Q about arguments for God's existence.

[robvalue]

Oh, and no, I'm not saying supernatural isn't it. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying there's absolutely no reason to think you are right.

Gotcha.

That makes more sense. I thought yall were 100% certain there was no God. I can understand now. Thanks.

You're welcome

Of course, I only speak for myself. Any other atheist may tell you something entirely different about what they think. But I would wager most atheists would agree with what I said.

You are right, in the mathematical situation I gave, I do have an idea what the answer is, in that I am aware of sensible boundaries. In this case, the boundaries are non-negotiable so it's not the same as with God. That one was meant to be a warm-up which I should have made clearer!

I have absolutely no idea at all how many metaphysical snooker balls are floating around my head at any given time. I have no information about them, no way to detect them, and no way to tell them apart from nothing at all. But I can still say that the suggestion that I do have such snooker balls going round me is absurd, because there is no reason to believe it is true. It goes against everything I've ever experienced, and the person telling me this information clearly has no way to know either. It's more reasonable to assign a high probability (not certainty) to there not being such snooker balls.

Otherwise, if we say it's just 50:50 we have opened the door to everything. We now have to consider it even money that there are also metaphysical dragons, metaphysical drain inspectors, metaphysical manifestation of Beethoven ideas and metaphysical angry Giants also orbiting me all at once. To me, it's not reasonable or indeed useful to consider all those possibilities as 50:50.

Let's take it further. I have absolutely no idea if there's a metaphysical trap that has just appeared on the other side of the door which is going to kill me in some horrific way when I open it. No way I can possibly know. Do I call it 50:50? Or do I assign a very high probability to there not being such a trap, due to no evidence?

If we have to consider everything that we can't prove isn't true, we would never be able to act. We'd be forever paralysed by absurd possibilities.

Just to be clear, this isn't me saying "You are wrong", this is me explaining why I consider some ideas and explanations to be less probable than others, without having to assume absolute certainty about anything. Waiting for absolute certainty would also lead you to never act. It's a red herring.