Ran across this short video the other day:
That is not the mic drop that @Daily_Dose_Of_Wisdom thinks it is.
The video cuts off before Keith Parsons’ response, but if I had been in his shoes, I would have pointed out that there are many ways to test whether you are hallucinating.
For one, you can ask other people whether they are seeing, hearing and feeling the same things that you are. If they are, then it’s less likely that you’re hallucinating. Yes, it could potentially be a mass hallucination, or you could even be hallucinating that those people were telling you that it wasn’t a hallucination. Those are possibilities, but the question is always “what is the most likely explanation of my observations”?
You could test yourself by observing whether the experience persists and whether everything else about your experienced reality is stable and still makes sense. Have you been sick? Are you running a fever? Do you have a history of delusions? Do you think the government is monitoring your thoughts? Does psychological testing reveal any abnormalities? Have you been taking drugs? Are “the little green wheels” following you, as they did Major Tom?
Do scientific instruments respond to the phenomena? Can you take a video of the towering figure, and record its voice, and play it back? Do detectors record the earthquake and the lightning flashes around the figure?
Anyone who would jump to the conclusion that it was a hallucination without performing these tests and others would be foolish. I certainly wouldn’t, and I doubt that Parsons would either.
In the comments, I’ll describe the sorts of experiences that could convince me that God exists.
I found the original debate video, and sure enough, Parsons’ reply was similar to mine as expressed in the OP. @Daily_Dose_Of_Wisdom “helpfully” cut the video before Parsons’ response so as not to destroy the “mic drop” illusion.
Link
I used to find personal stories of “after death” visions convincing. Then I read an article of a lady who had a brain injury, and it was possible to stimulate exactly the same kinds of visions (hallucinations) through stimulating a nerve patch in her head. Hallucinations. Revelation. Visions. All manifestations of the human brain.
SkepticCO:
That reminded me of this. A related exchange on an old thread:
colewd:
keiths:
Something that would convince me that God exists:
We wake up one morning and astronomers announce that the galaxies have been rearranged in one area of the sky so that they form letters that from earth’s perspective spell out a message. The message says something like “I am God. I exist, and the Bible is my Holy Word” in the four most common languages: Mandarin, English, Hindi, and Spanish.
The movements violate the known laws of physics in many ways, including by being superluminal. The rearrangement is difficult to explain by anything other than an intelligence, and the intelligence must be capable of violating the known laws of physics on a massive scale. It also requires advance planning and coordination, because the galaxies reside at different distances from earth and are millions or billions of light years away. That means that the galaxies cannot be moved all at once — the movements have to be staggered so that they appear to happen all at once as viewed from earth. And the movements need to be initiated long before humans arise on earth, so the intelligence has to know that humans will arise, and when — and when their telescopes will be capable of reading the message. (ETA: And what their languages will be.)
I’d have to consider the possibility that I was dreaming or hallucinating, but I could address that by taking measures like those I outlined in the OP. I’d have to consider the possibility that humanity was being manipulated by an alien intelligence into thinking that the galaxies had rearranged themselves, when in fact they hadn’t. (That could at least theoretically be done without violating the laws of physics, by, for example, intercepting the photons on their way to earth and replacing them with photons arranged to produce the illusion of galactic movement on a massive scale. Or by simultaneously manipulating the brain states of every human.)
I’d have to consider possibilities such as those and judge whether any of them seemed more likely than the hypothesis that the message truly was from God, but my feeling is that with a demonstration like that, the most parsimonious explanation would be that God (or a god) was behind it.
That still leaves a bunch of questions open: Is this a good God or an evil one? (The Problem of Evil is a factor here — if God is powerful enough to rearrange galaxies in violation of the laws of physics, why does he allow so much suffering?) Is the part about the Holy Bible true, or a deception? Does this God actually deserve worship?
However, even without being able to answer those questions, I think I’d be willing to acknowledge that God exists. Unl
ETA: One of my first questions for this God would be “If you are this powerful and knowledgeable, why did you choose a book as crappy as the Bible in order to convey your word to us?”
The parable of the trusty messengers
The Teacher called his disciples to him and said: “I have the most amazing news that will change the life of every single person who hears it and believes.”
Even though it is an impossible task, I need you to take this news to all people, everywhere.
Even though you cannot read and write, I need you to faithfully record every word I say so that there will never be any confusion or doubt about my message
Even though you are the lowliest and least credible, I need everyone to know that this message is true and from the highest authority, God himself.
