A good reason not to believe in God

[theVOID]

Fascinating Void,probably be even better once I understand it..

Are you arguing that God can be reasoned into or out of existence? A simple soul,untrained in philosophy(,I only had a year at university),that is not a position I'm able to accept, and why I only argued with a Catholic theologian once---and he wasn't even one of their top guys).

No not at all, I'm simply saying that in terms of the amount of information that is required to describe the state of affairs at t0, naturalism requires far less, this should be reason to prefer naturalism over theism as far as explanations for the origin of the universe go - We aren't dealing with theories here, we're evaluating hypotheses.

Essentially, the more information that exists in either scenario the lower the chance of it being true, in this circumstance both explanations either exist spontaneously or as a matter of brute fact - This places them on equal footing. Next you look at the amount of information required to describe the states of affairs demanded by each scenario, under naturalism you need very little information to describe a quantum fluctuation, some imbalance and a feedback loop, under the theistic scenario you require much more information to describe everything that is at t0 - Including the knowledge this deity possesses.

For something to exist spontaneously or as a brute fact requires that all parts in the set exist simultaneously. The chances of say 5 parts existing simultaneously as a set is greater than the chances of 6 parts in a set existing simultaneously. Considering all of the independent facts contained within the mind of the omniscient deity, you have a set with an enormous numbers of parts, thus to describe the state of affairs at t0 in your hypothesis requires an absurd amount of information.

Because the best hypothesis is the one with the least amount of information that still describes all necessary phenomenon, Naturalism is to be preferred as the best hypothesis at describing the start of the universe.

For the sake of my own sanity,I've been obliged to adopt a simple,but I think reasonable proposition; I demand supporting evidence before accepting any argument as more than possible/likely/probable

As do I, supporting evidence (be it empirical or otherwise) lends credence to a hypothesis a posteriori, this evaluation of the hypotheses is a priori, before we have any evidence to lend weight to one or the other - All we can say based on this argument is what hypothesis we should prefer prior to having evidence for and against, this would be a technique used most frequently by investigators and scientists who have to determine how to allocate their resources in order to have the most successful outcome statistically.

Empiricism ultimately overrules the hypothesis, even if the fact of it having less information complexity is true. If we did for instance find evidence for the existence of God then we would prefer that despite the theory being ultimately more demanding in terms of the information needed to describe it.

Perhaps I'm confused. My understanding is the notion of truth through reason alone comes from the so-called neo Platonists,and is favoured by apologists, from Augustine of Hippo onwards.

That's a pretty jaded understanding pad, there are plenty of things we can establish through reason alone as being true, you've heard the 'socrates is moral' one before I would assume? Math is pure reason for instance, and we also have the option of finding probabilities of certain things being true.

But anyway, this argument is not for the truth of any proposition, it is a point about the nature of hypotheses and which ones we should prefer from competing hypotheses.