More on “what is this god thing anyway?”
Jerry Coyne is discussing the “what would you consider evidence” question with Anthony Grayling. Anthony says what makes the whole enterprise nonsensical from the start:
on the standard definition of an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent etc being – on inspection such a concept collapses into contradiction and absurdity; as omnipotent, god can eat himself for breakfast…as omniscient it knows the world it created will cause immense suffering through tsunamis and earthquakes, and therefore has willed that suffering, which contradicts the benevolence claim…etc etc…
Which it seems to me is undeniable, and relevant. What could be evidence for the existence of the usual normal mainstream “God”? Given that the usual normal mainstream “God” is an absurdity, it’s not even possible to know what would be evidence that it existed.
It’s also not possible to know what would be evidence that human beings could even detect. What evidence could we detect that “God” is eternal, for instance? What could show that, to us?
There are quite a few different versions of God, and they don’t combine into a nice stew or pot pourri or tapestry; they fight with each other. Evidence for one would be evidence for not-another.
I can imagine evidence for a local earth-based god or gods, like the Greek gods. They paid visits now and then, and they were very recognizable people. The omni-being is a whole different category, and evidence for it strikes me as being impossible.
If you believed some other entirely unrelated things that you also had thought impossible actually happened, wouldn’t that lower your confidence in your ability to distinguish between the possible and the impossible?
>I can imagine evidence for a local earth-based god or gods, like the Greek gods.
Ah, okay, then we may agree more than i thought, and then you may also agree more with JC than is apparent at first.
Yes. That became apparent in my exchange with Tom Clark, too – we each whittled away bits and in the end it turned out that we agreed. (On the thread at Jerry’s, this is.)
@Brian,
There’s a difference between two unrelated things and the self-contradiction of the omni-god concept..
Brian, evidence isn’t something that happens (so I’m not saying “evidence for it strikes me as being something that can’t happen”), and I’m not sure I have “confidence in [my] ability to distinguish between the possible and the impossible.” I said what I think; that doesn’t necessarily involve claiming confidence.
You tell me. How could we test “evidence” for omni-properties?
What if our universe is a simulation running on a real entity’s computer. They would have no special powers at all in their world, but would have truly god-like powers in ours (they wouldn’t be benevolent of course).
There’s been much to unpack in all of this, and I may have missed something obvious, but, elswewhere, I just wrote:
I need to reread Grayling’s first response, but I’m a little at a loss as to why you can’t have a foot in each camp. I can see, and agree with, Grayling’s assertion that the concept itself isn’t coherent, and therefore there can be no evidence for it, however, where I would agree with Coyne is that if someone puts forward a particular conception, or, more importantly, makes a particular claim about that conception in the physical world, then that claim is subject to empirical testing. I may be missing something, in fact, I think I am, and I suspect it’s something about the individual physical claims not necessarily saying anything one way or the other about an incoherent idea.
I’m Brian too! Confusing the plethora of Brian’s on fora.
Of course it’s nonsense. But that’s not the question proposed. The question is, essentially, “what evidence?” That just takes a bit of imagination and thought. Far less time than spending weeks in a blog war because you lack imagination, or enough sense to realize you answered the wrong question.
For me it would be something that violated the laws of the universe, not only as we understood them now, but if we had perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe and that event violated them. For example, faster-than-light travel that violated the laws of physics. God raising all 10,000+ dead Japanese Tsunami victims. Amputees, by the score, being healed by the miracle waters of Lourdes.
Not so hard to think of… Yet there are those that are so rigid and dogmatic, they refuse to acknowledge it only takes a toss-off effort to come up with some conditions that we could probably agree were God-driven miracles.
OTOH, I don’t accept arguments. No arguments, no fallacious logic chains, no watchmakers, no ontological arguments, no arguments from authority or popularity. Nothing we’ve been hashing out for the past three hundred or so years.
Just physical proof in conflict to perfect knowledge… Pretty damn high bar, but imaginable.
Doing those things doesn’t prove omnipotence, omniscience, or omni-benevolence.
