RE: Probability of God's existence → zero
April 26, 2010 at 7:37 am
(This post was last modified: April 26, 2010 at 7:40 am by Fluké.)
(April 26, 2010 at 7:11 am)Tiberius Wrote:Quote:Which monotheist God am I referring to? There should be one God, but there are, in fact, several monotheist Gods. Thus, we could at this point determined how likely it is that God is the Christian version. He could be Jewish, Islamic, Sikh and all other versions ... But even if he was the Christian God, would he be the Lutheran God or the Anglican, Catholic, Maronite, Coptic or Methodist God (to name a few). So the chances that he is (1) a Christian God and then (2) a particular sect of Christianity is a small chance.
Non-sequitur (and an abysmal use of statistics). It does not follow that because there are numerous possibilities, the chances of one of them being true are smaller. Only if you assign equal probabilities to each of the possibilities can this be true, and you can't assign equal probabilities because you don't know anything about these possibilities to justify such an assignment.
I have made no fallacies and my statistics is accurate.
Well, since you put on bold Christianity in my example, let's deal with that. There are 22,000+ Christian denominations. The chances that the one a person believes in is right does drop. Also, we're going to have to reduce the probability of each denominations to an equal level, for a lack of evidence. I'll deal with this more below.
Quote:There may be more evidence to point to a particular God, and that is where probabilities change. It's like when creationists argue that because there are two outlooks (Creationism vs Evolution), the chances of either of them being true is 50%. This is of course, nonsense, and you can easily see why. The existence of other possibilities (aliens seeding life for example) doesn't suddenly make the chances of all three 33% each.
I have dealt with this point here (you might be interested to read since I dealt with practically every rebuttal)
Can there be evidence for us available so that God's qualities are combined within one entity? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Can we as humans be in a position to identify the qualities of supreme perfection, omniscience, omnipotence? I don't think we could ever. All we can do is identify the absence of such qualities in entities, in our limited human capabilities. Our ability to identify entities without such qualities, is not the same as identifying those that have them. Is it possible that humans, with our limitations, can ever have evidence that an entity does possess these absolutely qualities? Can we distinguished between an an entity that is very-long-lived and one that is immortal? Or one that is knowledgeable and an omniscient entity?
I think we fall short of being able to obtain reliable evidence that an entity exists as God.
Quote:Quote:So in the entire universe there can only be one truly omnipotent entity out of the millions of millions of millions of other entities. So the chance of a single entity in the whole universe is infinitesimal.
Now I pride myself in being pretty good at mathematics, yet I've never seen a calculation where "millions of millions of millions" is equal to infinity. Yet you claim that 1 in "millions of millions of millions" is an infinitesimal amount. Well...it's not. It's a very actual and measurable amount. Not only that, but 1 in "billions of billions of billions" is an actual amount, and very much smaller than your amount...so how can your amount be an infinitesimal?
For you to have an infinitesimal, you'd have to show that there are an infinite number of entities in the universe. Well, that is easily disproven. The visible universe is a finite size, ergo it can hold a finite number of things. Only a fraction of which are entities (assuming we are talking about living entities here), and even that fraction can be calculated to an actual amount. So your "infinitesimal" argument simply shows you have a very poor understanding of statistics, as does the rest of your post.
The problem here is that there is no calculation where "millions of millions of millions" is possible :p but as some able mathematician I am alarmed you think an infinitesimal amount is "a very actual and measurable amount". In statistics, it is insignificant.
There are something I should clear up, namely:
1) "millions of millions of millions" is synonym for the countless number of entities.
2) It is the infinitesimal probability raised to the power of as many definitions we place on God. So, it becomes inconceivably infinitesimal.
Would you discount the probability of being hit by elephant during an enormous earthquake tomorrow in England? We, as humans, would totally discount that almost infinitesimal chance but that is much less justifiable than discounting the thoroughly infinitesimal chance of God’s existence. Why do we apply one rule to God's probability of existence, and one to everything else.