Is it reasonable to deduce God from order in Nature?

[marco]

Is it reasonable to look at a lamb and deduce that God set the production of sheep in motion through his wonderful love. Blake wondered why the God who made the lamb also made the tiger to kill it.

When we see the operation of flowers, the human eye, the spider's web... some of us conclude there is a God who fashioned them. How else did they come about?

Thus God is the product of our ignorance. We do not know - ergo God.

Is this a reasonable position to hold?

Should we expect more definite signs of our maker?

And if we accept that some Intelligence made everything, how do we reconcile this Intelligence with the Titan of the Old Testament, hung up on sex, sin and sacrifice?

[marco]

For the whole species? Including Iraqis?
We kill others because they don't agree with us or because we want what they've got.
How much more barbaric can we get?

People have always killed others who did not agree; heretics were tortured and burned; little countries were invaded by bigger countries.

Sadly, the bad people among us have stolen the advanced weapons that clever people have devised; they can use mobile phones to detonate bombs. They can travel on planes and use those planes as a means of mass destruction. The bad intentions have always been there, but not the advanced weapons.

Basically, however, we are more forgiving - we leave witches alone; we don't send little boys down coal-mines; most countries don't murder gay people (except the really religious states!) and we have international charity organisations. Funnily enough, it's the people who are religiously enchained who want to kill us.

[Kenisaw]

Isn't it possible that instead of merely meeting some unmet explanatory needs (not that that's a bad thing), some or even most religions began or were shaped by genuine glimpses of a higher reality?

I substituted "leprechaun" in for "higher reality". I tried "unicorn" too. No matter what I used, I end up with a baseless claim that is devoid of any evidence or data supporting it.

Please submit your evidence or empirical data for a "higher reality". Skipping to the end and avoiding the middle stuff, you don't have any. No believer ever does, and it has definitely been asked for on this website more times than I care to count. If such proof existed it would been all over the news by now, and be both know it.

So no, I don't think anyone had genuine glimpses of anything. More likely, they injected their coping mechanisms into their experiences and their minds manufactured the rest from there (you can google that too by the way if you want to read more on that)...

Just to clarify I'm not a believer, I'm a sceptic. I'm not selectively sceptical; I question non-religious philosophies as well as religious ones. When presented with some data, the first questions I try to ask are "what does this point to?" and "how strongly does it suggest it?" Then, even if it seems pretty solid or something I'd like to agree with, I try to consider alternative explanations of the same data and consider how plausible those might be. For example: What kind of plausible scenarios might there be in which there really was a god who interacted with the Hebrew culture in its past?

So what do you get if you apply that kind of process to the origins of the biblical religion?

My apologies if it seemed I was suggesting otherwise, but I was aware you are a skeptic. But I am a little confused by a skeptic that would consider baseless claims as equal to other things that have empirical data backing them up.

I do the same thing as you do when I am presented with data. But I don't see the value of employing "magic" as a plausible alternative explanation. There is no data, no empirical evidence, for "magic". Why consider something that is baseless? I consider natural explanations, because we know nature exists, and there are bountiful numbers of natural explanations already. No need for magic.

Do you consider each god in the pantheon of human imagination, or just the Christian god? What about leprechauns, and unicorns, and Santa? Since they have no supporting evidence for them either, you should give them the same due diligence that you give the god. Be prepared to spend a lot of extra time giving equal consideration to all the possibilities that are baseless.

Perhaps you are still influenced by your former theistic beliefs (I know that was a common thing for me when I first became an atheist). Your brain might want to run home to the old you sometimes, it might want to include the remnants of the non-skeptic in the process.

There's no need to apply "magic" to anything when "magic" is nothing more than a human concept.

Moses never claimed that he met a leprechaun, did he? Isaiah did not say that he received revelations from a unicorn. The data that we are presented with here is claims of what certain humans have observed and experienced. Empirical observation is one of the twin pillars of human knowledge, and this data points to a super-human origin for the biblical religions (I dislike the incoherent term 'supernatural').

It's not data. It's a claim. It's third party story telling about something that no one can verify. It's called hearsay in a court of law. We have no clue if any of these people existed, much less what they did and did not encounter. On top of that, there is zero evidence for the existence of any of the super-human (supernatural) aspects of any of it. The entire thing could be one big lie and no one can discern if that is the case or not, so it is hearsay, not data...

Of course, it points very weakly to that super-human origin; the stories of Moses probably weren't even gathered into the format we have today until the 6th or 7th century BCE, for example, but even in the cases where we have primary sources for such alleged experiences of the divine, we should be rightly sceptical of whether or not those claims are true. Some people deceive themselves, some people deceive others - though not all people or all the time, it's important to note.

