Why Do You Believe?

[TJ in Oregon]

I don't believe that something can be created from nothing.  I believe there must be some greater being than I.  Whether or not that is the God I believe in is impossible to say.  It gives me comfort to believe in God and makes me at ease with whatever happens to me in the end.  Thats basically it.

Doesn't it strike you as a little contradictory to claim that "something can't be created from nothing, because that's not consistent with how the world seems to work" and then claim that God was something created from nothing?

I don't think many Christians would claim that God was created for nothing or that God was created at all but that God exists outside of time. That question seems to be attacking a position virtually no one actually holds.

[TJ in Oregon]

I don't believe that something can be created from nothing.  I believe there must be some greater being than I.  Whether or not that is the God I believe in is impossible to say.  It gives me comfort to believe in God and makes me at ease with whatever happens to me in the end.  Thats basically it.

Doesn't it strike you as a little contradictory to claim that "something can't be created from nothing, because that's not consistent with how the world seems to work" and then claim that God was something created from nothing?

I don't think many Christians would claim that God was created for nothing or that God was created at all but that God exists outside of time. That question seems to be attacking a position virtually no one actually holds.

Fair point on fact -- and I know that, so I should have phrased differently -- but why does that distinction matter?  The idea of "omnipotent entity existing outside of time" is just as unprecedented as "something created from nothing."

I mean, think about what this argument says logically

"There is no precedent for something being created from nothing.  Therefore, we should assume that it was created by a God that is omnipotent and exists outside of space-time."

How can you hold the former impossible and then endorse the latter claim with certitude as a result of rejecting the former claim?  It makes no sense.

The distinction matters because something being created from nothing is not merely something without precedent but rather something inexplicable in principle by our physical laws if one accepts that the universe is in and of itself intelligible (ie. each effect has a cause; if one rejects that idea then the logic stops making sense but that's not generally a view people hold). From there, one does not then conclude with absolute certitude that it was created by a God that is omnipotent outside of space-time but merely that it was caused by something outside of space-time. The God of metaphysics is an abstraction rather than a proof of the Christian God, who cannot be deduced entirely from logic in the absence of revelation, but the two are not inconsistent with each other.

[TJ in Oregon]

I don't really understand how arbitrarily choosing one answer, even because it's more pleasing, is necessary or meaningful.  Why not just say "this is a confusing question that doesn't seem to square with my current knowledge, and I have no reason to believe that either the simplest or most pleasing answers are true"?  Why not just...you know, not know?  It's not like you have to choose a side with absolute certitude.  

It's not surprising to me that people have intuitions about metaphysical truths.  It's just weird to me that so many people claim certainty about metaphysical truths, when often they don't even have a logically reason it's even likelier than alternative explanations.  Even if I thought one explanation was clearly likelier, I don't understand how I'd hop to believing it with absolute conviction.

"I know my belief might not be reasonable, but I know it's true" is just a baffling idea to me.  It's like arguing we're intellectually limited, but somehow magically, selectively omniscient anyway.

Pertaining to the question asked directly at the beginning of this thread, I don't think very many people actually hold their beliefs on this topic as a result of a logical proof. Instead I think they take their experiences and from those use inductive reasoning to formulate religious beliefs. Typically it is not until these beliefs are already formed, before people begin to consider deductive arguments from assumptions about the universe to explain beliefs they are already convinced of as a result of their observations about the world.

Now, as opposed to your last sentence, very few people agree that their beliefs are not reasonable and most think they are consistent with the logical framework induced from squaring logical argument with them. The non-contradiction principle is widely accepted by both believers and nonbelievers alike. One can certainly argue that the reason why people hold their beliefs is unreasonable but that is a different question than whether the beliefs themselves are unreasonable.

That is how the vast majority of people (in my experience at least) think. There are certainly some exceptions who are indifferent until they stumble upon an argument that convinces them of one position or another but they seem to be quite rare.

[TJ in Oregon]

Is existing out of space and time and being omnipotent and omniscient really more explicable based on our current understanding of physical laws?  I don't think "entity existing out of space-time" violates our observations about how the world functions any less than "entity that was not created."  The criticism I was making applies to both to my original misconstruction of this common argument and your accurate correction.

