lol. there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.
people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it, usually at young age when they lacked the rational apparatus to resist such brainwashing.
to be fair, logic and inference are different things. logic helps you build structure around a given set of axioms.
actually pure logic can be horribly unhelpful if you start with axioms that are not aligned with reality. that’s why some really smart people can believe in stupid things.
there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.
Agreed
people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it
It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).
Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.
In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.
I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.
All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).
i am using the word brainwashing to express my disdain for people who force religion on kids who can’t make free choice, it is not meant to be taken in the strictest literal sense. otherwise i agree with your comment.
We know this now, due to in large part very smart people trying to prove it can be done in scientific ways with real philosophical and logic systems, and failing… Not just non-believers saying it’s obvious.
well no, we know it because non-existence is the default status quo. if you want to claim there is a spaghetti monster running the world, the burden of proof is on your side, no one has a responsibility to prove you it is nonsense.
so the effort of all these very smart people trying to find god would only be of interest if they had actually find him… in which case he should be handcuffed and brought to hague.
I think you may be conflating burden of proof with the effort involved in that burden. Without a rigorous effort, the default claim is less strong and has not stood up to scrutiny. While it may seem too obvious for such things, we now know that science and physics can get really weird and complex… So ideas like “I think therefore I am”, first cause / Kalam, all the way to modern logic and number theory, all bolster claims of Occam’s Razor violation in a rigorous way instead of hand waving. We can think the outcome is certain and a waste of time, but really out of it has come some fundamental and valuable research into logic.
Without a rigorous effort, the default claim is less strong and has not stood up to scrutiny.
no. the default claim is true unless proven otherwise, that is why it is default. it does not have to stand to any scrutiny. it is the claim that there is an invisible man in the sky, who is allmighty, sociopathic, sadistic asshole, has been torturing people since he created the world and in spite of being allmighty needs you to go to church every sunday and bring him money, that needs to stand up to scrutiny.
While you’re clearly passionate about this, that’s not how science works. The default claim is not by default true. Instead science calls it the null hypothesis. Then a rigorous study is performed to try to disprove the null hypothesis with a percent certainty. Failure to refute the null hypothesis often constrains the possible domain, which is where the philosophy “God of the gaps” comes from. What this structure does is promotes new out of the box thinking for very hard problems, even if they seem they actually are not provable or outright wrong. The tactic of trying to overwhelm the scientific process of very strong null hypotheses and weak counter arguments is called a gish gallop.
that’s not how science works. The default claim is not by default true.
it is generally (lets ignore math) impossible to prove non-existence, you can only do it the other way around. so non-existence is the default claim, until you prove otherwise.
lol. there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.
people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it, usually at young age when they lacked the rational apparatus to resist such brainwashing.
to be fair, logic and inference are different things. logic helps you build structure around a given set of axioms.
actually pure logic can be horribly unhelpful if you start with axioms that are not aligned with reality. that’s why some really smart people can believe in stupid things.
starting with axioms “not aligned with reality” is not fault of logic 😂
Agreed
It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).
Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.
In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.
I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.
All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).
So yeah, it’s complicated.
i am using the word brainwashing to express my disdain for people who force religion on kids who can’t make free choice, it is not meant to be taken in the strictest literal sense. otherwise i agree with your comment.
We know this now, due to in large part very smart people trying to prove it can be done in scientific ways with real philosophical and logic systems, and failing… Not just non-believers saying it’s obvious.
well no, we know it because non-existence is the default status quo. if you want to claim there is a spaghetti monster running the world, the burden of proof is on your side, no one has a responsibility to prove you it is nonsense.
so the effort of all these very smart people trying to find god would only be of interest if they had actually find him… in which case he should be handcuffed and brought to hague.
I think you may be conflating burden of proof with the effort involved in that burden. Without a rigorous effort, the default claim is less strong and has not stood up to scrutiny. While it may seem too obvious for such things, we now know that science and physics can get really weird and complex… So ideas like “I think therefore I am”, first cause / Kalam, all the way to modern logic and number theory, all bolster claims of Occam’s Razor violation in a rigorous way instead of hand waving. We can think the outcome is certain and a waste of time, but really out of it has come some fundamental and valuable research into logic.
no. the default claim is true unless proven otherwise, that is why it is default. it does not have to stand to any scrutiny. it is the claim that there is an invisible man in the sky, who is allmighty, sociopathic, sadistic asshole, has been torturing people since he created the world and in spite of being allmighty needs you to go to church every sunday and bring him money, that needs to stand up to scrutiny.
While you’re clearly passionate about this, that’s not how science works. The default claim is not by default true. Instead science calls it the null hypothesis. Then a rigorous study is performed to try to disprove the null hypothesis with a percent certainty. Failure to refute the null hypothesis often constrains the possible domain, which is where the philosophy “God of the gaps” comes from. What this structure does is promotes new out of the box thinking for very hard problems, even if they seem they actually are not provable or outright wrong. The tactic of trying to overwhelm the scientific process of very strong null hypotheses and weak counter arguments is called a gish gallop.
it is generally (lets ignore math) impossible to prove non-existence, you can only do it the other way around. so non-existence is the default claim, until you prove otherwise.
I suggest you read Spinoza.