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On the nature of evidence.
#11
RE: On the nature of evidence.
You pleaded for a greatly reduced standard of evidence for the existence of your pet deity compared to existence of just about anything a reasonable person would accept as real and disingenuously phrased it as a leading question.

You neglected to notice that 1. Reduced standard of evidence reduces the credibility of any proposition barely meeting that standard. 2. Using this reduced standard allows any other deity to be proven to the same standard, and thus reducing the believeability of your particular pet dirty which claims to be the only one even though new lowered standard of evidence esuggest there are many.
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#12
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:14 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:
(October 25, 2014 at 4:05 pm)trmof Wrote: I think you might be setting your standards too high.
Conversely, I think you're setting yours too low.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:05 pm)trmof Wrote: As someone who I presume lives an ordinary life without major worldwide repercussions, it might be unreasonable to ask God for something so major that he has to make the laws of physics jump through hoops. He has to take into account the butterfly effect this would have on everything in your immediate vicinity and beyond.
I'm pretty sure a God that can plan for the intricacies involved in the evolution of intelligent life by means of physical laws and then intercede to violate them can also ensure that the butterfly effect remains exactly as it would given the absence of a miracle.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:05 pm)trmof Wrote: In my experience God is much more likely to communicate with people through strange circumstances which speak to them personally, as these are much easier to engineer.
That's what I would expect, as an atheist too. The difference is what you identify as God, without sufficient reason, I identify as fanciful projection of the ego, substantiated by a multitude of observations.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:05 pm)trmof Wrote: I would suggest you ask humbly for a very simple sign of this kind, and don't immediately write it off as a coincidence when something unusual happens; but ask God to provide a larger, bolder sign to confirm the first. If he is an active personality as I believe, he will see fit to give you these signs and make them more and more obvious. However, if you DO receive these increasingly obvious signs and still refuse to acknowledge them as circumstantial evidence, then God will eventually stop trying.
I would suggest that you apply a little more critical thought to your analysis of causes and effects.

On that note, my point becomes: If God did in fact exist and the ways I've described were the only way he were willing to communicate with you at the moment for reasons he can't currently explain to you, then your standard of evidence would tie his hands in terms of reaching out and making contact with you.
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#13
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:22 pm)trmof Wrote: On that note, my point becomes: If God did in fact exist and the ways I've described were the only way he were willing to communicate with you at the moment for reasons he can't currently explain to you, then your standard of evidence would tie his hands in terms of reaching out and making contact with you.
And we're none the worse off for it. On the other hand, if the requirements for what can be correctly recognized as evidence are bastardized to the point of personal credulity, for which you allow, then virtually all claims become justifiable as truths and man remains ignorant of true causes.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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#14
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:20 pm)Chuck Wrote: You pleaded for a greatly reduced standard of evidence for the existence of your pet deity compared to existence of just about anything a reasonable person would accept as real and disingenuously phrased it as a leading question.

You neglected to notice that 1. Reduced standard of evidence reduces the credibility of any proposition barely meeting that standard. 2. Using this reduced standard allows any other deity to be proven to the same standard, and thus reducing the believeability of your particular pet dirty which claims to be the only one even though new lowered standard of evidence esuggest there are many.

The question is about your personal standard of evidence, it's not making a particular statement either way about whether my particular God exists. If you are not actually interested in exploring the questions I asked, I'm confused as to why you keep commenting on the post. You appear to be looking to start an argument, whereas I am looking to start a civil discussion about the nature of evidence. Hence the title.

(October 25, 2014 at 4:26 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:
(October 25, 2014 at 4:22 pm)trmof Wrote: On that note, my point becomes: If God did in fact exist and the ways I've described were the only way he were willing to communicate with you at the moment for reasons he can't currently explain to you, then your standard of evidence would tie his hands in terms of reaching out and making contact with you.
And we're none the worse off for it. On the other hand, if the requirements for what can be correctly recognized as evidence are bastardized to the point of personal credulity, for which you allow, then virtually all claims become justifiable as truths and man remains ignorant of true causes.

Then we can kindly agree to disagree on that. Thanks for your opinions.
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#15
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:27 pm)trmof Wrote: Then we can kindly agree to disagree on that. Thanks for your opinions.
What part do you disagree with? That thousands of mutually exclusive metaphysical beliefs are justified in people's minds by appeal to an intuition or particular interpretation of their experiences? That's just a fact.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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#16
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm)trmof Wrote: I would like to know what the atheists on this forum WOULD consider to be persuasive evidence of God's existence.

First define your god and its attributes; because we don't have a god to examine, we have to depend on what is being claimed about it.

(October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm)trmof Wrote: If you are interested in scientific evidence of the existence of God, how would one go about acquiring this evidence?

That depends on whatever you're proposing for this god. Does it interact with the Universe in any way? Does it answer prayers and so on? All those claims are testable.

