Back to basics: Give me an argument as to why a god exists

[FaerieStories]

Hi, I'm new here and I see a lot of active topics on specific concepts where users are already heavily engaged in debate, making it a little hard for me to join in. So to test the waters a little (and to help me decide whether or not to stick around here), let's go back to basics and have a debate about the most fundamental question at hand here: does a god exist?

As a non-believer, I have yet to discover any convincing reason as to why I should believe in a god. So, if a Theist would like to get the ball rolling by giving me a reason why god exists, that would be great.

(PS: unrelated question: what is the general breakdown of belief/non-belief on these forums? Is it an even mix of believers and non-believers, or is there- as tends to happen on the internet- a larger proportion of atheists to Theists?).

[FaerieStories]

WHY, does any "believer" have to convince "you" in belief in God?

Why not, should we just pat you on the head and move on with "our" lives?

You can do what you like. No-one HAS to do anything.

And, the reason that there are a tiny amount of believers to a large number of non believers? Could it be because we know a waste of time when we see it? We've been where you are, and know the futility of that place of contemplation?

The huaghtiness in the common atheist deamnd is sometimes just plain boring to interact with. Most Christians have other things to do than to beat the proverbial dead horse don't you think?

It seems to me, that most atheists seem to think they have stumbled onto something utterly profound, when actually they are just walking an old and common road.

Have they? Are they?

Uh, no. Stop being so rude and arrogant. No wonder you're on probation.

The fool hath said in his heart: 'There is no G-d';

and the wise man says it to the world.

[kayky]

Perhaps I have been wrong all along. Perhaps science will prove the existance of God after all. Consider this quote from Fred Alan Wolf. Wolf is a theoretical physicist. I'm off to the book store today to see if I can find some of his books. I've also started a thread about his ideas.


How does quantum physics lead us to the existence of some kind of spirituality or the possibility of God?

We need to see first of all how classical physics leads us just in the opposite direction, into not having any spirituality or the existence of God.

Classical physics seems to want to get any kind of mind or consciousness of observer or anything spiritual out of the equation all together. It's really basically a materialistic point of view. Quantum physics says that even the material itself is not materialistic: that we can't understand matter itself in a purely materialistic way.

Quantum physics posits that there has to be something else that is outside of the material, that's something that we really can't observe, but its consequences is observable, this thing that we can't observe. And assume that we can't observe in a language of quantum physics is given different names. It's sometimes called PSI, like the Greek letter. Or it's called a quantum wave function or it's called a quantum wave aplitude, or a quantum probability aplitude, or a quantum state vector. It has many different names but it essentially refers to something which is invisible which is a field of possibility rather than an a field of actuality like say for example a magnetic field is a field of actuality. We can see a magnetic field by shaking iron filings around a magnet for example. We can't see the field of possibility out there in space. All we can do is observe its consequences in time. We observe by making a number of experiments. We see that there was some kind of guidance principle through time that's expressing the things we see in nature. But we don't see it like we would see a magnetic field. Nevertheless, we believe this field is real and exists in some way. But it is not a real field that we can tangibly grab onto. So it's the closest thing we can come to as being something called spiritual, or spirituality, or the essence of spirit is this quantum field of possibility. So I would say that quantum physics is really pointing to, or indicating a direction for spirituality to take. It's pointing to where spirituality and science might find a common ground.

[scourge99]

My point is that there is no consensus as yet. You probably agree with the skeptic at the top of the list. That's fine. But nothing has been proven at this point.

Actually the consensus by mainstream brain scientists IS that the mind is produced (either partially or fully) by the brain. You simply can't make sense of the evidence such as drug therapy, addiction, brain surgery, and brain damage without concluding that at least in some part the mind is produced by the brain.

[Mithrae]

Howdy again Faerie. Took a bit of a break last night, and spent half of tonight agonising over how to beat a couple of folk ganging up on me in a game But I'll try to respond adequately before bed-time.

So you're saying that it is an assumption that other people have consciousness (when we know that they possess similar organic structures to ourselves) but it is not an assumption that other things don't have consciousness, because they don't have the same organic structures. You haven't actually added anything new here I'm afraid, you're just making the same assertion in a different way.

But both go hand in hand. How could you possibly assume one without the other? By the way- to clarify- the assumption is simply that consciousness as we know it is experienced by others in the same way it is for us. That's the assumption. But we can certainly see the products of consciousness happening in others' brains so must assume that it is. Assumption was probably not a good word here. I mean, we know that spatial memory takes place in a certain part of the brain known as the hypocampus. That's no assumption, that's scientific knowledge. The assumption is that your experience of consciousness is the same as mine. And that's not an unfair assumption considering how similar all our brains work. We have absolutely no grounds for thinking objects without brains can contain consciousness, and we have no more reason to believe that than we do to believe that the moon is alive or that trees want to eat us.