We don’t look for evidence for false or nonsensical propositions. If the proposition is already refuted or false, then we don’t go looking for evidence to prove it, since no evidence will prove it true.
I’d settle for the evidence of a creator (doesn’t need to be omni-anything). He/She just needed to have created our universe or has the capability of creating a universe (hard to imagine) to qualify for the God label. I still wont worship it ,but I might start praying to it for a billion bucks though.
To be honest I’ve never been very impressed by the paradoxes of omnipotence and omniscience. Yes, it’s very difficult to define them in coherent ways. Some of the paradoxes can be solved, I think – I think the answer to “Can God make a stone that is too heavy for him to lift?” would simply be “No.” Making a particular stone that is too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift is logically impossible, and it’s usually agreed, at least in the Christian tradition, that the concept of omnipotence only involves being able to do all logically possible things.
But maybe some of the paradoxes can’t be solved. People certainly struggle to define omnipotence and omniscience in any detail. Still, I don’t think any serious believer is going to lose her religion over this or lie awake at night worrying about it. I think that what most believers who are not philosophers or theologians are committed to is not a God with some abstract description that may turn out to be self-contradictory, but merely a God that is Frakking Powerful – powerful enough to create universes, etc.
Conversely, the Problem of Evil keeps people awake at night worrying. I don’t think the problem is much reduced if we imagine that God is “only” Frakking Powerful, Frakking Knowledgeable, and Frakking Benevolent. The state of affairs we see in the universe casts grave doubt on just how frakking Frakking this God might be.
Russell,
thanks for weighing in.
I would add that I have also never been very impressed by the problem of evil. Just postulate an evil or callous god, or assume that might makes right, and then you are there. It could only ever convince somebody that the creator of the universe is not worthy of worship, but not that it does not actually exist. No, for me it all boils down to lack of evidence. Precisely because there are so many different definitions or concepts (which are usually cited to show that god is “not a scientific hypothesis”) you cannot expect to rule god out with one fell swoop of formal logic.
If we define God as (at least) a previously unobserved but “frakking powerful” agent that created the Universe and still interacts with it through events commonly known as “miracles” among other names, it should be possible to posit a falsifiable hypothesis concerning the mechanism(s) involved and devise an experiment.
Just such a problem was discussed at a recent atheist Meetup I attended. I proposed a hypothetical particle to be called the Jesutron or perhaps the Jehovahtron. Much as the hypothesized yet elusive neutrino was (as I understand) finally detected using a large volume of deuterium (“heavy water”) in a spherical vessel deep in a mine, I proposed a project using a sphere of holy water in one of the many salt mines under my home region of Detroit, USA. The Jesu- or Jehovahtron should be detectable with appropriate instrumentation. Perhaps something to detect the gradual transmutation of the deuterium into (heavy?) wine.
Should you wish to contribute to this potentially world-shaking scientific/theological endeavor, I accept PayPal.
Thank you.
sorry…”gradual transmutation of the holy water into wine”. Must be precise when doing Science.
Since this topic has come back to life, as it were (oooh, I’m getting religious already — or maybe I’ve just been watching a lot of Buffy lately), I’ll float an argument that’s been cooking in my head ever since PZ broached the topic in Montreal last October:
We accept that induction, while not mathematically air-tight, is nonetheless a valid basis for knowledge-claims: given enough examples, we generalize and (tentatively) conclude something about the bigger picture. However, we require that the conclusion be in some way commensurate to the observed instances. To cite the classic example, the induction that all swans are white proved to be too greedy — a more modest claim, say that all European swans were white, would have stood.
With that in mind, is there any demonstration that could warrant an inference of omnipotence? Obviously not, since that would be to draw an infinitely-large conclusion on the basis of a show of power that, however large and impressive, is finite, and therefore an infinitesimal fraction of the degree of power being claimed.
