A question addressed to professor Dawkins

[josef rosenkranz]

Professor Dawkins Hi

Why is there almost certainly no God?
This is the title of chapter 4 of your TGD put not as a question but as an affirmation without the ? sign
.
My question is why "almost"?
There is a saying that a woman can not be half pregnant, either she is or she is not.
So with the certainty .If we are only" almost" certain of the inexistence of God it is quasi equal to saying that we are not certain at all
I am saying that from the point of view of a 100% convinced atheist, who see the "almost' as a weakness in the disproval of God.

I have an explanation to it and would be happy to have your opinion.

In chapter 4 of the book you concentrated your arguments on natural selection of life ,on origin of life, on cosmological problems, etc.. ,rejecting the arguments of creationists, ID-ists ,theists agnostics and alike who are trying to attribute all those matters to the existence of an universal God

The "almost" to it is that science doesn't have all the answers.
For instance, in my opinion, what you call the anthropometric principle is beyond all the sophistical explanation, a mere declaration of ignorance of science .
I fail to understand why has science to be ashamed of this ignorance knowing that
modern science is only a link in the chain of an evolutionary knowledge of nature by human kind?
We have only to look back to the last 200 years in order to understand the improbable leap made by science.
It is not for us to foresee the future of science ,but it would be Darwinistically natural if lots of secrets of nature will remain hidden in the near or distant future or even not be disclosed for ever to the human brain.
So let's declare loud and clear for everyone to hear that there are a lot of undisclosed problems of science and will remain also undisclosed in the future for the simple reason that humans are not Gods which anyway do not exist.

But my point lays elsewhere.
The ancient Romans had a God they called Janus who had two faces.
In my opinion the representation of God in our time ,especially by Christians living in
the western free world is like that Janus, of a dual entity:
-one face is of an Universal God sustained by creationists, ID-ists, theists and alike who, up to them, has created the universe together with all it's laws of nature and is also the one to know why he did so, (he may be called the UG)
-the other face is that of a Humanly god ( he may be called HG),who was created by man "in his image" and not the other way around as written in the Bible.

Now, the disproval of UG generates this "almost "word as said above and I would be even more extremist by saying that as long as science will not have all the answers, this being highly improbable, there will remain a gap were religion in any form will penetrate her tail, trying to sustain the existence of God.

What is important in my opinion to atheism, is to climb the Improbable mountain by an other path.
That path should be the disproval of HG, which will implicit disprove also the UG.

The HG is the one who" created" holly scriptures ,he demands to be worshiped ,to be obeyed, to be afraid of, to be loved ,he dwells in Heaven between humanlike angels, he likes to dwell on earth in splendid buildings ,he wages wars and makes peace he is responsible for the fate of humans ,and so on.
Now, in order to disprove him we need to prove ,and that is not so difficult that HG is a clear creation of man.
All holly scriptures were written by men with provable social /political/religious purposes .
The main point to it is not only to disprove HG in a historical creationist way but to prove the undoubtful fact that UG is recreated in the mind of each religious believer the very moment he thinks of him. There is a magic circle: the believer needs him –creates him in his mind-believes that he is of real existence.
The prove to it is that for millions of people the "existence" of God is a deep rooted need which answers in a virtual way to their spiritual questions and in a large measure helps them in their daily struggle for survive.
In the chapters 5-9 of your book you have tried to diminish every advantage of religion but the real religious experience can not be denied.

So, in conclusion no way of disproval of God should remain untried, in my opinion the disproval of HG being the main trail to climb the Improbable mountain.
With all due respect
Josef

[Meatball]

I'll be honest, I had trouble reading your post. Did you cut and paste this from somewhere? It's formatted oddly.

We say "almost certainly" to remain logically consistent. We can't say for certain there exists no God like was can say for certain there exists humankind because it is a logical fallacy to declare something does not exist. There's no way to prove this, we can only make decisions based on evidence. This shouldn't be considered a weak argument. Think of Russell's Teapot. I am almost certain it does not exist, but can never say with 100% certainty that it doesn't.