All I asked is whether it is possible those claims for the origins of a given religion are true? You didn't really answer, but wouldn't you agree that it is possible, or at least that they are grounded in truth? And if it is possible, then explanatory theories which assume strictly naturalistic origins are merely alternative explanations of that initial data, not proofs against or refutations of the conclusions very weakly suggested by it.

No, I would not agree they are grounded in truth. Do you agree that the stories in the Vedas are grounded in truth? How about Egyptian mythology? Why aren't you considering all of the possibilities, not just the one you were raised with?

Since I cannot say, with 100% certainty, that there is no such thing as god creatures (I can't prove a negative after all), I have always freely admitted that there will always be the possibility of something like that existing. However, in the light of a complete absence of any support for the existence of such things, not to mention the contradictory nature of the claimed characteristics of such creatures, there is no rational reason for me to consider such beings as a plausible explanation for anything.

[Mithrae]

Just to clarify I'm not a believer, I'm a sceptic. I'm not selectively sceptical; I question non-religious philosophies as well as religious ones. When presented with some data, the first questions I try to ask are "what does this point to?" and "how strongly does it suggest it?" Then, even if it seems pretty solid or something I'd like to agree with, I try to consider alternative explanations of the same data and consider how plausible those might be. For example: What kind of plausible scenarios might there be in which there really was a god who interacted with the Hebrew culture in its past?

So what do you get if you apply that kind of process to the origins of the biblical religion?

My apologies if it seemed I was suggesting otherwise, but I was aware you are a skeptic. But I am a little confused by a skeptic that would consider baseless claims as equal to other things that have empirical data backing them up.

I do the same thing as you do when I am presented with data. But I don't see the value of employing "magic" as a plausible alternative explanation. There is no data, no empirical evidence, for "magic". Why consider something that is baseless? I consider natural explanations, because we know nature exists, and there are bountiful numbers of natural explanations already. No need for magic.

'Empirical' evidence refers to the evidence of observation and experience. As I pointed out, many of these religious stories are about what people have allegedly seen and experienced.

'Magic' runs into a similar problem as 'supernatural' (though at least it's not incoherent) in that it involves some preconception of how the world should work in order to declare that some things run contrary to that. For example, if you were living a few centuries ago, you would have a very clear and quite reasonable view of how the world works with regards to feathers and lead weights; a feather falls much slower than a lead weight, amiright? Therefore if someone claimed that they saw a feather falling as fast as a lead weight, that should be considered "magic." But supposedly there is no data, no empirical evidence for the existence of magic, and that claim can be dismissed as baseless hearsay. Heck, maybe even a few other people might also claim that they'd seen feathers falling as fast as lead weights, on the same or different occasions. But it's still only a few scraps of hearsay against your conviction that "magic" does not exist.

It's fair to view certain things as unusual, and to be more sceptical of particularly unusual claims. But creating a brand new category with which to dismiss unusual things does not seem like a sound approach, in my view.

Do you consider each god in the pantheon of human imagination, or just the Christian god? What about leprechauns, and unicorns, and Santa? Since they have no supporting evidence for them either, you should give them the same due diligence that you give the god. Be prepared to spend a lot of extra time giving equal consideration to all the possibilities that are baseless.

How many people honestly claim to have observational experience regarding leprechauns, unicorns and Santa? This isn't some kind of outlandish or arbitrary criterion, it's simply looking for the most basic source of human knowledge. Alien abductions and UFO sightings would be a better example; and while many reports might be readily explained by sleep paralysis or individual misperception, delusion or deceit, some are less easily dismissed. I remain sceptical, and open-minded.

Moses never claimed that he met a leprechaun, did he? Isaiah did not say that he received revelations from a unicorn. The data that we are presented with here is claims of what certain humans have observed and experienced. Empirical observation is one of the twin pillars of human knowledge, and this data points to a super-human origin for the biblical religions (I dislike the incoherent term 'supernatural').

It's not data. It's a claim. It's third party story telling about something that no one can verify. It's called hearsay in a court of law. We have no clue if any of these people existed, much less what they did and did not encounter. On top of that, there is zero evidence for the existence of any of the super-human (supernatural) aspects of any of it. The entire thing could be one big lie and no one can discern if that is the case or not, so it is hearsay, not data...

Of course, it points very weakly to that super-human origin; the stories of Moses probably weren't even gathered into the format we have today until the 6th or 7th century BCE, for example, but even in the cases where we have primary sources for such alleged experiences of the divine, we should be rightly sceptical of whether or not those claims are true. Some people deceive themselves, some people deceive others - though not all people or all the time, it's important to note.