This part of the question we're discussing - from my perspective at least, though there seems to be some confusion below - is what's the justification for the view that atoms, rocks and so on are not conscious. Your argument seems to be:

A> Consciousness is a product of brains
B> We have no reason to suppose consciousness from anything else


B> Consciousness is produced only by brains
C> If B is true then rocks have no consciousness; if B is

SHowever even if we pretend that you've got a valid argument here, that's only one half of the problem. I wouldn't say that my memories have consciousness, but they're certainly produced by and part of my consciousness. In other words we know from our most constant and intimate experience that things which are not themselves minds/consciousness can be produced by and exist within minds/consciousness. But even assuming, as you choose to, that rocks and so on are things which are not conscious/minds, what is the justification for any notion that they can exist or be produced without a mind? That's generally what's implied by the term 'physical' which gets used so often, after all.

Can you give me an example for a notion that can be produced without a mind?

You're claiming that there's something happening in your mind (consciousness) which is substantially different from pretty much all the rest of this 'universe,' as you call it. Bit of a strange notion from where I'm sitting, that we on this little planet are such an exception admist all that there is, but I guess it takes all sorts

Not different from ALL of the universe, no. There is a difference between a process and a physical thing. "Morality" is a very estranged thing from a paperclip. I don't know how anyone could argue to the contrary- namely that thoughts and physical objects are very similar in their properties. They aren't. They're about as different as is possible to get.

And yet you are asserting this position quite determinedly.

What? No I am not. I've never said that there are 'mental phenomena different from other mental phenomena"[/quote]

[kayky]

It is a consensus based on reductionism, nothing more.

[scourge99]

It is a consensus based on reductionism, nothing more.

Its a consensus built on a mountain of evidence, experiments, and case studies. Your trite dismissal of such a colossal amount of evidence in such a matter puts you in the same crowd as flat earthers and creationists. The latest evolution in the tree of religious science-deniers. But i don't suppose you accuse round earthers and evolutionists of "reductionism", do you?

Its also "interesting" to note how you trumpeted the scientific consensus until it came into conflict with your religious beliefs. That is, the problem seems to be that you have a particular conclusion in mind and are searching to support it.

[Filthy Tugboat]

It is a consensus based on reductionism, nothing more.

What is the other option? The mind is produced by the Kidney? As far as I'm aware the mind being a product/function of the brain is simply the natural conclusion, the same way the nervous system is utilized as a function of the brain to produce movement. It is the only logical conclusion available. The only thing that I've ever seen proposed is that the mind is supernatural and is not apart of nor does it reside in any physical form. It somehow has control over the physical body but exists not as a part of that body.

So is there another hypothesis of the mind? What s it and how is it credible?

[Mithrae]

However even if we pretend that you've got a valid argument here, that's only one half of the problem. I wouldn't say that my memories have consciousness, but they're certainly produced by and part of my consciousness. In other words we know from our most constant and intimate experience that things which are not themselves minds/consciousness can be produced by and exist within minds/consciousness. But even assuming, as you choose to, that rocks and so on are things which are not conscious/minds, what is the justification for any notion that they can exist or be produced without a mind? That's generally what's implied by the term 'physical' which gets used so often, after all.

Can you give me an example for a notion that can be produced without a mind?

You're claiming that there's something happening in your mind (consciousness) which is substantially different from pretty much all the rest of this 'universe,' as you call it. Bit of a strange notion from where I'm sitting, that we on this little planet are such an exception admist all that there is, but I guess it takes all sorts

Not different from ALL of the universe, no. There is a difference between a process and a physical thing. "Morality" is a very estranged thing from a paperclip. I don't know how anyone could argue to the contrary- namely that thoughts and physical objects are very similar in their properties. They aren't. They're about as different as is possible to get.

And yet you are asserting this position quite determinedly.

What? No I am not. I've never said that there are 'mental phenomena different from other mental phenomena"

Howdy again Faerie. There seems to be some miscommunication here which I've been procrastinating over addressing - hope you're still around here somewhere

You seem to be arguing essentially from the perspective of physicalism. Let me know if I've got it wrong, but that's the impression I get from a bit of a sampling of your comments (italics):
A> It's unintelligible to speak of two fundamentally different types of stuff
And I personally would not even make those distinctions between physical and "spiritual" at all- but the people who believe in this god usually do, so I have no choice but to work with them. I have not yet met someone (who isn't just a pantheist) who claims god is a physical being rather than a 'spiritual' one (whatever the hell that means).

Some kind of plane which is wholly different from the physical world in some way. . . . I don't buy this distinction. If it's there and exists I see no reason to make such a distinction. It overcomplicates things.

B> Atoms, rocks and so on do not have mental properties
I know rocks are not like me. They have no nervous system, no eyes, no respiratory system. They cannot experience the world in the way I can. That is not an assumption humans make, that is a demonstrable fact we can examine and prove.

