Why make stupid unsustainable arguments?

[SteveII]

Yeah, that's tantamount to saying "you're letting the evidence of your senses" get in your way.

You seem confused. We are talking about what the absence of evidence means. It will be up to philosophy to ponder what that means (in an arguement like i proposed). Unless of course you adhere to scientism -- a worldview that has proved to be wholly inadequate to describe reality.

[Mr.wizard]

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.

No, that is not the best answer to the question. Your scientism is getting in the way. All that science can tell you is that we don't know (and it may be impossible to ever know). It cannot make conclusions as to what it means if X or Y. Luckily philosophy can help us make sense of the world. You are also wrong about the purpose of logical arguments. They help us make sense of facts and other inputs and ensure our conclusions are sound.

Yes, the best answer when you don't know is "I don't know", can't really see how using an answer that your not sure is right helps to answer any questions.

Yes science doesn't make shit up, that's why its a reliable method.

Arguments, logical or philosophical, are just a series of statements used to persuade a person or support a specific claim. They are not fact finders, all they can tell you is whether the conclusion is a consequence of the premises. Again the problem with all of these arguments for god is they never prove god.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Unless of course you adhere to scientism -- a worldview that has proved to be wholly inadequate to describe reality.

[Whateverist]

Yeah, that's tantamount to saying "you're letting the evidence of your senses" get in your way.

You seem confused. We are talking about what the absence of evidence means.  It will be up to philosophy to ponder what that means (in an arguement like i proposed). Unless of course you adhere to scientism -- a worldview that has proved to be wholly inadequate to describe reality.

So pretty much anyone who disagrees with you can only be doing so as a result of clinging to some failed dogma. 

Project much?

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Oh, and fuck you idiot.

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[athrock]

Consequently, skeptics ignore these arguments at THEIR peril.

You've already been shown how long these arguments and their refutations have existed. I understand this is new to you and you seem enamored and convinced, but there's nothing to be seen here that most of us haven't already considered. Peril? You have grossly exaggerated the efficacy of your claims. There's nothing perilous in these arguments to an atheist's position. You would do yourself a tremendous service if you finished reading about these arguments at the link I provided.

My claims? I didn't come up with this stuff.

But actually, I have been reading, Cato. Surely you must know that refutations of the refutations have also been around for a long time.

Clearly, if theists had NO good arguments, the party would have been over for them long ago, wouldn't it?

This is like Obama calling ISIS the "JV team";  the potency of the opposition is being vastly underrated, IMO.

[Whateverist]

You've already been shown how long these arguments and their refutations have existed. I understand this is new to you and you seem enamored and convinced, but there's nothing to be seen here that most of us haven't already considered. Peril? You have grossly exaggerated the efficacy of your claims. There's nothing perilous in these arguments to an atheist's position. You would do yourself a tremendous service if you finished reading about these arguments at the link I provided.

My claims? I didn't come up with this stuff.

But actually, I have been reading, Cato. Surely you must know that refutations of the refutations have also been around for a long time.

Clearly, if theists had NO good arguments, the party would have been over for them long ago, wouldn't it?

That would be assuming that both parties are motivated only by deciding on the truth of the matter. Since no positive evidence against the existence of a magical being can be found in our natural world, apologists will never be shown to be wrong in their belief. But every time they argue that they are right they will go on failing, at least in the judgement of any fair minded observer.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

You've already been shown how long these arguments and their refutations have existed. I understand this is new to you and you seem enamored and convinced, but there's nothing to be seen here that most of us haven't already considered. Peril? You have grossly exaggerated the efficacy of your claims. There's nothing perilous in these arguments to an atheist's position. You would do yourself a tremendous service if you finished reading about these arguments at the link I provided.

My claims? I didn't come up with this stuff.

But actually, I have been reading, Cato. Surely you must know that refutations of the refutations have also been around for a long time.

Clearly, if theists had NO good arguments, the party would have been over for them long ago, wouldn't it?

This is like Obama calling ISIS the "JV team";  the potency of the opposition is being vastly underrated, IMO.

"Horse-hockey!", as Colonel Potter used to put it.

Theist arguments are designed to fool the credulous, the people who either don't think too hard about what they're hearing or who are already predisposed toward believing it (and thus won't think too hard about what they're hearing). Often, they're little more than philosophy double-think, running around in circles, such as:

1) Everything must have a cause. (Really? Is that so? How do we know that?)

