Deism for non-believers

[FallentoReason]

Your assumptions only have value outside of a thought exercise if a truth value can be assigned to them. Again, if the immaterial and the material don't interact than all immaterial things are incapable of contradicting the natural world, so any immaterial being is exactly as plausible as your "pluasible god" (judged by the metric of not contradicting the natural world alone). Immaterial strawberry shortcake, for example. But how would we determine this?

I think I'm allowed to assume things because I'm not making the claim that the plausible god then exists based on these assumptions that can't be tested (like the immaterial properties). Through the scale we can come up with a theory for a god but we can't do much else after that.

You have good instincts. The concept [Bohrs Model] could exist even if it were not a factually accurate representation of the reality of [an atom] (or if there were no such thing as [an atom] at all). Now insert " a plausible god" in the brackets.

This situation could be plausible I suppose.

Why do I need a new scale, just add "that is a creator" to the birds attributes and the bird's creator bit is just as unlikely (read undemonstrated) as the gods creator bit but all the pros of the bird hypothesis (being that birds exist etc) remain. It's still more plausible by sheer force of the demonstrable existence of birds.

Haha.. ok so the bird is divine now. Well quite obviously this hypothesis gets shot down straight away. There is no such bird-god in existence. This example isn't any more plausible than my Most Tangible God in the OP because you have made a material claim and that claim is false.

Ah, by the by since I was having a discussion about deists gods elsewhere on the boards it reminded me of something I forgot to mention to you. Your plausible god is not the god of deism. The deists god is a creator god. It interacted at least once (and since it made the terrible mistake of doing so, it would be theoretically possible to measure it's influence).

I did mention somewhere that the bare minimum for a god to be included in my scale was that it must have created the universe. Do you think that's in violation of physics?

I hadn't understood that this had progressed to a scale of plausibility rather than existence. I did kinda take a TL,DR in the case of this topic.
This tosses your idea that all atheists should be deistic out the window, doesn't it?

What's TL,DR mean?

This thread is meant to demonstrate that there are more plausible gods that could eventually exist than gods that violate the universe. The scale is a way of knowing roughly where one can stop and not be able to disprove the plausibility of a god. Therefore, taking it one step further, I think the probability that a sort of god could eventually exist becomes rather high. I don't know how one could go from the plausibility of said god to showing that it is real.

In any case, human beings can make any concept that isn't physical a "plausible" idea. That doesn't make it any more likely, which makes your scale less appropriate and Dawkin's scale more so, being as it is a scale of plausibility, possibility, and probability that take into account primarily the plausible but further reads into whether or not things are worth believing. The crux of the matter is that, through selectively hypothesizing the existence of any given thing, anyone wuold eventually be drawn into a sea of musings whose aggregate purpose is their own pleasure.

What's Dawkin's scale?

The question I have about a deist god is how that god avoids inevitably sliding into the god of Apatheism — he exists, but he is completely irrelevant to our existence. And any properties of this Deist god that you assign to "rescue" it from irrelevancy in the end becomes a property by which that* god can be falsified, or at least persuasively undermined by the traditional avenues of theodicy, justice, Euthyphro's dilemma, inconsistent attributes and so on. Any deist god worth caring about ends up being one of the ones we can't believe.

You can answer your own question. I gather that your threshold on the scale is fairly low to the extent that a plausible god must be apathetic towards us.

I just finished reading a fascinating book by Pascal Boyer called "Religion Explained," and a number of fascinating consistencies in supernatural / religious beliefs emerge. Nobody cares about a god who only exists on Wednesdays, or who is aware of everything, but has no power to do anything about it. People's supernatural agents are organized around various dimensions, one of which he calls relevancy — the supernatural agent is capable of acting in ways which matter to us, from the threat of eternal hellfire to the belief that malevolent witches caused your roof to collapse. Being a religious being means mattering. Otherwise, what's the point. In Buddhism, there are plenty of gods, but nobody cares, because they aren't relevant. How do you make your Deist god relevant without at the same time sowing the seeds of its destruction?

I think you're assuming too much about me. I've never appealed to any desire for there to be a god. The only desire I have is to uncover truths wherever I can that are based on reason. Having said this, I don't see any reason for a god to have to matter to us. Things in the universe exist because they exist. Our beliefs and desires are meaningless and trivial and they don't come into the equation at all. A god could exist whether we want it to or not.

I think what is key here is dropping any preconceived ideas of what a 'god' is. If anything, the gods of religions are all pretty much at the material extreme of my scale and if defined entirely by their 'chosen' peoples (which rarely happens...), they could be shown to be non-existent. I think the plausible gods aren't necessarily thinking beings with masterplans, but something even more 'basic' than that.