Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[R00tKiT]

The gish gallop.  I've corrected misapprehensions you had about two other specific articles.  Now we're on to some other throwaway discussion.  I've repeatedly expressed to you that no disagreement over which beliefs are reasonable to hold forms the basis of my inability and utter lack of desire to join your club.

You know, you won't look bad if you acknoweldge the misapprehensions you had about any topic. From what I recall, I never used the anthropic principle in any of my arguments, and I made it clear I don't reject it - that is, think it's false -, I just think it's meaningless to make a formal argument from it, and it turned out I was right.
Back to the sense of wonder, a very important question of mine went unanswered : should a deity make its existence "overwhelming", i.e. felt by its creatures in their everyday lives, or, send pages of rigorous proofs covering all the cases and thoughts every skeptic can possibly have about the topic?

I am waiting for a clear answer.

Assume that there is a god, your god, described by your magic book.  All of your work is still ahead of you.

For me, these discussions are pure academic minutiae. 

If you think I have some burden to spoon feed exhaustive answers to every possible doubt you can have, you're mistaken. That's the problem with religious discussions anyway, and that's what makes atheists atheists : everyone can build his objection to any possible positive case for god/prophecy, etc. and mix it with the appearance of thoughtfulness to hide the bias, but whether he does the thing honestly, no one can ever know, except the god he's arguing against, that is.

As a concrete example, as soon as child marriage is brought up, you begin name calling, unable to let go of the urge of considering your western upbringing/recent legal changes as some absolute moral reference. And I don't think you still understand what anachronism means, or how bad it makes people look like when they fall into it.

Fine, if you say so, but a god who came from no where, no when, and no thing..is very clearly something from nothing.

No, he's not. You are playing with words and think you can get away with it. A god didn't come from nowhere, nowhere was never an actual state, he is the "where".

I don't think you seriously write this crap, you just don't have any willingness to investigate what people, from the other camp, write to you.

Well then you have a logical problem.

Is every grain of sand complex? Yup.

Is every snowflake complex? Yup.

Is every atom complex? Yup.

Thus your god must have created all of them, right?

Yes, that's right. And I don't see how it can be a "logical problem".

So, now you’re equivocating definitions of the word “design”, which is another fallacy. Do you think it’s our first go-around with this terrible argument? I’ll give the intellectually honest answer to my own question: No, each individual snowflake is not intelligently designed by a god.

That's, actually, the most dishonest answer you can possibly give to your own question. You can't prove this negative answer, you could've stopped at "We don't know",. The fact that you know how the snowflake came into being, is irrelevant. A supposed god who designed things could've designed them by means of the process of evolution, or by adjusting the laws of physics in such a way to make their existence possible.

You're actually anthropomorphising the word design : since people need to use their hands, need manufactures, need planning and time, a logo on the designed product, the same should go for god. And because people don't usually design things through very very thoughtful and long term processes that force these things into existing, they're not designed. And that's a mistake.

And, we have stuff that looks intelligently designed that is, like a piece of art in a museum.

No, you have stuff that's designed by human beings alone. Why extend your intuitive human definition of design to a deity?

But the analogy breaks down quickly, at least in classical theology. A human designer develops his ideas over time, makes an active choice that things will be one way rather than another, and can change his mind or adjust his design as he goes along. The human designer is analogous in this way with the Demiurge in Plato's Timeaus. Plato, though, doesn't put the Demiurge in the highest position. The Demiurge itself depends for its existence on something eternal, unchanging, and ideal. And this ideal and unchanging thing is much like the classical theologian's idea of God. 

So in this system, it is correct to say that God determines the design of each snowflake. But people who are accustomed to think of human designers will misunderstand how God is said to work. God isn't sitting at a drawing board working out the designs. God sustains in existence the orderly laws of how water is and behaves, how cold weather affects it, and how in the right conditions it changes to snow. The apparent randomness of each snowflake's difference, then, is designed into the system. It is randomness by design.

I suppose we mostly agree. I would say randomness is subjective to us, as human beings. Randomness can simply be our misunderstanding of deeper - or unknowable? - reasons of why some laws appear to describe absolute randomness - I don't think that's actually the case, but let's push the definitions to their limits -.

Also the fact that we understand the system better than we did a few centuries ago, shouldn't make the reasons we believed in the most superior deity, obsolete. Science already hit a plateau in very ambitious topics [the uncertainty principle, Gödel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics, etc] . It's becoming increasingly clear that our scientific method will remain absolutely silent on the big questions, and that we should seriously reconsider our opinion about theology, arguing from scripture, etc. Because they are all we have.

This is the part I'm unfamiliar with. I have never studied the theologians who argue for a personal God. 

In this view, what is personal about God? Is it subject to moods and changes, like a human person? Is it in some way not transcendent, as the classical theologians' God is? I honestly don't know these things. 

I also don't see the reasoning behind saying that since God produced personal beings this argues in favor of God being a person. 

This may all be too much for the present thread. If you'd rather just point me to a link I'd be grateful.

I think any religious theologian you can look up will essentially argue for a personal God. To me, a personal god simply means a god who actually communicated with people, or a handful of people, in a language they understand, and gave very specific instructions about how to live their lives for the promise of some real happiness, eternal blissfulness, etc.

If we agree that any entity can't give what it doesn't have, and that the universe, including its components - human beings, nature, animals, etc. - was designed with us in mind, then clearly personal beings require the entity to fully have this property, very precise and unbreakable laws of the universe require an entiy with omniscience-like properties, etc.

Most of I read about theology in favor of Islam is essentially in Arabic. I think however that any content you can find by the so called Hamza Tzortzis, can be useful, including his book. He does take the time to argue for everything up to the personal god of Islam