Using The Climate Alarmists' Logic To Prove God

Climate Change Alarmists:

Premise I: 97% of climate scientists accept climate change.

Premise II: Climate scientists are the experts on climate change.

Conclusion: The overwhelming majority of those who most understand climate change, accept climate change. Therefor, it’s almost certain that climate change is real.

Me, using the exact same reasoning:

Premise I: 95%+ of theologians believe in God.

Premise II: Theologians are the experts on God.

Conclusion: The overwhelming majority of those who most understand God, believe in God. Therefor, it’s almost certain that God exists.

Exact. Same. Logic.

I look forward to the flimsy excuses you fine people come up with to explain why the “appeal to expert consensus” reasoning is valid with climate change, yet invalid with God. Give me something good.

Well, for one thing, lots of theologians don’t agree with each other about God.
Teach the controversy!

Problem: bias.

I am a believer but that logic does not hold because both groups, climate change scientists and theologians, are biased toward their fields.

Belief based on facts and empirical data is different than belief based on faith.

The difference *could *be that climatologists base their “belief” on actual temperature readings gathered over the last ~100 years or so, demonstrably accurate predictive models and actual demonstrable facts (google “Alaska freeway” for example) ; while Christian theologians base it on a 1700 year old book full of extraordinary claims, self-contradictions, vague metaphors and guys-I-swear-this-happened tales written by guys who weren’t there.

I mean, it could. I’m just throwing it out there.

Apples and oranges. You’re ignoring (or perhaps you don’t understand) the difference between science and theology. You’re conflating belief and expertise.

By you’re reasoning, either we believe nothing, or we believe everything that has a sufficient number of believers. I reject both positions.

You act as if climate change is an act of faith that people blindly believe because scientists tell them so.

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that Lake Mead is 30% the size it was fifty years ago.

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that snowfall in the Rockies has been consistently dropping.

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that the organizers of the Iditarod have had to move the starting point further north every year because it doesn’t snow where it used to anymore.

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that we’re breaking temperature records this year that were set last year, which broke the records set the year before that.

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that tropical storms are becoming more frequent and intense, that California is drying up, that the Arctic Ocean is suddenly navigable year-round, that flooding in coastal regions is becoming more frequent, that Antarctica is melting, that Pacific islands are sinking, that crops are being grown in climates that used to be too cold for them to flourish, that the migratory patterns of birds and whales are being thrown off.

These are all known effects of global mean temperature rise that we can see, right now, with our own eyes.

Contrarily to scientists, theologians have zero evidences to back up their statements. They’re worthless statements.

I could equally say : 95% of Ufologists believe we’re being visited by aliens, and they’re experts on flying saucers, therefore aliens are visiting us. 95% of conspiracy theorists believe that the Illuminatis are in charge and they’re experts on Illuminatis, therefore the Illuminatis are in charge. Or to stick to your example, 95% of Shinto priests believe in Shinto, and they’re the experts on Shinto religion, therefore Shinto is the correct religion.

It’s not about belief, it’s about evidence. The comparison should be:

-About 95% (or probably more) of scientists that study climate change have evidence supporting it.
-About 95% (Maybe) of theologians believe in something without actual evidence.

What you don’t get is that evidence doesn’t require faith. It exists with or without your belief.

Theologians are not experts on god. They have never observed god, measured god, tested god, or for that matter demonstrated that god exists. At best, they’re experts in mental masturbation and selectively reading an old book. Theologians are “experts” on god the same way that professional bigfoot hunters are experts on bigfoot.

Hey !! That’s going one step too far. Amaterasu-oomikami DID paint the Japan islands on the canvas that was the world, out of the drops of blood dripping from Tsukuyomi the Moon’s sword. I mean, that shit is known, Khaleesi.

Or something of the sort - I’ll readily admit that my knowledge of Shinto is half Legends of the Five Rings RPG, half Ôkami. Still, I mean, that puts me on par with Neil DeGrasse Tyson re:Science!, right ?

There’s your error.

You’re missing a premise or two, as exemplified in your playing fast and loose with the meaning of “accept”.

Climate change scientists interpret the evidence as demonstrating the existence of climate change, which has not been disproved.

Theologians posit the existence of God in order to understand what people think they believe about an entity whose existence cannot be proved, but for whom previous “evidences” have been disproved.

