"Defining" God would be like trying to "define" you. We can use words to "describe" various aspects of who you are, but they will fall short of being a "definition" of you.

What about defining what a "table" is?

Ok. So (exactly) as much as you are in the "theistic evolution" camp, you are in the "theistic gravitation" camp?

In addition the whole "makes sense" story is irrelevant to you since with your assumption it (theistic X) is the only option; and as such given you have nothing to compare to, there is no meaning for the phrase "makes sense more than".

*shrug* Most people do not consider "gravity" as a cause for something else, but rather a "cause" in and of itself. Compare this to evolutionary theory, which asserts that the changes that happen move towards a specific cause (survival of species). So the notion of "theistic gravitation" isn't really the same.

The distinction that theistic evolution is making is that the changes to species is not caused by "random" activity (whatever people mean by "random" since that concept itself is extremely difficult to define as well).

And how do you discern something being more or less likely without the ability to compare them?

Then you cannot claim a higher level of confidence in one or the other, as that implies a means of comparison.

I realize that when you are losing an argument it becomes attractive to try to insult people, but let us try to stay away from that. It only makes you look childish.

I used specific numbers for the sake of brevity. The ranges exist because it is difficult to pinpoint your exact level of certainty of a claim. There probably would not be much of a difference between 10-20% and 10-12% in most people's minds. The larger the range, the less able one is to ascribe a level of certainty to a claim, making the level of certainty more vague in that person's mind.

Perhaps I do not. Please explain.

Yes. I believe it is most likely that hospitals exist, then Julius Caesar existed, then free will exists, then the universe was created five seconds ago.

Nope...

I suspect that what you believe about me would be fairly easy to quantify, and on the same level I find it hard to believe your notions regarding god are not (atleast in parts) likewise.

Do you think there are things god does not like?

As far as I can tell, you do. If the existence of your God, a being that creates or sustains everything and that can destroy the universe in three minutes, is not an extraordinary claim, then what claim could be?

I don't know what you mean here. First, if you insist on bringing in human observation into the story, then gravity is the "cause" for existence of stars, planets and therefore us, and without it we wouldn't be talking about evolution. Second, evolutionary theory doesn't take that statement as an assertion.

Bah... You could have spared us both a lot of time just saying this, instead of all the nonsense about you not being able to answer "how" questions.

Since there is NO SCHEME with which to compare, you can draw NO CONCLUSION about your confidence level.

"Universal" --> I have no single criteria to use that can discern between any two generic statements to determine

1) Whether it is possible to compare two statements
2) If such a comparison is possible, which statement one would have more confidence in

You're the one who made the assumption that I was literally telling you to a 1000 question survey and go ask someone when I explicitly told you that it was a thought experiment.

You're also the one who continues to fail to understand the concept of "not comparable" as a distinct concept from "equally confident."

If I can't flag you down for making great errors in understanding, then why should I bother continuing with the conversation?

Your primary hypothesis: Given any two statements X and Y, exactly one of the following statements must be true.

1) I am more confident of X than Y
2) I am equally confident of both X and Y
3) I am less confident of X than Y

I'm telling you that this hypothesis fails when you use rages.

Suppose you deem your confidence in X to be 10-20% and your confidence in Y to be 13-15%.

If you declare that you are "more confident" in X than Y, you must have a scheme with which to take this range and compare them with each other. The most direct method is a high/low average. In this scheme,

X: 10-20% -> 15%
Y: 13-15% -> 14%

And you would declare that you have more confidence in X than Y.

However, under this scheme, you run into pathologies. For example, suppose you deem your confidence in X to be 45-55% and your confidence in Y to be 20-80%. Using the same scheme as above,

X: 45-55% -> 50%
Y: 20-80% -> 50%

You would decide that you are "equally confident" in both statements. However, this statement is clearly false because you allow yourself to be 70% confident in Y but you can never allow yourself to be 70% confident in X. Therefore, this scheme does not accurately reflect the constraints that you wanted to put on this system.

In fact, *ANY* scheme that you use involving ranges of numbers instead of specific numbers will have such problems. The reason is that the subsets of the interval [0,1] do not have a "sensible" linear ordering. (Math nit: There does exist an abstract linear ordering in some mathematical sense, but it requires the axiom of choice and does not reflect what you are trying to accomplish here.)

Thanks, but this analysis looks nothing like your first one.

Human observation is necessary as we are the ones who have defined the classes of observations which are understood under the schemes. Those who study "gravity" are not studying "people."

However, since you've made this statement, it's clear to me that you should be able to understand how it's not possible to discern God's influence on the rest of the universe, under the assumption that "God created..." The ubiquity of His influence on things is apparent in the same way that you've made the ubiquity of the influence of gravity on things apparent.

If you had asked me what distinguishes theistic evolution from "generic" biological evolution, I would have told you right away. I don't think this answers "how" any better (in the sense of being enlightening) than the word "random" answers the question.

No, not under the assumption "God created...", but under the much much stronger assumption of "without God everything stops".

You should renew your subscription to Occam's razor imo (the way I defined and always used it and not in any other bizzarro sense of what OR means, so don't go into random crap again) if that's how you see it.

laugh out ****in loud!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111

WHY IS DEFINE IN QUOTES WE ALL KNOW WTF IT MEANS AND IN NO WAY IS THERE ENOUGH WIGGLE ROOM TO WARRANT QUOTES?!?!?

you know Aaron is frustrated, and losing an argument horribly, when he starts using CAPS.

(this might be the most absurd argument/debate i've ever witnessed)

wow another dishonest theist.....but just in case you are not and that you have a rational worldview capable of honest thought and evidence evaluation skills I say this...

Theist make the unwarranted claim that a god exists. When making that claim you HAVE to have evidence.