(October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm)trmof Wrote: Assuming God is a personality and not just a force of nature, it would seem that it would be impossible to scientifically test for the existence of his personality and it's characteristics; just as it is impossible at the moment to come up with a functioning theory of another human's personality other than "It does what it does when it does it, and sometimes it doesn't."

Why would you think this god would be scientifically untestable, unless you're defining it to be so? Making your god claims unfalsifiable isn't a good thing; it just means they cannot be tested. And that's a double-edged sword, since you cannot then go on to make any claims about this god, including whether it's even there at all.

(October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm)trmof Wrote: It's theoretically possible that if you had all the information in the universe available to you, you would be able to predict another person's behavior accurately. But given that this is currently unfeasable, it would seem to me that experiential and testimonial evidence are the only two avenues through which we could currently examine the possible existence of God.

No, you don't need all the information in the Universe to do this. Advertisers, supermarket designers and the like have developed it almost to the level of art. Plus we already know that, unlike gods, other people exist and must have personalities. Unless you're advocating solipsism, in which case I have no reason to believe you even exist. Not to mention I would have to account for why my mind created all the greatest and the least music in history, from Beethoven to the Beatles and on to Bieber. And if my mind created Justin Bieber, I deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity.

(October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm)trmof Wrote: So what could a God do that would personally convince you of it's existence? I presume for most of you that if he started talking to you personally, you would simply assume that this was mental illness.

Not even close. I would investigate that option first, to eliminate the more common and obvious explanations first. If at the end of it the only option left to me was that a god was in fact speaking to me, I would have to accept that. Then I would track it to its lair and destroy it.

(October 25, 2014 at 3:50 pm)trmof Wrote: So if a God with a personality WERE to exist, setting the standard of evidence this high would be putting him in a position where it's impossible for him communicate with you in any way whatsoever.

It's generally not the atheist making whatever god is being touted unfalsifiable. Besides, a god which would find anything impossible isn't exactly what I would call worthy of the title.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist.  This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair.  Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second.  That means there's a situation vacant.'
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#17
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:27 pm)trmof Wrote:
(October 25, 2014 at 4:20 pm)Chuck Wrote: You pleaded for a greatly reduced standard of evidence for the existence of your pet deity compared to existence of just about anything a reasonable person would accept as real and disingenuously phrased it as a leading question.

You neglected to notice that 1. Reduced standard of evidence reduces the credibility of any proposition barely meeting that standard. 2. Using this reduced standard allows any other deity to be proven to the same standard, and thus reducing the believeability of your particular pet dirty which claims to be the only one even though new lowered standard of evidence esuggest there are many.

The question is about your personal standard of evidence, it's not making a particular statement either way about whether my particular Go exists. If you are not actually interested in exploring the questions I asked, I'm confused as to why you keep commenting on the post. You appear to be looking to start an argument, whereas I am looking to start a civil discussion about the nature of evidence. Hence the title.


It is a mark of honesty to start any such discussion by clarifying your own position, rather than by asking leading questions without nailing down your own position so as to be able to slip and slide and never admit defeat.

So what is your stamndard of evidence and why is that satisfactory?
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#18
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:31 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:
(October 25, 2014 at 4:27 pm)trmof Wrote: Then we can kindly agree to disagree on that. Thanks for your opinions.
What part do you disagree with? That thousands of mutually exclusive metaphysical beliefs are justified in people's minds by appeal to an intuition or particular interpretation of their experiences? That's just a fact.

I think that you are taking standards which apply to things we can scientifically test for and applying them to things which we can't scientifically test for. You're discounting that any number of things about the universe could be true simply because we aren't currently able to measure them, which is a fine skeptical analysis, but lacking as a philosophical analysis and is the reason philosophy exists in the first place. There is no reason to dicount one form of evidence simply because another form is better. I would argue that THIS places limits on our ability to examine what is and isn't true.
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#19
RE: On the nature of evidence.
There is reason to discount one form of evidence when another form is better: the first form has never been demonstrated to be sufficient for anything, much less a thing for which so much has been claimed.
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#20
RE: On the nature of evidence.
(October 25, 2014 at 4:43 pm)Chuck Wrote:
(October 25, 2014 at 4:27 pm)trmof Wrote: The question is about your personal standard of evidence, it's not making a particular statement either way about whether my particular Go exists. If you are not actually interested in exploring the questions I asked, I'm confused as to why you keep commenting on the post. You appear to be looking to start an argument, whereas I am looking to start a civil discussion about the nature of evidence. Hence the title.


It is a mark of honesty to start any such discussion by clarifying your own position, rather than by asking leading questions without nailing down your own position so as to be able to slip and slide and never admit defeat.

So what is your stamndard of evidence and why is that satisfactory?

They aren't leading questions, they are simply questions. I never claimed to have any beliefs whatsoever; I'm interested in yours, which you have still failed to state. As this is a polite conversation and not a college debate, there are no winning and losing conditions.

As for my standards of evidence, I have received numerous physical signs from God that he both listens to me and wants me to behave in certain ways, so I have no further requirement for evidence.
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