I think we’re back to the classic misunderstanding of what a “theory” is.

So do you believe in god and climate change?

97 is more than 95?

Also the climate side has scientific evidence. Lots and lots of it.

This is like saying 95% of people who believe they’ve been abducted by UFOs believe in UFOs, therefore it’s just as valid as science.

Edit: oops, kinda ninja’d by clairobscur. I should have read all the replies before posting.

The OP is basically a restatement of the standard wooist cackle, i.e. “Your science is just religion har har har!”, intermingled with the straw man about how scientists believe something because it is a consensus view*.

Climate change has credibility because it is backed by strong evidence supporting a logical mechanism. Religious faith is not comparable.

*Sneering at scientific consensus is often accompanied by comments about how “science wuz wrong before har har har”. Which it has - but it adapts through presentation of actual evidence that contradicts accepted theories. Religion (and all types of woo) function by clinging to beliefs despite evidence to the contrary.

Because scientists are basing their position on the assessment of the evidence and their expertise.

The theologians are basing their assessment on what they really, really, really want to be true.

This is clearly false. If we go back through history, there have been thousands of deities proposed and backed by anywhere from hundreds to millions of theologians. While I don’t know what Yahweh’s share is through history, I think it’s safe to say that it is not even the majority. I don’t think any particular deity nor pantheon has achieved that status. If we add the Abrahamic religions together, I’d be willing to go as high as 25% (at a guess), but nowhere near 95%.

We also should check how much theologians actually seem to know about their subject and how or whether that knowledge has improved with time.

If we look at the hundreds or thousands of religions that exist, they all have entirely incompatible creation stories. Thousands of different groups of humans have been ordained the descendants, the special ones, etc. of a particular pantheon of deities.

If we take one example, the Jews were ordained the special, protected ones by the god, Yahweh. He promised to lead them to victory in all battles and see to it that they lived amazing lives, so long as the male Jews all underwent circumcision and followed God’s laws, like the requirement to take a disobedient son in for execution by stoning (a law which Jesus expressly reasserts in the Gospel of Matthew - the earliest and least adulterated of the Gospels).

But the Jewish kingdom was quickly overtaken by the Roman empire and then destroyed. The followers of Jesus, who were neither Jews nor circumcised, ended up becoming the favored of Yahweh, despite the clearly written and authoritative works that had been compiled by theologians centuries before and rigorously disseminated. The Jews ended up being persecuted and reviled for the next 1900+ years.

Now, the Christian explanation for this is that the Jews failed to accept the word of Jesus. Within the Jewish religion, Jesus was far and away from being a learned theologian, let alone being among the majority on the realities of Yahweh.

But one thing that Jesus taught was that it was more important to Yahweh that people lived decently, than that they believed in him. He preferred a non-believer who was good over a Jew who was evil.

So how does that explain that time when God destroyed 95% of the native peoples of the Americas? What did they do to deserve that? Most of them were killed in-land, before the white people ever even got to them and had a chance to try and spread the word of Yahweh.

Did the theologians learn from this? Did they go back in and update the Bible to clarify whatever it was that would have explained God’s wrath in this instance?

Perhaps yes. Just as Christianity was created when the Old Testament proved itself wrong, Mormonism seems to have been created when the New Testament proved itself wrong as well. Are you Mormon?

The Shinto religion makes it clear that the Japanese are the divine and special people, the literal children of the gods. Earth was made for the Japanese islands, and then everything else was just an afterthought.

It was a big shock to the Japanese people when they discovered how small their island was compared to the rest of the world.

They haven’t updated the religion to explain this discrepancy.

The Romans worshiped their gods and followed all of the best advice on how to appease them, so that their country would prosper, harvests would be bountiful, etc.

Where are the Romans now? If the gods bring great harvests, why was Norman Borlaug necessary, to prevent famine from overtaking India?

The Aztecs straight-up sacrificed fully grown humans and warriors to their gods, at the insistence of the learned theologians. Disease took them out and then they were conquered by evil men who wanted nothing except to rape, plunder, and enslave.

Science told us that we should stop praying for the sick and instead to wash our hands. Proper sanitation never appears once in the Bible as any form of recommendation by Yahweh, and yet we can spot the instant it became the norm by plotting the average life expectancy over history.

Someone’s been spending too much time at Landover Baptists website.