Is belief in God Logical?

[McCulloch]

God is quite logical to me
I understand logic just fine.
The antithessis of there being no God is totally illogical.
The belief [that God exists] would be [logical] too, but yes God is logical.

The question then is, "Does logic support the belief that God exists? Is it illogical that there is no God? "

In order to avoid confusion, for purposes of this debate, the word logic without any modifiers will mean formal deductive logic. If you wish to reference any other form of logic, please distinguish them appropriately, for example, fuzzy logic or modal logic.

Feel free to reference the works of eminent logicians such as, Charles Babbage, Garrett Birkhoff, George Boole, George Boolos, Nick Bostrom, L.E.J. Brouwer, Georg Cantor, Rudolf Carnap, Gregory Chaitin, Graham Chapman, Alonzo Church, John Cleese, René Descartes, Julius Dedekind, Augustus DeMorgan, Michael Dummett, Leonard Euler, Gottlab Frege, Terry Gilliam, Kurt Gödel, Fredrich Hayek, Arend Heyting, David Hilbert, David Hume, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, William Jevons, Immanuel Kant, Stuart Kauffman, Gottfried Leibniz, Ada Lovelace, Jan Łukasiewicz, G. E. Moore, Robert Nozick, William of Ockham, Michael Palin, Blaise Pascal, John Paulos, Giuseppe Peano, Charles Peirce, Karl Popper, Emil Leon Post, Hilary Putnam, Willard van Orman Quine, Frank Ramsey, Julia Hall Bowman Robinson, Bertrand Russell, Claude Shannon, Thoralf Skolem, Alfred Tarski, Alan Turing, Nicolai A. Vasiliev, John Venn, John von Neumann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Eugene Wigner or Stephen Wolfram.

[bernee51]

Atheism is not 'based on faith' at all. It is based entirely on observable evidence. Atheists see no reason for a god to exist and therefore they don't believe in one. Before you were told about God, you had no reason to believe in him either, unless you are the first person in recorded history to be able to prove that you became spontaneously aware of God with no human intervention whatsoever. God, to an atheist, is a superfluous interjection which does nothing but push back the big questions even further. 'why are we here?' 'God put us here.' 'But who put God here?' or 'where did the earth come from?' 'God created it.' 'But who created God?'

I'll jump in on this one, if you don't mind.

I'd say that no evidence for or against God would logically lead to agnosticism. Atheism, on those terms is as arbitrary as theism.

Why can resolution never be found on this issue? No evidence against god does not preclude atheism which is a not believing in god and has essentially nothing to say regarding ‘knowledge’ or otherwise of nay god’s existence. Can you 100% say that you ‘know’ a ‘god in general’ exists? If not do you still believe god exists? Are you then an agnostic theist? I am, in the case of ‘god in general’ an agnostic atheist. WRT the JCI god - I hold stronger views. I know this god does not exist – I am, in the case of this god, a gnostic atheist. Do you claim to ‘know’ the JCI god exists?

Beyond that, I would add that many people have a sense of God which goes beyond education. If we don't allow for anything else, we cannot account for the rise of religion in the first place.

There are theories which can account for the rise of religion. We are a species the not only ‘knows’ but ‘knows that it knows. We self-reflect. We are able to ask “Who am I?� Arising from this is the sense of duality – a sense of the ‘other’. That ‘other’ easyily becomes a god belief providing meaning and legitimacy in a world of obvious suffering.

Moreover, I would say that the "big questions" would be much closer to being answered if it were established that God exists.

The ‘big questions’ would be closer to being answered if more people engaged in self enquiry rather than persisting with the duality illusion.

Mainly, I'd say that "who put us here?" is not so big a question as "what is the purpose of life?".

How does the existence of god answer the question "what is the purpose of life?"

[QED]

Sorry for the tardy reply Sjoerd, I hope you're still monitoring this debate.

