Do you believe in God?

[VirtualPA]

I am interested to know what the majority of people belive.

I personally believe in a Christian God, Heaven and hell etc.

I raised a strict an athiest

why are you people still at it? nobody's going to win.

I wonder if you ever have weighed the objective evidence for dragons and Harry Potter and made an informed choice. I mean, you could, but I wonder if that's what you've done. Or have you gone with your experience?

I experience faith. I haven't made a decision to believe in God. I was actually brought up in my faith, and although the details of how I practise it have changed over the years, the experience of faith hasn't. And if I speak to "born again" Christians about their faith, again it's an experiential thing. No rational decision on objective evidence (which I think we've established is never going to happen), but a subjective experience. You do not view religious faith as a matter for subjective experience. Presumably you reserve that for other things. Music for example. Or Art. Other people take a different perspective.

UQD wrote:

"Can I ask a serious question of those (and there seem to be a good few) who seem to think you don't need evidence to believe something, or that asking for evidence to distinguish between the real and the made-up is not fair?"

Please see my post at the bottom of page 35 and the following post at the top of page 36 that deal with this.

You have to work out you epistemology to see that there are different forms of evidence for different forms of questions. A corollary of this is that you have to use the answers you get from different methodologies in different ways (so fundamentalist Christian get it wrong by trying to apply a theological answer as if it were a scientific one).

And I have then given various pointers on evidence:

• The existence of the universe and natural laws that govern its workings
• Objective morality beyond mere collective human opinion
• Consciousness
• Religious experience being common among humans (again note my response to onagar comparing this to appreciation of art and the form of evidence that this is). Incidentally, while you rule out personal experience as valid evidence, can you give me an account of anything in this world which is not from your personal experience? I believe ice melting at 0 degrees C because I have experienced it. Your argument as it stands does not stand up. you might like to try a criterion such as replicability instead, but even that falls down for many areas (e.g. my example of whether it is right to marry or not - something not conducive to scientific replicability!)
• For specific Christian evidence I have posted regarding the nature of the New Testament text as a historical document. I have also raised the evidence of the early church flourishing in adverse conditions in my last post.

You have asked for methodology and evidence, I have provided. I hope you can see that for some Christians at least there is serious thought going on, and that your criticisms do have answers.

I'm a bit baffled as to why it atheists' job to "explain away" stuff which happened to a corpse 2000 years ago.

And human experience has taught us, whatever our beliefs, that if people believe something fervently enough they will GO ON believing it in the face of the most enormous opposition and difficulty - and counter-evidence. It may well be that, on one level, they are to be admired for this, it's true. But it doesn't add one jot to the evidence of the thing they believe in being true in the first place. People used to believe the Earth was flat, for goodness' sake. And look at the millions of deluded idiots who believe in Scientology.

Lots of people believing in something, even being prepared to die for it, doesn't make it true.

Aldous Huxley said "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

The Inquisition made Galileo recant about heliocentrism. But that didn't change the facts. As he allegedly said later: "E pur si muove."

SomeGuy - why are we still at it? Because we enjoy it! And because faith matters. Why else are we on 37 pages and still going strong?

UQD I'm mystified by your repeated insistence that there's "no evidence". There's plenty of evidence referred to by various posters on this thread. You can say there's no proof if you like, but that's very different from "no evidence".

permanentvacation I find your analysis of truth very interesting and well written. Don't mean to sound like a teacher. I enjoyed reading that post.

permanentvacation, your answer is unnececesarily rambling, and doesn't address my question.

"can you give me an account of anything in this world which is not from your personal experience?" Well... duh. Yes. Where do you want me to start? I've never seen men on the Moon, but either (a) they went, because there is objective evidence that they did, or (b) the Apollo missions were invented and people have done a bloody good job of maintaining the cover story and faking it. Obviously both options are possible. But one - that it is real - is hugely more likely that the other - that it is made-up - because there is simply more evidence in favour of it being real, and all the evidence in favour of it being shot in a studio by Stanley Kubrick, or whatever, is a pile of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy-theorist rubbish.

If you don't think it's your job to explain away what happened 2000 years ago, why are you on this thread? Why does it matter so much to you that you repeatedly come onto religious threads with your questions, trying to explain what happened.

You asked for evidence, we have provided it. You can't then duck the issue and say it's not your problem and you don't want to talk about it. You can either show you genuinely don't care by not coming onto the religious board, or you can engage in the debate. To go around saying "there's no evidence" and then say "not my job" to look at this stuff does your usual intelligent posts no credit.

