You question is basically asking me to judge the fate of someone else. I cannot do that. I have no idea whether someone else is doing the best they can, has searched for God and is following a different path from me or has received all the guidance they need to find God but has with bad intent turned wilfully away from that path.

I do not try. Getting to the assumption of God as a fundamental life choice is rational and defensible. Anything beyond that is not and I do not go there. Your fate is between you and God. It is ultimately none of my business.

[QUOTE=Mightyboosh;35837364] It seems obvious that you would have to possess the concept of God to engage in any reasoning exercise around that concept. Presumably if there was a time before the concept existed then that exercise could not occur. I am unclear that this leads anywhere. Obviously the concept of God is very old.

I cannot really imagine God nor imagine the characteristics of God in any meaningful way. It is a concept with immense breadth given the paucity of actual information that would narrow the concept.

I have to repeat the statement that we were already discussing the concept that you consider new.

Bollocks. And the rest of your post is little more than condescending gibberish.

No disrespect taken. As per previous discussions, I see your position as obviously and intuitively false, but I don't recall you ever expounding upon it in any details.

For clarity, I take your argument to be in the form of "For every object Q, it's properties P can exist if and only if Q exists for an infinite length of time", where you are inserting "purpose" or "meaning" for P and "a human being" for Q.

A sentence like "the furriness of a cat does not exist unless a cat exists for an infinite length of time" seems self-evidently absurd, so I assume you believe that you can explain why your argument is only true for certain Ps or Qs. Change the example to "purpose" and "a hammer" if you think the cat analogy is too cute/frivolous.



I have no problem with the bolded. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I find the bolded section far more convincing an explanation for your position than your other arguments.

Care to elaborate on why God has a higher likelihood of existence, as compared to the Flying Spaghetti Monster? or are you just going to throw unjustified insults around like a teenager?

Let me also suggest that you replace the FSM with 'x' if you find the FSM insulting? x can stand for whatever invisible, undetectable thing you want it to stand for (e.g., multiple universes, ghosts etc.)..... But please do tell me why God has a higher probability of existing compared to x....

If I understand his position (and it's very possible I do not), then the likelihood of x doesn't matter, because it has no negative EV attached. So if x turns out to be true, so what? The only thing that matters is that there is still a non-zero possibility of god. Again, he thinks he's free rolling. Although, I don't understand how this isn't Pascal's Wager reincarnated.

I can make some comments on these probabilities. There was a thread on the probability of God some time back where I went into some depth, but I have no desire to retrace that here. You can dig it up if you are interested. It was not just me participating so there are alternative points of view expressed.

I would say that there is an argument that the probability of multiple universes is 50/50. I think one could make the same argument for God although I would admit that there are counter-arguments that might have some weight. The FSM is of course much smaller, effectively zero.

I suppose I should apologize for being insulting, but you bring that on yourself. This post is an example. You have thrown concepts like fsm and multiple universes around like they have equal indistinguishable probabilities when in fact thoughtful analysis can demonstrate that they are very different. To the extent that such analysis is the result of a capability for rational thought and rational thought is evidence of intelligence, I am guilty at most of jumping to a conclusion.

If you want more respect, make better posts. Call it condescending, I really do not care, but your posts look like you never bother to think before you type. You do not have to agree with me. Bunny and Lestat do not agree with me, but I respect them because their posts are always thoughtful.

I think we're close.

It's old but once it didn't exist and there was no wager. Once it existed the wager became possible but how long and what critical mass did it have to attain before it was deemed worthy of analysis?

In other words, does Pascal's wager only exist because enough people believed in the christian god? If so, how many is not enough? What could I, as an individual, suggest that would be equally worthy of analysis and change the wager?

OK, I would say that if the concept of God just occured to me today and I was the only person in possession of it, then the wager concept would be valid. I see no reason for a critical mass.

If you want to suggest something, feel free. Nothing comes to my mind, but I will consider anything you want to toss out. With one caveat, if it is something that should be obviously unworkable I may not receive it politely. That is a personal failing. If I get the feeling that people are wasting my time by not putting any thought into their posts, I can get rude.