I happen to disagree with this view because we can explore the origins of meaning in a systematic way. In a paper by Christophe Menant a simple living organism (Paramaceum) is used to illustrate the fundamentals of meaning . By focussing on a simple life-form we strip away all the unnecessary distractions that get in the way when trying to explore the issue of meaning in human subjects. You, however, might want to say why it has no value when considering the issue in higher life forms.

Anyway, the rough idea is that when an organism evolves a motor response e.g. backing off from an acidity gradient, it has ascribed meaning to acid. Although this can be labelled as a crude reflex, nonetheless, the meaning of acid gets hard-wired into the organism's genes. Much more complex evolved behaviour can still be identified as the natural extension of this process as further meaning becomes moderated by additional sensory input.

Of course this doesn't provide any conclusive evidence to force us down the pathway to a reductionist explanation, but it shows that what at first blush might seem like an inscrutable mystery can have a naturalistic mechanism.

You are confusing meaning with function.

No. Menant's work exposes an essential link between function and meaning. That function might sound a bit mindless and meaning sound positively cerebral to our highly evolved brains is precisely why Menant chose to work from the "bottom up" in the first place. His paper charts a coherent relationship between the two.

I agree that complex behaviors can be explained mechanistically, whether they be bacterial chemotaxis or human behavior. I also agree that certain proteins in the bacterium can be said to have the function of chemotaxis. However, function is a human construct. We assign a functional term to the bacterium's response, the bacterium itself is happily ignorant.

It would be very easy to challenge someone to deny that a bacterium is ignorant and to deny that we are not, but this might well be capitalising on our inadequate definitions for terms relating to "conscious experiences".

Certainly if it could be demonstrated that there was necessarily some Élan vital or Élan mental acting over and above natural physical law to animate living things and give them conscious experiences (having first established adequate definitions for life/non-life conscious/unconscious) then this could be considered as evidence for an intentional supernatural intervention (but you didn't seem to hold out any hope for a logical route to such a thing a few pages ago).

I think the important point coming out of this is that, given the current state of the art (tantamount to ignorance) any prior intuitions about what can (human) and what can't (bacterium) be conscious (if indeed consciousness has such a discrete application) are utterly unreliable. The classic assumption based on this old kind of intuition is that if a functional copy of the neural network comprising an individual brain is made in some other medium (e.g. semiconductors) then only the original will experience consciousness. This assumption would probably be based on the assumption that transistors, as tiny slivers of silicon, could not have consciousness in any degree whatsoever. That may or not be a true fact about the world, but (in neither case) can it be built upon to draw the same conclusion about the collective action of numerous transistors. If that wasn't enough, as I was trying to point out above, our very definition of consciousness may have set the bar way too high in the first place.

I am not arguing that they cannot be deconstructed or explained in evolutionary terms, I am arguing that this does not take away the mystery and beauty of it. A painting can be fully deconstructed into molecules and there is no part of the painting that is not molecules. However, the beauty of the painting is an emergent property, and laws/guidelines that make a painting beautiful or not are wholly unrelated to their molecular structure.

Well, there's a whole bunch of people out there who think it's logical to believe in God because they sense something magic going on. Often, emotional properties such as beauty are put forward as examples of transcendentals that take us into a realm beyond the interplay of photons and molecules. Barrow, however, points to things like our general preferences for paintings depicting landscapes that "turn us on" due to our past evolutionary necessities (Many more walls are decorated with pastoral landscapes rather than deserted wastelands). Likewise the process of associative learning in musical appreciation, and striking the right balance between complexity and simplicity all provide keys to understanding the emotional effects of art -- emotions that in turn are chemically mediated control-loops determining our behaviour.

If it's suspected that reductionists are going too far in "explaining away" things that are "obviously magic", then I think it's only reasonable to demonstrate that there is indeed magic in the world. Particularly so when the reductionist's explanations so often make sense -- even at the most cursory level.

[Sjoerd]

Sorry for the tardy reply Sjoerd, I hope you're still monitoring this debate.

