So, I agree with OrP that the focus on "burden of proof" isn't very productive in a philosophical conversation (although it's clearly a popular rhetorical strategy in this forum), but I think this is a bad way of thinking about the argument Aaron was making, although to be fair to you he did agree that it was a useful rough approximation. I think he was wrong to say that :P

To make an analogy, imagine that you made the claim "there is an elephant in my garage." I think it is rationally permissible (but perhaps not mandatory) for me to refuse to assent to the claim that there is an elephant in your garage, but also refuse to assent to the claim that there isn't, and I don't think it follows that I am claiming that the probability that there is an elephant in your garage is 50%.

My refusal is predicated upon particular ideas about knowledge and justification. Even though I think it is highly unlikely that there is an elephant in your garage, I don't think there is process by which I can justify a claim to knowledge about it. It might be reasonable for some purposes to model this kind of lack of knowledge in probabilistic terms but the assignment of probability isn't inherent to the distinction between claiming ~P and refusing to assent that P.

Now, I also agree that in practice sometimes this distinction can be abused rhetorically, in just the way you suggest, i.e. by conflating a reasonable argument for a lack of knowledge for a claim of equal probability. But I don't think that conflating is automatic. In the same way, I agree that "burden shifting" as a rhetorical strategy can be tiresome.

P.S. There's a good thread from some years ago on this distinction in the context of atheism, if you're interested. In that thread, I think OrP would argue against the epistemology of my analogy, as a matter of fact.

Carl Sagan's essay "The dragon in my garage" is also worth a read, here's an extract with commentary:

https://theskepticview.wordpress.com...21/the-dragon/

Perhaps. I got tired repeating the whole refusing to assent thing and tried to get the conversation rolling again. (How many different ways can I say that "not guilty" is different from "innocent"?) I did have added language to try to distinguish between "a priori 50/50" and making an assessment of the claim after the claim has been defined.

Omnipresence and omniscience have no bearing on the laws of physics that I'm aware of.

Omnipotence is probably the only one that could be assented to, but that may also depend on the concept you're applying, since many atheists end up using rather poor definitions of it.

I will also say that the idea that humans are doing something other than following a specific set of predefined behaviors (or perhaps only probabilistically defined behaviors) is incompatible with all known laws of physics. There are no physical laws that seem to point to the idea that we have any type of real "control" over ourselves or the universe around us. And yet, at some level we seem to be doing that stuff anyway.

For example, I'm not aware of any laws of physics which indicate that we can derive a concept as simple as "1+1=2" or that this mathematical equation has any real "truth" to it. And yet, the experiences of humanity seem to point to this being a legitimately true statement (otherwise, virtually every culture in history would have just happened to have come up with an identical piece of fiction).

More generally, I find that this particular approach to the question is naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst. Since you're banging the drum of "scientific methodology" (even though you don't seem to have a clear sense of what you actually mean by it), I would question in what ways you intend by physical measurement to measure something that's asserted to be non-physical. It seems you've defined yourself out of the conversation before you've even started.

It's not clear to me what "incompatible" means in that claim. If it's supposed to mean that the laws of physics directly contradict the idea of omnipotence, I think that's wrong. Or at least it's not clear to me at all that it's true.

If it's supposed to mean that a lot of traditional theology seems incongruous with the world as we now know it, then I think that's pretty fair, although someone can take it as a criticism of particular kinds of theology rather than as evidence for the non-existence of God in general. Although "criticism of particular theologies" gets very close to rejection of the existence of the God(s) posited by those theologies, obviously. This line of thought veers into one of the sub-plots of that OrP thread on weak atheism that I linked.

It might have been fairer for someone to have told you that they are talking about Bayesian probability (oh yeah, and that you are arguing against a mathematician ). Funnily enough, this is something I too didn't really follow, until I saw it discussed on this sub-forum a few years back.

As for burden of proof, consider the following:

1 - Person A asserts that X is the case
2 - Person B, unconvinced, asks person A to justify their position
3 - Person A provides their justification for why X is the case
4 - Person B either accepts the justification (The End) or rejects it *

In case you are too wrapped up in X being "God exists", imagine instead that X is "the Earth is a globe" or "the Holocaust happened". There exist real Person B's who deny the evidence, for these examples. Don't you think they need to justify why they reject the evidence they have been presented with? In which case...

