Hypothetical: God is disproved

[Alcon]

It's hard for me to answer this question (even as an atheist) because it's hard for me to imagine a world in which it made sense for a metaphysical claim to be totally disproved.  I think the way God's existence was disproved would matter a lot to thinking in general.

Stupid question, a far better question would be the reverse. What would you do if he (or some other deity) were completely and utterly proved

Why is one question stupid and one "far better"?  They seem to be getting at similar things to me -- how people would deal with massive shake-ups in their worldview.  Honestly, asking this of theists sounds like a more interesting question, because most atheists are agnostic, and it seems more of a leap to go from belief to disbelief, because you often lose a lot of dogmas, communities, and structure that agnostic types don't really lose if they go from non-belief to belief.  (Not that it can't be a big deal for agnostics too, but again, you said the question was "stupid" and that asking about the opposite question would be "far better.")

An impossible question for anyone to answer for reasons that should be fairly obvious. However. Why do you think this question is one worth asking? Now that is an interesting question.

That's not obvious to me.  Please explain.  Like I said above, the means by which a metaphysical claim could be disproven -- and how they'd affect our thinking on other issues -- seem potentially relevant to me, because they might change relevant aspects of reality/logic/etc.  But even if you ignore that question, and accept the premise without worrying about how the premise is possible, there are plenty of things (belief in received truths, among others) that can be addressed without necessarily knowing how the premise is possible -- you just assume all else is equal, besides gaining that knowledge.  It's no more impossible to work with this premise than others that would require some unknown factor to make them logically possible ("what if the Earth were made of Jell-O?!").  

Hell, IIRC you have argued in the past that faith is reasonable outside of logic, and now you're arguing that this is unanswerable, presumably because the premise it rests on is logically untenable/dubious.  So how can you now reject considering a premise based on the logical difficulty of accepting the premise?  IIRC, you've expressed support in believing a premise regardless of the logical difficulty of accepting that premise.

Also, there are plenty of interesting answers to this: whether they would even accept the proof if it seemed logically sound to them; how they'd deal with the loss of moral guidance; what they would feel about the loss of moral enforcement; how the loss of belief in the afterlife would affect them, philosophically and emotionally; how they'd deal with the loss of a perceived loving relationship; how it would make them question their thinking/perceiving process in general.  Really, none of those questions sound interesting to you?

[Alcon]

God must exist beyond that which is objectively verifiable else God is not God.

So, you're effectively making the argument that I just rebutted.  Please explain why you disagree with the rebuttal.

Or, rather, the only conception of God that might be technically objectively provable/disprovable would be a particularly boring and pedantic Deistic conception (which I would not recognise as 'God' in any case) and, frankly, don't we all have better things to be worrying about that that?

It's kind of aggravating to deal with something that starts as a really specific statement, and then becomes incredibly vague.  I'm not a dumb guy, and I have no idea what you're talking about, or why people "pedantic" or "boring" would make an argument invalid.  [This is especially ironic considering that esoteric allusions your audience is unlikely to recognize, are arguably kinda "masturbatory."]

But a) stupid and b) ultimately masturbatory and therefore not honest and therefore, from one point of view, impossible to truly answer.

How is it stupid to accept the plausibility of a premise and then to answer the (interesting) possibilities that would follow?  Are you arguing against engaging counterfactuals?  By "masturbatory," do you mean "excessively self-absorbed or self-indulgent" (huh? how?) or do you mean, like, pointless but gratifying?  In which case...cool, so?

If a question can't be answered honestly (this one can't) then it's a useless question and is probably only being asked for rhetorical purposes. Or at least that's my suspicion.

You totally ignored both my main rebuttal of my argument, and my challenge to your consistency, and just repeated your position.  And then you attacked the intention of the question-asker, which has absolutely nothing to do with the merit of the argument/question.  Do you get this defensive about other counterfactuals, or only ones that relate to a personal sacred cow like religion?

[Alcon]

The only way a metaphysical concept can be disproven, would be to prove other metaphysical concepts real. So how I would react would depend on what which would be in the place of God.

There's a significant difference between the alternative metaphysic being for example Dharmic or Lovecraftian in nature. And my reaction would be quite different between those two.

Again, I think there are answers to this question that are not dependent on what the alternative metaphysics are.  You can even define the alternative metaphysics as "we are somehow certain there is not God."  Why not, if only just for a thought experiment?  

Using metaphysical uncertainty as a reason to avoid answering is especially weird since I assume most of the adamant non-answerers in this thread manage to operate on the premise that God certainly does exist, so either they can accept a premise regardless of understanding the metaphysics behind it, or they believe they are certain about metaphysical truth currently for some reason.  Either way, they accept a metaphysical premise (or some premise) that leads them to believing certitude is justified.  And if they can accept a premise, I don't see why they can't engage a theoretical.

This is seriously silly.

