Is life less meaningful with God?

[Rian]

And I still say you have never adequately explained what you mean by demonstrate.

I agree - I wish he would do this. I wish you guys would start another thread and try again.

[Keep The Reason]

I did do it. I'll try it again.

You know how I can take you by the hand and bring you to Gombe and sit you out in the forest so you can observe chimps in their natural habitat behaving in specific socialized ways? And you know how I can bring you to another such place where the chimps there have utterly no connection to the chimps in Gombe, and I can show you they still have similar behaviors?

I call this "demonstrating my position". If someone comes along and asserts something greater than what I have demonstrated, that's perfectly fine-- providing they demonstrate how thier assertion trumps my demonstrated position..

When you folks can demonstrate your claims like I can, then you can join the rest of us up on the shelf labeled "Demonstrable Claims" For now, you are on the floor wearing signs around your necks that reads, "Unsupported Assertions".

I think that's pretty explicit explanation. SHOW US. If you cannot, then say, "We cannot so I guess you're right-- we offer only unsupported assertions."

But you folks don't do that. You assert that your unsupported assertion trump my demonstrated ones, and insist you're right. You are not right.

[Dr Mundo]

...Now I'm not saying that atheists aren't moral; of course they are. I'm just saying that that very morality flies in the face of their worldview beliefs. And when something that big and consistent and spread throughout the human race so widely goes against a worldview belief, it is a negative mark against the probability of the worldview belief being true.

In the Christian worldview, it states that God has put morality in our innermost being, and that our own hearts tell us when we're acting rightly or wrongly, and this is just what I see all around me. Of course, this one thing didn't make me a Christian, but it's just one more point, along with so many others, in favor of the Christian worldview.

Rian..... this brought my palm to my face. Your initial response to Emery and your replies to KTR, have been ..(a bunch of negative adjectives)..
I wanted to respond to them but I see that KTR has, I think, done a great Job responding to both yours and MW's comments. I think I agree with him almost 100%. I also think it sucks that you guys have to get along so poorly but KTR has a ton of great insight and I think it would be beneficial to stop arguing so much for the sake of arguing and learn from each other.

[mitchellmckain]

Now atheists almost always counter this with "But I'm a moral person!" and "But I have meaning in my life!". I've only seen one person really grasp this and finally stop with those counter-arguments. She realized that if there is no God/higher authority, then there is truly no right or wrong or meaning. It finally hit her what we were saying. It didn't change her atheistic beliefs, but she was finally able to acknowledge that atheists borrow morality and meaning from theists, and when it comes down to it, she couldn't tell anyone that anything they did was right or wrong, based on her atheistic worldview.

BUT you must not mistake what was true of her for what is true generally. Some people DO think out the reasons why some things are right and some things are wrong, and I KNOW this doesn't require a belief in God because I did it myself before I had any reason to believe in God.

But Mitch, I'm not saying that at ALL.

But Rian, my comment is not concerned with telling anyone what you are saying. It was a caution that is all.

The key point here is in the last line that you quoted - that based upon her atheistic worldview, she couldn't tell anyone ELSE that anything they did was right or wrong. Do you see the difference? I'm not saying that a person didn't think out reasons why some things are right and some are wrong. I'm saying that
1) an atheist cannot logically say anything is right or wrong in itself; it's just what they think is good or bad, and

? ...right or wrong in itself and not for a good reason? Why in the world would I even want such a useless and frankly vacuous morality as that? I want reasons. I demand reasons. If a person cannot give good reason why something should be right or wrong then I cannot see this as anything but the typical confusion of a two year old that imagines that what he wants should determine the order of the world.

AND I deny your claim on top of this. ANYONE can declare what is right or wrong for no reason at all. That requires no great skill or rationality. The real challenge is to understand and explain WHY?!

2) an atheist cannot logically tell someone else that what they're doing is right or wrong; it's just their personal preference.

Sorry but yes they certainly CAN say something is right or wrong for any human being to do, not based on preferences but upon logical reasons why such a thing simply is or is not a good thing to do.

Therefore I KNOW that many atheists certainly DO have a basis for understanding what is right and wrong based on reasoning rather than divine command because I was one of them -- and those reasons haven't changed now that I do believe in God, and I think I see the real value of Christianity all the better for having such a red herring taken out of it.

What I said above applies here, too. Atheists can decide what their personal preferences are and then reason out what is right or wrong based on those preferences, but they have no logical standing to say something is right or wrong in itself, or right or wrong for someone else.

