Hawking says there are no gods

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Skeptic Ginger said:
Other than you disagree with my POV, have you actually addressed it?

There is overwhelming evidence all god are fictional.
There is no evidence any real gods exist.

Old POV: ask if gods exist and even though it's obvious they are fiction, cling to the problem one can't 'prove' the negative.

New POV: ask what explains god beliefs.
With no evidence of any real gods, one can conclude all gods are fiction and ignore the need to 'prove' there are no gods

I have mixed your posts up with Phlegm's regarding people's interpretation of their inner feelings being evidence. Sorry.

Back to your post: Claiming I don't understand other POVs because I don't agree with them is your mistake.
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In general, I agree. With some nuances. It would be better to set them aside for concord sake.

What I don't agree is:
There is overwhelming scientific evidence all god are fictional.
 
kellyb said:
No, it's a paraphrase. This is the quote from the article in the OP:
Because the universe also began as a singularity, time itself could not have existed before the Big Bang. Hawking's answer, then, to what happened before the Big Bang is, "there was no time before the Big Bang."

"We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in," Hawking wrote. "For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in."
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To me, I am an agnostic about what there is outside the universe, because we can't check in practice. In theory we can, if we can get outside the universe, but then we just move the boundary of inside/outside.
In epistemological terms, the reasoning is suspect.
  • The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other
  • The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
  • The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Münchhausen_trilemma
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He solves the regression of what caused what, by going axiomatic. But that is a form of dogma, because you either accept it or not. You can as a skeptic answer - I don't know and neither do you. You don't know, you think, but how you think, doesn't solve it, because your thinking doesn't decide if there is nothing outside the universe.

Hawking was a brilliant scientist, but apparently bad at philosophy.
The answer with knowledge as for what the universe is, is that none of us know and we all use different axioms. We just treat those axioms differently.
As a skeptic, I answer with belief and not knowledge: I believe that the universe is natural.

Then the non-skeptic comes along: I demand reason, logic/proof and/or evidence.
Me: There is none.
The non-skeptic: I don't accept that!
Me: That is psychology. We are different in what we accept for the term "knowledge".
The non-skeptic: I don't like that, you are saying knowledge is not real.
Me: That is a belief in your brain, based on your belief that you can answer everything with knowledge. I know I can't, I have checked! You just believe differently.

You can see it in not just this thread!
We always end in the Münchhausen/Agrippa's trilemma and the different beliefs about how to solve that.
 
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Tommy Jeppesen said:
To me, I am an agnostic about what there is outside the universe, because we can't check in practice. In theory we can, if we can get outside the universe, but then we just move the boundary of inside/outside.
In epistemological terms, the reasoning is suspect.


He solves the regression of what caused what, by going axiomatic. But that is a form of dogma, because you either accept it or not. You can as a skeptic answer - I don't know and neither do you. You don't know, you think, but how you think, doesn't solve it, because your thinking doesn't decide if there is nothing outside the universe.

Hawking was a brilliant scientist, but apparently bad at philosophy.
The answer with knowledge as for what the universe is, is that none of us know and we all use different axioms. We just treat those axioms differently.
As a skeptic, I answer with belief and not knowledge: I believe that the universe is natural.

Then the non-skeptic comes along: I demand reason, logic/proof and/or evidence.
Me: There is none.
The non-skeptic: I don't accept that!
Me: That is psychology. We are different in what we accept for the term "knowledge".
The non-skeptic: I don't like that, you are saying knowledge is not real.
Me: That is a belief in your brain, based on your belief that you can answer everything with knowledge. I know I can't, I have checked! You just believe differently.

You can see it in not just this thread!
We always end in the Münchhausen/Agrippa's trilemma and the different beliefs about how to solve that.
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I think you're right about him just rolling with the axiomatic. The idea that nothing can exist outside of time and/or this universe does seem to be taken as an "article of faith" with his line of thinking.
 
kellyb said:
I think you're right about him just rolling with the axiomatic. The idea that nothing can exist outside of time and/or this universe does seem to be taken as an "article of faith" with his line of thinking.
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Yeah, yes, different axioms can explain differently and to compare you need a set of meta-axioms, for which you need a meta-meta set. In effect you hid the regression problem.

