I don't have much in response to what you've written other than a nodding agreement.

But on this point, my position (for the sake of this conversation) is that I don't need to "explain anything about [God]" any more than I need to explain anything about my own existence. I don't claim that the evidence is rock-solid any more than I would accept that the failure of a "physical measurement" of God (whatever way we try to formulate that) is rock-solid evidence against God's existence.

I agree that there's a gap between general theism and anything specifically Christian.

I would argue that this is confusing cause and effect, i.e. the reason mathematics and logic work in the universe is because it is the language we have found to describe the universe we find ourselves in - it's not some chance discovery which just happens to work. Furthermore, the homogeneity of the universe is explained somewhat by inflationary theory.

My intention is to demonstrate that this type of hand-wavy argument doesn't really make a lot of sense, and it's easier to see how little sense it makes when you actually start trying to quantify (even in just a relative sense) whatever it is you're saying.

My basic proposition looks like this:

Suppose that there are N proposed explanations for the creation of the universe. The basic logic that you're applying is that each one has a probability of 1/N of being correct. This can immediately seen to be a faulty assumption.

Furthermore, such an assumption means that I can make up something on the spot and change the probabilities. There's no accurate accounting for the number of creation narratives available.

Also, by trying to argue by relative confidence, I can show that you really have to put an absurd amount of weight on one particular explanation for it to rise to the top.

I'll do this numerically. Suppose that there are exactly 1000 creation narratives that have been devised throughout all of history, one of which is the scientific one. (This number is probably very far short of the reality.) Based on your a priori principle, there is a 0.1% chance of the scientific one being correct.

But now let's say that you've got some evidences (whatever they may be) and you're now convinced that the scientific narrative is 100 times more likely to be true than any of the other ones. What's the probability that it's true based on this framework?

You have one narrative that has 100 "chances" of being true, and then you have 999 narratives that have 1 "chance" of being true. This means that the scientific narrative has 100/1099 = 9.1% chance of being true.

But in reality, I would expect your confidence to be much higher than that. Probably something on the order of 99%. I'll let you work out the math to try to figure out how much weight you must proportionally give in order for that to happen.

In the end, you'll see that the proposition is basically absurd because it's really impossible to justify that many orders of magnitude in relative confidence, especially as you've not actually investigated the 999 other narratives.

So I would argue that this framework literally has nothing to do with how you're coming to believe anything at all.

You're saying "it works because it works." This argument isn't a very good counter. Why should such a thing actually exist and could be "found"?

Philosophically, this line of reasoning makes sense if you hold that there's nothing that's actually true about mathematics. This is often phrased as math being "a useful fiction." (I think this position is "Mathematical fictionalism" or something similar.) I generally view this as biting the bullet in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Before I start picking this apart, I would like for you to explain what you mean by "inflationary theory." This falls back into the category of "I'm not sure you know what you're talking about" but I'll give you the chance to show me otherwise.

I don't want to speak for dynamite, but my interpretation of what he is saying is more like "the scientific explanation is 99%", and there is 1% to go round for everything else. If you add more "divine" possibilities, you just dilute the 1%, not the 99.

I mean cosmic inflation. Is homogeneity central to your point? If not, I would suggest picking apart my knowledge, which I admit is cursory, would probably just serve to derail the discussion. I believe that inflation is the mechanism that has been postulated to explain how areas of the universe which are outside of each other's light horizon share common physical constants etc.

I don't really understand your line. Are you saying "why should explanations for physical phenomena exist?"

Sure, this is sort of like OrP's point about "burdens of proof." I don't think you're actually obligated to justify yourself to me. And my interest in these topics isn't particularly polemical or intended to be persuasive.

