(June 29, 2015 at 12:40 pm)pool Wrote:(June 29, 2015 at 12:14 pm)robvalue Wrote: So.... What is your point, again? What are you suggesting we or anyone else do?
(1)My point is that the existence of a "God" is more probable than the non-existence of such.
(2)I think that this probable existence of a "God" makes pure atheism illogical because pure atheism is 100% believing in the non-existence of a "God" which is not the case.
Since this has turned out to be a debate kind of thread what i'd from anyone else including you would be to tell me i'm wrong and give me convincing input that points out the fact that i am wrong.
(1)This is false. You can't put a probability on god. You actually can't put a probability on the existence of an unknown entity at all, be it physical or metaphysical. You can say that you believe that he is more likely to exist. It it might sound as if you are making a probabilistic assertion, but you are not.
(2)This is also false, but this is mainly false because you are confusing knowledge with belief. You can have a belief and be unsure of it's accuracy. When you are sure(what you might call 100% belief) that your belief is accurate, you then hold that your belief is knowledge. Atheism is not a statement of knowledge. Atheists do not, by definition of the label, hold that they believe god can not exist. Atheism simply states that one rejects the hypothesis "God Exists".
Since you mentioned probability lets have some fun examining the acceptability of atheism even if it were more likely that god existed than didn't. . .When we talk about accepting a hypothesis based on probability, we generally talk about rejecting the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the opposite hypothesis of the hypothesis that is being gauged for it's validity. When we are trying to determine correlation or causality(when probabilistic statements are acceptable) we always hold the null hypothesis to be true, and the burden of proof is on the researches to show us that we should reject it. Now usually we don't reject the null hypothesis unless we can show that we are 95% sure that their is causality or correlation. It doesn't make sense adding probability to the existence of something, but if we were to do so and if we were also to keep our same standards when applying probabilistic techniques to the likelihood of gods existence, the atheist standpoint would still be valid unless we were 95% sure of gods existence. This is however just for fun.