[Alcon]

Now that's a specific question. Still an absurd hypothetical in my opinion since it requires looking for a change in non-theological topics that no one feels the need to look for at present.

what?  What topics, and why is it "absurd" to engage a hypothetical that requires looking for a change in those topics because no one "feels the need" to look for such a change at present?

I can't say that my life would change all that much. While I do have a strong belief in the existence of the Divine and an afterlife, their non-existence would not affect the system of ethics I live by. There are all too many consequences in this life from engaging in evil for the lack of any possible effect in the next to alter my behavior. The main effect on me would be indirect from how religious institutions react to the proof.

Thank you!  See, that's the point of this hypothetical.

[Alcon]

Nah, there's no doubt that this is a stupid question (which doesn't mean it's not fun to debate and think about but it does mean we won't get anything serious out of it), and to try and pretend that it's actually got us religious people quaking in out boots is silly.

The reason that it doesn't make sense is that the conventional, orthodox belief right across (most) different faiths is that God is Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, Why Anything At All Exists, He's not some person who is basically like us but also has some pretty neat superpowers. What this means for proof and disproof is that you can't just find him by looking throughout the universe and taking some readings, He isn't holed up in a flat in Croydon. He is not simply one more thing in the universe, if you had a list of all the things that are, you wouldn't add God to that list as a separate entity. This means that you can only prove God doesn't or does exist by a logical argument, and in a logical argument  you make some assumptions, then you show what these logically imply and you keep on doing this until you reach a conclusion. But of course those assumptions are just that, assumptions. They might be right and they might be wrong, but we can never, fully, know which one they are.

Your main argument, which is reasonable, is that God is not knowable based on empirical observation.  I'm not sure if you're arguing for certitude-via-faith or belief-in-absence-of-certitude, but it doesn't really matter.  The thing is, though, that the majority of Christians (at least in the polling I've seen) do, in fact, express certitude.  You might (rightly) argue that these Christians may believe in certitude-via-faith.  But if you believe in certitude-of-faith, and believe that's reasonable (I don't), how is any leap to attribute (via certitude-of-faith) metaphysical meaning to something concrete?  It's not really that hard to imagine a religion that has faith in the metaphysical significance of a concrete thing or observation.  That's why I reject calling this question "stupid," even if adding the "concrete" part was an unnecessary distraction; it's not inherently inconsistent with the thinking/belief system of most theists.

Of course this is all quite arcane. Whether such a proof or disproof that is comprehensible to humans is not really important to this question, because plenty of things exist but are inconceivable to us and plenty of things that can't exist are conceivable. The real problem with this question is it's like all counter-factuals. The dead body of Jesus of Nazareth being found tomorrow in a grave in palestine is just as silly a counter factual despite being unarguably possible and definitely conceivable.

The thing is, the only honest answer to any variation of "What if I'm wrong?"is "I don't know". We all think we're right, and all of our interactions with the world are shaped by these underlying beliefs. If one of these beliefs is proven wrong then our interactions with the world will have to change, but these are so foundational that we just can't predict what these changes will be.

I think one thing which is helpful to keep in mind whenever having debates about religious belief in general and whether we should hold them is to compare them to political beliefs.  Because so many (but not all) popular arguments against religious belief in the abstract work just as well against political beliefs in the abstract, but no one ever mentions it, and in fact the proposers of the arguments would be horrified with those conclusions. Ask yourself, then, if your politics were disproved, how would you react, and then you might see why the question in the OP isn't really helpful.

See, that's the weird thing: why are you so confident you're right and that your beliefs won't change?  Have you not been presented with reasonable counterarguments by reasonable people with different, reasonable intuitions?  If people's disagreement is not a function of unreasonableness, or stupidity, how can you not have a degree of uncertainty about whether your beliefs are wrong?  How is it so hard to imagine a world in which your intuitions change enough to agree with other reasonable people with different intuitions?

I have had people present arguments that challenged my fundamental beliefs.  A few of those arguments have been more consistent and reasonable than those I had -- so I changed my beliefs.  I don't know how this hasn't happened to anyone who has ever been a dumb teenager.  There are some fundamental value propositions I have (that, all else being equal, suffering should be avoided; that, all else being equal, autonomy is good).  Those would be hard to change, mostly because they're based on assumptions so loose I wouldn't even call them "assumptions" (why not let people live the life they prefer?  It's what I would want.)  But those aren't really good analogues to religious belief, which actually asserts a truth about reality, which is presumably based in more contestable logic and is believed "true."

tl;dr: I don't see the idea of changing your mind on a fundamental belief fantastical, and I don't see how it's so hard to think through, conceptually or emotionally.  If you allow it to be that difficult, doesn't that risk making it incredibly difficult to change your mind about fundamental beliefs even when doing so is reasonable?

[Alcon]

Which rebuttal is this?