The point in appealing to something outside of our space-time is not that is better matches our understanding of physical laws but as a statement that our physical laws are not in principle capable of answering the "uncaused cause" question. The argument rests on the idea that the physical laws are incapable of answering the question (ie. where did the universe come from) not because the laws are incomplete but they cannot in principle answer that question (incompleteness being another variety of 'God of the Gaps') because the problem at hand is to explain an uncaused cause whereas causality is one of the assumptions we use to determine the physical laws. People have postulated partial solutions to this problem (the origin of the universe) with multiverses and quantum fields in a vacuum but these partial solutions simply move the problem back another step and we're left, at best, with an infinite regress. (Which is the key difference between the misconstruction of the argument for God's existence from causation and the corrected one is that the corrected one avoids the infinite regress.)

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Level of certitude is an extremely difficult thing for people to grasp about something as simple as a prediction for who will win a sporting event and that typically has a predictable nature to its outcome from prior games. If we try to apply a probabilistic analysis to something like religion, we would be basically making up numbers or at best making very dubious assumptions about the likelihood of a particular belief being correct. Again, the vast majority of people simply don't think that way. They have experiences that they link to beliefs and tend to be very convinced they accurately perceived the experience and accurately interpreted it. Given the number of people and the nature of the induction process it's not at all surprising that we come to different conclusions (you meant induction not deduction here, right?)

You must be logged in to read this quote.

This example is distinct from religious belief because it contains a falsifiable hypothesis with probabilities that are known whereas religious beliefs contain unfalsifiable hypotheses. It also depends somewhat on how you define 'reasonable', which turns into a semantic game. For instance believing the next card is the ace of spades is certainly more reasonable than believing it is the 17 of spades. A better analogy to religion would be a person giving their belief on what the next card is when that person thinks someone they think they know has stacked it. The situation has a lot more contingencies but more information to it than simply picking a card at random.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I don't think we're really disagreeing on substance here; I was merely pointing out the same distinction you are with this example.

[TJ in Oregon]

As an aside for TJ, the statement that each effect has a cause is highly debatable in the world of quantum mechanics. The dominant view now is that some quantum effects (including some of those that underpin semiconductor electronics) do not have a cause per se, but are based on the probabilities of particular occurrences. The notion of strict causality at the atomic level does not fit into the current paradigm.

That's a fair point and one I completely glossed over with my simple language about cause and effect. I would say for the relevant purposes here that "causation" is not necessarily limited to strict causality but rather that there is matter, field, or law constraining what is happening, ie. the probability is coming from somewhere and is not entirely arbitrary. For example, if we used the analogy of a coin flip where I got 'tails' (assuming it were truly random), the 'tails' result would not be strictly caused by something that could not also have caused 'heads' but is still caused by the fact that I have a coin with a 'heads' side and a 'tails' side.

[TJ in Oregon]

As an aside for TJ, the statement that each effect has a cause is highly debatable in the world of quantum mechanics. The dominant view now is that some quantum effects (including some of those that underpin semiconductor electronics) do not have a cause per se, but are based on the probabilities of particular occurrences. The notion of strict causality at the atomic level does not fit into the current paradigm.

That's a fair point and one I completely glossed over with my simple language about cause and effect. I would say for the relevant purposes here that "causation" is not necessarily limited to strict causality but rather that there is matter, field, or law constraining what is happening, ie. the probability is coming from somewhere and is not entirely arbitrary. For example, if we used the analogy of a coin flip where I got 'tails' (assuming it were truly random), the 'tails' result would not be strictly caused by something that could not also have caused 'heads' but is still caused by the fact that I have a coin with a 'heads' side and a 'tails' side.

Your reply highlights an example of conflicting paradigms. I expect that most people would agree with your assertion that "the probability is coming from somewhere and is not entirely arbitrary." Most physicists would not agree with that in the context of the modern paradigm of measurement and quantum mechanics. Einstein and others tried to assert that there were "hidden variables" that created cause and effect for quantum processes, but their models were unsatisfying to physicists as a community, and we are left with the belief that there are truly random processes that are entirely arbitrary.

Even beyond the quantum level there are events that hinge on measurements that intrinsically can not be made with sufficient precision, and would require a computer with more atoms than in the universe to project an effect from the cause. upon seeing an effect one might philosophically claim these "chaotic" events have a cause, but if that cause cannot be discerned by any physical means does that sense of cause have meaning?

