You’ve perfectly captured the essence of life with a Labrador retriever.
Just obfuscation and stalling until the opposition walks away in disgust.
He just hopes you lose heart so he can claim victory (in his own mind at least).
Of course he has no ball.
I have literally no idea what you are talking about here. Did the bad man use a word in a slightly different way? Have I confused you?
You were not happy with a claim that claims for existence of god are asserted without evidence and that they were laughably easy to refute. I presented a selection of the best proofs for the existence of god so that we can all see that…yes…they all are asserted without evidence and no further work is needed to refute them.
Not sure what else you need here. Seems like you are just trying to avoid honest debate. I would hold up your posts here as an excellent example of what theologians try to do, you are dodging the important issues in favour of quibbling about minor substitution of words.
Would you agree that those “proofs” are asserted without evidence? or not? if not, what evidence do you think there is? or are word games more your style instead of the more challenging subject of rational enquiry?
I fail to see how the simulation argument excludes the proposition [1a]The fraction of human-level civilizations that have reached a posthuman stage is very close to zero which, if true, would render the conclusion false.
Yes. Arguments of this form ignore the fact that we aren’t plopped down in the universe at a random time. If we are presently in an era before such simulations are possible, then the probability of this all being a simulation is zero.
Sorry if this has been addressed, I haven’t read the whole thread. But when I saw this, I immediately thought of this thread, because this is why Christians must be debated.
Texas Legislators and Christian Groups Fight to Insert God Into Vets’ Funerals – Against Families’ Wishes
Shit like this makes debate a necessity.
Yes, despite all the complaints from Christians about how unbelievers should leave them alone if they don’t force themselves on other people, they never stop forcing themselves on others.
He doesn’t appear to be familiar with the arguments you listed, and so doesn’t understand that they are presented as proofs - logical ones. Full of holes, true, but that is what they are.
An atheist left out a comma on line 3 of his post, so God exists.
Ah! the old “argument from poor sentence construction” I forgot that one.
Well, because it’s amoral. A belief system based on fear and politics. Promotes segregation. Etc.
The practice of any religion, especially those of the Abrahamic, should only be allowed to be practiced in the “holy land”. Where the bombs drop quicker than your god’s tears.
Can’t wait till the GOPs make a visit! Wait-- that won’t happen. 
It doesn’t, if I was holding it up as evidence of my beliefs or as evidence of the existence of God then you’d be pretty well justified in disagreeing with me.
I was asked to provide a single example of what I’d consider a reasonable argument compatible with the existence of a “God like entity”. Perhaps I should have been clearer in how I presented that link, although I’m pretty sure everyone in this discussion is smart enough to figure out what my point was meant to be.
I have been very clear that I considered it to be based on debatable assumptions, as is the section of the wikipedia article quoted, which specifically lists alternative possibilities.
I am not arguing that a creator exists.
If you want to suggest that the hypothesis is completely invalid as the example I was asked for, I see no real gain to be made by arguing, so I cheerfully concede you that point.
I have been absolutely explicit in stating my own position.
“The universe exists, given that this is the case, and that I am pretty sure we lack any definitive explanation as to why it exists, I am unwilling to arbitrarily reject almost every class of solution in which it was deliberately created”
And like I said, I do not agree with you that “Object exists, I am unable to reject the possibility that it may have been created deliberately” is equivalent to making any random assertion without any evidence.
Do you care to address that last point?
Perhaps your argument sounds like one who says there is an elephant in the room,since others do not see it, and only you, then perhaps since you can’t prove it nor make them see it , it could just be in your mind. To prove an elephant was there should be an easy task, but you can’t just say it is invisible, as a proof!
Aren’t you taking some human’s word that it is of God? Why is it different than the Koran or any writing, weither it is the dictionary or Aesops fables?
Something to contribute? Do you mean something about Daffy Duck, or some sweeping generalizations, or some comments about wasting everyone’s time? :rolleyes:
Mockery, ridicule, intimidation, hyperbole, and glib dismissals can be effective if the intent is to shut down discussion, but not if the intent is to engage someone in a meaningful debate.
The title of this thread and the OP suggest that this thread is a debate about debating. I am not viewing it as another opportunity to argue against those who believe in the existence of god.
I think that you are one of the more reasonable debaters among the SDMB fraternity of atheists. You are intelligent, educated and you acknowledge your limitations, eg. that you are not an expert in Christian theology. But even you sometimes succumb to cheap rhetoric. (Hey, so do I, but I try to be aware of it when I do it.)