You're arguing that it's impossible to engage a theoretical that requires you to accept a shoddy premise.  That was the argument I was rebutting in the remainder of the paragraph whose first two sentences you quoted.  It's the one that starts with "That's not obvious to me."  Also, see my response to bore, where I pointed out that it seems logically consistent to vest a concrete reality with metaphysical properties if it's reasonable to have "faith" in a metaphysical reality.  It's not logically impossible, and even if it were, there's nothing that stops you exploring a premise based on a logical impossibility.

Which part is vague?

You think that most intelligent people would know what "particularly boring and pedantic Deistic conception" you're referring to, or why you "would not recognize [it] as 'God'"?

Let's not shift things too much. It was the question I labeled as stupid. I'd argue that any philosophical question that can't be addressed honestly is kind of stupid. I suppose I'm using 'stupid' to mean 'pointless and unproductive' rather than 'lacking in intelligence', but that's not unusual in this context. No one else has to agree, but that's my settled view.

You and bore have basically labeled it "pointless and unproductive" because it's based on an untenable metaphysical premise.  The thing is, as I have pointed out, the premise isn't untenable; it's potentially compatible with the logic of certitude-through-faith.  Even if it weren't, you seem to be arguing that

Quite possibly. You can't know how you'd react to most hypotheticals which does make them problematic from the honesty perspective (which is important).

You are on a political forum where you routinely express opinions about incredibly complicated social, economic and political constructs, all the time, and yet you're unwilling to consider your own behavior and thoughts in a hypothetical situation because those are so uncertain it would be "dishonest" to even speculate?

The idea that we have control over our feelings is risible.

When did I say you have control over your feelings?  I only said that you can "allow" thoughts to be difficult by rewarding yourself from avoiding them -- and that is exactly how our brain works.  If we train ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance or difficult thoughts, it gets harder to engage them when we really should, and more satisfying/comforting to dismiss them.  It's absolutely a learned skill.

[Alcon]

Which rebuttal is this?

You're arguing that it's impossible to engage a theoretical that requires you to accept a shoddy premise.  That was the argument I was rebutting in the remainder of the paragraph whose first two sentences you quoted.  It's the one that starts with "That's not obvious to me."  Also, see my response to bore, where I pointed out that it seems logically consistent to vest a concrete reality with metaphysical properties if it's reasonable to have "faith" in a metaphysical reality.  Why can you have faith in one, but not the other?  It's not logically impossible, and even if it were, there's nothing that stops you exploring a premise based on a logical impossibility.

Which part is vague?

You think that most intelligent people would know what "particularly boring and pedantic Deistic conception" you're referring to, or why you "would not recognize [it] as 'God'"?

Let's not shift things too much. It was the question I labeled as stupid. I'd argue that any philosophical question that can't be addressed honestly is kind of stupid. I suppose I'm using 'stupid' to mean 'pointless and unproductive' rather than 'lacking in intelligence', but that's not unusual in this context. No one else has to agree, but that's my settled view.

You and bore have basically labeled it "pointless and unproductive" because it's based on an untenable metaphysical premise.  The thing is, as I have pointed out, the premise isn't untenable; it's potentially compatible with the logic of certitude-through-faith.  Even if it weren't, you seem to be arguing that

Quite possibly. You can't know how you'd react to most hypotheticals which does make them problematic from the honesty perspective (which is important).

You are on a political forum where you routinely express opinions about incredibly complicated social, economic and political constructs, all the time, and yet you're unwilling to consider your own behavior and thoughts in a hypothetical situation because those are so uncertain it would be "dishonest" to even speculate?

The idea that we have control over our feelings is risible.

When did I say you have control over your feelings?  I only said that you can "allow" thoughts to be difficult by rewarding yourself from avoiding them -- and that is exactly how our brain works.  If we train ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance or difficult thoughts, it gets harder to engage them when we really should, and more satisfying/comforting to dismiss them.  It's absolutely a learned skill.

[Alcon]

There is no way to do disprove 'God', a physical or a spiritual being.

I get the distinct impression you reply to a lot of topics you don't read.

**********************************************

Your main argument, which is reasonable, is that God is not knowable based on empirical observation.  I'm not sure if you're arguing for certitude-via-faith or belief-in-absence-of-certitude, but it doesn't really matter.  The thing is, though, that the majority of Christians (at least in the polling I've seen) do, in fact, express certitude.  You might (rightly) argue that these Christians may believe in certitude-via-faith.  But if you believe in certitude-of-faith, and believe that's reasonable (I don't), how is any leap to attribute (via certitude-of-faith) metaphysical meaning to something concrete?  It's not really that hard to imagine a religion that has faith in the metaphysical significance of a concrete thing or observation.  That's why I reject calling this question "stupid," even if adding the "concrete" part was an unnecessary distraction; it's not inherently inconsistent with the thinking/belief system of most theists.

