It's fairly common for people to respond to this sort of question by saying something along the lines of "I disapprove of organized religion, but have spiritual faith."
My own view is exactly the opposite. I see the value in the ritual, community, and psychological "anchor" that organized religion can provide. But spiritual faith seems absurd; why mix your emotional security and your sense of identity up with a bunch of conceptual abstractions, or delude yourself into thinking that the subjective and particular is really objective and universal?
I respect religion, per se, and hold no grudge against religions that use theology and mythology as part of their symbolic repertoire. So when I say "I do not believe in God", I'm not so much rejecting God as rejecting belief.
Whether or not God exists objectively isn't really something I think about or care about answering.
Studies have been done on the effect of (other people's) prayers in curing a patient. They've all shown no effect, but let's say the experiment had shown convincingly that prayers of the followers of a specific religion result in major improvements to the patients' health.
Would you still say the question was meaningless? If not, how can a question be meaningless if it depends on the result of an experiment?
It's still jumping to an unrealistic conclusion. Interesting, for sure - but it'd just mean better scientific explanation is required, otherwise it's the very definition of superstition.
What you ask is whether the question remains meaningless when confronted by strong evidence towards the existence of a godlike supernatural being that answers to prayers of a given group.
I guess the question will remain meaningless until such evidence is uncovered.
I guess the question will remain meaningless until such evidence is uncovered
I doubt people who think the question is meaningless will be looking for answers. This is one reason such "evidence" may never be available.
Another reason (a stronger one, in my opinion) is that this question is purely a matter of belief and therefore outside of the realm of science. Which may be another explanation why some people refuse to consider the question.
If it's outside the realm of science, it's no longer a question. The believer already has an answer. In fact, any answer that makes the believer happy will do, for it cannot be neither proved nor disproved.
Science folks my return to the question in the future, when there is a hypothesis to test. Right now, it can't. Trying to answer a question by throwing reason out the window cannot be called trying very hard...
Yes. "Does the act of prayer have beneficial psychological effects?" and "does God exist?" are two different questions, and I do not presume any dependence of the latter on the former.
Besides, I don't see how being dependent upon the results of an experiment has any bearing on the meaning of the question. The data collected in the experiment may be empirically valid, but the connection between the data and the question is inherently rational, not empirical, and you must already have a set of presumptive axioms in order to connect the concrete data to the abstract question.
I don't see how the concept of meaning can be discussed in general terms at all. It seems to inhere in the relationship between a person and the ideas he considers.
I've certainly encountered other people who behave and speak in ways that indicate that they attribute a great deal of meaning to this question (often ironically because they insist on asserting an empirical basis for their faith), so I would not presume to speak for them.
(BTW, note that I'm being pedantic in this thread in order to discuss this topic with a high degree of precision. I'm not trying to create a semantics rathole, honest. But oftentimes clarifying the semantics is necessary to have a productive conversation.)
"2+2 is 5" is a mathematical statement. Mathematics is different from the rest of science in that it is not an experimental science, so that a (theoretical) statement does not need an experimental confirmation, just a (theoretical) proof.
Isn't the question only meaningless if the answer is No? Assuming you're talking about the traditional Judeo-Christian God, then you would certainly be missing out on a lot of good (both in this life and the next) if the answer is Yes.
When I say "the question is meaningless", I'm saying that the question doesn't identify a gap in useful knowledge of the world. It might be a purely definitional question for which the answer boils down to a tautology, or it may identify a trick of logic that appears to be knowledge but is not, e.g. a paradox, or it might simply be nonsense.
I say the question "does God exist?" is meaningless because:
(a) it is a simple Boolean yes/no question, but its is asking about the relationship between two incredibly abstract concepts: "God" and "existence". To address the question, these concepts must be defined in precise terms; but being abstract, there is no suitably objective metric to measure their precision against. Therefore, in practice, any logically consistent answer to this question will be a tautology.
(b) the validity of religion is not actually dependent upon the answer to this question; the concept of "faith" precludes the necessity of empirical validation. If you are religious, you may consider it important to believe in God, but this is not the same thing as it being important that God objectively exist.
(c) formalities of thought aside, my underlying metric is how useful answering the question is, not how true it is, and I do not see useful value in answering the question. Asking the question, on the other hand, opens the door to interesting conversations like this one, which give us an opportunity to analyze, exercise and improve our thought processes, which is why I'm participating in the discussion so extensively. :)
a.k.a. Pascal’s Wager: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager . It’s rather broken as a theological argument, if only for the fact that who’s to say you’re choosing the right religion if you do decide to go down the spirituality route?
I'm not suggesting that logic would lead you to adopt any certain religion. I'm just saying the question itself isn't meaningless, because it's answer is actually pretty important (not that we can know for sure what the answer is).
It's more like: We don't know whether it's true or false, and we will never know it.. so why bother losing time with this question anyway? (I don't say that is my point, I just wanted to clarify a bit the "only matter if it's no".
That's a valid explanation. When I hear someone call a question meaningless, I immediately think that it must not matter what its answer is, not that the answer (presumably) can't be known.
That's a big assumption. From another perspective, if one does not believe that any god (should it exist) intervenes in human affairs, then the question of whether it does exist would be not as interesting.
This is actually a faith claim In and of itself. Your basically saying you don't believe there is a God who desires (or worse, requires) anything from you. Otherwise it would be in your best interest to care. You're completely entitled to your own beliefs, but passing it off as a position of "non-belief" is illogical. It's the same paradox as "there is no truth" being a truth claim. You sound like a person of great dedication to your belief, despite (and actually because of) your statements to the contrary.
