The point is not that someone who plays soccer, plays the guitar, is a member of the Shriners, is a member of the Girl Scouts, is a member of a religion, etc has never contributed anything to those endeavours.

The point is that it is not those aspects that are informative to the points he made.


Are you excluding multiple readings of the Bible?

As the default has more or less shifted to various forms of atheism, maybe this list could be updated? Would be easier to find a match for many. For example if you are a dogmatic atheist, which I think I'm not, not at least an extremist . Agnosticism isn't spot on either, too much of a possibility for a deity given. Like it would be a real alternative.

Depends on what you mean by "helped." Looking through a fishbowl at a primitive species developing similar to humans and given the opportunity to intercede or not one time to prevent the development of supernatural beliefs and all they entail, I'd leave things be. Can't just hand-wave away the effects of nihilism on specie/cultural development. Like Nietzsche said: Was jetzt, Blödmann?

This thread was supposed to be about possible real existence, not the common imagined. Just sayin'

You're chasing your own tail. And until you understand why, you're going to keep chasing your own tail.

What is your concept of "evidence"? Once you've established that, we can then ask the question of what it would mean for something that is supernatural to conform to that concept. And then we will see whether the question you're asking is well-formed or if you're defining yourself out of the entire conversation.

I have no particular interest in hindering belief in god(s) or the supernatural. As long as people aren't hurt and it stays out of my life, I'm fine with it.

Have you found any evidence?

I make some real arbitrary actions every day. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Or are you going to merely assert determinism and define yourself right out of the conversation?

Does belief have to be all or nothing btw? Maybe you can't be a 70% or 0.1% believer for example? And I couldn't be a (E-13)% believer?

Nope. You can try to define your belief as some sort of estimate or something like a confidence interval. But it's worth recognizing that this is all subjective estimation, and that numbers are mostly just made up.

For example, you can claim to be a E-13% believer, but there's no expectation that you actually have anything remotely resembling any type of intuition about what that number means.

Numbers can be a means of finding the ballpark of the strength of belief, I figure. "I'm certain but not at all times" could be 70%. "I don't really believe, but don't want to go to hell if God exists" could be 0.1%. And "I'm not stupid enough to completely have absolutely exactly zero possibility expectation, but for practical reasons and a bit beyond anyway" could be E-13%.

There is a necessary rigor that complete skepticism provides, and there is a libido that complete faith has access to. Both of these I see as essential, so anyone who is incapable of locating themselves in either pole is lacking in my view.

Applying this pattern to the societal level, I see the increase in cultural secularity and atheism as a progression of the broader Christian story. Still, it’s up to the individual to be dynamic rather than “lukewarm”.

That is a pretty strong claim!

You are certain that you don't make these possibly arbitrary actions solely by way of some complex interaction between who you are (at the time) and the circumstances you are in (at the time)?

If not, that sounds quite frightening! I like to think that I had tacos for lunch today purely due to non-arbitrary causation. Don't like to think that I might arbitrarily eat gravel for dinner later today.

People don't typically operate at that level of granularity. We typically operate at a more categorical level.

They can be, but they are often terrible ways to actually understand what's happening. If someone is giving me a subjective probability estimate, I can more or less expect that they will be off by 1-2 orders of magnitude. (Edit: Technically, I'm thinking about odds estimates.)

Numbers give a false sense of clarity in situations like these. What you're saying "could be" E-13%. But in reality it could be something closer to 0.01% and you're off by 11 orders of magnitude. Mathematically, this is a huge deal. But in terms of intuition, not so much. But then what do you *actually* mean by giving that particular number?

You either completely understood the point, or completely missed it. And I can't tell which. Well played.

It depends on whether you think the first part of your post had anything to do (either way) with determinism. Since you mentioned determinism later on in the same paragraph, it seems that you did.

I started with one in E-10 to E-20 which corresponds to E-8% to E-18% or E-13% smack in the middle. But my interval is already ten magnitudes.

0.01% definitely looks way too high, as does one in a million. One in a billion starts to get potential, as flukes might, just might have some room. Get it to one in a trillion, and we are starting losing control, we have that limited total comprehension, even if I think it's good enough for reaching about that magnitude of a number.

At this point, you're showing that you're pretty much grounded in nothing, which is why this whole thing is entirely nonsensical.

It's an interesting choice to cut out the part of the quote that contained the part that you thought was relevant. That was just an offhanded remark.

I'm operating with the concept of "supernatural" as described by OP.

The point is that the assertion of "still not found regularities of nature" is insufficiently well-defined for any type of meaningful inquiry. Are all of the decisions that I make mere reflections of the "still not found regularities of nature"? If I decide to pick a ham sandwich instead of a turkey sandwich for lunch, is that a regularity of nature? Or is it a real "arbitrary" action? And how do you even know?

This ties further to my post previous to that:

I had a feeling that you were couching your posts in terms of OP's posts. This feeling was probably due to the posts being within a thread.

He was the one to use "arbitrary" as some sort of indication of something being something other than natural. It doesn't seem to be the case that "arbitrary" can stand in for such notions or that it implies them.

Like your belief is grounded on nothing?

We have to live with our best estimations.

My beliefs are grounded in personal observations and experiences. Your numbers, on the other hand, are not. You have no meaningful observations or experiences that lead you to concluding what you have about one in a trillion. Why one is one in a trillion where that tipping point is? Why not one in a quadrillion? Why not smaller?

We can live quite well without artificial numbers excreted from our rears.

Edit: You still haven't addressed the question of your concept of evidence, which will shed further insight into the foolishness of this errand.

My belief is also grounded on the bulk of evidence I have tried to get and observations I have done during my life. The actual (very very small) number is of course speculative, for practical uses l of course should be called an atheist.

Trying to analyze that utterly minuscule part left.

If you are, then I would invite you to go back to the thing that you have ignored (again).