I'm not sure I get your point. Of course many people are convinced that God exists, and many other people are convinced that He doesn't. It's worth noting that convinced does not mean mathematical proof though, it basically just means 99.9999999%. You might argue that the distinction is meaningless, and in all practical circumstances it is, but I don't care about practicalities, I'm a mathematician. I'm making a narrow point that the question of God's existence is not something that can be established as an unambiguous 100% proof, even in principle. The actual experience of believing is neither here nor there.

Let me distill the arguments as clearly as I can, since I went a bit overboard on making them precise:

1. Most practicing Christians in the United States do identify as "certain."  I do not think many of these people are rounding 100.00% up to certitude; many of them belief that faith is genuinely sufficient for certitude.  If they can have certitude based on faith in that metaphysical question, I do not see why they can't have similar faith-based certitude that a concrete, observable reality could also justify metaphysical certainty.

2. Even if that's not the case, and you think the premise (certainty about metaphysical truth) is dumb, this still seems interesting as a pure thought experiment.  I doubt it's functionally different from asking people what would happen if they were convinced God doesn't exist; I expect most people would react similarly (if not identically) to a 99.9% certainty their beliefs were wrong vs. a 100.0% certainty.

You misunderstand me. Of course my mind has been changed and of course I'm probably mistaken about many things I believe now. My argument is emphatically not (because, let's be honest, it's such a ludicrous argument that no one serious can believe it) that people's views don't change, nor that it happens rarely, nor that it shouldn't happen.

My argument is that we can't know how they will change until they do change, so talking about how they might change if thing X happens is about as likely to be accurate as astrology.

...Really?  You don't have strong enough theory of mind that you can think through your likely reaction to theoretical situations?  You can't think about the implications a change in belief would have on your philosophy and emotional investments?  I just read your (very nice) post on why you're a Christian, and you came to a strong conclusion through various intuitions, including the sense that Jesus "must be" Lord and Savior...and yet you're unwilling to speculate on a non-metaphysical question involving your theoretical emotional, behavioral, or intellectual reaction to a change in beliefs?  Your post also indicated that you "came to" a belief in God and Christianity, which makes them even more puzzling to me.

I'm not trying to be presumptive, but I've never seen so many people on this forum dodge a hard-to-answer or hypothetical question.  Normally, people here love this sort of thing.  It makes me wonder if it's a counterfactual people dislike considering for some reason.

[Alcon]

Here's where I see the difficulty. I'm talking about a proof independent of experience and you're not. What I mean by that is something like the proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. It is undeniably true for all people. A person can not deny the premise by saying "Well actually I don't believe that prime numbers exist" .I'm saying that a proof like that about God can not exist, for the simple reason that the premises are about the world and they do not have to be accepted. I don't doubt that many people wholeheartedly accept or wholeheartedly reject the premises, but my point is that if you want you can deny them without contradiction. Therefore no such proof or disproof of God is possible. At most you could get a sort of Goldbach's Conjecture situation, where every indication we have is in favour of God not existing, but it can still be rejected without doing damage to logic.

As you note in your second point though and as I noted before, this is something of a tangent. For the practical purposes of this question it doesn't really matter if it's 99.99........9% or 100%.  And while maybe these sorts of arguments can't be given direct percentage scores, I don't doubt that there could emerge very suggestive evidence that God doesn't exist.

I'm not sure I'm talking about proof dependent on experience, since I think everything we're talking about is based on observation, which is derived from experience.  Beyond that, we're on the same page, but what I said still stands.  I do not think most people would deny that they're "certain"; they would say they're absolutely certain because of their faith, and claim it's not remotely equivocal.  I think this is illogical, and you probably agree.  But if you ask me to take "certain" to mean "less than certain," why are you not applying similar latitude to interpreting the "concrete proof" part of this question as the "very suggestive evidence" you mention?

At this point, I think that the interpretive difference here is kind of pedantic.  My point is that people are reacting with hostility to this question, interpreting it with very little flexibility, and yet you're being very deferential toward those who take "certain" to mean "very slightly uncertain."  That seems inconsistent.

Yes, really  

I'm perfectly happy to give things that would make me at the very least doubt christianity, and maybe turn theism more generally. Things like the laws of the universe breaking down, Jesus's body being found, other gospels being discovered, the discovery of a babelfish and so on. But I'm not able to say how I would react to becoming an atheist until it happens.

Perhaps able isn't the right word though. I suppose I could speculate (which I think is an appropriate word) about it, but I just don't think it's helpful. For one thing there would be a very loose connection between what we think would happen and what actually does, otherwise bookies wouldn't exist. We are all pretty terrible at prognosticating, and when it comes to something as personal as our most important convictions we're even worse at it. The other problem is that when it comes to hypotheticals we invariably lie and give as the answer what we feel we ought to do, rather than what we actually would. There is a reason everyone in this forum claims they would have voted for the SPD in 1932.  

