[floomp]

> It certainly doesn't mean you have to become an atheist.

Technically, you're correct, but believing in a deity similar to the Abrahamic god and also accepting evolution is usually a sign of compartmentalization. You reach an acceptance of evolution by examining the evidence, and you reach a belief of god by starting from an unfalsifiable conclusion.

The processes required to be both religious and accepting of evolution are so diametrically opposed that, while technically possible to reconcile the two, it's rationally inconsistent to do so.

Beliefs like deism are much more understandable, although I don't personally subscribe to them. But if you're a deist, you wouldn't need to think that evolution isn't the sole source of biological diversity on Earth, either.

[lotharbot]

> "The processes required to be both religious [Abrahamic] and accepting of evolution are so diametrically opposed"

What makes you certain you have identified the process required to be religious? "Required" is a strong word, implying that it is impossible to become religious through any other process than the one you assume.

But the data shows otherwise. People become religious through a lot of very different processes. Some are drawn emotionally, others intellectually. Some are drawn by the religious community and by "fitting in", others by scholarly writings. Some are drawn because they don't like looking at evidence, others are drawn because they are dedicated to looking at evidence. Some may begin from premises that are not falsifiable, but it's quite a stretch to say that's required.

> "if you're a deist, you wouldn't need to think that evolution isn't the sole source of biological diversity on Earth"

You don't need to think that even if you're a total Bible-thumper. As long as your Bible-thumping includes an appropriate understanding of history, such that you recognize the creation story as a response to the Egyptian creation account [0], rather than as a response to Darwin.

[0] http://transformedthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/08/genesis-1-in...

[floomp]

> What makes you certain you have identified the process required to be religious? "Required" is a strong word, implying that it is impossible to become religious through any other process than the one you assume.

I was probably ambiguous, but I didn't mean to imply that there was only one process to be religious. Only that the processes to be religious aren't compatible with the processes that one uses to accept science. If you used the same level of scrutiny on religion as you do with evolution or gravity (or luminiferous aether), you'd reject religion.

> Some may begin from premises that are not falsifiable, but it's quite a stretch to say that's required.

Are there any falsifiable assertions that can convince someone to rationally become religious, and which address religion itself rather than the social and mental effects of being religious?

> You don't need to think that even if you're a total Bible-thumper. As long as your Bible-thumping includes an appropriate understanding of history, such that you recognize the creation story as a response to the Egyptian creation account [0], rather than as a response to Darwin.

Assuming said Bible-thumper doesn't interpret the Bible literally, I suppose so. But there's still the problem that they started with a religious belief and were able to mold it to fit evolution in - they didn't apply the same base standards to both ideas. I don't believe that's rationally consistent.

[lotharbot]

> "If you used the same level of scrutiny on religion as you do with evolution or gravity ... you'd reject religion."

I've used the same level of scrutiny on religion as on science -- an extremely evidential approach, I might add -- and yet I have become more religious rather than less. Your idea of the required process(es) is in error. Indeed, you appear to be guilty of exactly the error you accuse the religious of -- you are not applying an appropriate level of scrutiny to your assertion that "the processes to be religious aren't compatible with the processes [of] science". Given your assumption that the Bible would normally be interpreted literally, I submit that you've probably based your conclusion on interactions with a vocal minority which has only been around for about a century [0]. You would do well to expand your horizons to a broader cross-section of the religious community before making such sweeping generalizations about "the processes to be religious".

For reference, my masters degree is in applied mathematics; my masters presentation was a mathematical biology model of adaptive speciation. If you search through my HN comment history (consider using hnsearch.com and looking for terms like "evidence" and "falsifiable" with my username) you'll find I have a pretty firm grasp not just on the conclusions of science, but on the process as well. You'll also find a fair bit of discussion of such topics as the relation of faith to reason, and the role of evidence in religious belief.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

[floomp]

> I've used the same level of scrutiny on religion as on science -- an extremely evidential approach, I might add -- and yet I have become more religious rather than less.

