EvC Forum: Identifying false religions.

Rahvin writes:

We're getting close to novel length No rush though, it's not like we're on a deadline.

Hi Rahvin,

Yeah, we're getting close to it becoming a more Christianity-specific discussion, I think. I'll tell you why in my post...

The main difference here is that, as you just stated, faith invovles making an effort to be more credulous regarding certain claims than any evidence actually supports.

No. That's not what I believe, and not what I intended to convey in my writing. Faith involves willing belief in certain claims without expecting any corroborating evidence that support said claims. Without is the key word. Faith is when I believe in a given claim or idea knowing that it might never be proved true by means that I can understand (ex: God's existence cannot be proven by empiricism) or is NOT provable by tangible means. Evidence does not even enter the question...when I'm making a conscious effort to believe claims in my religion. I treat religion differently because there is not much that is tangible about religion. It is not like science or history where one can effortlessly rely on empiricism. It is different. It has more to do with the heart than with the mind or eyes. Therefore, we deal in terms of faith and doubt...not in terms of fact vs fiction.

But the entire line of reasoning that includes faith is irrational and easily leads to false conclusions - and that fact should be obvious

That fact that faith is irrational is obvious to everybody- as you say, even me. I a not a worshiper of rationality and empiricism. This is exactly what I meant when I gave you the....remember the car-crashing demon illustration? People view the world differently and this greatly affects their conclusions. I believe that there is more than meets the eye. That our minds...and our numbers...and out research....and a lot out there can and does deceive us. If I defy all that "facts" tell me and choose to believe in a claim that is not factually valid (or invalid, for matters concerning faith), then so be it. This is just the way some people think. If my beliefs eventually are the source of harm to the society and myself, then I obviously must discard them. When you say "Faith could easily lead to false conclusions", it makes me think of Christians that would like to see homosexuals killed, or Christians who like to see people on death row hanged because they did something wrong. And I'm with you on that, that hate should not prevail BECAUSE of faith. However, Rahvin, that hardly is a blemish on the religion itself. People don't realize that Christianity does not call for hatred. Both the Christians who do hate, and the outsiders watching them hate. At the end of the day, the religion has to suffer all reproach.

Under the hypothesis that God answers prayers, one would predict a given prayer to be answered. Yet unanswered prayers are not seen as evidence against god - rather, they are seen as negative responses from god,a nd further evidence that he actually exists.

You're missing the point. After one subscribes to faith, one does NOT look for evidence to prove it. If answered/unanswered prayers count as evidence for/against the existence of God, then why do I even need to have faith in Him when I can just evaluate His existence while being a skeptic by weighing the answered against the unanswered prayers? Right? When a person has faith, that means irrespective of whether or not God answers prayers, he has taken a oath that he believes that God exists.

I was a theist. And theists are not a uniform group. I know how at least some of them think because I was exposed to them for many years, and used the same lines of reasoning myself.

Yes, you--like many other people, were looking for some kind of vindication of your faith. That is not how it works. For if it did, that would not be faith. For example, if we treat answered/unanswered prayers as evidence and count up the number of answered/unanswered prayers (bascially, perform an experiment) and based on the results, conclude whether or not God exists---then faith does not come into the picture at all. Science does. And such a ideology is a fact not a belief. What is faith is, is when we believe something irrespective of what thousand people tell us...or what our own eyes fail to tell us.

The existence of a god whose contingency rests on his answering prayers is the most retarded argument ever to come from a theist. I got a job--god answered my prayer, therefore he exists. Or vice versa. I did not get a job...don't be fooled into thinking such arguments are religion, Rahvin.

There is no difference. Agreeing with what the Bible says still requires attributing the observed event to divine providence. There is no actual difference between saying "God healed my daughter" because the Bible says god will take care of you and saying "God healed my daughter" because you personally believe that god will take care of you. A distinction that makes no differenceis not a distinction at all.