That being said, I tend to agree with #12: given a demonstrably super-powerful entity who claimed to be omnipotent, I might be inclined to go along with it, if only out of personal prudence (assuming it was not obviously malevolent, and also being on the lookout for any signs of limitation). If it’s bigger than anything we can conceive of a way to stop, even given all the resources of the human race, for all practical purposes it may as well be omnipotent. You can worship it (if it so demands), or run like hell, take yer pick.
I don’t know what this means. By confidence, did you mean “surety”?
Very simply. First, we reason that the world is incompatible with the weaker Frakking properties (which is what I think people actually think; I agree with Russell). Also, we reason that the Omni properties (that few claim to believe in and far fewer actually believe in) are incompatible with any world at all.
Then we recall that crazy people sometimes think their appliances are talking to them, and there is no plausible explanation that is reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast, appliances aren’t yet sentient.
Then we walk into the kitchen. We hear our footsteps. This is good evidence that our hearing is intact, as is the fact that our hearing has always been fine and no trauma or other event occurred that we think would likely have led to its loss.
When in the kitchen, we don’t hear the toaster telling us to kill anyone, or even say anything at all. This reaffirms our belief in our sanity, which in turn allows us to maintain high confidence that things we think contradictory and impossible actually are contradictory and impossible, as these conclusions are based on chains of reasoning.
I thought the traditional answer to this is – Yes he can , and then he’d lift it anyway.
There’s no evidence for the existence of God, gods or the supernatural. However there is evidence that humans have a tendency to assign agency or significance to natural phenomenon as there’s an evolutionary survival advantage in being hyper-vigilant. It’s simply the way(most) human brains are wired.
‘This same concept helps to explain believe in God,ghosts and other nonexistent entities’.* So,for many people, their religion is not really vulnerable to philosophical reasoning.
*NewScientist 12 march 2011 pp 49-51
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Well if someone like Moses went up to a mountain top one day, and an eagle landed beside him and then bang! turned into a human-like form of the most blindingly brilliant radiance and said “I want to give you a hand: write everything I say down” and then proceeded to dictate physical laws and equations beyond the experience or knowledge of all of all living sages, so that when the Moses-like man brought it all back down from the mountain it started a wave of discovery and enlightenment wherever copies of it were taken, then I would tend not to dismiss it. Moreover, if I were that Moses-like man (well, I have been to the tops of a few well-climbed mountains) I would incline to accept that the human-like form of the most blindingly brilliant radiance was whatever he said he was; or she if that was the case. So if one day he or she said “Oh by the way, I happen to be eternal”, I would incline to believe it.
If I was in the situation of knowing everything minus only one fact (however big or trivial) and I knew that limit of my own knowledge, and the human-like form of the most blindingly brilliant radiance came and revealed that last fact to me, then I would believe that human-like form of the most blindingly brilliant radiance was indeed omniscient. So I would have great respect for him/her, particularly if he/she went on call to be summoned for two-way conversations 24/7.
But I do not think that there is any verifiable account of that having happened to any man, woman or child in all of recorded history.
Though there have been unverified claims, the information provided was a mere shopping list of do’s and dont’s that any half-literate Tom, Dick or Harry could have made up.
That would prove that this particular creature had “god-like” powers but would not prove it was a god. After all, compare yourself to the average human in Moses day, you have what would appear to that person as “god-like” powers but do you consider yourself a god?
Well, Graham, where is the line drawn between ‘god-like’ and ‘god’? And who but a genuinely omniscient god could do it anyway?
Can one cockroach tell another what the difference is between say, Tony Blair and Muammar Gaddafi? (The cockroach presumably does not know that only one of those two could actually helieve that he is a god.)
#6 Tom Davies: “What if our universe is a simulation running on a real entity’s computer. They would have no special powers at all in their world, but would have truly god-like powers in ours”
This seems to me to be the clincher; the argument itself has a respectable history ( http://www.simulation-argument.com/ ). The question becomes: can we tell if the universe as we perceive it is a simulation? If I understand Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorum correctly a system cannot be completely described in it’s own terms, therefore (given a sufficiently sophisticated simulation) we could never tell with certainty. And therefore any ‘supernatural’ observed effect could be the owners of the simulation playing silly buggars.
