Of course, it's not like I'm not skeptical of the experiences myself and just accept that all such miracles/supernatural events in my life were simply related to my beliefs and looked at them in such other ways. It's not like I haven't put together a model of the world and how things would work without "a God". The biggest flaw I find in such models is that they often lack meaning and purpose.
Meaning is not a metaphysical requirement and neither is purpose. Furthermore, God does not give meaning, nor does it give purpose. God adds one perspective to the mix and that's it.
No matter what kind of justification one can give against nihilism, the point is mankind is way too limited and silly to ever break out of the eternal cycle that entraps them. I believe that it is religion's purpose to break man out of this cycle, to empower them, to get them to behave.
Cool. I don't see it working.
Christianity is pretty much the only religion that offers the concept that it is love that empowers people and makes the world go around.
If you read selectively, yes, as many people do for all kinds of purposes. But have you read extensively about Islam? Buddhism? Hinduism? Taoism? Zoroastrianism? What if a gem is hidden in these religions' texts that would make you change your mind?
Perhaps it's also the fact that I am empowered by my God rather than restricted, that I believe there are concepts that are far greater than any human made systems that overcomes them all. While it is far fetched, it is a far better, and more meaningful life than any athestic worldview will bring you.
How do you know? You are no atheist. I could say that I feel empowered by the sheer magnitude of possibilities and by the freedom that I have to marvel at them without the nagging pressure of belief and as a matter of fact, I do. Atheism makes me completely free to choose what I want to do with my life, spares me from any arbitrary contraints or direction, makes it mean what I want it to mean.
I don't like belief and I see it as a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. Why would I believe anything that I am not required to believe? Why can't I let my mind wander, "this is cool", "this is a strange but amusing idea", "maybe this is reality", "or maybe
this is reality", without ever committing to believing anything? I would be blissfully neutral, marveling at all the raindrops that fall upon the Earth without caring which one is the true raindrop, without searching for it, because I know it's a pointless, tiring and -yes!- contrary exercise. I believe in things because I have to - but if I was some poor disabled chap, never to perceive anything again, alone in my head, I would not believe anything. And that would be
an amazing feeling.
I'm embellishing a little, but you started it ;)
I'm not citing this you as "evidence", I'm literally telling you why I picked Christianity over alternatives, and the purpose that I have derived behind it. I don't care what contemporary Christians act like or how they are - we are all pitiful humans who constantly try to improve ourselves and thus judging the followers do not judge the concept itself.
It sort of does because it shows that only you see it, which strongly suggests that your views are in great part personal and uncorrelated with what the religion actually says. Basically, that your beliefs mostly come from yourself, but that you attributed them to an external source, the case in point being that most people are not in agreement. Basically, given the range of interpretations that have been made of the Bible, it is presumptuous for you to claim that your interpretation is better. Essentially, the Bible is a blank text. You do what you want with it and your interpretation is much more telling of
you than it is of Christianity.
You always seem to enjoy using this argument like it's the end all argument and of course I'll agree with you on your points... except can you really really argue that everything else is indeed equal between what the models will explain? The second you claim that a model without God/supernatural can explain everything much better than a model with such elements, then immediately you miss the point of Religion - the idea is that we as humans are limited and cannot explain all the forces in the world perfectly, no matter how hard we try. How can you claim that all else is indeed equal?
Okay, so we cannot explain all the forces in the world perfectly. I agree. Cool. Now what? The point is, it pretty much ends there. Our knowledge is approximate, okay, it is important to be aware of that, but do you think I need religion to know this? I am perfectly aware of the limitations and their fuzzy extent, but that's it, really. The world is part known and part unknown. The unknown part is, well, it's... unknown! There may be a God but maybe there isn't. There might be an unknown teapot, or maybe there isn't. There might also be absolutely nothing that's unknown. I exclude no possibility, but I do not favor any either - in the absence of evidence, I suspend belief and I'm content with that. Why you go a step further is beyond me.
Look: "we as humans are limited and cannot explain all the forces in the world perfectly, no matter how hard we try". I suspect this (though it is presumptuous to state it as fact - many systems exist which would allow their "inhabitants" to infer their exact functioning from within the system, though these inhabitants could never be absolutely certain that they did). But as I read it, your wording pretty much precludes religion, as religion would be, quite precisely, an attempt to "explain" the unknown. Admittedly, it does not actually explain anything, but that's not a feature.
So this is just saying "haha my bias is better than your bias"? I would argue that it's hardly arbitrary and saying that anyone believes in something "arbitrarily" is simply insulting more than anything.
Yes and no. The fact is, you have the same bias at large: simpler is more probable. This is an extremely widespread heuristic, one which is usually taken as self-evident, as no one discusses it if they even realize that's what they are doing. What I am pointing out is, essentially, an
additional bias on your part - special pleading, basically.
I'm not too sure what you have against my concept of a God anyway.
As far as I can remember, my main gripe is that your God is not actually a deity and that your usage of word is immensely confusing.
Nonsense. Let's say I have a set of data regarding wage and education. I have strong believes that wage has a positive correlation with education, without even considering anything, as an "a prior" (pretend that it is this way since this is just a simple example).
No. You are misinterpreting the domain of the prior. I am talking about a prior over a
single random variable, i.e. a universal process. Other examples are irrelevant.
I run the data, and I find that there is no correlation between education and wage. I have just tested my hypothesis, something I have believed, according to you. All a priori are hypothesis that I want to test. How the hell can you claim taht they are not testable? Why should they all be "rationally and pragmatically derived"? Why can't I just look at a bunch of numbers, tinker with it a bit, and believe something, and try to prove it (only to find that I can't or I find a counter example, or I do manage to prove it)? This is ridiculous.
