How can we do that? It’s you who says that there is some God - it’s up to you to define it and bring evidence.
Of course, no one claims this. Let’s move on…
Yes, this is the one that atheists say.
Which is why no atheists assert that. We can assert that certain definitions of God don’t exist, such as the omnimax God, but in general, we don’t assert that God must not exist. What we do say is that since there has been no evidence presented for a God, then we accept the null hypothesis that there isn’t one, tentatively and provisionally. However, we’ve been looking for a long time, and we really don’t expect any new evidence to come up. On the other hand, we have seen the claims of believers for why they believe, and we say that their reasons shouldn’t justify their belief, either.
I agree with you in general on your explanation of “what is most likely”. And based on what I have seen and heard, Thor/Horus/Zeus/Vishnu/Ahura Mazda are as likely as Jesus. I’m not certain that none of them exist, but I don’t think it’s likely. You have presented nothing that makes your God any more “likely” than any other deity.
And until I have a reason to see any of them as more likely than any other, to me they are as likely to exist as the Sumerian God Nanna, the West African trickster god Anansi, Russell’s Teapot, invisible, undetectable pink unicorns, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It seems like you’re afraid to say that you have deep, intimate, personal reasons for your beliefs that have little or nothing to do with “proof”, “evidence”, or “likelihood”. Like, I imagine, most religious people do (and probably many non-religious people).
Answer here is simple: the (highly esoteric) diversion into a discussion of legality was totally a consequence of Dio’s (mistaken) assertion that the desecrators had not ‘committed an illegality’, and thus done ‘anything wrong’, by doing whatever they wanted to ‘their own property’. This conclusion is wrong in law and I pointed out why - property obtained by deception is not obtained legally.
However, that is not of course the real objection to the practice, which is not based on illegality, but on acting like a trollish jerk.
Actually stealing part of Catholicism’s sacred regalia is illegal (for the reasons discussed ad nauseum above) and it is also highly jerkish behaviour, because reasonable people tend to agree that descerating what others find sacred - unless you have some really strong reason that justifies it - is morally wrong.
It is also usually considered wrong to mock other’s beliefs - but much less so than actually, physically messing with their ceremonies. It is still jerkish, but more mildly.
Not actually committing the crime of stealing part of the sacred regalia, the guy simply faking doing so is not committing an illegality - he hasn’t, in fact, stolen anything, or intruded into someone’s ceremonies for false purpose. He has committed no illegality, and has not committed the majorly jerkish behaviour of actually messing with someone elses’ religious ceremonies. He is behaving like a jerk, but more mildly - he’s just trolling.
The question here is one of justification. Stealing is usually wrong even if the target is a bad guy, right? The excuse here is that the ends justify the means - waring others about the evils of Scientology justify lying and stealing to get their papers. I suppose that, depending on exactly what evils are exposed, that could well be true. If the secret plans document the commission of scams and crimes by Scientologists, I could see stealing their papers as morally justified.
Thing here is that stealing and descecrating the wafer has no such justification or excuse - no secret evils are going to be exposed.
There are still several elements missing to make this even close to an analogy for the resurrection. I think this is falling under a fallacy of equivocation. The situation you state is simply not the same as that of the resurrection. For a start you are missing pre-existing statements by people over several hundred years that someone would come and teleport to work. Secondly you are missing statements by you yourself prior to the teleportation that it will happen. I don’t think there is really much to be gained in making these silly analogies.
I think the problem here is that you are missing one of the key points of the discussion. The central point is not whether or not it is logically possible for sinless beings with free will to exist. The central point is whether it is logically possible for God to create sinless beings with free will. People in heaven may exist that never sin and also have free will. But they are not created by God that way. They are first created sinful, and then through the general resurrection become sinless by using their free will to choose Christ. If it is logically impossible for God to directly create these beings then for God to have a world in which free will exists he necessarily will create a world that will have sin and therefore suffering in it. Of course on this view the suffering in the world is not eternal, but only a temporary (and logically necessary) state on the way to a much better one in which there is no suffering. And I fail to see how that situation is contradictory with the idea of an omnimax God.
This is obviously false. You can make arguments and provide evidence for the non-existance of many things, even God. For instance I can prove that there are no square circles by simply stating that the negation of this statement (ie: that there are square circles) contains a contradiction and therefore the statement is true. So if you could show somehow that the concept of God is somehow contradictory, that would demonstrate that it is more likely than not that God does not exist.
Secondly, you can use the lack of necessary evidence to prove that something does not exist. Say for instance I want to demonstrate that the Loch Ness monster does not exist. If the Loch Ness monster exits, it follows that:
The Loch Ness monster is most commonly defined as biological (ie: not supernatural) in nature. Therefore to effectively maintain a viable population of monsters, there must be about 1000 or so of them in the Loch. Any less and inbreeding will soon lead to the extinction of the species.