All I asked is whether it is possible those claims for the origins of a given religion are true? You didn't really answer, but wouldn't you agree that it is possible, or at least that they are grounded in truth? And if it is possible, then explanatory theories which assume strictly naturalistic origins are merely alternative explanations of that initial data, not proofs against or refutations of the conclusions very weakly suggested by it.

No, I would not agree they are grounded in truth. Do you agree that the stories in the Vedas are grounded in truth? How about Egyptian mythology? Why aren't you considering all of the possibilities, not just the one you were raised with?

Since I cannot say, with 100% certainty, that there is no such thing as god creatures (I can't prove a negative after all), I have always freely admitted that there will always be the possibility of something like that existing. However, in the light of a complete absence of any support for the existence of such things, not to mention the contradictory nature of the claimed characteristics of such creatures, there is no rational reason for me to consider such beings as a plausible explanation for anything.

Sorry, I meant is it possible they're grounded in truth. And I'd agree that for such ancient claims the evidence is extremely weak; it would be essentially impossible to prove beyond reasonable modern doubt even that Jesus existed, let alone any miracle claims. (Of course the same applies for Socrates or the like also; historical evidence is meagre across the board.) But claims of experiences of various deities continue even into the enlightened scientific era.

Suppose some 'miraculous' event was reportedly witnessed by two or three people; all relatively intelligent professionals, none of them known liars or schizophreniacs, an event at their home rather than some hyper-emotional religious setting. How likely are the delusion or deception 'explanations' in that case? At what point do we cross the line from reasonable scepticism into stubborn dogmatism?

Maybe one report of that nature isn't enough to constitute convincing evidence for such unusual events. But what if there were two or three or four different miracle reports which might each be moderately persuasive on its own? I haven't really tried to collect a database of moderately-persuasive reports available online yet (it's been on my to-do list for about four years ), so I can't say how many such reports there are, but I've personally known two or three intelligent and trustworthy people who've claimed experiences which are otherwise had to explain in naturalistic terms - the two more persuasive ones being non-Christian.

So combined with the fact that idealism / panentheism seems to be a more reasonable way of imagining reality than materialism and philosophical naturalism to begin with, it's quite difficult to make a sweeping dismissal of all such reported observations.

[marco]

As far as I know there is only one world, one reality. If you believe in multiple worlds it might help to explain why first, because otherwise all these worlds are just confusing.

The OP asks whether it is reasonable to deduce God from order in nature. I do not think it is and especially if we dress him as Yahweh. Since you oppose this view you think it is reasonable to suppose a creator God exists, and you also think he exists in the only reality you know, but he incorporates all, whatever that might mean. Is he merciful or simply a container of all the garbage that is the universe? And you deduce this thing's existence from observation of what we have. Fair enough. He is the sum total.


Your voyage into metaphysics via The Matrix (which I have not seen) does not hold much relevance for me. It introduces some interesting personal ideas. But as to your thoughts on the OP, I am not sure whether you think Yahweh or some sibling is a reasonable deduction from watching lambs in a field. I think not.

[Kenisaw]

Just to clarify I'm not a believer, I'm a sceptic. I'm not selectively sceptical; I question non-religious philosophies as well as religious ones. When presented with some data, the first questions I try to ask are "what does this point to?" and "how strongly does it suggest it?" Then, even if it seems pretty solid or something I'd like to agree with, I try to consider alternative explanations of the same data and consider how plausible those might be. For example: What kind of plausible scenarios might there be in which there really was a god who interacted with the Hebrew culture in its past?

So what do you get if you apply that kind of process to the origins of the biblical religion?

My apologies if it seemed I was suggesting otherwise, but I was aware you are a skeptic. But I am a little confused by a skeptic that would consider baseless claims as equal to other things that have empirical data backing them up.

I do the same thing as you do when I am presented with data. But I don't see the value of employing "magic" as a plausible alternative explanation. There is no data, no empirical evidence, for "magic". Why consider something that is baseless? I consider natural explanations, because we know nature exists, and there are bountiful numbers of natural explanations already. No need for magic.

'Empirical' evidence refers to the evidence of observation and experience. As I pointed out, many of these religious stories are about what people have allegedly seen and experienced.

You are missing a key component of the definition of empirical - verifiable. Third party hearsay cannot be verified. Human experience is valuable if others can repeat it and confirm it. 2000 year old stories written by unknown authors about tales of people that cannot even be confirmed to have lived is a pretty low standard to use as a starting point. Especially as it relates to the topic. It's entirely plausible that there a dude named Moses and a troublemaking human named Jesus that lived in ancient times. Add any of the supernatural/super-human/magic stuff do it, and it becomes an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence...