2) We don't know what happened before the Big Bang, but we know it must have had a cause. (There was no "before", and also, see above.)

3) The only thing that exists outside of time and can be the first cause is God. (Because we just defined "God" into having those qualities.)

4) This nebulous concept of Pre-Big-Bang-God that I just defined into existence is somehow still the interventionist Yahweh of the Bible. (We're not going to think too hard about why that's self-contradictory with the Deist god-concept described in #3.)

Don't even get me fucking STARTED on the problems of the "Intelligent Design/Irreducible Complexity" morons, who (seemingly to me) deliberately make poor arguments that sound good only to people who don't think too hard or who who don't know real biology. As a former biologist who actually knows the things they're trying to attack, and who has seen poor argument after poor argument struck down, only to see the ID/IC crowd pop their heads up again with a new version of the same tired argument, I simply can no longer believe that it's not deliberate deception on their part (as opposed to self-deception, in which they can still think they're honest while lying their asses off accidentally) in order to sell books and/or push their religious agenda.

I have actually gone through several books of Christian apologetics and footnoted and annotated the logical and factual errors contained within, when my family sent them to me, complete with attached references to the correct information in well-established databases/journals, only to be told that I was being "hateful" for not accepting the falsehoods they were trying to peddle upon me.

And here you are, yet another one, after 20 years of listening to theists' bullshit arguments, each one thinking they're on to something clever, and each one completely unwilling to acknowledge when their arguments are busted by people who actually know how to reason critically.

I'd yawn if it didn't piss me off so badly!

[athrock]

Of course there are some people who were not believers in God (which is all that atheism means) who later converted to religion. Why this is a surprise to anyone, I'm not sure; I'm even less sure of what your point is, here. Nonbelief is not some magic bullet that repels faith. However, we have a hard time accepting the claims of religious apologists who claim they are "former atheists" because it simply works too well as a way to sell their books, since credulous believers just soak up that kind of backstory. With very, very few exceptions, when you dig into the "I used to be an atheist and now I believe" stories (like my aforementioned C. S. Lewis example), what you find is people raised in faith-traditions who revert to that tradition after a rebellious ("mad at god") or apathetic ("couldn't have cared less about religion") period, as opposed to those of us here who have actually done our research and found that the claims made by Christianity are vapid or false.

While "more likely than not" is certainly a valid part of an argument, I have never, repeat never, seen an argument made that strikes me as more likely than not, when it comes to apologetics. Most of the arguments are "just-so" arguments, requiring major leaps from logic to supposition in order to support them, or else flat-out contradicting things we actually know, and asking the audience to reject the Scientific Method in favor of some form of woo-woo thinking.

And none of this changes the basic premise: arguments themselves are not facts. They will never be facts. They cannot be used in place of facts. They cannot be claims at all unless they encompass every fact that may bear on the question, rather than employing observer bias to shade some of the facts into a favored argument, as every apologist's argument I have ever seen has done. If the arguer's goal is to fool people, to make them draw unfounded conclusions, then yes, I suppose they have done their intended job. But that does not change the issue described above. Arguments. Are. Not. Facts!

No, Rocket. You've either missed or attempted to side-step the implications of what I said. 

Maybe you're just one step behind the people you are so dismissive of. Are you one of those who will eventually revert to your deep-rooted faith once you get YOUR "mad at god" period behind you? Maybe you're one of those "I used to be a believer, but now I'm an athiest" types who has been hurt by some negative experience that will eventually be healed thereby enabling you to return to the faith you once held. Is that it?

Get real. People who were every bit as committed to non-belief as you are today HAVE come to faith in a supreme being as a result of deep reflection on one or more of the philosophical arguments.  You can read about them online, watch their videos on YouTube or buy their books at Amazon. 

What? They weren't true atheists? We both know that fallacy. Was Anthony Flew "fooled"? Are other former atheists simply idiots because they have come to a different conclusion than you have? You're right and they're wrong, eh? No, it's possible to be rational about a false idea as well as irrational about something that is true. To claim that intelligent people are simply fools is the easy way out. These arguments are not so easily dismissed; if they were complete rubbish, they would not still exist. 

And as best I can tell, there are apologists on both sides of the divide...cranking out books to try to persuade people that their view is correct. Are Hitchens and Dawkins any different than Craig or McDowell? Haven't they banked a fair bit of money over the past few years? Are they simply "fooling" a different target market into handing over that cash?