It is not an 'assumption' that rocks are not conscious because we know that rocks do not actually possess anything that we know to produce consciousness.

C> Our minds are produced by physical stuff
We know that whatever the mind and consciousness actually is- it is a product of the brain.

D> Atoms, rocks and so on are not produced by minds
I don't know how anyone could argue to the contrary- namely that thoughts and physical objects are very similar in their properties. They aren't. They're about as different as is possible to get.

For my part I agree with point A; like the problem of Cartesian mind/body dualism, fundamentally different types of stuff can't meaningfully be said to interact. But I don't think any of the other points can be justified, not as presumptions and certainly not as 'knowledge.' I've pointed out why I think that view is so common; because as infants we must necessarily go through a stage of differentiating ourselves from the world, else we could never have a sense of self. But questions like the problem of other minds and whether there's a mind behind the universe are beginning from that infantile presumption, when it seems to me that the first step of scepticism should really be questioning whether we are actually so different from the world at all. Hopefully that clears things up a little

So you're saying that it is an assumption that other people have consciousness (when we know that they possess similar organic structures to ourselves) but it is not an assumption that other things don't have consciousness, because they don't have the same organic structures. You haven't actually added anything new here I'm afraid, you're just making the same assertion in a different way.

But both go hand in hand. How could you possibly assume one without the other? By the way- to clarify- the assumption is simply that consciousness as we know it is experienced by others in the same way it is for us. That's the assumption. But we can certainly see the products of consciousness happening in others' brains so must assume that it is. Assumption was probably not a good word here. I mean, we know that spatial memory takes place in a certain part of the brain known as the hypocampus. That's no assumption, that's scientific knowledge. The assumption is that your experience of consciousness is the same as mine. And that's not an unfair assumption considering how similar all our brains work.

This is related to point C above of course. But whereas earlier you said that consciousness or the mind is a product of the brain, now you're saying that we see products of consciousness happening in the brain. That might not be a direct contradiction - there could be a two-way relationship between the mind and brain? - but I think it's more likely that you're not distinguishing between your conclusion and your argument. I don't know much about it, but from what I gather what we see happening in others' brains through various imaging techniques are things like changes in blood flow and magnetic fields. We don't see consciousness, we can't know that those things cause consciousness - though as Scourge has suggested, there's plenty of evidence for the connection between the brain and various behaviours we associate with consciousness - and you're arguing in circles and perhaps counter-productively by describing those things as the products of consciousness.

We have absolutely no grounds for thinking objects without brains can contain consciousness, and we have no more reason to believe that than we do to believe that the moon is alive or that trees want to eat us.

Point B from above. What you seem to be saying is that we 'know' certain assemblies of atoms can contain consciousness, but we have no reason to think that other assemblies of atoms can contain consciousness. But given the shakiness of how we 'know' that brains besides our own are associated with consciousness - we merely infer it by analogy from structure and behaviour - what you're really saying is just that other things are not so similar in structure and behaviour. Since that's obviously true, I would agree that suggesting consciousness in a tree is a marginally bigger leap in the dark than suggesting consciousness in a snake. But I think there's two points on which the view that brainless things aren't conscious has difficulties.

Above the atomic level, it seems strange if not absurd to suggest that this remarkably different quality of consciousness could arise from non-conscious components. The rest of our bodies, like trees, machines and the moon, could be viewed in strictly mechanical terms of behaviour, reducible to the properties of component molecules. Suggesting that consciousness is a particular exception to this would be a significant claim indeed - and in fact I have not yet found any other case at all where a whole has characteristics objectively, qualitatively different from its parts. It could be suggested that consciousness is a strictly subjective phenomenon, but we're still left with the problem of either brains being uniquely capable of producing subjective experience (which would be an objective capacity) or the probability that this supposed uniqueness merely derives from our perspective.

And from what very little I know it seems to me that at the sub-atomic level what we observe has commonalities with concious behaviour perhaps as much as any alternative. Non-conscious things' behaviour at the macro level is (in theory at least) consistent and predictable, whereas in the case of known conscious things generally we can at best guess what the person or animal is most likely to do; we can describe general patterns of behaviour, but not know specifically what behaviour will manifest. Obviously I'm open to correction on this by anyone with more knowledge, but from what I've read it seems to me that quantum behaviour is more along the lines of the latter than the former.

SHowever even if we pretend that you've got a valid argument here, that's only one half of the problem. I wouldn't say that my memories have consciousness, but they're certainly produced by and part of my consciousness. In other words we know from our most constant and intimate experience that things which are not themselves minds/consciousness can be produced by and exist within minds/consciousness. But even assuming, as you choose to, that rocks and so on are things which are not conscious/minds, what is the justification for any notion that they can exist or be produced without a mind? That's generally what's implied by the term 'physical' which gets used so often, after all.

