(June 24, 2012 at 9:30 pm)amateurlyinsightful Wrote: Cato, according to the same definition of evidence I've shown in the post you replied back to there is evidence of God to the believer, which is the people I present with this argument.

We've established that I think the argument is flawed, but I do see how you can use the method to have a little fun with biblical literalists. The problem I see you having is granting, for the sake of argument, the believer's evidence for god. I invoke 'literalist' because of the assumed evidence portion of the argument. I think it could potentially elicit good conversation with an agnositc or a doubting believer, but a literalist (faith intact) will have no problem dismissing your claims of an infinite number of other possible creators; believers believe in thier god.

I would be interested in knowing if this methodolgy bares fruit, in terms of turning a beliver into a skeptic.

I think I'm going to hand in this argument as well as other atheistic arguments as an article for my school's newspaper.

Cato seems to be the only person in here who knows anything about probability theory. Except that you don't need things like "known inputs" and "known mechanisms" in probability theory. That's something more like experiment design, where you want a random variable to accurately reflect the outcome of some experiment.

Really, in order to assign probabilities, all you need is a sample space S, a σ-algebra Σ defined on S, and a probability measure defined on Σ.

So let's say that our sample space consists of all the possible universe-creators--God, the monkey-mole, etc., and Σ is defined as the σ-closure of every finite subset of S.

By assumption, S is countably infinite. Now, your method seems to be something like, "Since there is no evidence that any particular potential creator is more likely to be the actual creator, we must assume that they all have equal probability."

That is, P(God) = P(monkey-mole) = ...

Unfortunately, there is no probability measure on an infinite set that assigns a constant value to every point. Since you don't have a probability measure, you can't draw probabilistic inferences. So your argument is invalid--it draws improper inferences.

Clive, in that case let's just use all the known animals with each of them having a mole on the same spot. Therefore, not infinite

(July 6, 2012 at 2:52 am)amateurlyinsightful Wrote: Clive, in that case let's just use all the known animals with each of them having a mole on the same spot. Therefore, not infinite

Hmm. Well, the biggest issues I see are:

1) How can something that is material precede the universe? Isn't that a contradiction in terms--if there's 4-dimensional arrangements of matter in spacetime, there IS a universe already.

2) How do you know that the information about the potential creators has no impact on the probability that they actually created this universe? That is, would a monkey be likely to make this kind of a universe? Would an entity that hates consciousness be likely to create a universe containing conscious creatures? etc.

How can anything that is capable of creating the material universe fail to have material manifestation at least as far as is perceptible through the application of physics and the other sciences? Watchmakers are born or watches are not made.

(July 6, 2012 at 10:21 am)Epimethean Wrote: How can anything that is capable of creating the material universe fail to have material manifestation at least as far as is perceptible through the application of physics and the other sciences? Watchmakers are born or watches are not made.

I don't think your analogy works; watchmakers aren't made out of watches.

..and watches aren't made out of watchmakers.

(July 6, 2012 at 10:29 am)Rhythm Wrote: ..and watches aren't made out of watchmakers.

Right. The universe isn't made out of God, and God isn't made out of spacetime.

Watchmakers are made of watches if you want to use the analogy. This is how your parents made you, and how the cells that constitutes the assemblage known as clive staples a year ago made the assemblage talking as clive staples now. Watches making watches. Some times the watch makes an fortuitous error and the resulting watch is better than the watch that made it. Some times the watch makes an unfortunate error and the resulting watch is a christian.