Why the low bar for evidence of gods?

[Nakosis]

Considering the importance that gods play in people's lives, why is the bar so low when we're talking about evidence for them?

I can't count the number of times that I've seen a theist respond to an atheist with some version of "yeah? Well, you don't know that God doesn't exist!" ... as if not being able to completely reject the possibility that gods might exist somewhere in some form justifies them devoting their lives to their God.

And the typical arguments for gods don't do much better. Think of the classical arguments for God: cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, ontological arguments, etc.: even if you set aside their logical problems, if they actually did what they set out to do, all they'd be really saying, effectively, is something like "if you take this set of factors into account, then you should conclude that there's a god out there somewhere."

But theistic-based religion is more than just the intellectual acceptance of the idea that a god exists; it's often full-blown devotion of a person's life to the existence of a god or gods and ideas that flow from it (e.g. living your life the way your god(s) want you to live it, or giving up significant time and money for worship of the god(s) and support of his/her/its/their church/clergy/etc.).

For many theists, their devotion to their god is akin to the devotion of a marriage. I don't know about other people, but if someone asks me to show that my wife exists, I can show them all sorts of evidence: pictures, stories of things she did, eyewitnesses who have also seen her, etc... I could even produce her herself and you could hear her say personally that yes, she really is my wife.

What I wouldn't do if I was asked to prove that my wife exists is make arguments like "well, sometimes when I wake up, the cats have already been fed, so it stands to reason someone lives in my house with me." And even that argument for the existence of my wife meets a higher bar than what theists typically shoot for when they try to prove their gods.

So what gives? Based on the level of discourse that I see around gods, even if I granted every one of the theists' arguments for the existence of their god(s), I'd only be at "okay - I can intellectually assent to the idea that God is possible"... or maybe with a really good argument get to "God is probable." I certainly wouldn't be anywhere near "I accept with my heart and soul that God exists, and that this is how he wants me to live my life, and I should give up a year of my life to go on a mission trip to convince other people that he exists."

Why the disparity? If the existence of gods is really an open question - and the level of discourse that I see suggests it is - then how is devotion to a theistic religion ever justified?

If you were to set a high bar I'd imagine it'd put a lot of Priests out of a job.

 

[Nakosis]

Really? You are entirely on a wrong path. God is not an object but it is the subject that experiences all objects. The question is not about existence of mango. It is about the subjective experience of its taste.

Aren't you the subject that experiences all objects?

God is about your subjective experience of God...?

So God doesn't really need to be real, as long as you can have a subjective experience of God.

So you taste a mango, hallucination or not, you taste something. Having nothing else to compare it to, the taste could be anything. You've no reason to doubt that what you're tasting is the true taste of mango.

You experience something. I fits what you think God should be, so you've no reason to doubt what you've experienced.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Really? You are entirely on a wrong path. God is not an object but it is the subject that experiences all objects. The question is not about existence of mango. It is about the subjective experience of its taste.

You can set your bar very high, defining and or studying taste of mango to finest detail possible and yet know nothing of the actual taste of mango. Or you can simply taste a mango and close your eyes in delight. In the second case, there is no bar to raise or lower.
...

Some foolish guy may refuse to taste mango directly, preferring to study tomes on mango taste. Similarly, some guys will read, debate, or deny god but will not actually take steps to introvert the roaming mind to its source. Of course introverting the outgoing mind to its source is not easy like eating a piece of mango is.

Please consider the examples as examples only.

I still have no idea what you’re trying to get at. How would a person tasting a mango establish the existence of a being that experiences all things?

 

[JustWondering]

There's a difference between an experience and the attribution of that experience.

You may have had some experience, but without some sort of justification - i.e. evidence - you can't reasonably make the jump from "I had an experience" to "I had an experience of a god." To justifiably make that leap, you'd need to be able to answer - at least for yourself - questions like "how do I know it was a god?" and "how do I know it wasn't something else?" Answering those questions still needs some sort of evidence.

I had an experience I attributed to god when I was younger and was very religious for years after. It wasn't until after I started reading the bible (on my own, not a guided bible study thing) and comparing what it said to reality that I realized that my experience was likely just a reaction to stress (my mind's best effort to cope) and not a divinely related phenomenon. My faith did give me comfort and a sense of security, but it was founded on ancient fables not reality.

 

[atanu]

Aren't you the subject that experiences all objects?
God is about your subjective experience of God...?

Is that true? Do I know who I am? Do I know whence the I? Most assume that they know, but no one does. We can refer to the following:

Personal Identity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

What am I? What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I and other human people? What are our fundamental properties, in addition to those that make us people? What, for instance, are we made of? Are we composed entirely of matter, as stones are, or are we partly or wholly immaterial? Where do our spatial boundaries lie, if we are spatially extended at all? Do we extend all the way out to our skin and no further, for instance? If so, what fixes those boundaries? Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or an aspect of something else, or perhaps some sort of process or event?

Here are some of the main proposed answers (Olson 2007):

• We are biological organisms (“animalism”: Snowdon 1990, 2014, van Inwagen 1990, Olson 1997, 2003a).
• We are material things “constituted by” organisms: a person made of the same matter as a certain animal, but they are different things because what it takes for them to persist is different (Baker 2000, Johnston 2007, Shoemaker 2011).
• We are temporal parts of animals: each of us stands to an organism as the first set stands to a tennis match (Lewis 1976).
• We are spatial parts of animals: brains, perhaps, or parts of brains (Campbell and McMahan 2010, Parfit 2012; Hudson 2001 argues that we are temporal parts of brains).
• We are partless immaterial substances—souls—or compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a material body (Swinburne 1984: 21).
• We are collections of mental states or events: “bundles of perceptions”, as Hume said (1978: 252; see also Quinton 1962 and Campbell 2006).
• There is nothing that we are: we don’t really exist at all (Russell 1985: 50, Wittgenstein 1922: 5.631, Unger 1979).

There is no consensus or even a dominant view on this question.

My teacher says "Forget God. Do you know who you are?" I at least understand his point. It is actually a joke that we claim we know God but actually we do not even know our own self.

 

[atanu]

I still have no idea what you’re trying to get at. How would a person tasting a mango establish the existence of a being that experiences all things?

Assuming that you are not being sarcastic and that you truly cannot sense that it is a metaphor that I am using, then we are wasting each other's time. Thank you for your time and patience.

 

[Nakosis]

Is that true? Do I know who I am? Do I know whence the I? Most assume that they know, but no one does. We can refer to the following:



My teacher says "Forget God. Do you know who you are?" I at least understand his point. It is actually a joke that we claim we know God but actually we do not even know our own self.

Perhaps we are just the sum of our experiences. Experiences which may or may not end when the body physically dies.

 

[atanu]

Perhaps we are just the sum of our experiences. Experiences which may or may not end when the body physically dies.

And what about the seer-knower of the ever changing experiences?

 

[Nakosis]

And what about the seer-knower of the ever changing experiences?

Sunyata I suspect.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Assuming that you are not being sarcastic and that you truly cannot sense that it is a metaphor that I am using, then we are wasting each other's time. Thank you for your time and patience.

I get that it’s a metaphor, but based on what you’ve said, I really don’t know for what.

When I asked you if the mango in your metaphor was supposed to be God, you said it wasn’t. You said that God is the thing doing the experiencing... so are you trying to say that by tasting the mango, you somehow recognize yourself as God? That’s the best I can do, but that still seems like a wonky interpretation.