Is it Rational to Believe God Exists?

[glendab]

Hello Peter.

For one thing, she tends to present the “facts” in as biased a way as possible against the event. One contention is that the initial population of Israelites could not possibly have grown to the numbers claimed in Exodus in just “four generations.”

The sojourn is described as lasting 430 years in Exodus 12. Taking the number of Jacob’s descendants in Egypt at the beginning of the sojourn at 70 persons (Ex 1:1) and a human population growth rate of 2.6% (certainly not outside the bounds of possibility) we get a total population of 4,349,738 in 430 years, a far cry from the 7000 males claimed by Wheless (cited by the author) based on a literal reading of four generations and ignoring the number of years given in Ex 12.

Population calculator here:

metamorphosisalpha.com/ias/population.php

True. I agree but it would need a whole thread of it’s own and I guess if JapaneseKappa wants to defend her source’s position on the historicity of Exodus, then we’ll have a head start on where her arguments will be coming from.

Glenda

 

[JapaneseKappa]

That hardly qualifies as evidence, does it? It certainly wouldn’t convince me that God does not exist.

At most that observation would raise the question of what kind of God this God really is?

That is, does God bring both good and evil into the world?

But it certainly doesn’t prove there is no God.

It doesn’t disprove God, it just makes it less likely that the God hypothesis is true. The issue is that if we supposed that God existed and was infinitely good/powerful/knowing/loving then we should be able to make some predictions about the world that he would have created.

Obviously, theologians pretty much universally fail to make any sort of predictions about the actual world. We therefore have no way to check and see if any given theological idea is right in an objective way (i.e. by testing theological predictions against the real world.) In other words, if theologians were able to say: God would make the world such that the vacuum energy of free space was 0, we would be able to test the plausibility of their God-model by going out and measuring the vacuum energy of free space. Theologians make no such claims because they realize that their model of God is not well defined enough to make such predictions.

The best we can do is look at predictions we might make about the world given an infinite good/powerful/etc. God model. Right up near the top of the list would be things like:

-Humans would have perfectly clear instructions from God so that they wouldn’t make mistakes stemming from uncertainty about what God wanted.
-Humans wouldn’t suffer needlessly, God would protect us from natural disasters, or cure our diseases.
-There wouldn’t be any evil.

Now, of course, theologians can and do find all sorts of ways to rectify our observations in the actual world with the conception of an infinite good/etc. God. However, each prediction they dodge is effectively an its possible that statement. It’s possible that God needed to create evil in order for us to have free will. Its possible that God deliberately causes natural disasters so that we can grow somehow. Its possible that God has some reason for not giving us perfectly clear instructions.

That’s fine, I wouldn’t take the position that any of those expectations (problem of evil, problem of instructions) definitively makes God impossible in some sort of a-priori way. However, it seems to me that the sum of these sorts of problems makes the existence of God unlikely.

Consider if we lived in a world with no natural disasters and a perfectly clear holy book. The book could have really new, practical advice at the time it was written (e.g. boil your water before drinking it) and a comprehensive set of instructions for determining what God wanted from people. I would be inclined to say that God was pretty likely to exist. I would look around and say things like: “Gee, this Bible2 book really has novel and clearly-correct teachings, that is just the sort of book a loving God would give us. If God didn’t exist, it would be unlikely that a primitive people could have come up with this sort of information” We don’t live in that world, though, we live in this world and so the best I can do is say there is some possibility that our un-met expectations about God’s world are somehow misguided or wrong. The end result is the conclusion that it really isn’t very likely that God exists in the first place.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

True. I agree but it would need a whole thread of it’s own and I guess if JapaneseKappa wants to defend her source’s position on the historicity of Exodus, then we’ll have a head start on where her arguments will be coming from.

Glenda

I’m not really interested in defending her position. Regardless of the merit of this author’s hypotheses, she did supply sourced quotations from reputable experts about the dubious historicity of the Exodus. The ball is in your court, so to speak. You’ve suggested that maybe Jewish or Christian scholars disagree. I don’t doubt that such scholars exist, I do doubt that they are credible. (e.g. PPlato’s young earth creationist historians.) The disagreement of hypothetical scholars is a pretty weak basis for defending the historicity of the Exodus, so I’ll await your collection of quotations to prove they are actual.

 

[stewstew03]

It doesn’t disprove God, it just makes it less likely that the God hypothesis is true. The issue is that if we supposed that God existed and was infinitely good/powerful/knowing/loving then we should be able to make some predictions about the world that he would have created.

