Actually, you don't really need to reply to any of my stuff for a while, I don't want to get this off track. OP tends to say what I mean better than I do anyway.

Why do people try to debate other people on their religious beliefs? Shouldnt it be quite obviously a waste of time? Do you debate with a child the merits of tax law and the limits of multivariable calculus? Do you try to teach your cat to speak German? Hopefully not, because these things are beyond their comprehension. I recently caught an email at work being forwarded around as proof that these giants, some sort of david & goliath type beings have been proven to exist, because said email contained poorly photoshopped pictures of large skeletal remains. Basically it looked like a normal human skeleton, but several times larger than a normal humans size. The pictures were instantly recognizable as having been shopped, just poor color contrast, unusual displacement to surroundings, you know the usual tell-tale signs. These are my co-workers, people with bachelors and even a couple of masters degrees, forwarding this **** around as "amazing". Only 3 words can sum them up - "What. The. ****." So why would I even attempt to speak to such mouth breathing knuckle draggers?

The biblical God said he was going to return to earth and bring peace after he killed all us heathens. How long do we have to wait for that to happen before it becomes evidence against him? Would another thousand years do it? Or maybe a million or billion.

I think eventually him not showing up is evidence. And if its not it should at least make you think twice.

I am not affirming the consequent because I am not arguing a syllogism. Formal logic really has little place here, and invoking it is basically confirming that you are more concerned with showing off your fancy education than you are at making an argument.

As for the dog example, you guys are simply ignoring that when you see no dog, some percentage of the time that will be because there is no dog, whereas if you see a dog, that percentage drops to zero. Not seeing a dog certainly does increase the possibility of non-existence.

By the way, here's a good way of thinking about the dog. Suppose the landlord visits 100 times, on different days and times, and there is never a dog there. And at the end of the 100 days, the landlord, careful not to overclaim, says "I have now visited 100 times. I conclude that due to my visits, it is now more probable that there is no dog there. I don't, however, claim that it is impossible that a dog was there but was hidden 100 times. I doubt that to be the case because that would require that the tenants engage in all sorts of machinations to conceal the dog every time. But it's possible. However, my 100 visits are still evidence, but not proof, of the dog's nonexistence".

What's wrong with that?

The reason why the 100 visits would count as evidence that there is no dog is because we would expect the renters to occasionally make a mistake if they were hiding the dog rather than just not having a dog. In other words, the hypothesis that there is a dog, but it is kept hidden, has different empirical implications from the hypothesis that there is no dog.

However, this point obviously doesn't relate to god, who wouldn't make a mistake.

This.

Not seeing God/Jesus/modern miracles increases the probability that God doesn't exist? I think we've been over that...

We'd expect to see a dog if there were a dog, so if your argument holds there's a chance there's no dog. Now explain why we'd expect to see God if there were a God, and we're all set.

Being less defensive will lead to a more fruitful conversation.

First of all, that assumes a big fact-- in the Hebrew Bible, God makes plenty of mistakes, so the idea that God could never make a mistake is one that I am not sure is even accepted in Judeo-Christian theology. But even if that is the premise, that premise could be wrong. Indeed, if God did make mistakes, I would not expect Christians to necessarily admit that.

But even if we assume that God, in fact, can't make a mistake, I don't think the renters making a mistake is the ONLY thing that increases the probability of there being no dog. Even if we assume the renters were perfect hiders, visiting the premises over and over again and not seeing the dog admits of two possibilities-- (a) there is no dog, or (b) there is a dog but the renters are engaging in complicated machinations to hide him or her, whereas visiting the premises and finding the dog admits of only one possibility, there is a dog.

So the probability increases that there is no dog for that reason as well.

I think most Christians claim that God is perfect (except for open theists). A perfect god would not make any mistakes.
You are doubtless correct that the probability is lower for the perfect dog-hider hypothesis than the no-dog hypothesis, but this disparity in probability is not increased by the landlady going to the house. Rather, it is a result of the lower initial probability of the perfect dog-hider hypothesis.

Now that we know that UFOs have indeed been visiting us and tampering with nuclear weapons, all of the arguments on this thread need to be reevaluated.

This is a tangent, but doesn't God apologize in the Book of Jeremiah for the Babylonian invasion? I thought it was pretty clearly accepted that at least the God of the Hebrew Bible was not inerrant.

Are we assuming the UFOs were sent by God?

I take it you are talking about Jer. 42.10? Looking at a few different translations I see that it is not always translated as an apology, but I am not familiar with either Jewish or Christian traditions of interpreting this verse, so I can't really comment.

However, at least in my experience, most Christians do not accept the claim that God, whether in the Old Testament or currently, makes mistakes (with open theists being an honorable exception).

Maybe his plan was to do miracles, and have it be properly documented, but instead humans screwed it all up as usual. So we got the hodgepodge of plagiarism and filler material that ultimately became known as the Holy Bible.

Or, as Thomas Jefferson concluded, humans made up all the supernatural stuff, as part of a "jobs program for the Priesthood" (I am paraphrasing Thomas)

The least likely scenario is that a supreme being, who could create an entire universe and everything in it, could not produce a coherent narrative.

It was the editors of this third-rate collection of four plagiarized "gospels", letters, and the horror story of The Book of Revelation (actually, the first part is more letters, and the second part is a horror story) who gave it the title of "New Testament" after a Jesus quote that had absolutely nothing to do with "scriptures".

The creation of a "New Testament" then required that the older Hebrew collection be named ...



The New Testament was short on material, comparatively, so they needed to duplicate material, and add some lackluster letters to various groups in an attempt to give it gravitas. They were even so audacious as to call some of these short letters "Books"*. Even then, the New Testament is much shorter than its predecessor.

Part of the reason why some call it "Good News".

* I have literally written postcards that were longer than two of these "Books".

Wait a second, open theists most certainly claim God is perfect, I am not sure where you got that from.

You're right. I should have said that open theists acknowledge that it is possible for god to make mistakes for other reasons.

I am not sure what you mean by mistakes here.

I mean something like: accidents are possible. But really, this is a tangent off of a tangent--I have no larger point here.

And that is how it is done.

Well we have no evidence against that possibility so it must be so.

What are you talking about?

Ok, I still disagree, there is nothing in the open theology that would result in an accident from Gods side. But if you don't want to get into it that's fine. This is just the first thing ITT thread that I found interesting so I pounced on it.