Atheists and proof

[Kdtym10]

On several threads, some atheists have said they would believe in God/the Divine if they had proof. If you’re an atheist what would that proof look like to you?

What I'm getting it at, is that my conviction in the example is based on my having a knowledge of the "true names" that you lack. Not just that your name being Booboofishface is my subjective truth, but that it is THE objective truth. As when you say "the universe was created by a divine consciousness" it's either true or not true. It can't be "true for you" and not true for me.

Why you may not be trying to convince anyone of anything, I feel there is a common implication that atheists are "arrogant" or "close minded" for not believing. But in your particular case, they would have to be convinced by an internal feeling reported by you, which they do not share. This seems like it's holding atheists to a very high standard indeed.

If I said "I will win the lottery tomorrow, I just know it" - would you believe me? The only difference, is that my conviction will be tested when the lottery results are out. That your belief cannot, by it's own nature, be tested, doesn't make it more convincing to me.

The onus is on the person who makes a claim, to provide something (reason/rationale, evidence) that supports it. Otherwise it is completely ordinary that other people won't believe them. That doesn't make the people not believing them some kind of unusually arrogant or close minded group. And it's not an equivalence. To not support/believe something claimed, is not the same as to make a claim.

However, other than that I hold much the same opinion about your belief as you do about my hypothetical "true name" belief. It doesn't bother me that you have a sense of internal knowledge that a divine consciousness created the universe. I just don't particularly think it's the objective truth, and I don't see something so extremely metaphysical as to not answer any question or make any prediction about the universe, to really matter at all anyway. In short, the belief you've shared might tell me something about you, I don't think it tells me anything else about the universe.

I wonder if you wish to set yourself apart from atheists by holding this belief, because atheists have been rude to you in the past about more conventional religious beliefs which have been unable to withstand scrutiny? Or, if you've found it difficult to altogether let go of religious beliefs which were once important to you, because they have not withstood your own rational scrutiny, so you have this belief as a sort of comforting vestige. Each of these is of course, pure speculation! If you choose to indulge my curiosity, when were you first aware of your innate knowledge of the divine? Did you come to this innate knowledge from a more conventional religious belief system that you became more distant from / could not longer support?

Thanks, that’s a really interesting and thought proving post.

I guess my starting point is, there is not a lot, which is really “objective truth” and certainly what we hold in our minds as being “the truth” is rarely the same as what others do. - I have to pop off out now but I’ll be back with stories of planes and tables😀

The one and only thing that might, just might, make me start believing in God would be if people stopped killing one another in the name of religion.

But that's never going to happen, is it?

I have no issue with other people believing in a god or gods. What I do have issue with is that some faiths then use their interpretations of what they are told to believe and use that to harm others. Whether by war, or by the subjugation and domination of women, they do it in the name of religion, and I cannot accept that any god would want them to do that.

Atheists should really not be having any say in such thread because they do not believe in God. Duh

But that was the whole point of this thread being set up!

It is asking what evidence atheists required in order to believe that God actually exists.

Lots of us have given many examples of how God could unequivocally reveal himself to all those of us!

He hasn't and never will because I do not think he actually exists.

Religious people do not react very well to having their ideas challenged though.

My thoughts too. They seem very defensive and unwilling to critically question their beliefs!

Proof is something, usually in the form of evidence, that establishes or verifies a truth or fact and sometimes proof needs corroboration.

It needs to be verifiable and not reliant on faith.

I am happy to consider anything that falls in the above.

^I thought it might be interesting to rework your original question and see what your answer would be.

If you believe in god / the divine, what proof would you need to see or experience to stop believing and become an atheist?^

I would need a loss of faith which is internal.

@Kdtym10 please could you give us some examples of what would make you lose faith (internally)?

Wars? Famine? Loves ones dying too young? Any other terrible events that no loving God would allow????

Based on this thread, non believers seem pretty open minded about changing their views about a potential god should the evidence change.

Believers, on the other hand, are showing a complete lack of willingness to critically question their beliefs and seem unwilling to change their minds about God not existing!

That's because one group is rational and open-minded. And the other is about about faith which is the opposite.

The premise of this thread is flawed. If there is proof there is no belief. We don't choose whether or not to believe in gravity, electricity or the aerodynamics that keep planes in the air. These are things that have proof, and they affect everyone in the same way.

Faith is helpful to those who have it but there's no requirement to have it (I am not among those who claim there's some kind of punishment in store for failure yo believe) but atheists cannot claim that they "would believe" if the very basis for something being a matter of belief/faith were to be eliminated. It's a ridiculous claim, like saying you would be perfectly happy to climb Mount Everest if it were first ground down to be a flat and level plain.

atheists cannot claim that they "would believe" if the very basis for something being a matter of belief/faith were to be eliminated

Ok, let's rephrase it like this:

Christians think that God is real

Atheists so not think that God is real, but they would change their mind and accept that God is real should any evidence become available to actually prove his existence

@YireosDodeAver

It's a ridiculous claim, like saying you would be perfectly happy to climb Mount Everest if it were first ground down to be a flat and level plain.

That analogy works though?

If something I believe to be impossible (there being a god / Mount Everest becoming flat) was shown to actually be possible, my belief about that thing would change.

First you have to define "real" and think about different levels of reality. My flesh is real, so is my house, the food I eat and the phone I am typing this message on.

There are other things that have a level of "reality" that is different. The concepts of justice and mercy for example. The idea that a bit of paper/plastic/metal with the queen's (or king's) head on it has some kind of intrinsic value that means I can exchange them for food, housing or electronic equipment. These things aren't "real" but exist because people believe in them and by living as if they are real they become real.

