A good case against God

[Taqiyya Mockingbird]

Arguments are not evidence, whelp. And the arguments you reference -- the kalam and the moral, along with hundreds of other similar abortions -- are long-debunked laughing stock. The fact that you consider them to be valid, along with the fact that you think any such arguments can replace evidence, tells us the level of self-delusion you are willing to inflict upon yourself in order to cling onto your silly superstitions.

The arguments I mentioned use evidence.

No, they fucking AVOID evidence.

It seems to me sort of like a prosecutor who argues that a person is guilty based on the evidence of the person being found with a gun, etc…

Except for your silly arguments there IS no gun, not evidence.

I think they have been debunked, as you say. I believe they are still debated in professional philosophy journals.

Oh I wouldn't doubt it: there is no shortage of credulous fucktards who are stupid enough to try to pander them.

Because there are still plenty of idiots like you who cling to their superstitions and delusions so hard that, lackiog even a shred of evidence to support their fantastical assertions of any sort of deity, they convince themselves that those pieces of shit could be convincing.

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They are debated between atheists and theists, not two theists.

Yes, because unfortunately there is no shortage of credulous fucktards who try to necro them, and credulous fucktards who will believe them, we are obligated to engage their tomfuckery and disabuse them of their delusions.

That verbose bit of word salad does nothing to address your responsibility -- and your deceitful, dishonest, disingenuous attempt to shirk your responsibility -- to the burden of proof.

I am sorry you feel that way about me. I am really trying to respond to people's points with fairness, reason, and respect.

Try responding with something new: intellectual honesty.

[Taqiyya Mockingbird]

Can I say things like "Blow it out your fucking ass", or "Nice straw man, fuckwit"? That was the response to my first post in this thread. Not to mention being called things like 'x-tard' the whole time.

Not that I mind, I like insult fights. But if you guys are taking it seriously, why does it only get reined in when the theists start dishing back? All in fun, of course...

As much as atheists like to insult theists they hate being insulted by them. Check the members list . . . I bet I get banned before you do.

LOL self-fulfilling prophesy....but not for the reasons it claimed...

[Tempus]

I would agree. So.....?

[Darwin and Einstein] both believed in God. Again it suggests that God is not the same as these fables.

No, they didn't. And this has been pointed out to you several times, both by myself and others. Here's my post on the subject from page 5 of this thread:

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and this has included such brilliant minds as Charles Darwin (a deist), Aristotle, William of Occham, Einstein, etc

Appeal to authority. Also, you're conflating a lot of different beliefs / equivocating... Darwin's beliefs changed over the course of his life from Christian, to a sort of deist, then to what he called "agnostic". Einstein, to my understanding, was never a theist or a deist. He believed in Spinoza's god, which has nothing to do with some intelligent deity beginning the universe.

1. Darwin and Einstein would not seriously believe a children's fable is true
2. Darwin and Einstein seriously believed God existed
3. Therefore God is not a children's fable

Please don't interpret this as me being rude, but you have an abysmal understanding of how logic works. Firstly, the conclusion doesn't follow the premises, making it a non-sequitur; you'd need to add an additional premise, something like "Darwin and Einstein can't be wrong", for example. Darwin and Einstein could simply be mistaken; after all, they've both been wrong before. Secondly, the premises themselves aren't known to be true - how do we know #1? And #2, as I highlighted above, is flat-out wrong. Thirdly, the whole argument is an appeal to authority. The argument is both invalid and unsound.

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Everyone makes mistakes and that's understandable. On this matter, however, you persist in repeating the same mistake, seemingly impervious to any facts or contradictions that come your way. Please don't state the same demonstrably incorrect thing again.

[Cato]

People keep saying God is just like a children's fable and this is the reason they believe he doesn't exist without evidence or argument. However, I think I could make the same argument about roman mythology today.

You seem to be sincere; however, you also seem to confuse cause and effect. Nobody argues that God doesn't exist because Santa Clause doesn't exist. Atheists invoke childrens' fables to illustrate the absurdity of believing in your God. This means that there is no more proof for your God than there is for Santa.

You then bring up Roman mythology, without proper deference to the Greeks by the way, as an illustration, but this only proves the atheist's point. Your silly shit is mythology, nothing more.

[Jeffonthenet]

In this thread, I am looking for a case against God. Cases require evidence and argument.

