Why is your god the real god?

The biggest problem with saying "love" in English is it's a "lazy" language, ther are 5 different kinds of "Love", the Greek language has it correct and has a different word for each one; Agape, Eros, Philia, Storge, and Thelema.

We lazy English speakers simply say "Love" for all 5.

Greek Words for Love

reply to post by Mike_A


So anyway, obviously I ran out of room, but back to your orginial question with one last thought. What's my reason for believing in a God with no reason?

Well after chatting with you I've had a great revelation. I thought it was because the story of Jesus made sense to me so I chose to believe it, but now when looking at it from an evolutionary point of view it makes perfect sense.

The reason I believe in God is maybe because I'm genetically programmed to relate to stories like that. Duh, it's so simple. Maybe I don't have any control over it. Telling me not to believe in God would be like telling me not to love my own kids. It would be impossible. I'm just a biological machine with no soul. Of course I have no control over it.

Why didn't I think of it sooner? You really helped me here. You see in an environment of heavy religion like where I live, since I'm programmed like they are, my genes might prosper where your genes could get naturally selected out when they realized you're programmed not to believe in things without evidence.

In your environment I may be naturally selected out when they find out I'm programmed to not be logical about my beliefs and just take them on faith. Cause there really is no bad gene you know. It all depends on which environment your in as to what provides you an advantage and what doesn't. Like if I was a female scorpoion it may be better if I just eat my boyfriend rather than loving him. Evolution doesn't stop after all. Never know what situation a creature will find itself in.

Well anyway, I guess you can't really be mad at me. That's just the way I'm programmed to think just like you're programmed to think the way you think.

After all my thinking patterns are controlled by the physical strucutre of my brain. Damage the brain and my thinking patterns will change after all. And the physical structure is coded by my DNA. So, there's not much I can do here.

Maybe I'm just programmed to think the way I do. Oh well.

[edit on 15-10-2009 by tinfoilman]

[edit on 15-10-2009 by tinfoilman]

I didn’t redefine love I just described the process by which it comes about and the indicators.

“A fate or destiny kind of love”, however, is not a definition of love it’s a vague concept that can’t be pinned down. I did ask, but you haven’t answer, can you describe love without referring to physiological or psychological concepts? I don’t think you can unless it is kept incredibly vague. How does it work? Can it change? If so how and why? If the biological concept and your concept both illicit the same feelings and physiological reactions then why are they separate?

You haven’t argued against the biological concept of love at all, yes it’s “just” a physical/mental process, yes it can go out of whack but what is your version of love? How do you define that differently? All you are saying is that it exists outside of what I’ve already described.

And your argument of free will in relation to love is irrelevant since neither the concept of love I describe or the concept you describe involve anyone choosing to love.

Take a moment and think about what you are saying, if you can think someone loves you without taking into account (consciously or unconsciously) their behaviours or anything else I’ve said then deciding whether someone loves you is an arbitrary process. I might as well believe you love me, the reason I don’t is because of your behaviour or lack thereof along with knowledge of cultural, social and biological norms. How do you know someone loves you? If your answer is “I just do” then I’ll again point back to the unconscious top down processes that have been tested again and again and found to be true that explain this.

You have a reason why you love, you have a reason to believe someone loves you; love is not the unreasoned, illogical thing you first claimed it to be.


On god…

So, there's not much I can do here

I agree with that last post, there is evidence that belief in the supernatural or other such things may be innate, or rather we have an inbuilt need to explain things. However this last sentence isn’t true, you still have conscious control over your beliefs (assuming you’re mentally stable) so you can still choose to believe something else or nothing at all. You may have a predisposition towards a certain belief or the environment you have grown up in biased you towards that belief but these things are not generally set in stone. Knowing a new fact can negate a previously held belief.

But my question is mainly to do with how a person reasons it to be true that a specific god is true in the face of self evidently contradictory information such as the “existence” of other gods.

reply to post by Mike_A


Well there's really no point and I can't really describe another kind of love. I was just asking if you believed there is another higher level form of love like many people do that isn't purely biological, but you don't. You just believe in the biological kind

You do believe in something you call love, but it was a different kind than what I was talking about. So, my argument doesn't really apply to the kind of love you believe in because what I was asking is simply do you believe in it? Well, the answer is no so I have my answer there.

As for making a conscious decision, well there's not really evidence that people either can or cannot make conscious decisions. It's just an unknown of science at this point that they argue about endlessly.

Much of the evidence shows that the conscious itself is just an emergent illusion of the evolutionary process and people actually subconsciously make the decision sometimes seconds before they actually "thought" they themselves made the decision. In other words your conscious and the perception that you have made a decision is actually a trick of the brain.

That the brain is like a computer where you can only make decisions based on past knowledge and experience, but since you can't control what your past experiences were you can't really control which decision you will make and therefore don't really have any control over your future experiences and therefore decisions either. So you never really get a chance to make a free will decision. You just pick how the computer in your head is programmed to pick.

Computer scientists understand this theory of determinism well, but it's a bit hard for other people. The computer can't really make a true decision. It just does what it's programmed to. If It does make a decision it is because it was programmed to make that decision. It has no choice in the matter.

Other people do believe in free will though or even something called free-won't where all you have is veto power, but they don't know where it comes from and don't really have any evidence to prove it one way or another. Like if your brain is built out of nothing but atoms and atoms have no free will then where does the free will come from? This is something that keeps AI programmers up at night BTW because not only have they not figured it out yet, they don't even know if free will is real.

