Why God almost certainly doesn't exist

Philosophy of Religion
41

We have coherent models of parts of reality. But we lack any credible scientific model of consciousness, cannot agree on a metaphysical interpretation of QM, and the standard model of cosmology is falling to pieces. That is the scientific part of the mess. Then there is the philosophical part, where we have a load more partial models of reality (e.g. Kastrup’s idealism) which try to fix one part of this (consciousness, in his case) but ignore the others (Kastrup has very little to say about QM, and nothing to say about cosmology).

You think the Hubble Tension (for example) isn’t a problem?

There are different levels of wrongness.

42

Almost everyone. Wittgenstein didn’t.

43

I am both roughly agnostic and almost entirely uninterested in such views, as they are mostly speculative and don’t represent the sort of God that most people talk about, when they talk about a God. I think such a supposition is unjustified but basically harmless speculation (like I believe of many philosophical positions).

I omitted lots of things that I think happen to be true for the sake of economy. I meant them to be implied in the phrase “my belief is embedded in a lifetime of experience and a more complete view of the world”.

I agree, however I think that it is fundamentally not required. There is a huge list of things that further lower my credence in an interventionalist god, but I’m not sure there’s a functional difference between “almost certainly” and “really really almost certainly… I really mean it!”. Once your credence gets to a certain level, it acts as if it was zero in most cases.

44

I’m not sure if you’re not reading me, or if you’re intentionally missing my point, so I’m going to repeat it and add some emphasis.

When I look at the universe, the only reason I would have to believe in a specific and knowable God like the Christian one is entirely based on the claims people have made.

P1 If the only evidence of such a God is people’s claims, and

P2 people’s claims about gods are observably and consistently unreliable

then

C There is no reliable evidence for God.

45

That’s exactly what I said.

That’s not true. Global workspace theory is completely credible, and widely accepted by neuroscientists. Not widely enough to be considered a consensus, but pretty widely.

A metaphysical one? No. It’s a physics problem, and there are lots of those because we don’t know everything about everything. It would only be a metaphysical problem if one’s metaphysics predicted that the universe was completely knowable, and that we should currently have all of that knowledge. I don’t even know what that metaphysic would be, but as a fallibilist, it certainly isn’t a problem for me.

No one since him? No one before him? I’d suggest that it’s a common middle state for people who reject naive realism but have no patience for further inquiry. Obviously it should also be represented by people who agree with Wittgenstein’s approach.

46

Doesn’t address the Hard Problem.

That’s what a lot of people think. I can explain to you exactly why they are wrong. The HT is the result of the mismatch between two figures which should be the same. But the early universe figure, derived from the CMB, is model-dependent, and that model requires inflation to be correct. If inflation is wrong, then the early cosmos H0 figure is meaningless nonsense, because it depends on a broken model.

Inflation is wrong. This is linked to the fine tuning problem. The cosmos is fine tuned for the evolution of conscious life. There is no way to get rid of this problem. But inflation is invented solely to get rid of problems which are in fact more fine tunings. If the cosmos is fine-tuned then the flatness and horizon problems cease to be problems. They do not need a dynamical explanation, because they are selection effects. That just leaves the monopoles which inflation supposedly “diluted”. If the cosmos is fine-tuned then so are the monopoles, which means they can be exactly the right monopoles to provide gravitational scaffolding for large scale structure formation. So this theory makes an empirical prediction that dark matter is monopoles, presumably in a bound state.

Full theory here: The Sacred Structure of Reality / Two-Phase Cosmology and a Metaphysics for the Quantum Age | Zenodo

I don’t meet very many of them, put it that way.

47

So rare occurrences are always incredible? Are all the eyewitnesses of observations that seem to defy known science deluded? What about “facts” that are even more bizarre than rising from the dead, like time being relative?

We think time alters with speed for the same reason religious people think God created the world: because trusted authority figures tell us it is so.

48

It doesn’t have to, to be credible. You keep replacing the concept of a complete theory that accounts for everything possible with terms like “credible” or “coherent”.

Because it’s the case. If you want to create a metaphysical theory that incorporates current physics problems, you are permitted, but it isn’t required.

It’s not the sort of view that gets explicated as it’s more of a non-view than anything. Wittgenstein was rare because he sort of formalized the non-view.

49

Go back to my original post to you. What I quoted from your OP is what I was addressing. That argument is a non-starter for the reasons I gave. No amount of deflection, moving the goalposts, playing the victim, etc, from you is going to change that.

50

It does have to if it is supposed to be a scientific theory of consciousness. The Hard Problem is the consciousness problem that has to be solved.

That depends whether you want it to be part of a coherent theory of the whole of reality or not. If you do, then you need to account for all of the biggest conceptual problems in science.

51

I didn’t say that.

Of course not.

What about such facts?

This is actually true. That is a similarity. If you are satisfied with this approach to truth finding, I understand why. I am happy to explain why that is not, in itself, satisfactory to me.

