Why do Americans believe in God despite all the evidence?????

[John Dibble]

As to the question of "Why do Americans believe in God despite all the evidence?" the reasons why people believe are not particularly different from why anyone believes in such things.

Primarily it comes down to the rather simple fact that most people don't actually understand what constitutes legitimate evidence and are not trained to think critically. As such they can be more easily fooled into believing arguments that merely sound good when they aren't examined thoroughly or just appeal to them emotionally. Those raised to be religious also had the idea ingrained into them, and various psychological factors make it difficult for many of them to change their minds even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

As to why America in particular is more religious than most other developed Western nations, that might be a little more complicated. I doubt the people in those other nations are really that much more versed in critical thinking than most Americans are, and as such I suspect many of the non-believers are apatheists and are just non-believers because they weren't raised to be religious and their culture doesn't put a heavy emphasis on being religious. One reason for that which may be valid is that the states had official religions for long enough that those religions didn't really have to compete aggressively for followers at most points, and by the time freedom of religion was popularized their influence just faded out. America on the other hand had no state church, so the various beliefs had to compete more aggressively to both keep and attract followers, and so a more religious environment developed and was sustained and people were raised more religiously.

[John Dibble]

Lack of evidence is not proof of non-existence.

As Alcon mentioned, I don't think you'll find many atheists who would claim otherwise. However, lack of evidence is a good reason not to believe a claim. In terms of theism and religion, there are multiple claims about what gods are real and what those gods want and things of that nature. Many of those claims also contradict each other so they all can't be true. If there's no evidence for any of those claims, then disbelief is the rational default position. That isn't the same as saying that none of those claims could possibly be true, just that the lack of evidence is a good reason not to take any of those claims as being true.

So, Duns Scotus and Rene Descartes were unable to think critically?

As Alcon stated, I'm not saying all theists never think critically but rather than most of them, and actually most people in general, just don't. Among those theists that do know about critical thinking, I just don't think they apply the same critical thinking skills to their religious views for a wide variety of reasons, or at least not completely. The theists who deal in apologetics for instance might have to do some critical thinking to come up with them, but I've yet to see an apologetic argument that didn't have some flaw (the better ones are usually sound in terms of logical structure, but have premises that are undemonstrated or even outright wrong) so I think that they sometimes unconsciously do a bit of mental gymnastics to get around the problems.

[John Dibble]

but it shows people who have spent their entire careers thinking critically about the issue and have come done on different sides of the issue of the existence of God, don't phrase it in simply materialistic terms.

Did you miss the part where I said "The theists who deal in apologetics for instance might have to do some critical thinking to come up with them"? That they might use a degree of critical thinking to come up with the arguments doesn't mean that they are thinking critically when they ignore the flaws in what they come up with.

[John Dibble]

That they might use a degree of critical thinking to come up with the arguments doesn't mean that they are thinking critically when they ignore the flaws in what they come up with.

Whether or not an argument has a flaw does not determine whether it was a product of critical thought.  Critical thinking is the process that is gone through to come to an answer, not the answer itself.  Einstein's general theory of relatively brought with it problems with the standard static model of the universe, problems he (arguably) chose to ignore with his famous "cosmological constant."  It doesn't mean his work wasn't based on critical thinking, there are flaws in every argument.

*sigh* Again, just because someone applies critical thinking to their process for most of their work does not mean they do it constantly. Humans aren't perfect. In the case of Einstein, if you're saying that he added the cosmological constant just so he could ignore some problems it means that he wasn't critically thinking about that thing - that would mean he wasn't thinking critically about that, but rather just trying to mold his equations to personal preference. Finding a creative way to make something fit isn't the same thing as critical thinking, in fact it's often the opposite.

[John Dibble]

Einstein's assumption: The Universe doesn't expand.
Your assumption: There is no God.

I make no assumption - my position is that there's not even remotely enough evidence for a god to justify believing in one.

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Einstein's unsupported theory: Cosmological constant.
Your unsupported theory: "it comes down to the rather simple fact that most people don't actually understand what constitutes legitimate evidence and are not trained to think critically."