For a fictional treatment of a world where the existence of God is obvious I commend to you Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God”. It was described as “trite antichristian propaganda” when it came out.
Unfortunately this sort of argument tends to be dismissed by many as it veers too close to extreme Hume-ian skepticism (how can we really know anything?)
The simulation explanation, Matrix explanation and the technologically advanced alien explanation all fit into this category and are part of an unspoken assumption (the assumption being, “If we discount the possibility that we are really a computer simulation or living in the Matrix or can possibly be tricked by an advanced alien” – then … )
I guess that this is how Jerry is approaching the matter since he doesn’t try to address the options within the unspoken assumption.
Simulated organisms to date have been to my knowledge confined to simple non-conscious replicators. Games and variants on Conway’s Game of Life can mimic evolution to some extent, but as the organisms’ universe is a computer motherboard, they rely on a god-programmer to write the program, set the starting conditions, and not shut the whole thing down without being pre-programmed some way to do so; power to do so themselves having not been conferred upon them.
If the Universe we know is a computer simulation, then there will be a god-programmer behind it; if it can be proven so then ‘Intelligent Design’ will be flavour of the moth, year century; whatever. But at the same time, the god-programmer will be a game player, a control freak, and possessed of a strong streak of malice, if not an outright sadist.
Come to think of it, somewhat like the God of the OT. Except that the latter also has a lust for sacrificial blood. Not a very nice fellow at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
Moses:
” Amputees, by the score, being healed by the miracle waters of Lourdes.”
I read recently where medical researchers were working on the problem of regrowing severed limbs and, apparently, having some encouraging results. So a more advanced society might have this technology too. In fact I can’t think of anything that would be both convincing and beyond the capability of a technology somewhere.
Russell: “can god make a stone too heavy for him to lift?” The question is really can some other god make a stone too heavy for this god to lift? If there’s one god why not many others?
If a tree falls in the forest and a man has ears, let him hear!
Of course if my fundie neighbour gets raptured and I get to have his Lexus and credit cards, then I might think there was a benevolent god……
Seems to me that the answer to “Can (Omni-) God make a rock so heavy He cannot lift it is: No.
Both ‘Lift” and ‘Rock’ are limitations that an omnigod is larger than. A rock that cannot be lifted is called a planet. It cannot be lifted because it generates its own gravitation field in which ‘lift’ is irrelevant. ANd if you make the rock bigger than that, its gravity squashes it down to the point where ‘rock’ ceases to exist, becoming plasma or perhaps a black hole.
So let’s put this geocentric rock lifting question to rest.
@28: There was an article in Scientific American some months ago about limb regrowth in humans. Apparently for lost fingertips, there’ve now been hundreds of cases of successful regrowth, dating back to the 1970s. Part of the key was _not_ to carry out the standard treatment of disinfecting and covering it, but something else that I can’t remember.
Of course many lizards and the like can regrow a limb.
As I suggested at WEIT, the root issue is whether metaphysical naturalism (and atheism as a corollary) is a priori, necessarily true. It doesn’t seem to me it could be. Rather, it’s an empirically plausible but conceivably defeasible view about reality. To suppose one’s worldview is evidentially impregnable violates the basic good epistemic practice of science and empiricism. This is not to say there are any plausible supernatural hypotheses going, only that we can’t know in advance of intersubjective evidence what reality must contain. http://www.naturalism.org/Close_encounters.htm
Anytime someone uses the term “metaphysical naturalism” when referring to atheism, my antennae go up. Because atheists use methodological naturalism. Metaphysical as a concept is the realm of theists, deists, and so forth.
MosesZD @ #9
For me it would be something that violated the laws of the universe, not only as we understood them now, but if we had perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe and that event violated them. For example, faster-than-light travel that violated the laws of physics. God raising all 10,000+ dead Japanese Tsunami victims. Amputees, by the score, being healed by the miracle waters of Lourdes.
How is god a better explanation than: I just went insane and am imagining all this?
