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A relative once told me they believed in god because;
"If god exists and I believe I go to heaven, If god exists and I don't believe I suffer for eternity in hell, if god does not exist then It does not matter if I believe. The logical and sensible thing to do therefore is to believe in god."
This is truly someones logic. When confronted with what happens to a person who has not been told to believe the reply was "I'm sure god will take that into account". When asked what happens to people of different faiths and beliefs "all thats important is that they believe in god". When asked what happens to people if they have no concience and commit unspeakable acts "as long as they believe in god they will be alright".
The fear of eternal suffering can create some strange logic.
Next time ask your relative "What if God only saves atheists, and sends believers to hell?"
Secular Heaven
They would probably reply "Thats not what athiests say".
Well, of course, but is your relative trying to please atheists or to please God? What if he can only please God by disbelieving in Him?
After all, if an all-powerful God wanted to be believed in, he could easily make his existence self-evident. We could ask the heavens "Are you there, God?" and a booming voice from the skies could reply "Yes, I AM".
But if there exists a God that wants to be disbelieved in, the reply to "Are you there, God?" is silence -- and that's indeed confirmed by testing. This God's existence seems therefore, going by the rational evidence, more probable than the existence of a God that wants to be believed in.
Your relative is pissing off God by believing in him, despite all of God's best efforts to promote atheism in the universe.
Somehow, this discussion is beginning to remind me of this fascinating book.
That book looks like an intro to Vernor Vinge's "Applied Theology".
Then why would He make people who feel inclined to write Bibles?
Probably something parallel to the reason that, if there is a god who does want to be believed in, he apparently created people who feel inclined to write things like "The God Delusion".
(One possibility: Satan planted the Bible, the Qur'an, etc. in rebellion against God's desire to not be believed in. Ever since then, God's been doing desperate damage control by watching over torture, rape, and genocide, and not doing anything, but to little avail — people go right on believing in him, because Satan's memes are just too infectious and powerful.)
If someone removes all the fingerprints from a commonly used room that normally should have had fingerprints, that's by itself evidence that someone was there who wanted to remove the fingerprints.
Likewise if God didn't permit the existence of Bible-writers, as such conmen and fools normally should exist, that would itself be evidence that there's an entity out there with the power to so disallow them.
Wait, really? If there was no evidence of God (in the form of Bibles or fingerprints), that would be evidence that there's a God out there hiding?
Yes. If the nature of humans is such that if physics operates in a natural way then they do a certain thing with high probability and said thing is not done then it raises the probability that physics is not operating as thought.
The absence of expected evidence is evidence of interference.
You wouldn't have enough evidence to even find the hypothesis "God exists" much less "God exists and is hiding" - even people who have no concept of privileging the hypothesis would be able to point that out to you. A person in that world would look like someone in our world telling us that there's no evidence of mind-controlling reptilian shapeshifters, and there really should be.
The original point of this scenario was as a rebuttal to Pascal's Wager, specifically that the hypothesis "god exists and will send you to hell for atheism" isn't significantly more likely than "god exists and will send you to hell for believing." Even if this scenario is unlikely, it's plausible enough to illustrate that the massive utility difference implied by the believer's scenario has no logical reason to dominate over other unlikely massive utility differences.
The key word there is enough. ;)
Allowing a general concept of God ('creator' rather than the details of a religion's particular deity), I don't think the hypothesis is privileged. We see cause and effect relationships everywhere, and it is natural to wonder about the first cause. God-beliefs can be very complex and explain a lot more than that, but all God-beliefs seem to serve at least that purpose.
I would wonder about an intelligent species with no curiosity or speculations about their origins (and fate), especially if in other contexts they tended to have a spattering of not-fully-empirically-justified-beliefs if such were useful to explain things.
Ah, but it's stronger evidence that your expectation is wrong; and self-reflective priors would have 'expectation is wrong' starting more likely than 'interference from an outside agency'.
Keyword stronger. The claim you were questioning was whether there was evidence at all. I do nothing more than support the claim that it is evidence.
Probably, given roughly human-like intelligence with information roughly like what we have now. The counterfactual wasn't specific in that regard but did suggest an assumption of a particularly strong understanding of human nature.