What evidence did you find to make you more religious? I ask out of genuine curiosity - one or two examples would be great.

> Given your assumption that the Bible would normally be interpreted literally

You've misread. I assumed that a Bible thumper would interpret the Bible literally (since you were using it as an example of a logical extreme). Perhaps I am in error in that case. But, no, I don't assume that the Bible is interpreted literally normally.

> You would do well to expand your horizons to a broader cross-section of the religious community before making such sweeping generalizations about "the processes to be religious".

I admit that is a generalization but I'm not sure if it's sweeping. You say that it's possible to use evidence to support religion, but I hold that this can only happen if someone erroneously interprets the evidence, as humans (all humans, religious or not) have a tendency to do. That's why we have the scientific method to keep our ideas in check. Religion bypasses the scientific method and it's not an accurate description of the universe because of this reason.

---

I searched for your username and "falsifiable":

The first area of concern is that you seem to believe that god can communicate with people, including you (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2963530). I would be curious to know what mechanism is used to do this, and why you think it's more plausible than your own brain communicating with yourself.

The second concern is this:

> Now, if one person who I trust is His follower says "God told me X", and then X is wrong, the theory would be disproved -- so the theory is falsifiable.

Based on this quote, I severely doubt that you apply the same level of scrutiny to religion as you do to science, as you claim. There are several problems with this statement:

1. How to validate that someone is a "follower" of god.

2. How to validate that the person is telling the truth about what they were told.

3. How to validate that the person received a metaphysical message from god (whatever what means) rather than a hallucination. This is one point where falsifiability breaks down because I'm fairly certain that metaphysical events are unfalsifiable (since we can't analyze them "outside" the universe).

4. Even if these validations were made, I guarantee that most religious people would try to claim that god was just testing their faith, or something similar. People do this all the time when errors in the Bible are pointed out, or if a prayer isn't answered, and so on. In that sense, it still isn't falsifiable.

This is why we don't build our understanding of the world based solely on human intuition. It just isn't accurate because the universe is not a human. It's just reality. It doesn't share any of our assumptions or ideals or desires, and projecting them onto the universe to try to divine some cosmic purpose is a mistake.

I contend that nothing you've brought up is sufficient evidence to justify religion as a correct belief to hold. In fact, I'd argue that the amount of assumptions and intuitions that religion presents as truth is good reason to shed it as it seems to make it very hard to analyze it objectively.

[lotharbot]

> "I hold that [using evidence to support religion] can only happen if someone erroneously interprets the evidence" > "Religion bypasses the scientific method"

Do you have any sort of evidence to support these assertions? Can you explain precisely what it is about religion that makes it necessarily incompatible with the scientific method? You've waved your hands in the direction of falsifiability, but haven't really made a specific argument to that effect (and I don't think you understand the concept of falsifiability very well; more on this below.)

I concede that some people's approach to religion is not evidential. I concede that some people make religious claims which are not falsifiable. But you have erroneously assumed this is a necessity of religion rather than simply the failing of some individuals. You have asserted that "most religious people would try to claim that god was just testing their faith", and perhaps that is true among the religious subgroups you've interacted with, but that's not the approach I see among my subgroups.

-------

> "I would be curious to know what mechanism is used to do this, and why you think it's more plausible than your own brain communicating with yourself."

The mechanism might be described as telepathy: a thought coming into someone's mind which is not their own thought, and which was not communicated through known physical means (such as sound or sight).

I describe a few of these experiences later in the linked thread [0] -- things like hearing turn-by-turn directions to previously unknown locations, or being told to give a particular item to a stranger who had some specific need for that exact item. It is implausible that this is just my own brain, specifically because it's information my brain doesn't have at the time it's communicated.

