and that would be evidence of a supernatural creator how?

It would be evidence of something very weird going on but we'd need to know a lot more than the above to even hint at a supernatural creator.

No, you are not misunderstanding. There are an infinite number of ways in which 99% of people would over night all have the same religion.

I don't have an issue. My problem is with people stating that they need scientific evidence to believe in God when this is not possible because of the framework.

So they are asking for something that could not exist, then using it as an excuse not to believe in God. Which is why I keep calling it a self fulfilling prophecy.

You don't think that people could come up with a natural non God invoking reason why this happens?

Or even better, I could tell you how many people on this forum would react, "well we don't know why this is happening. What's wrong with saying we don't know? Stop inserting God into the gaps in our knowledge!"

You can call lack of good evidence an excuse if you want. It won't change the fact that if we wish to be rational we shouldn't believe in things not backed by good evidence.

If we're asking for something that does not exist. If we can't find God because of "the framework"...Well that's just more reason not to believe in God. However, that doesn't mean God does not exist.

But it's not self-fulfilling unless you're concluding God first! Think about it. The GotG argument only works if...

1) God does things that are completely undetectable to humans at this point in time, or
2) God operates in such a way that his actions are meant to look like they're random, or
3) God's actions ARE random.

If I assert a conclusion that the Invisible Pink Unicorn is an all-powerful universe creator, etc., then the "Invisible Pink Unicorn of the Gaps" would also be self-fulfilling from my viewpoint (but not from yours). So you see, it's pointless.

This is why both "God of the Gaps" and "Invisible Pink Unicorn of the Gaps" are the same. They CAN'T work for when we don't know the answer because there's no way to differentiate between a correct theory and an incorrect theory (falsifiability issue).

BUT NO EVIDENCE IS ALLOWED TO EXIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This post has been skipped over. Please respond.

I'll respond.

We pull the supernatural into the natural all the time. If your god exists and has actions that affect the natural world in any detectable way, then we'll find him too. Until then, sit back and have patience.

The "current framework" is ludicrously successful, you probably use it for everything except god. I am not going to make an exception just because you want to believe in god.

ugh. try reading anyone of my posts. then come back and apologies for this stupid statement.

This just is not true.

Your claim is that no matter how outlandishly obvious a piece of evidence, someone could deny it. Let's say a moon made of cheese shaped exactly, 100% like Jesus existed in our solar system. Not a vague outline, but a perfect figure. I would have a very, very hard time denying this as evidence of a higher power, God or not.

The fact is that nothing even remotely this outlandish has come to pass. When you say "oh you atheists wouldn't even accept a handwritten message in the stars!" you are saying that our standards for evidence are too stringent, that we could always be skeptical. You have a point - it's always possible to deny something. But while denying the significance of such phenomena would be a little silly, nothing even a teeny, tiny little fraction this obvious has ever existed as evidence for a deity, ever. You're creating a strawman here. If you have evidence, present it, and tell us why it's so blindingly obvious.

Says you. I'm not convinced of that. However, if it is true that the evidence for God is forever inaccessible to us then that sucks. In such a situation the rational response is still the same: Unbelief.

But if the framework is not set up this way, then scientific progress either slows drastically or halts altogether. There is no reliable way to determine which explanations we simply haven't found yet and which explanations don't exist. All you do by changing the framework is change the fallacious argument from God to the impossibility of finding an explanation (which is where the real fallacy lies in the God of the gaps argument anyway). We can't see the future, so the only logical way to proceed is to assume there are natural explanations.

This is why science is limited to explaining the natural world. I don't think that science has the answer to every important question, but once we leave "How?" and start asking "Why?" we are no longer in the realm of the scientific.

Sorry, you are correct. You clearly do not use any successful framework in any of your thinking.

Science isn't built upon refuting the idea that there is a God. It can't even really comment on it because an all powerful deity that super naturally created everything would be outside of the realm of science.

A creator existing is just as likely as it is unlikely, because nobody knows. The thing about it, though, is that asserting that there is one serves absolutely NO PURPOSE TO US as we are now, yet preachers constantly try to peddle their religions, and waste others' lives with them.

The likeliness, however, of whatever power creating the universe being the God of any books man wrote is as close to 0 as you could possibly get.

Spirituality is a private thing, for people to experience by themselves or maybe even with people close to themselves. Having a cult like organization that constantly requests donations from you, and feeds you placebos once a week is the McDonalds of spirituality.

I expect more out of people like you. I expect these sort of posts from people like rizeagainst, but not you.

Your previous comment was attacking claims that I never made.

This is simply a case of different starting assumptions. My default position when it comes to anything we don't have an abundance of empirical evidence for is skepticism. However, I don't require irrefutable scientific evidence to believe in something.

The world looks, to me, exactly as I would expect it to look if there were no theistic God. Thus, I don't believe in a theistic God at all. I would never tell you that my belief is backed by science though, even though science is a big part of how I determine what I would expect the world to look like and what it does look like.

Science can tell me that a specific claim made by a specific religion is wrong, such as a literal reading of Genesis, but it cannot tell me that my opinions as to what a world with or without God would look like or what the world looks like today are correct.

I don't really think he is. He is merely stating his opinion that if the current framework doesn't allow plausibility to your idea of God then the problem is far more likely to be with your idea of God than with the framework.

And as I have said (in just about every other post of mine in this thread) I find this to be a perfectly acceptable statement.

What I don't find acceptable is that people require scientific evidence to believe in God. Or when people claim that because a majority of scientist are athiests that this carries some sort of weight if the two are current mutually exclusive.

What the hell? That was answered multiple times.

"z0mg your qualifications for evidence of an invisible skydaddy don't include a 2 thousand year old book with primitive and disproven ideals! if you can't accept this book as sufficient evidence, nothing will sway you from atheism!"

I can understand and respect that position. The world to me looks just like if the God revealed in the bible does exist.

But your statement is not the mentality of most of the posters here. Which is why my belief is God is likened to that of belief in the tooth fairy. (which to me is the same as me saying your disbelief in God is the same as disbelieving in the Holocaust.)

What is your point? You are saying that god cannot be shown to be likely within the current framework. I don't think this is true, god could make himself apparent if he wanted to if he is like the christian god, all powerful/knowing. Yes, you can construct a pathological case in which god really does exist and I can't ever know based on the current framework because you can always keep tuning down* the effect he has. But if you are going to believe in god mostly for this "reason" you should believe in pretty much everything.

*This is also one of the reasons why good scientists are less likely to believe in a personal god. The concept of god looks exactly like a bad scientific idea that keeps getting more and more convoluted as time goes on since every new piece of evidence (evolution, anthropic explanations for why earth is hospitable ect) seems to contradict what people thought initially based on god existing.

Why is it unacceptable? Besides God, is there anything else about which you think it is irrational to ask for evidence before believing? People make untestable claims about Ghosts, Vampires, etc. and I would definitely require scientific evidence to believe in any of those.