For all intents and purposes, it means there is not God, no Russell's Teapot, and no (gasp!) Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[StewartP]

It is possible, tho improbable, that there is a god whose properties include omnipresence, omniscience and complete and utter indetectability.

I'm almost certain such a god doesn't exist.

[Ace Otana]

Ok, Now you can't disprove a negative. You can't disprove something that cannot be detected.

So when there are atheists who say there 99% certain, they are leaving that 1% gap because they acknowledge that they cannot KNOW for certain.

There sure but acknowledge that they cannot know for sure.

The flying teapot is something that cannot be disproved, As well as the Flying spaghetti monster. The point of them is to demonstrate that they have the same equal chance of being responsible for the existence of all we know just as much as god.

A god is not entirely impossible but extremely improbable.

[Tiberius]

Also, there is certainly no reason to believe in gods. Remember, it was the theists who put "God" outside the realm of the provable. Atheists simply pointed this out.

[Edwardo Piet]

Well I think there's no reason to believe in God; but there is reason to believe in the tiny possibility of God.

[Tiberius]

Absolutely, which is where the difference between atheism and agnosticism is forged. An agnostic atheist like myself does not believe in god, but doesn't rule out the possibility.

[Alan]

The problem lies with the difference between colloquial semantics and science.

Probability does not make something "possible" in the sense you'd use it in everyday conversations.

If there is no proof for the existence of deities that means their existence is improbable. It's still possible, but only because EVERYTHING is possible, scientifically speaking.

It's possible that at any given moment the universal constants simply change and the universe turns into a pink lollipop. It's possible, but it's so bloody unlikely that the possibility can easily be discounted and forgotten about.

Science is EXACTLY about that: Finding out rational explanations and testing them. When an explanation ceases working, you try to find a new one. Because it's tedious to have to discard explanations on a daily basis, they are tested VICIOUSLY before they become canonical. If two explanations work equally well, the one that makes less assumptions is the one that should be preferred -- if they have no such similarities, they are both valid until either of them can be disproven, provided they are testable.

The God Hypothesis is inherently untestable because it says God is. It doesn't even TRY to pretend to be testable. It says it right there in the definition of "supernatural": beyond nature, and thus not testable by naturalistic (read: rational) means.

So, to answer a common question asked by theists: if God WOULD suddenly make himself be apparent in a way that would not allow any other explanation than that he IS God, EVERY SINGLE ATHEIST would accept him. Not necessarily as the One True God, but at least as a very advanced sentient being that behaves the way you'd expect God to behave according to scripture.

Does that make us believers? Hardly so. We wouldn't BELIEVE, we would KNOW (not in the Biblical sense) -- we would have facts that hold up under vicious tests (and if those tests wouldn't be vicious, I don't know what would be), not just word of mouth and a heavily mistranslated, mis-copied book written by dead lunatics.

Does that make us agnostics? Only in a very very weird sense of the word. It makes us agnostic to God in the same sense we are agnostic to the FSM, IPU, orbital china pots, little green men and hobgoblins (except for nutty AD&D players maybe). That we don't fully discount the possibility only comes to show it's NOT a matter of faith, not that we aren't fully convinced.

[josef rosenkranz]

Absolutely, which is where the difference between atheism and agnosticism is forged. An agnostic atheist like myself does not believe in god, but doesn't rule out the possibility.

"Et tu me filli Brutus?" .
An agnostic atheist? When I wrote about para atheists I got shots from all directions ,I was suspected to be a para atheist my self.
No offend Adrian but the cathegory of agnostic atheism seems to me an aberation.
RD in his TGD sends volleys of lightning fire and thunder in direction of agnostics.
If you are right then you should change the name of the forum to "agnostic atheism".
I don't see my self in such a category.
Read my general reply to problems arised by other members on my topic

[StewartP]

Perhaps Adrian is like me:- 99.99999% certain there is no god. But intellectual honesty requires me to acknowledge the 0.000001% chance that a hidden, unknowable, remote god who does not involve himself in human affairs MIGHT exist.

How this god differs in practice from no god is beyond me. But I acknowledge he might exist.

Hey I'm a fence sitter, so sue me.