When Atheists Can't Think Episode 1: No Evidence for God?

[Cyberman]

So you claim that God does exist and Atheists claim he doesn't. And you say that Atheists are false in their claim? So then god or gods do exist?

Well I think they are false. They think I'm false.

According to me God exists.

To coin a phrase: that's asserted but not demonstrated.

[robvalue]

I'm only yanking everyone's chain. I don't mean any offense. Just having fun with my favourite punching bag, God. It's a victimless crime

[Redbeard The Pink]

Right, the infinite regress leads to something that must be outside of time and without need to be caused. The question is: is it more reasonable that this is an intelligence or unintelligence? I think that it is more reasonable to think it is an intelligence. Nobody wins in the infinite regress, but I think the naturalists/atheists are in a slightly worse position.

Nope. Sorry, buddy. This still leaves you with either infinite regress or special pleading.


If something outside of space and time is required in order to create space and time itself, then something outside of the designer should have to create the designer, and something outside of that creator should have to create it, and so on. We're back at infinite regress.


If Gaud is the only thing that does not require a cause outside of itself, that is once again special pleading.


Thinking it's "more reasonable" to believe the Causeless Cause is intelligent rather than unintelligent is merely an unsupported argument from incredulity. Without good evidence, it's rarely useful to choose to believe one thing over another.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Another note about "intelligent design":

It seems to be treated like God has to solve the issues of how we can eat, how we can breathe, etc. But these are problems he made himself. There was no requirement that we had to eat and breathe or else we died.

I've said before, people seem to flip-flop between god setting the rules and God having turned up one day and having to deal with things as they are.

If you were designing life, with unlimited power and resources, would you put in these death clauses that you then have to solve in weird ways? Or just not have death at all and make exactly the number of whatever things that you want?

Things didn't have to remotely be as they are. Would you design it so that the body has to excrete waste after eating? Why would you do that? Eating could just have been a fun activity, and you didn't die if you don't eat.

It's cock and balls all the way. The only reasons for things to be the way they are are God not being able to do any better, God not wanting to do any better, or God not being involved at all.

If God is real, then he's a drunken slouch. Had to hunt up this cartoon because I couldn't find a drunk smiley!

[Cyberman]

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
--Woody Allen

[paulpablo]

EVIDENCE.  You yammer on and on and on about "evidence", you ignore responses and keep yammering about "evidence", and even when we ask for "evidence" you keep yammering on and give us nothing.  Zip.  Nada.   Pages upon pages upon pages of people asking for your "evidence".  You give us absolutely nothing.  Worse than nothing - you ignore everything you've been told, and type crap like the nonsense above.  All you do is stick your nose in the air, try to think up a new way to tell us how superior you are, and have fun typing more insults.  

We tell you and tell you and tell you:  Definition of atheism =  disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.    We tell you that we have not seen sufficient substantive empirical evidence to support belief in any deities.   Evidence, not something from a book of fairy tales, not stories for people who had "experiences", not philosophical arguments, not "look around you, only an idiot looks at nature and fails to see god" - - - you keep flapping your jaw about evidence, so give us the evidence.  

Put up or shut up.  How much longer are you going to spread shit all over our carpets and try to claim you're throwing pearls before swine?

I have to ask you to stop and think more carefully.

Read the question:

People can see no evidence of God because they have competently examined the evidence and found it lacking, or they are simply incompetent and incapable of seeing the evidence. Which are you?

"Where is the evidence?" is not one of the answers. The answers are one of the following:
a) I've examined the evidence and found it lacking, or
b) I'm incompetent and incapable of seeing the evidence.

Those are the only two possibilities that can explain why someone sees a lack of evidence. 

So once again: Which is it?

Pretty sure that the two terms exist because of the difference.

Pretty sure noone's talking about the existence of the terms.

How is it that someone as learned as you in epistemology struggle so with the idea of justified true belief?

You're good at repeating slogans. Too bad you don't understand them.

It's been about 50 years since justified true belief was refuted. For my struggle (and those of contemporary epistemologists) you can thank Edmund Gettier.

But to keep the discussion on track, the bottom line is: Your belief+knowledge account of your view about the existence of God refutes atheism itself. 

Here's why:

1) The JTB account entails that if a belief is justified and true, it is knowledge.
2) Your belief (atheism) is not knowledge (agnosticism)
3) Therefore your belief (atheism) is not both justified and true. (modus tollens)

Taking (3) as a premise in a second argument, we get the following:
1) If a conjunction is false, one or both of the conjuncts are false.
2) The conjunction "The belief (atheism) is true and justified" is false.
3) Therefore, either atheism is unjustified, or atheism is false, or atheism is both unjustified and false.

Read the second conclusion again. You're logically committed to the view that atheism is either false, or unjustified, or it's false AND unjustified.

Someone who knows a bit of formal logic can verify the structure of my argument here.

