woodbine wrote: ↑January 31st, 2020, 4:45 pm
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.
woodbine wrote: ↑January 31st, 2020, 4:45 pm"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.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me