This is a FALLACY. It's a classic Appeal to Ignorance and I'm surprised to see you make that kind of blunder in a debate. It's not logical.
Plotinus said, "Then the problem becomes: I can't "believe" in something (in your sense) if I don't think that that thing exists. But I can't simply decide to think that something exists. That's not within my power. Is it within yours? If so, can you give us a demonstration?"
This is an appeal to ignorance. Plotinus can't believe in something so he thinks it isn't true. It's the very definition of an appeal to ignorance.
It's
Fallacy Man! But the problem with just shouting "fallacy" at people is that it doesn't show
why what they're saying is a fallacy, if at all. It's not a very constructive approach.
I'm not making any appeal to ignorance here. The appeal to ignorance is when you argue "We don't know whether X is true or not, so it is (or it isn't)." I've not said that here. Indeed we've already seen examples of this fallacy, if you wish to call it that, in this very thread.
The video Unicorny posted, back when this thread was young and so were we, argues that because we don't know whether or not the physical constants necessarily have the values they have, we might as well assume that they don't. And Unicorny himself did the same thing
when he argued that since we don't know whether or not all the possible values they might have taken are equally probable, we might as well assume that they are. Now I've not argued like this at all here.
In fact it looks like you haven't understood what I'm actually arguing for here. I'm not arguing for the non-existence of God. I'm certainly not arguing "We don't know whether God exists, so he doesn't." What I'm arguing against is your original statement:
Let's presume that it could be definitely proven that God exists because the mechanism for the creation of the Universe meant that only a Deity could create something from nothing. Then this would evaporate the notion of choosing to believe in God. If we cannot freely choose to believe in God, then our relationship is as meaningless as one who is forced by circumstances to be married to another. That's a form of Rape, or at least subjugation, and hence by definition such intellectual arguments persuade not one single soul in the final analysis.
I dispute that it's possible to "choose to believe" in God in the first place. This has nothing to do with whether God actually exists or not.
Now evidently I failed to express myself clearly enough before. Let me try again, this time avoiding both the terms "belief" and "faith" and their cognates, to avoid misunderstanding:
(1) It's not possible to choose to put your trust in something if it seems to you that that thing doesn't exist.
(2) Whether or not you think that a given thing exists is not within your control.
(3) If a potential action is not within your control, you can't choose to do it.
(4) It seems to me that God doesn't exist.
(5) I can't choose to think that God exists (from (2), (3), and (4)).
(6) It's not possible for me to choose to put my trust in God (from (1) and (5)).
Now this is, I think, a valid argument. If the premises (1) - (4) are true then the conclusion (6) must be true too. Are the premises true?
(1) seems to me to be true. The aforementioned brother is an example. I don't think that I have a brother; it's therefore impossible for me to choose to trust my brother. This is so even if in fact I
do have a brother, unknown to me.
Now I can think of cases where one might rationally act as if trusting someone whom one isn't sure exists. Suppose I fall into a canal during the night. The bank is dark and I can't see whether anyone is there to throw me a lifebelt. In fact I think there probably isn't anyone there, since I didn't see or hear anyone while walking, and it's the middle of the night when few people are likely to be out.
In that situation I would still shout for help, even though I think there probably isn't anyone there to answer. It would be rational to do so because there
might be someone there and it costs me nothing to try. But even so, I don't think one could plausibly say I'm
trusting in the person who might or might not be there. On the contrary, I'm not trusting in them, because I think they probably won't answer, because I think they probably don't exist. I'm just taking the chance that I might be wrong.
That's the closest thing I can think of to a counter-example to (1). So (1) seems to me to be true and to be borne out by experience.
(2) is also true, I think. Bernard Williams made a
classic series of arguments in favour of (2), and I think he's right. (That's not an Appeal to Authority, by the way, because I've linked there to the
arguments he used, and I think he's right
because they are good arguments, not because he's a Big Brain.) In brief, if I were to choose to think that something exists (which I currently think doesn't exist), I would be choosing to think something to be true that I currently think to be false. That seems a psychological impossibility. I
want to think things to be true that
are true - I don't want to be mistaken in what I think to be true. If I currently think that X is true, how could I wish to think that X is false? I might wish X
to be false, but that's not the same thing.