My take on this is that the question in the OP is the philosophical equivalent of "What if the Nazis won?" or "What if Stalin died in 1960 instead?" It can be fun to wile away a few hours discussing it but you won't learn much because you'll never know if you're right. In other words, it's not serious history. And this question isn't serious philosophy.

...

2. I'm speaking for myself, but I would find a question along the lines of "For all you atheists, if God was conclusively proven how would you react?" similarly problematic. I think the same about the Who would you support in the American Civil War thread in FC at the moment.  I just don't think such questions have much merit, except as a fun exercise. It's not the fact we have to make assumptions to have a falsifiable debate on this question which troubles me, we have to make such assumptions for every debate. It's that for this debate, there are no assumptions you can make that make them falsifiable.

You have some fair points here, but I think your analogy to analyzing past events doesn't work at all.  That's because considering how you would have reacted to a past event introduces a much larger set of variables, and those variables play into cognitive bias much more effectively.   Those aren't issues with the question in this thread.  Let me explain.

Larger set of variables first: In this thought experiment, we hold everything else constant except the change in the input about God's existence.  When people are asked to consider how their 1940 analogue would have voted, they are forced to consider the million variables that would change, were they an analogous person in 1940 -- personal background, surroundings, knowledge, etc.  The reason people say they wouldn't have supported Nazi Germany is because they fail to consider the variables that would have changed.  Instead, they hold them constant, using information, background, and context they have now.  That's errant if you're trying to predict if your analogous past-self would have supported the Nazis.  It's perfectly fine if you're trying to present whether your current self would support the Nazis if transported into the past.  The question we're asking here asks people to hold all other variables constant, so the fact that people are bad at retrospective analysis is not a concern with the question in this thread.  In this case, failing to adjust for those variables is correctly answering the question.

Now for the cognitive bias issue.  You might protest that there's another factor with the Nazi analogy, in that people are biased toward giving desirable answers, so their answers on theoreticals can't be trusted.  That is, you could argue that even if the question where "with the background and context you have today, would you have supported the Nazis in 1940?", a lot of people would say no, wanting to think themselves less susceptible to being swayed by something bad.  However, again, that's not relevant here.   There is no desirability bias associated with predicting what would happen if you changed your mind to a belief you find unpleasant (that God doesn't exist).  If anything, the desirability bias is toward not engaging the premise, because it's accepting the premise that is undesirable, not considering the implications of doing so.  That would be consistent with people's total dodging in this thread -- it would not be consistent with this question being fatally flawed.

(There is also, in the retrospective analysis, a bias toward believing you'd be an accurate predictor/evaluator.  That's definitely a problem in the historical analysis analogies you give.  It's not a problem in this case, since you're asked to talk about how you process something you currently think is inaccurate anyway.)

In sum, I think your analogy fails to reject this as a reasonable and productive question, because the things that make the historical questions unreasonable/unproductive aren't a problem here...in some cases, they're actually good for this question.  A lot of my argument here is intuition-based, so let me know if you disagree with anything I'm saying.

[Alcon]

...and importantly this silly question isn't being raised as a 'haha I has a question now lol' but as a barely concealed broadside. Inevitably the tone of responses is not going to be particularly friendly.

isn't "barely concealed broadside" rather part of your personal brand?

[Alcon]

God is non-falsifiable. The hypothetical is as nonsensical as asking what you'd do if justice or freedom were disproven.

I agree with your point on falsifiability, but I don't think the analogies quite work logically.  "Freedom" and "justice" could be constructs, or abstractions of a (near-)universal set of preferences had by people; they don't necessarily need to be "true" in any sense to exist as concepts, or be useful.  Asserting the existence of God, by contrast, is generally a claim about the truth of the world.  "Disproving" 'freedom' and 'justice' doesn't make syntactical sense the way "disproving" God might (even if I agree that metaphysical claims -- all of them -- are unfalsifiable).

Further, if such a proof did exist, it would be impossible to tell if it were just a test created by an omniscient being or not. But, ignoring all this, I'll play along.

Those counterfactuals also exist for your current beliefs, no?  Why is this such a terminal issue for this hypothetical scenario but not a problem for your current beliefs?

There seems to be a lot of this in threads about religion here.  It doesn't make sense to arbitrarily apply much higher standards of scrutiny toward arguments against one's current belief system, than those in favor.

[Alcon]

I don't think that when people say they're certain they actually mean they're almost certain. That strikes me as arrogance, to think that I alone can say what people really mean. What I do think is that certain to the person who's had an experience does not mean certain for everyone else. Take the example of me saying that I've witnessed an assault. I can be certain that I've witnessed an argument, but if I told you about this, you would not be certain that this had happened, because, for instance, I might be a liar. So what is certain for an individual is not certain for everyone. I'm saying that a disproof of God could never, by it's very nature, be like the proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers, rather, it would be something like my claim to witnessing a argument.