Unless God gives an afterlife to those who live as if God does not exists without belief and exterminates those who live as if God exists without belief.

If this really were a Pascal's Wager type argument, then you should act as if/believe in one of the gods that punishes non-believers with eternal punishment. If the actually existing god doesn't punish non-believers for reasoning errors then their life is just as meaningful as the believers (as they will also have immortality).

Just noticed this and clicked on the links but could not find the reconstruction you mentioned.

Maybe not that simple. There is middle ground between no consequence and eternal punishment that still could be very significant. I do not see how the specific consequence changes our behavior as long as there are more or less desirable outcomes.

If god saves well-meaning non-believers, then my life is meaningful regardless of whether I believe in god or not, and so the meaninglessness of my life without god doesn't function as a reason to believe in god. You are correct that in that case other things--such as the possibility of purgatory--might still function as a reason to believe, but that is something different from what you've been arguing for here.

Thus, presumably what actually functions as a reason to act on the assumption god exists is the possibility of a god that does eternally punish non-believers for their lack of belief existing.

My real issue is that because I real a lot of sci-fi, it's easy for me to see multitude of ways to replace that 'x' with millions of other invisible, undetectable entities or ideas, but since we still do not have the instruments to measure their existence, I do not see what importance or influence they have on my life. They're all equally likely, until proven otherwise. Sure, some may be conceptually stupid, such as the FSM, but this is no reason to discount their likelihood of existence. If the multiverse does exist, God or the FSM could easily exist within one of these highly divergent universes. My realm of possibility is not restricted solely to this universe, and neither should yours be, considering you think that the likelihood of the multiverse is 50/50.

I think I just adhere to the famous "if you cannot measure it, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist" notion, but then again I have a pretty strong love affair with empiricism.

The bold statement is correct but do not over-simplify it. It was not possible to measure the Higgs boson before the SSC but people spent a great deal of time thinking about it. There was a very good reason, ie. it was quite likely that there would someday be an experiment that could distinguish between existence or non-existence for the HB and the difference might be important.

You could say the same for God. It is a certainty that someday you will conduct an experiment that will distinguish between the existence or non-existence of God and the difference might be important.

Do not let love cloud your thinking. Said in humor, don't take offence.

I would agree that the reason to act on the assumption requires the possibility of favorable or adverse consequences from our life here to provide the driving force for a decision along the lines of what I have proposed. But all you require is the possibility. I have said that I do not believe that Hell as typically constructed makes sense. But that does not rule out other eternal consequences.

Whilst true, there is a world of difference between ordering my life according to whether or not the Higg's boson exists and whether or a not an intelligent universal creator exists.

Whilst there's logic for considering that both may exist because their existence may (or may not) explain what we observe, no one has decided that the HB delivered Ten Commandments, controls morality, judges you and gives you an eternal life etc etc etc. Also there aren't 2000+ versions of the HB that no one can agree on.

Neither was abandoned the possibility that other theories might also provide an explanation because they hadn't yet identified the HB.

Further, failing to discover the HB would not have caused anyone's view of reality to collapse. They'd still be searching for an answer and not committing, in the face of a lack of evidence, to one possibility over all others, unlike religions. No one believed the HB existed 'on faith' and no one suggesting any other type of theory than religious that were based on 'faith' would be taken seriously. They'd be expected to provide evidence.

From past experience, I think I've got more chance of going to the moon than getting a response to this, but bumping anyway.

I'm 90% sure you find my other examples as absurd as I do, so I presume that what you are doing is using words like 'meaning', 'purpose', 'matters' in a manner that precludes being applicable to a finite existent being, by definition. That's all good, of course, though not compelling to anyone else who doesn't use that definition and therefore would clearly invalidate your argument that any atheist who has "thought deeply about it" would agree with your position. Kinda similar to how Lemonzest's "There can be no objective morality without God" argument turned out to rest entirely on defining morality as "doing what God says".

Or naturally it's completely possible there's another way to defend your argument that I just haven't thought of yet.