When denying that claim I need no evidence I just have to not be convinced by the evidence (or lack there of) that is provided to me by the theist.

for instance I say Unicorns exist and you say they do not....well you have no scientific evidence saying that they do not exist, so does that mean that my arguement for unicorns is just as honest as your disbelief in them? NO!

please its obvious you are just another theist ignorant of the facts and what science really is.

IF YOU MAKE A CLAIM YOU MUST HAVE EVIDENCE TO BACK IT UP! And if you make an extraordinary claim you must have extraordinary evidence to back it up.

that which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

now gtfo you fail at life.

I have not followed this thread as the discussion is not particularly interesting, but this post was so poorly conceived that I have to respond.

The key error is that I must have demonstrable evidence to make a claim. That is not true. For example, I claim that I have consciousness and am self-aware. I can not offer any demonstrable evidence that proves that statement is true. The evidence is totally internal to me and cannot be given to you. Yet I make the claim. You can respond that my consciousness is an illusion, but that has no weight for me as you do not perceive my consciousness directly so you literally do not know what you are talking about when you make that claim. If you want me to abandon my position, you must prove to me that I am in error. Do you understand that? If you do, you must see the analogy to theism.

My theism is based on my personal experience, much of which is internal to me. I admit that I cannot produce demonstrable evidence to you, but that does not mean I am incorrect. I also admit that I cannot provide evidence that should compel you to also become a theist. I could suggest that you try sincere prayer and meditation, but you could simply claim that you have and it did not produce anything to cause you to change your mind.

Concerning your OP, I would gladly shut up if atheists would at least realize that they do not have a closed case. They also do bear a burden of proof if they wish to change the minds of theists. If you recognize that, then we can go our separate ways believing what we choose.

Where did the guy you're talking to make any extraordinary claims?

He does say "Atheists... believe there is no God", which... sigh... isn't true of most atheists (that I know, anyway), but apart from that, pretty much all of what you're saying is either unfounded (where, for example, is your scientific evidence that he's a theist?) or outright irrelevant (no extraordinary claims).

Just out of curiosity, do you spend a similar amount of time and energy on UFO forums, ESP forums, etc?

Let me see if I'm understanding your interpretation correctly.

Let's say I built a self-replicating machine. And I set it to work at self-replication. After a while, you've got a bunch of self-replicating machines which a replicating themselves. Would you say that my action as the creator of the self-replicating machine has no influence on the system?

Even if the universe were to continue in the absence of God, if you accept the premise "God created..." then I don't see how you can divide between "God's influence" and "some other influence."

Does evolution make measurable predictions?

If you created that self-replicating machine and then had a heart attack and died the machine would keep going. That's very different from your initial position. In addition to think that initial creation has everlasting consequences and forever decides everything you must be a hard determinist. Are you?

An f'ing ton. And they have all been confirmed so far. I suggest Dawkins's recent book if you're unfamiliar with the subject of evolution, it's a decent read.

Most definitely, yes. (How do atheists convince people that "no belief" is different from "disbelief"? I could actually use some pointers here...)

Most definitely, no. (I'm on my intellectual home turf making a mathematical observation of his scheme. I don't think he really realizes that his comparability statement involving ranges is mathematically incoherent. I fear he may not get it because partially ordered sets are usually not seen until at least upper-level college mathematics.)

Probably, yes.

As far as I know, the "predictions" of evolution are not the same type of "predictions" as one would make for a physics experiment. For example, you could not put a bunch of different bacteria into a container for a period of time and make anything but the most broad predictions about the bacteria that will be in there in the future based *solely* on evolutionary principles.

I will certainly agree that evolution allows for many types of "conjectural inferences" about things such as correlations between this and that, but I don't think that this is actually a "prediction" about anything.

Edit: For example, if you see a man and a woman holding hands as they walk down the street, and they both have a ring on their finger, would you consider it a "prediction" that they are married to each other? I wouldn't. However, if you see a man tell a woman she's fat, I would "predict" that he's about to be struck in some manner (maybe a slap, a kick to the groin, or something else).

I've always understood a prediction to be about future events, not about "currently unknown" knowledge.

Evolution has made some extremely specific predictions about genetics that could never have been predicted by any other theory. For example, knowing that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while the other great apes have 24, evolution explained the missing chromosome by predicting that one of the human chromosomes must be an exact fusion of two chimpanzee chromosomes since we came from a common ancestor. This was confirmed when the human genome was mapped.

I really suggest reading up a little more on the subject before claiming stuff. It's like claiming atmospheric science makes no predictions because their equations are chaotic.

Here are some predictions of evolution fyp: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/evo_science.html

There is a bunch of predictions of future events in the above link.

Maybe I'm just thinking of a "prediction" in an entirely different way.

Going back to the married couple:

Prediction: "If we ask, they'll say they're married."
Non-prediction: "They are married."

Now taking the first item in the link and forming an analogy:

Prediction: Darwin predicted that precursors to the trilobite would be found in pre-Silurian rocks.
Non-prediction: There are precursors to the trilobite in the pre-Silurian rocks.

*Shrug* I have to admit that I'm not sure how I would parse one from the other. It just seems odd to me to rephrase a question about unknown information that has already been "established" in the past and turn it into a "prediction" by framing the question in a slightly different manner.

I really haven't thought about "prediction" very much, so this is all more or less reactionary to the concept of predicting the past.

Edit:

A prediction: These chromosomes will fuse
A nonprediction: These chromosomes have already fused
A prediction: These chromosomes will be found to have fused

I think I'm reacting more to the tense than anything else.

Chaotic differential equations are still completely deterministic, and the errors in atmospheric predictions are based on errors in the initial data, which means that there exists a window in which the data will be accurate enough to make predictions.