There are various concepts in particle and quantum physics that aren't exactly "real" but are accepted as a good-enough approximate models to fit observed phenomena which may turn out to be incorrect as more evidence emerges when science develops.

These are just 3 possible levels of reality and it doesn't take much imagination to accept that there could be many more levels.

If God exists that level of reality would be different from any of these kinds of reality, being neither a being with graspable physical presence nor something with conditional reality dependent on faith. I would think God's level of reality, if God has a reality, is closest to the physics one - that there is some kind of objectively real version of a deity that is far beyond our actual understanding and everything we currently think or understand about God is totally wrong but at the same time the best approximation we can currently achieve.

I consider myself to be a faithful agnostic. I do not know whether God exists and accept there is no proof. However it seems to me that living as if God is real and trying to live according to the teachings of Jesus - to love one's neighbour and one's enemy as much as one's self, to prioritise the needs of the weak, the sick and the vulnerable over the desires of the rich and powerful, and to forgive others' shortcomings and hope for forgiveness of ones own - is as good a way as any to get through this life.

There are other things that have a level of "reality" that is different. The concepts of justice and mercy for example. The idea that a bit of paper/plastic/metal with the queen's (or king's) head on it has some kind of intrinsic value that means I can exchange them for food, housing or electronic equipment. These things aren't "real"

Of course these are all real. They may not be tangible but they are all real. Money is real, regardless of the value of the paper it's printed on. So these things are definitely all "real"!

I'm not a quantum physicist so can't comment on how real your physics examples are, but maybe someone more knowledgeable can confirm.

God, or another non existent creature, is not real.

However it seems to me that living as if God is real and trying to live according to the teachings of Jesus - to love one's neighbour and one's enemy as much as one's self, to prioritise the needs of the weak, the sick and the vulnerable over the desires of the rich and powerful, and to forgive others' shortcomings and hope for forgiveness of ones own - is as good a way as any to get through this life.

I'm an atheist but hopefully @TheFancyPoet sees this and rethinks their aggressive message in which they literally wished pain on others. Very unchristian indeed. And bizarre. What an angry and violent mind they have.

to love one's neighbour and one's enemy as much as one's self, to prioritise the needs of the weak, the sick and the vulnerable over the desires of the rich and powerful, and to forgive others' shortcomings and hope for forgiveness of ones own

Amazingly, @YireosDodeAver, most people do try to live by these tenets (or, if we're in a cynical mood, feel we should). It's got more to do with being a functional member of society than with what a populist preacher may have said thousands of years ago.

Just to clarify again, I don’t believe in an all loving God. I believe in a divine force that is All.

What would make me lose faith? If I looked inside snd there was nothing there, if I evoked or invoked a spirit and there was nothing there. If I suddenly felt an emptiness were before I felt the Divine. What would cause that to happen? If I killed my gods and new ones didn’t arise.

if I did, hypothetically believe in a Good only God, and I witnessed war and famine (which we all have) if a loved one died too soon )which they have done) how would I react? I think I would be angry, the pact thematic religion often sells people has been broken as all too often it is a cause and effect. Pray more, you get better. Do charitable works at certain times they will come back to you 10 fold etc etc.

How would this anger manifest, you never know with anger. Would I want to punish God by denying his existence, would I be angry at myself as I felt (unreasonably) I had failed? Would I be angry at others for not teaming up with me in my anger and validating my beliefs. likely a combination

Would I be closer to God and try and justify with “God moves in mysterious ways” because I wanted that comfort, thinking it’s not God who is wrong, it’s the world?

I can only really comment about myself and my own actual position.

The premise isn’t false though. Elsewhere on the board atheists have claimed this very thing.

And I strongly agree with this. Many of us live that way because we want to, without needing the carrot of salvation or stick of damnation.

Agreed. I think @YireosDodeAver's coming from a POV that religious belief is a matter of unsubstantiated faith, which is antithetical to a provable god. Most of the believers on these threads experience God as a real phenomenon (not just a personal conviction), which is why this discussion is happening.

So, back to objective and subjective truth. There is a well know study regarding a crash at an airshow in, I think, the 1950s. It was witnessed by something like 100,000 people.

The investigators asked for eyewitness accounts. They were somewhat perplexed as to why there were so many variations. Whether the plane broke up in the sky, whether it broke up when it hit the ground, whether there was a fire, even if the pilot escaped or died. Eventually a film of the crash was located.

Now which one is the truth? Most will say the film. Why because we often trust technology over ourselves and a film we think will not be impacted by things like emotions and imagination.

But I would argue every one of those perspectives are the truth. The film shows a truth more useful for the air crash investigators, those who thought they saw the pilot escape were better served by their truth as they didn’t have the trauma of witnessing a fatal crash etc.

Sometimes we enter into a conspiracy cloaked in language. A group of atoms clumped together in certain shapes suddenly takes on a man made identity of being a “table” another group of atoms takes on the identity of being a stool. Where do we draw the line, is this reality or something shaped in our imagination? Where is that line between reality and imagination?

I’ll set out my background in a separate post.

Re the aircrash. Each person observing can only answer the question, "what do you remember witnessing?". They are not answering the question of what actually caused the crash, or what was the exact sequence of events. We know that humans are not always reliable witnesses when you carry out experiments to check that. These are not all equally valid truths, but fragments of the same event witnessed in different ways by fallible people with fallible recall and understanding.

Someone who thinks they saw the pilot eject can be proven right or wrong by the video footage, and then anyone rational would adjust what they claimed to have witnessed in the face of more accurate information.

The plane crash example is particularly useful when paranormal believers say "I know what I saw." They patently obviously don't.

And yes, there is objective truth. Of course there is. Unless you're Donald Trump.

Exactly its like the show supernatural with Sam and Dean the the beings are real then they are real etc until then it's more myth than reality