It makes no difference in terms of then rationality of the argument, that much I agree. Saying "God healed my leg because God says He meets physical needs" isn't more rational than "I think God healed my leg" I was just telling you that when Christians attribute events to divine intervention, then are doing it out of faith and respect....not of confusion or a love of saying "goddidit"

In either case, attributing such events to a deity does indeed involve faith, but there's another word for it: non sequitur. It's a compeltely unfounded logical leap, attributing causality when correlation hasn't even been established. Such applications of faith are not to be lauded - they;re logical fallacies, perfect examples of flawed thinking.

For you its called non-sequitur--a logical fallacy, for me its called faith-- the hope of discovering God. I don't care if science establishes a causality where there is correlation, because I already have faith that there IS causality irrespective of what 200,000 people tell me.

If I deal with tangible, observable things in terms of faith and doubt, call me a fool. I reserve such things only for religion.

Let me ask you this question Rahvin.

Assume for arguments' sake that ALL religions' deities 1. empirically, 2. scientifically, 3. repeatedly, and 4. independently have been physically observed by the world. so much so that if you wanted, you could take your car to Buddha's house and I to Thor's house and have coffee with them. Every single one of them claims to be god. Who would you believe, Rahvin?

The existence of a deity is not contingent on anything. However, a prayer-answering deity should in fact answer prayers, else it's not actually a prayer-answering deity. If prayers are in fact answered with a statistically significant margin over a double-blind control group, that would be evidence supporting the hypothesis of a prayer-answering deity (and a few other hypotheses that don't necessarily involve deities, but it would at least establish a correlation between prayer and the prayed-for event happening; the next step would be to control for the specific deity prayed to, to eliminate the non-deity hypotheses as well as eliminating false deities).

Why, why, why do you do this to yourself?

How do you expect to "control" for a given deity? How do you...

I don't know about the Norse gods, but now this a fairytale. What you just said. I don't for one minute believe you are using the right instruments to evaluate religion. When the game calls for faith and doubt, youre using rationality and science to play the game. IS it working?

They are evidence. They just aren't very strong evidence, because the existence of the gospels equally supports the hypothesis that they are works of fiction or a dozen other hypotheses.

Uh, actually, they are markedly different from fiction. Ask any scholar who has evaluated them properly.

Not to mention the fact that there is serious dispute as to whether the authors of the gospels were actual eye-witnesses, as the earliest and best individual copies of the texts we have available tend to post-date the events by a significant margin. And of course the fact that we have so many different versions of the texts that, to paraphrase Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus, there are more errors and mistranslations in the New Testament than there are words. The gospels themselves aren't quite the same as your typical eyewitness account given in a court of law or on the nightly news.

The Bible is one of the best preserved historical texts of all history. Where there is uncertainty, there will always be debate. But when you compare it with other texts, there are remarkable facts about its preservation.

It is possible that this is true. It is not likely. It is roughly as possible as the existence of my unicorn. You can't touch it or see it or ever make any observation of it directly or indirectly, but it could still be there.

The question is simply whether there is an adequate probability that any of these faiths accurately reflect reality to justify confidence in them? If they have a 5% or lower probability of being accurate, should one believe that they actually are accurate?

If higher probability should justify faith then why do we need faith at all? Isn't faith what you do when you have absolutely zilch probability of a claim being proved/disproved. Isn't faith also for things that we can never scientifically assign a probability to? IOW, isn't faith what we employ when dealing with intangible deities? Why then, do you bring probability into the picture? What does BLIND faith have to do with numbers?

Welcome to Bayesian reasoning. Does it look like it makes sense?

Oh, I've encountered it before. My brother, a computer engineer, introduced me to it. It is a great tool......but not for evaluating religion. Religion is abstract.

I would conclude that the accident was caused by a previously unknown creature, which posesses claws and black/white feathered wings. I don't have any evidence supporting "demon" over "feathered dragon" or much else.

The evidence so far is very similar to seeing an object fr off in the distance. With limited means for observation I might only be able to tell that the object is a building, but be unable to tell whether it's a house, or a barn, or a store, etc. As I'm able to uncover more details that support some hypotheses and eliminate others, I'll be able to make more andmore specific descriptions until I can actually identify the object.

To draw an extremely precise conclusion based on very imprecise data is like recording the length of a pen in millimeters when your only measurement tool is a ruler whose smallest unit is inches - it requires an unfounded logical leap from the evidence to support such a conclusion, even if that conclusion later turns out to be correct.

