I cannot say, but I doubt the math is that simple.

(August 30, 2015 at 4:42 pm)Cecelia Wrote: I think it's a take on the Pascal's Wager argument.




Of course Pascal's wager ignores you having the wrong faith, where No Faith is considered better than the wrong faith.  It also doesn't count the loss of living your life to the fullest.  Atheists are more likely to do things that make them happy, even if it's against the laws of god.  While theists are more likely to not do something that makes them happy if it goes against the laws of god.

But I don't think Pascal's wager needs the 50/50 assumption. The reward/loss is very large and hence could be argued to outweigh small odds - if the argument were sound in the first place.

I have come up with a very simple way to calculate the existence of any given god. Let us say, just for shits and giggles that it is a 50/50 chance that a god could exist. Out of that 50 percent, there are an infinite amount of gods, so, 50 divided by infinity, gives an infinitely small chance or in layman's terms 0 percent chance that a god exists.
Now, that could be complete  , and if it is please tell me.

(August 30, 2015 at 4:29 pm)Shuffle Wrote: Does anyone agree that the existence of god is a 50/50 chance? I have heard atheists say that theists have said this in the past, but I have never heard it. I just want to make sure it isn't a straw man that atheists have come up with, so I can avoid using it in the future.

Thanks!

In ancient times gods were simply men who forced their buddies to obey the political and religious rules that they issued under penalty of death.  Kim Il Jung is the current god of North Korea.  People actually worship him there.  

There is no celestial god in this solar system.  

It might help to think of the word "god" as simply the title of the meanest bastard in the land who controls both the political and religious sectors under penalty of death.  The Iranian dude does that but he doesn't qualify as a traditional god since he worships some guy the Arabs made up.  The ancient Persian emperors were gods in their own right.

Wyrd, where do you get this shit from?!?

(August 31, 2015 at 1:53 am)SnakeOilWarrior Wrote: Wyrd, where do you get this shit from?!?

Haven't you ever read the fairy tale?  Or do you seriously think that some invisible sky deity who lived on a Middle Eastern desert mountain went around talking to people and giving them a long list of rules to follow?  

The "God" character was simply the series of real men who ruled the Middle Eastern area from Egypt to Persia to Turkey and Greece at various times and controlled the superstitious Israelites/Hebrews/Jews.  In ancient times everyone and his brother was called a god.  Remember the Roman Emperors?  The word "God" was simply the colloquial title given to the Big Wig.  

Have you forgotten the story in Daniel chapter 6 how people had to pray to the Persian King Darius for thirty days under penalty of death?

And there was the Macedonian Antiochus Epiphanes who ruled Persia and beat the crap out of Egypt.  He made people worship him as a god and screwed over the Jews.  His story is in the books of the Maccabees.  Don't forget that the Egyptian Pharaohs were also gods, as well as the emperors of Japan.  

Now get it through your head:  there is no celestial god character in this solar system.  There has never been one.  There will never be one.

I don't see how anyone can ever say with any confidence what the probability is that some form of intelligence created this reality. (That's all God means when you take away the bullshit).

The only scenario of this kind that makes any sense to me is that this is a manifestation of a process in another reality, such as a computer simulation or an emergent property. If I was forced to guess I'd put these possibilities at about 1%, but that really is just a guess. The possibility of any kind of cartoon style God, rather than just a being in another reality, is negligible.

Just saying it's 50/50 because there are two possibilities is mindless.

I have heard the argument intimated a couple of times, but not very seriously, and it takes little to no effort to convince the person using it that there is no normal distribution on which to calculate such a probability. You need data to predict the probability of something, and in a lack of it, you could not possibly calculate a probability that would bear up, even under the lightest of scrutiny.

We have no more empirical data points for god than we do pixies, so neither are really able to be assessed by probability, as they are unfalsifiable propositions supported by precisely no direct empirical evidence.

The entire argument stems from a complete misunderstanding of probabilities in the first place, as most people find the field unintuitive. Most people can't work out the likelihood of a true positive in medicine, given a disease with a 1% prevalence and a test with 95% accuracy, but it is approximately 16%...

That would depend on the *puts on sunglasses* type of God you are talking about.

Good point Hedglin.

I always ask the "Everything looks designed" people what a non-designed universe would look like. I never get an answer. Like you say, we have nothing to compare to. People just keep making the fallacy of composition by looking at things inside the universe designed by other things inside the universe and trying to apply that to the universe as a whole.