I am aware of the notion of hidden variables and that most of modern physics has rejected the notion but I am a little confused by your response. Are you saying that the probability itself of an event is arbitrary (not the outcome but the probability)? Aren't the probabilities of events contingent upon variables such as the existence of particles, positions, and fields? Sorry for being obtuse, I recognize here that my knowledge of quantum mechanics is only at the undergrad physical chemistry level.

[TJ in Oregon]

But my point was that avoiding the infinite regress isn't necessary.  You can simply declare that, in the case of God, the infinite regress doesn't apply.  It is true that we operate under the assumption that everything has a cause -- but we also operate under the assumption that entities exist within space-time.  My point was that it's unsound to argue that all things must have a cause, because that fits our observations of how things work, and then to use that to argue that God must be an entity that exists out of space-time.  That inference requires asserting that, because one possibility (something without a cause) does not match our observations about how the world works, we should infer some other possibility (something out of space-time) that also doesn't.

(I don't want to overcomplicate things, but I recognize there's a distinction between "everything has a cause" -- which is 'substantiated' by our observations -- and "nothing exists out of space-time" -- which is instead 'substantiated' by our lack of observations.  However, the correct parallel is between the claims "nothing lacks a cause" and "nothing exists out of space-time."  If you think that distinction is important, I can explain why I think the correct parallel matters.)

I think the key distinction here is not just whether the claim is substantiated by our observations rather than our lack of observations (though the latter would be a less compelling claim all things being equal) but also is in what domain we would expect the laws to apply. We would expect something as fundamental to our understanding of our universe as causality to apply throughout. On the other hand, we would not expect to observe something out of our space-time so the fact that we don't observe it doesn't tell us anything other than it's not a falsifiable hypothesis.

It gets semantic at a certain point, but not at the point I was describing.  I think we can logically say the cut-off line for "reasonable belief' starts somewhere above a 50% probability that the belief is true.  It makes absolutely no sense to believe something is true, if the probability it's true is less than 50%, or less than or equal to the probability that some competing claim is true.

The particular challenge here is that these sorts of claims have probabilities that can't be evaluated in a way that isn't completely arbitrary. I guess we disagree on the definition of "reasonable" here. For instance I wouldn't consider someone's beliefs unreasonable for believing in Hinduism on the basis that I think its odds of being true are less than 50%. I guess I see "reasonable" meaning something along the lines of "plausible".

I actually meant "deduction."  I just forgot how I was going to finish that sentence

Anyway, I must not have been clear, because you're reading my analogy (and overall claim) as being about probability.  Not really.  The point of the card analogy is merely that just because something is true does not mean believing it is reasonable.  Whether it's knowable (the distinction you point out) is not relevant to the analogy.  The point is that a belief can be non-contradictory with presented facts, and even turn out to be true (if it's knowable), and yet that belief can be totally unreasonable.  Why?  If you can't even explain why the belief is more compelling than all other hypotheses (as in the card analogy), it is not reasonable to believe it.  That's the case in the card analogy.  And that's all the card analogy was meant to demonstrate.

I hope it's clearer now that my analogy was not implying that I think all religious claims are equally compelling, which seems to be how you've taken it.  Like I said above, I don't think it's unreasonable to find a given religious claim more compelling than others.  However, most people's religious convictions go way, way, way beyond "I intuitively and subjectively find this metaphysical explanation of the world more compelling than other competing explanations."  And that's not because people don't know the difference between intuition-driven operating assumptions, and certitude.

Here's why it's really weird to me that certitude is so common.  You are right that most people assume that they accurately perceive and interpret experiences.  However, I also assume that other people reasonably believe they accurately perceive and interpret experiences, as well.  I don't think that others are secretly crazy or dishonest, and I doubt you do either.  It is not surprising, of course, that people come to different inductive conclusions.  Because experiences and processes vary, you'd expect even a few reasonable people exposed to the same stimuli to come to conclusions that are "outliers" in the larger group.  Like, if a big group of people observes a fight in public, a small number of people are probably going to completely misinterpret the events that occurred.  It's not surprising to me that perceptions and interpretations can vary.  It's surprising to me that perceptions and interpretations can vary so much, and yet certitude remain so widespread.