As for the people prepared to die for something they believe in, that doesn't prove it. But in the case of the first disciples, it does prove that they utterly believed the resurrection to be the case. And they were in a strong position to know whether it had or not. And they were given sufficient cause not to believe, but unlike Galileo they held their nerve and were executed. This is VERY strong evidence regarding the resurrection. You may not call it proof, but as we have shown we have gone beyond proof and are dealing with evidence. To call for proof is a straw man for we do little in life with absolute proof.

PermanentVacation: Well, the myth of the sacrificed-and-resurrected deity was around for a long, long time before the Christian version popped up (two examples that immediately spring to mind are Odin and Osiris and there are some Celtic variations as well). It's basically an allegory for the cycle of the seasons, that's all.
As to why the Christian version of the myth got so popular, that was mostly to do with the Romans. A couple of the emperors took a fancy to the new mythology, someone somewhere worked out what an effective weapon of conquest this new monotheistic stuff was, and that was kind of that - ROman military efficiency and the setting up of an institution that was all about self-enrichment and social control and very good at the propaganda (do as we say or not only will our imaginary friend eat you but we will chop you to bits or burn you alive first)

Mind you, I would like to hear (though, you know, I'm not holding my breath) from those who take the Christian myths seriously - why are your imaginary friends more plausible than fairies, pixies or the Roman/Greek pantheons? All of the ones you don;t believe in have been believed in by lots and lots of people (and in the case of the fairy-pixie-elve types) are still believed in by some saddoes people. All these have inspired vast amounts of art and literature, all human cultures have stories of supernatural and often benign little creatures - why should these stories be considered as any more stupid than the ones you take seriously?

UQD - regarding personal experience. You believe that men went to the moon because Neil Armstrong had a personal experience of being on the moon, and his account is one that you have personally experienced and have decided to be true.

The only things you "know" are thoughts within your brain. While they may correlate to external objective realities, you still can only access them as experiences within your brain. That is why I say that your discounting personal experience is a fallacy.

Please remember my rider that subjective experience has to be used as such, and my point that when religious people try to use subjective experience as if it were objective they tend to make errors. But subjective experience is still important, if limited in scope. Try explaining beauty without it, yet we all have experiences of things that are beautiful.

SGB - the resurrection account was around before, You could add Mithras to your list. But the Roman Emperors appropriating Christianity for political ends does not explain the early explosion of Christianity around the Med. Which Emporers are you referring to? The events I am talking about happened from the time of the resurrection (c. AD30) to the exile of John on Patmos (c. AD 90-100). For Christian Emperors you are probably talking about Constantine and the Edict of Milan in AD 311. You can't claim it was a stitch up by the Romans. The first Century Romans had sporadic persecutions of Christian groups, largely because they would not declare the Emporer to be a god and make household sacrifices to him.

I'm not aware of any historical documents about a fairy, pixie or Roman/Greek god coming down to earth, SGB.

I'd ask the non-believers why, if Jesus was just a bit misguided or mad, did the wise men come from the East to worship him when he was born? How could they have known he would grow up to be a great teacher? And why do Jesus' teachings all make so much sense? Why were the religious authorities of the day so annoyed with him yet could not catch him out with any of their questioning?

Sure, the Romans initially didn't much like Christians because they were insurrectionists against Roman rule, but one of those sort of basic things in human history is the way in which powerful groups see something useful in insurrectionist groups, take it over, rebrand it and sell it on.

As to why rationalists enjoy threads like this, well, can'[t answer for UQD and he's capable of doing so for himself, in my case it's not anyone's particular idiot superstitions I object to them holding, it's the political dimension: giving representatives of this crap special privileges is a bad thing.
And it is kind of interesting seeing how many buttons you have to push before you get the invariable end result of 'My imaginary friend is real and better than the others because, because WAAAAAH IT JUST IS WAAAAHHH!'.

pv - no, I don't just believe it because Neil Armstrong says. That's your fallacy. I believe it because there is a plethora of strong, powerful evidence in its favour, aside from personal testimony, and quite a bit of very shaky, refutable evidence that it was made-up. You're making a fundamental error by assuming I discount personal experience. That's not what I am doing. I am just not trusting it on its own.