'Magic' runs into a similar problem as 'supernatural' (though at least it's not incoherent) in that it involves some preconception of how the world should work in order to declare that some things run contrary to that. For example, if you were living a few centuries ago, you would have a very clear and quite reasonable view of how the world works with regards to feathers and lead weights; a feather falls much slower than a lead weight, amiright? Therefore if someone claimed that they saw a feather falling as fast as a lead weight, that should be considered "magic." But supposedly there is no data, no empirical evidence for the existence of magic, and that claim can be dismissed as baseless hearsay. Heck, maybe even a few other people might also claim that they'd seen feathers falling as fast as lead weights, on the same or different occasions. But it's still only a few scraps of hearsay against your conviction that "magic" does not exist.

I wouldn't say "should work". We have preconception of how the world DOES work, based on empirical data and evidence thoroughly tested and verified by others. And we both understand that any knowledge is only considered temporary, because new information could come along in the future that changes our understanding (that's why no scientific theory is ever considered closed as I'm sure you know).

But even when people had incorrect conclusions about things like the shape of the Earth or that a feather could fall as fast as a lead ball in the right conditions (a vacuum), there was never any magical component to those claims. Please understand, I realize you are trying to use a comparison as an example of your point, but your example isn't anywhere near the scale or magnitude of these religious tales.

My "conviction" that magic doesn't exist is based on the dearth of evidence for magic.
It is a rational conclusion based on the available information. If you want me to consider magic as a possibility, show me that magic is even remotely possible.

It's fair to view certain things as unusual, and to be more sceptical of particularly unusual claims. But creating a brand new category with which to dismiss unusual things does not seem like a sound approach, in my view.

I don't dismiss religious claims because they are religious. I dismiss religious claims because there is no evidence for them. The fact that they are religious in nature has no bearing on it. And, as I have already mentioned, evidence has been requested a lot of times by a lot of people, and we've yet to receive anything useful. If you want to consider hearsay stories thousands of years old as evidence, then why aren't you taking Egyptian mythology claims as seriously as Biblical ones?

Do you consider each god in the pantheon of human imagination, or just the Christian god? What about leprechauns, and unicorns, and Santa? Since they have no supporting evidence for them either, you should give them the same due diligence that you give the god. Be prepared to spend a lot of extra time giving equal consideration to all the possibilities that are baseless.

How many people honestly claim to have observational experience regarding leprechauns, unicorns and Santa?

More than the number of people that claim to have seen a resurrected Jesus the same decade he died. So why aren't people decorating trees in honor of leprechauns? If it's a numbers game, surely a billion Hindus demand that you start considering the Vedas as seriously as Biblical claims, right? If you are open-minded, this seems to be an avenue you would be exploring with equal vigor.

This isn't some kind of outlandish or arbitrary criterion, it's simply looking for the most basic source of human knowledge. Alien abductions and UFO sightings would be a better example; and while many reports might be readily explained by sleep paralysis or individual misperception, delusion or deceit, some are less easily dismissed. I remain sceptical, and open-minded.

So do I. But I choose to do it within the confines of our total knowledge base. Not only do many religious claims not have any evidence supporting them, they often contradict other facts about the universe that have been routinely verified for generations (like the conservation of energy to name one). After thinking that through, there is no serious reason to consider such tales as a remotely plausible explanation about anything.

Moses never claimed that he met a leprechaun, did he? Isaiah did not say that he received revelations from a unicorn. The data that we are presented with here is claims of what certain humans have observed and experienced. Empirical observation is one of the twin pillars of human knowledge, and this data points to a super-human origin for the biblical religions (I dislike the incoherent term 'supernatural').

It's not data. It's a claim. It's third party story telling about something that no one can verify. It's called hearsay in a court of law. We have no clue if any of these people existed, much less what they did and did not encounter. On top of that, there is zero evidence for the existence of any of the super-human (supernatural) aspects of any of it. The entire thing could be one big lie and no one can discern if that is the case or not, so it is hearsay, not data...

Of course, it points very weakly to that super-human origin; the stories of Moses probably weren't even gathered into the format we have today until the 6th or 7th century BCE, for example, but even in the cases where we have primary sources for such alleged experiences of the divine, we should be rightly sceptical of whether or not those claims are true. Some people deceive themselves, some people deceive others - though not all people or all the time, it's important to note.

All I asked is whether it is possible those claims for the origins of a given religion are true? You didn't really answer, but wouldn't you agree that it is possible, or at least that they are grounded in truth? And if it is possible, then explanatory theories which assume strictly naturalistic origins are merely alternative explanations of that initial data, not proofs against or refutations of the conclusions very weakly suggested by it.

