Mad Kally

Has anyone had their foundations shaken yet? I have, but I live in California..

GunnerJ

Just a thought... maybe we could get Dougie over here to check Tercel's math.

madmax2976

The only shaking going on here is the shaking of my head at the weakness of Christian arguments.

Ted Hoffman

What the hell is wrong with you guys?
From dictionary.com:
Frog-march march a person against his will by any method 2: carry someone against his will upside down such that each limb is held by one person

Sounds very apropos - considering everything. The math is making us crazy. We could let off some steam.

Ender

Sheesh, Intense one, you must be fun at parties!

~WiGGiN~

madmax2976

Atticus has apparently deserted this thread, but just to recap:

- Atticus has failed to provide any convincing evidence for the existence of his Christian God

- What evidence he has offered has been more the adequately exposed for being weak at best

So it appears belief in the Christian God is based very largely on mere faith as we expected all along.

brighid

Part of the problem with the apostles dieing for a lie theory is the assumption that Jesus was NOT some sort of con-man, or more accurately a false prophet, but actually a divine being and in this case THEE son of THEE God. The apostles could full well have believed everything that Jesus said to be true, and that he was the son of their God, however believing this to be true does not in fact make it true. Nor does the fact that they were willing to die for their belief in this man relevant to the actual truth of the divinity of Jesus. It simply proves that they were willing to die for a man and a set of beliefs. History is littered with men and women willing to die for a belief, or even follow a man into certain death for their strong “faith” in that man and other posters have done a tremendous job pointing to but a few of those examples. We can look to some modern day examples such as the Heaven’s Gate Cult and all those people who committed suicide believing what their “prophet” told them. In reality, those men and women are no different then the original apostles and perhaps in a few centuries a new religion will be built upon the foundations of those Heaven’s Gate cultists who gave up their lives for a belief in their version of the supernatural. That is IF the apostles were actually persecuted and executed for failing to recant their beliefs!

Although it may be true that the apostles died believing that Jesus was who or what he said he was makes little difference to the actual truth of the claim of Jesus’ divinity. In the end, there is only one point of any significance – is Jesus actually a divine being and specifically to the Christian claim, the ONLY divine being worthy of worship? I would consider that to be an extraordinary claim bearing the responsibility of extraordinary proof. We cannot find objective evidence in the Gospels, or anywhere in this Holy Text because the authors had an enormous emotional investment in BELIEVING these things to be true, again the belief in the truth of a claim does not equate to it’s actual truthfulness. Therefore, in this day and age, far removed from the superstitions that filled the minds of the majority of people (oh wait a minute – we aren’t so far removed ) we must determine what evidence exists for the claim of the divinity of any being, not just the Christian deity. Unfortunately for the theist, the evidence is sorely lacking and even though we have half a Holy Book recounting the alleged deeds of the man we call Jesus (although I encounter at least 5 or 6 Jesus’ a day working with a Mexican immigrant population) we have nothing to demonstrate his actual divinity. It is simply not enough to say that this person and that person have said they saw such events, recounted them, and decades and centuries later SOMEONE put those events into a written format AND because of those claims one should BELIEVE in this deity or that deity. This standard of evidence makes any and ALL miraculous claims and deifications of fictional and real life figures believable and leaves the monotheist in a serious quandary.

However, none of this information is new to the skeptic. Faith is a weak evidentiary measure to use when determining something as important as the existence of a God and which specific God of the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses one should choose to pledge ones soul and eternal devotion to. I have always found it disheartening and quizzical that theists place such little veracity in their evidentiary measures, yet use such stringent ones for all other but their own God(s). How easy it is to fool the theist and if their belief in demons is correct, it could easily be the Great Satan who has come to trick the masses and weed out only those worthy of higher standards and relegate the weak, and mindless masses to a fate they profess to be immune from by creating the myth of this Jesus. And in the probability model used by Tercel, that probability is just as likely as any other! Oh, if there was a God it would only serve the quibbling theist right that such an irony would befall the masses – their demon god having perpetrated the stories of a false god, placing visions into the minds of believers, all along calling this God one of love and mercy and yet driving the “true” believer to commit all sorts of heinous and utterly vile acts attempting to prove who has the right version of the story. The confusion, the chaos, the hatred, murder, greed and lust that so typifies the history of Christendom and yet this sprang from a perfect being, born of a virgin, perfect in his human form, capable of miraculous works, ubiquitous in his love, compassionate, merciful and just yet out of that legacy a monster has sprang. A vile, hideous monster but surely, surely all of this is because of a perfect love, from a perfect being!