Obviously, theologians pretty much universally fail to make any sort of predictions about the actual world. We therefore have no way to check and see if any given theological idea is right in an objective way (i.e. by testing theological predictions against the real world.) In other words, if theologians were able to say: God would make the world such that the vacuum energy of free space was 0, we would be able to test the plausibility of their God-model by going out and measuring the vacuum energy of free space. Theologians make no such claims because they realize that their model of God is not well defined enough to make such predictions.

The best we can do is look at predictions we might make about the world given an infinite good/powerful/etc. God model. Right up near the top of the list would be things like:

-Humans would have perfectly clear instructions from God so that they wouldn’t make mistakes stemming from uncertainty about what God wanted.
-Humans wouldn’t suffer needlessly, God would protect us from natural disasters, or cure our diseases.
-There wouldn’t be any evil.

Now, of course, theologians can and do find all sorts of ways to rectify our observations in the actual world with the conception of an infinite good/etc. God. However, each prediction they dodge is effectively an its possible that statement. It’s possible that God needed to create evil in order for us to have free will. Its possible that God deliberately causes natural disasters so that we can grow somehow. Its possible that God has some reason for not giving us perfectly clear instructions.

That’s fine, I wouldn’t take the position that any of those expectations (problem of evil, problem of instructions) definitively makes God impossible in some sort of a-priori way. However, it seems to me that the sum of these sorts of problems makes the existence of God unlikely.

Consider if we lived in a world with no natural disasters and a perfectly clear holy book. The book could have really new, practical advice at the time it was written (e.g. boil your water before drinking it) and a comprehensive set of instructions for determining what God wanted from people. I would be inclined to say that God was pretty likely to exist. I would look around and say things like: “Gee, this Bible2 book really has novel and clearly-correct teachings, that is just the sort of book a loving God would give us. If God didn’t exist, it would be unlikely that a primitive people could have come up with this sort of information” We don’t live in that world, though, we live in this world and so the best I can do is say there is some possibility that our un-met expectations about God’s world are somehow misguided or wrong. The end result is the conclusion that it really isn’t very likely that God exists in the first place.

But the bible predicts that there will be evil in the world – have you read it? It seems, then, by your own standards you have proven that there is evidence for God’s existence.

 

[Peter_Plato]

It doesn’t disprove God, it just makes it less likely that the God hypothesis is true. The issue is that if we supposed that God existed and was infinitely good/powerful/knowing/loving then we should be able to make some predictions about the world that he would have created.

Obviously, theologians pretty much universally fail to make any sort of predictions about the actual world. We therefore have no way to check and see if any given theological idea is right in an objective way (i.e. by testing theological predictions against the real world.) In other words, if theologians were able to say: God would make the world such that the vacuum energy of free space was 0, we would be able to test the plausibility of their God-model by going out and measuring the vacuum energy of free space. Theologians make no such claims because they realize that their model of God is not well defined enough to make such predictions.

This would presume that the “God model” defined by the hypothetical theologians would have features similar to a finite one that is amenable to being systematically and exhaustively defined by those theologians. That would seem to entail that the model itself would be limited in at least some respects and would itself need explanation as to how it came to be because it couldn’t explain itself, given those limitations.

I would suggest that to be Subsistent Being Itself, Self-Subsistent Existence, Subsistent Act of Existing or Existence Itself (Thomas’ “model" of God) requires something like the quality of being unconstrained by “models” of any sort; i.e., analogically like the quality of ‘free will’ in humans which allows the creative initiation of novel causal sequences, but in God’s case the creative ‘bringing into being’ of all that does exist along with the capacity to define the very nature of the predictable order itself.

In other words, God couldn’t be a definable model because, to be UNconstrained in the sense required by omnipotence (the Unmoved Mover, Uncaused Cause behind all that exists) it would be God’s active will (that is identical to Being Itself) that brings all into being and creates the predictable order, in a manner not constrained by any conceptual 'model’ or anything else, for that matter.

Your requirement that a predictable model be behind the order of the actual universe is simply another way of saying that not just the universe, but God himself, ought to be fully comprehensible to you, which implies that both must be controllable by you in order for “God” to exist. In other words, God must be a conceptual ‘machine,’ that – once you have figured out all the principles that run it – will be fully in your power to control.

That is not my idea of God at all and certainly, if it were the case that theologians could construct a “well-defined model” of God, that would lead me to the conclusion that such a model could not aptly define what I take to be God in the first place.

The difference between us is that you have a positive requirement that God be limited and within your power to understand and control; whereas I have a positive requirement that such a “model” could not describe nor be “God" at all.