No, I would not agree they are grounded in truth. Do you agree that the stories in the Vedas are grounded in truth? How about Egyptian mythology? Why aren't you considering all of the possibilities, not just the one you were raised with?

Since I cannot say, with 100% certainty, that there is no such thing as god creatures (I can't prove a negative after all), I have always freely admitted that there will always be the possibility of something like that existing. However, in the light of a complete absence of any support for the existence of such things, not to mention the contradictory nature of the claimed characteristics of such creatures, there is no rational reason for me to consider such beings as a plausible explanation for anything.

Sorry, I meant is it possible they're grounded in truth. And I'd agree that for such ancient claims the evidence is extremely weak; it would be essentially impossible to prove beyond reasonable modern doubt even that Jesus existed, let alone any miracle claims. (Of course the same applies for Socrates or the like also; historical evidence is meagre across the board.) But claims of experiences of various deities continue even into the enlightened scientific era.

All true. I will state for the record that I do think Jesus was a real human being, or at least the stories of Jesus were based on a real person. That's a very plausible and realistic possibility.

Suppose some 'miraculous' event was reportedly witnessed by two or three people; all relatively intelligent professionals, none of them known liars or schizophreniacs, an event at their home rather than some hyper-emotional religious setting. How likely are the delusion or deception 'explanations' in that case? At what point do we cross the line from reasonable scepticism into stubborn dogmatism?

Maybe one report of that nature isn't enough to constitute convincing evidence for such unusual events. But what if there were two or three or four different miracle reports which might each be moderately persuasive on its own? I haven't really tried to collect a database of moderately-persuasive reports available online yet (it's been on my to-do list for about four years ), so I can't say how many such reports there are, but I've personally known two or three intelligent and trustworthy people who've claimed experiences which are otherwise had to explain in naturalistic terms - the two more persuasive ones being non-Christian.

So combined with the fact that idealism / panentheism seems to be a more reasonable way of imagining reality than materialism and philosophical naturalism to begin with, it's quite difficult to make a sweeping dismissal of all such reported observations.

Maybe I should have articulated this earlier, but part of the problem with "super-human" claims is not just that there is no evidence or data for them. The problem is also that they pretty much always require a suspension of known universal laws in order for the super-human claim to be accomplished. A god keeps a tornado from killing a particular person in a trailer park, or a body comes alive again days after it died, or water is turned into wine, etc requires that laws of chemistry and/or physics and/or thermodynamics be suspended in order for the claim to have happened. Laws and rules that cannot seem to be violated are suddenly violated in "super-human" situations, and no evidence is left behind (even though every action causes an equal and opposite reaction - another rule that gets violated).

There are massive issues with such claims, far too big to ignore and far too big to put them in the "possible" column...

[Mithrae]

As far as I know there is only one world, one reality. If you believe in multiple worlds it might help to explain why first, because otherwise all these worlds are just confusing.

The OP asks whether it is reasonable to deduce God from order in nature. I do not think it is and especially if we dress him as Yahweh. Since you oppose this view you think it is reasonable to suppose a creator God exists, and you also think he exists in the only reality you know, but he incorporates all, whatever that might mean. Is he merciful or simply a container of all the garbage that is the universe? And you deduce this thing's existence from observation of what we have. Fair enough. He is the sum total.


Your voyage into metaphysics via The Matrix (which I have not seen) does not hold much relevance for me. It introduces some interesting personal ideas. But as to your thoughts on the OP, I am not sure whether you think Yahweh or some sibling is a reasonable deduction from watching lambs in a field. I think not.

From lambs in a field, no. From order in nature generally yes, as I originally outlined with regard to causation; knowing that choice is the causal process of our actions leads to the inference of a similar causal process in other events. A weak inference obviously, but unless and until we can demonstrate any alternative it seems the most reasonable view; determinism or prescriptive 'laws of nature' have not been demonstrated by contrast. In fact from what little I understand of it, quantum indeterminacy is more along the lines of a probability function, arguably throwing a bit of a wrench in the works there. (And as I showed, there's also at least two other lines of reasoning supporting the same conclusion, which aren't necessarily within your OP guidelines.)

[Mithrae]

Suppose some 'miraculous' event was reportedly witnessed by two or three people; all relatively intelligent professionals, none of them known liars or schizophreniacs, an event at their home rather than some hyper-emotional religious setting. How likely are the delusion or deception 'explanations' in that case? At what point do we cross the line from reasonable scepticism into stubborn dogmatism?

Maybe one report of that nature isn't enough to constitute convincing evidence for such unusual events. But what if there were two or three or four different miracle reports which might each be moderately persuasive on its own? I haven't really tried to collect a database of moderately-persuasive reports available online yet (it's been on my to-do list for about four years ), so I can't say how many such reports there are, but I've personally known two or three intelligent and trustworthy people who've claimed experiences which are otherwise had to explain in naturalistic terms - the two more persuasive ones being non-Christian.