In other words: The available evidence is inconclusive, and therefore I cannot draw an accurate conclusion. I don't know.....yet.

What if, for arguments' sake, you life was at stake? You have two options 1. I don't know. 2. I will go with the eye-witness, it was a demon. And your life depended upon it, in some way.

This is the situation people encounter in religion. Here is a person who claims to be god, who has certain demands. (in a sacred text, or some other means) Do they say 1. I don't know who you are or whether or not you even exist really or 2. I believe you are who you say you are based on the information given to me (either through a sacred text, or a missionary etc) irrespective of any evidence, I don't need it.

Everything is a question of less or more wrong, and faith is never useful in being less wrong. I don't "Wager." I analyze and conclude. My conclusions are never absolutely precise, but my method gives me the most important advantage of all:

the ability to recognize when I'm wrong, and change my mind accordingly.

The rewards and consequences of belief in Christianity specifically are certainly all-or-nothing. The problem is that Pascal's Wager is stupidity of the highest order: it's not a binary choice of "believe in God and maybe go to heaven" or "don't beleive in God and maybe go to Hell." The real wager is every conceivable religion vs. every other conceiveable religion - perhaps if I belive in the Christian god, Odin won't let me into Valhalla; we all know what the Christian god would do if I worship Zeus.

Sorry, Rahvin, but if you believed in the Christian God, you would not be believing that Odin even exists. I know, that is a giant logical leap. But such leaps happen in faith. Infact, that is how faith works. You look at them as logical leaps because for you, your reasoning power and analytical skills are more important in resolving matters. But in faith, people take people's words as plain fact irrespective of reasoning or analyzing. When God says that only He is the true God (John 14:6), then guess what, Odin doesn't exist. Thor doesn't exist. Frigga doesn't. Freya doesn't. Loki doesn't. I know, you might be uncomfortable with such thinking....but this is faith.

But that was not my main point. I said all that to kind of drive my point home. And that is, when you wager, you wager on your best possibility. If the Norse gods appeal to you, wager on them. If Jehovah does, wager on Him. If Shiva does, wager on him. And when you do wager (IF you do), let go of all rationality which binds you and play the game in terms of faith.

However, like you just said, you don't like to wager.You like to observe and analyze. So be it. I was just explaining it to you.

How much is history? How much is made up by people? How do you tell the difference from one to the next? Regardless, the preconception lies in the fact that the Bible effectively lists the qualities of god and sets up your definition of what a god is and is not - the descriprion of what a god is is not a conclusion carefulyl derived from experimentation and evidence, but is rather a preconception based on an appeal to the authority of the various Biblical authors. The fact that the source is the Biblical authors rather than your own mind is irrelevant - you're still increasing your support of one definition of god and decreasing your support in all other definitions, not based on evidence, but because of a preconception.

You're writing yuor conclusion ("God has these attributes...") before determining why you should think so.

I agree with every thing you say. And I believe I have found THE one small point of disagreement. I probably would not have caught it had you not mentioned the phrase "appeal to authority of Biblical authors." Herein lies the crux of the matter. When people believe the pre-conception of God in the Bible to the true depiction of the real, existent God, they are essentially relying on the Biblical authors' credibility. They're staking it all on 40 people' words. And the reaosn some people are comfortable doing this, is because they treat the Bible just like it wants to be treated. A supernatural book. If it never claimed divine inspiration, people would not care about what the 40 men and women author's said in it....atleast not as much. I agree with you that we shouldn't take people's word/testimony as conclusive data. But when they claim something as unique as supernatural intervention, again....we're playing the faith game not the rationality game.

Pauline writes:

I imagine that you interested in furthering this conversation based on the level of interest and time you put into your previous couple posts. I imagine that you will respond pretty soon, since you have been doing so. I imagine that you will indeed further our conversation. I do not assertively say you will, only that I believe you will. That's faith, the evidence of things unseen...being sure of things hoped for.

