The highly statistically improbable event does occur. For example, take the “spontaneous” remission of “terminal” cancer. Sometimes a malignant tumor disappears without a medically explicable cause. These cases are an example of the “one in a million” scientific prediction. Does conventional “scientific” thinking tend to marginalize these cases? Are they less significant because they are more infrequent or vice versa? What might be learned by examining the exception?
You’re missing the point. Most people believe God exists, in whatever unlikely form they imagine, DESPITE the probability and evidence against it.
Most people don’t believe a teapot is flying around the sun BECAUSE of the unlikely probability and evidence against it.
Cancer’s sudden remission is a serious case for study, as it is a mystery that a better understanding of might lead to a cure. But it has nothing to do with the discussion, as there’s clear evidence that it happens, although rarely. So at most we can believe it is something that rarely happens.
Again, it shouldn’t. Which is why, even as an atheist, I have to admit there is a very very very tiny chance that God exists. But what does everybody else conclude based on the evidence we have? That it’s 100% certain in most cases, and 99% certain for most other cases.
Even those who guess it’s a 50% chance are going against the evidence, or the lack thereof. And while I do mean to pick on theists, please keep in mind there are people who believe in magnetic healing, astrology, bleeding statues, fairies, bigfoot, that Elvis is still alive, etc.
Is your point the point?
Why is there any reality at all?
Dorky,
What is the “evidence” against the existence of God that you are referring to?
How do you decide the magnitude of this tinyness?
Oh please let me answer…
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Evidence against god…
Let’s see… hmm… an omnipotent and omniscient being who is also personal is a logical impossibility… let’s try that one on for size if you like… As for the probability that “god” exists… despite being logically impossible… well… we’d have to use the only tool we have here… irrational imagination… and I’d have to say that the chances of a being so vastly powerful and all knowing to boot caring so passionatly about our personal lives and petty concerns in a universe infinitely more complex than all of humanity combined… is rather absurde…
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How to we messure the probability? We compare it to experence… and see if it even remotely resembles anything that we have witnessed before in any way shape or form… and the closer it is to something we know of… the more likely it is to be true… and personally… I have never come close to experiencing anything “invisible, insubstatial, omnipotent, nor omniscient”… so in that regard to me the teapot orbiting the sun is actually more likely… since I at least know that a teapot can exist… and that items can be in space… and things can orbit the sun… So already the teapot seems far more likely to be true than god…
Why is there a god?
How is it helpful to say that reality exists because a god or any other external source caused it to exist? What does it even mean to say that something is external to reality?
Even if we presuppose that a god created our reality then isn’t the obvious question at that point, What caused the god to exist? And next, What caused the cause of the god to exist?
Where do the questions end and why do they end?
If something has to be fundamental then why can’t that something be the reality that we assume we share? Why do you find it necessary to add an unhelpful assumption to the assumption that reality is fundamental?
Mad man,
Please show me the precise logical arguement proving this is a logical impossibility. Just because you think that such notions are absurd do not prove “logical impossibility”.
So just because you have never experienced anything of a religious nature, it therefore means that they are impossible? What about all the people that report to have had religious experiences? Do these experiences not count because they don’t fit in with your world view?
I asked why there is any reality at all. Why do you think that implies there something external to reality?
I’m glad you asked… and we can go into further detail on that topic if you want… but i’m afried that such a discussion would likely derail this thread… perhaps if you are interrested in discussing it in further detail we could start a thread?
For now suffice it to say that… omnipotence and omniscience combined do not allow for reactive qualities if confined to logic. And i’m sure you would agree that in order to be a personal god… one must posses the ability to react to an individual… rather than just act on an individual… otherwise god would be a law, rule or principle such as gravity rather than personal.
I’m sure the above is not satisfactory… but if you should express an interrest in discussing this further i’m more than happy to start a thread on that topic and discuss the logical implications.
I did not say impossible… I said improbable…
Also… I don’t know where you got the term “religious experience”… since i distinctly mentioned the experience of insubstantiality, invisibility, omnipotence and omniscience… none of which I have ever heard anyone claim to have experienced… A sense of enlightenment… A sense of being small in the presnece of something far greater than oneself… ect those are the experiencess I commonly associate with “religious exerience”.
Also… as for dismissing the experiences of others… I weigh the reliability of their claims the same way I weigh probability… hence my utter lack of belief in the claims made about being abducted by UFO’s ect… and sadly… claims made about “feeling god’s presence” are even less likely to be true by my standards… That is however not to say that the person is lying… he or she might very well believe in what they are saying… even when it comes to UFOs… that belief does not make it any more likely to be true however… wishful thinking, need for significance and purpose are all valid and powerful motivs for believing despite reason…
What other reasonable implication might it have?