By this theory, you've positioned yourself to be the ultimate arbiter of what is "legitimate" evidence to prove the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural being; what percentage of Americans can recognize that "legitimate" evidence; how critical thinking is correctly performed; that critical thinking, performed correctly, will provide an accurate report of reality; that there is an outside, objective reality; what percentage of American's are trained in critical thinking, etc.  If you do not have an answer for all these statements, you are simply finding a creative way to make facts fit your assumptions.[/quote]

I never said I was the ultimate arbiter of anything, nor did I position myself to be that way. I'm just educated - I know about critical thinking, how science works, and standards of evidence.

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We know logic works because it's been demonstrated to work consistently when applied correctly using demonstrated premises.

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Lulz! Where shall we start...

1. Dark matter and dark energy - these ideas most certainly are based on critical thinking, because they were proposed due to observed effects in nature. We don't actually claim to know a lot about them, but we had to name the causes of the effects something even if we don't understand them perfectly. What specifically make these not a result of critical thinking?
2. Luminiferous ether - I'm not sure why you're including an idea that was debunked in 1887 in this list. I'm only vaguely familiar with the history of this idea, so I can't comment on what kind of thought went into developing it.
3. Standard model of particle physics - We currently use the standard model because it's the best available model and has worked in experiments. What specifically makes this not a result of critical thinking?
4. Abiogenesis - Multiple experiments have shown various stages of non-organic matter becoming organic. Not actually producing life from non-life isn't a lack of critical thinking, it's a lack in our knowledge of the process - research is ongoing. Again, what specifically is not involving critical thinking here?
5. Vaccinations - Smallpox says hello. Oh wait, no it doesn't - we killed it.

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No, just no. Most of the theoretical particles are postulated based on the prior knowledge we've obtained and a significant amount of mathematics. The ideas are not simply accepted as fact by the scientific community. After checking the work of those proposing it for flaws, they then try to verify them. Why do you think they built the world's biggest supercollider? For s**ts and giggles?

There's a significant difference between postulating something based on available evidence and then trying to verify it experimentally and just making something up to fit a preferred worldview.

Could you both define what you mean by "critical thinking"?  I had like a three-paragraph post typed up about critical thinking, first principles and the ontological argument, and then I realized I can't figure out a possible consistent definition of "critical thinking" going on here.

There's quite a few concise definitions, but I'd say this is the one I like best that I could find - "the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which uses reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria." Unfortunately there can be disagreements on what constitutes things like evidence, so you'll of course get some disagreement from time to time even among critical thinkers. I imagine though you and I probably have somewhat similar standards, given what I know about you.

[John Dibble]

I make no assumption - my position is that there's not even remotely enough evidence for a god to justify believing in one.

Ok, then substitute "there's not even remotely enough evidence for a god to justify believing in one." for your assumption.  Your basic problem is that you are substituting the term "critical thinking" for "correct answer."  A correct answer is a thing, critical thinking is a process.  Critical thinking can and has resulted in many incorrect answers.

I never asserted that critical thinking always leads to correct answers. You gave a specific example of Einstein and I responded to that saying that I didn't think he used critical thinking to come to that specific conclusion based on your own description of him ignoring problems. If he was aware of the problems, but willf

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Ossum!  I couldn't imagine how to further state you are the ultimate arbiter of objective truth than that response!  You might as well have stated, "I never said I was the smartest man ever, but I am."[/quote]

Straw manning me isn't going to help your argument.

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Another way of saying, "we used logic to prove logic, therefore we know logic works".[/quote]

I don't think I can address this any better than Alcon did, so I'll just go with what he said.

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No I didn't. I specifically said "I'm only vaguely familiar with the history of this idea, so I can't comment on what kind of thought went into developing it."

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I think you're the one who's missing the point - when I say "make something fit" I didn't mean in every sense possible. (not sure why you would think I did) I mean making something fit your preferences, not actual data. In the case of Einstein it seems that he very much did not like the idea of a non-static universe - if he indeed just added the cosmological constant just because he didn't want to accept a non-static universe, as his equations implied, then that wouldn't be thinking critically. Einstein himself called his failure to predict the expansion of the universe his biggest blunder - if he was indeed too personally attached to the idea of a static universe then it was a flaw in his thinking process. That's not to say he was a bad critical thinker, just that he was subject to the same kind of pitfalls that all of us are.