New Testament is evidence in favour of the Christian God, but at the same time it's also evidence against Vishnu or Zeus -- indeed it may be stronger evidence against Zeus that it's good evidence for the Christian God.
I'm not therefore sure at all if it would have a positive correlation with (be evidence for) the existence of a God in general.
Does that answer the contradiction you perceived?
I'm pretty sure it's completely uncorrelated. My previous comments were to point out the flaws in your rhetoric. Deconverting people is a noble goal, but
is not the way to go about it.
Sorry, but I still don't see any flaws in my logic. As a point of fact, some people atleast can conceive superior beings as pieces of fiction; and indeed they constantly seem to do so, every culture ever imagining some being more powerful than they currently are, from Zeus to Superman.
Also, as a point of fact, some people try to pass off fictions as truths (conmen and fools, as i said).
Therefore if, given the above, and without knowing why, nobody ever in the history of civilization considered combining the above two (passing the idea of a superior being as truth) -- this is evidence in favour of something, an unknown law of nature or biology or an unknown agent, stopping this from happening.
Where is the logical flaw here? If you tried to simulate the whole of human history, using the most accurate biology possible, and religion (alone of all human charactestics) arose nowhere in your simulation, wouldn't you consider it evidence in favour of some programmer tinkering with the program in order to purposefully eliminate it?
Yeah, really, but only if it's possible to ascertain that humans are naturally religious independently of, well, watching us be naturally religious. Which seems difficult - we can look at fingerprints in other rooms, but we can't look at humans in other universes. This problem may relegate the idea to interesting-but-unprovable-land.
I read Bibles as a synecdoche for Holy Books in all their mutually contradictory multiplicity. The way that the Holy Books of competing traditions deny each other pushes many people to atheism. If He has made people who feel inclined to write Bibles and New Testaments and Korans and Books of Mormon etcetera, that is good evidence that God wants to be disbelieved in.
That's all Satan's doing.
I'm wondering whether your relative believes that God is good. Because if so, combined with zhir other beliefs, zhir morality would seem very scary.
Good, yes, but only to those who believe.
If you aren't familiar with Pascal's Wager, you might find it salient.
Except for religionites so young or so isolated as to actually believe that stuff, people are not believers because they fear hell. Rather, they fear hell in order to go on believing.
How can you know that? It seems like a very broad generalization about a lot of people you don't know.
I'm pretty sure this isn't universally true. The first counterexample to come to mind is a believer you also know; Raw Power has stated on numerous occasions that he still feared and was at least in part motivated in his religious disciplines by the idea of hell, until he gave up being a Muslim entirely. However, he never provided the risk of hell as an excuse to maintain his belief when he participated in religious debates prior to giving up his religion.
I think that it depends in part on how literally inclined one is; all the people I can think of who I understand to have been motivated by a genuine fear of hell have either been fairly strict literalists of their religions, or atheists who used to be religious literalists.
Hence "so young or so isolated as to actually believe that stuff". People who genuinely believe out of fear of hell will not long survive exposure to Reddit.
I've known adult biblical literalists who seemed to have a genuine fear of hell who were no more isolated from viewpoints than the average theist. I can't think of any adult biblical literalists who appear to genuinely fear hell and not believe for any other reason, who are also not exceptionally isolated in their viewpoints, but that would be a prohibitively small set anyway, so if they exist I would not have a strong expectation of having met any and knowing about it.
This particular person was raised by an absolute nutter. From a very early age they were told there were demonic forces at work everywhere and the end of the world and the second coming were about to occur. This kind of upbringing probably necessitates a literalistic approach to life. If is not against the law to teach children such things, then it should be.
Who are you referring to by "this particular person?"
In circumstances like that, I think there's another way you can also go, which is to eventually learn to start interpreting it all figuratively as a defense mechanism for your own mental health.
I am not sure these two things are mutually exclusive. The self is not very unitary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
I constructed Pascal's Wager when I was 4 and stopped accepting it as as an effective arguement when I was 8. I came up with other reasons to believe for a long time, but I still have problems accepting that there are adults who take Pascal's Wager seriously.
I mean, every time you say, "I don't believe in faeries," a faerie drops dead!