Evidence for the existence of God

[Asmodee]

The definition of knowledge has been well established since Plato and is "justified true belief." Personally, I consider the qualifier "true" redundant. With respect to the findings of natural science, or any other belief, the question is whether a belief is justified, meaning we have sufficient reason to suppose that the belief is true. Some people argue that some specific beliefs are properly basic, as i did earlier for uniformatarianism. A properly basic belief does require justification by a positive reason; the lack of a defeater suffices.

I don't think the word "true" is in any way redundant there. A justified belief is in no way necessarily true. As a child I had a belief that Santa Claus brought me presents. This belief was justified by the evidence I saw in the morning, presents mysteriously materialized overnight, claiming to be from Santa. For a child, this is a "justified belief", but that didn't make it a "true belief".

And it does make a difference. By having the word "true" in there then, no, science definitely does not advance "knowledge" because nothing in science is held as being "true".

While semantics discussions are usually pointless time-wasters intended to frustrate, unfortunately, they are sometimes necessary. In this case it makes a real difference whether you use the definition you adhere to as written, or whether you throw out the word "true", which you saw as unnecessary.

Order is the opposite of chaos. In orderly world causes have regular effects by necessity. In a chaotic world, causes may have regular effects but could be otherwise for no reason. Since we are talking about the universal orderliness of the world (which encompasses all natural causes) and not various local examples of order your request cannot be met. Nor need it be.

Okay, so "order" essentially says "follows the laws of physics", making it meaningless. Everything follows the laws of physics. There is no question there (well, there was a study a few years ago that suggested the laws of physics may not be the same throughout the universe, but that aside, given what we believe we know). But I do find it difficult to believe that not one single example can be given, nor is it clear exactly where you're going with this, nor what "order" has to do with the "patterns" we were originally talking about.

At any rate, I'm actually kind of enjoying this conversation with you. Not that we're likely to agree in the end as I certainly don't think that even if there were evidence of order, chaos or patterns of any sort it would necessitate any god, much less a specific one, but it's still an interesting conversation.