I happen to disagree with this view because we can explore the origins of meaning in a systematic way. In a paper by Christophe Menant a simple living organism (Paramaceum) is used to illustrate the fundamentals of meaning . By focussing on a simple life-form we strip away all the unnecessary distractions that get in the way when trying to explore the issue of meaning in human subjects. You, however, might want to say why it has no value when considering the issue in higher life forms.

Anyway, the rough idea is that when an organism evolves a motor response e.g. backing off from an acidity gradient, it has ascribed meaning to acid. Although this can be labelled as a crude reflex, nonetheless, the meaning of acid gets hard-wired into the organism's genes. Much more complex evolved behaviour can still be identified as the natural extension of this process as further meaning becomes moderated by additional sensory input.

Of course this doesn't provide any conclusive evidence to force us down the pathway to a reductionist explanation, but it shows that what at first blush might seem like an inscrutable mystery can have a naturalistic mechanism.

You are confusing meaning with function.

No. Menant's work exposes an essential link between function and meaning. That function might sound a bit mindless and meaning sound positively cerebral to our highly evolved brains is precisely why Menant chose to work from the "bottom up" in the first place. His paper charts a coherent relationship between the two.

I agree that complex behaviors can be explained mechanistically, whether they be bacterial chemotaxis or human behavior. I also agree that certain proteins in the bacterium can be said to have the function of chemotaxis. However, function is a human construct. We assign a functional term to the bacterium's response, the bacterium itself is happily ignorant.

It would be very easy to challenge someone to deny that a bacterium is ignorant and to deny that we are not, but this might well be capitalising on our inadequate definitions for terms relating to "conscious experiences".

Certainly if it could be demonstrated that there was necessarily some Élan vital or Élan mental acting over and above natural physical law to animate living things and give them conscious experiences (having first established adequate definitions for life/non-life conscious/unconscious) then this could be considered as evidence for an intentional supernatural intervention (but you didn't seem to hold out any hope for a logical route to such a thing a few pages ago).

I think the important point coming out of this is that, given the current state of the art (tantamount to ignorance) any prior intuitions about what can (human) and what can't (bacterium) be conscious (if indeed consciousness has such a discrete application) are utterly unreliable. The classic assumption based on this old kind of intuition is that if a functional copy of the neural network comprising an individual brain is made in some other medium (e.g. semiconductors) then only the original will experience consciousness. This assumption would probably be based on the assumption that transistors, as tiny slivers of silicon, could not have consciousness in any degree whatsoever. That may or not be a true fact about the world, but (in neither case) can it be built upon to draw the same conclusion about the collective action of numerous transistors. If that wasn't enough, as I was trying to point out above, our very definition of consciousness may have set the bar way too high in the first place.

I am not arguing that they cannot be deconstructed or explained in evolutionary terms, I am arguing that this does not take away the mystery and beauty of it. A painting can be fully deconstructed into molecules and there is no part of the painting that is not molecules. However, the beauty of the painting is an emergent property, and laws/guidelines that make a painting beautiful or not are wholly unrelated to their molecular structure.

Well, there's a whole bunch of people out there who think it's logical to believe in God because they sense something magic going on. Often, emotional properties such as beauty are put forward as examples of transcendentals that take us into a realm beyond the interplay of photons and molecules. Barrow, however, points to things like our general preferences for paintings depicting landscapes that "turn us on" due to our past evolutionary necessities (Many more walls are decorated with pastoral landscapes rather than deserted wastelands). Likewise the process of associative learning in musical appreciation, and striking the right balance between complexity and simplicity all provide keys to understanding the emotional effects of art -- emotions that in turn are chemically mediated control-loops determining our behaviour.

If it's suspected that reductionists are going too far in "explaining away" things that are "obviously magic", then I think it's only reasonable to demonstrate that there is indeed magic in the world. Particularly so when the reductionist's explanations so often make sense -- even at the most cursory level.

I have just read this paper, but I must say that I am not impressed at all. It is horribly written and the author seems to be completely ignorant of the terms "function", "meaning" and "mind" as they are used daily in cell biology, ethology and neuroscience (which is something completely different from neurology).