What's a god? You haven't even bothered to describe what it is that you are demanding a rebuttal of! And you are too fucking stupid to see how preposterous what you are doing is. You might as well wander into here and demand, "Can anyone give me a good case against the existence of Brufarian Fershniblets that can stand up to scrutiny?".

Have you no idea at all how stupid what you are doing is?

You are making a positive claim. Namely, you are saying that God less plausible to exist than Brufarian Freshetc… by the standard of evidence of seemingly all the atheists here, this requires evidence. I am not trying to fight with you, I just think your comparison of God with Mr. Freshetc is misleading, and if such claims were removed, your point would not stand up to scrutiny. I also defined God in one of my previous posts to this current one, so I would refer you to that at this point.

It doesn't follow that if we have no good arguments for God, (which I have not accepted) then there is no good reason to believe God exists.

Arguments are not evidence, whelp. And the arguments you reference -- the kalam and the moral, along with hundreds of other similar abortions -- are long-debunked laughing stock. The fact that you consider them to be valid, along with the fact that you think any such arguments can replace evidence, tells us the level of self-delusion you are willing to inflict upon yourself in order to cling onto your silly superstitions.

They seem like decent arguments, and they use evidence. For example, for the Kalaam, the evidence would be the scientific evidence for an absolute beginning of the universe. And I think you are mistaken that these are absurd arguments which cannot be defended, or have somehow been debunked. I don't think this is what the scholarly literature shows, while popular literature and internet sites might say something else.

There are no good non-circular arguments for the fact that there is a past or that the external world is real.

You are making all sorts of positive claims here, even from your first of a non-defined "gawd"-thing. The onus of proof is yours.

I am quite sure that there is wide agreement among philosophers that properly basic beliefs must be assumed and cannot be argued for. And it seems quite evident that it would be impossible to show that the past didn't pop into being five minutes ago with the appearance of age (the atheist Bertrand Russel's example), as it would look exactly the same as it does now if it did. The same thing with the reality of the external world.
Likewise there is the, I believe, unsolved problem of induction the atheist David Hume which means that casuality itself cannot be proven. How do we know things like this happen then? I submit it is intuition. It is surely possible that the way we know these most important beliefs could be the way we know God exists as well.

Then why are they debated in professional philosophical journals by world class philosophers, some of them atheists, who take them seriously?

Because there are still plenty of idiots like you who cling to their superstitions and delusions so hard that, lackiog even a shred of evidence to support their fantastical assertions of any sort of deity, they convince themselves that those pieces of shit could be convincing.

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I really have spent a lot of time looking at the evidence myself. My own rigorous adherence to following reason where it led which I learned from reading the Dialogues of Plato eventually caused me to lose my atheism as I found that I had been convinced that there was no God by faulty reasons. I still constantly question my faith and subject it to every objection I can think of to the point of almost an unhealthy obsession. I try to do this with all of my beliefs.

To everyone who answered by saying that the burden of proof is on the theist, rather than repeating myself five more times, I would direct you to post #3 where I replied to this point.

That verbose bit of word salad does nothing to address your responsibility -- and your deceitful, dishonest, disingenuous attempt to shirk your responsibility -- to the burden of proof.

Certianly there are threads on the internet where theists can present evidence for the existence of God. This is not one of them. This is the atheist's chance to do likewise, and I have tried to defend with reason that even if there is no demonstrable evidence for God it does not justify atheism. Go ahead and be agnostic if you want, but if you refuse to give any argument against God or belief in God that can stand up to scrutiny, I contend that your atheism is unjustified.

So really in this thread I am not arguing that God exists.

I am arguing that the absence of demonstrable evidence for God doesn't justify atheism.

I am also asking atheists to give good reasons to think there is no God, and I can't say that I think I have seen any.

And that one shouldn't rule out God simply because of the apparent absence of evidence.

If there are any agnostics here I would invite you to join me.

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I have been reading and answering the posts in the order I have received them. Unfortunately I don't have time to do this faster than I am. I simply can't respond to the 14th page of them by now and hold a social life as well… though maybe I will do things differently like only respond to the most relevant comments since people are insulting me about not noticing things on pages that I haven't seen yet. (though just now I looked at the most recent replies) Thanks everyone for participating though.

