Arken

I'm assuming you also take a Pascal's wager approach to this... i.e. since there's no proof, you lead a 'moral' life because the alternative may mean bad things in the hereafter.

Anyway, I can't really argue with a position like that. It wouldn't really be possible to since you admit that there is no way to get evidence.

emotional

No. Pascal's Wager is a pragmatical argument for belief. It pertains only to religions where faith counts, eg Christianity and Islam. And I'd lead a moral life even if I didn't believe in God.

I've been all around the Secular Web library and read the atheological arguments and the refutations of theological arguments. Conclusion: there is no evidential case for God. The only case that can be made for God is experientialist (having subjective religious experiences, ie mystical visions) or fideist (which I choose because I've never had an SRE).

The EoG debate is a waste of time.

Aria

This excuse doesn't work anymore. We are effectively a global society. Any bit of information propogates in hours all around the face of the earth. An omnipotent being could do any myriad of things which would be unmistakably supernatural. Now that our society has means of information storage that effectively have no time limit, now would be the perfect time to reveal itself.


Are you even listening to yourself? Skeptics don't put their fingers in their ears and say "neener neener!" With my limited, human mind I can think of a dozen permanent displays of power that could not be mistaken for anything but the imprint of a god. Surely an infinite being could do even better.

I am speaking within the framework of an unlimited god. This unlimited supercreature wouldn't have to satisfy any natural laws. It could simply create a space where the nature of the universe is changed into whatever it wants.

A thinly veiled attempt to impress meaning on a cold, uncaring universe. None of these things require supernatural explanations, nor do they even hint at one. An unlimited god could create something that is impossible, given the construct of our universe, that would serve as a permanent testament to it's existence.



I see that man invented god to explain those things he didn't understand. It is no coincidence that manifestation of god and spirituality has chnaged fundamentally over the recorded history of our species. It's rather easy to chart the progress of 'everything is done by the will of god/spirits' to 'god is a transcendant, ephemeral being that doesn't REALLY interfere'

It's blindingly obvious even in the judeo-christian mythologies. God is at first a father that pushes his people along, meddles in their affairs, spanks them when they are bad. This all changes with the advent of the new religion.

I can't parse this statement very well. Are you suggesting that were a god to show it's existence, it would somehow undermine what the people that believed in it thought? Please correct me if I am misinterpreting.

Why then are you responding to my statement? I specifically said "omnipotent creature." A god that works within 'natural laws' is another can of worms, and there are different ideas guiding my opinion on that topic.

I mean this in the kindest way possible: You need more education. There is nothing anywhere in the body of science to suggest what you are suggesting. There is no failure of determinism. Science, at present, simply doesn't have a complete answer to why things work the way they work. There are layers upon layers, and we've revealed only a few so far. There is a level of indeterminism present whenever you have life, and this level is perfectly coherent and expected within the framework of our current science, as time goes on, I expect this to become only more codified, even better explained.

The discoveries of physics are consistent with the way life works. The idea that we need some third party supernatural omni-power to give us free will is entirely unreasonable. It is, very clearly, a reach into territory that you can't possibly know anything about.

Well why didn't I see it sooner. Our omnipotent creator of life, the universe, and everything didn't know that it's display wasn't going to be well received for all eternity.

Imagine that.

ComestibleVenom

Nothing. Well, close enough to nothing that I promise you that no human being could ever tell the difference.

Ojuice5001

Arken,

Need to satisfy them, no. Want to create a universe where they're reliable, why not?

How would we know, and retain the knowledge through the generations, that it's naturally impossible? People can get used to anything. Naturalists say (it's partly true and partly not) that when people decide something is supernatural, the only real reason is that that something seems highly mysterious. The corollary of this is that a visible phenomenon that you grew up with your whole life, that everyone for three hundred years has been used to, is likely to seem natural but not explicable (or explicable by a theory that is in fact false), even if it were in fact miraculous.

Yes it is. That doesn't mean that we're correct now, or will be correct once we stop bothering about god(s) at all. Intellectual trends are quite often taken too far--for instance, the movements for racial and sexual equality started out doing things that are self-evidently right, but that doesn't mean that the modern people who try to shift politics in the same direction are right.