Even though I could choose to appear to everyone in the world myself, I need you to go on foot.
Even though I could give simple, clear and comprehensive teachings, I will give you parables and many contradictory, immoral and nonsensical teachings
Even though I could provide objective, verifiable data to prove what I say is true, I will instead provide myths, tales, visions, forgeries and stories that will surely provide even more truth
So that the people will know the stories are true, I will teach you magic tricks.
I will appear to another who will never meet me in a dream so that everyone will believe
Lastly, I need my message to be written down in a book, decades after I have passed, in a different country, in a different language, by people who will never meet me. This book can then be altered by generations to come, based on the whims and fashions of others.
Even though I told you that you are the last generation, I tell you all this just in the highly unlikely event that you are not the last generation after all.
Even though you may not understand, it is what must be.
All these things will prove my messages are true and from the greatest authority. You will be my trusty messengers.
A disciple stepped forward and said “Thank you teacher, for trusting us as messengers. ”
The teacher said nothing and walked off, a smile on his face and his pockets heavy.
SkepticCO,
I commented to colewd once:
Indeed you are right!
Earlier in the thread I described a scenario that I think would convince me that God exists.
Here’s another one:
Suppose we discover that every earnest, moral, non-frivolous and well-intentioned prayer we offer is answered if we click our heels together three times and recite a sort of Christianized version of the Shahada: “There is no god but Yahweh, and Jesus is his Son, Our Savior”. It always works. If you ask for a cure for cancer, you receive it. If I ask for peace in Ukraine, I get it. If someone asks for a persuasive miracle so that everyone can be confident that God exists, then a miracle is provided. Illnesses are healed, difficult scientific questions are answered, climate change is averted, egg prices come down. Problems that mathematicians have been trying to crack for hundreds of years are suddenly solved.
If God doesn’t answer a prayer, he tells us why, specifically. It might be because our prayer conflicts with someone else’s, and he’s prioritizing theirs because it’s more urgent. It might be because he foresees problems with answering our prayer that we aren’t smart enough to anticipate. Whatever the reason, he tells us. He’s perfectly just about it, so we never feel like we’re being cheated.
For every prayer, we either get an answer or a good reason for its denial.
This only works if we do the heel-click thing and recite the Christianized Shahada. Any other statement of faith toward any other God doesn’t work, no matter how earnest the prayer. “Abracadabra”, “shazam!”, or any other non-Shahada utterance doesn’t work.
That scenario would make me believe in God. I’d have to do everything I mentioned earlier to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, dreaming, on drugs, experiencing psychological problems. I’d have to make sure other people agreed with me about what was happening. And so on. But if it seemed like the experience were real, then I think I would believe in God.
Would it be proof? No, because there could be other ways in which I was being fooled — for example, if an alien superintelligence were playing the role of God and trying for some reason to convince me that he exists. You can never rule out all alternative possibilities, but I think I would be persuaded in this scenario to believe in God.
My point in describing these scenarios is that it isn’t true, in general, that atheists are closed-minded about the possibility of God’s existence. There are lots of us who would become believers if the evidence were strong enough. It isn’t, though, and that’s the problem, not closed-mindedness.
I searched for prominent atheists who have declared that no evidence could possibly convince them of God’s existence, and I only found two: Dawkins (who is featured in the OP video) and Peter Atkins, the well-known professor of chemistry at Oxford.
They both cite the “it’s more likely to be madness or an illusion” reason, which strikes me as silly. I’ve described ways to test for that possibility in the OP and in the comments, and I would have far more confidence in the veridicality of the experience if it passed those tests.
Also, their position depends on a probability judgment. They are saying that the probability of hallucination or illusion will always be greater than the probability of God’s existence, regardless of the evidence. But what exactly is the a priori probability of God’s existence?* It’s very hard to judge.
If you could somehow show that God were logically impossible, then yes, no evidence should be sufficient to convince you that he exists. However, I don’t see any reason to think his existence is logically impossible, and I can’t see why its probability should be so low as to defeat all possible evidence.
It’s true that atheism is the more parsimonious hypothesis, so Occam’s Razor would encourage us to go that route, all else being equal. (Which is ironic, because William of Ockham was a friar and quite devout). But all else wouldn’t be equal if we were presented with strong evidence for God.
* I’m talking about a supreme being, not any particular God. If you specify the Christian God, then the probably of his existence is much, much lower.
