Why do people believe in god?

So if you can't see it on a screen or in a test tube, it isn't "truly" verifiable?

So there's no truly verifiable evidence that you have thoughts, or a mind?

 

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Belief != Knowledge
Knowledge > Belief

I do "believe" that people have thoughts and/or a mind... But this discussion with you is making me doubt that belief.

 

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Presuming by that you weren't actually limiting us to those things mentioned then please explain how something can be verifiable if it can't be checked?

Define "mind".
Thoughts are verifiable in a number of ways.

 

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Ok. A thing that thoughts occur in. A kind of abstract space. A part of consciousness.

So science has a way to verify your thoughts? Is that before, during, or after you think them?

But you don't "know" that's true, right?

 

At the very least since we can verify thoughts exist then mind (being the thing thoughts occur in) seems to necessary, no?

At the time, for one.
MRI

 

Oh fuck. Are you seriously claiming MRI can tell what you're thinking?

That's just not "true". I don't "believe" it. It might be able to tell that your brain is active, and so there might be thoughts in your mind.
Suppose you think some phrase repeatedly without revealing it. Can MRI "verify" what the phrase is?

No?

Don't you mean: since you can verify thoughts occur in your own mind, then your mind seems to be necessary to you personally?
But as you've pointed out, this isn't something science can verify.

 

To an extent.

Not so far. But it can tell that you are thinking, even if not what.

On the contrary, since YOU have defined mind as "where thoughts take place" then, since we know thoughts DO occur, it must exist.

It's an inference. A logical one. Of course there is other inferential evidence.
The problem with "mind" is that it's a "fuzzy concept" - hence one must decide what it is before deciding whether or not there is evidence for it.

 

example:
I don't believe i am on a date with such a hot women.

this crosses the line between know and believe as posited.

 

Next verification test: do you believe you have dreams, and can dreams be verified?
Or, do you know you have dreams, and can this be verified?

Can science tell you when you're dreaming, can it tell you what you're dreaming, or are dreams only verifiable by the dreamer, as they occur, in an "involuntary" way, unlike "conscious" thoughts?

But just a quick reality check:

How would YOU define mind? How do YOU know thoughts occur? How does an MRI scan tell the difference between conscious thought, and "unconscious" thought, as in dreams?

 

Again there are a number of ways. Common experience for one. REM and other effects for another.

When, but not what (so far - though it's been mooted [re the fMRI above] that we may be able to at some point).

Good question. I'd check Wiki

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seems pretty good. It's where "I" am.

We're back to "what's your definition of thought?" The easiest way to express it would be "there's a "voice" in my head that goes on, works things out, finds solutions, makes estimates of what'll happen if I do this, or that".

I have no idea. Presumably they check to see if the patient's awake when they're scanning. :shrug:


I am intrigued, however by all of these questions from you, as opposed to, say, a presentation of the supposed evidence for god.
I strongly suspect that you're going to seize on the tentativeness of one or more the things I've written and then ask "If science says X is true on such flimsy evidence why doesn't it accept god on the same flimsy basis?" or some such.
What do you say?

 

Look, the argument is quite simple.
You can't verify that what occurs in your mind is the same kind of thing that occurs in another person's mind. All you can do is scan a person's brain and claim that the patterns of activity correspond to thought, conscious or otherwise. Or "we can't prove that we all think the same way".

You could try scanning an elephant's brain too, or any other animal that has a brain. Would the patterns of activity then correspond to thought, or dreams? Would brain scans verify that animals think and dream? If you see the same kinds of pattern that you see in human brains, is that "verification" that animals have thoughts and dreams?

If all you have is patterns from a scan, you can tell they are conscious, but you can't tell what they are thinking or feeling. You can't tell what an animal is thinking or feeling either.

What you have left is common experience. "I was thinking about so and so". "Really? So was I, maybe we should compare brain scans??"

Brain scans can't tell anyone what someone believes, or why they believe it. Where does that leave verification?

To assert that you can tell what someone is thinking or dreaming about is an extraordinary assertion, though.

But for some reason, asserting that you know God exists is an extraordinary assertion, although a lot of people assert this.

 

Yes (1) and (2) are quite different and the truth of (1) (that it is an extraordinary assertion) does NOT support there being any truth of (2) (That God exists).

The reason why (2) is an extraordinary assertion is it is an assertion about the existence of something for which there is no evidence and thus likely to be false. (Evidence could come in later, so we can not be sure it is false.)

(1) Is as you say also an extraordinary assertion and certainly false, at least for the foreseeable future, because of the fine scale and 3D nature of the electrical activity of the brain is impossible to record without disturbing it.

Plus the known fact that the same thought or belief can be held / made by different activity in different brains or even in the same brain at different stages in one's life. That is: Brain cells are dying all the time and the interconnections between cells (estimated to be more numerous than stars in the universe) are constantly changing.

Thus a thought / believe I held at age 5 (for example that the sun only appears to go around the world) is the same thought I hold 70 years later but very differently made by different brain cells by an entirely different implementations in my current set of fine, 3D synaptic interconnections.

Thus even if it were possible to record all this fine scale electrical and neuro-transmitter diffusion flows in the synaptic gaps, there would be no way to know to what thought they correspond as two very different patterns of these electrical and neuro-transmitter flows correspond to the same thought.