Human mind is something mysterious. At current level of the development of science, the nature of mind is still to be discovered. Studies on mind are however numerous and diverse (philosophy, neurology, artificial intelligence, psychology, science of knowledge/cognisciences, ...). The results achieved so far by these many fields of research are alas far from delivering an acceptable understanding of the nature of mind. The nature of mind is currently out of the field of scientific knowledge.

I am sorry, I can see no merit in this kind of writings.

[QED]

I have just read this paper, but I must say that I am not impressed at all. It is horribly written and the author seems to be completely ignorant of the terms "function", "meaning" and "mind" as they are used daily in cell biology, ethology and neuroscience (which is something completely different from neurology).

Human mind is something mysterious. At current level of the development of science, the nature of mind is still to be discovered. Studies on mind are however numerous and diverse (philosophy, neurology, artificial intelligence, psychology, science of knowledge/cognisciences, ...). The results achieved so far by these many fields of research are alas far from delivering an acceptable understanding of the nature of mind. The nature of mind is currently out of the field of scientific knowledge.

I am sorry, I can see no merit in this kind of writings.

First I must thank you for the time and effort it took you to reach that conclusion. Menant's expertise is in electronics engineering, so I'm prepared to cut him some slack when it comes to his use of terms outside his field. But I think you're going further and saying something is wrong with his essential idea. I would still like to know what that is. If you still feel that it is confusing meaning with function I think we could do with some tighter definitions for meaning and function. Chemotaxis is undeniably a very basic function but I don't see why this should automatically eliminate it from our understanding of how and what meaning is.

I'm totally fascinated by the subject of human consciousness but I'm not entranced: I don't regard it as being inscrutable. I think many valid insights have emerged that chip away at the notion of it being somehow off-limits to understanding -- which is the way some people seem to regard it. More often than not, these insights come from looking at the familiar in a different way.

I was particularly struck recently by a potential explanation Dan Dennett came up with for the generation of speech; how it could be that an abstract concept could ever come to be accurately vocalised (call this operation write). He started out with something that's clearly possible; the exact opposite; how vocalisation could be converted back into abstract symbols (call this read). By internally reading (easy) and editing a loosely associated, virtually random, series of words, the most appropriate words could be marshalled and written out (apparently hard). In support of this idea two kinds of Aphasia (due to trauma in Broca's area, governing language production, and in Wernicke's area responsible for language interpretation) present us with people with "open loops" resulting in tell-tale random utterances.

Other peculiar pathways have been identified; like the verbal self-instruction that can be seen in children. Already used to listening and understanding directions given by parents, young children (and the not so young!) can be overheard giving themselves spoken instructions while internal routes for such communications are still under development. In nearly all good scientific understandings of nature, it's nature that gives itself away by exhibiting different symptoms under unusual or extreme conditions. The key to understanding consciousness should be no different.

[Sjoerd]

I have just read this paper, but I must say that I am not impressed at all. It is horribly written and the author seems to be completely ignorant of the terms "function", "meaning" and "mind" as they are used daily in cell biology, ethology and neuroscience (which is something completely different from neurology).

Human mind is something mysterious. At current level of the development of science, the nature of mind is still to be discovered. Studies on mind are however numerous and diverse (philosophy, neurology, artificial intelligence, psychology, science of knowledge/cognisciences, ...). The results achieved so far by these many fields of research are alas far from delivering an acceptable understanding of the nature of mind. The nature of mind is currently out of the field of scientific knowledge.

I am sorry, I can see no merit in this kind of writings.

First I must thank you for the time and effort it took you to reach that conclusion. Menant's expertise is in electronics engineering, so I'm prepared to cut him some slack when it comes to his use of terms outside his field. But I think you're going further and saying something is wrong with his essential idea. I would still like to know what that is. If you still feel that it is confusing meaning with function I think we could do with some tighter definitions for meaning and function. Chemotaxis is undeniably a very basic function but I don't see why this should automatically eliminate it from our understanding of how and what meaning is.

