Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?

[Angrboda]

I exist too. I believe the existence of "myself" is self-authenticating. But even though it is incontrovertible, for another person it may not be incontrovertible insofar as their "opinion" goes. Some may deny it altogether and not even give a hearing to it. This is in spite of the fact that they suppress what is self-evident. I do not say that that is my opinion, though it can be taken as such, but I believe (rightly) that it is the truth.

One has to take into account standards of evidence, and not everyone possesses the same standard of evidence. For someone who rejects things like logic and things that are self-evident, forms of authority and so on, it may be impossible to even begin with the preliminaries of formulating an argument, a justification for beliefs.

Let's go beyond my own existence, how do I believe in other minds (besides my own) at all? There is a consensus among most human beings that there are other minds. We at least act as though there are. But what is the proof of this? At bottom, we only believe it because it is accepted, because others believe it, or due to some kind of existential knowledge. So let's extend that sort of scope of what is evident regarding the divine. I believe, based upon similar common sense, that some kind of Supreme Being or Essence exists, and that knowledge of this being, even only that of a "bare-bones" variety, is natural to our reasoning capacities and personal psyches. I extend my standard of evidence broader than others. And I more than believe, I know, that I am correct and others (atheists) are not, in this regard.

We believe there are other minds because we see other people moving around, talking, and acting in ways that show they have minds. They act in complicated ways that show the existence of internal states and motivations involving planning and long-term goals. That is the evidence for other minds.

What evidence can you provide that there is a divine? What do you see, hear, touch, feel, or taste that provides evidence for the existence of a divine that is *anywhere* comparable to the above evidence for other minds? You claim it is based on 'common sense', but common sense dictates that we should limit our claims of existence to those things that have obsevable evidence supporting them.

Humans are quite prone to any number of illusions and illogical leaps in thinking. That many people 'feel' the existence of a deity is very far from proof of the existence of such a deity *especially* when the claimed properties of such deities conflict on almost every point.

Let's give an example. Suppose you are color blind, for specificity red-green color blind. How could you learn that the claims people make for the difference between red and green is real? Well, you can observe that many people make this claim. That alone is not enough--they could be delusional or simply under some sort of illusory mechanism. But, after looking a bit more, you find that they are *consistent* in their evaluations of red and green. So, one person may claim an apple is red (which you cannot detect). And it then turns out that *other* people will agree that this particular apple is red. Even when there is no communication between the people involved, they will still agree that the apple is red. Similarly for a green apple (which looks identical to you): people who claim to see red and green will be agree between themselves about which are red and which are green even if there is no communication allowed between the people questioned.

On the other hand, when it comes to the divine, there are literally thousands of mutually contradictory claims concerning its nature made by those who claim to see such divinity. pretty much any two people who claim to experience the divine will disagree about most particulars, even if allowed to discuss with each other, let alone if they are prevented from such. Instead of the consistency of red and green, which can be determined even by someone who is color blind, the claims of divinity have almost no consistency at all.

This is strong evidence that the experience of the divine *isn't* an experience of reality, but simply a common malfunction of how the human mind works, like a sort of optical illusion.

This does *not* deny that you have some sort of experience. I believe you do. But it *does* deny that your interpretation of that experience is valid.

One might counter this with Frank Jackson's thought experiment about Mary the neuroscientist, who, having been raised in a black and white world, had never experienced the color red. Presumably, Mary, as a neuroscientist, knows all the factual knowledge there is to know about perception, yet all that knowledge would not inform her about what it means to experience the color red. The implicit argument is that factual knowledge cannot cover all possible knowledge, and that some things can only be known through experience. One might make an observation about consciousness that if we did not possess consciousness and experience it ourselves, then we would probably be unlikely to attribute such a thing to other persons, and the behavior of other people would likely remain a black box, the mechanism behind which we do not understand. It is only through our experience of our own consciousness that we make sense of, and develop a theory about, the behavior of others. (It is true that we have evolved the inference about the behavior of others and their consciousness, but I don't think that alters my point significantly.)

I know that there are various objections to Jackson's argument, but both the objections as well as the original argument seem inconclusive to me. YMMV.

My observations about the reliability of inductive inference and reason that I posted in another thread are relevant here as well, so I'll repaste them here for convenience.

This is similar to the question of how we can trust inductive reasoning. Logically, we can't. Take the black swan problem. For a long time, Europeans presumed that all swans were white because they had not encountered a black swan up until that point. Their sample of possible swans only included white ones. But that did not prevent the existence of black swans outside of the sample of swans they possessed. We may know the contents of the sample we are aware of, but that tells us nothing about the total size of the pool of possible instances that our inductive inference is about, so we have no basis for estimating that the next sample will be consistent with the characteristics of the current sample. Thus you cannot justify using inductive inference on purely logical or a priori grounds. Yet all the same it has been a useful tool because such inferences have proven to be generally reliable. As one philosopher put it, inductive inference cannot be justified, but it can be validated, through use and experience. Inductive inference will not reliably work in all possible worlds that we may find ourselves in, but in the actual worlds that we do find ourselves in, because of the general homogeneity of phenomenon, it proves itself to be a useful and reliable tool through its use and track record. I might point out that depending upon the reliability of inductive inference itself in this way leads to yet another inductive inference, namely that of whether inductive inference itself will continue to be reliable, but perhaps that may be justifiable upon a priori principles, whereas inductive inference in general cannot be (I have an idea or two based upon Ramsey theory, but it may not pan out; it may just be a paradox). In a similar way, perhaps the reliability of evolved brains cannot be justified based upon a priori reasoning, though I would follow Gae's suggestion and say that we mean something other than infallibility by "reliable" here, something which may be demonstrable. Even if not, even if we cannot justify the reliability of our brains and reasoning through a priori reasoning, a bit of a paradox itself, we can nonetheless validate that it has and likely will continue to be reliable based upon experience. If validation rather than justification is good enough, and if inductive inference on the whole can be put on a firm footing by the method outlined above, then we don't need logical justification for our belief at all. To use a time honored truism, "The proof is in the pudding."

This is one tack by which one can approach the question. I have another which I may explore, depending. Regardless, it seems something of a paradox to even ask the question, as in order to prove that reasoning is reliable, we have to first assume that our reasoning is reliable, or else we never get off the ground. This reminds me of an obsefvation I made recently that all systems of knowledge and belief start with assumptions and build from there. The reliability of reason is similar. We cannot justify our reliance upon reason, but no other system can justify its base assumptions either. So in that regard, it is no better and no worse than any contrary belief. And so it seems while our belief in the effectiveness of our reason cannot be justified any better than its contrary belief, its justification is certainly no worse than that of its contrary. We must just assume that our reason is reliable and work from there. There is no good alternative.