(June 9, 2012 at 10:44 pm)FallentoReason Wrote:(June 9, 2012 at 10:33 pm)Brian37 Wrote: Mental masturbation is not reason. Reason is the ability to kick your ideas with real tools like scientific method. And the history of scientific method is leaving no room for a deity of any kind.
All I hear you doing here is say "Let me make something up, and see if it works".
You don't simply make something up. You go with prior established data and then work with that with standard established tools to test and falsify it. There has never been any credible data for a god, not even a generic one.
Making things up is how science works to a degree at first. The Bohr model of an atom was 'mental masturbation' to begin with. Niels Bohr literally sat down and defined what an atom would be like. This thread is no different and by the sounds of what you see as problems for a god (which I tend to agree with) has shown me that your threshold is somewhere in the area of a non-material god that doesn't intervene in the universe.
The implication of the OP for you is this: can you give a reason why the god above can't exist and therefore pushing the dial further down the scale?
There is a HUGE difference between when a scientist guesses and when people pull shit out of their ass. If they had no science knowledge prior to build on, they wouldn't have been able to do that. They were still building on prior established science and still had to use the tool of method to confirm their "guess".
They were still basing it on physics and motion and math.
The Wright brothers simply didn't jump off a cliff and flap their arms.