Verifying someone is a follower of the same God is much like verifying that someone else is really friends with your mother -- they give accurate and specific descriptions which correspond to your own observations, and their behavior shows the appropriate characteristics. Verifying they're telling the truth about these experiences is much like verifying someone is telling the truth about any other experience -- partly it comes down to their credibility on other, verifiable matters (do they lie about what they were doing yesterday?), partly it comes down to the details of their story (do they get tripped up when retelling it? Is the level of detail consistent and appropriate for a true story?), and partly it comes down to the same thing as validates it's not a hallucination: there's some tangible result, such as their having found a specific person at a specific location who needed a specific item. All of the bits of scrutiny you accuse me of not applying, I have applied, and I've found that my position stands fairly strong while the alternate explanations people tend to propose are woefully inadequate [1].

> "What evidence did you find to make you more religious?"

Partly the above experiences, and personality/behavioral changes I've observed in myself and others directly following similar experiences (I regularly ask thoughtful atheists for explanations, with the honest desire for viable alternatives, but they always end up with goofy explanations requiring some combination of telepathic aliens, very honest people lying, and an unreasonable amount of luck.) A lot of it has been examinations of what are supposedly the "best" secular theories about some of the things my wife describes in [2], such as the origins of the New Testament gospels, and finding those explanations not to correspond to the evidence very well while the Christian explanations do [3].

-------

Now, you've made the same mistake about falsifiability that appeared in the other thread [4]. Specifically, you've attempted to apply the criteria of falsifiability to experiences or observations, and complained that supernatural experiences don't qualify. But falsifiability doesn't apply to observations/data, it applies to theories/explanations. Falsifiability means that a theory is constructed such that, if it was false, you can conceive of a particular set of data that would be inconsistent with the theory [5]. "I counted three white swans" is data and therefore has no relation to falsifiability; "all swans are white" is a theory which is falsifiable. Likewise, "I heard a voice that told me to do X" is data; "I recognize the voice of God, who tells me to do things which He's always right about" is a falsifiable theory (if I hear what I think is the voice of God tell me to do something that turns out to be wrong, say, "such-and-such person will be at such-and-such place" and they're not there, this is not consistent with the theory.)

You are correct that I haven't brought up sufficient evidence to justify religion as a correct belief; that's well beyond the scope of a Hacker News post. All I hope to show here is that religion is not necessarily incompatible with the evidential approach that characterizes science, and that some people who take an evidential approach become or remain religious without "compartmentalizing".

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971781

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3016150

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971214

[3] if you're willing to spend some time, watch from about 9:00 to 33:00 of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ylt1pBMm8 for a fairly intriguing argument about the names, and disambiguators, present in the gospels

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2956963

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

[alinajaf]

> I describe a few of these experiences later in the linked thread [0] -- things like hearing turn-by-turn directions to previously unknown locations, or being told to give a particular item to a stranger who had some specific need for that exact item. It is implausible that this is just my own brain, specifically because it's information my brain doesn't have at the time it's communicated.

You need psychological help.

[ericd]

Atheism is just as unprovable as theism.

And it's fairly easy to reconcile a belief that evolution is true with a belief in a complex force that influences things in the background, outside of our observation - humans have never kept tabs on more than a small percentage of happenings on this planet at once, and without being able to accurately model everything at once, we won't be able to prove that there's nothing outside our model of the universe at play. Even then, something with a suitably powerful influence over reality could alter our observations. To believe that this is impossible and that we're capable of observing/measuring every part of reality is hubris. We only evolved to see and intuitively comprehend the small piece of it that helped us best survive given our environment and unforgiving energy and developmental constraints.

[floomp]

> Atheism is just as unprovable as theism.

Perhaps, but what matters is that it asserts less than theism. When you start from no evidence, you need to believe in as little as possible until enough evidence presents itself that you can change your mind.

This is especially true given that religion has a highly plausible explanation as man-made, a creation of human imagination. When you have a collection of assertions, with no evidence, and the only physical source is the human mind itself, why would you believe it has any correspondence with reality?