Ah - faith, such a perfect weapon to feeble the minds and make the masses pliable to the will of just about any one!

Brighid

Tercel

Thanks Pompous Bastard for helping sort out the maths stuff.
The rest of you guys may wish to stop attempting to fault my maths. I don't want to blow my own trumpet or anything, but maths and stats were my best subjects and during college I was top of my college for Math and 3rd in one of the national tests and I got about 4th in my country in Stats in my last year of college, and I've done both subjects to 200 level at university, getting first in my university class upon occasion. So trust me: I do know what I'm talking about here.

There seems to be some confusion as to exactly what I'm trying to prove with the numbers here.
I'm saying there are many arguments for the existence of God. Now we may not think they all "work", we may think that not any of them work. However we may feel that there's a chance they might work. For example we might think that the Cosmological argument has a 10% chance of being true. Or we might think that a certain miraculous healing has a 5% chance of being true. Perhaps the argument from the resurrection suggests to us that perhaps the resurrection has a 20% chance of being true.
Now clearly the numbers 10%, 5% and 20% are simply numbers I am making up. The actual values of the numbers is not important here

The point I was making is that in such a case we can begin constructing a Cumulative Case. Having a proper understanding of this case is very important to having a proper understanding of the evidence for the theist position. There exist very few, if any arguments that conclusively prove God. Even the best arguments IMO only render the existence of God likely not certain. However the combined force of all these uncertain arguments taken cumulatively renders in my opinion the case for Christianity as being proven beyond all doubt. The little maths I gave was an example of how this might work. The example was that if 10 of the arguments for Christianity were felt to each have a 10% chance of working by themselves, then cumulatively they provide a 65% chance of the existence of the Christian God.
If more arguments are added and the probabilities are raised then the cumulative case shoots through the roof.

Clearly if you believe the chance of arguments working is significantly lower than 10% then the cumulative case is also significantly lower.
This was not an attempt at saying "Christianity is 65% probable", but merely at attempt at explaining the existence of the cumulative case.

Tercel

Datheron

Tercel,

After reading through this, I am quite against using probabilities of arguments as a form of argumentation itself.

From what I know of probability theory and statistics, its primary function is to show that given a controlled set of possible states, the likelihood of any resultant state.

Arguments, however, don't work on probability. There is no such thing as "this is true 10% of the time" - you do not expect the argument to be true once if you argue it the exact same way 10 times. Argumentation does not have that randomness needed to make probability applicable; I see it no more than an interesting but fallacial way to ensure that whoever has the most arguments wins simply by majority.

Even then, I think you have problems.

So, let's say that we have 10 arguments for God, each with a 10% of being true, and for the moment ignoring what I said above about such a declaration not making any sense. You worked out that in such a scenario, we have a 65% chance of God existing.

The problem is then working backwards. If we show that God does indeed exist, that every argument for God is also true. For that to be true, the probability is the usual (0.1)^10, which is undoubtedly small, and a contradiction to what you worked out. Inituitively, this makes sense; in order for your formula to work, you must assume that all the events (arguments) are independent, and that each probability does not affect any other event (argument). Obviously, since any one argument being true instantly makes all arguments true, they are not independent, therefore the cumulative probability doesn't really work, from what I know of probability.

madmax2976

<strong> We hadn't gotten to whether or not these type of arguments are suitable for entering into probability equations. I'll leave that up to the math experts. Its not like we dealing with hard data here but rather with a scant amount, subject to a lot of personal interpretation.

I'll just note that for any argument Tercel could come up with in this regard, we could come up with a counter argument demonstrating the very low probability of Christian events being true. Then it'll be a matter of determining which equation best fits the data - but hey - isn't that what we do in this forum anyhow?

In any case, until Tercel or anyone else actually presents a case, with real numbers to plug into an equation, this is all much ado about nothing.