Sorry but when I get into a discussion there are usually 10 atheists and 1 or 2 theists. I do not feel obligated to respond to every single post.

I did not respond to this one because it totally missed the target to an extent that I wondered if there was any point to a discussion.

Concerning the furriness of the cat, that furriness does not depend on the cat existing for an infinite time for it to exist. What is "furriness of a cat"? It is a concept that exists in your mind, created as a result of an experience that you have had. It will exist as long as you exist. When you die that concept will cease to exist, as totally and completely as if you and the cat had never existed.

Looks like your chances of going to the moon are better than you thought. Wise of you not to have said "The chances of God existing" instead.

Mmm-hmm. The first time we had this discussion I quoted from the Kagan-Craig debate and you dodged on the grounds that "I'm not responding to a copy and paste argument", so I expected something similarly risible this time around. Anyway, let's summarize the story so far in this thread.

Here you assert your proposition in a handily concise manner:

Quote:

Originally Posted by RLK

[...]under the materialistic consciousness scenario the significance of my life is strictly and identically zero.

Some back and forth happens and bunny interjects:

Quote:

Originally Posted by bunny

Presumably, RLK considers that second form of "extreme long term mattering" to be more valuable than the "short term" kind.

To which I respond:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Me

It seems like rlk's position is more like 'there is no such thing as short term mattering'.

You agree with my summary of your position:

Quote:

Originally Posted by RLK

This is not a bad restatement in some sense[...] ultimately, there is no such thing as "short term mattering".

Now, I used the somewhat ungainly word "mattering" but "significance" was the word you used and I think it is essentially a synonym in context. So if we look for the definition of "significance":

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oxford English Dictionary

the quality of being worthy of attention; importance:

Let's move on to your rebuttal of my cat analogy:

This does not, in any way, address the issue of short-term significance vs extreme longterm / infinite time significance. If your entire argument is that, once we die, that is the end of the significance of our life*, then your point is true, but trivial.

Why does my life have no significance NOW, just because it will have no significance LATER? Surely you agree the cat is furry NOW, even if it won't be furry at the heat death of the universe. Why is significance different from other properties? This is the point you (and WLC, for that matter) repeatedly fail to address.

Woop woop!


*Ignoring objections about continued significance via the memories of friends and family etc, that aren't really germane to the argument.

Even wilfully turning away from god only happens due to the psychological and physical make up of that individual, which again is god given. Each person , at any given time, is always doing the best they can. Yes, even hitler.

but you do go there. You assume that there being a god gives meaning to your life. That there being a god implies that you will exist after your death, and a whole load of other assumptions about god, meaning, etc. Which you have no basis for, because you cannot get from "god exists " to specifics about that god.

This implies a deterministic view of human behavior and choice which is not necessarily true. If it is true than presumably God would know that and judge accordingly. But if not...? Anyway, you do not know that Hitler was doing the best he could. I do not know if you are doing the best you can. I am not sure that I am doing the best I can.

But if you are confident that you are doing the best you can, than great. How does that affect me?


but you do go there. You assume that there being a god gives meaning to your life. That there being a god implies that you will exist after your death, and a whole load of other assumptions about god, meaning, etc. Which you have no basis for, because you cannot get from "god exists " to specifics about that god.

This statement does not capture what I said. This is the last time I respond to you when you show that you cannot simply restate what I said.

I said this (please read carefully):

No afterlife - no meaning
Afterlife - possible meaning
God - Possible differentiation based on this life

Please note "possible". Not a certainty, just an opportunity.

You do not understand and are therefore not saying anything that leads to an interesting debate. That's why I didn't respond the first time. You do not say anything that is thought provoking, challenging or interesting. You may find me amusing, but I find you boring. Goodbye.

Sure, as long as you understand that even the Christians in this thread have said that you are wrong, and you have simply and repeatedly evaded answering a question that you claim is not "challenging".

Not sure why you are so quick to hand me the rhetorical victory when it seems you would be able to swat my objection down like a fly if you would only deign to descend to my intellectual level...