(March 5, 2012 at 8:51 pm)AthiestAtheist Wrote: My question is what evidence is required to make you not believe in a God? I would have thought that the fact that every religious text in the world is full of holes would have been enough, but I guess not.

Physical evidence did not prompt me to get religion, philosophy did.For many years I considered myself an existentialist and an atheist for many of the same reasons as most members here: a profound respect for science, inconsistency in the text, and the hypocrisy of many religious people. But neither a bottom-up physicalism nor a top-down idealism seemed adequate to explain the way I experience and interact with life. The old cliche "no matter, never mind" bothered me so I kept trying to reconcile these two approaches. Doing that forced me to grapple with various meanings of "cause" etc. Many of these concepts are grounded in some form of theism. So in my case, since physical evidence had no part in my turn toward religion. But that does not mean that continued study and reflection will not turn me away from it again. If I find a better theory that fits reality than that's the direction I will go.

Then you didn't care enough about philosophy to be rigorous in your study of it. Show me anything in the realm of philosophy that leads to theism, anything at all? Show me a single thing grounded in theism? Cause? Try again (and have a chit chat with our resident deists while you're at it).

Plotinus in general. Aquinas's formal causation. Kant's categorical imperative. Schopenhauer's Will and Idea. No one in particular takes you directly to the divine, but collectively they have lead me that way. And might lead me back away. Who knows? But I do know this for sure. The always certain are most often wrong.

I think you mean to say that no one in particular takes you to the divine, but that you have decided to go that way anyhow.

And those who love to walk in bullshit often smell bad. The categorical imperative is a slimy three-tailed thing, Aquinas' five ways add up to zero, and Plotinus may have got one out of three right, and it wasn't One.

(March 5, 2012 at 11:06 pm)Epimethean Wrote: And those who love to walk in bullshit often smell bad. The categorical imperative is a slimy three-tailed thing, Aquinas' five ways add up to zero, and Plotinus may have got one out of three right, and it wasn't One.

Not to mention that Schopenhauer technically was an atheist.

Coming in late to the party, but I have to agree with comments on the first page which say that if you don't know what would constitute evidence, then there's no use trying to prove anything.

I would accept evidence which was considered acceptable in the scientific realm to believe in the claims of any religion.

(March 2, 2012 at 10:32 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: What kind of evidence or proof would it take for you to believe in deity?

Extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claim, obviously. Which is virtually impossible for most theists to meet their obligation and simply present, because:
a) They haven't defined the "god" they want to argue for properly or presented a clear positive ontology of it;
b) They don't understand how the burden of proof works in either a philosophic or scientific context;
c) They can't comprehend how disbelief in any given claim regarding the supernatural, until proven true, is the default position;
d) They don't care whether their beliefs are true or not, so long as they're comforting and make as many appeals to emotion as possible.

Quote:Some say belief in deity is not scientific in the sense of not being falsifiable. But can't something be true even if it isn't falsifiable.

Your view of scientific method is... incomplete. Theists have not even presented a theory for existence of deities or that reality was created by deities, they barely have a hypothesis. Science is interested in deducing predictions and repeatability from explanations of reality, so deities, like ghosts and fairies, have no explanatory power, at all.

Quote:How can you prove that other people are self-aware?

What does this have to do with god claims?

Quote:If a computer passed the Turing test could you prove that it was or was not conscious? Etc.

Again, what does this have to do with god claims?

“Extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claim, obviously.” – Welsh

I agree. That certainly applies the specific claims of most religions, including my own. But what all religions have in common is a belief in forms of reality other than the one governed by the laws of physics. I do not believe this general claim is particularly extraordinary based on the examples I provided.

“Your view of scientific method is... incomplete.” – Welsh

I subscribe to the philosophy of science promoted by Karl Popper. My understanding is that a scientific hypothesis is one that can be falsified by empirical observation. I maintain that a general epistemology includes other ways of knowing besides scientific inquiry. This includes but is not limited to mathematics and subjective experience.

Mathematics, as I have stated above, is a form of human knowledge independent of empirical verification. It could be a convenient fiction, but then what is it a fiction of. There must be ultimate and inviolate rules from which proximate rules derive. Presumably, mathematics was true before matter and energy came into being. The possibility of deity can only be considered if we believe in some kind of underlying order that informs the particular order in which we find ourselves.

The reason I raise questions about the self-awareness of other people and machine consciousness is this. Subjective experience provides at least one example of something most people consider real that cannot be objectively observed or subject to empirical falsification.