Since it’s not clear to me from your post, perhaps you aren’t aware that denumerable sets can have measure zero (and hence zero probability). For example (just copying from wikipedia because I’m lazy):
The Lebesgue measure of the set of rational numbers in an interval of the line is 0, although the set is dense in the interval.
The point here is weighing infinities against infinities. Some infinities are (much) larger than others.
I was wondering if that was the issue. The next part answers (what would have been) my next question.
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
The Lebesgue measure of the set of rational numbers in an interval of the line is 0…
[/QUOTE]
Which would have been about how large the possibility space has to get. I guess it is obvious that it doesn’t need to get that large; but then I never trust my mathematical intuitions.
I’d find interesting any attempt at a refutation of any sort of God. It is useful if it is said which definition of “God” people assume when arguing; but I think this is often apparent from the argument itself, because one will need to say something about God (e.g. that he is omnipotent, thus can stop evil, that he is uncaused, and so on). The conclusion, in such cases, might be needed to be stated more clearly (e.g. no omnipotent God exists). I don’t think such confusion reigns as to make the exercise a waste of time.
No, that’s not really what I mean, although I’m sure that happens. What I’m talking about is with regard to the omni’s. So, let’s say a philosopher presents a few arguments that show that omniscience or omnipotence (or the combo) is incoherent or logically impossible. The theist philosopher would then redefine those terms - or try to.
William Lane Craig essentially makes this point in his article in the Cambridge book on atheism. All the atheists are doing is, essentially, forcing theists to perfect their definitions of God. The underlying thought I had while reading it is that what this ultimately means is that there would be no properties argument that would be successful. You could put forth one and the theist (Craig) would shrug and say okay, I guess i gotta go back to the drawing board. He wouldn’t say ‘you caught me, there can’t be any God’.
To some extent I think this is reasonable - you shouldn’t just change your mind at first blush when presented with a new argument. You should think about it, research it, and the like THEN change your mind if you can’t refute it.
To another extend it’s not reasonable in that such redefining seems to lead to the “McNose problem” of omniscience. Check out 289-290 here (starts on the bottom paragraph of 289).
An atheist (and lest I put words in anyone’s mouth, if you are an atheist and disagree, feel free to correct me) is a person who includes no concept of “God” in their worldview. To an atheist — barring temporary moments when they may entertain the concept of “God” for purposes of participating in a debate with a theist — the word “God” is utterly meaningless and might as well be stricken from their vocabulary were they not living in a world that contained theistic people.
One thing this implies is that in order for an atheist to make an argument about God (such as the nonexistence thereof), the atheist must first define the term. Me, I don’t use the term twiddletwaddle (except right here right now in this sentence) and it is meaningless to me (except as I choose to use it in order to explain that, as used by hypothetical others, it refers to something that doesn’t exist), so before I say “twiddletwaddle” doesn’t exist, I need to explicate it, thusly:
[QUOTE=hypothetical construct]
Joe Blow is a self-identified twiddletwaddlist. Joe Blow believes twiddletwaddle exists with the following characteristics and aspects and manifestations: {lists them here}.
This ‘twiddletwaddle’ that Joe believes in does not exist. {optional elaborations to follow}
[/quote]
Me, now, I consider myself theistic. I seldom disagree with the assertions of most atheists when constructed in this fashion. (i.e., God, as the atheist understands a specific theist to believe in same, does not in fact exist). But if you do not use the term you should not (and should not be EXPECTED TO) make an argument that God (unqualified) does not exist. Coming from someone who does not make use of the term, in a world where there is a lack of uniformity and agreement on the use thereof, such a statement is meaningless.
No, the first thing an atheist must do is to ask whoever he is debating for his definition of god. Otherwise the atheist is refuting a strawman. I can define all sorts of logically inconsistent and absurd gods, but I don’t think a theist would be very convinced by my disproof of them - nor should he be.
Now there are thousands or millions of possible gods to be refuted, but since a monotheistic theist and the atheist will agree on the nonexistence of all but one of these, the problem is much simpler. The trouble is that monotheistic theists don’t agree on the characteristics of the one god remaining.
Since atheism is a statement of belief, not knowledge, it is not unqualified. However given the lack of reasonable evidence for any of these gods over thousands of years, the belief that none of them exist is perfectly reasonable.
Sorry, I should rephrase.
Obviously if the atheist is at this moment debating with a theistic person, the atheist should have the theist define the term; that’s the person who’s using it!
What I should have said was that in any other context (like popping into a thread about the existence versus non- of “God” to have a say) the atheist should define the term, usually (I assume) by referencing some Joe Blow Theist’s stated definitions thereof;
or, if not that, then by generalizing and making those generalizations specific: “OK, most theistic people believe God ‘hears’ them when they pray… let’s posit a metaphorical ‘hears’ but say that a feature of ‘God’ is that the prayerful thoughts inside the heads of praying believers are received and understood by ‘God’…”
I don’t mean to be placing the burden of definition on the atheist. But the atheist can point to one theist, or to some position statement of aggregate theists of some ilk, or make a generalization drawing upon our common everyday experience with various theistic people to get a nod that yeah in general they believe that, etc. And it is important (to all parties involved) for the atheist to be specific about which def of ‘God’ is in play. Otherwise:
• the theist is going to feel like the disbelieved / disparaged God is not God as the theist understands or defined God; and
• the atheist is going to feel like the theist keeps moving the goal posts throughout the discussion.
You already have all kinds of assumptions about any god(s), which I’m sure reflect beliefs you already have, we’re pointing out why it is thus.
It appears you want to see if the possibility of the existence of meatballs is falsifiable but don’t want to confine the debate to balls or meat.
I didn’t intend to have a debate to about the existence of God. I took it that discussion of issues was the forum topic, not always straight up debate .