 

[Peter_Plato]

(e.g. PPlato’s young earth creationist historians.)

I take it your policy is: “If you can’t refute, demean," or, at least, associate the vexing position with a less credible one to shelter your own opinion in its secure bubble of rational superiority.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The end result is the conclusion that it really isn’t very likely that God exists in the first place.

Thank you for the valiant effort to make a case that God does not exist.

I suppose there is also a case to make that the universe therefore must be infinite and eternal, otherwise we are stuck with no explanation why anything exists.

But the evidence that the universe is infinite and eternal is non-existent. Most of the evidence suggests, even through science, that the opposite is true. The universe was created at a moment in time roughly 14 billions of years ago. Moreover, if their were no guiding intelligence behind the creation of the universe, how would it be possible to explain the orderliness and predictability of the universe? That is, why do we have laws instead of chaos? If there were no guiding intelligence behind the universe, how did life first begin, since the irreducible complexity of even the first living organism seems improbably to have happened by the sheer luck of mixing molecules to produce the first living cocktail. None of the problems are solved by atheism, whereas they are easily explained by a living God.

As to the objections you raised, I believe they are so many and so varied that each one would require a thread of its own to satisfactorily explore them. To answer just one: God did provide us with a moral handbook easy to read: the Mosaic law. But long before that he had endowed every living being with the power of discerning good from evil: we call it the natural law, so that even without a catechism, it should be possible for all men to instinctively and intuitively know when an action is right or wrong.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

This website organizes various scientific evidence pointing to, if not directly demonstrating, the existence of God.

y-jesus.com/more/science-christianity-compatible/

 

[Aloysium]

. . . the sum of these sorts of problems makes the existence of God unlikely. . . . we live in this world and so the best I can do is say there is some possibility that our un-met expectations about God’s world are somehow misguided or wrong. The end result is the conclusion that it really isn’t very likely that God exists in the first place.

Whatever is the truth of existence, is there anything more important in this life, in this very moment, than to seek it out?
Rather than debunking ideas, perhaps you should begin by determining what you hold to be true.
Shouldn’t you know without asking: who you are, how it is that you know of your existence, how you know what is “not-you”, and ultimately what it is that you are to do with your life.
You have had different people’s answers to these sorts of questions. Although they are satisfied with their explanations, you seem not so much.
However, once you have solidified within yourself a connection to Truth, it becomes very, very interesting how others view the world.

 

[Peter_Plato]

If God didn’t exist, it would be unlikely that a primitive people could have come up with this sort of information" We don’t live in that world, though, we live in this world and so the best I can do is say there is some possibility that our un-met expectations about God’s world are somehow misguided or wrong. The end result is the conclusion that it really isn’t very likely that God exists in the first place.

Kind of like it being unlikely that a primitive people could have come up with an account of creation where the universe began at some finite past time, whereas modern scientific knowledge was adamant that the universe was infinitely old and matter neither created nor destroyed - well, at least up until the past half century or so.

Or how the primitive people insisted on common human ancestry when they had no reason to think such an idea necessary - at least until modern genetics caught up to the primitive beliefs in more recent times.

I suspect your argument isn’t as strong (i.e., “isn’t very likely”) as you suppose it is.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Thank you for the valiant effort to make a case that God does not exist.

I suppose there is also a case to make that the universe therefore must be infinite and eternal, otherwise we are stuck with no explanation why anything exists.

But the evidence that the universe is infinite and eternal is non-existent. Most of the evidence suggests, even through science, that the opposite is true. The universe was created at a moment in time roughly 14 billions of years ago.

Science doesn’t actually know if the universe is eternal or past-finite. The “created 14 billion years ago” bit is based on popular ignorance of the actual meaning of the big bang. The big bang is where classical physics predicts a singularity, but near the big bang, non-classical physics become important. Basically, the singularity is what you get when you trust classical physics in a region where you have no reason to believe classical physics applies. Some people misinterpret the BGV theorem as saying that the universe must have a finite past, but this is not the case.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

I take it your policy is: “If you can’t refute, demean," or, at least, associate the vexing position with a less credible one to shelter your own opinion in its secure bubble of rational superiority.

If your source represents an alternative but mainstream view of the Exodus, then why not just quote a different scholar who isn’t affiliated with creationism?

 

[JapaneseKappa]

But the bible predicts that there will be evil in the world – have you read it? It seems, then, by your own standards you have proven that there is evidence for God’s existence.