The problems I run into are

  1. There are multiple people who claim to be religious authorities who make mutually contradictory claims, and not just one or two, but there are hundreds of sects of each major religion. They can’t all be true.
  2. Historically, people have claimed to have religious authority simply in order to assert power over others
  3. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It actually seems less likely to be true the more I think about it or look into it.

I am aware that, at least with the first 2, and one could argue about the 3rd, a person could say the exact same thing about science, right? The difference is that science is created specifically to deal with these sorts of issues. That is why people talk about things like scientific consensus and reproducibility.

So with science, if I am worried that someone is claiming something based on their authority, solely to benefit themself and not because it’s likely true, I can simply see what all of the other scientists in the field say on the matter, and what they have to say about the claims of this specific scientist. For example, there are still a tiny number of scientists who claim that tobacco smoke isn’t very dangerous. While I might just throw up my arms and think “experts disagree, so I guess we’ll never know!”, if I check on what most scientists say, and how they respond to these outliers, it’s actually pretty easy to come to a reasonable conclusion without learning all the science myself. Religion offers no such methodology.

I’m a curious and naturally skeptical person, so when things don’t make sense to me, I generally feel like I want to understand them at at least a basic level. I understand relativity at a basic level. I’m not sure that I understand QM at a basic level yet, and I remain skeptical about lots of things about it. Apparently, no one in the field really disputes that some of the weirdest things actually appear to happen, so I believe that’s the case. I am open minded about the various models and approaches used to describe the subject. For someone who isn’t equally curious and skeptical, one could simply withhold a belief. I don’t think the average person needs to have an opinion on such things to live their life.

52

I read your post. I answered, and rather than responding to my answer, you are just claiming that I haven’t responded. If you have an axe to grind or just want to promote your view, we’re not going to get any further through this form of repetition. If you are actually curious about my reasoning, and really want me to explicate something, your responses are hiding that curiosity pretty much completely.

Edit: Is it that you believe that when I contextualized a claim for clarity, you think I was dodging? Do you believe that if a single sentence that I type, removed from all context, can be interpreted in a way that makes it seem false, that it is therefore false unless it is defended in terms of the decontextualizing interpretation? That seems like the most blatant sort of strawman if that’s what you think.

53

The hard problem isn’t even universally accepted to exist. Many (I think actually most) neuroscientists reject that such a problem exists. Before you start making a case that it does here, start your own thread for it. You’ve basically hijacked my thread in a way that seems to be just contrarian.

That’s what I said.

54

Compare your syllogism to what I quoted from your OP in my first post to you.

You need to be aware of how much ego defense affects your ability to reason. You wrote what you wrote in your OP. Stop projecting and blame shifting and own it.

56

So you’re more interested in rebutting a couple of decontextualized sentences than what I actually mean?

57

What I quoted from your OP in my first post to you was a lot more than a couple of sentences . True or not true? If you haven’t bothered to reread it, I suggest you do.

Hint: It’s contained in the quote box.

Stop with all this nonsense and own it.

58

Lots of people who have hallucinations recognize them as hallucinations. At least according to Oliver Sacks and others in the field.

59

Empty?
Is Evolution, that is, this reality we exist within, manifested?
Are you an evolved creature, the cumulative product of Earth’s evolutionary processes?
Those aren’t empty questions.

Where does consciousness emanate from?

Regarding God, how does an assumption become a thing?

sorry wrong location …

60

To know, with absolute certainty, whether God exists or not is an extremely simple and easy process.

Anyone can ‘try to’ argue for what they already currently believe is true, like “dobbler” without proving absolutely anything, as shown and proved above, but there is only one way to know, for sure, what is the actual irrefutable Truth of things.

61

Having read through my reply below, I might come across as unnecessarily argumentative, or that I’m just nitpicking around the edges of the argument. But it’s not like that at all, these are important arguments from the more apophatic, or mystical end of the discussion and give reasons why we can’t definitively address the question of whether there are , or are not God’s.

I don’t have to demonstrate it, it is obvious, simply by accepting that our knowledge and understanding is necessarily limited, allows the possibility that there are other things that we are unaware of. One might think, ahh yes this is the God of the gaps. But I’m not hiding a God in a gap, I don’t need to hide it, because I’m not asserting that it exists, just accepting that it might exist.

If we accept that there are (by definition, we have limited knowledge) things we are unaware of, then they might include God’s that we are unaware of.

I haven’t referred to anything that has no effect on the world. I’m referring to things that have an effect on the world that we are not aware of.

This is irrelevant because I am not referring to a God that doesn’t affect the world. But rather a God that effects the world, but that we are not aware of.

This isn’t so much about what is, or isn’t interesting, but rather if we can say God’s don’t exist, or not.

You’ve given the game away here, you’re talking about the God told to us by other people. Other people wearing the blindfold (I accept what you say about the blindfold as a poor metaphor). So it’s an argument about what people say, not about any Gods that there are, or not.

In theory, yes, but we might not have detected it yet, or we might not be capable of detecting it at all.