Is it ultimately based upon something that they value? Of course it is. Why shouldn't it be? I make no pretense to objectivity here. We certainly cannot objectively demonstrate moral principles completely apart from what we want and believe. But that is something in which neither theist nor atheist has any advantage whatsoever.

Thus it is true that as a Christian I look to what God values as what is most worth pursuing, not because real values are dictated and objective, but because I know that God knows better than I do what is most fulfilling and worthwhile in the long run, which is especially important if an eternal existence is on the table. On the other hand, I do not assume that God has the same answer (of what is best) for everyone.

I agree with you here. Shall we try to work on the parts at the top of the post together and see what we come up with? I'd like to hash it out with you, because I think that we both have a high regard for truth and integrity and are willing to follow things to where they lead instead of just trying to force things into our beliefs.

Sure.

[Moonwood the Hare]

I did do it. I'll try it again.

You know how I can take you by the hand and bring you to Gombe and sit you out in the forest so you can observe chimps in their natural habitat behaving in specific socialized ways? And you know how I can bring you to another such place where the chimps there have utterly no connection to the chimps in Gombe, and I can show you they still have similar behaviors?

I call this "demonstrating my position". If someone comes along and asserts something greater than what I have demonstrated, that's perfectly fine-- providing they demonstrate how thier assertion trumps my demonstrated position..

When you folks can demonstrate your claims like I can, then you can join the rest of us up on the shelf labeled "Demonstrable Claims" For now, you are on the floor wearing signs around your necks that reads, "Unsupported Assertions".

I think that's pretty explicit explanation. SHOW US. If you cannot, then say, "We cannot so I guess you're right-- we offer only unsupported assertions."

But you folks don't do that. You assert that your unsupported assertion trump my demonstrated ones, and insist you're right. You are not right.

KTR I feel I have not been responding to some very important points you have made and have not spelled out a very clear position but to deal briefly with the problem of demonstration. What you give above is for me too specific and anecdotal; it looks like you are still saying that in order for something to be demonstrated there must be some facts commensurate with it being the case. You believe that God is a false or mistaken explanatory hypothesis that is to say people observed some things about the world they could not explain and postulated God in order to explain those facts - these could be facts like the appearance of design or the presence of human moral impulses or a number of other things. You are not denying that such facts exist and consequently you would agree that that are some facts which are commensurate with the existence of God being the case. However you think that with the emergence of modern scientific explanations the stuff God was meant to explain has now found a better explanation. Hence it is not a matter of two theories one of which can be demonstrated and one of which cannot, it is a matter of deciding which of two theories provides the best explanation of facts on which we agree. (I don't believe that God is a theory myself but for the sake of argument lets suppose it)

With the specific matter of apes at Gombe the situation is much more difficult than you seem to realise. Firstly there is the question about observer interference. I have given the example of the killer ape theory which was based on observations at Gombe, then rejected because the observations at Gombe seemed to be atypical due to interference effects. Then violence in apes was observed elsewhere. At present we still don't know whether the behaviour of the apes at Gombe is typical or not. If you do not use the kind of methods Jane Goodall used to get close to the apes stuff will get missed, if you do use those methods you will change things and not know if you really have facts about behaviour in the wild. When we get to the Washos and Nim Chimpskys of this world the business gets even more complex.

The observation of a certain behaviour which parallels a human response like grief can be matched with other observations where apes behave completely differently towards their offspring with callousness or indifference which would be shocking in a human being. You are selecting only the data that fits your theory.

If a certain behaviour is found in both apes and human beings there are at least two possibilities. One is that the genetic make up giving rise to the behaviour can be traced back to a common ancestor and the behaviour was coded for before the split that lead to modern apes and modern humans, the other is that the behaviour was a product of similar environmental pressures acting back onto the genome in both cases and emerged after the split. If as the current theory claims modern humans and modern apes are different because they evolved in different environments then it is possible that that evolutionary process produced behaviours which appear similar but had different survival functions just as in a snowy environment one animal may develop a white pelt to enable it to hunt and and another to avoid being hunted. We cannot directly examine the behaviour of these ancestors and that means drawing conclusions about the shape of human behaviour from the observation of modern apes is always going to be highly speculative and interpretative.

So although we may be in a different place to medieval scholars who observed the animal world primarily to find moral lessons for human beings I don't think we are now in the position of being able objectively to demonstrate something that was previously mere supposition. Observation is always theory dependent.