So combined with the fact that idealism / panentheism seems to be a more reasonable way of imagining reality than materialism and philosophical naturalism to begin with, it's quite difficult to make a sweeping dismissal of all such reported observations.

Maybe I should have articulated this earlier, but part of the problem with "super-human" claims is not just that there is no evidence or data for them. The problem is also that they pretty much always require a suspension of known universal laws in order for the super-human claim to be accomplished. A god keeps a tornado from killing a particular person in a trailer park, or a body comes alive again days after it died, or water is turned into wine, etc requires that laws of chemistry and/or physics and/or thermodynamics be suspended in order for the claim to have happened. Laws and rules that cannot seem to be violated are suddenly violated in "super-human" situations, and no evidence is left behind (even though every action causes an equal and opposite reaction - another rule that gets violated).

There are massive issues with such claims, far too big to ignore and far too big to put them in the "possible" column...

The problem is that you are invoking prescriptive 'laws of chemistry/physics' here, which is philosophy rather than science. (In fact not only prescriptive, imposing a general rule, but proscriptive, forbidding any exceptions.) Science itself provides us with descriptive 'laws,' collating and formalizing the apparently consistent behaviours from a wide range of observations. But the fact that these are not prescriptive laws is demonstrated by the fact that they're sometimes found to be broken (eg. Newton's laws of motion and gravitation).

Now you could say okay, some laws don't apply in some circumstances, but we've got good approximations of what must be universal laws with no exceptions in their given scope. That's a coherent philosophical position. But in my conversation with Marco I have already shown an alternative and I believe more reasonable philosophical perspective: That instead of postulating a 'physical' (ie, non-mental) reality and deterministic (or in light of quantum phenomena, perhaps merely quasi-deterministic) laws to govern it, we introduce fewer new assumptions and create fewer new conceptual difficulties by simply extrapolating from what we do know with certainty - the fact of our own consciousness, thought and choice. Instead of imagining reality as 'physical' stuff which inexplicably produced subjective, conscious minds, it makes more sense to imagine reality as mental stuff, the product or substance of some greater Mind which our own are tiny aspects of.

Not that prescriptive laws of nature can be considered a given even if we did assume materialism (let alone prescriptive laws of nature identical to 20th century science): But since materialism itself is a questionable philosophy and an apparently more plausible alternative seems highly compatible with theism if not explicitly theistic, it does not seem reasonable to simply rule out reports of highly unusual events as "too big to put them in the 'possible' column."

This isn't some kind of outlandish or arbitrary criterion, it's simply looking for the most basic source of human knowledge. Alien abductions and UFO sightings would be a better example; and while many reports might be readily explained by sleep paralysis or individual misperception, delusion or deceit, some are less easily dismissed. I remain sceptical, and open-minded.

So do I. But I choose to do it within the confines of our total knowledge base. Not only do many religious claims not have any evidence supporting them, they often contradict other facts about the universe that have been routinely verified for generations (like the conservation of energy to name one). After thinking that through, there is no serious reason to consider such tales as a remotely plausible explanation about anything.

I count five or six times in your post that you have declared there is "no evidence" for religious claims, when on the contrary I have shown that there clearly is evidence worthy of consideration: Observational reports by multiple, not-obviously-unreliable witnesses, any one of which might have a 40 or 60 or 80% likelihood of being misperception, deception or delusion, but for which it becomes increasingly unlikely that numerous such instances can all be hand-waved away.

Perhaps instead what you mean is "no evidence that I have so far found convincing"? Maybe that's just a point of semantic trivia. But how we talk and express ourselves shapes how we think, and I see this "no evidence" mantra posted so often by so many people that I can't help but wonder whether what effect it may have on folks' open-mindedness.


As a fun fact and point of comparison to the reasoning above, did you know that Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'?

• Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. . . .
  
  After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies' findings. Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.

Even in peer-reviewed scientific publications, there is a substantial percentage of unreliable reports. For obvious reasons the percentage is certainly much higher in the case of reported paranormal phenomena, but the fact that many reports are unreliable is clearly a fallacious reason to consider all such reports unreliable.

Dr. Jacalyn Duffin is Professor in the Hannah Chair of the History of Medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston, where she has taught in medicine, philosophy, history, and law for more than twenty years. She has served as President of both the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine. When she was asked in 1987, to investigate a reported miraculous healing for the Vatican...

• Duffin agreed to do the investigation, but only after warning the group that she was not herself a believer.
  
