Feel the wrath...

But why did you use God as an example of Joe's belief and not the goblin in his basement?

And no, the question is not meant insultingly.

Are there no scenarios where Joe cannot reasonably hold the belief that there is a goblin in the basement?

The starting point for my line of reasoning was MB saying he thinks deism is reasonable. Therefore in this case we are referencing that a creative consciousness or creating entity may exist (I am not committed to the name "God" here).

My point is that going from deism to theism only requires 1 or 2 experiences. Deism and theism are not so far apart. Why would deism be reasonable and theism be absolutely unreasonable?

The general issue with comparisons between God and "purple pandas in underwear" or "basement goblins" or FSM is that the supposedly analogous alternatives are both overspecified (which matters for RLK's probability argument, although I am dubious that a probabilistic argument is even valid to begin with) and that they don't actually have anything in common with most classical theological understandings of what "God" means. Not in Christianity, nor even really in Judaism (or at least later judaism), and not in Hindu concepts of Brahman either.

Essentially all they accomplish is to convey the opinion that the speaker finds God as ridiculous as goblins in the basement, but the entire analogy misunderstands what sort of thing the word "God" is supposed to name

I agree with the over specification of this argument, but I believe it's more of an attempt to compare the belief of a creator (to which they believe there is no proof), to another belief which there is also no proof, where the more ridiculous the analogy, the more obvious the lack of proof.

The problem I have with these arguments is not only that I disagree that there is no proof for God, but that the argument itself ends up resembling a tautology, since the comparison is made with things which we know don't exist and aren't plausible.

Suppose we grant that it is true that there is no empirical evidence for either of these two propositions

1) The universe has a creator, and this creator has certain human-like characteristics
2) A giant purple panda may appear in my underwear*

Nevertheless we may consider (2) to be more inherently an unreasonable proposition because of the kind of thing that is being proposed. If (1) were instead "God will heal an amputee" the comparison would I think be a lot more apt. The difference is in how coherent the concepts seem prior to experience.

* I may or may not be wearing underwear

I see what you're saying, it's a good point. I think that when searching for an absurd analogy, people become overly specific and overlook the probability.

actually from a priori reasonableness standpoint "god heals amputees" doesn't quite work. Have to think about it some more :P

the reason "giant purple panda" is obviously ridiculous is simply because giant and purple have nothing to do with what a panda is, "panda" is pretty well defined, and its definition doesn't really admit of the logical possibility of appearing unexpectedly or being giant and purple. All of that does have to do with experience.

whereas God names something that isn't proposed to have those sorts of qualities, and isn't really even very well defined. God being "creator" or prior to the universe is something that is much more naturally connected to the basic concept.

There is a category error in that question. Deism IS theism, but theism is not deism. Or in simpler words; deism is a type of theism.

If we know Joe believes in a god, and it is not a deistic concept of God... then in almost all practical cases we're talking about a form of revealed theism (we can probably find some non-deistic theism that isn't based on revelation, but I don't really know of any such type of beliefs that exist today in large numbers).

Yes, I should be more specific rather than simply saying "theism."

One can go from deism (believing in a God that created but is otherwise uninvolved) to believing in a specific God. In other words a mystical experience could cause a deist to add some attributes to their featureless creative God.

Why is there a lack of scrutiny this involved in terms of evolution? There is no factual evidence that evolution happens, though science has gathered assumptions based off likeness in the fossil record. But none of us (nor Darwin himself) have actually witnessed the evolution of species to guarantee the theory is valid. Yet so many people willingly accept its validation.
Likewise, no amount of belief in God by any theist can make the athiest believe in divinity any more or less.
Faith assumes evolution can be explained, though in reality it is still a theory.
Faith assumes God exists and created the universe, and in reality it is again a theory.
There is but one true reality imo, and that is that either something (that we call God) created what is (universe, life, etc) or else nothing did. Evidence to me shows that I theorize that everything we know in existence couldnt have happened haphazardly because its too perfect in its design to be circumstantial. Laws of science/math/physics have concrete rules that must be followed. This again points to a designer as chaos does not follow order.

To be offended by prayer is to assume, quite arrogantly & quite possibly, that one theory is true (God doesn't exist) and the other is false (God does exist). Can either truly be proven? Absolutely not, which is why it is faith based.

My only point of contention to the atheist is to know the answer to this question - What if God does exist? Because to the theist, if God doesn't exist, my prayers don't matter. But to the atheist, if God does exisit, not believing in prayer does matter....

Not quite sure why the evolution derail appeared but if you believe the bolded to be the evidence for evolution then you need to research the subject more. Also note that the scientific usage of 'theory' is different from the everyday usage.

/derail.

\derail and thoughts about question posed? /derail

Not really. There are plenty of believers who get offended and dont want to participate or be a part of other believers prayers.

Let's go back to your original statement:

You said 'God', with a capitalised G, so I'm assuming, quite reasonably I think, that you mean the Christian description of god, especially as you have expressed that belief previously and if you had meant a different god, you most likely would have specified it to avoid confusion. If you had meant a deist concept of god, I think you would have specified that too.

So I'd like you to answer what I think is the more important objection that I have to your assertion, and that is that by assigning an apriori 50% probability to the existence of 'God', you are ignoring or discounting all other possibilities. You're taking a position of 'absence of any information', in other words at this point there could be many possibilities, and then you're ruling out all but one possibility, that the Christian God exists, but you have no reason to favour that possibility over any other. The second you specify your personal god, you immediately create alternatives. In fact you don't actually have any way of knowing all the possibilities which is what makes it virtually meaningless or so close to zero as to be meaningless.