Can you give me an example for a notion that can be produced without a mind?

You've misunderstood me there by the looks. My point is that you can't give me an example of anything which is known to be produced without a mind. We know that our minds produce things, including images of people, places and so on, but we don't know that anything can be produced without a mind. If it were the case that things can only be produced by a mind, it would follow that our whole universe is the product of some greater Mind/s. It's an understandable oversight, but in questioning after evidence or reasons to believe in gods, you seem to be simply assuming that an alternative is even possible, let alone plausible.

You're claiming that there's something happening in your mind (consciousness) which is substantially different from pretty much all the rest of this 'universe,' as you call it. Bit of a strange notion from where I'm sitting, that we on this little planet are such an exception admist all that there is, but I guess it takes all sorts

Not different from ALL of the universe, no. There is a difference between a process and a physical thing. "Morality" is a very estranged thing from a paperclip. I don't know how anyone could argue to the contrary- namely that thoughts and physical objects are very similar in their properties. They aren't. They're about as different as is possible to get.

I'm curious; what's the difference between the paperclip on my desk and the one in my mind, besides location? I can make the one on my desk function in different ways - holding paper, bending it into weird shapes or so on - and I can make the one in my mind do the same things. Is it simply the fact that the one in my mind exists and behaves entirely and only according to my will, whereas the one on my desk is subject to constraints from outside my mind? I'm interested in your thoughts on this, because I suspect that's pretty much all the difference you can show. You describe the stuff outside your mind as a universe which is 'physical', but without that delineation of perspective and its associated term which (as far as I can tell) has no metaphysical meaning beyond "not mind", and you may as well call the stuff outside your mind 'god' and ask why anyone believes in this 'universe.' In other words you're presuming because of perspective that there's some big difference between the nature of your mental and 'physical' paperclips, and I don't think that's a very valid presumption to make.

Obviously, until we have some reason to suppose that there can be any aspects of reality of a different type to the mental phenomena which we all experience, such a notion must be viewed with considerable scepticism. Some reason better than babies' earliest and most basic developments of perception and interpretation, I mean. I wouldn't say - as some folk might - that it is irrational to believe such a thing without valid reason, because obviously many intelligent and learned people through history have indeed believed precisely that. For my part I reckon it's an interesting notion to speculate on, but that's about it. You are welcome to your beliefs

Well I agree. It is something interesting to think about. It's one of a good deal of subjects which are interesting to think about, but not worth any consideration until we are presented with some evidence for the positive.

And yet you are asserting this position quite determinedly.

What? No I am not. I've never said that there are 'mental phenomena different from other mental phenomena"

But you are suggesting that there can be aspects of reality of a different type to mental phenomena. And so far I haven't seen any valid reason suppose that this is the case, nor even that it's possible. So until such justification is forthcoming (and since I know that my mind can produce images of things) it seems much more sensible to suppose that the images I perceive outside of my own mind were also produced by Mind/s than to imagine a brand new type of existence and suppose that my mind is some kind of rare phenomenon in this 'physical' plane of existence.

[kayky]

Its a consensus built on a mountain of evidence, experiments, and case studies. Your trite dismissal of such a colossal amount of evidence in such a matter puts you in the same crowd as flat earthers and creationists. The latest evolution in the tree of religious science-deniers. But i don't suppose you accuse round earthers and evolutionists of "reductionism", do you?

All this evidence shows is that the brain is an instrument of the mind. It is reductionist to then conclude that that is all that is going on. I do not deny science, but I do not worship at the feet of scientists who make conclusions that go beyond the evidence. This isn't the first time science has made this mistake.

Its also "interesting" to note how you trumpeted the scientific consensus until it came into conflict with your religious beliefs. That is, the problem seems to be that you have a particular conclusion in mind and are searching to support it.

This is exactly the mistake these scientists are making. They assume that the human being is nothing more than neuro-transmitters and chemical reactions. So they announce that "brain" and "mind" are one and the same. Not all scientists have made this error and have been vocal in their disagreement.

I find scientism just as distasteful as fundamentalism. I see them as branches from the same tree. In my opinion, they appeal to the same mentality: the desire for absolute certainty and the comfort-level this provides.

[kayky]

You're saying it's courageous to accept the "knowledge" arrived at through unreliable methods, as if this is something to be respected. But you give no justification that I can see. Vague talk about supposed limits of science and appeals to personal revelation don't amount to much for the skeptical thinker, and why should they?

I certainly am not seeking your respect. It means little to me. But i do think an authentic spiritual path, not predicated by the certainty of the absolute truth of a certain book or tradition, takes a certain degree of courage. Whether or not you agree with that makes no difference to me. I find no special value in sustained skepticism about every aspect of life. I think it can at times be just as blinding as credulous belief.