Now the problem is this: There are different sets of axioms of how to behave as a part of reality and the end defense always seems to come down to this:
  1. You are a candidate for a Darwin Award. Problem: Jumping out of windows and trying to fly is not all of reality.
  2. I can't believe that you believe that. Problem: It works in both direction and always involve that one of them are special in the positive sense and the other negative. That also works in both directions.
  3. I speak for a we and you are the other. Problem:Tribalism.

#1 is empirical.
#2 is cognitive.
#3 is social/moral and so on.

That is the 3 core categories.
  • Empirical
  • Rational
  • Moral
I am just able to spot them in some cases.
 
Dave Rogers said:
I disagree, and I think you're syntactically incorrect below.



"Tall," "short" and "brown-haired" are all adjectives that qualify the noun "man" here. To apply this to strong and weak atheists in the same way, you'd have to be asking whether they couldf bench press 300 pounds. But in fact, that's not what "strong" and "weak" qualify in the terms "strong atheist" and "weak atheist"; the qualify the nature of that person's atheism, and as such are very specifically descriptors of belief. It's more akin to "long brown-haired man" and "short brown-haired man".
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You’re perfectly right there. I agree, my analogy had actually been syntactically incorrect.

And absolutely, “long-brown-haired man” and “short-brown-haired-man” would, as you say, be a better analogy than mine about the “tall brown-haired man” and “short brown-haired man”.


And I would argue that a more conventional interpretation of the terms, and one which has a wider usage, is where "weak" and "strong" describe respectively the difference between not holding the positive belief that any god exists, and holding the belief that no gods exist.
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I don’t think we disagree at all. That is exactly what I was going for, except I did not, in the interests of brevity, spell out one intermediate step in my reasoning. Let me clearly discuss that intermediate step now:

Yes, the hard atheist does hold the belief that no gods exist. As you say.

Now this hard atheist might -- like anyone else -- either be rational in as much as this particular position, or he may not.

And any claim you make -- either to yourself in your mind, our aloud to the world at large -- you need to back up, in order to be rational.

Therefore, in order for the hard atheist to reasonably and rationally make his claim that no gods exist, he must be able to back it up.

In as much as he can back up this claim of his, that no gods exist, to that extent his position -- his hard atheism -- is rational.

Of course, he is free to hold on to his hard atheism without necessarily being scrupulously rational. He may simply hold this opinion subjectively, a personally held belief; and in as much as he is aware that his belief is simply subjective, a matter of his personal unsupported opinion, I’d say that, while not strictly rational, he is nevertheless reasonable.

It is when the hard atheist is neither rational (that is, unable to back up his claim that there are no gods), nor aware that his position is subjective and personal, that he is actually unreasonable.

As for the soft atheist: his position is simple. I have seen no good evidence for the existence of God. Unless and until such is available, I do not believe in (your) God. Simple, and straightforward, and reasonable.

This also is ultimately (and implicitly) a statement of personal belief. Therefore, the soft atheist cannot actually, basis his reasoning of no-good-evidence, go out and claim that there are no gods. He only says that he sees no good reason to believe in it.

And yes, all of this presumes this rationality. Sure, people are free to be irrational. So that you can have a hard atheist who blissfully uses the soft atheist’s reasoning to defend his hard postion, while claiming objective validity for his stance. Just as you might have the cock-eyed theist claiming objective validity for his belief in fairy tales. So yes, you could in theory have hard atheists who think this way. Therefore, I suppose what I said pertains to the rational hard atheist and the rational soft atheist. That presumption of rationality I suppose I may have taken for granted, and implicitly assumed without actually spelling it out.


(...) it is fundamentally impossible to disprove that any entity exists that may be defined by the term "god", and so one would have to conclude from your definition that strong atheism is a logical impossibility.

Dave
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No, I don’t think that is the case at all.

First of all, let’s get one thing out of the way. Nothing at all can be “proved” with cent per cent certitude in the real world; absolute proofs cannot exist outside of pure logic and pure mathematics (and that only because we choose to operate within set-in-stone axioms that we choose to take as given). Any “proofs” IRL can only be essentially tentative. This essential tentativeness inherent to any real-world “proofs” or “disproofs” isn’t what I’m referring to at all. We’ll take for granted that, when we say something is “proved” or “disproved”, we mean that that something has been proved (or disproved) in as much as anything can be proved or disproved at all IRL.

With that understood, yes, it is very much possible to actually disprove some Gods.

