Wow. Although I didn't spell it out, it was obvious that my original post was making the assumption that flips were either random or that I was God. Unbelievable.

Wow. Of course the bible isn't significant evidence. I was just pointing out that if we assume that a universe that contains a God that wants to reveal himself always contains a Bible and a universe without such a God sometimes doesn't, then the knowledge that there is a bible slightly increases the chance that there is a revealed God (unless that God is logically impossible.) I pointed this out to chezlaw years ago and he reluctantly agreed. Unbelievable.

70 years old with one year of college yet I smite three guys who know ten times as much math as me. Maybe I am god.

No I don't agree with this statement. The spaghetti monster is made of spaghetti and by definition cannot meet the qualification for metaphysical necessity.

Do you want me to think up some other magic being that qualifies? Actually I could just give a whole list of like 2k gods that humanity has come up with in the past. 50/50 for all of them right?

How do you know God doesn't manifest itself in reality? How would you detect an event that is Gods interaction vs an even that's not? It seems that these must be presumed axioms one way or another. Either some sort of presumed naturalism or some sort of presumed theology, they are both still axioms that are assumed a priori.

I don't think you quite grasp what im saying. If something doesn't predate, matter, time and the physical world it wouldn't be necessary in the way im using the word.

There are of course other classical gods that fit this idea IE: Abrahamic faiths, some ideas of deism etc.. But most of these 2k "gods" you're thinking of wouldn't be analogous to what were talking about.

The War of 1812 was not the Civil War.

Also, I didn’t say this means anything. The question was asked if there was any proof of god, and all I did was propose a possible way, which is actually based on probability, that someone might use to claim that proof exists.

By the way, the luckiest man to ever live has got to be Arnad Cortez. The probability of him having all the events that happened to him has got to be a decimal followed by a whole bunch of zeros, and this included the Aztec prophesy, which he fit to a tee, that he was their missing long lost god.

Best wishes,
Mason

Yeah I don't think you can claim evidence for god when he wins a war for someone when at the same time millions of children die from disease and hunger. Like yeah, that one time highly improbable event happened, but there are a lot of events that happen that are very low frequency. It's just numbers, if there are 10^20 things can happen with very low probability and some of them happen, that is expected. I myself witnessed a 10^-8 event in a board game throwing dice, but when there are so many events of low probability can happen that doesn't mean jack.

Dearest Mason,

It is with great joy that I received your letter.

Please accept my most humble apologies for not paying any attention at all to the historical details of your post, not limited to not caring what war you were even talking about. As you will recall from our previous written correspondence, the point is that 'influential but unlikely weather events' being evidence of deities seems extremely weak. Perhaps God sent the Kamikaze to save the Japanese from Kublai Khan. Perhaps God sent storms to destroy hundreds of persian ships in the second invasion of Greece. But I at least can not see any reasonable way to look through the wide lens of history and see an influence of God beyond "low probability events happen". Why do this? Why do any of it? And more importantly, why, for thousands of years, let such rampant suffering and evil persist if God is intervening in weather to change human history?

I'm glad you didn't say this means anything, because surely it doesn't.

Loyally and always yours,
uke

You told me the universe was indistinguishable regardless of God's existence. Ok. Then why does it even matter whether God exists? If his existence doesn't change any feature of the universe, what's the point? It's just metaphysical mumbojumbo at that point.

Clearly it Matters, if it didn’t you wouldn’t be talking about it right now.

I gave my reasons for accepting my axiom over yours

*accepting the ontology of morality
*intrinsic purpose
*justifying love of others

Not to mention, people who believe are generally happier than non believers. I remember seeing studies on this and a bunch of other things that seem to suggest society is better with spiritual beliefs.

I wanted to say something about how you don't need to be bat**** crazy to have morality, purpose or love but I chose not to.

At the moment of your death, you find the answer. Or not, because you're just ****ing dead. Most likely the latter.

Your desire to force a structure to your triple post meant, unfortunately, that you entirely missed the point. The problem I identified wasn't because of your limited sophistication with advanced mathematics, it was with being able to read people. When atheists dismiss the evidence via the bible as nonsense, they are not rejecting your silly "1 in a quintillion to 1 in 500 quadrillion" betting game nonsense. I don't reject that. No-one ITT does. To feel like that was some important clarification that atheists were confusing is simply a bad read.