  "I revealed my atheism to them," Duffin says. "I told them my husband was a Jew, and I wasn't sure if they'd still want me. And they were delighted!"
  
  The group reasoned that if Duffin, as an atheist, found there was no scientific reason the woman should have recovered, who could doubt it was a miracle? In fact, after her investigation of the woman's recovery, Duffin agreed that the woman's healing was — for lack of a better word — miraculous.
  
  Intrigued by the experience, Duffin investigated hundreds of other miracle stories chronicled in the Vatican archives in Rome. She came away convinced that "miracles" do indeed happen.
  
  "To admit that as a nonbeliever, you don't have to claim that it was a supernatural entity that did it," Duffin says. "You have to admit some humility and accept that there are things that science cannot explain."

[liamconnor]

[Replying to post 1 by marco]

It should be added that the term 'God' is ambiguous: the god of the deists? the Jews? the Christians? Islam? a god beyond good and evil?

If all I had were the underlying character of nature to go on, I still think I would perceive a power behind the universe and on two grounds: I remain convinced by Aristotle's argument from change for a supernatural cause. The chief character of nature simply cannot account for itself: by herself she becomes self-contradictory. I also look at the world and see that, though the world is a severe place, there is much 'goodness' in it. This juxtaposition of good and evil might lead me to a more pantheistic viewpoint where the two are mere subjective perspectives or reality, were it not that I see good predominating: after all, the general strive of humanity is towards life, i.e., there are more happy people than miserable, more healthy than suicidal. I have been to 3rd world countries and met, among some of the most under-privileged folk, the most grateful and joyous.

But that is as far as I could go. A covenantal god? a triune god? a god from whom mankind Fell? a god then trying to 'save' us? No. None of that is "deducible" from the spectacle of the universe.

[Justin108]

It should be added that the term 'God' is ambiguous: the god of the deists? the Jews? the Christians? Islam? a god beyond good and evil?

Personally, the idea of a deistic god seems the most rational. Yet you describe yourself as a Christian. Can you explain how Christianity is the more rational conclusion compared to deism?

[Kenisaw]

Suppose some 'miraculous' event was reportedly witnessed by two or three people; all relatively intelligent professionals, none of them known liars or schizophreniacs, an event at their home rather than some hyper-emotional religious setting. How likely are the delusion or deception 'explanations' in that case? At what point do we cross the line from reasonable scepticism into stubborn dogmatism?

Maybe one report of that nature isn't enough to constitute convincing evidence for such unusual events. But what if there were two or three or four different miracle reports which might each be moderately persuasive on its own? I haven't really tried to collect a database of moderately-persuasive reports available online yet (it's been on my to-do list for about four years ), so I can't say how many such reports there are, but I've personally known two or three intelligent and trustworthy people who've claimed experiences which are otherwise had to explain in naturalistic terms - the two more persuasive ones being non-Christian.

So combined with the fact that idealism / panentheism seems to be a more reasonable way of imagining reality than materialism and philosophical naturalism to begin with, it's quite difficult to make a sweeping dismissal of all such reported observations.

Maybe I should have articulated this earlier, but part of the problem with "super-human" claims is not just that there is no evidence or data for them. The problem is also that they pretty much always require a suspension of known universal laws in order for the super-human claim to be accomplished. A god keeps a tornado from killing a particular person in a trailer park, or a body comes alive again days after it died, or water is turned into wine, etc requires that laws of chemistry and/or physics and/or thermodynamics be suspended in order for the claim to have happened. Laws and rules that cannot seem to be violated are suddenly violated in "super-human" situations, and no evidence is left behind (even though every action causes an equal and opposite reaction - another rule that gets violated).

There are massive issues with such claims, far too big to ignore and far too big to put them in the "possible" column...

The problem is that you are invoking prescriptive 'laws of chemistry/physics' here, which is philosophy rather than science.

What? I thought you were a skeptic, and scientific. You think chemistry/physics is "philosophy"??? You are starting to sound more and more like a believer all the time. Perhaps you really are and just don't want to admit it...

Maybe you should have googled "is chemistry science" or "is physics science". Then maybe you would have seen this:

{Chemistry is a branch of physical science that studies the composition, structure, properties and change of matter}

{Physics is the natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion and behavior through space and time, along with related concepts such as energy and force.}

I must be honest here Mith, I find it ridiculous that this even needs to be explained.

(In fact not only prescriptive, imposing a general rule, but proscriptive, forbidding any exceptions.) Science itself provides us with descriptive 'laws,' collating and formalizing the apparently consistent behaviours from a wide range of observations. But the fact that these are not prescriptive laws is demonstrated by the fact that they're sometimes found to be broken (eg. Newton's laws of motion and gravitation).