5 - Person B, in rejecting the justification, has a burden to justify why they rejected Person A's justification





* a binary outcome for the sake of argument

What I do consider to make the existence of any particular god improbable is the fact that different cultures throughout history have believed and/or continue to believe in very many different gods, many of which are incompatible with each other.

Different cultures throughout history have believed and/or continue to believe in many ideas about the creation of the universe, many of which are incompatible with each other.

Does this logic imply that you should consider the truth of any particular creation narrative to be improbable? That because there are a lot of them, that they must all probably be wrong? And in particular, does it imply that the scientific description of the events of the early universe as equally suspect as all the others?

This line of reasoning isn't very strong.

If God supervenes upon the universe, that could reasonably be interpreted as altering the "laws of physics" as a collection of known mathematical equations that predict things like the motion of objects.

I think there's also quibble room for "the laws of physics" (our mathematical models) and "The Laws of Physics" (the things that actually happen in the universe).

The truth is that they are not as incompatible as you might think; the only difficulty is our present comprehension of these "gods". We also tend to project our fitted thought forms into our histories and thereby deny and obviate understanding.

As Augustine has noted that Christianity had a presence before Golgotha and he related the likes of Plato and other ancients to Christ; pre current era. The ancient mysteries spoke to Christos as one of the hierarchical stages of the initiated was called "Christophorus".

Its a fascinating study but be sure; if one can glean or come to grips with a spiritual world, in the present, then one realizes that these plethora of beings didn't disappear because we happend to enter the earth with our present consciousness.

Mankind evolves, and at present we have a materialistic consciousness bias which does not allow for any other; a great enchantment but as i said mankind evolves and will become conscious of these higher realms, the future of man.

Personally, I quite like this quote:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

You're welcome to like whatever you choose to like. But at some point, you may come to realize that the ability to parrot other people doesn't mean that you actually understand what you've just said.

In particular, this is an incredibly stupid response to the analysis of the logic presented.

Great thread, thanks. Half way through it now.

I have clarified in this thread that I have been talking about the god of the old testament when I refer to "god".

I'll give this a shot.

Omniscience - Presumably, to be fully omniscient, one would need to know the state of all particles in the universe (forgetting about quantum uncertainty for a second). Even if it is possible to encode this information using a fewer number of particles than there are available, as soon as you use a particle, you change its state, so now you have to encode the new state of this particle using another particle. Etc. ad infinitum.

Omnipotence - if there is an immovable object, then by definition, there cannot be an irresistible force and vice versa. You can't have both given our current state of the knowledge of the laws of mechanics.

Omnipresence - ok, I concede this is actually possible, e.g. cosmic microwave background.

Of course, the above statements are simplifications. I don't think this really matters though, since it is just an exercise in intellectual masturbation. We could refine this ad nauseam only to find out that the proposition is that this "God" isn't subject to the laws of physics at all, rendering the original proposition unfalsifiable and the concept of providing evidence for or against it meaningless.

Good read thanks. Not dissimilar to the orbiting teapot and the flying spaghetti monster, all of which serve to demonstrate how untenable the theist position is, IMO.

Unfortunately, I am not blessed with your intellect and eloquence, so I find myself having to resort to reading other people's views in order to refine my own, and sometimes I find they even phrase things better than I would have thought to.

I guess that would be possible under some sort of simulation theory, in which case whoever is running the simulation is, for all intents and purposes, our "god"; I will concede that much. These theories bear little resemblance to the Abrahamic "God" though.

I do not think there's a problem with reading other people's views. It's an excellent way to learn new things. The problem is that if you think that the quote is a remotely reasonable response to the analysis I gave, it means that you don't understand the idea behind the quote in question. (Edit: Or possibly, you don't understand the analysis I presented.)

I find this to be very similar to when you were claiming that others were making your point for you when in reality they were stating things that worked against the argument you were making.

If you really want to refine your own thoughts, you have to engage in a thoughtful level of self-reflection. You're not doing that. You haven't done that. I doubt you're ever going to do that.

What a surprise that you chose to attack the evidence against, rather than provide the evidence for.

If there are 1000 different mutually incompatible creation myths then I would say the a priori probability of any particular one being true is pretty low.

Unlike the religious creation myths the current scientific view is supported by evidence which to me makes it far more probable than the alternatives. Since the alternatives are generally in contradiction with the evidence this to me makes them far less probable.