I have read Menant's paper another time and I am still confused. Menant fails to address even the most classical and well-known ideas on meaning. In Menant's definition of meaning:
- Would coins be meaningful to a slot machine?
- Would Chinese be meaningful to the man in Searle's Chinese room or would it be meaningful for the room itself?
- Would Pavlov's dog attach meaning to the ringing of the bell, or would this be absurd because there is no systemic constraint involving bells?
- Would the concentration of glucose in my blood be meaningful information for me, even though I am not conscious of it?

And I hate to attack the author rather than his work, but I still believe that someone ignorant enough to say "molecules in proteins" should be banned from using the cell biology of Paramecium as an example.

I will address your own ideas on the subject in a later post, I think they are more interesting

[QED]

I have read Menant's paper another time and I am still confused. Menant fails to address even the most classical and well-known ideas on meaning.

I think it's more of a deliberate "setting to one side" in order to explore a fresh approach -- one that might be more productive in furthering the kind of understanding that could result in a practical implementation of AI. I'm glad to see you mention the Chinese room.

In Menant's definition of meaning:
- Would coins be meaningful to a slot machine?
- Would Chinese be meaningful to the man in Searle's Chinese room or would it be meaningful for the room itself?
- Would Pavlov's dog attach meaning to the ringing of the bell, or would this be absurd because there is no systemic constraint involving bells?
- Would the concentration of glucose in my blood be meaningful information for me, even though I am not conscious of it?

I'm always suspicious of falling into traps set by false dichotomies. I happen to think that the classic dichotomy set up between the unconscious and conscious may be just such a trap. Meaning registered at a conscious level need have no qualitative difference to meaning resulting in an unconscious reaction. By reserving meaning for consciousness we could be closing-off an important avenue of understanding. Of course it could be that the AI boys and girls continue to fail, but it won't be the faulty logic of Searle that defeats them.

I will address your own ideas on the subject in a later post, I think they are more interesting

Perhaps we could spin-off a new debating topic to preserve the spirit of this one. If I recall, the thing that fired me up was your blanket dismissal of the very notion of employing logic regarding the existence or non-existence of God. It struck me that we ought to retain a pragmatic approach in order to maintain control on arbitrary belief where it counts. The notion that we should have carte blanche to motivate ourselves politically and ethically on the basis of beliefs in things that are, by definition, utterly unverifiable should (I think) ring alarm bells in any thoughtful person.

[Sjoerd]

I'm always suspicious of falling into traps set by false dichotomies. I happen to think that the classic dichotomy set up between the unconscious and conscious may be just such a trap. Meaning registered at a conscious level need have no qualitative difference to meaning resulting in an unconscious reaction. By reserving meaning for consciousness we could be closing-off an important avenue of understanding. Of course it could be that the AI boys and girls continue to fail, but it won't be the faulty logic of Searle that defeats them.

This is very interesting.
IMO, Searle was flawed because he tried to unify two kinds of meaning that shouldn't be confused. There is clearly a dichotomy between what is meaningful to the man in the room and what is meaningful to the Chinese room as a whole. Likewise, there is a dichotomy between 1) a human as an organism, an information-processing system (which also processes meaningful information such as metabolite concentration), and 2) a human as a human mind, which has only access to a very limited subset of that information, and holds abstract information of its own. The human mind is emergent from the human organism, but metabolite concentration is not meaningful to the human mind and beauty is not meaningful to the human organism. They surely influence each other: a lack of glucose will surely affect the human mind, and an artist who pursues beauty and forgets to eat and sleep is likely to affect his human organism, too. But you cannot describe glucose levels in terms of beauty nor beauty in terms of glucose levels. I believe that any attempt to completely reduce the human mind to the human organism (as in reducing a painting to paint and music/speech to air vibrations) leads to behaviorism.