If my best mate says he slept with Cheryl Cole, I am entitled to be a little sceptical - until he can produce something in the way of supporting evidence, I have only his personal testimony (shaky, and, let's be honest, with a strong motivation/agenda for invention).

What criteria do you use to distinguish between Harry Potter and a real person? Between your kitchen table and the TARDIS?

Dawntigga: I haven't avoided anything. Nobody on this thread asked me that question. I don't know. Awe? Gratitude? Conviction? I don't know.

Evidence is not only not necessary. If you have solid evidence you do not have faith. Faith is supposed to be without evidence, it's trust.

UQD: I'm not trying to convince you to believe in a logical impossibility. I have no idea why you think I am. Indeed, I assumed you could not. It is the unwritten premise of my proof. You are on this same old track, it's not a proof, it's not a proof, I can't be wrong. Trust me on this: you were wrong, and the sky isn't going to fall on you.

Onagar's hippo analogy was very acute, I felt.

MerryMarigold, I was away for a while.

I see you have had answers and I don't any better ideas about why they spread as they did. However as others have said they were not the only group of believers to spread quite a way. They were just the latest. So not a unique phenomenon.

permanentvacation,

1. If you do not believe there is such a thing as right or wrong, would you mind if I came round your house with a sawn off shotgun and an appointment with your kneecaps?>>

There are things which I don't like. Just as they are things you don't like. My position is that there is no objective way to say "this is right" since it always comes down to someone's opinion.

The church tries to 'trump' this by saying it's god's opinion which counts for more. Even though if you take the old testament, god does things which would have him in prison here and now.

You can say "oh but killing someone is obviously wrong" and everyone would agree on that, except that most people accept war as ok and many of us are ok with capital punishment. Also what about killing in self defence?

So you won't even get everyone to agree that killing is wrong

The only rule I can think of that makes any sense is this one.

Given that my guess about right and wrong is no better than anyone else's. The best way forward is to allow everyone as much freedom as possible to do things the way they think is right.

So killing someone is bad because it takes away their potential choices (but you may still decide to kill a madmen with a bomb/gun to stop him taking away lots of other people's else's choices). Rape is wrong because it takes away the victims choices and so on.

Any unnecessary interference in people's private lives is wrong for the same reason.

So I wouldn't approve of a law that stopped you worshipping god for example. I don't approve of compulsory worship of the current favourite god in schools for the same reason.

My whole opposition to religion is simply that I don't want it or its immediate effects forced onto those who don't want it.

Of course I could be wrong

but who says freedom is right and taking away choices is wrong?

freedom doesn't necessarily maximise happiness

wouldn't the "best" thing to do be the maximisation of happiness, but then anyone who says anything is right or "the best" believes in an absolute rather than a relative good, don't they

aaaaaaaarrrgggghhh

pv: terrific and interesting posts

permenantvacation - "I would say (as a Christian) that there is evidence for God, as good as the evidence by which I chose to commit my unobservable and unknowable future to a person by marrying them."

That then is enough evidence for YOU to believe something then. Do you think that should be sufficient reason to expect others to treat it as true? Or sufficient that others should treat arguments based on it as valid? Or that it is a belief that should be legally and socially privileged above others?

PV: I would like to ask you something about your faith. Is it really heavily dependant on evidence?

There arent any universally agreed moral absolutes as in, totally without get-out clauses for the powerful. Most people would agree that it's wrong to kill other people.
Unless it's wartime
Unless they are threatening or trying to kill you or someone incapable of defending him/herself
Unless they are heretics...

Most people agree that it's wrong to take away another person's property.
Unless you are starving and desperate
Unless you are the government and reckon that the state needs the property more than the individual does or that the individual isn;t enough of a grown up to be able to keep whatever it is...

Etc.

backtotalkaboutthis. It's not that freedom as such is 'better' it is just that it minimises the effects of any one person's guess.

Note my next post which said "but I could be wrong"

why, if Jesus was just a bit misguided or mad, did the wise men come from the East to worship him when he was born? How could they have known he would grow up to be a great teacher?>>

Is there any proof that actually happened?

There is no such thing as 'objective' morality. There are more or less efficient ways or organising human society that lead to more or less misery or happiness for more or less people.

The parts of morality that are common across many societies are due to those societies coming to common conclusions, such as it all gets terribly messy if people go around killing each other without consequences, people who can escape the consequences of their actions tend to behave badly so that should be discouraged etc.