Now do UFOs.
petrushka:
You’ll need to be more specific. If the question is “do they exist?”, the answer is already yes, because there are flying objects that have remained unidentified. That doesn’t say anything about their origins. They’re just unidentified flying objects. No additional evidence needed in order to answer that question in the affirmative.
If the question is “are they instances of advanced alien technologies?”, then my answer is yes, I could definitely be convinced of that by sufficient evidence. For instance, suppose we’re tracking a large interstellar object (like Oumuamua) as it enters the solar system. Telescopic observations confirm that it is a perfect metallic cylinder with flat ends. As it approaches earth, a landing craft separates from it and lands in the Kalahari Desert. Inspection of the craft reveals advanced engineering far beyond what humans have yet achieved. Various objects and controls on board are labeled with what appears to be an alien script. Holograms are found that when examined closely contain hundreds of documents written in that same script. Philologists decode the script and are able to learn much about the civilization that produced the landing craft and the monstrous cylindrical mothership. And so on.
That would be sufficient evidence to persuade me.
As Steven Novella and a host of other skeptics have said, if something defies the laws of physics as we know it, we would have to just say, we can’t explain it, and perhaps we have to refine our laws of physics.
So he, and many others would say, nope, not God. This is why the atheist argument is not really an argument, its a belief system that can’t be changed.
“We wake up one morning and astronomers announce that the galaxies have been rearranged in one area of the sky so that they form letters that from earth’s perspective spell out a message.” So, not God….
I’m not following this. Your first paragraph sounds correct – scientists would admit they don’t understand and they would investigate. How does this response have anything whatever to do with atheism or religion? I’m sure scientists of every faith would be fascinated and all would be figuring it out together.
I think that would be sufficient evidence for the powers that be to ensure that you never heard about any of it. There would probably be some witnesses to some of it, but hey, there are witnesses to alien abductions all the time. Do you believe them?
phoodoo:
Phoodoo! Long time no see.
(For anyone joining the thread late, phoodoo is responding to this comment of mine.)
For some phenomena, I would agree. Suppose, for instance, that we detect a slight deviation from the inverse square law of gravitation at large distances. Does that point to a god? I’d say no — we just need a better theory, with different laws of physics.
My scenario is vastly different. It would require the heretofore undiscovered laws of physics to “know” where the earth would be millions of years in the future, to know when humans would arise, what languages they would be speaking, and what writing systems they would employ. It would have to stagger the galactic movements so that they all appeared to happen simultaneously as viewed from earth.
It seems wildly implausible to me that any such physical laws could exist. Far more plausible that an intelligent being with unfathomable powers was behind all of it.
keiths:
Flint:
(Flint is referring to this comment, which concerns UFOs, not God.)
That’s assuming that the powers that be could suppress the story before it got out. Anyway, my thought experiment assumes that I am aware of the evidence.
I wouldn’t rely on reports from a handful of supposed witnesses, obviously, but suppose that astronomers around the globe detect the perfectly cylindrical mother ship and observe the landing craft separating from it and taking a deliberate path toward earth, touching down in the Kalahari. Then suppose that scientific teams from the US, Russia, China and South Africa all travel to the site to inspect the landing craft and that they confirm all of the details I mentioned in my comment. News reporters on the scene confirm what the scientists are saying.
If all of that happened, and if I used the methods I described earlier to decide that I wasn’t dreaming or in psychosis and hallucinating all of this, then I would accept that the ship came from an alien civilization.
The larger point being that just as there could be evidence that would convince me of God’s existence, there could be evidence that would convince me that a UFO came from an alien civilization. My atheism isn’t a faith, and neither is my skepticism regarding UFOs.
Personally I’d have to agree with Phoodoo on this one. Even if the observed total violation of all known physics should be carefully investigated and human science drew a complete blank, this still isn’t evidence of any god, at least to me – no matter how closely the phenomena might resemble any tenets of any organized religion. If I possessed technology so advanced it was indistinguishable from magic, I might very well use that technology to pull a practical joke on the True Believers. You might enjoy doing that yourself.
Flint:
It’s conceivable — that is, not logically impossible — that the true laws of physics are such that they could bring about the galactic realignment I described. We can’t rule that out with 100.0% certainty, but I would argue that if we observe the superluminal realignment, it’s far more likely to be the handiwork of an enormously powerful, intelligent being or beings than it is to be the result of heretofore unknown, mindless physical laws.
