Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[woodbine]

First ever post.

If we accept that the God hypothesis, (where God is defined nothing more than the prime mover, uncaused cause of the universe) is unfalsifiable then by definition no possible evidence can be used to distinguish between the truth or otherwise of the God hypothesis.

No possible evidence can distinguish between Gods existence or non existence.

Personal experiences are possible evidence.

Personal experiences cannot distinguish between Gods existence or non existence.

"Possible evidence" would encompass any information received from the senses and I suggest, logic and reason. This seems a non trivial point.

Without books or testimonies or personal experiences, or appeals to logical arguments, there seems nothing evidentiary left.

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Thoughts?

woodbine.

[Terrapin Station]

So first, if one accepts that something is unfalsifiable, then nothing can falsify it. That's what it means to be unfalsifiable.

If you accept that something is unfalsifiable, however, that doesn't imply that you can not believe the unfalsifiable claim. It only implies that you would say it's unfalsifiable.

In order to say that it implies you can not believe the unfalsifiable claim, you'd need an additional step, a step that makes it explicit that you feel you shouldn't believe unfalsifiable claims.

Of course, that step would rule out all sorts of claims that you probably believe, so you'd need to be careful there if you want to be consistent.

And of course, one doesn't need to accept that something is falsifiable. One could argue that it's falsifiable instead. For example, one could find the idea of a "cause of the universe" incoherent, which would falsify anything claiming to be that.

[Pattern-chaser]

First ever post.

Welcome to our dance!

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Yes, definitely. ... Provided you also conclude that there is no reason whatsoever not to believe in a God. And the reasons are the same in both cases. No evidence = no analysis = no conclusion justified or justifiable.

[Pantagruel]

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

I'm not sure whether having a reason to believe in something is related to the actual truth or falsity of the belief in any way?

Say there is a man living on an island, and every night a hen comes out and lays an egg by his hut. But the chicken never comes out when the man can see her. So he formulates a belief that the egg "grows" there, like mushrooms do perhaps.

The man "has a reason to believe" that "eggs grow like mushrooms". Although that belief is certainly false. I don't see how knowing whether the belief is falsifiable or not-falsifiable enters into the origin of the belief. Having an opinion about the falsifiability of one's belief is tantamount to criticizing the belief before it has been formed. In other words, what you would be talking about would no longer be a belief, strictly speaking, it would be something else.

[Terrapin Station]

Oops, serious typo in my post above. The last paragraph should read:

"And of course, one doesn't need to accept that something is UNfalsifiable. One could argue that it's falsifiable instead. For example, one could find the idea of a "cause of the universe" incoherent, which would falsify anything claiming to be that."

Someone should have caught that, but I don't know how closely anyone reads any of this stuff.

[Papus79]

No possible evidence can distinguish between Gods existence or non existence.

Personal experiences are possible evidence.

Personal experiences cannot distinguish between Gods existence or non existence.

We're in really confused times I think, where the west carries a lot of cultural baggage and assumptions on this topic. It's a bit like 'either bible or naive forms of reductive materialism with your atheism - anything else doesn't matter because it's held by too small a minority to matter' and this seems to shine a light on the trouble - ie. that this isn't a topic where people would normally seek truth and it has far more in common with conformity, identity branding, family heraldry, and tribalism, just like politics - they're really part-in-parcel in terms of how they behave.

"Possible evidence" would encompass any information received from the senses and I suggest, logic and reason. This seems a non trivial point.

Without books or testimonies or personal experiences, or appeals to logical arguments, there seems nothing evidentiary left.

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Thoughts?

I think what personal testimonies that break the assumptions of reductive materialism (as a total worldview) and suggest either panpsychism, functionalism, or some form of idealism conservative enough to give us the world we see and experience - these just question reductive materialism as a totalizing ontology.

The God question - if we really want to consider it in the realm of facts or ideas to be evaluated and separate from its political and tribal ramifications - is something where we can acknowledge that to even meet something vast that might claim to be God isn't even proof that it's God. The term 'God', outside of specific faiths, only makes sense as a claim that the super-set of all things is self-consciously aware in a similar way to how we are or perhaps even more aware, and I can't think of any such evidence for that.

So on its face this really should be a question where we're comfortable with true agnosticism, ie. that if something's as distant from us in scale as that then there's probably no way of knowing and it's extremely doubtful that there's any fire waiting for people who are agnostics, apatheists, or who follow the wrong religion.

Where it does matter is politics. It's probably more accurate for us to say that we find certain group's imperial behaviors obnoxious, ie. their deities are just grouping symbols by and large to beat the war drums in fealty to (whose will is dictated by their priesthood), ie. it's memetic warfare of the sort that's worked in nature since time immemorial and the tribe who believes in a more emboldening and unifying batch of BS will typically dominate and possibly destroy, subsume, or enslave the tribe who doesn't believe in useful fictions that aid military conquest and brutality.

Worth thinking about that if we want to survive as a species we need strong antidotes to this kind of this sort of brash lineage selection behavior or at least far more innocuous or peaceful repackagings that don't put us face to face with things like nuclear war or populating ourselves out of a substrate. OTOH the God question is largely irrelevant here in the real sense and my advice on it - we actually should be looking at the sorts of 'miracles' that seem to violate the laws of what we currently think not as successful chicanery always (though sometimes that's true) but rather something for us to get a deeper knowledge of, untangle, and actually use the disunity in that deeper realm of consciousness - assuming it exists - to actually disprove any idea that the holy books are anything more than tribal jingoism.

