(November 14, 2016 at 8:10 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Edward John: Your arguments are terrible. That you think you have provided enough evidence to persuade an open minded person is likely the result of you not being very smart. It takes brains and a willingness to consider alternatives to mount a convincing case. You have neither of these. You provide poorly framed arguments for your God and have the cheek to format it in large colorful fonts as if we were children that you had to speak down to. If you want to know why you've failed to convince, then I suggest you look in the mirror.
point 1: God isn't "the best explanation" for anything. God is an explanation, but not a very good one. God as an explanation has great explanatory scope, meaning that it can account for a wide variety of facts. But that is the only virtue that God as an explanation has. There are other virtues we look for in an explanation which are lacking in your God explanation. One of these is explanatory power, which is the quality of increasing our understanding of the phenomenon on account of the explanation. This is usually done by providing a mechanism of action by which to understand the phenomenon. Your God explanation is notably deficient in this area in that the only mechanism postulated is, "it's magic." Saying that it "just happened" does as much to illuminate the underlying mechanism as your God explanation does. There are other qualities that we look for in a good explanation that are not found in your God explanation. One of these is the ability to make predictions based on the explanation. "Goddidit" provides no useful predictions. In summation, far from being the "best" explanation for these things, it's hardly an explanation at all. At best it's a very poor one.
Well said.
'God' as an explanation is not an explanation at all. It is nothing more that sweeping the questions under the rug.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