Whilst it might seem that intuitively it must be a 50/50 proposition of something existing or not existing, in this case it's not that simple. A coin flip is 50/50, but that's only because we know all the possible outcomes. What you have done is create a false dichotomy.

Or did you actually mean to say something else?

I dubious too, I think a form of special pleading is used to create the false dichotomy of the 50/50 probability starting position and the second you start bringing in specific evidence to try to firm up the number it becomes entirely subjective.

Doesn't this presuppose that God is the more likely possibility? That's where the special pleading takes place IMO. I think God is no more likely than spontaneously materializing purple pandas.

This is factually incorrect, there is plenty of evidence, we have witnessed animals species evolving in very short time frames.

This is a blatantly dishonest effort to confuse an issue. You truncated my post to delete the explanation of the term "God". It is also insulting because it implies that you would think that I could not remember what I said and paste the actual quote to demonstrate your lie.

The actual quote:



You are truly unbelievable. I have once again lost all respect for your mental capability. You cannot hold a train of thought long enough to have a conversation. I have to constantly go back and fix all of your memory errors to get any point across by which time you have acquired new memory errors that render progress impossible.

If you said "Steven Hawking does not believe in God and he is smart so I am not going to believe in God either" it would be far better than anything you have said in our discussion.

What is more likely, that there exist purple pandas, or that there exist purple pandas that are able to do calculus?

When you start adding other clauses, like they need to appear in your underpants, you are reducing the probability, much like was said earlier, when you start to pinpoint the specific nature of God vs simply a creator.

I didn't truncate it, that was a direct copy from one of your posts. Post 436. Nor did I deliberately choose that version of what you said because I thought that it aided my argument knowing that there was in fact an almost completely differently written version elsewhere. I couldn't remember exactly how you phrased your assertion so I went back through posts using Ctrl-F and found that one first. Also, the other quote doesn't define God much better than the one I used.

No need for you to apologize for this strange error though (apparently you actually can't remember what you've said?) and your pretty outrageous and offensive accusation, if I were to take your incredibly patronising manner and regular insults personally I'd have stopped talking to you long ago.

I think that this is still wrong. Firstly, you're wrong to assert that assigning characteristics 'lowers' the percentage, or at least, you don't appear to have considered that any characteristics that you assign would be purely subjective and might increase the percentage rather than decreasing it. Haven't you read 'The Probability of God' by Unwin? All this time I'd be wondering if you had and that's what was informing your argument. If you haven't perhaps you might want to but be advised that Physicist Larry Ford said that “propositions that postulate existence have a far less than 50 percent chance of being correct.” and then went on to demonstrate why using Unwin's own formula.

Or it occurs to me at this late stage that perhaps what you're saying is as simple as 'this is a probability with two possible outcomes, existence or not-existence and so it's 50/50' but that would be simplistic to the point of being completely meaningless and I don't believe that you're doing something so pointless?

Amazing. Post 436 is the one to which I was referring. There is no "other quote". You just do not read very well. Look at it again and read both sentences.

None of my comments are insults. They are statements of fact. If I seem patronizing it is only frustration at your incredibly inept handling of this conversation.

MB is obviously totally confused and I am unable to help him out of his situation. I am giving up, however I do feel that I have clearly demonstrated the key flaws in his reasoning. If anyone else cares to defend his points, I would be happy engage with them.

RLK, I've been impressed with your posts, namely because we are arguing from the same position, but you grasp the concepts much better, and are able to articulate them so well.

I only say this as a plea for you to not abandon the thread so quickly because of frustration, your insights and contributions are appreciated.

So I haven't read Unwin but I found this blog article, conveniently by someone else who claims to have not read Unwin:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossex...bility-of-god/

It seems clear your P=0.5 is the same as his P_before.

I do think MB is correct that presumably, if the 0.5 is justified because we're proceding from maximum ignorance, which I think requires that we have no pre-conceived notion of what the word "God" refers to whatsoever, then it is possible that by adding to it we might actually increase the probability. Like if it turned out that "God" meant "The Mississippi River". When the blogger objects to P_before because he doesn't think P_before(Yahweh) should be greater than P_before(Zeus) I think he's missing what maximum ignorance actually means.

But given the kinds of attributes we'd actually like to add to "God" so that it has something more to do with what we actually think we're talking about, it does seem reasonable enough to think that adding them will decrease the probability. In the same way that you are less likely to encounter a panda with a specific pattern of markings than just any panda.

For MB, the very rough version of this is as simple as expanding from one completely undefined concept to the P(Yahweh) vs P(Zeus) vs P(...) where, even with "Zeus" and "Yahweh" minimally defined, and without actually talking about the probabilities of the attributes, now supposedly we go from P=1/2 to P=1/N (where N is the number of hypothetical deities). That is what RLK basically means when he says adding specification reduces the probability.

There seems to be some tension between the one process (specificity reduces P going from "panda" to "panda with marking pattern X") and the idea of proceeding from maximum ignorance though, unless we're capping the probability of God existing at being .5 max. The first process should require a starting conception of God which is maximally broad for "God" but not complete ignorance, and there is not really any reason why the prior probability for the most generic conception of God should be 0.5, because even the most generic definition of God that is still specified enough to be reasonably named "God", is specified enough that we're not talking about complete ignorance. But saying P_before=0.5 implies complete and absolute ignorance, but at that point it's no longer really like moving from "panda in the most general sense" to "specific panda".