Now, I'm curious about something, and I've asked this question before (though not to you directly):  what physical evidence is offered before the Justices of the Supreme Court in the United States? When the Court upheld Obamacare, were photos, bloody clothing, shell casings or imprints of tire tread admitted into evidence? And when the Court legalized gay marriage, did the attorneys present bank deposit slips, bags of cocaine and a dashcam video to make their case?

Or are these examples of ARGUMENTS being made in court based upon ideas, legal precedents, the constitution and the law?

So, you can split hairs over whether the philosophical arguments are "evidence", but they are still being used effectively to win people's hearts and minds to the theist position, and if atheists want to counter that, they need to do more than chant, "Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence." in their vain attempts to attain some godless nirvana.

[Edwardo Piet]

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.

[Mr.wizard]

Of course there are some people who were not believers in God (which is all that atheism means) who later converted to religion. Why this is a surprise to anyone, I'm not sure; I'm even less sure of what your point is, here. Nonbelief is not some magic bullet that repels faith. However, we have a hard time accepting the claims of religious apologists who claim they are "former atheists" because it simply works too well as a way to sell their books, since credulous believers just soak up that kind of backstory. With very, very few exceptions, when you dig into the "I used to be an atheist and now I believe" stories (like my aforementioned C. S. Lewis example), what you find is people raised in faith-traditions who revert to that tradition after a rebellious ("mad at god") or apathetic ("couldn't have cared less about religion") period, as opposed to those of us here who have actually done our research and found that the claims made by Christianity are vapid or false.

While "more likely than not" is certainly a valid part of an argument, I have never, repeat never, seen an argument made that strikes me as more likely than not, when it comes to apologetics. Most of the arguments are "just-so" arguments, requiring major leaps from logic to supposition in order to support them, or else flat-out contradicting things we actually know, and asking the audience to reject the Scientific Method in favor of some form of woo-woo thinking.

And none of this changes the basic premise: arguments themselves are not facts. They will never be facts. They cannot be used in place of facts. They cannot be claims at all unless they encompass every fact that may bear on the question, rather than employing observer bias to shade some of the facts into a favored argument, as every apologist's argument I have ever seen has done. If the arguer's goal is to fool people, to make them draw unfounded conclusions, then yes, I suppose they have done their intended job. But that does not change the issue described above. Arguments. Are. Not. Facts!

No, Rocket. You've either missed or attempted to side-step the implications of what I said. 

Maybe you're just one step behind the people you are so dismissive of. Are you one of those who will eventually revert to your deep-rooted faith once you get YOUR "mad at god" period behind you? Maybe you're one of those "I used to be a believer, but now I'm an athiest" types who has been hurt by some negative experience that will eventually be healed thereby enabling you to return to the faith you once held. Is that it?

Get real. People who were every bit as committed to non-belief as you are today HAVE come to faith in a supreme being as a result of deep reflection on one or more of the philosophical arguments.  You can read about them online, watch their videos on YouTube or buy their books at Amazon. 

What? They weren't true atheists? We both know that fallacy. Was Anthony Flew "fooled"? Are other former atheists simply idiots because they have come to a different conclusion than you have? You're right and they're wrong, eh? No, it's possible to be rational about a false idea as well as irrational about something that is true. To claim that intelligent people are simply fools is the easy way out. These arguments are not so easily dismissed; if they were complete rubbish, they would not still exist. 

And as best I can tell, there are apologists on both sides of the divide...cranking out books to try to persuade people that their view is correct. Are Hitchens and Dawkins any different than Craig or McDowell? Haven't they banked a fair bit of money over the past few years? Are they simply "fooling" a different target market into handing over that cash?

Now, I'm curious about something, and I've asked this question before (though not to you directly):  what physical evidence is offered before the Justices of the Supreme Court in the United States? When the Court upheld Obamacare, were photos, bloody clothing, shell casings or imprints of tire tread admitted into evidence? And when the Court legalized gay marriage, did the attorneys present bank deposit slips, bags of cocaine and a dashcam video to make their case?

Or are these examples of ARGUMENTS being made in court based upon ideas, legal precedents, the constitution and the law?

So, you can split hairs over whether the philosophical arguments are "evidence", but they are still being used effectively to win people's hearts and minds to the theist position, and if atheists want to counter that, they need to do more than chant, "Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence." in their vain attempts to attain some godless nirvana.

Holy fuck this is stupid!