Far more probable, as in 10 times more likely?

Actually, I did. But you just don't recognize it as such.

Could you either briefly restate your position or link me to a post? I'm afraid I also missed this, and I'm curious...

I was intentionally a bit vague in my reply to jeccross with some snark rolled into it. And I really only hinted at the two lines of reasoning that could be fleshed out into something more like an argument.

There are two pieces of evidence that I would put forward as pointing to the existence of God.

The first piece is that despite all the laws of physics, there is something in our experience of the universe that points to something more. This can get wrapped up in both a "free will" type debate as well as a "consciousness" type debate. But in either case, it seems that both our current set of equations and equations that we can imagine writing down fall short of describing the entirety of the universe as we experience it. This line of evidence points us to look beyond the physical universe for a full understanding of our existence.

The second is the universality of mathematics. There is no apparent explanation for why math and logic work in the universe. That is, it doesn't seem to be just a cultural thing, or even just a human thing. We would be utterly shocked if there were aliens out there that had math where 1+1=2 is a false statement (after working through all the translation bits and whatever, so that this isn't some sort of language issue). There seems to be a universal logic that exists and does not appear to be explainable by chance or the laws of physics (actually, the universal logic bears upon our laws of physics since math is the language of physics.).

I would posit both of these as being evidence that points towards the existence of something that transcends whatever it is in this universe, and that the ideas being put forth from what is mostly a physicalist perspective seem to fall short of explaining the whole of our existence.

But I would also fully expect that this line of reasoning would not count as evidence in either jeccross' perspective or in d2_e4's.

It depends on the probability of the particular creation myth. The more suspension of natural laws and divine intervention has to occur, the less probable it becomes for me.

Thanks Aaron. Those are both interesting topics. I think about the nature of math and the relation between math, logic, and the "order" of the universe reasonably often, when I feel like being a little mystical. When I want to be really mystical I start using terms like logos and rtam :P

I think these are topics that open up the idea that our understanding of ourselves and the world is still very shallow in some ways, but it seems to me that the concepts of divinity that these thoughts lead towards (almost like a natural theology, if you will) are pretty far removed from most traditional religious doctrines, although perhaps somewhat more similar to the mystical/apophatic traditions threaded through the more mainstream parts of those same religions.

With regard to your first paragraph, on consciousness and will, if it feels like there's a tension between the ontologies suggested by physical science and the experience of consciousness, on the other hand the arguments against the possibility of dualism in philosophy of mind are also very compelling. If you begin by positing that there is both "physical" reality and "mental" reality, you come to a pretty enormous impasse attempting to explain how the mental interacts with the physical without collapsing the ontological distinction, so that the mental just becomes another kind of physical. For this reason, it doesn't seem like a very convincing argument to me for supernatural entities, although perhaps the argument for some kind of panpsychism is more plausible? The basic issue is making sense of the transcendence of any hypothetical non-physical reality, given what "physical" means in the context of actual modern science.

I would think that the atheistic response to the argument from the universality of math is going to involve some invocation of the anthropic principle (it's not surprising that intelligent beings find themselves in an intelligible world, since that is a precondition of the existence of intelligent beings...). But, I think the argument against this as evidence of God (or at least a transcendent God) should also be along the same lines as the argument against dualism in the mind-body problem. I want to say that the language of math is a language for representing different kinds of relationships between abstract objects, more or less (feel free to object to this), and the fact that the language is adequate to make sense of "physical reality" tells us that this "reality" has a structure, so to speak. Physical stuff is not just some undifferentiated whole, but consists of analytically separable parts that bear certain kinds of relations to each other. The models shouldn't be mistaken for the territories, and obviously modern physics has upended the most intuitive ways of thinking about the kinds of relationships in question, but the point is that this structure has to be intrinsic in some way, rather than being an imposition "from above", as it were. It doesn't suggest to me the need for some entity beyond "the universe" from which that structure must come. It seems easier to reason from this starting point towards some kind of pantheism a la Spinoza than to an utterly transcendent creator. Or, on the other hand, it's not clear to me how positing such a creator actually explains anything. That's the same problem as with the cosmological argument, really. Positing a supreme being neatly encapsulates all the interesting questions and wraps them up in a handy word: God, but it doesn't actually explain anything about it.

Also I think there's an enormous impasse going from any starting point like this and arriving at the truth of something like the core gospel narrative, for example.