Rahvin writes:

But you have seen. That's the difference. If you and I had never spokem previously, then you would require faith to believe that I would read your message. But you already have an established track record of me responding to your messages - much like repeated observations that thrown pens fall back down. That's not faith, Doc, that's a perfectly rational conclusion based on available evidence.

It might be. But the decision of whether or not to respond to my post was a voluntary choice based solely upon your will. It is not like there is a scientific law governing our conversation here on EvC. Which is why probability and evidence do not click. I might very well have evidence in the form of your previous posts, of your expressed interest in conversing...I might calculate the probability of your replying to my post at a high level...and yet, you are not compelled to reply. But you did. While playing peek-a-boo with a child, it not certain that the person behind the curtain will always appear...after 3 or 4 times, he might or not appear. It is based solely upon his will whether or not to appear before the child. But the child anticipates his appearing...that's faith. When he does infact choose to appear, then faith is justified. If he doesn't...then faith was in vain. Why do you bring probability into the conversation? Neither you are, not the person behidn the curtain is bound by probability, are you?

It does, if you're basing your faith entirely on an appeal to the authority of your supposed deity. Not all theists do so. Many simply find emotional solace in the claims of a given faith, or find the "basics" to be personally credulous even if the details are allegorical, etc.

Yes, like theistic evolutionists. But even they, are missing the whole point.

That study certainly is interesting. However, that was actually a NYTimes article, and so I have to take it with a grain of salt - reporters are not scientists, and they tend to sensationalize. Most of the misconceptions we have today about things like cosmology and evolution are because of sensationalism in reporting science and journalists trying to convey ideas they don't understand themselves.

The researcher wrote it.

But if so, so be it. You always have the opportunity to go read the real research paper itself.

What your moral compass says about the claims of a religion has no conenction or influence over whether those claims are accurate.

And what if, what my moral compass tell me about a religion is infact what I personally believe to be true. i.e reflect reality. You'll call that, irrationality. I call that faith.

The existence/nonexistence issue is the only one of any relevance. Or would you continue to worship your deity even knowing it didn't exist, simply because you agree with it's imagined ethics?

Yes, it is. But that issue is resolved individually, not universally. It cannot be resolved universally, simply because it is dealing with abstract entities. And so, personal faith is a perfectly reasonable way to resolve the issue? To some it might look like irrationality, but what gives? My issue is resolved....for me, that is.

Your moral compass will never ever help you be less wrong about the Universe - it's only useful for dealing with other people.

Science is the best way to study the physical universe. My moral compass, I reserve, only for religious purposes.

Either the claims made in the Bible are verified by observations in reality or they are not. I don't exclude anything. My determination of whether Christianity's various claims about the real world (Genesis, etc) is independant of whether I morally approve of the content - as it should be. Anything else is absurd. When you ask whether the Moon exists, or what it's made of, does your sense of morality have anything to do with the answers, or are the solely determined by observation?

1. no, my sense of morality has nothing to do with the answer

2. The answer is determined solely by observation

But, Rahvin, aren't we dealing with the moon here? Very much physical, an entity?

And shouldn't we change our mode of analysis when dealing with an abstract entity, if we are interested in doing that?

I exclude nothing. The claims made in the Bible (supposedly made on god's behalf by the human authors) are no exception. Whether I approve of the genocide described in teh flood myth is completely independent of whether I think the flood actually happened.

You're looking at the facts, Rahvin. I'm looking at the moral content. All the time when I was talking about how I would use my moral compass as a means to navigate through various scriptures, I was talking about evaluating them moral content. But you apparently think I use it to evaluate general claims. I don't.

All I use it for, is to evaluate the moral content. For example, if x religion commands its followers to murder, my moral compass tells me, no: don't follow this religion-it is going to cause harm to you and your fellow beings. That's it.

I mean any omnipotent omniscient deity that Created the Earth in 6 days, rested on the 7th, made woman from the rib of a man made from dust, dorwned the entire Earth except for a menagerie and an incestuous family aboard a boat made of gopher wood, saved the Jews from Egyptian slavery by killing every firstborn child in the nation, gave the Ten Commandments, twice, and later sacrificed himself to himself for a debt he claimed we owed him.