Thanks for playing. Now tell me about your justified true belief.

I can see one fault here, atheism is a lack of a belief rather than a belief. I'm surprised you overlooked this since you say atheists are always telling you this.

It might be the case that you're constantly being told the same arguments by atheists because you're constantly ignoring the arguments resulting in them being repeatedly explained.

[AAA]

Right, the infinite regress leads to something that must be outside of time and without need to be caused. The question is: is it more reasonable that this is an intelligence or unintelligence? I think that it is more reasonable to think it is an intelligence. Nobody wins in the infinite regress, but I think the naturalists/atheists are in a slightly worse position.

Nope. Sorry, buddy. This still leaves you with either infinite regress or special pleading.


If something outside of space and time is required in order to create space and time itself, then something outside of the designer should have to create the designer, and something outside of that creator should have to create it, and so on. We're back at infinite regress.


If Gaud is the only thing that does not require a cause outside of itself, that is once again special pleading.


Thinking it's "more reasonable" to believe the Causeless Cause is intelligent rather than unintelligent is merely an unsupported argument from incredulity. Without good evidence, it's rarely useful to choose to believe one thing over another.

You  don't win in an infinite regress. Nobody does. Either intelligent force was eternal, or matter was eternal. Neither makes sense, and matter being eternal is no more reasonable than intelligence.

[AAA]

This is a response to RocketSurgeon. It said the other discussion was too long to post, so I'm putting it here. Hopefully you see it.

I am not presupposing that life requires enzymes. That is what we see. YOU are the one presupposing that RNA word is even possible, despite the lack of stability of the molecule. it is less stable than DNA, which requires enzymes to maintain it. It isn't a supposition to say that life always operated by the way we see it operate. It is a supposition to say that it operates by unobserved conditions. Again, observing the molecules necessary for life is a long way from saying abiogenesis can happen. You also seem to think that there are so many promising hypotheses for abiogenesis, but saying it may have happened long ago and far away is not good science. I'll accept it when they do the work and provide better evidence. I realize they are working, but like other scientific theories, it needs to be developed more before I can accept it. Until then, it should be the job of the rest of scientists to challenge what they put forward with facts. You keep saying I'm ignoring facts but I think I just have a different interpretation of the facts, which seems to bother you.

You explained evolution exactly as I understand it. It is microevolution, and I know it's an old debate, but I don't think that it can be extrapolated to macroevolution. Natural selection is capable of changing the allele frequencies of a population, but these small changes in phenotype (which i agree can lead to better adapted individuals) are due to small differences in the code. Small changes in the code don't accumulate, because, while the code can tolerate some change, most change is detrimental to protein function.

I don't have a supreme lack of understanding of the functions of genetics. I have already taken these 300 level classes you mentioned, and more next semester. I finished with the highest grade in the class, and I have asked my professors some of the questions.

Why do the whales have terrestrial leg design? I don't think they do. I think that is presupposed by the evolutionists. Yes I heard the muscle attachment thing from the creationists, but it's not the source that matters, it is what they are saying. The picture you have is a nice story, but I've said this before that we could easily do these gradual looking charts connecting virtually any two species. They are just putting similar organisms next to each other.

The bacterial flagellum is still problematic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last I heard on the topic, less than half of the proteins involved in the flagellum come from proteins with other functions. The fact that proteins can do multiple things shows efficiency, which could be interpreted as design or evolution. The flagellum may not be irreducibly complex, but it again seems like they are making assumptions about the past. Some of the proteins involved have other functions, therefore in the past they must have done different things, and slowly evolved into the flagellum.


I stand by the fact that we should not discourage the questioning of evolution. If it can only be done through peer reviewed articles, then we are at a disadvantage due to the ideologies held by the bulk of the scientific community. I watched a documentary called no intelligence allowed. It seems like there is unfair treatment of the intelligent design people. I'm not saying that the scientific method is wrong, but it is portrayed as the ultimate system to ensure objective interpretation of evidence, but it isn't. Everyone has presupposition and we cannot ignore them no matter how hard we try.

Again I think that ID people should be considered real scientists. What do they have to do to be considered a scientist? They are doing research. They are intelligent people who know their science. Steven Meyer seems to be very up to date with evidence, and I have never seen him lose a debate, so I don't think they can just be dismissed as wrong due to the fact that they are questioning the theory.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, and Happy Holidays.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Ah, OK. The uber God just really likes shit, so God has to work it in somewhere or he'll get canned.

This, I think, explains CL's odd fixation. Perhaps she really does worship at the porcelain altar?

[Thumpalumpacus]

That's clearly not what I said.  I'd suggest you reread for content rather than vapid riposte. Your summation is flawed.

You're certainly doing a great job hiding your point because even you can't make it explicit.

You haven't been able to show anything actually wrong yet. Your appeals to slogans don't excuse independent thinking.

I've made it plain. If you're too dense to see it, that's your problem, not mine.