[JustJim]

I know you meant this for KTR, and I know I'm interrupting. I just felt like throwing in my observations, which you can do with as you please.

KTR I feel I have not been responding to some very important points you have made and have not spelled out a very clear position but to deal briefly with the problem of demonstration. What you give above is for me too specific and anecdotal; it looks like you are still saying that in order for something to be demonstrated there must be some facts commensurate with it being the case. You believe that God is a false or mistaken explanatory hypothesis that is to say people observed some things about the world they could not explain and postulated God in order to explain those facts - these could be facts like the appearance of design or the presence of human moral impulses or a number of other things. You are not denying that such facts exist and consequently you would agree that that are some facts which are commensurate with the existence of God being the case.

The problem, I think, is that they'd only be "commensurate with the existence of God being the case" if the existence of God WAS the case, which has not been even remotely established. That God exists is possible, that's true. But that God does exist, or even that it is likely that God exists, requires more than just possibilities, and has not been shown to be true. I think KTR is "going with the odds" here, and asserting that things for which there is demonstrability are more likely explanations for things theists attribute to God than are things that are not demonstrable. If you could just show some connection between moral behaviors among chimps and God, i.e., demonstrate that God is the most likely and best supported explanation to account for chimps as social animals with apparent moral behaviors, then your assertion would be worth serious consideration. But since you can't offer anything that demonstrates such a connection, why should anyone sit up and listen?

However you think that with the emergence of modern scientific explanations the stuff God was meant to explain has now found a better explanation.

Exactly! Go with the BETTER explanation! Why on earth would you NOT?

Hence it is not a matter of two theories one of which can be demonstrated and one of which cannot, it is a matter of deciding which of two theories provides the best explanation of facts on which we agree.

Well, I think we all agree on the "facts" but not on your assertion that the facts are "commensurate with the existence of God" - any more or less than we'd agree that the facts are commensurate with some experiment set up on earth by aliens, or that they're commensurate with there only being a brain in a jar that conjures up all this imagined reality. The existence of God is a "wild guess" explanation for what we observe. I prefer the more solid explanations demonstrability provides.

Jim

[Keep The Reason]

Wow, Jim, thank you for saving me a lot of typing. I could not have said it better.

I can offer some tangible support for my contentions, while the theist can offer utterly none.

Moonwood, given modern technology we aren't far off from placing remote viewers in these areas and observing without interfering. I am fairly confident that these behaviors will be seen regardless, just like that dog saving another dog was caught n a traffic camera.

[Moonwood the Hare]

The problem, I think, is that they'd only be "commensurate with the existence of God being the case" if the existence of God WAS the case, which has not been even remotely established.

No Jim because that would mean that any state of affairs for which there is evidence would be the case. You would be saying if A then B and B therefore A which is a false inference. That has been my point all along; it's why I keep saying that KTR is repeating the mistakes, or some of the mistakes, of the logical positivists, who were verificationists. So yes the same evidence can support two different and contradictory theories. So for example the fact that all the swans we had ever observed were white which was true for many years was compatible with the theory all swans are white and also compatible with the theory that not all swans are white but the discovery of black swans proved the first theory false. This is not difficult. To say the evidence is compatible with a theory only if the theory is true is just plain nonsense.

That God exists is possible, that's true. But that God does exist, or even that it is likely that God exists, requires more than just possibilities, and has not been shown to be true.

Of course it has not been shown to be true. The fact that there is evidence for a theory cannot show it is true.

I think KTR is "going with the odds" here, and asserting that things for which there is demonstrability are more likely explanations for things theists attribute to God than are things that are not demonstrable.

I don't know how he could measure this likelihood. Either he has some way of measuring these probabilities which he is not sharing or he's making a personal judgement.

If you could just show some connection between moral behaviors among chimps and God, i.e., demonstrate that God is the most likely and best supported explanation to account for chimps as social animals with apparent moral behaviors, then your assertion would be worth serious consideration. But since you can't offer anything that demonstrates such a connection, why should anyone sit up and listen?

Chimps displaying 'moral' behaviour in the sense of behaviour altruistic in its consequence rather than behaviour consciously submitting to a known moral law is compatible with the existence of God and equally compatible with his non-existence

However you think that with the emergence of modern scientific explanations the stuff God was meant to explain has now found a better explanation.

Exactly! Go with the BETTER explanation! Why on earth would you NOT?

If you have two alternative explanations you should go with the best but then you would need to specify what criteria you were using to objectively determine which was best. If not you would need to concede this was a partly subjective judgement. If your two explanations are compatible there would be no need to chose between them.