Cause every atom and chemical reaction in your body is bound to the laws of determinism just like a computer. Which decisions you make are based on the computations that are carried out by those atoms and electrons and so forth.

When there is nothing to control the atoms in your brain other than the laws of the universe then there really is no free will because the laws of science will always determine what path the atoms take to calculate the decision.

At a quantum level there might be some randomness involved, but you don't have any more control over the random signal that's sent up to your brain than you do a non-random one. You may make a decision based on some random results, but you don't really have control over the randomness, so even though you may make a different decision, it isn't one that you had any control over because the decision was based on information sent to your brain that you had no control over.

So where does the free-will come from? Well who knows. Much of the evidence shows it doesn't even exist.

I believe it exists though, but it might not. I don't know if free will exists or not. Do you believe that free will exists?

reply to post by tinfoilman


Well I don’t believe in a higher form of love because there is no reason to, and the fact that you not only have no reason to believe there is but you can’t even describe it should give you pause for thought shouldn’t it?

On free will, I’ve long thought much the same as in your post (minus the still believing in free will bit) though I ultimately take an agnostic view since it can’t be confirmed. The logic of the argument, however, is pretty sound imho; but since we can’t know whether something was always going to happen then I don’t think it matters all that much if it was.

Lack of true free will does not mean we can’t change though; most people can change their mind, as clearly evidenced by learning, it’s just that this capability is controlled by internal and external factors.

You could say that you have a predisposition to believe in a god and since there’s no free will there’s nothing you can about this but that is not true since it only considers one set of drivers (those that push you towards a god) and does not consider those that push you away. You may well be able to change your mind but this doesn’t violate the idea that there is no free will; it merely considers the factors that cause you to take that decision.

I think this line of discussion causes the original question to diverge. There can be two separate ways of answering; you can describe the forces that cause you to believe something (i.e. I’m predisposed to this behaviour, I grew up in X culture etc). You can also answer it by describing your conscious thought process that rationalises the belief.

The latter relates to interesting studies on left brain/right brain function in split brain patients. These cases were people who had had the connection between the left and right hemispheres of their brains surgically severed; they were then tested on the function of each half by presenting each with a different stimulus. In one case a subject was presented with a picture of a chicken in the left hemisphere and a snowy scene in the right; the subject was then asked to report what he saw and to pick up an object that related to it with his left hand (it’s probably handy to know that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa). Since the left side of the brain is the dominant language area and controls speech the person reported seeing a chicken but because his left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere (which saw the snowy scene) he picked up a snow shovel. That study demonstrated lateralization of brain function but it also brilliantly demonstrated an innate need to make sense of things, especially our behaviour. It demonstrated this because when asked why he said he saw a chicken but picked up a snow shovel he came up with “you need the shovel to clean out the chicken coup”; which makes perfect sense but is utterly not true! This also demonstrated (probably more simply but sod it I’ve written all that I’m not deleting it!) by a patients explanation of behaviours following post hypnotic suggestion; for example a patient may get up, walk across the room and pick up a fire extinguisher because the hypnotist tells him to. However when asked why he did this he’ll come up with something like “well I was sat over there and I couldn’t read the label so I thought I’d get a closer look.”

Anyway the whole point of that is that even though it is controlled by forces outside of your control, you can still articulate how you make sense of what you believe given other, problematic facts.

reply to post by Mike_A


Well I don't spend too much time thinking about it. If free will doesn't exist then if in the future I believe in God or don't believe in God it's really out of my control. It'll depend on some other future experience which I haven't even experienced yet. So, why worry about it now?

I mean sure my theory may or may not have problems and there may be drivers pushing me towards believing and there may be drivers pushing me away, but what the evidence tells us is that I don't really having control over if I'm going to let those problems bother me or not.

Like there's problems with the theory so will I choose to not believe in the theory? Well, if there's no real choice then I can't make that choice. So, if I stop believing in the theory due to its problems or not, I really have no control over that.

My brain may calculate that I shouldn't believe in God because of the problems, but it may also decide to go ahead and calculate that the problems and drivers pushing me away from a belief aren't a problem and simply dismiss them and go ahead on believing.

Who knows? But I think most of the evidence shows us I don't really have any choice in the matter so why worry about it ya know?

Even if I was going to worry about it now, well I wouldn't be able to make the choice to worry about it or not even if it was logical to do so. With no free will I can't even control if I worry about something or not. Maybe that's why computers don't worry. Who knows?

So explaining why I believe what i believe isn't really going to help. There may not be any choice for me to believe any other way. So, sure I may be able to change my mind, but I might have no control over doing so. I might just have to wait until some external factor changes my mind. Just a waiting game maybe. And if so then we'd have to ask if a person's opinion even really matters? They can't change it anyway even if they wanted to.

Maybe free will does exist. I mean I believe it does, but maybe free will doesn't actually exist and I have no true control over if I believe in it or not. So, even if it's not real, maybe I'm destined to believe it does.

I guess we won't know for a while longer.

[edit on 16-10-2009 by tinfoilman]

[edit on 16-10-2009 by tinfoilman]

lol I think we’ve caused a paradox


I will say this though.

Most people’s physiology and experience allow them to make rational, logical decisions (subject to certain heuristics); presented with one “fact” and then three that refute the first the person will reliably determine that the first fact is false. That is true for almost every human being even though it is still subject to factors that are ultimately out of our control.

The important thing is that these control factors can change themselves. So a congenital predisposition towards one belief does not mean you are bound to that belief.