I am asking if there is an evidential basis to your beliefs which, if demonstrated to be invalid, would cause you cognitive dissonance.
What do you mean by an "evidential basis"? I don't know what kind of answers there are for that...
What evidential basis are
you committed to? What are the alternatives?
Crazy? No. I think they/you are irrationally placing personal conviction and personal preference over objective evidence.
I think you throw the word 'irrational' around too loosely when you just mean "something I don't agree with"...
I don't have objective evidence that my personal conviction and personal preference are inaccurate so I'm not placing them
over it and I don't see how you can actually determine the rationality of it.
So you consider belief itself to be a valid form of evidence?
Not just the belief itself, its that people have thought it out and investigated it and come to that conclusion that makes me think its more plausible. Like, some kid believing in Santa Claus does nothing, but a Buddhist monk that has spent his life studying Chi energy makes me think he might be on to something actual.
but I also don't think that you can discount it as being evidence for me.
I don't believe I ever have. In the same sense that I would not dispute your personal preference for chocolate over strawberry ice cream as being personally "evidenced".
Discounted in the sense that you think I'm irrational for accepting it as a reason to believe.
Although, we don't ever ascribe anything supernatural, except as jokes, but still we're not eliminating them as possibilities either.
I am not eliminating any possibilities either. I never have. In fact I have explicitly stated the very opposite of that which you are accusing me.
I wasn't saying that you were...
I've said that I don't think you should take my subjective evidence as evidence for you...
Good. Then what conclusion does the evidence available to me suggest?
Apparently that god doesn't exist. Although, I don't think the liklihood that you use logically follows from the evidence.
You don't think that (to put it in the broadest of senses) there is evidence that humanity is highly prone to erroneously invoking the unknowable to explain the unknown?
If they're unknowable then how have they been shown to be erroneuous? And if they've been shown to be erroneuos, then they weren't really unknowable.
But I've agreed that you can use that argument for some specific things...
Yes. Things that do not conflict with your own beliefs.
Well if I thought they were wrong then I wouldn't believe them. I'm not just resisting the argument because of the implications, I honestly don't find it convincing.
Would it cause you cognitive dissonance to accept that the objective evidence supports the argument that the concept of god is a human invention?
In the sense that I'd be accepting something that I didn't think was true, yes.
Granting that I was conviced by objective evidence that there was support for the argument that the concept of god is a human invention, I probably would not have CD because the argument having support doesn't necessitate that its accurate. It still wouldn't prove me wrong, so to speak. But I guess it depends on the strength of the argument. I guess a very strong argument for the non-existence of god would cause me some CD, assuming I wouldn't just change my belief and go back to being an atheist.
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