Sophistry
People ask me if I believe in GOD and I always answer yes! What they don’t know is that in my head GOD stands for the Great Original Dilemma for which I have (and no one else has) a solution of any kind! 
Have fun – Dick
Maybe.
And that’s FINAL!
The only sophist around here is this Exapno dork.
He needs to set his sights on an easier target than our Master, because
he couldn’t tie our Master’s shoe laces.
Our Master’s work is a model of rigorous clarity in fact and in reason;
It is uniquely, hilariously invective; it is both art and science.
I’m genuinely dismayed with Cecil jumping to a conclusion or resolution on this topic when neither can be had without proof. Surely Cecil was not sleeping during logic and philosophy classes? He should have couched his potato head thinking as an opinion which is all we can muster til we visit the post life phase. I can’t call it the after life since some folks don’t buy into all that.
The first cause may be “mechanistic” or non-sentient as Cecil seems to be leaning, or it may be sentient as others lean toward believing. Both sides are only doing just that, believing. Atheism is a belief and deism is a belief. No preponderance of facts or shouting will change that. We just have to be nice to each other til we get a chance to see who is right.
Athiests have the unlucky 3-sided coin of being right and never knowing or being wrong and regretting it or possibily being wrong and meeting a sentient first cause that is indifferent to their opinion so no harm no foul.
Cecil, I hope you will take the time to set the record straight. Beliefs and opinions, they are the fruits of our research into first cause.
This is equivocating. The principle of parsimony is that if no evidence is forwarded for a proposition, we do not hold it to be true. This is a very different approach to holding that in the absence of evidence, it is equally likely that a proposition and its antithesis are correct.
Pascal’s wager is essentially an appeal to emotion and only holds true if there are minimal opportunity costs of believing in a proposition (or more accurately, pretending to believe in one - the act of even holding that pretending to believe in something for future gains may in fact have massive costs for society). When one leaps from a rather vague deism to the belief in a particular brand of the competing monotheisms, there is no longer a simple dichotomy between belief with positive consequences and disbelief with negative, there are many different positive and negative effects following different religious practices can have.
Wha?
I understand that Pascal was fully aware of the high costs of weekly attendance in church. Pascal’s wager is justifiably acclaimed as an early application of cost/benefit analysis and risk assessment. I agree though that it doesn’t handle competing metaphysical systems particularly well. For that, methinks you have to assume or establish some sort of ecumenicalism on the part of the Deity.
Re: the OP.
Cecil possesses a limited omniscience: he knows all that is known, but not all that will be or could be known. When turning to matters philosophic, his arguments will necessarily turn on fine honed and perhaps uncolloquial distinctions – such is the state of current knowledge.
Something is posited because of the favourable consequencesof holding that proposition rather than any logical or empirical reason to believe in that proposition.
By sleight of hand, the proponent of Pascal’s wager manages to multiply the axioms with no logical basis. Assuming one can posit entities without evidence, I’ve argued before that there is an entity called Athe beyond the event horizon that replicates the consciousness of credulous beings and tortures them for the remainder of the universe’s existence. While that predicates that the cost of credulity is finite compared to infinite torture (Hitchens preposes that any God that will admire disingenuous snivelling more than a reasoned search for evidence is not worth worshipping, a sort of reversal of the wager), it just demonstrates a contiguous scale of costs without an evidential basis and how our actions must be evidence based.
This is actually interesting, since some people posit that omniscience doesn’t contradict free will. They say that God doesn’t know exactly what our actions are, just all possible future outcomes of our actions (like some people posit infinite universes where all actions are possible: I don’t think the wave function actually has that big an effect on everyday actions and that slightly altering the laws of physics would have effects more on the scale of galaxies than what we have for breakfast). Anyway, if that were the case, God would have no more predictive power than a weather agency and I’d be loathe to call that omniscience. If God can predict our actions with complete certainty based on the fact that he has a totality of knowledge about the past, our free will is actually an illusion. Actually, I think our free will is an illusion without God or not and even a rnd() element does not actually resolve that fundamental lack of free will.
Not holding it to be true is a far cry from holding it to be false.