So seeing as I don't conflate certain with very nearly certain, there is no inconsistency with me not conflating 99.999999% and 100%. That said, we both agree that for the purposes of this question they give the same results.

I agree with your analysis of the nature of reasonable near-certainty, although I think you're over-thinking the amount of logic most people apply.  I expect if you asked theists, a lot (possibly most) would unequivocally say that they're certain, period, and it's a matter of faith.  At least, a significant proportion would say intellectual certainty of any degree is moot in the presence of faith.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty confident it's very common.

But it doesn't really matter.  My objection was not to you being inconsistent about conflating 99.9999% with 100% and near-certainty with certainty.  My objection was with you reading "certain" to reasonably mean 99.9999%, and yet not reading the topic question to be getting at, as you put it, "very suggestive evidence."  That seems inconsistent to me.

Not to start a separate discussion, but unless you have reason to believe that those with different intuitions/experiences than you are being dishonest, or are unknowingly deluded, why would you remain "near-certain" that your intuitions/experiences are correct if others' are strongly different?  Applying that to the witness example, if my honest friend reported being quite sure he saw something else (as often happens in witness situations), I wouldn't maintain near-certitude about my own perception.  That wouldn't be reasonable.  We know it wouldn't be reasonable, because we know how inaccurate perceptions of concrete events are.  Deferring to one's own religious intuitions seems to be treating metaphysical perception as more accurate than our perception of concrete, manifest events.  That doesn't seem crazy to you?

The thing is this question is asking those of us who are theists to imagine ourselves as atheists. Now for most theists religion is about more than just a set of abstract beliefs-it, for want of a better word, inserts itself everywhere. Your religion can shape your morals, your politics, your employment, your entertainment, your grieving, your celebrating, how you spend your free time, your engagements with your family and so on. Trying to imagine how your religion being shown as false would change you therefore requires you to accurately evaluate, in a similar way to the Nazi question, thousands of variables- because such a revelation could change everything.

It does -- and if I got the impression your only issue was that it's a difficult question to answer because there are a lot of variables, I wouldn't be objecting.  However, you said: "There is a reason everyone in this forum claims they would have voted for the SPD in 1932."  You're right.  However, that reason is about the systematic skews I discussed, not merely that there are a lot of variables.  If the problem were primarily about many variables, as opposed to desirability effects, you'd expect the error to be more randomly distributed (as unskewed errors would usually be).  That's not the case, for the reasons I mentioned.  As such, that example is poor proof that having a lot of variables makes a question "stupid" and unanswerable.

I disagree that having a lot of variables makes a question "stupid" and unanswerable.  There are thousands of variables involved in any probabilistic evaluation of human behavior, and we make them all the time.  Moreover, even if we are wrong about our own theory of mind, it's interesting and useful to parse how we'd expect ourselves to handle a situation.  It tells us a lot about our belief system, our emotions, our morals, everything.

For example: Just last month, my closest friend had a sudden onset of suicidal depression and alcohol abuse.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would handle losing him and learning to live with the grief.  It's something I've never been through before, so there were a ton of unknown variables to consider.  But did I have intelligent, useful thoughts about how I might process it emotionally and intellectually?  Definitely.  It's really hard for me to believe that this is somehow impossible to do with something like changing religious belief.  Complicated, multi-variable questions and theory-of-mind thinking are such a ubiquitous part of life.  They're a ubiquitous part of politics, social sciences, and this forum.  It's hard for me to believe the reticence to respond to this question is merely concern about the complexity of the theoretical.

The other point, about cognitive bias, again, I think applies to this scenario, albeit in (obviously) a much more nuanced way than with the nazi example. It's difficult not to see some people downplaying the role of religion in their life, because they don't think it's cool or whatever. Similarly there will be some people who exaggerate the effects of this revelation because they want to present themselves as more pious than they actually are.  We already know, from decades of religious data, that it is a nightmare even getting truthful simple details right (americans massively exaggerate how often they attend church, for instance). I don't see why those same biases wouldn't be at play here, especially as, unlike in those cases, there's simply no way for anyone to call you out, because the whole thing is hypothetical.

I think I basically responded to this objection in the portion you're quoting.  Yes, of course Americans overreport church attendance.  That's because of social desirability bias, and because people tend to remember their own actions in more favorable terms than actually occurred.  My point was that I'm asking you to continue a hypothetical situation where the premise is not desirable.  Considering that accepting the premise itself is "undesirable," why are social desirability effects destroying your ability to think through the implication of accepting the premise?  The only problem there would be if people found accepting the premise of the question so "undesirable" that they consciously refused to engage it in even a theoretical sense.

Which is exactly what most people in this thread are doing.

Which is exactly my point.

[Alcon]

This thread summarized: man attempts to convince others that, contrary to what their preferences might tell them, that they should actually partake in counterfactual conversations that do not amuse them in the slightest.

That's not what I'm arguing.

