Disproving Odin - An Experiment in arguing with a theist with Theist logic

[Jenny A]

One faith healer exposed cheating with a radio transmitter.


A practical demonstration of how to cheat.




It took about ten seconds to find these Huggy.

That is one of the problems with trying to prove a negative. The proponent for the positive just comes back with one more worthless bit.

[Jackalope]

Seriously, google "photography artifacts" and pay particular attention to what light leaks in the camera body can produce without doctoring the print or film negative. Same with internal lens reflections.

No supernatural explanation required. The supernatural explanation is a non-sequitur.

[Ravenshire]

You guys can't claim that she's lying because the audio of what she's talking about is included at the end of the video, it happen's just exactly as she says.

Actually, she could easily be lying about the "random stranger" never having met her before. Even if true, there's no way of knowing he hadn't researched her as part of a con. It is a religious meeting after all.

What you're doing is dismissing the evidence without actually looking at it, because you've already arrived at the preconception that everything is known.

What you're doing is projecting. Just stop.

We've looked at you "evidence" (for lack of a better term) and found it unsurprisingly lacking.

[LadyForCamus]

Actually Marilyn Hickey claimed she saw and I quote:

Marilyn Hickey: Here I am on a platform facing this man and had the most unusual experience. I don't know how to describe it but it was like a wheel within a wheel lower on the ground and I could see it and as it turned it went whoosh.. whoosh.. I could hear it and this man is saying to me you're not from here you're from Denver Colorado, you're from a wooded area and you can't have a baby.

Interviewer: And he had never met you?

Marilyn Hickey: Never, ever

I haven’t the faintest idea why you think this is evidence of god. We’ve already established that people in the audience claimed they saw a light; a light penis, a light wheel; its distinguishing features (shape, size, color, etc.) are largely irrelevant. Also, she absolutely could have been lying about not knowing him.  This sort of thing happens all the time, and evidence of that has been provided to you in this very thread.

I have never seen evidence that a god exists, and if he does, no one has given me a thorough and specific explanation for what he’s made of, how he does what he does, or how he interacts with the physical world.  On the other hand, I know for a fact that religious hoaxes and fake “miraculous” healings occur.  I know for a fact that humans orchestrate such hoaxes. I know for a fact that coincidences happen, and that the power of suggestion under the right conditions can cause people to see, hear, and act on things that aren’t actually there. Demonstrable evidence of these facts exists and is accessible.

So, the relevant question becomes: Which explanation is more reasonable and probable in this particular scenario? The explanation that invokes the inexplicable magic of an unevidenced god, or the explanation that points to demonstrable facts which support it?
 
You have some people who said they saw a light, and a picture of some light. Still. That’s all you’ve ever had, and that’s all your ever going to have with this particular event.  Reaching for anything more than that is obvious confirmation bias, and total abandonment of critical thinking.

[Minimalist]

Hickey is a known fraud.  I"m sure Huggy has written checks to all of them.

http://www.equip.org/article/whats-wrong...-part-one/

Faith teachers such as Robert Tilton and his female counterpart, Marilyn Hickey, have copied many of the scams pioneered by Pentecostal preachers such as Oral Roberts and A. A. Allen. In fact, Tilton and Hickey have managed to exceed even their predecessors’ outrageous ploys. This is hard to believe when one considers what sort of schemes they had to outdo.

Huggy is the personification of this old English quotation:

"A foole and his money be soone at debate: which after with sorow repents him too late."

This phrase is at least 460 years old. While the wording is different, the idea behind the 
expression is used by a poet named Thomas Tusser in a poem he wrote called Five Hundred 
Points of Good Husbandry, 1557:

Apparently some asshole later copied a version into Huggy's precious fucking inerrant bible.

[LadyForCamus]

Actually Marilyn Hickey claimed she saw and I quote:

Marilyn Hickey: Here I am on a platform facing this man and had the most unusual experience. I don't know how to describe it but it was like a wheel within a wheel lower on the ground and I could see it and as it turned it went whoosh.. whoosh.. I could hear it and this man is saying to me you're not from here you're from Denver Colorado, you're from a wooded area and you can't have a baby.

Interviewer: And he had never met you?

Marilyn Hickey: Never, ever

I haven’t the faintest idea why you think this is evidence of god. We’ve already established that people in the audience claimed they saw a light; a light penis, a light wheel; its distinguishing features (shape, size, color, etc.) are largely irrelevant. Also, she absolutely could have been lying about not knowing him.  This sort of thing happens all the time, and evidence of that has been provided to you in this very thread.