Hence it is not a matter of two theories one of which can be demonstrated and one of which cannot, it is a matter of deciding which of two theories provides the best explanation of facts on which we agree.

Well, I think we all agree on the "facts" but not on your assertion that the facts are "commensurate with the existence of God" - any more or less than we'd agree that the facts are commensurate with some experiment set up on earth by aliens, or that they're commensurate with there only being a brain in a jar that conjures up all this imagined reality. The existence of God is a "wild guess" explanation for what we observe. I prefer the more solid explanations demonstrability provides.

Jim

Well as I said the facts can be commensurate with a number of theories. If you think the facts are not commensurate with the existence of God then you are saying there are facts that contradict the idea of God existing. KTR has given some examples of this because he thinks (falsely I think) that if God existed he would have to set up the kind of universe the Fundamentalists believe in and deliberately leave gaps in scientifically observable processes so we could infer his presence though he also thinks (correctly I think in this case) that gaps in scientific theories do not imply the action of God.

[Yuri]

From your original post,

What am I missing?

Nothing. You are absolutely spot on.

[OzAnt]

So yes the same evidence can support two different and contradictory theories. So for example the fact that all the swans we had ever observed were white which was true for many years was compatible with the theory all swans are white and also compatible with the theory that not all swans are white but the discovery of black swans proved the first theory false. This is not difficult. To say the evidence is compatible with a theory only if the theory is true is just plain nonsense.

Just thought it should be pointed out that whilst the observation of only white swans is COMPATIBLE with both theories, it would not, as you indicate, SUPPORT the theory that black swans existed. That's just plain silly. In fact it was the very fact that a black swan hadn't been observed that would give rise to the theory that there [likely] were no black swans.

And, let me tell you, the Christian god is a very very very black swan indeed. So much so that this conversation reminds me of that joke that explains that only a religious person would go look for a non-existent black cat in a pitch black room, to which the retort is, "ah, yes, but let's not forget that a philosopher would find it".

Ant

[Joaquin el comunista]

After I am not Christian anymore and become a Atheist (10yrs a go) I am a better person, less judgmental and with more acceptance to the others humans.

[Moonwood the Hare]

So yes the same evidence can support two different and contradictory theories. So for example the fact that all the swans we had ever observed were white which was true for many years was compatible with the theory all swans are white and also compatible with the theory that not all swans are white but the discovery of black swans proved the first theory false. This is not difficult. To say the evidence is compatible with a theory only if the theory is true is just plain nonsense.

Just thought it should be pointed out that whilst the observation of only white swans is COMPATIBLE with both theories, it would not, as you indicate, SUPPORT the theory that black swans existed. That's just plain silly. In fact it was the very fact that a black swan hadn't been observed that would give rise to the theory that there [likely] were no black swans.

And, let me tell you, the Christian god is a very very very black swan indeed. So much so that this conversation reminds me of that joke that explains that only a religious person would go look for a non-existent black cat in a pitch black room, to which the retort is, "ah, yes, but let's not forget that a philosopher would find it".

Ant

Well now you have reverted to the idea that a theory that has strong confirmation is probably true. I think Popper defeats that idea about as thoroughly as any idea could be defeated. Vicki has pointed out recently that general scientific theories are universal in intent if that is so then the number of their potential fulfilments is infinite. The number of observed fulfilments is finite hence you are dividing a finite number into an infinite one so the probability must be zero. Popper's argument is more complex than that but if you have a way of getting from a finite number of observations of a universal claim to a probability of the claim being true the world is waiting to hear you. It was because of these kinds of issues that I started the falsifiability thread.

The other side of my point here would be that taking Vicki's point about scientific theories being universal then clearly the existence of God is not a scientific theory in that sense. It is possible to utilise general scientific theories to make singular existential claims such as for example there is a planet beyond Neptune. But the existence of God is not an empirical claim which is the kind of claim we use general theories to make. So why do people insist on using a methodology designed for a particular purpose with the kind of claims it was never meant to deal with?

I am not sure what you mean by supporting a claim but if developed this could give some content to Keep the Reason's idea of demonstrability; could the idea be developed? Popper would actually say the value of a scientific theory is inversely related to its probability so a good theory will be highly improbable and have resisted attempts to falsify it. Anyway observing large numbers of white swans just does not make it more likely that all swans are white. It may have the psychological effect of making me feel all swans must be white or are likely to be white.

