Subjective Evidence of Gods

Hi Chuck, hope you don't mind my cutting in. You mean that the act of choosing to pray is evidence for God in and of itself? I don't see how that follows.Some people choose to avoid walking under ladders. That doesn't make it true that walking under a ladder will bring you bad luck.Some people choose to try and make contact with aliens. that doesn't provide evidence for the existence of aliens. Okay, I get where you're coming from. This point is often expressed by Christians in something like the form given below;

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God answers ALL prayer, but sometimes the answer is "no", sometimes it is "not yet", and other times the answer is "yes".

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The problem with this is that it is indistinguishable from praying to thin air. One could apply the same results to any non-divine, non-prayer answering entity and get the same results.The late great comic George Carlin suggested that we pray to Joe Pesci. That gets you exactly the same result as you get by praying to the Christian god. Sometimes Joe Pesci says "Yes", sometimes Joe Pesci says "No" and sometimes Joe Pesci says "Get the fug outta here and wait a while you fuggin mook". Joe Pesci may have a bit more of a potty mouth, but the results are exactly the same. Sometimes you pray and get what you want, sometimes you pray and you don't get what you want. This is indistinguishable from praying to a rock (which I have seen people do. It didn't seem to be helping much).On this basis, and with all those other prayers of rival religions achieving the exact same results, I can't see this as evidence for anything.I urge you to view this video from the Youtuber Evid3nc3. He is an ex-Christian who came to doubt the reality of intercessory prayer. He describes something of what I'm talking about from that perspective. It's very well made, please give it a watch.Mutate and Survive

Hi GDR,Interesting discussion you're having here. I don't want to get too involved, but I thought you should know that this; is completely untrue. Take a look;

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In this subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is, do the gods exist or do they not? It is difficult, you will say, to deny that they exist. I would agree if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly. But in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so. - Cicero

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Religion is considered by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. - Seneca

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I could go on.Just take a look at the Wiki page on History of Atheism. You will see that doubting the existence of gods is as old as theism itself. Indeed, there are even a handful of cultures that express no theist tendencies at all.If you're interested, Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief is well worth watching and can be viewed here.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

Perhaps. Or perhaps he was merely engaging in the kind of public professions of faith that he alluded to in the first quote. Fine insofar as it goes. But;i) I expect that there would have been many unbelievers throughout history. It's just that their voices were not recorded, not least because in many historical societies, public statements of atheism could get you executed.ii) The historical ubiquity of religious belief only serves to back Straggler's argument that such beliefs stem from our own inbuilt tendencies toward superstition.Mutate and Survive

Agreed. Only to those who cling to superstitions without admitting that this is what they are doing. I think it is. If we assume that no real gods exist, then we would expect to see that the various competing notions of gods would disagree and, where possible, be falsified.I do not claim that the falsification of various god concepts is absolute proof of the non-existence of any god. I don't claim that it is especially strong evidence. But it is evidence. Well I think you're getting that backwards. One might as well claim that because human brains are extremely bad at accurately assessing probabilities (which is true), then probability-related mathematics is wrong.We know that human minds are over eager to assign agency to non-agents. We know that we have a natural tendency to assign agency and teleological explanations to completely natural events. We know, with certainty, that this leads us to make mistakes. To suggest that this represents some sort of system for sensing God is bizarre. If that were true, he seems to have designed it to misfire far more than it get things right, since if any single religion is correct, then the majority must have got things very wrong.I see it as being far more sensible to suppose that the belief in supernatural entities is an emergent property of various processes that occur in our brains and that those processes persist because they provided us with an evolutionary advantage. In this case the urge to understand that you describe is simply our urge to sense and understand our environment. An important part of that environment is the presence of active agents, whether they are friends trying to aid us or predators trying to eat us. That is why we have this urge, because understanding our environment presents us with an obvious advantage in trying to survive that environment. And when we have no understanding, we invent one, because that is more comforting than an admission of ignorance. It doesn't give any weight to supernatural beliefs at all, quite the opposite.Mutate and Survive

Well, perhaps. I can't help but think though, that if, as you suggest, we have some inbuilt sense that guides us towards these spiritual truths, then these falsified religions would be fewer in number. Also, it would seem reasonable to assume that more of them might provide accurate information, something that is actually very rare.In simple terms, I can't see how this could be anything other than (admittedly quite weak) evidence against gods. The more god concepts are shown to be false, the more reasonable it becomes to suspect that any remaining god concepts will be false, especially in light of the fact that no strong positive evidence exists for any of them. That strikes me as being a description of how evidence works. No argument from me! Now that is an interesting claim. Might be worth your starting a thread on that at some point.Certainly within a Christian framework, I find this hard to believe. The more beneficent god of the New Testament is pretty hard to square with the Old Testament's cosmic bully-boy.Mutate and Survive

No, I would completely dispute that. The history of religion is one of reinvention and repeated schism. Christianity in particular has split into a thousand splinter groups. If religions were gradually converging upon a truth, we would expect them to merge. They don't. They split.Further, the areas where religions tend to agree are very closely associated with the types of psychological failings that Straggler has been pointing to; over-active agency detection, preference for teleological explanations, etc.The only sense that I can see in which diverse religions are converging is where "God-of-the-Gaps" theists are gradually being forced to retreat into ever smaller and less relevant territory. They are all gradually being pushed back into the position of an absentee deist god, since science has stripped them of any of their deities' former responsibilities. The OT God is a bit of a rotter, whether the books are read literally or not and the NT is not much of an improvement.I do sympathise with what you're saying, but if we treat the Bible as being the work of men, I do not see why it should be considered special any more. One might as well seek meaning in Winnie the Pooh (have you read The Tao of Pooh? It's very good). Moderate Christians seem to me to be stuck between a divine Bible (which is absurd) or a human one (which is irrelevant). I just don't buy that. It is quite clear that the "God" characters described in the OT and NT have very different natures. They have different values and personalities. It is clear that it's not humanity's understanding of God that is evolving, but God who is evolving to keep up with the human moral Zeitgeist.Mutate and Survive