Why am I posting in here? I'm not sure but this thread is a sight to behold. The OP basically slapped his dong out on a table to taunt others and some people are defending his taunt. What if a Christian posted a thread titled "Hypothetical: Jesus Christ returns to the Earth and tells Everyone that he's Lord and Savior"? I'm assuming that you wouldn't bother participating! Not because it's "implausible", because this thread is equally implausible, but rather because it wouldn't interest you; it's a question designed to irritate people, not to enlighten them in any way.  I don't think there's any point in dressing this up.

I totally agree this was probably mostly an attempt at taunting, but intentions have nothing to do with the substance of the question.  If the substance of the question doesn't interest people, that's fine.  I've argued the question isn't "stupid" and has potential substantive value, not that everyone has to be interested in that substantive value.

Please go ahead and quote a single place where I have criticized people for not participating in this topic because they don't find the question interesting.  I'll wait.

I also think it's totally reasonable to avoid the topic if you think the OP is baiting.  Again, not what I've been arguing against.

[Alcon]

I've been very clear, from my first post in this thread that, for the purposes of this question, near certainty and certainty are the same thing. Nevertheless whether such a 100% proof could exist was being discussed before I posted as a separate discussion, and I also gave my views that such a thing is not possible.

Not trying to be a jerk, but that's not really responsive to what I just said.  I didn't accuse you of being inconsistent about certainty and near-certainty being the same.  I said I think it's inconsistent to give a non-literal interpretation to "certain" and then a literal interpretation to "definitive, concrete evidence."

Yeah, this is a completely different discussion, but I would say that it depends. We obviously need to keep in mind the limitations of our senses, and that they are generally greater than we care to admit. But nevertheless if we have experienced something that we know can not be explained by any other means, then it would be silly to reject it just because others disagree. This is the sort of question that does not lend itself to generalities though. Perhaps as a rule I'd say that we should be very sceptical towards our own experiences, but we should certainly not reject them outright just because others contradict them.

I'm not sure it's a completely different discussion, because it goes pretty directly toward whether it's possible for proof to be "concrete" in any meaningful way.  No problem if you want to separate out our conversation on this, though.

I'm not arguing for "rejecting outright" one's own personal perceptions.  I'm arguing that it makes no sense to dismiss or nearly completely discount perceptions of other people's perceptions.  That is, if we perceive other reasonable, honest people as having different and highly variable intuitions and perceptions (as they do), it makes no sense to affirm our direct observations.  If two sane, honest people viewed the same crime, and had two different, strongly-held perceptions about what happened, would it make sense for one to believe their perception is more likely?  Sure, because there's always the (small) chance that the other person is dishonest or deluded and you don't know it.  However, does it make sense to affirm your own perception with certitude, dismissing your perception of their perception?  That seems obviously unreasonable to me.

The thing about the variables is they aren't measures of the same thing, they're each measures of a different thing. What I mean by this is all of the variables I've suggested (take, for example, social life and taste in music) are largely independent. What this means is if you're wrong about one in a positive direction and wrong about one in a negative direction they won't cancel out, you're just wrong in two different ways.

Again, you're forgetting that I was responding particularly to your analogy about Nazi Germany, under the belief that you were invoking that particular analogy because there was a systematic bias to answers on that question.  I think that was a totally fair interpretation, considering the original quote: There is a reason everyone in this forum claims they would have voted for the SPD in 1932.  If you were just talking about layering a lot of independent variables, why would you be using an example that’s clearly about systemic skew?  

 

I will concede that answering hypotheticals can tell us a lot about how we are now (Think of trolley problems, for example) But I think that, even there almost universally, the more variables the less useful it is. For instance "Could there have been a revolution in Russia without the First World War?" is a useful historical question "What would Russia have looked like without the First World War?" is not.  This is because the more variables, the harder it is for us to actually grasp and put ourselves inside the situation.

I agree that having a lot of independent variables makes this harder to answer.  I don’t think the independent variables are enough that it’s a “stupid” question, especially since it also offers the potential for moral reasoning that involves a lot fewer independent variables than predicting behavior or emotional reactions.  It’s cool if other people don’t find that feasible or worthwhile, but again, my objection is to the hostile reaction that forwarding the question has received.  

I'm sorry to hear about your friend, and I'm glad that this type of question helped you through what must have been a very difficult time. I, too, when faced with problems (though none as bad as yours) go through in my mind various hypotheticals, and it can be quite cathartic for me, personally. But I would say that it's only cathartic if you want to do it, and, also, when I've tried doing it I've never actually been right about the future.

I’m not disagreeing, but I’m surprised to hear that.  You’ve never been right (or at least insightful) about theory-of-mind analysis of yourself, enough to justify doing it?  I’m also surprised by the disinterest in reasoning through moral conclusions that require premises you don’t believe in.  Unlike what DFB claims, I don’t have a problem with it, but I’m surprised.