Given that the Loch Ness monster is generally considered to be a large creature, the food intake of it would be quite large.
Loch Ness monstors only have a limited lifespan, and therefore must die at some point. Their bodies are likely to float or wash up on the shore of the loch. Even if you assume an extrodinary lifespan for a creature of that size of around 200 years, on average 5 creatures a year will die in the Loch.
From these statements, if the Loch Ness monsters did in fact exist we would expect to see:
a) Sonar and other technological scanning methods should see them. If there really is around 1000 of them in the Loch, and they are all large creatures, they can’t be hiding every time someone does a sonar sweep.
b) Loch Ness should be teeming with fish and other aquatic life necessary to feed such a large number of beasts.
c) People should occaisonally see the bodies of these creatures as they die. It would seem extremely unlikely that the 1000 or so creatures that have died in the Loch in the last 200 years have all died in such a way so that their bodies neither floated to the surface or washed up on the shore.
Given that we in fact see neither a, b or c, it would seem more likely that Loch Ness monstors do not exist.
One could mount a similar argument for the non-existence of God. Demonstrate that if God exists, certain things must be observed. If these things are in fact not observed then that would be a reason to think that God does not exist.
Really if you are saying that you need the Null hypothesis to make any sort of argument for atheism then I would conclude that you have no rational basis at all to conclude that the non-existence of God is more likely than his existence.
Evils is too strong a word for it but exposing how some people are so detached from reality they would threaten someone who did this is a useful and informative exercise. PZ Myers isn’t dangerous - someone who would threaten to kill someone for stealing a wafer, or indeed anything really, is.
The (obvious) problem here is that these “certain things” that “must be observed” are not at all clear, and differ wildly, even in their very existence, depending on which deity you’re talking about.
Can you think of anything that “must be observed” for the existence of your God? I can’t. Based on my understanding, anything He could do, if he so wishes, He could do without the possibility that I “observe” it.
I take it you feel the same way about Fred Phelps? He routinely gets death threats.
I guess, according to this reasoning, Phelps’ campaigns - in which he’s not a physical threat to anybody - exposes the really dangerous people in this land - folks who hate him enought to send death threats. It’s a useful and informative exercise to picket funerals.
No, I think the likelyhood of that is low, but then I can mount an argument as to why I think so.
The Sun is actually a bad example on your part. You probably would have been better off going with Uranus or one of the other planets.
When you say “teapot” and “Sun”, the definitions of these words indicates that these are non-supernatural enities.
The main problem is that teapots are very light in mass, and can only withstand certain temperatures. Because the teapot is light, for it to be a stable orbit it would have to be relatively close to the Sun. However the heat at such distances would likely vaporise the teapot. Secondly because the teapot is light it may be pushed out of any stable orbit by the momentum of photons and ionized radiation leaving the Sun.
Therefore I think it extremely unlikely that a teapot would indeed be in orbit around the Sun because I think ultimately the laws of physics would prevent such an event from occuring.
If you had said orbiting a planet though I would point out that a teapot is a created object by definition, and therefore must be somehow put there by some intelligent agent. Humans don’t have the ability, or else we would have heard about it. Extra-terrestials, even if they exist, are simply too far away to be able to do it. Therefore there most likely isn’t one orbiting a planet either.
You keep trying to pretend that a scientific question is a philosophical one. That’s part of your problem. The God hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis, not a philosphical one. Simply being able to imagine somethiong, absent any evidence or necessity, does not give that thing a 50/50 chance of existence. Does the Tooth Fairy have a 50/50 chance of existence? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?
You have a fundamental misundersanding of how scientific method is supposed to work. There is no 50/50. There is only the null hypothesis. The Null doesn’t have to be proven. An argument based on simply imagining a magical entity and then demanding that everyone else disprove it is no argument at all, especially when the thing you’re imagining is a prima facie impossibility.
And the idea that the 5th planet around Mizar is populated with pink fairies?
50/50.
Do you really believe your own words?
Au contraire, I’m quite sure that if someone dug through the writings of Nostradamus, he could find vague references that my future followers would interpret as prophesies that I would teleport to work. Same with some previous things that I must have said at some point. It really is an apt comparison to the resurrection.
You are really stretching it here. Your all-powerful God can’t create sinless beings with free will - he can just create them with free will and let them sort themselves out into sinless and sinful sets?
You know how I said earlier that it’s up to the theist to define the God he believes in, because every time an atheist makes assumptions about a God we’re informed that this particular theist doesn’t believe in that kind of God? Well, you’re demonstrating my point by making up random crap on the spot to contort yourself so that you think your ideas aren’t speared by reason.