If a large group of reasonable, intelligent people saw an event and had an array of wildly different perceptions of what occurred, I wouldn't expect them to all maintain their interpretation with certitude.  Thinking that their interpretation was the most likely interpretation?  Sure.  Operating under the assumption that their interpretation was accurate, for lack of a more compelling interpretation?  Quite possibly.  Widespread certitude, in the face of many wildly different observations and interpretations from apparently reasonable, honest people?  Like I said, that would be baffling to me.

For why people have a high level of certitude about deductive claims while coming to a wide array of conclusions I have several hypotheses to offer up. I will let you subjectively decide if you think they are reasonable :

1. Despite believing that others' experiential claims are true, people still believe their own and think others who disagree are merely misinterpreting their own experience. These sorts of ideas are so deeply ingrained in the way we view the universe that we simply can't see how everyone else doesn't agree.

2. A sort of Pascal's Wager comes into play here. (Yes I know there are a lot of philosophical problems with using Pascal's Wager as an argument to actually prove anything.) But the options posed by it still may inform people's decision making process.

3. The inherent assumptions behind the deductive arguments are sufficiently abstract that our view of which are most plausible is mostly determined by our experiential views of the universe. For instance I don't see the universe coming into existence uncaused as a very compelling answer though obviously others disagree. Yet it is abstract enough that I wouldn't at all think they're lying if they say it best matches their experiences.

4. The arguments get very complicated very quickly, so much so that the majority do not actually understand their opponents' views as well as they think they do. Understanding their own much better, they of course see them as the most reasonable.

[TJ in Oregon]

Right, but the nature of an uncreated entity is not a falsifiable hypothesis either.  We don't know what would prompt an uncreated entity to come into existence, so the assumption that it would recur in a manifest way later on isn't based on a falsifiable claim, either.  The problem with "____ of the gaps" article is that you can fill any gap with just about anything.

And, again, either way, recall that my original post on this subject would still hold up to even the revised version.  The argument was that it must be true something exists outside of space-time, because everything within space-time must have cause.  However, that requires holding that it must be true that, if there are things that need not have cause, we would have observed them by now.  Accepting a world in which things can exist outside of space-time is accepting a world in which there are things that do not operate by the observed rules -- or at least happen beyond our observed rules.  If you argue that God can exist out of space-time and impact something within space-time, you're arguing that something outside of the rules of space-time (including causality) can manifest within those rules.  As such, it's logically incoherent to argue that it's impossible that something not have a cause, and therefore God must have influenced the world's creation from outside space-time; opening up the gate for God opens up the gate for the very hypotheses he was rejecting to affirm the necessity of God.

I am a little unclear as to what the second sentence here is referring to (is it referring to "God"?).

If God: The entire point of invoking an uncreated entity ("God") is precisely that the entity doesn't come into existence at all but is outside of time and thus outside of causation and creation. The entity simply is. Otherwise it would just be adding another step without addressing the issue (ie. "If God created the universe then who created God?"). That was the point my original post was trying to clear up and is the difference between the original misconstructed argument and my corrected version.

For the latter part of your question, the argument is that everything within our space-time must have a cause, not that its cause must be within our space-time. Indeed virtually everything within our space-time clearly does have a cause within our space-time. However, if everything within our space-time must have a cause, at least one thing must have a cause outside of our space-time because it cannot cause itself. (An alternative explanation here would be a circular time but we have a lot of physical reasons to reject that idea.)

Sorry, but I don't buy that's how people use "believe."  When someone says "I believe x is true," do you really think they mean "I think x is more probable than other hypotheses, even if I don't even think x is likely?"  It would be like me saying "I believe, if I pick a random person off of Earth, their name will be Muhammad."  I simply don't think that's ever how we use "believe."  Also, if you asked what people mean when they claim they have religious beliefs, I really doubt they'd say anything like this definition of "believe."

Oh I do think they really mean they believe their own hypothesis is >50% likely to be true when they say they believe it. However, the actual probability and perceived probability is obviously different given the widespread disagreement. I agree that it would not be reasonable for a person to say they believe something they do not think is more likely than not to be true. However, I do not think it is unreasonable for another person to have a different belief about what is more than 50% likely to be true due to our inability to evaluate the ideas' likelihood in a universally understood way. Instead I would consider someone else's stated belief to be reasonable (assuming they think it >50% likely to be true) if the belief is plausible even if I do not think it likely to be true.