Newton's laws were superceded by the theory of relativity. No one here, including me, has ever tried to claim a Newtonian law as "universal". I've been talking about universal laws, the ones for which no violation can be found, despite many efforts to do so for generations. Conversation of mass, conversation of energy, etc.

Your stance makes zero sense. We have claims for gods for which there is no data or facts (I'll address that again below in reply to your other statements), and on top of it those claims almost invariably violate universal laws that have loads of data and facts showing they exist. And you somehow think these super-human/supernatural/god claims deserve consideration as plausible? There's no reason to do so, at least not rationally...

Now you could say okay, some laws don't apply in some circumstances, but we've got good approximations of what must be universal laws with no exceptions in their given scope. That's a coherent philosophical position.

It's a coherent scientific position actually. But on to the rest of your statements.

But in my conversation with Marco I have already shown an alternative and I believe more reasonable philosophical perspective: That instead of postulating a 'physical' (ie, non-mental) reality and deterministic (or in light of quantum phenomena, perhaps merely quasi-deterministic) laws to govern it, we introduce fewer new assumptions and create fewer new conceptual difficulties by simply extrapolating from what we do know with certainty - the fact of our own consciousness, thought and choice.

Universal laws are not assumptions. They are supported by mountains of facts and data. Our consciousness, by the way, works within those universal laws. Even our own minds do not violate them.

There are no conceptual difficulties with a material universe. It's what we observe, it's what we test, and it is what makes us up. To pretend otherwise is silly. To "extrapolate" from the material universe is fine, as long as you can back it up with data and empirical evidence rigorously examined and tested many times over to verify the results. Otherwise, it really isn't anything more than pure speculation.

Instead of imagining reality as 'physical' stuff which inexplicably produced subjective, conscious minds, it makes more sense to imagine reality as mental stuff, the product or substance of some greater Mind which our own are tiny aspects of.

Yeah you really sound like a believer now.

Anyway, the mind is nothing but your physical brain. All the data points to this being the case. You brain is a bunch of non-living atoms structured in such a way that it can retain information and process information via chemical and electrical impulses and connections. Consciousness does not exist separate from what is inside your coconut.

Not that prescriptive laws of nature can be considered a given even if we did assume materialism (let alone prescriptive laws of nature identical to 20th century science): But since materialism itself is a questionable philosophy and an apparently more plausible alternative seems highly compatible with theism if not explicitly theistic, it does not seem reasonable to simply rule out reports of highly unusual events as "too big to put them in the 'possible' column."

You will have to explain to me, in much greater detail, why materialism is a "questionable philosophy" in your opinion. I'd like to request the background that leads you to make such a statement.

Meanwhile, you go back to the believer play again, trying to claim that there is a more plausible choice compatible to theism? Easy to say, hard to prove. And I need your proof, Mith. Cold hard facts will do nicely...

This isn't some kind of outlandish or arbitrary criterion, it's simply looking for the most basic source of human knowledge. Alien abductions and UFO sightings would be a better example; and while many reports might be readily explained by sleep paralysis or individual misperception, delusion or deceit, some are less easily dismissed. I remain sceptical, and open-minded.

So do I. But I choose to do it within the confines of our total knowledge base. Not only do many religious claims not have any evidence supporting them, they often contradict other facts about the universe that have been routinely verified for generations (like the conservation of energy to name one). After thinking that through, there is no serious reason to consider such tales as a remotely plausible explanation about anything.

I count five or six times in your post that you have declared there is "no evidence" for religious claims, when on the contrary I have shown that there clearly is evidence worthy of consideration: Observational reports by multiple, not-obviously-unreliable witnesses, any one of which might have a 40 or 60 or 80% likelihood of being misperception, deception or delusion, but for which it becomes increasingly unlikely that numerous such instances can all be hand-waved away.

Evidence is not a matter of statistics. It's not a popularity contest. It is observable, testable, verifiable. Personal claims do NOT fall in that category, and you know it. I can make it real easy for you: No matter who is telling you their religious claim, is there a chance that they are lying? The answer, obviously, is yes, and you'd have no way of knowing. Is there anyway to verify their claim? The answer, obviously, is no. Is there any data or empirical evidence that supports their claim? People ask for such proof all the time around here, and we never see it. Never. That's why personal claims are not evidence.

Perhaps instead what you mean is "no evidence that I have so far found convincing"? Maybe that's just a point of semantic trivia. But how we talk and express ourselves shapes how we think, and I see this "no evidence" mantra posted so often by so many people that I can't help but wonder whether what effect it may have on folks' open-mindedness.

Whatever. I've adequately explained the difference between verifiable evidence, and baseless claims. The difference matters.