But, excusing for a moment the various flaws of the OP of this thread, the general sentiment being expressed is incredulity at the idea that thoughtful, rational, educated people can adopt traditional religious worldviews as meaningful explanations of reality. Obviously, the major world religions have traditionally made very confident claims about the fundamental nature of reality, and those claims are central to the kinds of ethical systems they also build. Religions are more than sets of propositions about the world, but nevertheless the "formulating [of] conceptions of a general order of existence" (to quote Geertz' definition of religion) seems fundamental to religion.

So, in the context of this thread, and jeccross' point about evidence for the existence of God, the relative weakness of the arguments (especially in relation to standard Christian beliefs, and not just "general theism") is fairly striking. I don't take this as evidence that theists are uniquely irrational, or unintelligent, or illogical, and it would be fair to point out that evaluating the "weakness of the arguments" presupposes some standard which not all religious people would even accept, and that there are many ways of practicing religion and not all religious people are fundamentalists. But, I think it's nevertheless clear that traditional religious accounts of the world are becoming less and less plausible, and that's an interesting phenomenon. It can be entertaining, and even worthwhile, to point out to arrogant atheists that they don't necessarily have the grasp on rationality that they think they do, but there is something in that focus that feels like missing the forest for the trees to me.

That probably sounds more pointed than I really intend, but it's taken me a long time already to figure out how to express that thought, so I'm going with it :P

You probably shouldn't speak for dynamite because you're just confirming the point I'm making with the analysis. I believe it's unrealistic to justify the many orders of magnitude of confidence required to get the scientific explanation anywhere near 99% if one is approaching the question starting from anything that resembles starting from "if there are lots of myths, then the a priori probability of any one of them being right is very small."

Homogeneity is central to the point insofar as one believes mathematics is universal. But cosmic inflation doesn't really explain it unless you're positing that mathematics is a physical feature that's somehow woven into the fabric of the universe, and that mathematics expands with the universe expanding. Or something like that.

You're arguing that the discovery of math is the "effect" and the "cause" is that we are trying to explain physical phenomena.

This would be contrary to most conceptions of what math is or how it operates within the sciences. The sciences are generally viewed as being subordinate to math and not the other way around.

I agree with this in many ways. And I would say that the bolded is true for general accounts of the world. The focus on religious perspectives is a bit of a red herring in this part of the conversation.

There certainly are problems with some religious perspectives, in the sense that I do not believe that they are accurate reflections of reality. YEC is the easy-to-pick-on example. But the forest in this case is... that there people hold beliefs that are difficult to rationally justify? Yes, they do.

I agree that this particular aspect of religion, call it "worldview formation" for lack of a better term, can be separated from other aspects of religion and can exist in forms that are distinct from what we usually think of as religion, for example in certain all-encompassing political ideologies.

But I don't think that makes the focus on religion a red herring. While it may be possible to separate the two things, and that may become more and more relevant in the future, it's also true that "religious" paradigms for worldview formation have been dominant throughout human history, so the decline of religious worldviews in particular is interesting and has interesting consequences within modern, secular, pluralistic cultures.

I think that's too glib. The forest, I would say, is the crisis of confidence in traditional worldviews. That is not perhaps uniquely a religious problem, but it is most clearly seen in religion because of the way religious worldviews dominate throughout so much of the world. I don't think that crisis came about primarily because of changing standards of rationality or even changing capacities for rationality, but because of the pace of change in technology and our ability to empirically investigate the world.

This is very well put, actually. I'll take a plea deal on the "arrogant.."

Depending on how far we want to stretch the definition of "deity", I could probably buy into some of the more marginal theories that seem to not contradict with the basic tenets of science and logic. For example, our universe is a simulation which is a lab exercise of some C- student in an advanced civilisation that has been evolving for billions of years in the "real" universe. I think he or she have to be a bit whimsical and sadistic given all the wars and natural disasters, to say nothing of that horrific 2-outer yesterday, but sure, it's possible.

On a more serious note, I concede that the OP was plenty flawed and rather careless with definitions of things like "religion", "god" and "logic". But you have captured the intent pretty accurately in the above. There was also a political angle, especially given current developments in the US, which has largely been lost in subsequent discussion.