Experience backs this up. I've never been able to change my mind about something simply by choosing to do so. Rather, I have changed my mind about things because they have come to seem different - perhaps new evidence turned up, or I came to think that the evidence I'd already seen wasn't very good after all, or something like that. I am of course able to choose to try to find new evidence or to review the arguments, perhaps with the goal of changing of my mind, but I can't simply choose to change my mind. So I say that (2) is true, too, and if you think differently, I ask for counter-examples.
(3) seems to me to be true pretty much by definition.
(4) is certainly true, and you'll just have to take my word for it.
Once again, this argument has nothing to do with whether or not God exists. It's about the psychological possibility of choosing to put one's trust in God. I'm saying that this isn't something a person can do if they don't think that God exists. This is the case even if in fact God does exist.
Now if you disagree with this argument, you must show either that it's invalid (i.e. the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises) or that one or more of the premises are false or at least doubtful. Shouting "fallacy" isn't a way to do that!
This is a FALLACY. It's the classic definition of an Appeal to Probability. Just because it seems to you that this is more probable than that doesn't mean this is more likely to be true.
No, an Appeal to Probability is when you infer that something
is true from the fact that it's
probably true. I'm not doing that here. I'm simply reporting the plain fact that it seems to me that God doesn't exist. Even if I'm mistaken and God does exist, it still seems to me that he doesn't. I'm not asserting on this basis that he certainly doesn't.
This is a fallacy. It's an ad hominem attack that presumes I am naive because of all things I use a dictionary definition that is ABSOLUTELY consistent with philosophy as well as my assertions. Interesting!
No, Ad Hominem is when you infer that a claim is false because the person who makes it is unreliable. I'm not making any claims about your knowledge and I'm certainly not basing my assessment of your claims upon what I think of you. I'm basing it on what you say! It
is naive because it makes the classic debating society error of assuming that there's only one possible way of understanding words and only one possible meaning to give them.
A dictionary, like the one you quote, reports
possible uses of a word. These uses may be inconsistent with each other, because not everyone uses words in the same way. The definitions (2) and (4) that you cite, for example, are clearly inconsistent: one of them defines "faith" to mean belief
that is not based on proof while the other defines it to mean belief
in anything. These are different ways in which the word is used. And of course words like "faith" and "belief" are used in all kinds of ways by different people.
The problem with your position, and the reason why it's naive, is that you're asserting that there's only one possible viewpoint: the view that belief in God, or faith in God, or trust in God, or thinking that God exists, or whatever you want to call these things, are matters of volition, not evidence, and that it's mistaken to try to use reason to support them. Leaving aside the fact that this is an odd thing for someone to say while also citing Anselm's ontological argument as a "demonstration", it is not the only way that people have seen it. As we've already seen, Thomas Aquinas thought that
God's existence is demonstrable (though not self-evident, and you might want to study his refutation of the ontological argument in that text).
The
First Vatican Council also laid down - as definitive Catholic doctrine - that God's existence can be certainly known through unaided reason:
Vatican 1 said:
The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason : ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.
Indeed that view is perfectly biblical:
Romans 1:19-21 said:
For what can be known about God is plain to [the gentiles], because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him...
In that passage, Paul seems to agree with you that
putting one's trust in God is within people's control, and he blames those who don't do so. But he insists that
belief in God in the first place, i.e. recognition that God exists, is
universal. Do you think that? The problem is that you need to think that if you really think that everyone has the choice whether or not to have faith in God; but it's clearly false. Clearly there are people who don't think that God exists at all.
It's hard to be sure precisely what you're asserting, given the fact that we're not using language in the same way. Here are some possible positions one might hold:
(1) It's possible to choose to think that God exists, and consequently to choose to put trust in him.
(2) It's not possible to choose to think that God exists, but everyone does think that God exists. It's possible to choose to have trust in God.
(3) It's not possible to choose to think that God exists, and some people don't think that God exists. It's nevertheless possible for those people to choose to put trust in God.
