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(June 11, 2011 at 8:28 am)SleepingDemon Wrote: Goddammit, again???? Diffidus will you just change your religious views to theist and get it over with? This is becoming abbhorently banal. You have yet to prove why a space god with superpowers is more likely to exist than a unicorn so until you do that, your argument is bunk.
I was reading an interesting account about how the Human mind works with regard to belief. It goes something like this: when a person sees a fact or an argument that agrees with their belief, it is immediately taken on board without hardly any critical examination. When a person sees a fact or argument that goes against their belief, it induces a state of anger. It is difficult to challenge one's own beliefs, but alarm bells are raised within me if I find I am becoming angry over anothers point of view. It maybe that they have a real point. I sense anger in your response.
I will try to answer your question as best I can.
I think that with regard to the various ideas that you suggest, such as unicorns and the like, there is an error of classification. While the following is not wholly comprehensive, it does provide a certain coverage:
Class 1: Claims related to the existence of little red riding hood, peter pan etc. These can be dismissed on the basis that nobody is claiming that they exist, in fact, the authors of the fairy tales freely admitted that they were pure inventions of their imagination.
Class 2: Unicorns, the Greek God Pan etc. These concepts have become mythology. It is in the nature of a myth that they do not exist and that nobody now claims they do.
Class 3: Loch Ness Monster, Yeti etc. These are claimed to exist by some people and even now there are regular sitings. For these we should keep an open mind, but the probability of their existence is very low. We can assert this probability due to measurement. These creatures are not undetectable, in principle, using current technology. For example, Loch Ness has undergone search using submersibles and sonic radar. No sign of Nessy has been found. This does not rule out his existence, but we know from the area of the Loch and the claimed size of the monster, that the chances of it being outside the search zone is small.
Class 4: Gods existence, the human soul etc. Claims related to these, such as 'God exists' are still widely held by people. Evidence is presented by people in the form of personal accounts. But the really important point, is that it is not possible, at present, to estimate the probability of the claim being true or not, due to the inherent nature of the thing under consideration. It could well be that, as Humankind's knowledege progresses, we may be able to settle these issues, but at present we cannot.
Your class division appears to be primarily based on how popular a belief is. God's existence and the human soul have no more good evidence than unicorns, they're just more popular. You don't make a very good argument.
"It is in the nature of a myth that they do not exist and that nobody now claims they do."
Just substitute religious beliefs for myths in that sentence, and you have it.
Not really - you have completely ignored the subtlety of probability. We can always estimate the probability of existence of mythical creatures such as unicorns, based upon the fact that these beasts (it was once claimed) existed on earth. The earth is finite and we have explored a great deal of it including satelite coverage. So, if somebody were to claim that they had seen a herd of unicorns the claim could be challeged. We could certainly state that the probability was extremely low. However, since these are mythical creatures, which, by definition, nobody believes in them anymore, this would seem to be an pointless academic exercise.
Loch Ness monster is similar, in that the probability could be estimated, but it is not yet a myth - since people still seriously claim that it exists and offer varying degrees of evidence.
So you see the really important thing is whether it is possible to estimate the probability.
With the concept of God, claims are being made and evidence offered, but the evidence is largely subjective. The result is that no estimate of the probability of existence can be formed. If 'those that believe' claimed that God was like a Unicorn i.e. a real living beast on earth that had somehow evaded detection, at least we could search the planet and then confidently say His existence is unlikely. With God, however, the claim(and I emphasise claim) is that He is all around us but in another dimension. Since we cannot detect Him, either He does not exist or, our understanding or detection methods are not yet developed enough. But how do we know which is true, since Humankinds current state of knowledge could be just a drop in the ocean of what is to come!
