Even if theism is a failure, it's still superior to atheism

[R00tKiT]

Goody for you. I got a PhD in mathematics 36 years ago and have been a research mathematician since.

But you are right, we cannot say the q is false simply because p is false and p-->q. But we can say that the argument attempting to prove q is invalid.

Now, are you suggesting the the existence of a deity is independent of other axioms? That it can neither be proved nor disproved?

And if that is the case, how do we choose whether to assume q or not(q) as an axiom?

36 years as a research mathematician, that's really impressive, doc. Mad respect for you and your profession. Mathematics is the only discipline that I used to be good at, it helped me build the confidence that I can actually do something significant in this life.

It seems we agree now that starting with false assumptions doesn't always lead you to false conclusions. So even if one grants you that theism fails, it doesn't follow that everything else that the theist argues for is necessarily false. As for the existence of a deity, my central argument has always been and remains the teleological argument. "Look around" is the reason why people believed in God for millenia, it doesn't require any advanced training in logic or modern physics to understand it, which is what an actual argument for God should look like.

My position is that this argument should continue to enjoy the same stature it once had. The sudden shift that happened after Darwin's ideas is simply unwarranted, and I might say motivated by a strong bias against the church at the time -which is understandable-. How can an argument for a designer become invalid or fall out of favor just because we understood some of the designer's work, or just because we know more about the history of His design? 

Perhaps it's better to use an analogy here : let's say you have a dozen of highly intelligent AI robots. These robots started investigating their own origins and eventually ended up tracing the entire history of technological progress made by mankind. One day, one robot suggested that : we have a lot of evidence of less intelligent machines, we found ((fossils)) of analog computers, calculators, floppy disks with laughably limited storage, and countless other machines in nature. It seems we can explain our origin or genesis without appeal to some intelligence called "human". Now, it's not hard to see that something is wrong here.

One often finds the following criticism : A deity is purportedly omniscient and omnipotent, and so doesn't need any evolutionary mechanism to bring about human beings. The answer is that : yes, ofc the deity doesn't need any of that, it doesn't need to bring about any universe at all, but the fact that it doesn't need x doesn't imply that x's existence invalidates the deity's existence. People didn't really need to create AI robots to survive, but now that they did, AI robots can't plausibly argue that they didn't need a designer.

That is a fine accomplishment.  I hope you continue your education.  I also hope you share your thoughts on Bayesian Analysis and the probability of the failure of theism.

Thank you. I hope I can do that one day.

The bayesian approach is a fascinating topic in statistics, it introduces the ideas of priors, likelihoods, among other things. But the underlying logic is pretty simple : the probability that some assertion A, in and of itself, is true, may be difficult to determine. Instead of directly trying to determine this probability, we can take an additonal assertion B that we're familiar with, and which is linked to A, and then assess the probabilities of A given B (called conditional probabiltiy), or of B given A. Bayes' theorem tells us that P(A) is directly linked to P(A|B) and P(B|A).

This approach is extensively used today in philosophy of religion journals, many theist (and atheist) philosophers rely on its formalism in their arguments. But like any argument, they rely on controversial assumptions. if you reject the assumptions, all the subsequent calculations are false, and using heavy machinery like bayesian analysis doesn't help in this case. 

Swinburne used bayesian probabilities to prove that probability that Jesus ressurected from the dead is pretty high (more than 0.8, if I recall that correctly). I didn't read his argument in its entirety, which he developed in a well-known paper, but I can't really take any argument for Jesus's ressurection seriously, the initial plausibility of such an event is close to 0 for me. Given that the initial sayings of Jesus are lost, and that the Bible doesn't inherently warrant a supernatural explanation -unlike the Qur'an, I would argue- I don't see how any argument in favor of christianity is even possible.

OK, that is a good start. Empirical investigation. How, precisely, do you define that?

As for obeying physical laws, I very much doubt that we know what the ultimate physical laws are, so we cannot tell what obeys them. I assume you would agree.

But perhaps you can clarify what is meant by the term 'physical laws'. In the process, you might want to define what it means to be 'physical'.

Something being reachable by empirical investigation means that we have some means to detect its existence, even if undirectly. This is what we do routinely in science, we collect evidence and clues about various objects or particles and come up with models that fit the evidence. As for the definition of physical, I would say an object is physical if its essential constituents are elementary particles. 

And we all know what physical laws are, our knowledge is probably not final or ultimate, but we can't really do better anyways.

But the objects of human ingenuity are not, right?

Now, would a human born from in vitro fertilization be 'natural' or not? They would be the product of human intelligence, no?

In vitro fertilization is simply assisted reproduction by artificially combining male gametes or sperm with a female egg, it doesn't really replace the reproduction process which occurs naturally. So this type of feritlization doesn't really amount to  human intelligence. I might as well argue that the very act of a male penetrating a female to introduce sperm is somehow human intelligence, and that, therefore, all humans are a product of human intelligence.

I would also like to know what it means for something to 'exist'. How would this be determined/ How could it be tested? For example, does the number 2 exist/

Now that's an interesting question. It's probably the most important issue hanging between theism and atheism. Probably a good start is to think about things that all people agree that they exist, regardless of their beliefs. The next thing would be to ask yourself why you believe in their existence so strongly. 

Perception is a basic source of forming beliefs for all human beings. Now, lo and behold, the most curious thing about beliefs from perception is that they are inherently fallacious : you know that the wall in front of you exists because you trust your perception, and you trust your perception because, well, everybody else says that the wall really exists! 

Or maybe you believe walls exist because the pain you feel once you hit a wall makes it more probably than not that walls exist, but pain is just another category of perception. Surely an unpleasant sensory experience can't be a serious proof that walls exist ! 

I can go on and on to show how difficult it is to prove that walls exist. I would argue that it's impossible to do so, unless you make some epistemic concessions, the same epistemic concessions that led people to believe that the appearance of design implies a designer...