As usual, you try to force these kinds of EV odds calculations into...well....everything and fall flat on your face with it once again.

When someone rejects the bible that's just common sense. Bringing up the bible as evidence makes me.... well....

Your view is the universe is indistinguishable regardless of whether god exists. A deistic universe and an atheistic universe - on your view - provide identical information on which to form our beliefs about morality and purpose. You aren't really doing anything here, when you say you accept "intrinsic purpose" this seems like more or less just equivalent to you believing in a god. But again, if the deity doesn't actually do something - if the universe is indistinguishable from one without a deity - then why should I care?


This one confuses me. I love my wife and son. I don't need a deity to do that. And my love seems perfectly "justified" on multiple levels of analysis.

I doubt your empirical claim, but so what? That wouldn't make religious beliefs true. Believers of different stripes have mutually contradictory beliefs.

And one last thing. Stop with the "Dearest Mason" stuff. It's insulting and condescending, and quite unbecoming. You need to remember that one of the purposes of these forums is vigorous debate, and that means you don't insult someone who you disagree with.

Mason

Indeed. You don't "basically double" the chances.

All-or-nothing fallacy.

This is an absurd assumption to make. DUCY?

Are you just trying to be obnoxious now? If 'p' is the prior probability that Sklansky is God, the probability that Sklansky is God given the new evidence is 2p/(p+1), per Baye's Theorem. The chances ARE "basically doubled" for small 'p'. Do you think it's likely that Sklansky is God?

Kelvis seems right to me. Explain exactly which part of his argument is fallacious?

If you want to get into it, it has a lot more to do with the general approach to thinking about belief as being merely probabilistic in nature. Among other things, it's an error that one should assign a 50% probability to getting a single coin flip right under these types of circumstances and use that to update my beliefs. I would literally conclude nothing after watching one correct coin flip. I wouldn't allow for such nonsense in my sense of experimental design. (Note: This is highly asymmetric and I'm okay with that. That is, if he gets it wrong, I will conclude that he can't do it on the spot. But there's no reason to do this symmetrically since the weight of evidence isn't symmetric.)

The example that was given by the other poster is a clear example of how this actually isn't how we update our beliefs. You can assume whatever you want, but if those assumptions don't match how I (or most anyone) actually updates our beliefs, then his claim that we "must" do anything with our beliefs is clearly going to be wrong.

(DS also a history of him making comments of this type here and in SMP, and it's a well-trodden path of objections to his insistence of using this model for how people update their beliefs and what people "must" conclude as a result of his approach.)

The all-or-nothing fallacy is basically that we have a binary classification scheme, and that all things must go into the same category. Specifically, because there are small probabilities of events happening by chance, that therefore all events *ARE* the result of random chance.

Here's the statement again:

Yes, it's true that rare things happen as a result of random chance. It's not true that because a rare thing can happen by random chance that a rare thing that happened *IS* random chance. And pointing to other rare events happening as a result of chance does not imply that some particular event is the result of chance. There's little justification to support such a claim and it's almost certainly wrong. It stands as a possible explanation (I would even grant a "probable" explanation in some cases), but that only results from actually assigning various probabilities to things and doing such an analysis, and making other observations about the situation. And much of this is quite impossible to do with real life coincidences or situations.

It is logically fallacious to simply argue that because there are lots of events that we can therefore conclude nothing regarding low probability events.

(The addition of the anecdote "I've seen a rare random event and therefore <conclusion>" is just an added bonus of bad argumentation.)

I humbly suggest that people read Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion".

Of course I don't think that when a small probability event eventually happens it cannot be evidence for something else. If you're talking about the storm that sank a few ships then it's just very poor evidence and tells absolutely nothing. It's just noise.

Presumably, you have more than an assertion to justify this claim?

This time, my point is that you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth. "This tells you absolutely nothing" and "It's just noise" are not the same claim. By claiming it's "noise" you are making the positive assertion that randomness is the explanation. That's what "noise" is.

This is quite possibly more subtle than you're able to realize given the quality of other arguments you've made, which is why I don't expect you to accept or understand the error. You can argue things like "the signal is below the noise" or something like that, but to claim that this is *itself* noise is extremely flawed.

I would also argue that this presentation is dramatically different than the one you actually put forward that I criticized.

This probability = 50/50 argument reminds me of an old John Oliver report on the daily show:
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/hzqmb9...adron-collider