It’s a point on which I agree with ID proponents. There truly can be signs that are indicative of design. If I were unaware of Mt Rushmore’s existence and suddenly stumbled upon it, I would conclude that it was designed, not that it was the result of unguided natural forces. I disagree with the IDers on what constitutes evidence of design, of course, particularly when it comes to living creatures, but I think it’s pretty obvious that there can be evidence of design. The galactic realignment would be strong evidence of design.
Yes, it’s conceivable that there’s a powerful alien intelligence capable of predicting the emergence of intelligent life on earth, including the exact languages we will end up using and the exact religions we will form, and the exact times that all of these things will happen. It’s conceivable that this alien intelligence is powerful enough to move entire galaxies at speeds faster than light, violating the laws of physics as we currently know them, staggering the movements over millions of years to create the desired visual effect on earth. But is that more plausible than the existence of a God capable of doing those things? Would there be any reason to rule out the God hypothesis if we observed the galactic realignment?
As I believe you have pointed out in the past, there is no reason to rule out the god hypothesis for anything and everything. And I’m sure you’re aware that the god hypothesis has been applied liberally through the ages for anything not understood. You’re aware of the “god of the gaps”, which while shrinking is still lurking around and still filling gaps.
So you seem to be casting around for some proposed (if imaginary) gap so intractable that only a god could fill it. Something our current knowledge and theories would regard as impossible. Personally, I doubt we will ever encounter such a gap. Even if we did, hopefully it would inspire new and welcome scientific development. As Isaac Asimov wrote, the most important words in science are not “eureka, I found it” but rather “hmm…that’s funny…”
But I think phoodoo is more restricted here, to well-presented puzzles not yet solved. I interpret him as saying that his concept of an atheist is someone who simply will not ascribe to his god any phenomenon currently unexplainable, and who will opt for “not yet understood” rather than “goddidit.” I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to a very long history of using the god hypothesis to cripple human knowledge and progress, which it certainly has done.
Flint:
Right. For any observation we make, there are many (perhaps infinitely many) possible explanations, and one logically possible explanation is always “God did it”. We have to weigh that against the competing explanations, and usually one of the competing explanations wins.
Likewise, a logically possible explanation for the motion of the planets is that angels are pushing them around. But gravity is a competing explanation, and it wins out over the angelic hypothesis. That’s because the latter is a worse explanation, not because it’s impossible.
Yes, and while I think that “god of the gaps” arguments can be fallacious (and most of them are), that doesn’t mean they can never, in principle, be legitimate. To make the case that they’re never legitimate, you’d have to prove that a superior alternative explanation would always be available, regardless of our observations. I don’t think that’s possible.
A proposed gap doesn’t have to be impossible for anything other than a god to fill. It just has to be better explained by a theistic hypothesis than by the alternatives. The scenarios I’ve concocted in this thread don’t strictly demand theistic explanations, but if I were to observe them, I would judge theistic explanations to be superior to the alternatives.
Me too. If I thought we were likely to encounter such a gap, I would be a theist, not an atheist.
Yes, and I think it would, even if we concluded that a god was the most likely explanation. It wouldn’t be a reason to stop investigating. We’d test the hell out of the theory to see if we could disprove it, just as we do with other scientific theories. We’d also try to build on it and learn as much as we could about the posited deity and its interactions with the world. Scientists would not be hanging up their spurs, saying “That settles it. No need to investigate any further.”
I think phoodoo’s claim is stronger than that. He’s saying that atheists are closed-minded dogmatists who would be impervious even to the kind of evidence I described in my galactic realignment scenario:
Painting atheists as stubborn dogmatists is easier than refuting their arguments.
The well-worn Mt Rushmore analogy, beloved of ID proponents, makes my point.
Suppose we travel to a distant planet in another solar system. It’s a barren planet. Nothing lives there. As we explore, we stumble upon something very like Mt Rushmore, though the “faces” depicted thereon are not humanlike. Do we ascribe it to mindless natural forces? No, we posit that it was crafted by an intelligent sculptor or sculptors who are no longer present on this lifeless planet.
Is that an “intelligence of the gaps” argument? Yes — we judge that mindless natural forces are inadequate to explain the formation. That leaves an explanatory gap, so we invoke an intelligence or intelligences to fill it, even though we see none on the planet and have no evidence of their past existence other than the formation itself. It’s an “intelligence of the gaps” argument, but a legitimate one. The intelligent sculptor hypothesis wins out over the natural forces hypothesis.