> And it's fairly easy to reconcile a belief that evolution is true with a belief in a complex force that influences things in the background

I never disputed this.

> To believe that this is impossible and that we're capable of observing/measuring every part of reality is hubris.

I feel like you have created a strawman, because I never used any of these arguments.

Yes, of course we don't know every happening in the universe. Yes, our senses and reasoning skills are limited. That doesn't make religion true. How could it? Religious people have the same senses, the same access to knowledge as everyone else. I don't believe that religious people have any insight into the workings of the universe that no one else does, especially given that there are so many religions that can't agree with each other about even basic tenets. It's a very human creation - not a truth of the universe.

But I'll never assert that theism is impossible. That wouldn't be defensible, because we don't have all the information in the universe (or outside it!). Of course it's possible, but that doesn't matter, because we have no evidence whatsoever to believe it.

[ericd]

Sure, Occam's razor and all that. That doesn't really point out a correct explanation, just which one is more likely in the absence of other evidence, and it's not really something I'd bring into an argument with someone firmly on the other side of the fence.

I never argued that religion is true, I argued that atheism (rejecting the existence of a God) is no less unprovable, and might be a bit worse - the theists at least have personal experiences that might have made them believe - it seems less likely to have an experience that proves to one that there cannot be a deity. I'm personally agnostic.

And some people do have different senses and sensitivities than others, people aren't working from the same vantage point. Perhaps some religious people have experiences that others of us haven't had that proved to them just as concretely as seeing would to nonbelievers.

[Dove]

you reach a belief of god by starting from an unfalsifiable conclusion

That doesn't pass the smell test. If that were true, no intellectuals would ever convert to Christianity. In point of fact, they regularly do.

Take Lee Strobel, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strobel). You can find his particular evidences unpersuasive, but you can hardly call his process irrational.

[floomp]

> If that were true, no intellectuals would ever convert to Christianity.

That doesn't follow. Intellectuals are also susceptible to cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization, especially when there is social pressure to change your beliefs, and doubly so if you hadn't explored the rationality behind being an atheist (speaking in general, not necessarily about Strobel).

I glanced briefly at the Wikipedia article and some of its references but couldn't find anything particularly noteworthy (perhaps you could point out some examples). My first impression is that there's no reason to think he used a rational process over a process motivated by some other reasons.

Atheists converting to religion is mostly support for religion's incredible strength as a meme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_of_reli...).

[Dove]

Intellectuals are also susceptible to cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization

True enough! I guess what I really mean is that if rational processes don't lead to Christianity, you would never see people convert by following those processes. But they do all the time!

I think Lee Strobel is a good example, really. As somebody with a Master's in law and a background as a criminal investigative journalist, he certainly is reasonably well qualified to understand what evidence is and how it works. And the story he tells about his conversion is that he undertook to investigate Christianity by the same standards he would expect to use in a court case, and found it true!

Now, you could claim he's lying about that -- that he really wanted to convert because his wife did (though the story he tells is that he wanted to assemble evidence to challenge her). Or you could claim he did an incompetent job -- as critiques of his book often do. But I don't think you can claim the process he documented Case for Christ wasn't rational or evidential.

What I mean is, you don't have to buy his arguments. But I don't think you can fault him for buying them. And I don't think you can call his process anything but rational. Sure, he doesn't seem to set his prior probability on God's existence as low as some people would like, but he does certainly appear to be following the evidence where it leads.

Moreover, it's my perception as a Christian that, "Tried to evaluate Christianity to prove it false, was qualified to do so, found it true, converted" is a common story for Christian apologists. It applies to Josh McDowell, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis, just off the top of my head. (Not to mention a number of personal friends of mine.) You can say these folks are all lying or deluded, but I think that's an unlikely claim. If they didn't arrive at Christianity by rational means, they sure do a convincing job of writing like they did!