The counter-analogy would be that I am aware that “meatballs” is used in many ways, and I am interested in arguments against any reasonable definition of “meatballs”. For example, amongst the definitions might be “is massless and tasty”, and “is massless and perfectly reflective”. Someone may give an argument refuting the former, and thus not refuting the latter; but so what, I could still find the argument interesting. And they could give an argument refuting the latter but not the former. If I said “only meatballs so defined…”, I would only hear about one of the arguments, and that isn’t what I wanted.
What are the barest minimum qualifications for an entity to be considered a “god”?
That is a problem with the arguments as things that are meant to convince a theist to renounce faith in (any) God. I don’t think that is the only way to think about such arguments. For example, they might be meant to explain, or justify a position (which is possibly what some theistic arguments do); they might be meant to just show that some Gods don’t exist (so a theist could indeed use them to improve their position, in some respect). My interest is academic; the various cosmological and ontological arguments for God, in particular, are interesting intellectual exercises. Even if we know how to deal with such arguments now, and show the flaws, I think they are still interesting objects of study. But while I have seen a number of theist arguments, I haven’t seen many atheist arguments. I thought such arguments would also be interesting objects of study. And, indeed, people have presented some here. From your links I particularly like Ontological Argument for the Non-Existence of God as it is some sort of analogue of an ontological argument for theism.
Sufficiently advanced technology…
From post 5.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But that isn’t the way it plays out. If you read the mainstream reviews of the new atheism books, (in the Times, not some church bulletin) they say that the atheists are too nasty and in any case they are refuting some silly fundamentalist brand of religion, not the religion they believe in. I just finished Hitchens’ book, and he is very careful to address mainstream religions, and hardly talks about fundamentalist ones at all.
Surely you see how moderate theists here will barely own up to believing that Jesus died for our sins, let alone any other part of Christianity. It seems most people who will discuss god have retreated into deism, which isn’t refutable.
I don’t think there are any general statements that are universal. Prayer? There are plenty of reasons given why prayer doesn’t seem to work (god’s plan and all that.) Cosmological arguments may be more or less universal, but they can’t get you anywhere except to weak deism, considering how all religions got the story wrong - the Western ones wronger than the Eastern ones.
People who can’t express their idea of god beyond simple cliches probably believe due to social and parental conditioning, not from reasoning. That’s the way I believed. I was Jewish, most of my friends were Jewish, I went to Hebrew School, and no one would express doubt - not even my grandfather who didn’t believe. It took years for me to see the light.
From scriptures I take a god has these abilities: create life, create reality, & be ‘worshiped’ or followed. I would contend that though limited mankind has those abilities and therefore is a god.
To me we are god’s children and therefore gods ourselves. The advanced forms of ‘god’ so to speak are the angels and archangels, who are our most direct parents. We will grow and become them, they will grow and move to ever higher levels of life, love and adventure. And that procession continues to the so called omnimax God of Gods.
I agree with you - I find the arguments interesting. I no longer find them compelling - even the atheological arguments.
I agree although I would lump in evidential arguments in there as well. I like the study of religions and I appreciate the various apologists who try to justify their religious positions - such as resurrection arguments for Jesus. I don’t find them compelling, but they do make me think (well, the good ones do). I also find that through them I end up researching and studying ancient religions/history which I find fascinating as well.
They are out there, it’s just that the atheological side of the house is not as engaging as the theological side. There are almost no ‘atheist’ courses in college, for instance, while there are entire schools devoted to apologetics. I only know of one, taught by this guy. He was on Luke’s podcast a while ago.
Hm… If that interested you I wonder what you would think of Michael Martin’s TANG argument. Are you familiar with Bahnsen, the TAG, and presuppositional apologetics? If not, then this probably won’t interest you. Gene Witmer, a philosopher, wrote up some interesting stuff in a PDF document a few years ago on presuppositionalism. I can’t find it online anymore, but i do have a copy of the PDF. Shoot me an email if that interests you.
I’m familar with (what I think is) one brand of it, i.e. Safrati of Creation Ministries.
The two most interesting parts of Martin’s TANG, to me, are the logic and ethics sections. In the case of logic I think a response along the lines of “I mean something else by dependance” might work (something fuzzy that isn’t at all contigent/causual; or even co-dependance). Maybe that is what Frame is trying to do, I am not sure. The way the discussion goes seems to be muddled. Maybe Frame is trying to sperate different concepts of necesity, which is a reasonable thing to do, one might think it necessary that red things are coloured, but not a logical truth. But it doesn’t seem like Frame and Martin are managing to engage on the issue.
In the ethics section Martin is arguing specifically against divine command theory. Here it seems you either have to buckle down, which is what Frame does, or abandon the theory, because there is no room to move with what “dependance” means; it means “command”. Along these lines, given that divine command theory seems implausible, I wonder if anyone has argued that omnipotence entails divine command theory.
I wasn’t actually aware that Sarfati was a presuppositonalist. I seem to recall he was a YEC dentist (or something like that) who continually argued against evolution.
I think the problem is that Martin’s TANG and Frame’s TAG have a wrong view of logic. They both manage to view it as some sort of aether, whereas I think it’s more akin to rules of language.
It doesn’t make sense to me to say that logic is both contingent on God and a necessary feature of reality.
An almost necessary book for this is “Five Views on Apologetics”. In my opinion that book fairly decisively destroys presuppositionalism. I relied on it a bit in my debate here.
I don’t know if anyone else has argued that omnipotence entails that, but I think William Lane Craig holds to divine command theory - so it might be worth it to go through his reasonable faith Q&A archive.
There are infinitely many positive integers: 1,2,3,4,5,… But each one does exist. There are infinitely many possibilities for how tall I could be or what my name might be, but I exist.
nm…