@34: Well, that’s just the problem: we certainly don’t know all the laws of nature, and even if we some day achieve a Theory Of Everything that explains all known phenomena, we still can’t know if it is truly complete. Encountering a novel phenomenon — one that cannot be accommodated under our TOE — would just indicate that there exists a hitherto unexplored domain, and science has new work to do.
Ultimately, reality is all of a piece, and any line you draw between natural and supernatural is arbitrary. As it stands, the latter term seems to be a trash-can category for gods and ghosties and things that go bump in the night and psychic powers and anything else magical or spooky. We could try to clean up the mess by defining it as, say, pertaining to the nature and action of disembodied conscious agents (which includes God), but that’s just as arbitrary as any other division we might make.
Mm, give me a particular god, and there’s something to talk about. Is Keith Richards a god? If that were the full claim, without additional magic abilities, I’d shrug and for the time being accept Keith’s existence(, though it wouldn’t seem important). Even if the claim was that Keith Richards the Divine cannot die, I’d be very interested in hearing more about it, and it almost seems plausible.
But give me “a god”, or “the supernatural”, or “ooo, something”, and I’ll shrug again, but disregard it as a non-claim, still less important than the existence of Keith Richards. A noise, more than a piece of conversation.
Another kind of claim, such as “Magic Steve can move really fast, and he can’t move in any sense of the word” is more than noise, and I still don’t think there could be solid evidence for it, even hypothetical evidence.
Thank you, but no; that’s not right. I’m not being rigid and dogmatic, and I’m not refusing to acknowledge something. I’m saying what I think are difficulties in figuring out what such evidence would be. And the question wasn’t “can we think of some conditions that we could probably agree were God-driven miracles”; it was whether we can think of some possible evidence for God.”
I’ve already said I can easily imagine various Somethings that would be astonishing and inexplicable; I don’t accept that that equates to “God” or that the only possible conclusion would be “God.” I accept that one reaction could and probably would be “God???????” But not necessarily just “God.”
It’s just not clear to me that anything would be obviously evidence of “God” as opposed to something else. That’s not being rigid and dogmatic, it’s trying to figure out how reasoning and evidence work. It’s attempted clarity.
That shouldn’t be called rigid and dogmatic.
The problem with this argument, in my opinion, is that it is using purely logical reasoning to make a statement about theoretical possibilities about the real world. There’s always a danger that your reasoning relies on some hidden assumptions that nobody would have possibly anticipated.
The argument presented here, I feel, bolsters the case that there will almost certainly never be evidence for a god — but I don’t think it rules out in principle that there could be hidden assumptions here and that evidence could emerge. It’s a patently absurd possibility, of course, but I don’t think we can rule it out in principle (only in practice).
Commenting on Jerry’s blog, I think I have finally found a pithy way to express my opinion on this: I won’t go so far as to say that sufficient evidence of a god(s) is impossible, but I will say without reservation that it is unimaginable.
For every example of possible evidence I can think of, there is always a better nontheistic explanation, and none of these evidences seem to resolve logical problems such as the one Ophelia expresses here. Thus, I must admit that I cannot say what evidence would convince me of the existence of a god(s). But I stop short of PZ et al in asserting that therefore there must not even be any potentially sufficient evidence. Perhaps there is and I just haven’t imagined it yet.
I can’t think of anything that, if true, I would ultimately accept as proof of God, that I wouldn’t first say: “Wait, it’s a trick. Let’s figure out how they did it.”
“on inspection such a concept collapses into contradiction and absurdity” for the simple reason that ‘religion’ hasn’t even started, religion being defined as having direct access by faith to those resources of omnipotence and omniscience. All that exists is the theological/philosophical counterfeit that uses the name God. http://www.energon.org.uk
So, I think the real question is what qualifies as “evidence”.
Just about every scenario offered appears to be one-off demonstrations of this or that power. That’s not evidence. That’s anecdote.
Even thousands of Lourdes visitors being magically cured only counts as thousands of anecdotes.
Evidence comes in the systematic evaluation of predictable and predicted events over and above background noise that raises its predictive value to that far above chance.