(4) It's not possible to choose to think that God exists, and some people don't think that God exists. Consequently, it's not possible for those people to choose to put trust in God.
I was interpreting you as holding (1). Is this accurate? Perhaps it isn't, in which case our disagreement may be elsewhere, or perhaps we don't disagree at all, at least on this. The view of the Catholic Church and, I think, St Paul is (2). My view is (4). It seems to me the only view that makes psychological and experiential sense.
This is a FALLACY. It's an Appeal to Ridicule by comparing the definition for God who is BEING itself with fictious literary figures! At the very least it's a non sequiteur because it doesn't follow that belief in comic book character's abilities has ANYTHING to do with a Supreme Being.
It's not a fallacy and not an Appeal to Ridicule (who names these things?), because I wasn't talking about God
at all. I was just answering Sommerswerd's question about the nature of belief and the willing suspension thereof, and trying to think of examples of cases where people care very much about something that they know to be fictitious. It wasn't about God at all.
If your criticisms of people's comments are going to hold water you need to pay closer attention to what they're saying, and in particular
why they're saying it. To see a reference to Thor and automatically to assume that the person is making a comparison to God is a knee-jerk response. There's probably a Fallacy name for that.
He makes an appeal to probability prior when he believes that atheism is more probable to be true than a belief in God. There is evidence for neither. Atheism is a belief system just as much as any spiritual system. It's definitely NOT an absence of belief which is undefined in philosophy and theology. One can only have disbelief and belief, and these are a matter of choosing some system like atheism (a disbelief in God) versus something like theism (a belief in God).
There certainly is evidence for atheism. For that matter, there's evidence for theism, too. The evidence for atheism is, in my opinion, much stronger than the evidence for theism. It's perfectly rational for me to say, on that basis, that I think atheism is probably true; and that's rational even if in fact I'm wrong and atheism is false. There's no fallacy in that. It would only be fallacious if I asserted that atheism is
certainly true on the grounds that it's
probably true. But I'm not doing that.
Have you ever been on a debate team? It's a standard aspect of debating when clear demonstrations of logical fallacies are stated. It's a withering attack on the posts of others for the whole point of debate is to try to free yourself from making logical fallacies in order to have a rational debate of ideas.
Everything else is just opinion. What would be the point of labeling this [RD] and then not dealing with logical fallacies?
As I think others have said, just shouting "Fallacy!" every time you think someone's made a mistake is an unconstructive way of proceeding. For one thing, if you don't take the time to explain
why it's a fallacy and precisely
how the person commits it, no-one's enlightened. That's not rational debate, it's just point-scoring. For another, merely
asserting that someone's committed a fallacy doesn't mean that they actually have. There's a long tradition of people labelling viewpoints that they disagree with "fallacies" so that they can shout "fallacy" whenever anyone asserts them. But maybe it's not a fallacy in the first place. Moore's coining of the "naturalistic fallacy" is arguably an example of this (although I'm inclined to agree with Moore).
And finally, of course, debate teams are hardly the model of rational discourse. The purpose of a debating contest is to win, not to determine the truth. In my experience, the styles and techniques of formal debates are, if anything, designed to obscure the truth, not to reveal it.
Nope, evidence.
"the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid."
Show me a fact that is evidence for God. Show me a fact that God doesn't exist without exploring all of the Multiverse (or at the very least the Universe). The former doesn't exist. The later hasn't been done.
Some phenomenon E is evidence for hypothesis H iff the probability of E given the truth of H is higher than the probability of E given the falsity of H.
Now, if God existed, the probability of people reporting experiences of God would be higher than it would if God didn't exist. You can see this if you consider that, in a universe where God
doesn't exist, there would be a certain probability of people reporting such experiences because they might occur as a result of naturalistic causes. In a universe where God
does exist, that probability would be the same, but there would
also be a probability (however small) of such experiences occurring as a result of God's action. So the probability of people reporting such experiences would be higher if God exists than it would be if God doesn't exist.
But people
do report such experiences. They are, therefore, evidence for God's existence.
Of course that doesn't mean that they're
good evidence. That would only be the case if the probability of their occurring given God's non-existence were exceptionally low, and the probability of their occurring given God's existence were appreciably higher. I don't think this is the case, so I don't think that they constitute good evidence for theism. But they are still evidence.
