Logic and Faith and Cheesy Internet Quizzes….
Caution: What follows is very long, and probably very twisty.
I took the Battleground God quiz and got the following results:
Congratulations!
You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.
The fact that you progressed through this activity being hit only once and biting very few bullets suggests that your beliefs about God are well thought out and almost entirely internally consistent.
The direct hit you suffered occurred because one set of your answers implied a logical contradiction. The bitten bullets occurred because you responded in ways that required that you held views that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. At the bottom of this page, we have reproduced the analyses of your direct hit and bitten bullets.
Because you only suffered one direct hit and bit very few bullets, you qualify for our second highest award. A good achievement!
Of course, I have issues with the “direct hit” that I suffered. Naturally.
You’ve just taken a direct hit!
Earlier you said that it is not justifiable to base one’s beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, paying no regard to the external evidence, or lack of it, for the truth or falsity of this conviction, but now you say it’s justifiable to believe in God on just these grounds. That’s a flagrant contradiction!
Oh, no! A flagrant contradiction? How could I?
Well, I guess it would have something to do with questions 7 and 17 – the points where the contradiction leading to my “direct hit” seems to have appeared.
7: It is justifiable to base one’s beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, regardless of the external evidence, or lack of it, for the truth or falsity of these convictions.
Answer: False
17: It is justifiable to believe in God if one has a firm, inner conviction that God exists, even if there is no external evidence that God exists.
Answer: True
Oh, no! They’re right! A blatant contradiction!
Of course, they failed to ask me if I believe the absence of evidence to mean anything. As a matter of fact, one of my bullets was not a contradiction, but merely a chiding for being foolish enough to state that the lack of evidence for something does not disprove the existence of that thing. I believe the words that “bullet” ended up with were as follows:
But by denying that the absence of evidence, even where it has been sought, is enough to justify belief in the non-existence of things, you are required to countenance possibilities that most people would find bizarre. For example, do you really want to claim that it is not rationally justified to believe that intelligent aliens do not live on Mars?
Maybe I would.
Excuse me, but I’ve been taught my entire life that you cannot disprove anything – you can only prove it. You cannot seek evidence to disprove the existence of a gene that makes people susceptible to spontaneous combustion. You can only point out that such a gene has yet to be found.
The closest you can come to disproving something is to prove an opposing theory. To follow the previous example, if I prove that spontaneous combustion is caused by the introduction of a deadly cocktail of hormones into the bloodstream, I might take weight away from the idea of a genetic predisposition to spontaneous combustion. This, however, is not a solid disproving – the a genetic predisposition may still exist.
You can prove the existence. You can find a lack of proof for the existence. You cannot prove a non-existence.
The question that follows panting immediately after is, “But doesn’t the lack of proof mean that it doesn’t exist?”
No, it doesn’t. We have only recently found the proof that Black Holes exist as theorized – that does not mean that prior to the finding of such proof, Black Holes did not exist. They existed – they just hadn’t been proven. Scientists managed to find the top quark – a particle they had only theorized about without any hard evidence that it existed. Following the logic that lack of evidence disproves a theory, the top quark should never have existed to be found.
But by denying that the absence of evidence, even where it has been sought, is enough to justify belief in the non-existence of things, you are required to countenance possibilities that most people would find bizarre.
You mean, for instance, that the world might conceivably be round? Or that the atom can be split? Or that the so-called “primitive savages” of Africa had a language and a culture when they were being rounded up for the slavers’ ships? Or, perhaps, the concept of heavier-than-air flying ships? Or lighter than air, for that matter?
You can prove that life as we know it could not survive on the Moon – life as we know it requires certain things to survive that the Moon has in short supply. An atmosphere, for one thing. However, as Carl Sagan was fond of pointing out, this was not solid proof that life could not exist on the Moon, merely that life as we know it would not be found there. It was Sagan’s contention that we would never be able to know the absolute truth of the matter until we were able to pick the Moon apart, grain by grain. Why?
Because you cannot disprove something, only prove an opposing theory – which, frequently, doesn’t rule out the theory you were trying to disprove.
The Battleground God quiz requires you to accept a mainstream, illogical idea as logical – the idea that lack of proof serves to disprove a theory. It’s mainstreaming of the worst sort – the mainstreaming of ideas and beliefs.
“You wouldn’t want to be like one of those loonies who believes in UFO’s and ghosts, would you?”
Maybe I would.
July 1st, 2003 at 3:34 am
Oh Dude, that’s scary. I got the same results and took a direct hit on the same (7 and 17) questions.
And yeah, what you said about proving and disproving things.
I think the crux of the matter is contained in these words from question 7: “regardless of the external evidence”. I see no problem with people believing in God because there’s no evidence to the contrary. (I’m very much with William James on this point. If believing in God makes you a happier/moral/better/whatever person, then for you, God exists.) Obviously, if some evidence came to light that proved conclusively that God didn’t exist, then conducting yourself as if S/He did would be a form of self-delusion.
July 1st, 2003 at 6:10 am
I don’t think that the Battleground God quiz really requires you to accept that lack of proof serves to disprove a theory. What it does do is tell you that if, in one case, you agree that it’s irrational to believe something without proof, you must accept that it is always irrational to believe something without proof. It’s checking your consistency, not your correctness. The idea that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is a scientific principle, but this quiz isn’t about science. It’s about consistency of belief. It allows you to dispute that statement within the realm of one’s beliefs, and claim that no evidence is needed to confirm a deeply held belief (“the Earth is flat”). I certainly think that people who have strong faith in God but apply scientific reasoning to everything else will have a hard time with this quiz, but if you’re consistent, you can escape this quiz unscathed as a True Believer, an athiest, or as an agnostic (which is the scientific position – there is no evidence of absence, after all).
July 30th, 2004 at 10:06 am
I just happened upon this thread and thought I might just jump in, especially on the external evidence that there is God.
I encourage any of you interested in this thread to read CS Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity”. Lewis gives a great argument based on logic and classic philosophical rational progression to make an argument for God.
People who are looking for outward signs of God are like the character of a book trying to find outward signs that there is a writer. The characters in a book lives in a world of the authors creating and may not include any clues at all to prove their world is a mere act of creativity. The characters only knows what is in their “book world” not what is outside of it. (this is an approximate analogy, not an exact correlation)
We as characters in our own world have to be clever when we look for outward signs of God because we are in a world of his making, not a world that he lives in…a painter is not in the painting and the writer is not in the book he wrote. Now of course, some aspects of the writer or painter come through in their creations. It is these aspects that CS Lewis brings out in an attempt to prove the existence of God.
Sorry for the rambling…
Ray