[Pantagruel]

First ever post.

If we accept that the God hypothesis, (where God is defined nothing more than the prime mover, uncaused cause of the universe) is unfalsifiable then by definition no possible evidence can be used to distinguish between the truth or otherwise of the God hypothesis.
...
Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Thoughts?

woodbine.

Hi woodbine!

Am I correct in saying that you are asking..given that the God-hypothesis is unfalsifiable...as a consequence of that unfalsifiability there cannot be "a reason to believe"?

If that's accurate, I'd say that, by definition, unfalsifiability cannot be construed as having an influence on belief. I think the strong sense of unfalsifiability relates to types of statements that are by definition unfalsifiable, i.e. truth functionally truths or analytically truths. If it is red then it is coloured. If A knows that something is unfalsifiable, it is because A already knows that it is true. If A knows that red is a colour, then A already knows he could never see something that was at the same time red-but-not-coloured. So A is simply incapable of holding that belief.

In other words, the only way for the idea of god to be "unfalsifiable" would be for it to be already known to be true.

[Pattern-chaser]

In other words, the only way for the idea of god to be "unfalsifiable" would be for it to be already known to be true.

Surely if any idea/concept/etc is unfalsifiable, it only means that it cannot be falsified. Falsifiable = if it is false, there is a way to show that it's false. It says nothing about whether the thing needs to be true or not. Falsifiability is about testing our theories; it has nothing to do with the theories themselves. Yes?

[Pantagruel]

[ Falsifiability is about testing our theories; it has nothing to do with the theories themselves. Yes?

If falsifiability is about testing our theories, unfalsifiability is not about "not-testing" our theories, it is about a type of theory that is "not-testabile". It's not that we "fail to test" it's that it can't, in principle, be falsified. Like analytic statements. Metaphysical claims are also, in principle, unfalsifiable, by their very nature.

[Terrapin Station]

[ Falsifiability is about testing our theories; it has nothing to do with the theories themselves. Yes?

If falsifiability is about testing our theories, unfalsifiability is not about "not-testing" our theories, it is about a type of theory that is "not-testabile". It's not that we "fail to test" it's that it can't, in principle, be falsified. Like analytic statements. Metaphysical claims are also, in principle, unfalsifiable, by their very nature.

All ontological claims are metaphysical claims, and any claims about the nature of existence, including claims such as "nothing can travel faster than the speed of light" are ontological claims.

[Pantagruel]

If you read the wiki on falsifiability, it explicitly states that metaphysics, logic and mathematics, are unfalsifiable.

"More to the point, the falsifiability criterion does not imply that unfalsifiable systems such as logic, mathematics and metaphysics are not parts of science."

Yet people clearly do have beliefs about all of these things. So unfalsifiability does not, in itself, have bearing on for the reasons for belief in these things.

[Terrapin Station]

If you read the wiki on falsifiability, it explicitly states that metaphysics, logic and mathematics, are unfalsifiable.

That could very well be the case--that it states that. If it does, it's wrong. I explained why. Again, you need to be able to think about things beyond just more or less parroting stuff you're reading as if it's gospel.

We can falsify whether anything can travel faster than light. "Nothing can travel faster than light" is an ontological claim. Ontology is metaphysics.

[Pantagruel]

If you read the wiki on falsifiability, it explicitly states that metaphysics, logic and mathematics, are unfalsifiable.

That could very well be the case--that it states that. If it does, it's wrong. I explained why. Again, you need to be able to think about things beyond just more or less parroting stuff you're reading as if it's gospel.

We can falsify whether anything can travel faster than light. "Nothing can travel faster than light" is an ontological claim. Ontology is metaphysics.

Ok, just so you acknowledge you are directly contradicting a well reviewed and documented entry, from a generally reliable source, which has not been flagged or criticized. It also happens to be a core concept in two books I've read within the last two months, so I think the ad hominem may be slightly ironic in this case. Perhaps if you "parroted" more, that is more of what you said was actually in line with something that was written somewhere, we would perhaps reach a consensus.

[Terrapin Station]

That could very well be the case--that it states that. If it does, it's wrong. I explained why. Again, you need to be able to think about things beyond just more or less parroting stuff you're reading as if it's gospel.

We can falsify whether anything can travel faster than light. "Nothing can travel faster than light" is an ontological claim. Ontology is metaphysics.

Ok, just so you acknowledge you are directly contradicting a well reviewed and documented entry, from a generally reliable source, which has not been flagged or criticized. It also happens to be a core concept in two books I've read within the last two months, so I think the ad hominem may be slightly ironic in this case. Perhaps if you "parroted" more, that is more of what you said was actually in line with something that was written somewhere, we would perhaps reach a consensus.

How about thinking about what I wrote instead?

Do you think that "Nothing can travel faster than light" is not falsifiable?

Do you think that it's not an ontological claim?

Do you think that ontology is not metaphysics?

[gad-fly]

Personal experiences are possible evidence.
"Possible evidence" would encompass any information received from the senses.
Without books or testimonies or personal experiences, there seems nothing evidentiary left.
Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Agreed: personal experience = possible evidence.
Agreed: possible evidence would encompass what received from the senses.
Disagreed: without books or testimonies or personal experiences. There are plenty of such, in the Bible, in the Koran, and so on. Some have experienced what can be referred to as miracle. You may take such as accidental, but it can be a matter of opinion.
Agreed: no reason for you to believe in God, but I suggest there is no reason for some not to believe too, and for some to retain a reasonable doubt.
Personal: whether I believe in God or not is immaterial to the debate.