Belief and Knowledge

[bennyboy]

Okay. Here's one more for you, since we're on the same page:

"_____ is exactly something we should expect to see if the universe has no God."

See, Christians use order as an argument that God must exist. Then, in the next breath, they use QM as evidence that something is intrinsically unpredictable about the universe, and that God must therefore exist. They use all the laws of the universe as proof of God (a watch must have a watchmaker). They then throw out this deterministic vision of Theistic perfection and praise God for our (indeterministic) free will.

Everything makes sense? Hallelujah, must be the design of God. Everything is chaos and confusion? Hallelujah, that unpredictability must be the hand of God. As far as I can tell, every piece of evidence we have is taken as evidence for God, even when it turns everything we have already learned or observed upside down.

And "THIS is exactly something we should expect to see if someone intends to bend everything we know, or ever will know, into support for something that cannot be seen or demonstrated to exist."

I have never said "God must therefore exist". I have never claimed I can prove the existence of God. If you are going to argue against my position...then please argue against my position. Stop making up positions to argue against and pretending they are mine.

Your response is funny, because you are doing exactly what you just (falsely, mind you) claimed I did. I never said YOU made those claims, I said that THEY (Christians) made those claims. So "stop making up positions to argue against and pretending they are mine." If you think I'm making straw-man arguments for you, go ahead and point them out.

What I DID do is refer several times to your claim that "the observance of effects without local causes is exactly something we should expect to see if an unseen God exists and interacts with this world." I have shown that Christians have followed the form "X is exactly something we should expect to see if an unseen God exists" with all different kinds of evidence, much of it internally condradictory.

You claimed that my previous list of possible invisible influences on causality, including Magic Space Monkeys and the Matrix, all constituted God. So my point (which you have avoided with your red-herring hypocritical accusations of straw man argumentation) is this: given ANY philosophical device, posited to be conscious or not, wouldn't the expectation of reality as confirming evidence be a simple complement to the fact that the device was CREATED to explain that reality?

Let's try and see:
1)
ASSERTION: I posit that the eternal dance between Yin and Yang is the seed from which all other things have been created.
INFORMATION: Large bodies act deterministically according to simple laws, and QM particles act (for the most part) indeterministically, according to different laws.
CONCLUSION: This dualistic harmony and division of reality at levels is exactly something we would expect to see if Yin and Yang are real.

2)
ASSERTION: we live in the Matrix
INFORMATION: Objects are well-defined according to dimensions, material properties, etc.-- i.e. the main "ideas" of things are always consistent. However, the QM building blocks of those things are dynamic, ever-changing, and occupy less than .00000001% of space.
CONCLUSION: This lack of clarity at the finest "resolution" of reality is exactly something we would expect to see if we were living in the Matrix.

3)
Get it?