[Epimethean]

If the absence of demonstrable evidence for god fails to justify atheism, then that very absence continues to fail to justify theism. Agnostics belong to one of those camps by virtue of the excluded middle and the value of the term, "agnostic." Therefore, that absence would seem to fail to justify agnosticism, and the only way past the issue is to dispense entirely with the discussion of religion.

[The Grand Nudger]

He failed to show for his arraignment, yet again.

[CliveStaples]

Certianly there are threads on the internet where theists can present evidence for the existence of God. This is not one of them. This is the atheist's chance to do likewise, and I have tried to defend with reason that even if there is no demonstrable evidence for God it does not justify atheism. Go ahead and be agnostic if you want, but if you refuse to give any argument against God or belief in God that can stand up to scrutiny, I contend that your atheism is unjustified.

So really in this thread I am not arguing that God exists.

I am arguing that the absence of demonstrable evidence for God doesn't justify atheism.

I am also asking atheists to give good reasons to think there is no God, and I can't say that I think I have seen any.

And that one shouldn't rule out God simply because of the apparent absence of evidence.

If there are any agnostics here I would invite you to join me.

Well, I'm not an atheist, but I can think of a reason that absence of evidence for God justifies (weak) atheism.

First, methods of drawing inference rely on evidence. There is a difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence (looking in a cage and seeing empty air is evidence of the absence of a polar bear; not looking into the cage at all is absence of evidence), and in the absence of evidence, we cannot draw valid inferences.

For suppose we could. Suppose we were to assume a principle whereby a hypothesis would be answered in the affirmative (or in the negative) in the absence of evidence, with confidence 0 < c < 1. In order to be consistent, c must be constant across all hypothesis tests (if we ask the same question again and again, each time with no evidence, we shouldn't become more or less confident in our answer).

So suppose we are asking whether some hypothesis H is true, but we have an absence of evidence. We then affirm H with confidence equal to c. Now, let us ask another question--whether ~H is true. We will also assign this c.

However, P(H) = 1 - P(~H), since P(H or ~H) = 1, and H and ~H are mutually exclusive, hence P(H or ~H) = P(H) + P(~H) = 1.

Thus c = 1 - c, hence c = 0.5

Now, any argument used to justify believing H on the basis of our confidence that H is true applies equally to ~H. Thus there is no way to probabilistically distinguish them; we must either arbitrarily draw an inference (which negates the whole point of having a method of inference), or decline to draw an inference.




This argument could be further developed using utility theory; choosing between H and ~H could be done based on both the confidence we have in them and the expected utility of each.

[Mister Agenda]

Can anyone give me a good case against the existence of God that can stand up to scrutiny?

A good case against the existence of which God? The deist God? The Christian God? Is the God you're referring to omniscient and omnipotent? Does it have perfectly free will? Is it omnibenevolent? Does it condemn people to hell? There are a lot of Gods, would you be more specific, please? I can tell you that the God of Theodicy doesn't exist: an omniscient being can't do anything it does not foresee and an omnipotent being can do anything. Omniscience also contradicts free will.

An explicit atheist rejects claims and arguments for the existence of God. Despite the advantage of God apparently being whatever one wants it to be for the sake of the current discussion; no theist has ever presented an argument for God that is not fallacious or built on faulty premises. So the atheist doesn't believe what these bad arguments are trying to prove. We admit we can't prove a proposed entity made up on the spot whole-cloth from imagination doesn't exist anywhere in reality unless it has contradictory attributes. I don't see how you can take comfort from the same limitation applying to the God you propose.

[CliveStaples]

A good case against the existence of which God? The deist God? The Christian God? Is the God you're referring to omniscient and omnipotent? Does it have perfectly free will? Is it omnibenevolent? Does it condemn people to hell? There are a lot of Gods, would you be more specific, please? I can tell you that the God of Theodicy doesn't exist: an omniscient being can't do anything it does not foresee and an omnipotent being can do anything. Omniscience also contradicts free will.

Eh, bad definition of "omnipotence", I think. "Omnipotence" is self-contradictory; you'd have to be able to do things that you can't do--and do impossible things, like draw a square circle, or create a married bachelor, or give an example of a non-commutative group of order 2.

I think a better definition is something like, "Everything willed can be actualized", and you just say that you can't will to do impossible things.

And just saying "omniscience contradicts free will" isn't giving a reason. It's just stating a conclusion, without any reason to think that it's true. How do you know that the Molinists are wrong?