Why make stupid unsustainable arguments?

[The Grand Nudger]

Perhaps you should go take a look for yourself Ath...or you could believe that it's just two assholes talking into a vacuum......... I have a feeling that you're going to embarrass yourself to no end on these boards.

: shrugs :

[RobbyPants]

Belief in the supernatural has been around for as long as we know. The Aborigines here in Australia have a belief system that stretches back at least 40-60,000 years, and theirs is the oldest known & still present belief system. My point is these beliefs are part of human nature.

I don't need to measure it in antiquity, I rely solely on the scientific theories of game theory and evolution (as applied to systems).

I'm not debating that. What benefit is it? More importantly, how do you know these benefits outweigh the harms?

[Edwardo Piet]

Can you give me an example of the circumstantial evidence for god?

Do philosophical arguments count?

No! How many more times? Argument is not evidence! How are you supposed to give evidence of anything by merely logic alone? All valid argumentation has to be based upon sound premises, and sound premises require external evidence, not abstract words and symbols.

[Edwardo Piet]

If arguments were evidence we'd call them evidence..and not arguments...now wouldn't we?

No. Arguments are just one TYPE of evidence.

No they're not dimwit.

If you think you can provide a sound premise by logical argumentation alone then you are clearly falling into circular reasoning - or question begging - which is fallacious by the way.....................

...........but if you don't know that that may explain why you're Christian. "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and we can trust God because he wrote the Bible."

[SteveII]

First, your appeal that some other possible world might provide answers do nothing to defeat the truth of the premise. Second, what does sample size have to do with anything? Life on one planet isn't enough to draw conclusions from? Are we to subject every scientific inquiry to "well, if we had more data from other worlds...?"

If science says "we don't know" does not mean we can't draw conclusions from the lack of evidence and/or theory.

Yes, it does defeat the truth of the premise.  It said a thorough search.  There hasn't been a thorough search because there haven't been other examples of life to look at.  We're dealing with a woefully incomplete set - carbon based life on a singular planetoid that uses DNA as a mean to replicate and evolve.  And given you're talking about a designer of the universe/reality, extrapolating from a set of 1 out of billions upon billions of other possible examples is mind boggling ignorant.

No, we don't need to subject every scientific inquiry to data from other worlds.  Don't be dense.  What we can't do is say that because life exhibits certain qualities here, that this is always the case either because this is the only planet with life (which we don't know) or because all life in the universe exhibits DNA or something similar (which we also don't know).  Or that these processes are somehow special, or somehow impossible for nature to replicate.  You're operating from willful ignorance at this point.

And it's difficult to draw conclusions from a lack of evidence.  In this case, a lack of evidence does not point to god.  That's the classic God of the Gaps fallacy.

So, your defeater for premise 1 is that we don't know (and logically can't know) what life on other planets will tell us. And you think that is more plausible than this argument? arguments are supposed to find the most plausible answer with the data we have. That is what this does. You are biased because of your scientism.

[Mr.wizard]

Yes, it does defeat the truth of the premise.  It said a thorough search.  There hasn't been a thorough search because there haven't been other examples of life to look at.  We're dealing with a woefully incomplete set - carbon based life on a singular planetoid that uses DNA as a mean to replicate and evolve.  And given you're talking about a designer of the universe/reality, extrapolating from a set of 1 out of billions upon billions of other possible examples is mind boggling ignorant.

No, we don't need to subject every scientific inquiry to data from other worlds.  Don't be dense.  What we can't do is say that because life exhibits certain qualities here, that this is always the case either because this is the only planet with life (which we don't know) or because all life in the universe exhibits DNA or something similar (which we also don't know).  Or that these processes are somehow special, or somehow impossible for nature to replicate.  You're operating from willful ignorance at this point.

And it's difficult to draw conclusions from a lack of evidence.  In this case, a lack of evidence does not point to god.  That's the classic God of the Gaps fallacy.

So, your defeater for premise 1 is that we don't know (and logically can't know) what life on other planets will tell us. And you think that is more plausible than this argument? arguments are supposed to find the most plausible answer with the data we have. That is what this does. You are biased because of your scientism.

The best answer when you don't know, is "I don't know", making one up is irrational. If you don't know what life on other planets will tell us it impossible to say what is most plausible. Your just plugging god into places we don't have answers (God of the Gaps). Also arguments are not used for finding the most plausible answers, that's called research. Arguments are used to persuade or convince someone about a specific claim or point of view.

[athrock]

No. Arguments are just one TYPE of evidence.

No they're not dimwit.

If you think you can provide a sound premise by logical argumentation alone then you are clearly falling into circular reasoning - or question begging - which is fallacious by the way.....................

...........but if you don't know that that may explain why you're Christian. "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and we can trust God because he wrote the Bible."

In which post did I say that I am a Christian? Or have you assumed this simply because (like Aractus) I take issue with stupid arguments even when they are made by atheists?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

No they're not dimwit.

If you think you can provide a sound premise by logical argumentation alone then you are clearly falling into circular reasoning - or question begging - which is fallacious by the way.....................

...........but if you don't know that that may explain why you're Christian. "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and we can trust God because he wrote the Bible."

In which post did I say that I am a Christian? Or have you assumed this simply because (like Aractus) I take issue with stupid arguments even when they are made by atheists?