It was believed that thunder was the weapon of Thor (and, in other cultures, of Indra), and that these Gods needed to be “propitiated”, usually through “sacrifices” and worship, else you’d either get no rains at all, or too much rains or thunderous storms, or whatever. Again, this can be clearly disproved, first, by showing how performing or stopping these rituals has no significant effect on thunder and rains; and two, by clearly explaining the mechanism of rain and thunder.

Similarly, the God of the Bible: that God-idea also has many attributes, clearly mentioned, many of which can actually be disproved. For instance, one article of belief for some/many people is that what the Bible contains is literally the Word of God. So, if one can clearly show how the Bible came to be written, and also how different versions/Gospels actually contained contradicting claims and accounts, then that would clearly disprove the-God-that-wrote-the-Bible.

So absolutely, it is indeed possible to actually actively disprove certain God ideas. And therefore, it is possible to reasonably hold a hard-atheistic position in respect of some Gods.

But you’re right, disproving the existence of all God-ideas that men have thought up, that is truly an impossibility -- not just impractical but, given the nature of some beliefs, actually impossible -- therefore, yes, a generally hard-atheistic position, as it applies to all God ideas, is indeed, as you say, a logical impossibility. You cannot reasonably hold that position, not for all Gods -- although absolutely, you can hold it for certain specific Gods.

For instance, as kellyb had suggested earlier in this thread, if you limit your definition of Gods to only deity-Gods, and choose deliberately to leave out more abstract God-ideas, then probably hard atheism would be a valid enough stance, perfectly reasonable and rational.
 
kellyb said:
Of course.



Again, I don't really find the distinction between hard and soft meaningful. "Kneejerk rejection" is a spectrum of possible strengths of rejection. I don't see two neat boxes.

The vehemence with which I think "pshaw!" is totally arbitrary, too, and often based on my mood that moment/hour/day/week/month.



Not in my mind. At this point, I operate on the assumption that it's all a bunch of baloney. I don't need (or want) to examine every new "sighting". I feel about the bigfoot "sightings" the way I assume you (and I) feel about the promises of miraculous healing coming from the televangelists.



Again, I reject the premise of a meaningful distinction between hard and soft. :)
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You personally no longer find the soft-atheism-hard-atheism difference meaningful. Fair enough. I can understand that, and respect that.



I might not meet your definition of "hard" whatever anything, since I don't completely reject stuff like "brain in a vat" theory. Since I'm only and exclusively 100% sure about the fact of my own existence, how can I literally 100% reject anything else?
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Like I was saying to Dave Rogers in my post just preceding, in the real world nothing can actually be proved or disproved with cent per cent certitude. That kind of certainty is possible in mathematics, for example, and that only because we’re operating within axioms, and therefore in a sense everything we’re “proving” is tautological in nature.

That isn’t what I’m referring to at all.

No one can reasonably be 100% sure of anything at all. Nevertheless, that is something we ignore for all practical practices.

Leaving aside this nuance, there still are things we can hold different opinions on -- like “guilty” and “not guilty”; or “lack of evidence” on the one hand, and “evidence of lack” arising out “lack of evidence where evidence is expected”, as you’ve yourself spelt out in another post, in the context of medical research.

And this further nuance, the whole “innocent” vs “not proven guilty” routine is something you no longer find meaningful, as far as God. I take your point, and sure, that is perfectly reasonable at the individual level.

I just wanted to clarify that the inherent lack of certitude around any proof IRL -- which is what you seemed to be alluding to in that last portion of your post -- isn't really what I was referring to at all. That isn’t what the whole soft-hard business is about. I suppose you were generally reflecting about that uncertainty, without necessarily linking that to the rest of our discussion?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
But the number of potential planets is so large that incredibly unlikely cases are extremely likely to have occurred. This one here on Earth happened.
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I agree that incredibly unlikely things are extremely likely to have occurred given the huge span of time and space in which such events could occur. But that's for some particular value of "extremely unlikely".

If we knew that within 1 cubic meter of pond scum (or water near geothermal vent, or whatever the guess is for where life is most likely to emerge) has a 1/109 chance/year of a proto-organism arising, and said organism has a 1/3 chance of producing a stable lineage that goes on to evolve (instead of either it or it's first decendants dying off before evolution can really take hold), then we only need 3 billion cubic meters of water for a year, or 1 cubic meter for a billion years for something to happen. Pretty easy.