Incidentally, if you ever start giving seminars on diplomacy and civility, sign me up.

Well, yes. Is this a naive view or something? All the maths I studied (probably up to and including intermediate calculus) certainly relates to our descriptions of physical phenomena. Undoubtedly there are abstract fields in pure maths which may not be directly related to physical phenomena, is that what you mean when you discuss "maths" though? To suggest that 1+1, or differential and integral calculus does not relate to our explanations of physical phenomena is fanciful, IMO.

What does subordinate mean in this context? That the mathematical equations are developed first and then we chance upon the physical phenomena which they describe? I am aware that this has happened in the past through serendipity, but I am not aware of its being a common occurrence.

Be careful in your reading. I never claimed that there's no relationship between mathematics and the physical universe.

Very few people would try to argue that "math is the effect of studying the universe."

I'm saying that all the formulas for whatever models of the universe we happen to be discussing at any given time are fully dependent upon mathematics. If math didn't exist, the model couldn't exist. But at the same time, the math can exist in the absence of the model.

In this sense, it appears that math dominates over the universe, making the universe subordinate to it. Somehow, we might come to a sense that these mathematical formulas are what drive the universe, rather than the universe causing mathematics to happen.

There are several other moments in history where religious paradigms clashed in multicultural settings and corresponding to a decline of religious worldviews. I've read that Ancient Greece is a bit like that. We like to ascribe blind religiosity to Greek culture because of how we understand their mythology, but the reality is a lot closer to them believing in their gods in the same way that patriotic Americans may believe in the constitution or the "free market." That is, it's more about confidence in an abstract collection of principles that have a direct impact on how one might live or interact with others, or how one might understand some aspect of the world around them.

Sure. I can go with this.

Right, and that's why OP doesn't think theists think logically.

Right. Because you clearly have the contextual reading comprehension skills to have mastered the understanding of that sentence based on how you're attempting to frame what I've stated.

Also, and amusingly, OP has abandoned that claim.

But sure. Feel free to try to defend something that nobody has been able to successfully depend for over 500 posts.

The original post was. The original poster has since clarified and refined what he meant by those concepts.

I have to give you this though - your arguments/evidence in the last dozen or so posts have been a masterclass in sophistry.

I wonder what you're using this word to mean. Is it that you disagree with me and therefore think that there must be a flaw in the argumentation? Because you have yet to actually attempt to describe a flaw in anything I've presented. You just sit there and complain about how you disagree with me.

I've shown you how it's possible to very clearly demonstrate flaws in arguments. Here is an example:

So if you would like to actually make an argument, you are free to do so. You are also free to continue embarrassing yourself.

I can't really disagree with you, because I find it hard to parse what you're saying. You make hand-wavy arguments about how you feel that there must be some deeper fundamental meaning out there or something. That may well be true, but you fail to make any connection between this "deeper meaning" and any deity, much less the Christian one.

To me, your argument is no different to that of our ancestors, who didn't know where lightning came from, so they just assumed goddidit. You are very articulate in phrasing this world view, but that is ultimately what your argument boils down to, in my eyes.

Really? Can you show me where I did this?

You're welcome to believe what you want. I've stated this several times. But there's a gap between simply believing something and coming to an understanding of it through intellectual effort and reason.

In this conversation, you've continuously expressed a lack of desire to engage intellectually and demonstrated a severe lack of proficiency with reason. Until you change that, you will remain in your state of intellectual blindness.

The entire essence of your presence here is analogous to the bolded, except you're just assuming goddidntdoit. You still have no idea what's actually happening.

I can quote a lot of supporting material from this thread alone, I am just too lazy to do it right now. Be careful what you wish for.

Quoted for irony.

How much intellectual effort and reason did you expend before you arrived at the pixie in the sky as the most logical and intellectually strenuous conclusion?

Edit: I'd wager - orders of magnitude less than you now expend defending that conclusion.