There may have been a man (or men) named Jesus of Nazareth who wandered around the region of Jerusalem and founded a splinter sect of Judaism that proclaimed him to be the messiah of Jewish myth. That man may have been executed by the Romans, so on and so forth. But I find it spectacularly unlikely that Jesus was actually of "supernatural" origin - that he was the son of a deity, or the deity incarnated into human form, or some combination of the two; that he performed physics-breaking "miracles;" that he rose from the dead. I find these things to be unlikely because other than religion these things would better occupy the pages of a Harry potter novel than a history or science textbook; in every case these themes have belonged to works of fiction and have never been observed to happen in the real world. They bear all the hallmarks of flase belief - an unfalsifiable, untestable set of beliefs that are objectively impossible to differenciate from fantasy except that this particular fantasty is widely accepted as true by a large segment of the population.

Here's where it gets, Christianity-specific. I tried to ignore these specific spots in this particular thread, but we can try to address them in another one. And this...

I do not disdain Christianity as the potential "true religion" because of my moral disapproval. I wouldn't worship the Christian god even if he did exist because of my moral issues with his behavior,

You just made our conversation 1000X more simpler and more clearer, Rahvin. If this is the outlook with which you now approach Christianity, then I am not surprised that you left it in the first place. Infact, I don't buy your "I once believed, but now don't" argument too. How is that possible? Not just with you but with anybody....
If they "once believed" and "now don't", then obviously their faith was based on contingencies other than the ONLY necessary one--God. If your "once faith" was based on whether or not you approved of genocide, then how is that a faith in Jehovah God, Rahvin?

Rahvin writes:

"There exist two afterlives - one is called heaven and it's a paradisical reward for people who live good lives/worship this deity. The other is called hell and is a place of eternal torment for people who didn't obey the rules/worshipped the wrong deity."

Pauline writes:

Thats why Pascal came up with a wager.I don't understnad why some people are willing to wager and some other people are not at all.

Rahvin writes:

Because some people are too ignorant of statistics to realize that Pascal's Wager is bunk, and some are not. As I explained above, Pascal's Wager depends on a binary choice between an unlikely positive reward and an unlikely horrible punishment, with "nothing happens" occupying the vast majority of the probable results. Pascal unfortunately only considered Chrsitianity vs. Not Christianity. To put it in simple terms:

Let's say you have a 6-sided dice. Christianity is represented by the 1. The others are all alternative religions. Pascal's wager involves choosing either 1 or everything else - he's treating it like a coin toss ratehr than a roll of the die. In actuality, there are countless competing mutually exclusive religions, with Chrisitanity being only one. Rather than "nothing happens" occupying most of the probability space, "you wind up in somebody else's afterlife" is far more probable.

In other words, what if I bet on Christianity, but the Muslims or the Hindus or the Norse or the Egyptians or the Inca or the Aztec or the Greeks or the Iroquois or the Druids or somebody else was actually right? I just wind up in somebody else's Hell.

Beyond that, it treats the probability of a hypothesis being accurate as pure random chance, rather than a rational conclusion based on evidence. It's utterly absurd. The only reason Pascal's Wager ever works is because both fear and the hope for a reward are powerful motivating factors and frequently override our decision-making process. In other words, Pascal's Wager works on people who listen to their hearts instead of their heads, and somehow manage to establish credulity because they find something preferable and something else scary.

I am not proposing PAscal's wager as a solution to our problem. You missed the point I was trying to make with that. I was only trying to tell you that, there come situations in life where the ONLY the other option is to wager. The one option is to not have an opinion. The other option is to wager. We don't encounter such situations on a frequent basis, but religion is surely one of them. That was my point. Are we comfortable with wagering? Or are we with being agnostic? Pascal was with wagering. I am with wagering. You are with being agnostic...ar atheistic, whichever. That only was my point.

Edited by Pauline, : No reason given.

Edited by Pauline, : editing

3 online now:	DrJones*, kjsimons, Tangle
Newest Member:	ChatGPT
Post Volume:	Total: 916,909 Year: 4,166/9,624 Month: 1,037/974 Week: 364/286 Day: 7/13 Hour: 0/2