So, as a baseline you’d have to A. have a predicted outcome; B. demonstrate that the predicted outcome occurred; C. explain away all other possible outcomes (ie, the water in Lourdes may be contaminated with a cure-all that can be synthesized); and D. have that predicted outcome replicated by several disinterested and/or hostile critics of the research.
A simple one-time magic trick does nothing.
And that, of course, is exactly why there is no such thing as evidence for the existence of the supernatural, including god. You can’t make predictions of the behavior of the supernatural. And if you try (ie, prayer helps healing), you’re going to be proven wrong.
Let’s face it – religion has had more than 3500 years to offer evidence for the existence of any of their gods. And they offer nothing but unproven, unprovable, unrepeatable, unverifiable, unmeasurable anecdote.
Time’s up. What’s the difference between religion and mythology? The number of people who currently believe in the likelihood of the events described.
James at 38: “But I stop short of PZ et al in asserting that therefore there must not even be any potentially sufficient evidence. Perhaps there is and I just haven’t imagined it yet.”
Right. We shouldn’t suppose that reality can’t transcend what we can imagine or conceive. But of course that it might isn’t a good reason to claim the existence of things for which there’s no good evidence.
Right. I’m not ruling it out, I’m saying that I find it impossible to imagine, and why. I’m pointing out difficulties which seem to me to be (so far) insurmountable.
[James @ #38 -]
I was deliberating about which part of this post to quote, but all of it is too good to exclude. James wins the internet!
Well it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to just paste the whole thing in again! Just cite the number or something.
James Sweet @38:
Or consider a parallel case: I can, in principle, imagine that the earth is flat. What I cannot imagine is what evidence for this would look like (outside of wild conspiracy theories in which every geographer, astronomer, long-distance navigator, etc, etc, for the past several centuries has been systematically lying to everyone else). There would have to be some absolutely radical paradigm shift which not only incorporates our (hypothetical) new evidence of geoplatitudinism, but successfully re-interprets all the old evidence as well to show how the observations are consistent with a flat earth, and I really can’t imagine what that evidence might be, or what that new theory might look like.
And that’s for a straightforward, well-defined empirical claim. Add to that the general vagueness and incoherency that God-claims tend to suffer from, and it becomes doubly unimaginable what would be sufficient evidence.
I think statements about a god can be coherent … IF you shrink down the god enough. But, the classical western religious omnipotent AND omnibenevolent deity? Incoherence is built in.
That said, PZ and his type are wrong on philosophical grounds in claiming they’ve disproved the existence of god. The idea of proving any negative is the logical equivalent of dividing by zero. It also shows why good scientists still need good philosophers to keep them in check at times.
lol. Of course it’s ‘nonsensical.’ But that’s not the question. And those that answered ‘no’ showed a lack of imagination or, perhaps, just didn’t understand the question. Or, perhaps more charitably, they just got themselves in the weeds by answering a different question and are too proud to back-track…
Well, to quote myself from comments I made elsewhere…. if a credible argument could be made that the problem of evil was just a pseudo-problem, then the only responsible option for a Watchmaker critic would be to reconsider the strength of their atheism.
Or, Moses, maybe you didn’t understand the question, or maybe your shoes are too tight, or maybe the moon is in cucumber. The possibilities are endless.
@47: If I’ve proved the positive claim Q then I’ve disproved the negative claim ~Q: this is not the logical equivalent of dividing by zero. You may be confused about the idea of proving a universal negative. Please don’t make sweeping philosophical claims unless you’re very, very sure of your terms.
I haven’t followed these threads much, so apologies if this has been discussed already. Would continued existence after my death count as evidence? Assuming the existence follows some religious narrative, complete with the appropriate god.
Sure at first I would be more likely to assume hallucination, but how many years/decades/millennia of uninterrupted consciousness would need to pass before it would be reasonable to accept my own perceptions?
