Probability of God's existence → zero

[Fluké]

To repeat VOID

The probability of God existing is infinitesimally small, and could be considered impossible.

The probability of people existing is infinitesimally small, and could be considered impossible.

This isn't a convincing argument.

There are two important differences:

1) God is a single entity and 'people' is a collection of entities.

2) The probability of a person existing (like me) has certain definitions. You will need (assuming you can, of course!) find a person with my name, my attributes (such as hair colour etc ...), living in a particular city – London, the fact that I post on atheistforums.org with a particular username etc … some maybe smaller than others but no where near ‘infinitesimal’. There are 6m people living in London (I think!) that is no where near the probability involving the countless entities in the entire universe and the unique attributes such as being the omniscient!

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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.

So now you are changing your argument? Your original statement was that the chances that a God is the Christian one is small because there are numerous other Gods. Now you are saying that the chances that a person believes in the correct God are smaller. There is a difference...one deals with the personal choice of a person, the other deals with the actual existence of such beings.

No, they're both the same argument. Admittedly, I worded it clumsily there. It is the probability that the Christian God (or whatever) of a certain denomination is true.

I think we fall short of being able to obtain reliable evidence that an entity exists as God.

That's a separate argument. The point is, you cannot simply make the assertion that all God claims are on an equal level. Certainly there is a way of showing that some Gods are more likely that others. If God A has contradicting attributes, and God B and C do not, then Gods B and C are both more likely than God A.

More likely?

We are dealing with infinitesimal chances, for starters.

If God A has contradictory definitions, then it doesn't exist.

The problem here is that there is no calculation where "millions of millions of millions" is possible

Erm...yes there is. 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 x 1,000,000. Millions of millions of millions. Otherwise known as a quintillion.

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.

I don't. That was in reference to the "1 in millions of millions of millions", which is an actual and measurable amount.

1) "millions of millions of millions" is synonym for the countless number of entities.

Not really, especially not in statistics. If you want to say "countless" then say it.

This is bordering on pedantry.

I am dealing with ALL the entities in the universe. Obviously, people use millions of millions in very day speech to convey ‘countlessness’ and not "1,000,000 x 1,000,000 x 1,000,000". That's no-where near enough! After all, it is countless!

2) It is the infinitesimal probability raised to the power of as many definitions we place on God. So, it becomes inconceivably infinitesimal.

Again, based on faulty statistics. You could apply this to anything and say that everything is inconceivable. There are an infinite number of things that could happen when you toss a coin, so the result of a toin coss is inconceivable. Of course, most of those things are infinitesimally small, but two of them (i.e. it landing heads or tails) are very much more probable to occur.

I am genuinely confused and don’t really understand what you’re trying to say. There are several issues:

Firstly, when one toss a coin, it can land on heads, or tails - both of which make P(coin landing on either heads or tails) = 0.5. There are other possibilities. It could, for instance, sink through the floor. The chances of that happen are so insignificant that we disregard it and count it as zero. Now, 0.5 is very measurable.

Secondly, one must be careful using "infinitesimal". I was careful in selecting it. It is a measure denoted to something that is "so small that there is no way to see them or to measure them". So the it really won't apply to a probability that is 0.5 !

Thirdly, and I'm not sure you're saying this but tossing a coin and landing on either heads OR tails is a single probability. The probability of the existence of God is a satisfaction of all the definitions that need to be satisfied. Thus, it would need to satisfy all the probabilities. So they depend on each other.