[VickiRW]

Anyway observing large numbers of white swans just does not make it more likely that all swans are white.

To clarify, that isn't exactly right. The flaw in the all-swans-are-white conclusion is failing to see that the swans were not sampled randomly. There is no flaw in saying that the large number of observations of white swans all across England, along with no observations of non-white swans in England, makes it highly probable that all swans in England are white. It would be an error to say that a highly probable thing is certain. Is that what you are getting at?

In practice, it is often hard to see yourself making this sampling bias error. You easily and naturally assume that the way the world normally operates for you if the way it works always. You can be careful to sample randomly within your sphere of understanding. The limits of that sphere are hard to identify though because they are assumptions that you just don't think about.

Another way to look at this problem of viewpoint is to think about what the null hypothesis should be. The null hypothesis is the default position. When analyzing the data - you calculate the probability of making the observations that you have made if the null hypothesis were true. If the observations don't match the null - that probability is low. If it is low enough, you reject the null hypothesis. Unless you are doing Bayesian analysis, you don't even get into the probability of an alternative hypothesis being true. So, what should the null hypothesis be in this case? That all swans are white? That there is no coloration bias in swans? The answer can often seem obvious, but it depends on your viewpoint.

[Moonwood the Hare]

Anyway observing large numbers of white swans just does not make it more likely that all swans are white.

To clarify, that isn't exactly right. The flaw in the all-swans-are-white conclusion is failing to see that the swans were not sampled randomly. There is no flaw in saying that the large number of observations of white swans all across England, along with no observations of non-white swans in England, makes it highly probable that all swans in England are white. It would be an error to say that a highly probable thing is certain. Is that what you are getting at?

Good old Sir Karl covers this with his distinction between specified and unspecified statements. All swans at p are white where p is exhaustively searchable is verifiable but it is then lo longer a universal theory. The nearer we get to exhaustively searchable the closer we can get to something more like probability (that's me not Sir K) I think I'm starting to sound like I have a Popper obsession and I admit I do like his stuff a lot

In practice, it is often hard to see yourself making this sampling bias error. You easily and naturally assume that the way the world normally operates for you if the way it works always. You can be careful to sample randomly within your sphere of understanding. The limits of that sphere are hard to identify though because they are assumptions that you just don't think about.

Well that comes up all the time. The other example that gets used is taking the temperature of water. We could take the temperature of boiling water every day and get 100% as the answer as long as our location is at sea level. And the assumptions we don't think about are intriguing as are the implications of theories their creators are not aware of.

Another way to look at this problem of viewpoint is to think about what the null hypothesis should be. The null hypothesis is the default position. When analyzing the data - you calculate the probability of making the observations that you have made if the null hypothesis were true. If the observations don't match the null - that probability is low. If it is low enough, you reject the null hypothesis. Unless you are doing Bayesian analysis, you don't even get into the probability of an alternative hypothesis being true. So, what should the null hypothesis be in this case? That all swans are white? That there is no coloration bias in swans? The answer can often seem obvious, but it depends on your viewpoint.

Well, I like that. It suggests that science rests to some extent on judgements people make before they start testing. I would guess the default position is whatever current theory we have; so we start with all swans are white as the null hypothesis. If we are dealing with all swans everywhere then I just don't see how we get any probability about them at all. Although a knowledge of genetics might help; how probable is it that we will find an elephant that looks like Elmer for example? I am aware of Baysean ideas but I really know nothing about them. I know Chalmers put a chapter on that in the third edition of 'What is this Thing Called Science' and drew very negative conclusions about their usefulness. I'd like to understand more but not sure I would grasp it.

[OzAnt]

Well now you have reverted to the idea that a theory that has strong confirmation is probably true. I think Popper defeats that idea about as thoroughly as any idea could be defeated.

How did you get that out of what I said? What I said was,

Just thought it should be pointed out that whilst the observation of only white swans is COMPATIBLE with both theories, it would not, as you indicate, SUPPORT the theory that black swans existed. That's just plain silly.

Moonwood, if I said to you (pretending for a moment that we existed at a time that only white swans had been observed), “Well, we've only ever observed white swans, so it's apparent that there must also be orange swans.”, would you be inclined to say something like, “quite possibly” or would you think that my mental cheese has slid off my cranial cracker?

I then went on to say,

In fact it was the very fact that a black swan hadn't been observed that would give rise to the theory that there [likely] were no black swans.

And the same principle is in effect today. That's why today under “Swan: colour availability” it doesn't say “all known colours man can dream up”.

Ant