"Not believing" is not the same as "believing against". The first involves no claim, positive or negative, about religion except in response to a question or prompt. The second is an active disbelief or truth claim.
Most atheists do not go around saying "I know there is no god" but, if asked "do you believe in a god/something supernatural/things you can't see", they would answer "no".
Not many atheists are strong atheists (those who "believe against god", who believe the existence of god is objectively disproven). Rather, they are not convinced by anything they experience that there is a god and so do not believe in one, just as they do not believe in unicorns or pots o' gold at the end of the rainbow. (Surely you wouldn't say they are making a faith claim about unicorns just because they don't happen to acknowledge their existence.)
However, they often actively push back against encroaching beliefs that they have not, themselves, claimed as their own.
This distinction between "nonbelief" versus "disbelief" is subtle but important.
EDIT: The only faith claim I could possibly agree atheists have is a general statement about the nature of faith as it relates to them. Namely, most say "I will not have faith. I will only accept as true that which can be demonstrated."
I prefer not to use "god" as a pronoun, since it makes assumptions which aren't warranted. Let's remove the assumptions by using "a god" instead, and look at your sentences again.
Maybe it's a problem with English. I can say that I don't believe in the existence of life on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, but that I don't believe in the non-existence either. In other words I have no data, so how could I believe either one?
The words "I believe X" used to mean "Based on all available evidence I have seen, I'm convinced that X is true". Lately however people have started to use the word to mean any strongly held opinion regardless of any evidence or reason.
To believe something is "to be convinced of the truthfulness of it", to have faith is to have hope in the future based on a belief.
Believe and faith can be misplaced: To be convinced that something is true does not make it true. A conviction which is specific enough maybe testable, a conviction can sometimes be proven or disproven. It is rational to hold convictions which are consistent with available evidence and experiences.
A theology is a (philosophical) theory about gods. A theology may be specific enough to be testable, most however are not. Someone who is convinced that a particular theology is true has a religious conviction or religious believe, which often becomes part of the persons identity or self-identification.
People who share similar theological convictions often join together to form religious groups and religious organizations. One can be convinced either by personally examining the evidence available or by the believing the word of someone who one considers an authority (often as part of the religious organization one is a member of).
The word "god" has also taken on a whole different meaning. The word god used to mean someone with authority and power. For example: In the bible Jezus applies the word "gods" to human judges? By this definition it's obvious that there are gods, many even. [We could then reserve the word "God" (with a capital letter) for the hypothetical entity which has no authority above him. Which leads to the weird conclusion that (this hypothetical) God would be the only true atheist: a-theist, without-god.]
The word "natural" is also confusing. Regardless of what we personally may think: Assume for a moment that the universe was created by someone who was not created. Now we have the situation that the universe is not "natural", but rather "artificial". The only thing natural would be this creator who what no created.
This makes it currently impossible to reason from within science about intelligent design. Intelligent design is not inherently unscientific, but it does challenge some of the most basis assumptions at the basis of modern day science: The unproven (and perhaps unprovable) conviction that Life, the universe and the rest are all purely natural (and not artificial).
The word "supernatural" is also meaningless. Just try to define any observable phenomenon which is neither natural nor artificial? By implicit definition no observable phenomenon could ever be labeled supernatural. Just the fact that we are able to observe it either makes it natural or artificial. Logic leaves no room for anything else.
Interesting use of generalization with a universal qualifier.
One has to be a wee bit naive to "accept as true" everything that one can see: The truth is often hidden behind very convincing illusions and stories, most of which are not really false. These stories often represent other, more limited, truths, pieces of the reality underneath.
That's an excellent point. I'd agree that I have a somewhat Kantian conceptualist worldview, in that I consider that I have access only to my own experience of the world, not to the world itself, so all knowledge is inherently subjective and particular.
But thinking this way, "there is no truth" is only a synthetic claim of truth, not an analytic one; that is, it is "true" because the terms are logically consistent with each other given the rules that define their context (i.e. language), not because it expresses an objective representation of reality.
In other words, given the subjective and particular nature of my experience of the world, I have no basis on which to construct a universal understanding of the world, so I am therefore incapable of making any analytical claim of truth in any universal sense.
More practically, I'd say that ideas, including the idea of God, and including the processes of science, are useful tools that enhance our experience of the world, not objective and "true" representations of the world, and are best judged on how useful they are, not whether they are "true".
One thing I dislike about society is you have to have a religion - even if it is no religion. As someone else has pointed out it just doesn't matter to some of us - until asked outright.
"Otherwise it would be in your best interest to care"
That's still assuming anything matters. So maybe there is a god that hurts me if I don't do his bidding. What is hurt (just some electrons choosing other paths than for pleasure)? Why should I care? What does it matter, if all I can do is what a god wants me to do?
A Dutch comedian once described this as the church of Aliquid, for people who believe there is "something". Despite most people calling themselves non-religious, Aliquid turned out to be the most popular faith in the Netherlands.
My own view is exactly the opposite. I see the value in the ritual, community, and psychological "anchor" that organized religion can provide. But spiritual faith seems absurd; why mix your emotional security and your sense of identity up with a bunch of conceptual abstractions, or delude yourself into thinking that the subjective and particular is really objective and universal?
I respect religion, per se, and hold no grudge against religions that use theology and mythology as part of their symbolic repertoire. So when I say "I do not believe in God", I'm not so much rejecting God as rejecting belief.
Whether or not God exists objectively isn't really something I think about or care about answering.