SLD

True, concerning the Judeo-Christian God. Personally, I've always preferred the God of the enlightenment that guided our founding fathers. I don't think they would have viewed God as having an interest in human affairs - just a watchmaker who started it all running and then left it in place.

Indeed, though I have not heard a good Christian argument against the PoE.

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Generally, any god who is relevant to us must be interested in us, otherwise there's no way for us to tell or reason for us to care if it exists. And, if it's interested in us, we should be able to detect some signs of it's interference with us, correct?

Maybe, but what if that interference were at the quantum level? Then we wouldn't be able to detect it. Now I agree that there isn't much reason to care if it exists - at least for purposes of leading our lives. If there were, then indeed the PoE creates real problems. But does that mean we shouldn't be just a little bit grateful for his building the universe (or the laws of physics that allows it to exist)? I don't know, I fluctuate about this honestly. I don't call myself an atheist, or an agnostic, but I'm hesitant to say I'm a deist since I don't have an affirmative belief in God. But then again, I like the idea of God as an answer the Strong Anthropic Principle (Sappy though it may be) (and I do not mean the Weak Anthropic Principle). It is easier for me to tell someone what I don't believe in - the Judeo-Christian version of God then to state what I do.

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That's where the POE comes in - whatever god might be out there, it doesn't seemt to have any agenda remotely comprehensible to us, let alone one matching typical theistic claims about its agenda. That's what makes god improbable - while it is certainly concievable that there could be a plan behind the apparent chaos of life, the POE and similar arguments make that very unlikely by falsifying any attempts to state that plan.

Good points indeed, but I think you are merely arguing against the religious view of God - not necessarily a deistic view of God that our founding fathers had.

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That doesn't mean God shouldn't care about life on Earth too, assuming he has sufficient power to change it. To scale this down with an analogy, would you be willing to be tortured for a week if you could be assured a long comfortable life afterward? Wouldn't you at least strongly prefer to avoid the torture? It seems as if God should be able to let you... if he existed.

Short term torture for long term gain is one of the driving forces in human nature - we leave our families and set out on journeys to unknown lands to find gold and make us rich. We go West young man to find Gold in California, but risk dying in droves along the way. Could life itself be any different? Certainly God could just let us enjoy the rewards up front - but then that would be violating the laws of physics that he created. From the purely mathematical perspective the universe works, so why upset the beauty of it. The problem is that we seem to think that God created the Universe for us - and that's obviously not true to anyone with even the most rudimentary scientific education. Perhaps he invented it to entertain himself - simply because of its mathematical beauty and the fact that enormous life and patterns take hold. Now that may mean he is not really relevant to us at least for purposes of guiding our lives; I certainly don't go to church to worship him. But that doesn't mean we can't be a little bit grateful to him for creating what, to me at least, is a quite beautiful creation.

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The POE's one of my favorites.

Good.

SLD