(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(May 10, 2025 at 4:25 pm)Alan V Wrote: he should be

Objective evidence, as we pointed out, is never some sort of pure and direct perception, but always facts that are interpreted in light of prior beliefs. 

Straw man, yet again. 

Quote:you have an image or conception of what an omnipotent God would be like, and then you look for indications in the world of whether that God exists. And of course you find none. 

Utterly wrong, you make claims, and we ask you to justify them, god claims are treated the same as all the others. Why wouldn't they be? 

Quote:Then a question you could ask would be: is my conception of God the same as the one that intelligent Christians hold? When I look at the world and interpret it as lacking signs of God, am I looking for the right kind of thing? 

Then a question you could ask would be: is my conception of unicorns the same as the one that intelligent Unicornists hold? When I look at the world and interpret it as lacking signs of un, am I looking for the right kind of thing?

(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Dawkins and Hitchens, for example, conceived of God in the simplest, most childish way possible, and then (no surprise) decided that the God they had imagined didn't exist. But there are better books.

The problem is also true of scientific theories. The models you remember from grade school of atoms and solar systems are all false. If you try to find them in nature you'll come back empty handed. They are abstractions and approximations. And you can imagine why: because what a model or theory aims to do isn't exactly to map out reality, it's to make reality comprehendible for our brains, and that will never exist on a 1 to 1 ratio.

(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Here is where reading the right books can help. Dawkins and Hitchens, for example, conceived of God in the simplest, most childish way possible, and then (no surprise) decided that the God they had imagined didn't exist. But there are better books.

On page 31 of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins wrote: "It is unfair to attack such an easy target [the Old Testament God].  The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation."

He went on: "Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.  This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.  Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.  God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion."

But I do agree that there are better books.  The best I found was God: The Failed Hypothesis by philosopher and physicist Victor Stenger.

(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Objective evidence, as we pointed out, is never some sort of pure and direct perception, but always facts that are interpreted in light of prior beliefs. Observations of the world are "theory laden."

So apparently you have an image or conception of what an omnipotent God would be like, and then you look for indications in the world of whether that God exists. And of course you find none. 

While it is true that I abandoned the Christian concept of a Trinity God when I was still a teenager, because I thought it clearly conflicted with the basic idea of monotheism, I spent over two decades trying to make the best possible sense of the Sufi interpretation of the Islamic idea of God, as the one and only absolute.  That made a great deal more sense to me, so it took me much longer to figure out what was wrong with it.

(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Then a question you could ask would be: is my conception of God the same as the one that intelligent Christians hold? When I look at the world and interpret it as lacking signs of God, am I looking for the right kind of thing? 

I think I examined all of the major ideas about God, and didn't find any of them which made sense in the end. Atheists have fairly clear arguments against all of them. (I started reading atheistic ideas only at the age of 50.)

(May 10, 2025 at 2:51 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 10, 2025 at 2:16 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: Since it is "evidence" for both the thesis and the antithesis, it is evidence for neither. That's what we call "equivocal".

...

ETA: Isn't "God ---> Life on Earth. And we observe life on Earth" affirming the consequent? Asking for a fellow doctoral student.

Yes, it's affirming the consequent, that's been my entire argument against evidence. And all you've done is restate the problem of underdetermination. In other words, you've reinforced my case against evidence.

(That said, I do reject your exclusivity argument, that X only be possible under Y, or else X doesn't corroborate Y. I don't think such exclusivity exists anywhere in the universe.)

The evidence against evidence brought to you by the philosophically illiterate. Nice to see that you reject your own argument against god.

(May 10, 2025 at 7:35 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Dawkins and Hitchens, for example, conceived of God in the simplest, most childish way possible, and then (no surprise) decided that the God they had imagined didn't exist. But there are better books.

The problem is also true of scientific theories. The models you remember from grade school of atoms and solar systems are all false. If you try to find them in nature you'll come back empty handed. They are abstractions and approximations. And you can imagine why: because what a model or theory aims to do isn't exactly to map out reality, it's to make reality comprehendible for our brains, and that will never exist on a 1 to 1 ratio.

You might wish to distinguish between gross oversimplifications taught to grade-schoolers and scientific theories. I'm sure that they must have covered that in Philosophy of Science.

Ah apologists trying so hard to undermine the concept of evidence because they know their beliefs don't have any

(May 10, 2025 at 7:39 pm)Alan V Wrote: He went on: "Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.  This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.  Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.  God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion."

Dawkins lives in North Oxford. Oxford probably has a higher percentage of people who know theology well than just about any other city on the planet. 

Why didn't Dawkins get on his bicycle and visit one of them, so that he could have it explained to him why this whole thing is an argument against something which they don't believe? 

It is certainly true that God, "in the sense defined" by him, is a delusion.

(May 10, 2025 at 7:39 pm)Alan V Wrote: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything

Since divine simplicity is a fundamental point in Christian theology, this sentence is Dawkins announcing that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Divine simplicity yet another made up superpower apologists use to make their nonesense seem sensible silver age superman has nothing on the Christian god

God by any sane explanation is delusional

(May 10, 2025 at 9:42 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(May 10, 2025 at 7:39 pm)Alan V Wrote: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything

Since divine simplicity is a fundamental point in Christian theology, this sentence is Dawkins announcing that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

New Atheism is so millenial.