Perhaps a better example might be the "tired light" hypothesis - the notion in which basically light loses energy over time - which was proposed in response to Hubble's observations. This idea seems to have been a desperate, albeit creative, attempt to save the static-universe model by explaining away red-shift rather than a conclusion come to based on actual data. It's actually quite common for scientists who've invested a great amount of time in a particular theory to try to just come up with something to explain away data that doesn't agree with their theory - scientists are people to, and they can get attached to ideas. That's why science is a multi-person process. It tends to weed out our little personal issues.

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You shifted the focus when you brought in all of the other science things and said they weren't the result of critical thinking. (yet making no effort to argue as to why they weren't) If you don't want to come off as anti-science, you will have to make a better case than just an assertion with no argument.

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I agree, but given what I know about how they came up with those ideas I do believe they did come upon them by methods that involve critical thinking and I don't understand why you are asserting otherwise.

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No, I'm saying willfully ignoring problems that you either notice or have pointed out to you isn't critical thinking. Going back to apologetics, the arguments used by apologists haven't really changed much over the centuries - the problem of premises not being demonstrated is one that's been pointed out again and again and again, and yet the apologists continue to use those same arguments without addressing that rather basic and fundamental problem. That is most certainly not critical thinking.

[John Dibble]

I mainly have quibbles with two of Dibble's statements on why he believes critical thinking cannot lead to a belief in God.

I didn't say it can't. You have a real problem with putting words into people's mouths. My response was to the question "Why do Americans believe in God despite all the evidence?" - I asserted that most people don't think critically as part of that. I simply think that if people applied critical thinking more that more of them would be unbelievers.

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Again, I didn't say no critical thinking goes into coming up with apologetics, just that in all cases I've seen there is still some flaw that further critical thinking reveals.

For instance there are a number of problems with the cosmological argument:
1. How do you know this prime mover is god-like? The word "god" has certain implications that can't just be ignored - if there is indeed a first cause, why can't it simply be some primordial, unintelligent force? That wouldn't exactly be a god by any standard definition of the word.
2. How do you deal with infinite regress? Ever heard the phrase "It's turtles all the way down"? What created this "God" thing? And if you assert that this "God" thing has simply always existed without a beginning or a cause, then how do you know that? How can you demonstrate it?

These have been pointed out to the apologists again and again over the centuries and yet they continue to ignore them. Again, willfully ignoring problems in an argument is not critical thinking.

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Aside from physical evidence and logic, what kind of evidence is there that is remotely reliable? If you don't have any such kind of extra evidence and you don't have any kind of physical evidence to back up your god claims or your logic for it, then how am I or any other objective observer going to be able to distinguish your belief from a delusion?

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Interesting line of reasoning, but still problematic. If you and everyone around you were born into a universe where there were red pixels in the blue sky, would you necessarily think it odd? We know a bug in a computer program when we see it because we know it's a program and we also know what the intent of the program is. A bug is just a flaw in the instructions in regards to intent, but the instructions are still carried out flawlessly as they were written. But we didn't make the universe and we don't really know if it's something someone wrote, and as such we don't know what the intent of the universe would be. If we don't know the intent, how can we know what is or isn't out of place? Maybe our universe is a program, and the designer actually intended for there to be red pixels in the blue sky, but since there aren't it's a bug. But not having been born with innate knowledge about what the universe is for (if it has a purpose at all) how could we possibly infer that?

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Yes, it's not very strong evidence because it isn't evidence - what distinguishes our universe from one with no purpose and no intelligent creator and one that has a purpose and an intelligent creator?

[John Dibble]

Eureka!  I think I have found at least one area where we have been talking past each other.  You stated on a least 2 occasions the premises for the deductive logic on the existence of God argument was undemonstrated or outright wrong. Given your answer here, I don't think your beef is with the premises of the argument, but with the inference drawn from the premises.  I'm usually not picky on word selection and I often misuse words myself, but I think this spawned my tangential arguments about proving a premise that maybe I did not need to address.