Your statement about arguments for god being simple and easy to refute started with “All”. Generally, I am skeptical of claims that start with “All”. I asked you to support your statement. You presented two arguments and then a few words of refutation. Do you think that two is the same as all? And do you really think that you refuted the arguments with a few words?
Then, after admittiing that another poster presented arguments that were not easy to refute, you went from “All arguments” to “All arguments around here”, suggesting recent posts on SDMB. I suppose this was your indirect acknowledgement that your initial statement was not true. Fine.
But, then, in your most recent response to me (which I quoted above) you try to shift the burden of proof by asking me to provide arguments that you can’t refute. I’m not the one who made the statement about refuting “all” arguments.
Also, your statement implied that anyone who believes in God is irrational, and that anyone that believes in the Christian God is laughably irrational. Perhaps you disagree with this implication. In any case, it’s a naive, simplistic dismissal of religious beliefs. Yes, the arguments for god can be refuted but if the structure of religious beliefs is as fragile as some atheists think it is, it would have crumbled centuries ago.
The logical and evidentiary structure is non-existent. It’s preserved only by emotion and culture.
If you disagree, then show me some examples of reasoning or evidence that hold up. I’m not making any qualifications. I will easily refute and and all arguments of any sort whatsoever which you want to present for the existence of any gods or any other supernatural entities, events or phenomena, without exception, and I will do so without effort or sweat.
I case you were wondering Galileo, yes, that did come across exactly as you intended.
And as for theology? I refer you to the"courtiers reply"
Perhaps refute is the wrong word to use when such a refutation requires one to prove a negative. Again, the burden of proof is on the claimant…no evidence? no refutation needed.
Of course it is. Consider this:
“Socks sometimes vanish when I do laundry. I am unable to reject the possibility that they are being intentionally stolen.”
Yes, it is *possible *that someone is sneaking into your house and stealing your socks. It is *possible *that invisible sock gnomes are stealing socks across the world. But barring some *evidence *that your socks are being intentionally taken, the claim of malice is just a random unsupported assertion.
Sure, maybe we’re all living in a simulation. Maybe a pantheon of gods created the universe. Maybe life is just a fever dream. Maybe, maybe, maybe … it’s easy to generate random, unsupported assertions ad infinitum. But unless there is some scrap of evidence to suggest that one of these explanations is true, they can be provisionally rejected as incorrect.
Maybe I am Tommy Westphall.
Mind taking a shot at the questions in post #311? I understand that references to Daffy Duck or spaghetti monsters or invisible pink unicorns may seem derisive, but Zeus was worshipped quite seriously by millions of people for hundreds of years, at the center of a culture that was not some isolated backwater, but arguably (along with Rome and their Zeus-equivalent, Jupiter) the cradle of western civilization.
Were those people wrong and modern JudeoChristians right? If so, can you explain why?
May be a reasonable assertion, depending how diligent you have been in establishing that they are actually vanishing, depending on how inclined your flat mates are to juvenile pranks and depending on how you are doing your laundry.
In reality, you could expect this assertion to be false, but you could also expect the type of person making it to be mistaken about the fact that his socks were missing to begin with. And I’m pretty sure that the universe does exist.
But, even on the face of it, it’s certainly a much less ridiculous than the assertion that George Washington is a space alien on the basis that you have no evidence he isn’t.
You are trying to suggest that any possible assertion that can not be explicitly disproved is equally (im)probable. This is obviously not the case, we must weigh evidence and experience.
In the context of our own experience, whether something has been deliberately created is a pretty fundamental question, if you are playing animal, vegetable, or mineral, then you can expect “is it man made?” to come up quite a lot more often than “is he a space alien?”. Admittedly there is no reason to suspect the context of our own experience to be super helpful in determining the lineage of universes, but it’s the only context that we have
But even so, as you say, it would not be appropriate to reject the George Washington hypothesis anyway. It would be fairly safe to do so, but you shouldn’t. It’s not exactly good logic to preemptively discard a hypothesis, even if it’s ludicrously unlikely, until you actually have a valid reason to consider it and evidence to disprove it, ludicrously unlikely things do happen every so often.
If you came across a completely unrecognised object on the beach, you wouldn’t reject the possibility that it was deliberately made without reason to do so.
How then do you justify entirely rejecting the possibility that the universe was deliberately created without any evidence to the contrary? In your own experience a significant subset of things that exist are things are created.
I’m not suggesting that you should conclude the universe is deliberately created. I’m suggesting that I don’t see a valid reason to reject that possibility entirely. And I don’t see any reasonable grounds to make any safe assumption as it’s to it’s relative likelihood either.