It doesn't matter if you're a Christian or not, with respect to this particular argument. You're still plugging in one data-set (the earth's conditions for life) and assuming it's the only way. We simply don't know if life found elsewhere will be based on carbon (it's likely, because of carbon's properties) or DNA. On earth, DNA took over for two prior "precursor" chemicals, but we don't know if that's the process we'll find when we start seeing other forms of life, elsewhere. Earth may well be unique, or rare, in how life evolved here. I personally think it's common, and we'll find the process that happened here repeated elsewhere.

But all of that is irrelevant, in terms of this "God of the Gaps" discussion. We have zero reason to think that the Big Bang was "caused", in the Kalam (or Augistinian) sense, by some form of intelligence, or that the universal constants are anything but random settings or emergent properties of the very nature of particle physics. Inserting an intelligent agent into the mix is entirely unnecessary, a fabrication by those who seek to affirm their pre-set beliefs about God... perhaps someday we'll find true evidence of such a Prime Mover, but the reality is that until the moment we have such evidence, it's all Projection of our desires onto a universe that frankly couldn't care less about what our religious ideologies are.

Most important in this discussion is what has been pointed out to you repeatedly, that arguments themselves are not evidence. Arguments only tie together pieces of evidence into a (hopefully) cohesive whole-- the formulation of a hypothesis, and nothing more. Until you have enough evidence to build a predictive model that can be independently tested and confirmed, you have nothing even resembling a scientific theory, and you cannot expect us to take it seriously.

Intelligent Design proponents like to claim they have a working theory, but it fails at every level, including cohesion of ideas and the need for falsifiable hypotheses and predictive capabilities. This was demonstrated quite handily in the Kitzmiller case, in front of a hyper-conservative US District Judge who is a Christian and had no reason to side with the scientists other than the utter failure of the ID "experts" to demonstrate that their ideas held merit in the face of modern scientific knowledge and methodology.

Instead, the ID experts were forced to move the goalposts and claim that science's definition was too narrow (as you are doing)... the problem was that, once those goalposts were moved, things like astrology fell into their new definition of theory. There's a reason science operates as it does, and you ignore it at your peril. And you can expect us to call you out on it.

[athrock]

In which post did I say that I am a Christian? Or have you assumed this simply because (like Aractus) I take issue with stupid arguments even when they are made by atheists?

It doesn't matter if you're a Christian or not, with respect to this particular argument. You're still plugging in one data-set (the earth's conditions for life) and assuming it's the only way. We simply don't know if life found elsewhere will be based on carbon (it's likely, because of carbon's properties) or DNA. On earth, DNA took over for two prior "precursor" chemicals, but we don't know if that's the process we'll find when we start seeing other forms of life, elsewhere. Earth may well be unique, or rare, in how life evolved here. I personally think it's common, and we'll find the process that happened here repeated elsewhere.

But all of that is irrelevant, in terms of this "God of the Gaps" discussion. We have zero reason to think that the Big Bang was "caused", in the Kalam (or Augistinian) sense, by some form of intelligence, or that the universal constants are anything but random settings or emergent properties of the very nature of particle physics. Inserting an intelligent agent into the mix is entirely unnecessary, a fabrication by those who seek to affirm their pre-set beliefs about God... perhaps someday we'll find true evidence of such a Prime Mover, but the reality is that until the moment we have such evidence, it's all Projection of our desires onto a universe that frankly couldn't care less about what our religious ideologies are.

Most important in this discussion is what has been pointed out to you repeatedly, that arguments themselves are not evidence. Arguments only tie together pieces of evidence into a (hopefully) cohesive whole-- the formulation of a hypothesis, and nothing more. Until you have enough evidence to build a predictive model that can be independently tested and confirmed, you have nothing even resembling a scientific theory, and you cannot expect us to take it seriously.

Intelligent Design proponents like to claim they have a working theory, but it fails at every level, including cohesion of ideas and the need for falsifiable hypotheses and predictive capabilities. This was demonstrated quite handily in the Kitzmiller case, in front of a hyper-conservative US District Judge who is a Christian and had no reason to side with the scientists other than the utter failure of the ID "experts" to demonstrate that their ideas held merit in the face of modern scientific knowledge and methodology.

Instead, the ID experts were forced to move the goalposts and claim that science's definition was too narrow (as you are doing)... the problem was that, once those goalposts were moved, things like astrology fell into their new definition of theory. There's a reason science operates as it does, and you ignore it at your peril. And you can expect us to call you out on it.

You make some valid points, but I'm not convinced that philosophical arguments have no teeth.

IMO, the classical philosophical arguments (working together) attempt to demonstrate that:

• There are good arguments for the existence of God.
  
• A supreme being is more likely to exist than to not exist. 
  
• The arguments make it rational to believe that a god exists.
  

Whichever one of these you choose, the arguments have achieved the goal of the one making them, haven't they?

Yes, they do have the intended effect, apparently. Just to be sure, I Googled to see whether I could find any stories about atheists who have converted to theism or Christianity. Yep, they're there. And that's just what I know of as a westerner. I cannot comment on atheists who are converted to Islam or Buddhism or some religion from the East because I am not part of that culture and am blocked by language barriers. I suspect that the Kalam, for example, with its rich history in Islam, is being used by Muslim apologists with some success.

So, I'm NOT going to be drawn into some big discussion about the Big Bang theory because I'm not qualified to discuss those details. But what I am comfortable saying is that the practical application of these philosophical arguments does achieve the conversion of non-believers to the theistic point of view. At least occasionally.

Consequently, skeptics ignore these arguments at THEIR peril.

[Mr.wizard]

This a total waste of time