It seems to me that the bible does what most theologians do: simply states "see how the world is, that’s exactly what God would have done. I’m not aware of any reading of Genesis that says Adam and Eve’s sin was inevitable from the get-go.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Kind of like it being unlikely that a primitive people could have come up with an account of creation where the universe began at some finite past time, whereas modern scientific knowledge was adamant that the universe was infinitely old and matter neither created nor destroyed - well, at least up until the past half century or so.

Or how the primitive people insisted on common human ancestry when they had no reason to think such an idea necessary - at least until modern genetics caught up to the primitive beliefs in more recent times.

I suspect your argument isn’t as strong (i.e., “isn’t very likely”) as you suppose it is.

The scientific jury is still out on the infinitude of the universe.

The common ancestry bit is quite a stretch. That seems almost like arguing that the Greeks knew how earthquakes caused tsunamis because Poseidon was the god of the sea and earthquakes. I will also point out that most mythologies have a common human ancestry story, e.g. the Greek myth where Prometheus made man from mud, then Athena breathed life into the clay.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Here is an example of the hand waving I am talking about:
biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/07/08/Egyptian-Domination-of-Canaan-during-JoshuaJudges.aspx

When the Israelites arrived in Canaan in 1406 BC they had no material culture of their own since they had been living in the Sinai as nomads for the previous 40 years. What is more, those with craft skills learned in Egypt had died in the wilderness. As a result, the Israelites purchased their pottery, tools and weapons from the Canaanites making it difficult to distinguish Israelites from Canaanites until the Israelites began making their own material items ca. 1200 BC.

Born out by…

unamsanctamcatholicam.com/history/biblical-archaeology/97-history/biblical-archaeology/475-shrines-khirbet-qeiyafa.html

unamsanctamcatholicam.com/history/biblical-archaeology/97-history/biblical-archaeology/476-gezer-calendar.html

Of course this is a Catholic site, so, ipso facto,“dishonest” by your estimation.

 

[Bradski]

But the bible predicts that there will be evil in the world – have you read it? It seems, then, by your own standards you have proven that there is evidence for God’s existence.

There was evil in the world when the bible was written. A prediction about something that already exists isn’t much of a prediction, is it…

Kind of like it being unlikely that a primitive people could have come up with an account of creation where the universe began at some finite past time, whereas modern scientific knowledge was adamant that the universe was infinitely old and matter neither created nor destroyed - well, at least up until the past half century or so.

Or how the primitive people insisted on common human ancestry when they had no reason to think such an idea necessary - at least until modern genetics caught up to the primitive beliefs in more recent times.

If the biblical story of creation at some finite time was unique, then you may have had a point. That there are countless versions throughout the whole of documented history from every corner of the globe might indicate that you don’t. In fact, it only tends to back up JapaneseKappa’s view.

If you were the only guys in town who had a creation story, then it would be reasonable to think that you may be on to something. You don’t, so there isn’t.

And are you really going to suggest that genetics shows that the Sunday School story of Adam and Eve has some semblance of truth? When it actually shows that anything in the bible relating to our origins is completely false.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Some people misinterpret the BGV theorem as saying that the universe must have a finite past, but this is not the case.

But it is the case that there is no scientific evidence of an infinite past. Right? Whereas there is evidence that the universe as we know came into being about 14 billion years ago.

 

[Bradski]

But it is the case that there is no scientific evidence of an infinite past. Right? Whereas there is evidence that the universe as we know came into being about 14 billion years ago.

Now if the bible quoted something like that figure, I’d be suitably impressed. Whereas the biblical account has practically zero association with the actual events themselves.

 

[stewstew03]

It seems to me that the bible does what most theologians do: simply states "see how the world is, that’s exactly what God would have done.

But it’s more than that. The bible says evil will persist until Jesus returns. So, yes, the bible describes the world as it is – but it also says the world will be like this until the Second Coming.

(As an aside – Jesus also says that we will always have the poor with us, despite attempts by humanity to correct it.)

I’m not aware of any reading of Genesis that says Adam and Eve’s sin was inevitable from the get-go.

Neither am I.

 

[stewstew03]

There was evil in the world when the bible was written. A prediction about something that already exists isn’t much of a prediction, is it…

I’m only relying on JapaneseKappa’s standards, which demonstrate that the “God hypothesis” is more likely than not to be true. To wit, using the bible, we can reliably predict that the world will continue to experience evil until the Second Coming.

It’s also worth noting that we can reliably predict that evil will not overcome the Catholic Church. In other words, despite all the corruption and evil that might exist within the Church – and there are plenty of forces working against the Church --*** those forces will NEVER destroy the Church***. (See Matthew 16:18).