Tell us about the dinosaurs

[Minimalist]

"...but....I have thoughts..."

Always dangerous!

[Lethe]

"...but....I have thoughts..."

Always dangerous!

[thesummerqueen]

There are things in this world that almost magically produce instant migraines.

[Anomalocaris]

"...but....I have thoughts..."

Always dangerous!

The missing link lives still.

[Minimalist]

"...but....I have thoughts..."

Always dangerous!

Unfortunately that sign is a prime tenet of xtianity.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.
Martin Luther

[Dotard]

Only if IPUs are defined in a way subject to reason and evidence.

Sure, why not? Do you really need me to provide the definition?

Invisible Pink Unicorn.
The one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.
A deity, presiding over affairs.
The Supreme Being, understood as Life, Truth, love, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle.

Three principal reasons: nothing requires their existence (predication), other than IPUs themselves; no evidence or compelling reason to believe they exist has ever been presented to me; they are characterized in a manner that defies intelligibility.

The universe requires the IPU's existance.
I have been wondering for quite awhile what evidence or compelling reason you have for believing in the xtain 'God'. I think you had mentioned some arguement that gives compelling reason for the existance of any character you insert as its subject, but what evidence or compelling reason is there to believe it is the xtain God that exists and not any other entity inserted as the subject of said arguement?

As you told me I could rightly call you delusional, so you must also tell me how I could prove they are a delusion. On the other hand, if I am left to speak for myself, I would say that I have no idea whether or not they are a delusion because I have no idea what your IPU-belief consists of.

You would not know if I am delusional if I am sincerely claiming IPUs exist based on what my delusion consists of? Huh?
Humor me for a bit and say for the sake of arguement you examined my IPU theology and could not find any "fault" with it simular to how you cannot find any significant fault with your own theology believing it to be logically grounded.

Now my claims of invisible pink unicorns are no longer delusional? I really don't understand. Maybe you could re-word or dumb that down for me.

Essentially a delusion is a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. Thus, unless you can demonstrate that some belief is false using strong contradictory evidence, you should not classify it as a delusion—otherwise you put yourself in the position of trying to prove a negative.

There exists no contradictory evidence for the existance of the invisible dancing gnomes in my backyard.
Is it rational to believe they exist? No contradicting evidence.....that gives my claims credence?

Am I understanding what you're writing correctly?

[Welsh cake]

One has to wonder why we see so many Christian theologians trying to interpret a Jewish book (Genesis) without ever calling upon the authors (Jews) to get them to explain it.

Evidence, please: list for me a few of the "so many Christian theologians" who do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chr...heologians

I am interested in what is true, not in what is simpler.

If you are being intellectually honest about your position and you really care whether your beliefs are justified, i.e. whether they are true or not, I can't see you prolonging a deconversion-to-atheism process for very much longer, granted if you are actually being *serious about your position* and not preaching in the heat of the moment.

I'm not afraid of sorting through arguments with informed reason to get at the truth, including scientarded arguments. Moreover, Occam's razor is a heuristic principle, not a criterion for truth, which together with logic renders scientism an incoherent pile of twaddle.

I can appreciate it if you have objections to the scientific view-point taken as authoritative, (I do too) and I can understand if you have criticisms that the scientific practice can be manipulated with political and ideological agendas, and not actually enquiring into what is demonstrably true (same here also). However, you do realise that by identifying where science is being misused to test claims outside the context they apply, scientism is also a counter argument to these aforementioned appeals to authority?

I know a good few theists who assert god or magic-man or whatever is transcendent and thereby beyond investigation or the field of inquiry, but then hypocritically proceed to bash scientific concepts or philosophies as "incoherent" because it cannot test or account for logically impossible/unknowable concepts such as deities for which they claim. Sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it.

If reason and evidence disproved God as creator (i.e., delusion), I would not have left atheism.

As much as I enjoy reading the infamous skeptics' account of being a former-atheist but then they either found god or god found them, ever heard of the phrase Absence of Evidence is Not Evidence of Absence?

If you find arguments from ignorance convincing that's your prerogative, I find them insufficient (to say the least) to discern fact from fantasy and cannot understand how anyone else ever could consider them acceptable.

[Anomalocaris]

"...but....I have thoughts..."

Horrible things. Must get rid of them at once.

[Ryft]

You seem to believe that you have either evidence or a complelling reason to believe in God. You have probably spelled these out somewhere. Could you please point it out, as I am interested in your reason to believe?

I could, but then you (and others) would no doubt want to object to and contend with various things I would say. None of that would have anything to do with dinosaurs and young-earth creationism, so the entire endeavor can only hijack and derail this thread even further.

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Invisible Pink Unicorn: the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe; a deity, presiding over affairs; the Supreme Being, understood as Life, Truth, Love, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle.

To my knowledge, you are an atheist. As such, it is safe to assume that you likewise reject IPUs, so I wonder how we disagree over the logical and empirical issues of IPUs. I was of the understanding that IPUs are an historical novelty (c. 1990), which some atheists admit inventing as a religious parody (Ashman, 2007). Surely IPU-belief would qualify as a delusion, should anyone happen to mistakenly take it as real in the face of its being openly admitted as not real?