Make that 1/1030 and it might take a little while to happen, even on a planet the size of the earth, but you can be pretty confident it will happen early in the planet's history.

Make it 1/1040 and we need a galaxy full of such planets to expect it to happen once. But of course we have such a galaxy, so it's in that case it's really no surprise that it did happen at least once.

Make it 1/1060 and we might only expect it to happen once in the history of the observable universe.

Make it 1/1070 and we need a volume much larger than the observable universe (but of course we do expect that the volume of space that is much like what we see extends to such sizes) for life to have a good chance of arising once.

How do you distinguish between extremely unlikely, but given the number of places where it could happen very likely to have happened many times within our galaxy, and so unlikely that it probably only happened once within our Hubble Volume? What I mean is, what evidence makes you choose the former value rather than the latter?

It can't just be that life exists on earth, because that is the same in both cases. It could be based on your assessment of likelihood of particular pathways from basic chemistry to living organisms (I know a little, but only a little about that subject and you may know more which influences your assessment). I don't think we have a good enough understanding of abiogenisis to estimate it's probability, though we do know enough to say that it's clearly possible and there are good lines of research.

The fact that the elements of life are abundant throughout the universe is encouraging, but again we don't know enough (I may be wrong here, but this is my understanding) about how those elements come together to form the precursors to life, and then how those precursors interact to from the first proto-organisms to make a good estimate.

This is why I say I don't know. I really shouldn't guess but if I had to I'd probably lean more toward your viewpoint that life (at least simple life) is common. But I don't know of any good evidence that can distinguish between the cases I outlined above, one of which has life abundant throughout out galaxy and the other has only a single instance of life in the observable universe (and perhaps for many hubble volumes beyond).

ETA The particular numbers I used above were off the top of my head. Had I put more time into this post I'd have looked up the volume of water in the earth's oceans, thought more about how much of that volume could be included in the scope of places where life could have arisen, and in general spent more time and research effort to get those numbers at least somewhat accurate. I didn't, and I apologise if they are off by a few orders of magnitude. If you find that they are just substitute whatever you think the correct values are into those sentences. There is certainly some value that's accurate for each of those statements.
 
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David Mo said:
....
What I don't agree is:
There is overwhelming scientific evidence all god are fictional.
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Have you looked?

There are volumes of papers on the significance of god beliefs in various cultures throughout history and in pre-history.

What are you looking for, a study that says geologists looked for Péle in all the volcanoes in Hawaii and found nothing? :rolleyes:
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
As per the OP: ""If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?""
That depends on how you combine science, philosophy and morality???

In the end it is politics and not science.
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Politics? Where?

kellyb said:
They have to do the philosophy first to figure out how to test it. But, yes.
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I don't think all thinking counts as philosophy.

Phlegm said:
Sorry, I don't understand the distinction. The methodology was born out of philosophy.
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And I was born out of a zygote but I'm not a zygote, and what I do as part of my professinal work can't be called zygotes either.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
How we treat religious beliefs, is a matter of politics. Not science.
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Those are not mutually exclusive.

I'm confused by what seems like little knowledge of research in a subject in the psychosocial and anthropological fields that literally permeates the human species.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Just so people move past this misunderstanding of a logical fallacy:

The Rules of Logic Part 6: Appealing to Authority vs. Deferring to Experts
If folks don't get it from the excerpt, read the whole thing. Or review other sources. Please. Thank you.
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I didn't mean to use "argument from authority" as a fallacy. I meant, "belief from trust that this man knows 106 times (at least) as much as I do and that he knows more than 99.99 (at least) percent of people do." I understand your argument that if every "sacred" tale so far has been disproved, we can conclude all gods are fictional. I'd call that an inductive proof. But I'm not sure it meets the bar for a deductive proof. Even Hawking hedges his bets just the tiniest bit. Quite possibly he was doing that to be polite.

I find it deliciously absurd how Christian his memorial service was.

kellyb said:
My thoughts and feelings about it all are very similar to yours, but I find that the definition of "agnostic-atheist" (which I usually shorten to just "atheist" for the sake of simplicity) fits me perfectly.
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And I don't use it. Maybe I'm too chicken. But unlike you, I didn't have a particular version of God rammed down my throat. I'll have to remember to thank Mom for that, because she came from a very strict tradition. Makes Baptists look decadent.
 
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