Well, my response was to the first cause argument you presented - I would still say such arguments exist. For instance the moral argument:

1. If God does not exist, morality does not exist.
2. Morality exists.
3. Therefore, God exists.

How would you go about demonstrating #1? And if you define morality such that it has to involve God, how can you demonstrate #2 to the point where it excludes anything that simply looks like that morality but comes from a different source? While the argument is possibly creative, the premises seems to be more bald assertion than anything.

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Yes, I'm aware of this. Of course there are those who thing that somehow, magically, without any real explanation, that this argument somehow leads to their particular god, whichever that may be. I'm glad you aren't one of them - it makes it possible to have an actual discussion.

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I looked it up. It seems his answer to infinite regress was more in terms of how we deal with logic and knowledge rather than being in particular relation to his idea of a prime mover. Basically his answer seemed to just deal with the problem of "how do we know what we observe is accurate", or "1 + 1 = 2 and that's obvious to the point where I don't need to demonstrate it". In regards to the prime mover though, he just made an assertion that he thought there was one rather than address the possibility that there isn't one.

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Yes, but instead of asserting a prime mover of some kind we just don't make assertions - we admit we don't know what we don't know.

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I'm not sure how you're using 'testimonial evidence' here is all that useful, let alone standard - by this note empirical evidence would be to a large degree useless because anyone who does not directly observe it would have to call any communication of it testimonial rather than empirical. I think communication of empirical evidence is rightly divided from testimonial because of our standards in determining why such evidence is trustworthy.

In what I think would be traditionally defined as testimonial evidence, it's largely a matter of whether or not we think the person giving the testimony is someone who would tell the truth and whether or not they interpret things reliably. (a court wouldn't want to take the testimony of someone who has regular hallucinations as evidence, for instance) For empirical evidence though we have further information - the person giving the testimony in regards to the physical evidence can explain exactly what methods were used to examine the evidence, and is someone else was so inclined they could repeat the methods and see if they come up with the same results. You can't do that with testimony alone.

It might get a little blurrier in regards to your high school diploma and other kinds of historical records, but I think that kind of thing involves a bit of both worlds depending on the particular historical question.

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I find there to be a difference between reasonable and understandable. I think it reasonable for people to not believe we're in a computer simulation because there isn't any apparent reason to think we are in one. I think it reasonable to think that logic and math work because we can observe them to work when used correctly. I think it reasonable to think that other minds exist because we regularly interact with other people and they behave in ways we'd expect other minds to behave.

On the other hand there are beliefs that I find it understandable as to why people might hold those beliefs but not think they are reasonable - typically I put theism in this category because I don't see any good reasons to believe in such things.

If I wasn't clear, I didn't mean this to be a proof for the existence of God and I'm not sure Smolin is in anyway religious.  It was simply to demonstrate why it is hard to demonstrate such things with physical evidence.  I read Computing the Universe (I think that was the name) by a MIT quantum computer professor who also stated the universe is essentially a giant quantum computer that is computing itself.  The MIT professor also displayed no religious leanings.  It is simply a theory that has become more and more popular over the past 30 or so years as our computer technology advances.  It's a freaky theory, whether you are a believer or not.

To be clear, I wasn't saying that it was an attempt to show proof for the existence of God either - I was simply pointing out the problem with his idea of there having to be an obvious bug if we're in a computer simulation. I would actually expect the universe to behave in a similar manner as a computer because computers operate using the physical laws of the universe. We know computers are designed though, we can't say the same for the universe.

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Yes - generally speaking when I use the term evidence I'm speaking of 'good' evidence.

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The problem with saying that something is more likely than another possibility is that you need a basis for asserting that probability. I can assert that a truly random roll of a pair of dice will be more likely result in a seven than any other result on the basis that are more combinations that result in a seven than any of the other possible results. So what is your particular basis for this assertion?

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I addressed morality above, and beauty has similar problems. (being in the eye of the beholder and all that) Furthermore, more advanced modern observations of nature have not indicated a deity. Not intending to sound condescending, but I just don't find the amount of ink spilled to be relevant - substance is more important than quantity.