[TJ in Oregon]

For why people have a high level of certitude about deductive claims while coming to a wide array of conclusions I have several hypotheses to offer up. I will let you subjectively decide if you think they are reasonable

Do you think any are reasonable?  I appreciate the attempt to explain the behavior, and your hypotheses line up with the ones I've thought of, but I'm really interested in debating what's logical, not what people do.  People are the worst .

Well, as your name suggests, grad students are the worst. Or maybe the second worst and professors are the worst (except for muon of course ).

1. Despite believing that others' experiential claims are true, people still believe their own and think others who disagree are merely misinterpreting their own experience. These sorts of ideas are so deeply ingrained in the way we view the universe that we simply can't see how everyone else doesn't agree.

That's not reasonable.  It suggests that you, for some reason, are correct, while other people with the exact same methodology aren't.  This is how people behave, but it doesn't make sense.

I am somewhat split on whether or not this hypothesis is reasonable or not. I was immediately about to reject it as unreasonable upon re-reading it since it is believing an anecdote over the wider array of information that can be gathered by looking at others' experiences as well. On the other hand, the opposite hypothesis (look at peoples' experiences as a whole and don't take too much stock in your own) does not seem reasonable either as it results in ignoring your own intuitions and simply agreeing with the majority opinion whatever it may be without being able to question it. In reality this is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy and we're forced to consider the question somewhere between the two extremes; neither seems particularly reasonable, but we don't really have a better option here if we're going to consider the topic at all.

I do think it is probably the most common reason why people behave the way they do regardless of whether it is reasonable.

2. A sort of Pascal's Wager comes into play here. (Yes I know there are a lot of philosophical problems with using Pascal's Wager as an argument to actually prove anything.) But the options posed by it still may inform people's decision making process.

Not reasonable, since there's no reason to assume that wanting to believe something has any effect on whether it's true.

Here, I would agree that this is not a logical position to hold for certitude, but it is a logical reason to act without complete certitude in virtually the exact same manner as someone with certitude in every way except claiming certitude, provided the person is convinced the belief is at least likely to be true.

3. The inherent assumptions behind the deductive arguments are sufficiently abstract that our view of which are most plausible is mostly determined by our experiential views of the universe. For instance I don't see the universe coming into existence uncaused as a very compelling answer though obviously others disagree. Yet it is abstract enough that I wouldn't at all think they're lying if they say it best matches their experiences.

OK, you're basically making an argument that it's reasonable to prefer your intuition over other people's intuitions.  Of course.  But does it make sense to have certitude about your intuition?  To be clear, there are some cases in which there are unfalsifiable claims that are so narrow, specific, and ridiculous ("God actually a hedgehog in a tutu and he only responds to 'Chesney'") that I think it's reasonable to find them so counterintuitive that they shouldn't be entertained as possibilities.  But when other reasonable, intelligent people come to strong, conflicting intuitions using the same mental methodology, completely dismissing these conclusions and maintaining certitude doesn't make sense.  That's not just me saying that -- it's based on the fact, outside of religion, people don't really behave this way in any other contexts.

Eh, I do think people occasionally do act this way outside of religion -- not as universally so -- but they sometimes do. I remember going to a conference about liquid crystals 3 or 4 years ago and there were a couple professors who would dive in repeatedly in the Q&A sessions and bicker about a feud they were having over whether or not bent-core liquid crystals have biaxial alignment. Most of the people there would roll their eyes and try to ignore them. I think the necessary condition is having a strong passion for a particular outcome. Regardless, that does hamper their objectivity somewhat.

I think this hypothesis might actually be the same as the first one and my view of it is the same.

4. The arguments get very complicated very quickly, so much so that the majority do not actually understand their opponents' views as well as they think they do. Understanding their own much better, they of course see them as the most reasonable.

Also true, and I accept that someone can reach unreasonable or illogical conclusions for reasonable and logical reasons (for instance, they might not care enough to spend the mental energy analyzing their beliefs).

Indeed. There is always a limit to just how much time one can devote to reading and studying these arguments.