Unless you are asking, What external to reality causes reality to exist? or What is reality’s purpose?, then what are you asking?
Do you agree that for a statement to be true must it correspond with reality? But quantum physics suggests that reality does not exist when we are not observing it. So my question is whether there is any reality apart from what we construct and if, given the state of knowledge anything positive can be stated about it. If that is so, then it would seem that true meaning could be derived from it. If not, then we are stuck in a web of our own projections, as Tentative seems to think.
Careful…what do you mean when you say this, because I get the feeling that to the laymen, this means something different than it does to a quantum physicist…
If you mean that physical reality disappears without a conscious observer…well, I’m not so sure that’s what they are suggesting. I’m not sure it isn’t what they are suggesting, and I’m not a quantum physicist. As John Wheeler stated,“If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.”
I think it’s way too early to conclude reality doesn’t exist at all without a conscious observer. And I use the word reality loosely.
Mad man,
Fair enough, sorry to paraphrase you. Aren’t insubstantiality and invisibility, by definition, impossible to experience though? Omnipotence and omniscience are a priori characteristics used to describe God, that is, they are characteristics which are generally deemed to be required for a creator.
Let me ask you this, have you ever experienced a quark? They are forever shrouded within hadrons, but do you doubt their existence? Their properties have been derived a priori and have never been directly experienced, does that mean that they can’t exist?
Dorky said:
It depends what you mean by reality I suppose. If reality is considered to consist of observables, that is definite positions and energies of things, that are deterministic then “reality” is kind of ethereal when it isn’t being observed under QM. Small particles (of which everything is made) can only really be considered to exist as wavefunctions when not being observed, from which probabilities of observables can be deduced. When an observation is made on such a small particle, the wavefunction collapses to an eigenstate, with a definite observable, such as position or momentum. Preceding such an observation though, only probabilistic things can be said about such a particle.
There is no comparison there… I refuse to sit here and explain to you the difference between scientific discovery/theory and make believe ideas like ghosts and goblins and little pink trolls dancing naked on the moon.
Evidence… evidence… evidence… makes all the difference when it comes to likelyhood. And all EVIDENCE is experienced… but not all experiences are evidence.
Mad Man,
Are you sure about that? Quarks can’t be experienced directly, in other words are invisible, and have characteristics assigned to them a priori. God, as a whole, cannot be experienced directly and has characteristics which we assign to him a priori. No comparison at all?
Thank God for that.
Again, quarks can’t be directly experienced i.e. “seen” by a measurement, they are inferred in order to explain phenomena (Hadrons, specifically), so by your own definition they are unlikely. Are you happy with that conclusion?
It seems I am in fact forced to explain the difference…
the evidence of quarks is not in direct observation… but the observably predictions made by assuming their existence. Which is turn is evidence for the quark hypothesis.
No such claim can be made about the god of any religion… at least not without the use of extreame sophistry
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I don’t think that is what quantum physics suggests, FDK. I think that one interpretation of quantum physics (the Copenhagen Interpretation) suggests that our knowledge of reality is indeterminate until reality is observed but that’s about as close as any interpretation of quantum physics gets to what you’re suggesting here. Other interpretations (the “Many Worlds” interpretation, for instance) disagree even with that.
Take the famous ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ paradox, for example. This paradox doesn’t imply, as some seem to think that it does, that the cat, according to quantum physics, is neither dead nor alive but is in some other-worldly ‘in-between’ state. It means only that our knowledge of the cat’s state is 50-50. There’s a 50% chance that the cat is dead and a 50% chance that the cat is alive. It’s a statement about the state of our knowledge of reality, not the state of reality itself.
Mad Man,
How trying that must be for you.
Hang on, didn’t you say before that:
Unless you consider “direct observation” to not be somewhat synonymous to experience (which would seem a little absurd to me) you are contradicting yourself. From what you said above, you are now saying that evidence can take the form of a deduction from experience/empirical observation, not direct experience/empirical observation itself. Which is it?
Oh my #%"
ok… I’ll spell it out…
The observable EVIDENCE is the PREDICTIONS made when assuming the quark hypothesis. NOT the quark itself… the observable predictions are then EVIDENCE supporting the quark hypothesis… increasing it’s likelyhood.
the EVIDENCE is always observable… as stated…
the EVIDENCE in this case is the observable predictions
There is no contradiction…
jeez… 