it about … well … physics, the real world, what happens when you’re not observing or measuring or subjectively knowing anything, etc.?
That’s not an argument, by the way. They don’t disagree with Copenhagen or the “orthodox” theory or whatever you think the textbook version is, when it comes to any experimental results. Given that, what do you think the problems are? I can say clearly what I think the problems with Everett are (but we both probably agree about that already), and on those same terms I’d honestly like to hear what you think is problematic about Bohmian mechanics.
cr @78: OK, see you in Mended Drum tomorrow. I’m going to bed.
Yes, It’s worked really well for the last 90 years or so.
We don’t know. But just because we don’t know doesn’t mean you can fill in the hole with your favorite myth.
Just to be clear, for tomorrow or whenever, nobody is arguing that standard textbook QM is making the wrong predictions or that it’s not extraordinarily useful or successful. Your interpretation or theory shouldn’t take all of the credit for that. The reason I include Bohm and Everett in the list of viable candidates (even though I think one of them is too bizarre to take very seriously) is precisely because at the very least you can’t criticize them for being empirically inadequate or that they (likewise) haven’t “worked really well for the last 90 years or so.”
I guess I could have said I have some other whacky theory which makes different predictions from QM (or no predictions at all), but that’s simply not how I was arguing. Here’s how my thinking was supposed to go above, because I figured all of this was understood: (1) They are empirically the same thing, but not at all on the same solid footing conceptually or logically as interpretations of what we’re supposed to think various experiments say about the world, (2) some are deterministic and some are indeterministic, so (3) empirically there is nothing to get you to the conclusion that QM is indeterministic. There’s literally zero evidence which demonstrates or powerfully suggests or even hints at that.
He doesn’t actually care where we think that universe came from (any astrophysical/cosmology will do as well as any other). He wants to stump us with how we answer “how can something comes from nothing”. If we assume nothing existed before something, and if we assume it’s impossible for something to come from nothing, then we have just disproven *everything*. Including God. So if we do make those assumptions then *all* of us are wrong. In which case he’s just wasting our time.
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I think I’ve heard about C.S. Lewis’ trilemma before but I never gave it much thought. I’ve been thinking about it a lot today and it really pisses me off. A lot. How stupid can something be before we can simply dismiss it out of hand. This is “birds fly and airplanes fly so they must be related” stupid. Every single statement ever said by any human being ever falls into the three categories a) wrong (hence you must be insane to believe it?) b) a lie (hence you are evil beyond belief?) or c) true. And if you are capable of doing something positive (such as give the sermon on the mount), then a and b are “obviously” not the case? So *anything* ever said or ever believed by anybody must be unquestionable true because otherwise the guy saying them would be either too insane or too evil to tie his own shoes? Um, yeah, that’s really sound reasoning…
consciousness razor @78: For my sins, I’ve posted a couple of replies in The Mended Drum.
Except that:
1) Hitler, being Christian, would not be suffering the “justice” of “Hell” but would rather be frolicking in heaven with his dudebro, The Big J.
2) Instead, people who committed only minuscule “crimes” — and failed to mutter the right chants to Jesus — are the ones burning for eternity in Hell.
That’s justice for you!
@ Saad #25
Right? It’s like asking “What do you do with your happiness?”. It’s an emotion; how does one do anything with an emotion? It’s nonsense.
@ tbp1 #65
I really enjoyed the Narnia series as a kid, but honestly had no idea he had written any V. Serious Apologia™. I also completely failed to spot the obvious Christian propaganda within the Narnia books, and thus didn’t find it at all convincing.
@Carbonfox
Re. “is it fair?”; no, it isn’t. Why does that mean there is a God? These people confuse me so much.
General: I’m always confused as to why religious peeps seem to think “Can you prove God doesn’t exist?” is some sort of gotcha. No, I can’t, but I can state with reasonable certainty that on the balance of probability and based on the available evidence, he almost certainly doesn’t exist in the way most modern religions understand him to do so.
I can’t prove that Saturn is not in fact a huge ocean of whiskey with isolated islands populated entirely by marijuana plants* and an atmosphere consisting entirely of laughing gas and just enough oxygen to survive where you go after you die if, and only if, you manage to obtain the correct cocktail of acid and cocaine here on Earth to have a quick word with the Guardians of Saturn and ask them very nicely if they’ll let you in, which they normally do because they’re generally pretty chill about most things. But the fact I can’t prove it is no reason to suppose that that scenario is actually the case.
*Fun fact: Everyone thinks Saturns rings are rocks and stuff. Not true; they are the remnants of a huge smoke-ring blowing competition held back in the 2nd century AD by the Guardians, because before people discovered cocaine and invented acid they didn’t have many guests and therefore hadn’t much to do with their time.
WithinThisMind (#20): Well, when a mommy universe and a daddy universe love each other very much…
One Internet is reserved for you; just present this eticket at the pop-up window. You have your choice of mommy Internet or daddy Internet.