SUMMARY: For the well understood reasons just stated no educated person holds extraordinary assertion (1) to be true; however many do hold extraordinary assertion (2) to be true and that fact is what this thread is all about - I.e. why do many educated people assert (2) is true, assert God exists, despite total lack of any evidence that it is true?

 

As thread is drifting away from the question, here is my direct answer (from two old posts) in hope of getting back to discussion of the tread's question. As I noted in bold text at end of post 714, it is strange, badly needs an explanation, as to why many well educated people believe God exists with zero evidence that is true :


Why >90% believe things they do is told in my post 445:
“… It is the history of man that he has believed in many things only because that is what the prior generation believed and taught him even though there was no supporting evidence. For example: “Sail too far from land and you will fall off the earth.” 5000 years ago, most believed that dozens of specialized gods existed, until the Jews consolidated all these gods into only one and for Christians reduced them to a "3 in 1" god. ..."

From my post 410:
“…Although the scientific method has provided an understanding of many mysteries of the past, there still exist significant things we don't understand so, just as our distant ancestors did, we eventually give up trying and assign cause. Now days this for many tends to be "It is God's will." that the baby was born without feet, that I got cancer, that my son died in a car crash, etc. ("The good God works in mysterious ways." - The idea that God might be evil is too scary to consider although that is the most simple explanation for the many misfortunes humans suffer, like Hitler, whom a "good, all knowing God" could have given a heart attack at age 25 without seeming to violate the natural laws.)

In an earlier era, there were in most societies many gods each with areas of responsibility, and needing some offerings to prevent mishaps:

The drought was because the god of rain was angry.
The flood was because the river god was angry. etc.

Most of these specialized gods had names - at least two dozen names from the Greek and Roman cultures are still known, but don't forget the Nordic Gods. It is very rare (probably non-existent) for a primitive culture not to have a multitude of Gods usually even a hierarchy of gods with a "chief God" especially if their society had a "chief". (Man always creates his gods in his own image.) ..."

And why many of these groundless beliefs still persist is also explained in my post 410:

"... Most of these earlier beliefs with zero supporting evidence have been dropped as man gained greater understanding of the world he lives in, but some old beliefs, (those with powerful self interested groups teaching these beliefs to children too young to critically think), about the existence of some non-worldly existence still are widely believed. As this activity collects a lot of money, there are many of these religious groups competing with each other and trying to spread their version of these beliefs in re-incarnation or after lives. ..."

IMHO, it is this commercial reason which keeps many religions strong today.

 

The epistemology of disagreement is a relatively recent development in philosophy.
One of its central concerns is looking into what to do when we disagree: are we obligated to accept the other's stance, why yes and why not.


The traditional approach to the theist/atheist debate is to take a particular epistemology of disagreement for granted, implicitly. Namely, that when there is disagreement, one party should take on the stance of the other party and abandon their own.
It is not clear though why this should be the case.

 

No, yours is. And I'm about to show why that's true.

No, everyone has dreams when they're asleep, there's nothing metaphorical about having dreams. The analogy is that science cannot verify that dreams exist, and nor can science verify that God exists. Nor can it do the opposite.

What about knowing God exists and believing that you know? Much like believing that water exists, or elephants exist?

Nor am I. But I believe God exists.

But that isn't what I'm claiming. I haven't claimed any such thing.
Hence, you are resorting to fallacious reasoning and employing some kind of ready-made, but quite facile argument.

And God can't be natural, of course. It can't be something that doesn't "cause" you to throw your hands up in defeat because you can't explain it.
But we can't really explain why dreams exist. We can't really explain what consciousness is. And nobody is throwing their hands up in defeat about those yet-to-be-explained phenomena.

Translation: "to claim that an invisible, illogical supernatural universe exists" is extraordinary. But that's what you're saying I'm claiming, and I'm not claiming that.

The problem with your argument is that it has to invent something that isn't there, viz:

There isn't anything supernatural about what I know and believe exists, it's as natural as consciousness.

 

And what, then, is the reason why the assertion of the existence of a mind or of consciousness is extraordinary? Is it because a brain scan or encephalogram can't find either of these things?

 

The existence of my mind or consciousness is NOT extraordinary for me.

In fact I directly experience it. That is fundamental - from these experiences I infer the existence of an external world, but I can not be 100% sure they exist like I am that my directly experienced consciousness does.

This was pointed out more than 300 years ago by Bishop Berkeley. (or Descartes more recently but then, his “logic” led him to conclude about five pages later (in On Pure Reason) that Christ had to have died on the cross for our sins.)

Berkeley knew when to stop, but did in his book give a clever reason why the non-existent but perceived "external world" did normally obey the "physical laws" - If it did not then the greater spirit giving him his illusions of an external world could not make any miracles, as miracles are by definition a violation of the physical laws.

 

Dreams and consciousness are directly experienced - no external proof of their existence required. They are not postulated to exist independent of the dreamer, but you (and many others) are postulating that god does exist independent of your belief in him/her/it. - That is an extraordinary claim, which should require extraordinary evidence, yet there is ZERO evidence for that claim!

I do agree that the total absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. Why I hold an agnostic POV on the existence or not of God just as I do on the existence or not of unicorns. They could indeed be pulling plows on some distant planet. But claiming to know that they or God exist is a totally unsupported claim.