In the absence of evidence for either the proposition or its antithesis, one can not assign any probability to either side. It does not mean they are equally likely, it merely means that you can’t decide between them. You have nothing to go on. “I can’t decide, because I have nothing to go on” =/= “Both are equally likely”
One or the other could indeed be extremely unlikely, but with nothing to go on, you have no way of knowing its level of “unlikely”.
Again, reserving judgement in the absence of evidence is quite different from equivocating. While we’re arguing emphasis here, Russell’s teapot, “not even wrong” and parsimony mean that all propositions devoid of evidence should not be assumed unless there is a logical reason for doing so.
Well, somebody’s out to get me…
What’s your position on the existence of Santa Claus?
Extremely unlikely, because Santa’s toy delivery schedule requires violation of many known laws of science. Additionally, people have been to the North Pole, and found no evidence of occupancy. If someone presents evidence to the contrary on either of those, I’ll look at it. That was easy.
Santa’s North Pole base lies outside of our universe(and time, of course). That was easier.
At which point someone shifts the goalposts to say that Santa Claus exists in a spiritual version of the North Pole and very infrequently (albeit, midnight December 25th at GMT-12 until GMT+12) makes connections with the world. Not disprovable by current science, thus not even wrong. The neutral position to take is a lack of belief (again, not ambivalence, nor explicitly asserting the lack of existence of an entity) which is altered when presented with evidence or logical reasoning. If a flaw in the logic is demonstrated or new evidence disproves the theoretical underpinning of the body of evidence, a theory can be said to be disproved. For example, rabbits in the Precambrian.
It’s worth noting that under Popper’s conception we can’t assert things absolutely (problem of simple enumeration), but only relatively. Thus we do not have any evidence for the phenomenon of water turning into wine under laboratory conditions, but given the lack of empirical evidence to the contrary or theoretical explanations for the phenomenon we do not hold that water turning into wine is as likely as not. Equally, we can only say that there isn’t an elephant in the room that we can observe, there may be a very small, silent elephant hiding in our closet. Should we spend hours investigating the gaps between our radiator and our wall looking for elephants that have no theoretical explanation?
If you insist on redefining Santa into an unfalsifiable form, then I can no longer make any statement on the probability of his existence.
Which is precisely the position I take.
Well Cecil, you did it again…
You had yet another chance to address the limitations of Science but instead chose to spin the issue of God into some pseudoreligious concept of some First Cause.
You could have simply stated the issue of God is outside the realm of Science but like most skeptics, you can’t fathom the idea that Science is not a panacea.
There are in truth many questions Science cannot answer but the attitude of most skeptics is to assume that any question Science cannot answer is unworthy of being asked in the first place.
Here are just a few…
-
By your own admission, half of all marriages end in divorce (Is it true half of all marriages end in divorce? - The Straight Dope).
What then does Science have to say about ensuring a lifelong, happy marriage that does NOT end in divorce? -
With recent problems in the economy and more coming to light every day, what does Science have to say about ensuring you don’t get swindled by the many Bernie Madoffs in the world and will have an adequate income when you choose to retire?
-
How do you go from NOTHING to SOMETHING?
Not one thing to a different thing, but the universe from a true void – no physics, no mechanisms, no energy, no matter?
Are these questions unworthy of being answered simply because Science cannot address them? You may think so but they are certainly important to many people and if Science has no answer for them, where then do you suggest they turn in pursuit of answers?
WHY CAN’T YOU JUST ADMIT THERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS SCIENCE CANNOT ANSWER?!
Déjà vu.
Because reasonable people admit that certain descriptions of how the universe functions and certain epistemologies are more accurate than others. One may take a solipsistic view, where the problem of simple enumeration is the only absolute in a sea of flux. One may take the post-modernist view of absolute relativity of epistemologies. One may choose to believe that because something is dogma, it corresponds better to reality than not. Or one may try and be informed by the evidence without substituting it for one of the previous approaches at its boundaries. If one honestly wishes to pursue the evidence, certain things that were held to be absolutes in science have been challenged recently. One of these things is that of absolute speed, another is that of an applying the principle of conservation of energy to the universe as a whole.
- Why do you want to give up trying to find out?
- Who are you to determine what science can or cannot find out?