Science and naturalism changed to accomodate the fact that their idea of determinism was wrong. In the eighteenth century, most materialists thought that if you knew the position of all particles, and all the laws of physics, you could predict anything. That's what naturalists would like, and what a naturalistic universe would probably be, but it isn't.

The laws of physics don't dictate how every event in a complex system turn out. Why not something else, and why shouldn't that something else be the gods? And BTW, I'm not just talking about human and warm-blooded animal decisions; I have in mind all indeterminate events

SanDiegoAtheist

Ummm, a god worthy of the title should simply be able to imprint undeniable knowledge of its existance into its creations. That would certainly suffice to convince all of its existance. No more evidence would be necessary, as far as I'm concerned, any more than the knowledge of my own self-existance has no more requirement of proof than that I KNOW that I exist. We are, after all, talking about what would convince the individual, rather than what one mortal individual can point to to convince ANOTHER individual of some fact.

Of course, the usual response to that is that it denies freewill, but I can't see how simple knowledge of a Gods existance would deny freewill. It would simply render faith a moot point...which of course, is the entire POINT of evidence. Faith with evidence is no longer faith, it is knowledge - at least to whatever level of knowledge the evidence provides proof of. If you believe that faith should be enough, then you have no need for even the slightest scrap of evidence - if you need so much as the slightest scrap of evidence, you probably shouldn't be relying on faith...as that really isn't faith, it's simply that that persons standard of proof is low enough for what evidence has been provided.

Faith to me is ignorance, and I truly don't see how it can be considered otherwise. I'll stick with knowledge...and frankly, any God which claims to be interested in my wellbeing, who DIDN'T bother to take the simple step of providing me with the knowledge of its existance, seems to me to be a rather contradictory entity.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

Ojuice5001

It's likely that they have. But with some people it just didn't take. Much like not everyone responds well to any given medical treatment. And it's entirely possible that with the passing of time, this condition has spread, whether through the action of rival gods or for some other reason.

acronos

If God exists, then he is natural by my definition of the word natural. Any manifestation he exhibited would just be incorporated into my mental model of the natural universe – except one. If there were a noticeable advantage to believing in God that outweighed any advantage to not believing in God, then I would probably believe in God. For instance, I notice in this world that all those who believe in God have abilities that all those who do not believe in god don’t have, such as telekinesis or anything else that would today be considered miraculous. Another example, everyone who does not believe in God is tortured with whips every night but those who believe in God get to do anything they want to angelic virgins each night. Just getting tortured or getting to do everything I want would not convince me one way or the other concerning God. I need evidence that there is a tangible advantage to believing in him. Heaven and hell, which I don’t believe in, don’t do it for me. Him appearing in front of me and telling me what I have to do to get to heaven and then placing me in hell for a few days then placing me in heaven for a few days and tying that in with other people or permanent physical scars so that I didn’t think it was a dream would be very convincing to me.

I believe in other people because there is a noticeable advantage to me in doing so. Other people can do things to me if I piss them off. Rocks can do things to me if I fail to correctly predict their behavior and smash my head on one. It is what things do to me that determines my base belief in them, and abstractly what I observe those things I believe in doing affect my beliefs as well. In a society where people punished people for not believing in God, I would believe in people, and keep my disbelief in God to myself.

Normal

The irrefutable theistic position:

Stuff exists
Therefore, God exists

Godless Wonder

No, I don't buy this argument. God could come down and walk among us everyday. Sure, we'd get used to him. We'd say, "Oh, yeah, God did this today," or "God did that today.", but clearly he would not be human, and he would constantly be in the news, and he would outlive simply everyone. We would be used to him, sure, but we wouldn't doubt him. After all, he would be able to do all sorts of stuff no human could do. But, instead of coming down here (again, it's not like he hasn't done it before, right? </sarcasm>) to help us believe with a display which would be adequate for 99.999% of people, he does ..... absolutely nothing. Why? Because he doesn't exist.