That’s exactly why I said that some concepts of God could be proved false, such as the omnimax God. But short of complete logical contradictions like that, this God idea is usually poorly defined so we atheists can’t say what evidence you should expect to see. That’s your job - define the God that you believe in. I can just about guarantee that it’s different from the God that anyone else believes in.
The Loch Ness Monster can be shown not to exist because it’s so well defined. Not so with God. You provide us a good definition, and tell us how he interacts with our physical world, then we can talk.
Yep, it’s 50/50, just like those pink fairies inhabiting Mizar-5.
The Resurrection has no eyewitness testimony and no evidence that Jesus predicted it would happen beforehand. The Resurrection essentially has no evidence whatsoever. Furthermore, it’s impossible.
Heh, you guys are hilarious. You have a real live believer to play with.
I never got the attraction of that. Literal religious belief is by definition not a rational position, so arguing about it seems a pointless exercise in frustration for everyone involved.
There was no “stealing.” asserting it over and over again doesn’t make it true.
Furthemore, beliefs, per se, are not entitled to respect. What people are entitled to is respect for their right to believe, not the respect for the beliefs themselves. Do you respect the religious beliefs of the nation of Islam or Christian Identity? Would you say that anyone who disparages race religions on a blog is 'troll?"
What we have here is two cases. One kid who took a communion wafer back to his seat to show a friend before eating it (subjecting him to a physical assault, death threats and over the top accusations of “hate crimes” from all the poor victims of his perescution), the other is a guy who put a nail through a wafer that was sent to him by a reader. It was his wafer, on his own time, involved no church or ceremony and could not be witnessed by anyone who didn’t voluntarily click on his blog. Both Cook and Myers have received death threats from your poor, suffering, persecuted Catholics. Who are the real jerks here?
So I also wanted to respond to this comment of yours as well:
If you are talking about why I believe in God now, then there are a number of reasons.
Firstly, I don’t really think that atheism is very likely. For one thing I think it offers no good explaination of why there should be something rather than nothing at all. Secondly it does not explain really why the world is the way it is. I am a scientist (Theoretical chemist to be precise) and the more I learn about nature and about the aparent laws themselves that govern it, it just seems designed in a way that it is complex where it needs to be, but also understandable where possible. This is exactly what you would expect if God designed the universe. Note that I am not talking about objects such as animals or produced through evolution, but that actual underlying laws themselves. Secondly this universe in which we are in seems rediculously tuned for creation of life like us that can be in relationship with God. This is again what theism would expect of the world. I see no good answers for these properties of the universe in atheism. I understand the “multiverse” theory that proports to explain away this, but I think it is full of flaws.
That, for me at least, explains why I believe in some sort of God. I just don’t think on it’s own merits atheism is very likely.
In terms of why I believe in Jesus specifically, I believe that Jesus physically rising from the dead is the best explaination of the apostles, the gospels, and the early church. I think the gospels conform to the general standard of ancient history that we expect of other ancient authors, and are therefore generally reliable. I also think that no naturalistic explaination of Jesus resurrection (gospels were intentional lies, disciples lost the body, swoon theory, ect) really explain all of the facts surrounding the resurrection.
On this point it surprises me that you say that the evidence for all religions are pretty much the same. I have investigated the claims of a number of other religions (although not all, obviously) and in every case found them less credible than Christianity. Apart though from the relative merits of each claim in many cases the types of evidence and arguments that different religions offer are very different. So for instance Christianity offers a historical type of argument in favour of Christianity. In constrast many Monistic Pantheist religions like Hinduism see history as unimportant and instead offer philosophical reasons why you should believe in that religion. Again still other religions offer more pragmatic reasons to believe in them.
I can only really conclude that you havn’t really honestly looked at the evidence for each religion on it’s own terms. I would encourage you to really go back and have a look at why different people accept different religions. Especially asking thinking people of the faiths themselves what it is that they believe. I think if you do that, and really listen to what people tell you, you will start to find that the claims of different religious groups are not similar at all.
Thirdly I also believe in God because having become a Christian I have experienced something of the risen Jesus in my own life, and seen Him in the lives of other Christians I know. While this is certainly real to me, I would say that this is more of an emotional reason for believing in God, not a logical one. As such if I was talking about strictly rational, logical reasons for believing in Jesus, then this one would not count as much. Because it is emotional it is almost impossible to effectivly convey to people who have not experienced it. As such I would understand if you dismiss this as a reason for you to come to believe in Jesus. However just because I cannot effectively communicate my experience of Jesus to you does not make it any less real.
This is hilarious. You really think these are clever answers. It’s only too easy to do whattheists always do. it’s a magic teapot, impervious to the laws of physics. They’re magic aliens capable of instantaneous teleportation. see? All you have to say is “it’s magic.” That’s what religion does.