I think you had mentioned some argument that gives compelling reason for the existence of any character you insert as its subject, but what evidence or compelling reason is there to believe that it is the Christian God that exists and not any other entity inserted as the subject of said argument?

It is called the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG), and the compelling reason by which it excludes any other deity is that the God of Scripture alone accounts for all features argued by the TAG (metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics, and so forth). If the God of Scripture is X, then any other deity is necessarily ¬X; and every ¬X at some point must fail the test by virtue of its not being X. Put in other words, the only way a proposed deity can account for all features argued is by fine-tuning the definition of said deity until it possesses all the properties of X.

But since this gets away from young-earth creationism and dinosaurs, this is not the thread for exploring such issues.

Humor me for a bit and say (for the sake of argument) you examined my IPU theology and could not find any 'fault' with it ...

That would require examining your IPU theology, which has not been done. But since it is admitted as a parody religion; i.e., not real, your having a sincere belief in IPUs qualifies as delusional (not to mention the serious cognitive dissonance of an atheist believing in deity).

There exists no contradictory evidence for the existence of invisible dancing gnomes in my backyard. Is it rational to believe they exist?

The rationality of a belief is not determined by the absence of contradicting evidence (though that helps) but by the presence of supporting evidence or reason for said belief. As David Lund writes, "The truth-tracking method of effective philosophic inquiry would lead us to believe a proposition when the evidence available to us justifies our believing it, to reject a proposition when our evidence disconfirms it, and to suspend judgment about it when our evidence neither confirms nor disconfirms it" (Lund, 2003).

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REFERENCES CITED:

• Ashman, A. T. (2007). The Invisible Pink Unicorn. BBC, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2.
  
• Lund, D. H. (2003). Making Sense of It All: An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry, 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. pp. 15-16.
  

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You do realise that by identifying where science is being misused to test claims outside the context they apply, scientism is also a counter argument to these aforementioned appeals to authority?

That is one of two ways in which "scientism" is used pejoratively to indicate the misuse of science, yes.

I know a good few theists who assert God ... is transcendent and thereby beyond [scientific] investigation or the field of [scientific] inquiry, but then hypocritically proceed to bash scientific concepts or philosophies as 'incoherent' ... Sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it.

First, those good theists are not the only ones. For example, atheist and skeptic Michael Shermer writes (1999), "What criteria for falsifiability could we establish to determine God's existence or nonexistence? Believers' claim that there is overwhelming evidence, or atheists' claim that there is no evidence, is not a test. If we want to make this a scientific question that can be decided by empirical evidence, the burden of proof is on both believers and nonbelievers to establish operational definitions and quantifiable criteria by which we can arrive at a testable conclusion. What is the operational definition of God and what quantifiable criteria should we use to accept or reject the null hypothesis of God's nonexistence?"

Second, those theists are not hypocrites if they point out that God is beyond the scope of "incoherent" science. They want to have their cake and eat it too only if they bash science on one hand yet esteem it on the other.

If you find arguments from ignorance convincing, that's your prerogative.

I don't, actually. I have no idea where that came from.

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REFERENCES CITED:

• Shermer, M. (1999). Reconsiderations and Recapitulations: Since the October 1999 publication of How We Believe. Positive Atheism. Retrieved from http://www.positiveatheism.org.
  

[orogenicman]

First, those good theists are not the only ones. For example, atheist and skeptic Michael Shermer writes (1999), "What criteria for falsifiability could we establish to determine God's existence or nonexistence? Believers' claim that there is overwhelming evidence, or atheists' claim that there is no evidence, is not a test. If we want to make this a scientific question that can be decided by empirical evidence, the burden of proof is on both believers and nonbelievers to establish operational definitions and quantifiable criteria by which we can arrive at a testable conclusion. What is the operational definition of God and what quantifiable criteria should we use to accept or reject the null hypothesis of God's nonexistence?"

This is where I've seen religious folk, particularly Christians, recount all sorts of rubbish as evidence for the existence of their God. Anecdotal evidence is not scientific. As I pointed out to you before (and you brushed it aside), personal revelation, the very foundation of Christianity, is, by definition, first person. As such, no one is under any obligation to believe one man's persona, revelation over anothers. And as such, science doesn't rely on them as evidence of anything. 10 anecdotes are no better than one, and 100 no better than ten.

Secondly, this is also where I invariably hear Christians claim that God is outside of our physical realm, and as such, cannot be empircally tested. And if that is (rather conveniently) the case, then there is no emprical test that can be devised to prove this God's existence. And so the idea of testing for the existence of God is a non-starter. IN addition, if this deity is outside of the realm of reality in which we meet out our existence, then it seems to me that he could be defined as an alien. And so the question that comes to my mind is what vested interest does this alien being who doesn't reside in our world have IN our world? I have a hard enough time trusting my neighbor who I know lives in my world, much less some omnipotent critter from the 37th dimension.

If, on the other hand, God is not outside of our physical realm, then it's existence should be testable, measureable. In that case, the question that comes to mind is why, after over 500 years of serious scientific enquiry, is there no unambiguous evidence for this God's existence (remembering, that in science, anecdotal evidence is worthless)?