If you disagree, I will gladly debate it

I will address your own ideas on the subject in a later post, I think they are more interesting

Perhaps we could spin-off a new debating topic to preserve the spirit of this one. If I recall, the thing that fired me up was your blanket dismissal of the very notion of employing logic regarding the existence or non-existence of God. It struck me that we ought to retain a pragmatic approach in order to maintain control on arbitrary belief where it counts. The notion that we should have carte blanche to motivate ourselves politically and ethically on the basis of beliefs in things that are, by definition, utterly unverifiable should (I think) ring alarm bells in any thoughtful person.

Well, as you can see I believe that there are different domains of meaning, and the principles that work well for science should not be applied to ethics or religion, or vice versa, in any combination. You can agree or disagree, but I am afraid that this would be very hard to debate!

[Jester]

Well, no evidence for God might lead to agnosticism, however, if you look at the 'no evidence' categories on other items, no evidence often can lead to non-belief either.

It is totally reasonable not to believe in the Loc Ness Monster, or big foot, or many other things, based on the lack of evidence FOR it. It might be a provisional disbelief, but it is a disbelief. I can safely say that I don't believe that Thor or Zeus existed.. I can safely say that based on the current evidence, I don't believe in telekinesis, or precognition or reincarnation, or ghosts.

I've heard that argument many times, and, while I can understand that many consider it to be compelling, I feel that the analogy is flawed. Specifically, lack of evidence for something that could, if it existed, be directly observed with the senses is more telling than lack of scientific (therefore, sense-oriented) evidence for something that exists in a non-scientific layer of reality.

As for the purpose of life, if God put us here for his own reasons, who is to say that our purpose has to match his? Why should I accept someone else's goal for my own life?

If that someone were, in fact, omniscient, that would be a good reason.

[Goat]

Well, no evidence for God might lead to agnosticism, however, if you look at the 'no evidence' categories on other items, no evidence often can lead to non-belief either.

It is totally reasonable not to believe in the Loc Ness Monster, or big foot, or many other things, based on the lack of evidence FOR it. It might be a provisional disbelief, but it is a disbelief. I can safely say that I don't believe that Thor or Zeus existed.. I can safely say that based on the current evidence, I don't believe in telekinesis, or precognition or reincarnation, or ghosts.

I've heard that argument many times, and, while I can understand that many consider it to be compelling, I feel that the analogy is flawed. Specifically, lack of evidence for something that could, if it existed, be directly observed with the senses is more telling than lack of scientific (therefore, sense-oriented) evidence for something that exists in a non-scientific layer of reality.

As for the purpose of life, if God put us here for his own reasons, who is to say that our purpose has to match his? Why should I accept someone else's goal for my own life?

If that someone were, in fact, omniscient, that would be a good reason.

I don't believe that omniscience is a logical quality. And, if theoretically someone has their own purpose for me, doesn't mean I can't have my own purpose for myself. Someone who is omniscient would take that into account when designing their own purpose. However, I am much more limited , and I don't see any direct communication from God what my purpose should be. The claims for what my purpose should be are all filtered through other men or women. Being that I can't tell if their claims about what my purpose is from God, then well, I might as well make my own purpose anyway.

[Jester]

I don't believe that omniscience is a logical quality. And, if theoretically someone has their own purpose for me, doesn't mean I can't have my own purpose for myself.

For purposes of this debate, we are at least accepting omniscience as a hypothetical. I would argue that the purpose of one's creation as defined by one's creator comes closer to truth than any other suggestion I've yet heard. I don't consider "one's purpose" to be something that can be simply decided by an individual. To site the extreme example, one cannot simply decide that committing genocide of a race is one's purpose in life and have it be so. That may be a "self-purpose", but that does not make it existentially true.

Someone who is omniscient would take that into account when designing their own purpose. However, I am much more limited , and I don't see any direct communication from God what my purpose should be. The claims for what my purpose should be are all filtered through other men or women. Being that I can't tell if their claims about what my purpose is from God, then well, I might as well make my own purpose anyway.

Beyond what I said above, I'd add that not knowing is no reason not to seek to know. In the event that we consider something to be vital, we do not toss up our hands and forget about it. Rather, we endeavor to learn as much as we can.