Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

I disagree. The likelihood is precisely the same: guaranteed in both cases. Either something exists and there are natural laws that describe its properties, or things are random and the laws of probability apply. Either way, there would be natural laws. The only other case is where nothing exists, and we know that isn't the case.

What do you mean by "guaranteed in both cases"..........? Appeal to randomness doesn't explain anything, I don't understand how you can assert such nonsense. Given randomness, it's vastly more likely that... randomness arises, no laws, complete chaos. Given a rational lawgiver, a personal designer, it's vastly more likely that an orderly universe arises. This can't be more straightforward.

Imagine that, one morning, you enter the kitchen and find a plate and cup on the table, with breadcrumbs, and some peanut butter on it, plus a pack of sugar, and empty cartons of milk. You conclude that one of your house-mates got up at night to make him- or herself a midnight snack and was too tired to clear the table. This, you think, best explains the scene you are facing. Now,  it might be that someone burgled the house and took the time to have a bite while on the job, or a house-mate might have arranged the things on the table without having a midnight snack but just to make you believe that someone had a midnight snack. But these hypotheses are clearly more contrived explanations of the data at hand.

We apply the same kind of reasoning (i.e. abduction/inference to the best explanation) when it comes to the appearance of design, talk as long as you want about randomness bringng about pretty fish and determining the value of the cosmological constant... it's embarassingly contrived and completely unwarranted.

And no, it's not straightforward that the laws of probability apply. You should first define carefully Kolmogorov's axioms, and, more importantly, define a sample space which includes all possible outcomes. In the case of a coin toss, the sample space would be {Heads, Tails}, it could of course be a much more complicated set in other examples. In the case of a random universe... I don't see how we can meaningfully define a sample space and start assigning probabilities to each outcome.

And we know that we are inclined to attribute intentions to things that have none: how many people name their cars or complain about their computers being cranky?

This is a well-known fault in how the human mind works and so it needs to be guarded against. That is quite sufficient to show that appearances are not enough in this case.

That's not a defeater to the principle of credulity. We were ultimately wrong about the luminiferous aether but we weren't wrong when we accepted it, temporarily, as a a plausible explanation. All science is based on the appearances, all scientific explanations are an inference to the best explanation of the available data, and the best explanation might be wrong, but one simply can't have better than the best explanation, nor is justified in going with any other contrived explanation.

I see you don't understand basic logic. I am showing how your proposed contradiction is not a contradiction within my model.

So what? A wrong model can also be empty of contradictions .............. You assumed an eternal past on your model and then incorporated a starting point. Nice sleight of hand.

I am going you to ask you again once: Can false propositions yield true propositions ? If you really know anything at all about logic, you would know, above all, that false implies everything.

Your false model being empty of contradictions doesn't prove your case, it only reveals you are confused.

Most things have more than one cause, so it is reasonable to assume that, if the universe is caused, it has multiple causes. That seems like a very good reason.

You should elaborate more on the assertion "Most things have more than onc cause". We know to distinguish between several categories of causes since Aristotle.......

Which we know happens in reality in quantum systems. There is no 'reason' why electron-positron pairs appear out of nothing, exist for a while, and disappear again.

Gosh.. not this again. QM violates determinism, not causality. Besides, as I explained pages ago, an object or particle in QM should be redefined because it doesn't have the same nature as in classical mechanics, QM incorporates probabilistic reasoning. When everything is defined properly, there is no violation of causality.

And I am saying the universe potentially didn't begin to exist. If it is a consistent possibility for your god, then it is also consistent for the universe.

You're not really comparing like with like, you know... God is purportedly timeless, the universe is not. 

On the contrary, it is unreasonable to think that something as complicated as a lawgiver (especially one that is conscious) can exist without physical laws.

Um.. what? 

The physical laws describe the physical world by definition, that's what 'physical' means. A lawgiver obviously is not physical ... so?

Wow, so you actually believe that every sand dune is designed by God. That every mountain is designed by god's hands and not by wind and water erosions. That every snowflake is designed by God's hands.

Is it too difficult for you to understand that wind and water erosions are God's way to bring about mountains ? Why do you imagine that a designer has to intervene at every stage of the mountains' formation .... A serious lack of imagination... maybe?

I was recommending you a book by a scientist who explains his field of science to laymen, but, as any fanatic, you have to keep away from the actual science and keep tight to a primitive way of looking at the world and spew logical fallacies, this time its genetic fallacy and strawman, of course.

Are you dumb enough to think that a militant atheist, and one of the four horsemen, will present an unbiased account of evolutionary theory which, by the way, is completely irrelevant to the designer's existence....?

And.. ever heard of guided evolution ?

And I insist: Dawkins is a dumbass when it comes to the philosophy of religion. Many reviews of his books explicitly state that he doesn't understand traditional arguments for God's existence. Dawkins discusses, embarassingly, the BS question "who created God?" in some of his books.