I think here may be where we disagree about what Phoodoo is saying. It’s not that a theistic explanation is better than the alternatives, it’s that sometimes there have simply not been any plausible alternatives, and that atheists still insist that Phoodoo’s god could not be responsible. The choice is between admitting complete ignorance and expecting that a concerted organized investigation might someday cast light on it, and being satisfied that Phoodoo’s god did it and stop looking right there.
I disagree. The “intelligent sculptor” hypothesis is worse than lazy, it militates against searching for some currently-unknown mechanism. You might be satisfied with that hypothesis, but I would prefer to dig a bit deeper. I might end up meeting the actual sculptors, I might even be willing to use them as a working hypothesis, but I’d never stop looking.
The “goddidit” “explanation” has been applied commonly throughout human history, on countless occasions to “explain” countless things. Of all of those, perhaps you can list those still attributed to gods, and those that scientific investigation has explained. Last I looked, those who reject evolution (not the ignorant uncurious people but those who think about it) have been reduced to claiming no model of how life may have originated satisfies them. But they are unsatisfied not because current models are not plausible, but because those models violate a tenet of their faith that can’t be tolerated.
Flint:
He’s pretty clear. He says that atheism is “a belief system that can’t be changed” and that in my galactic realignment scenario atheists would say “not God”. He wants to paint atheists as dogmatists who can’t be swayed by evidence for God, no matter how strong. That’s certainly true of some atheists (including you?), but it’s not true of all of us and it’s not true of me.
I don’t see anything in his comment that specifies a particular god. For that matter, I don’t even know what phoodoo’s god is like. I’m not sure he’s ever told us. I think he’s claiming that in my realignment scenario, atheists would deny that any god could be responsible, not just his god.
There are other choices. My choice would be to approach it like any scientific question: observe the evidence, think of hypotheses, and tentatively adopt the one that seems the best. Then test the hell out of it, trying to falsify it. If it fails, replace it with a better hypothesis and test the hell out of that one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Science.
I wouldn’t limit my consideration to phoodoo’s god, whoever or whatever that is, and I definitely wouldn’t advise that we stop investigating. I’d be intensely curious, and so would a lot of people, and I’d expect there to be enormous scientific interest and further investigations even if the leading explanation were that a god was responsible.
Regarding the alien Mt Rushmore scenario, I wrote:
Flint:
Not at all. There’s no rule stating “Once you posit an intelligent cause, further investigation is prohibited.” What would be lazy (and silly) would be to refuse to consider the intelligent sculptor hypothesis, especially when 1) we know that intelligent sculptors have produced a similar formation on earth, 2) we have no idea how mindless natural forces could have produced such a formation, and 3) there’s no good reason to think that further knowledge of how natural forces work would solve that problem.
Another scenario: Suppose we stumble upon a similar formation somewhere on earth, rather than on another planet. Surely you wouldn’t argue that the intelligent sculptor hypothesis would be “lazy” in that case, would you? To me, it would obviously be the most likely explanation, far superior to the natural forces explanation. Would you really argue “No, we can’t consider the intelligent sculptor hypothesis, because it’s logically possible that natural forces are responsible even though we have absolutely no idea how that would work”?
Assuming you agree that the intelligent sculptor hypothesis would be legitimate on earth, then why not on the other planet? The only difference is that we know for sure that there are intelligent beings on earth who are capable of sculpting, while we don’t know that there are (or were) such beings on the other planet. But there’s nothing unreasonable about considering the possibility that we aren’t the only beings in the universe capable of this sort of sculpting, and in fact I think it would be silly to assume that we are.
I still don’t get why you think that “intelligent sculptors probably did this” leads inevitably to “therefore we must immediately stop investigating.” Could you explain your reasoning?
Not sure what your point is. I’m not positing the existence of a god — I’m an atheist, and I don’t think the evidence points to a god. The purpose of this thread is to show that there are atheists, including me, who could be swayed by the evidence to become theists if the evidence were persuasive enough. For many of us, atheism isn’t a dogma. It’s a conclusion based on the evidence to date, and it’s subject to revision if new evidence warrants it.
The relevant question is whether their rejection of a natural OOL mechanism is justifiable, and whether their theistic hypothesis is superior. I think it isn’t, because it isn’t at all difficult to conceive of natural law giving rise to biogenesis under the right conditions, even though we don’t currently know how it happened. Natural law giving rise to the galactic realignment I described is a stretch. Natural law giving rise to life isn’t.