A question addressed to professor Dawkins

[Alan]

The thing is: if there is a non-interventionist God, does it really make any difference? Prayers won't work, there'd be no miracles -- nothing you do religiously has any consequence. How is that different from an atheist world?

It's meaningless to discuss about invisible non-interventionist beings who don't do anything. The world could be chock-full of them and we wouldn't ever know nor have any reason to care.

[starbucks]

Intervene in what way?

In ways that benefit only whoever is doing the asking right? Well what if two people are asking but they both want two very different things that negatively impact the other?

Say person A wants person B dead. But person B also wants person A dead. God answers both they're prayers. They're both dead.

[Alan]

In ANY way at all.

[josef rosenkranz]

(25th September 2008 23:23)Alan Wrote:  The thing is: if there is a non-interventionist God, does it really make any difference? Prayers won't work, there'd be no miracles -- nothing you do religiously has any consequence. How is that different from an atheist world?

It's meaningless to discuss about invisible non-interventionist beings who don't do anything. The world could be chock-full of them and we wouldn't ever know nor have any reason to care.

Which atheist believes in the existence of God,whether interventionist or not?
Why should we need miracles?
Are you afraid of an atheist world?Read TGD you will find answer to your
questions. It is not the subject of the thread.The subject is why should atheism
not be sure of it's justness.
We have to use all "cranes " ,as expressed by RD which are at our disposition in order to be close as much as possible to the disproval of God .
One of those "cranes " is the provable fact that all Gods whether of abrahamic religion or others are a provable creation of man "in his image" for provable purposes engendered by human beings.
How could one declare that he is only a 99% atheist.
To what measurable scale?
By intuition? Thanks a lot.
Lord Kelvin said that if one has a scientific hypothesis but can not express it in measurable units his knowledge of it is poor and unsatisfactory

[Alan]

Of course I don't believe in any god at all. But my point is that being a theist it doesn't make sense to believe in a non-interventionist god, because he won't be of any more use than no god at all -- so he might as well not exist in the first place. You CAN believe in it, but what difference does that make?

The reason why I raise this question is that it would turn the problem from a scientific one (is there evidence of a god?) into a philosophical one (if there is a god and nobody's there to praise him, does he cry himself into sleep?). In short, a god that doesn't DO anything doesn't matter and may just as well be presumed not to exist because the only basis one would have to assume that he did would be faith.

Because non-interventionist gods are boring, silly and not exactly worthy of being worshipped (any more than the monster under your bed), this means the only noteworthy god we have left is the God of the Gaps: an interventionist god. And if that god actually does something or did things in the past, then that is something which should be testable and observable, scientifically.

[Giff]

There is no God. There are no proof, there are of course proof that say that there are no God but that doesnt say that a god exists.

Like Dawkins said about the tea pot orbiting around the sun. No one can proof that it is there, it´s too small to be detected by a telescope but for the same reason you cant say it isnt there.

If there is a proof that say that there is no God is simply by looking around in the world, for example wars and that people who belive in other religions like Hinduism and Buddhism dont have it worse then christians. By just looking in the bible you can see lot of things that we know is incorrect. For example that world is not 6000 years old it is bilions of years old and so on

[Darwinian]

It's all to do with the level of certainty.

For example, I'm pretty sure that there isn't a pink elephant sitting quietly in the room next to me. Of course, to be 100% sure I would have to go and take a look but I feel on pretty safe ground saying that I suspect there isn't.

[Alan]

I'm pretty sure there IS a pink elephant hiding behind me at all times.

But then again they say I'm paranoid.

[HalcyonicTrust]

(30th September 2008 10:08)Alan Wrote:  I'm pretty sure there IS a pink elephant hiding behind me at all times.

But then again they say I'm paranoid.

lol...what have you been taking? lol (joke).

[josef rosenkranz]

(29th September 2008 17:13)Giff Wrote:  There is no God. There are no proof, there are of course proof that say that there are no God but that doesnt say that a god exists.

Like Dawkins said about the tea pot orbiting around the sun. No one can proof that it is there, it´s too small to be detected by a telescope but for the same reason you cant say it isnt there.

If there is a proof that say that there is no God is simply by looking around in the world, for example wars and that people who belive in other religions like Hinduism and Buddhism dont have it worse then christians. By just looking in the bible you can see lot of things that we know is incorrect. For example that world is not 6000 years old it is bilions of years old and so on

The purpose of my thread is exactly targeted to what you say together with the "almost" disprove of God by RD.
The best proof agaist the existence of God is ,in my opinion, the undeniable fact that he is a creation of man in his own human image and not the other way around as written in the Bible.
Most of the scientific diprovals of God are imperfect because our knowledge of nature is only a link in the evolutionary chain same as we humans are .
The pot example means just that.
To present inexplicit phenomenon of nature, as RD does, under the title of the "anthropometric principle" is just an elegant mode of accepting failure.
So what it remains provable und undeniable is the creation of God by Man and the understanding for what purposes he did it in ancient time as well(and that is important)the recurent creation of him the very moment he things about him.