[…] following the recent discussion occurring between such epic bloggers as PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, and Ophelia Benson about the issue of whether there could be any convincing evidence for there being a God. It […]
If God were independent of natural laws and standing outside of the Universe as an acting observer, then he might choose to snap his omnipotent fingers and put time and with it all those natural laws into reverse. Gravity would then push things apart, not pull them together; light and sound would move towards their sources not away from them, entropy would gain wherever it is presently decreasing and vv.
Because our senses and perceptive and cognitive systems were caught up in this as well, the Universe would porbably appear to us to be going on as usual. Right now, God could be snapping his fingeres like a flamenco dancer, throwing everything into reverse every time he did it, and we might still be blogging away here, oblivious to the fact that it was very much business as unusual.
James would still be able to say in all sincerity
That might cause the god to chuckle. Or maybe not.
The difficulties seem insurmountable to me as well! Following the god arguments as best I can, it seems the word can only legitimately encompass incoherent things. Yet, who am I to say that what seems to me a certain way absolutely is that way?
Nonetheless, knowing what I know, who am I not to say that as a being with finite time, the arguments for god are so bad as to be not worth either a second of my thought or a shred of respect?
There is probably a true disproof for something I think likely that I do not realize only because of lack of imagination on my part. This particular issue fills out the bottom of the list of things it could be. However, the list of things that could possibly be really ought to include everything I think, for completeness’ sake.
GD – it seems to me that would just be evidence for life after death (in one case). It would certainly be a very revolutionary kind of evidence, but it wouldn’t be evidence for god, particularly.
Anything like that is totally screened off by the apparent incompatibility of components of the particular hypothesis in question.
If my hypothesis is that there is more gold than lead in Alaska because the universe has 11 dimensions and thoughtfulness is in 42 of them, finding gold deposits doesn’t help because 42>11 and thoughtfulness can’t exist absent underlying structures, and it isn’t even a causal explanation. The only thing that would lead me to give up my problems with the hypothesis would be evidence my reason is totally broken (which is something I can imagine evidence for). Once I thought that, I would distrust my conclusion about finding gold even more than my conclusions about dimensions, 42, 11, causation, and thoughtfulness.
Some believe that there is life after death because of (nonsense I think is impossible). If I think it very likely my brain is broken, I will no longer think the nonsense impossible, but I will also not have any conclusions left about life after death.
So evidence of life after death can’t be evidence for a god.
I’m just thinking out loud here. Personally, I think minds are what brains do. When I die I don’t expect to ‘wake up’. There will no longer be a ‘me’ to experience anything.
But, supposing I did, and the afterlife was as advertised in some particular religion in every detail. Spin the roulette wheel and pick a religion. Maybe I’m in the Happy Hunting Ground, or Valhalla, or maybe South Park is right (and hence Mormonism), whichever. Wouldn’t the content of that experience count as a piece of evidence (however weak and provisional) towards the god of whichever religion had come closest to providing what would, under the circumstances, seem to be justified, true information?
@GD
What if you found a vein of gold in Alaska? Does that make you think it’s more likely “Brian’s dog caused there to be more gold in Alaska than lead” is true, compared to your rating of that hypothesis before you found it?
GD, it might, but which god actually has provided any such information? There isn’t much detail about the afterlife in the bible, for instance. The Koran does a bit better…
Good point OB. Most of the familiar concepts of heaven, for Christians anyway, seems to be more folk religion than dogma. So, the only sort of gods that might leave any evidence are the crude, unsophisticated types that we are not supposed to talk about because it’s not fair to focus on the low hanging fruit. That would make us petulant children, and philosophically naïve to boot!
And we can’t point out that the more sophisticated god of the philosophers seems to be either an empty concept or a contradiction; either irrelevant or impossible. That would make us a morally repugnant, bullying mob.
Boy, this bridge building is harder than it seems.
[…] the recent discussion occurring between such epic bloggers as PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, and Ophelia Benson about the issue of whether there could be any convincing evidence for there being a God. It […]
Nonsense. Science uses methodological naturalism, atheism is a metaphysical conclusion that many people arrive at through science and methodological naturalism.