(And thanks – hell of a month, but things are fine.  Antidepressants can work magic when you stop abusing alcohol and let them work!)

See, I don't think this argument works. Yes, there are many people who find the premise undesireable, but I don't see why that makes them unlikely to answer the question. You could fill whole libraries with fiction where the character is in a bad situation. There are an almost infinite number of books where we are asked to judge how the protagonist reacts in a tight spot.

Sorry, just to be clear, I don’t actually think the main reason people are dodging this question is because it requires them to accept undesirable premises.  Although that is definitely something people do – I can dig up some research, but people are very bad at reasoning through the implications when they don’t like a foundational premise.  Our brains try to shut that down.  However, I honestly think the reason people are dodging the question here is because they think it’s gotcha bait (which is fair).

I was saying that the only major desirability bias I could see would be not wanting to accept the question's premise.  That doesn't imply I think the the main reason people are rejecting the question is desirability bias .

The thing is, even where the situation is one we would rather not be in, there are still "right" and "wrong" choices. Those of us who are religious may not wish to imagine a Godless universe, but we'd still like to imagine that we wouldn't collapse into hedonism. Or, vice versa, we would rather not say that our religion was just a fig leaf and did not shape us in any way.

That’s the sort of stuff I think is worth exploring here!  (Again, not arguing people have to be interested in doing so; I just don’t think the question is “stupid.”)

[Alcon]

Hey, sorry, but I'm swamped by work things and don't want to reply while out of my mind.  Will ASAP!

[Alcon]

Hey, sorry, but I'm swamped by work things and don't want to reply while out of my mind.  Will ASAP!

Take as long as you need, I'm looking forward to continuing the discussion when you can

Totally accidentally dropped this off my to-do list.  Still on the docket.  sorry...

[Alcon]

I've sort of lost the thread here, I'm not entirely sure what I'm being accused of  What I was trying to get at was that, for me, the discussion about the question in the OP and the discussion about whether a undeniable 100% proof/disproof of God were possible were entirely separate.

Just to put it simply: you complained that this thread was ridiculous on the grounds it suggested it was possible to have "definitive, concrete evidence."  However, you argued that we should presume the term "certain" actually means "less than certain," and that certitude is an entirely individual matter.  It seems like you're being inexplicably flexible with the definition of "certain" considering how inflexible you were with "definitive, concrete."

I don't disagree with this. I would say that most "religious experiences" don't really lend themselves to this type of contradiction though. With mental, interior experiences there are no other witnesses.

Why does it matter to the analogy if there aren't other witnesses?  The point is two apparently sane, honest people are reporting mutually contradictory things, and you're arguing they'd both be reasonable to be certain their perception was correct, even though they accept the other person is likely just as sane and honest as they are.

Here, just to prove the point that the lack of a witness doesn't matter to the analogy: imagine that two sane, honest people, who reasonably trusted each other's sanity and honesty, thought they saw the same mutual friend at the exact same time, except in two totally different locations.  Would it be reasonable for them to say, "Well, you're sane and honest and I assume your perception is reasonable, but I'm going to ignore that and remain certain that I saw the guy and my perception couldn't have been mistaken"?  No, obviously not.  And if they did assume that certainty was warranted, we know they would be being unreasonable -- because we have evidence about the accuracy of recalled perceptions.

And my analogy involved a concrete issue -- not a metaphysical one, where one assumes a little more uncertainty about our perceptions is probably warranted.

Perhaps I confused you by conflating two separate examples. Looking back I definitely did use the SPD example to show the problem with hypotheticals with one option more socially desirable than an other. But I did also use other examples like "What would happen if the Nazis had won
World War II?" as examples of the problems of lots of variables.

Err, dude, in the SPD paragraph you stated "bookies exist for a reason."  That makes absolutely no sense if your SPD point was an entirely separate point from your WW2 outcome point, unless you mean to tell me that cognitive bias was the reason bookies exist, as opposed to unpredictability.  Are you sure you weren't conflating your own arguments a little?

Regarding variables, I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I think there simply are too many variables. What I would say though is that there are more variables the more embedded religion is in someone's life, which I think renders the question answerable only to the people whose answers aren't particularly interesting.

Really, do you think I was only able to consider the emotional and social implications of my friend's death because his involvement in my life is "not particularly interesting"?  Or do you just think it is so difficult to be at all accurate about these thoughts and predictions as to render the thinking pointless?

(This isn't a "gotcha" question at all.  I'm not offended or anything.  That just strikes me as a surprising assertion.)

I said it was never accurate, not that it was never justified Again, as I mentioned above, I don't see the question as moral, so I wouldn't describe it like that.

You don't see the question "How do you live your life?" as at all impacted by changes in your moral belief system?

[Alcon]

Wish I had seen this sooner.  At this point, I'll probably have to reply in a few weeks -- sorry.  I'll drop you a PM when I'm done.