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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. ;)
I... I just realized... there's no evidence whatsoever of the Glowing Purple Space Cannibals, nobody's ever even postulated their existence...
I hope people do realize that I was just comparing the probabilities of "God exists and wants to be believed in" and "God exists and doesn't want to be believed in" -- obviously God's silence is even better evidence in favour of God not existing at all, it's just I wasn't comparing that possibility with anything.
You are considering a different counterfactual to the one Aris intended.
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.
The question of first cause is probably a natural one for a species to ask. However, our concept of causality seems closely connected to our ability to intervene on the world and as you start talking about variables farther and farther away from plausible human intervention the concept gets strained. For example, I'm not sure it makes sense to say things like "The fine structure constant caused complex life." Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it's application away from the domain of potential human intervention. Hell, this might be a reason why humans have a tendency to invoke such and anthropomorphic conception of a first cause: causality may not make a lot of sense without the human-like mind element to it!
That may be true for final cause and formal cause, but efficient causality is obvious even when there is no evidence of rational minds.
Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I've been triangulating around two problems while discussing 'God' concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by 'cause', 'God', etc) and one of concept (can 'God' mean something without agency?). I'm beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I'm assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
An understandable point of view, but see here.
It is. It's not natural to wonder if the first cause is a complex structured intelligent being, because such complicated and internally correlated structures demand simpler preceding causes of which to be the effects, for if we try to model the structure as uncaused we have unexplained internal correlations, which is a no-no in causal graphs.
If you then start making special pleading excuses about an intelligence that you predict using a complex structured internally correlated model but which you claim to have no structure so that you can pretend it's simple even though you can't exhibit any simple computer program that does the same thing, it's really unnatural - not just physically unnatural, but epistemically unnatural.
I'd like to taboo the word "natural" here. Do you guys mean 'good and reasonable'? Or do we mean 'typically occuring in human societies'? Or something else entirely?
I agree.
I realize that I've been confused about distinguishing what may be natural for humans to believe about God verses what is 'natural' (probable and reasonable) to believe about God. If I go back and reconsider different things I've read about privileging-the-hypothesis-brand-arguments, they may sound different now. What mislead me from the beginning was an argument you made that if there was no theism, humans wouldn't reinvent it (agreed now, as long as the science paradigm handles the edges of knowledge well enough) and a perception that atheists believe that the main motivation for religion is authoritarian control rather than explanation.
As I replied to shockwave below, I agree that particular religious hypotheses are privileged due to human psychology, and this may be angling different than my position at the beginning where I was ambiguously trying to defend them as natural for humans to have.
"God as first cause" is just the latest god of the gaps. If the concept of first cause / creator is general enough to be legitimately supported by not knowing enough about the beginnings of existence then it's isomorphic to ignorance.
If it's specific enough to include concepts of believers and non-believers and the punishments and rewards due to them - as the grandparent does - then it is privileging the hypothesis to consider it.
The God of the gaps idea is that since there could be no possible natural explanation, God must have done it. God-as-first-cause is a different argument, because God is the first cause whatever it is, even a natural one.
The fallacy is more one of anthropomorphism: when we think of creation of the universe, we think of a creator deciding to do so (mind), being invested in his creation (loving) and setting up the outcome. It seems clear we have projected our ideas of a parent (our notion of a creator) onto God. Different religions (especially early ones) are the hypotheses that came up in the absence of science, and reflect human biases. In this sense the hypotheses are certainly skewed (I agree the hypotheses are privileged) but not the God-concept itself.
This is why I had added the words ('and fate') up above. It is very, very easy to see design in random events over a lifetime. Over the weekend, a friend told me about how they decided to name their child after a saint whose 'saint day' was a couple weeks before her scheduled C-section. I shared the warm flush of surprise and happiness that her water broke and her son was born on that day after all. (Imagine, God had overseen the naming and birth of that child. What a blessing.) I understand that this fact is the one treasured from hundreds of mundane occurrences -- statistically, this is going to happen sometimes.
The relative in question already only considers the issues of belief vs disbelief, existence vs non-existence, as motivated by reward and punishment.
If God doesn't exist, the issue is moot (for the relative) If belief doesn't matter either way, obviously the issue is moot (for the relative). If reward and punishment isn't related to it, obviously the issue is moot (for the relative).
What I asked was therefore contingent to the following givens: 1) God exists 2) Belief in god matters 3) Reward and punishment is connected to belief.
And I mentioned the hypothesis that seemed to be missing from the whole above reasoning: "Why does the relative assume that belief will be rewarded and disbelief punished? Why can't it be the other way around?"
Have I been voted down on these comments because a concept of God is a privileged hypothesis?
I would like to verify that this was the reason for the downvotes, rather than something else, and see if I couldn't persuade, or find my error.
First, all that I am packing into this concept of God is "creator". We don't know how (or if) the universe was 'caused' -- if the universe was caused by anything, wouldn't that thing be our creator? For example, theists would be disappointed if it turned out that the universe and everything created was the result of 'possibility', but wouldn't they agree, semantically, that 'possibility' was God? An impersonal, mindless God, but the source of our existence.
I didn't downvote, but I think it's because you're calling something "God" which has no resemblance to a god, and thus trying to sneak in with all the connotations of that word.
Two things.
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I don't much care for discussions about points, but I think using the "God" label to refer to whatever it was that caused (assuming, as you say, that there actually was any causal factor) there to be something rather than nothing unavoidably introduces, via implicit associations, certain assumptions and constraints to the ensuing discussion.
If this is unintended, it's a sloppy use of language; if it's intended, it's a sneaky one. This might account for people thinking poorly of your comment.
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Many theists of my acquaintance, if somehow convinced of the existence of an impersonal mindless process that caused everything to come into being, would not conclude "Ah! God is this particular impersonal mindless process. Now we know," and continue more or less as before, but would instead either stop identifying as theists, or continue to believe that "God" refers to some mindful entity that is in some as-yet-not-understood way really responsible.
Similarly, of the many theists who identified "God" as the entity responsible for the origin of life before an impersonal mindless process was shown to be responsible for that, some rejected the evidence, some gave up theism, and some concluded that "God" properly refers to some other entity. (And, yes, some generalized their understanding of God to include that process, and some had an understanding of God that was already sufficiently general to include that process. My point is merely that they are the minority.)
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.