Look this is not a prior you're talking about. A prior might be P(wage): how probable is a certain wage? You don't know about education, you don't know about the job, you don't know about the currency, you have no examples of wages, you know
nothing. That is the prior and you can't test it because that's not the point, it is a
tool for inference and
nothing more. In this case, you would probably choose a uniform prior. Any wage is equally probable in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, which is logical. The only effective criterion to choose a prior is effectiveness.
Basically: a hypothesis is not a prior and the correlation you are set out to determine is the choice of the likelihood P(education|wage), which you may combine with P(wage) in order to determine the posterior P(wage|education). A strange prior that would give undue importance to wage 100,000 would skew the posterior. I'm talking about Bayesian inference essentially.
The point is that the very CONCEPT of a God surpasses human experience and likely isn't simply limited to how people can think or comprehend, so why do people bother requiring evidence for it?
Because there are no free passes. It's not because a concept deems itself incomprehensible that I won't hold it to the same criteria as any other concept. It is also debatable whether this is in fact a contradiction in terms: a concept is a mental structure, it can't surpass human experience. Furthermore, several concepts, such as a square circle, cannot exist because they are nonsense, and the same kind of test needs to be applied to the concept of God: does it mean anything, or is it nonsense?
If the concept of God is incomprehensible, there is a fundamental identification problem. Chiefly, proper identification of an object entails that the object may be comprehended. Thus, should God be beyond human comprehension, given an object or a process, it is impossible to determine whether it is God or something else. You essentially end up lumping together every single incomprehensible concept as "God" because it is only through comprehension that you could tell them apart. This obfuscates the fact that there is an infinity of radically different incomprehensible processes.
Basically, take God and isolate the part of him which is irreducibly beyond human comprehension (for example if we contend that God is sentient and that he is good, we partly comprehend what he is and we may set these things apart until what remains of his modus operandi is beyond us). My contention is that there is no criterion which would allow you to tell God apart from a source of randomness, for such a criterion would entail that you partly comprehend God. it is a subtle argument, but it is essentially true that any irreducibly incomprehensible thing would look random to us, regardless of whether it is actually random or not, and by corollary, any concept we might put forward which we deem beyond our comprehension would be the concept of randomness in disguise, because we couldn't cognize it differently.
In a nutshell: God, at the core, is incomprehensible, randomness is incomprehensible, now tell me how I can tell them apart with comprehensible criteria.
The point is - you can believe it or not - it does not matter. But calling belief in a god irrational because we don't have evidence for it? Why does evidence even matter anyway since you can likely explain ANY sort of evidence by calling it a mental disease or some weird phenomenon or anything like that?
That's a plausible and falsifiable hypothesis and you've got to admit it's compelling. If we can conclusively determine that there is no likely process that explains your train of thought then we'll talk.
Considering everytime you bring up the "if god came down from heaven and just showed himself to us and hung out with us" is complete nonsense since you apparently have this image of what God is supposed to be (you want evidence that confirms your view of god). You say you can't communicate with God, and I'll say you can't communicate because of your bias.
Look what the fuck am I supposed to think God is? X says God is A, Y says God is B, or maybe it's C or maybe it's Love, I mean, fuck, why is there no agreement on something so fundamental? I'll make it simple: God is some dude in the sky who created all the shit there is. It is a childish, anthropomorphic concept. Now, whatever it is you are talking about, please, don't call it God and then wonder why I am confused. God. Is. A. Dude. Just leave him to the kids. What you are talking about is Tangerinum. Now tell me what Tangerinum is, and please, for my sake, do me a favor and call it Tangerinum, because I am fed up of being confused.
I don't understand your point since you seem to assume that the a priori will simply make more and more complicated assumptions for no reasons and not simply try to adjust the theory as they observe. I start with "always display red", and if it changes (after a period of time), I test another theory that it changes after a given period of time, and so on and so on. I don't see why you claim that I will start gambling instead of looking back and trying a time series or any other example - it's pretty insulting that you think i'm gambling lol.
You are reading more into this than what I meant to say. What I meant is that if the screen is to stay red for a couple hours and "always show red" doesn't work, I will start trying random shit. It's better than idling. It's not gambling in a pejorative sense, anyone would do this in the absence of better ideas. Sorry for the confusion, I was just being logical with the fact the task tells you when you're wrong :(
Nice strawman I guess - you assume that people who start with a priori are idiots apparently, rather than being able to comprehend data just like the "agnostics". Suppose that it takes 1000 observations to get the screen simulation properly - what makes you think that the person with the a priori is going to just be gambling the entire time around and not consider the entire thing at once? Why can the agnostic do it, but no the person with the a priori? That's ridiculous and you're completely limiting the thinking capabilities of one side (you're making them retarded or something) while saying "hey this agnostic guy will do it faster heh" when they have access to the same data simply because one person (the person with the apriori) tries out more approaches than the other.
I don't think you get it at all. Nobody tries out more approaches than the other and both of them "gamble" when the alternative is to waste time. The problem with the pointed prior guy is that he will try more contrived approaches in general because his prior is basically injecting information in his tries redundantly over time. The number of tries is perhaps identical but each try is longer because of that piece of information that the prior guy disciplined himself to insert. Whereas the "agnostic" approach is to go for the simplest option, the other approach is to go for the simplest option which satisfies some criterion that was determined a priori with no evidence - and that option is necessarily longer and potentially harmful since the options might be significantly limited by the requirements.
Basically what I mean is that there's a problem when your prior is skewed to the point that the explanations you put forward for what you see contains parts which are both non-trivial and unconditional to what you observe. And note that, as I stated, I do not think that you are doing this.