I have never seen evidence that a god exists, and if he does, no one has given me a thorough and specific explanation for what he’s made of, how he performs, or how he interacts with the physical world.  On the other hand, I know for a fact that religious hoaxes and fake “miraculous” healings occur.  I know for a fact that humans orchestrate such hoaxes. I know for a fact that coincidences happen, and that the power of suggestion under the right conditions can cause people to see, hear, and act on things that aren’t actually there. Demonstrable evidence of these facts exists and is accessible.

So, the relevant question becomes:

Which explanation is more reasonable and probable in this particular scenario? The explanation that invokes the inexplicable magic of an unevidenced god, or the explanation that points to demonstrable facts?
 
You have some people who said they saw a light, and a picture of some light. That’s all you’ve ever had, and that’s all your ever going to have with this particular event.  Reaching for anything more than that is obvious confirmation bias, and total abandonment of critical thinking.

[robvalue]

I'm not just providing someone else's testimony, I'm giving live commentary. Surely that's even better! I can interact and answer questions. No one who wrote the bible can do that. All we can do is read what they wrote over and over. Everything I say becomes eyewitness testimony. He's right here, I'm looking at him.

I have testimony as well, I have seen Odin in dreams and he spoke to me, how could Odin send me dreams if he's not real?

That's awesome! We now have four eyewitness testimonies. Huggy won't even comment, let alone believe them.

Do they only count when it's something he wants to be true?

This shit about "God is light" is ridiculous equivocation, as usual. It's a metaphor, of course. If it was literally true, then you have to stick to it, which of course he never does. "God" is this transformer, a robot in disguise, that can answer any question by being anything Huggy says it is under any circumstances. I may as well say "Odin is apples" and thus prove he exists.

[LadyForCamus]

Woops, sorry about the double post; I’m just seeing it now and it’s too late to edit!

[robvalue]

You'd think that theists would have good imaginations, given their tendency for magical stories. But I've found that the opposite is true. Huggy is showing here how incapable he is of imagining different possibilities. In his mind, either:

1) We have a current explanation for something
2) God did it

That's it. And of course, by "God", he means his God, not one of those fake imaginary ones. No matter how many times we bring this up, he's incapable of seeing how he is building a false dichotomy. Incapable, or brutally dishonest. If it's the latter, he's only cheating himself. He should have realized by now that he's not going to convince anyone of anything by using obvious fallacies, so he can only be trying to convince himself. I think that's what most theists come here for, to be honest.

This lack of imagination/critical thinking is not entirely their fault, of course. When all you ever hear is "God did it" from your parents and community, it's going to stunt your thinking and curiosity. Any question you have, that doesn't have a simple immediate answer, "God did it". Now look at the results, an adult with a fifty year old picture of a ball of light, using it as evidence for a character in a story book in an effort to disprove a real Norse superbeing. I would expect that most five year olds could spot the flaws in that plan. I'm not trying or be mean, it just makes me really sad to see someone's thinking so thoroughly addled by conclusions they require to be true. [Cue tu quoque about "you atheists".]

[SteveII]

Supernatural intelligence. 

By definition, it is not subject to natural laws. 

su·per·nat·u·ral
ˌso͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl/
adjective

1. 1.
   (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.
   

God, by definition, is supernatural.

You are assuming that your god exists. There is no evidence to warrant that assumption being made.

Provide one example of something existing that is also supernatural.

Wait a minute. All this started when you thought you had a clever argument that God was not thermodynamically possible. That reasoning was silly. Now to salvage your part of the discussion, you take the typical atheist tack of "well...you don't have any evidence of God anyway...so there." If you want to comment about properties of God, you have already granted for the purpose of the discussion that he exists. Falling back to this is disingenuous at best. 

And if you are defining supernatural as beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature then that means quantum mechanics is supernatural, also dark matter, dark energy, dark flow etc.

What are you talking about? Supernatural is not a state of knowledge. It is a category of existence. 

But if you define supernatural and as not existing in nature, then you have defined it as something that does not exist. You are effectively admitting that your god is a fantasy and a figment of your imagination.

That does not make any sense whatsoever. Supernatural is a category of existence. I am "effectively admitting" that God does not exist in the natural category.