I don't require evidence for God. I believe in Yeshua completely on FAITH, which is belief without proof. We have eyewitness testimony in that say the
Magdalene papyrus might be as old as 70AD and hence originally written by one of Mathew's followers. Just as we have eyewitness accounts of lots of historical events from primary evidence, then we can either believe that things happened because they were written, even when many years later, by primary witnesses, but this is not a FACT or evidence. Their writing it is a fact, but doesn't mean it's valid as can be claimed it's written by passionate subjective human beings (as some atheists claim) and not the Word of God.
I don't find this position comprehensible. If you're appealing to the Magdalen fragment and talking about eyewitness testimony, then of course that's
evidence! If I believe (say) that Socrates never wore shoes, because Plato says so, then I'm taking Plato's statement to be evidence. Indeed, Plato's statement
is evidence. Now I may consider whether it's good evidence or not (is this the kind of thing Plato would invent? Is it corroborated by other evidence, e.g. the writings of Xenophon? etc.). If I decide to put my trust in it and believe Plato, it's because his evidence seems to me to be good. In which case it's not really a decision on my part at all.
If you're claiming that the Gospels are, or may be, eyewitness testimony or something like that, and that this is a reason for believing that what they say is true, then this is precisely an appeal to evidence. I don't understand how you can disparage those who ask for evidence while at the same appeal to it. What do you think "evidence"
is?
That needn't be quite as iron-clad as you set it out, perhaps. C.S. Lewis has a bit (sorry, can't say where; it's been a long time), where he proposes, to people who think they have first to believe in the existence of God before they could then put faith in Him, that they just try it out for a while the opposite way round; live your life trusting in Him (as revealed in the Bible? as mediated by Anglicanism? That would be it's own separate issue, I suppose), and see whether that lived experience doesn't give grounds for believing in His existence. I'm ninety percent sure that Lewis makes it a matter of these different definitions of "believe" that have just come up.
I thought it was a clever argument, at least, because I think Christianity is not primarily an explanation for the workings of the universe, but a frame-of-meaning for one's life.
I am kind of sympathetic to this sort of argument, because I think it's true that religious faith isn't
just about cognitive belief. To that extent people like (say, just at random) Richard Dawkins are mistaken when they treat it as if it were. Lewis is right that it's about an existential attitude. It's also correct that attitude can precede cognitive belief. In fact it's an established fact that minority religions typically spread not by evangelisation but by people becoming involved in communities of that religion, and coming to believe in the truth of their claims as a consequence. E.g. you might have friends who belong to a religious group, and you might go along as well for social reasons, and get involved in their various activities, and eventually you might find that you just believe what they do, because you've effectively been living as if you do.
However, I'm not convinced that this is something one can consciously choose to do. Can I, as someone who thinks that God doesn't exist, really live my life trusting in him? Perhaps I could act
as if I put my trust in him, but that's not the same thing. Also, even if this is possible (and I'm not even sure what it would really involve), the question then is what kind of "lived experience" one might go through as a result of the experiment that would convince you that God does in fact exist. Here again I'm not sure I can really imagine it.
I might add on a personal note that living in a way that involved putting trust in God didn't work for me. In my misspent youth I believed very fervently in God, in every sense of "belief" here: I thought he existed and I put my trust in him. Eventually I changed my mind about his existence, and it seemed to me that he didn't exist. (This wasn't a choice on my part; it was simply how things then seemed to me to be; although of course
acknowledging that things now seemed this way to me might have been a choice.) So living in the light of faith in God didn't convince me of his existence - quite the reverse. And of course once I stopped thinking that he existed at all, I stopped putting any trust in him. And I became, on the whole, quite a bit happier as a result. So if we're going to compare "lived experiences", my own experience would favour lack of belief in God, not belief in him. Does that prove that God doesn't exist? Of course not, before anyone tries to accuse of Appeal to Ignorance. But I can only see the world through my own eyes, as it were. It seems to me that he doesn't exist. There's not much I can do about that, even if I wanted to.