The absurd need for logical proofs for God

[The Grand Nudger]

Why not?  Why aren't blind or unconscious processes supposed to yield conscious beings?

because they are ... UNconscious ? It's good to splash your face with cold water from time to time, you know.. to pay more attention to prefixes and all.
Are monkeys randomly typing on a keyboard for 100 years supposed to produce one of Shakespeare's plays ? ..... you guessed it, no.

The fact of unconscious process being...unconscious.... isn't in dispute.  I'm asking you why they aren't supposed to yield conscious things.

Can you elaborate on that?

Additionally...monkeys are conscious beings, Kloro. You're one of them. So was Shakespeare, and it didn't take him a hundred years..........? It wouldn't surprise me in the least if another monkey thrashed out a story like one of his..mostly because that's happened thousands of times. It would surprise the shit out of me if rocks wrote stories, and if they wrote stories that their stories were like a monkey's stories. Ditto with gods writing stories, and their stories being like monkey stories - like our stories..like your magic book.

Additionally, why do you keep babbling about blind unconscious processes as we discuss life?

Because it's really unlikely that these unconscious, lifeless processes would produce life if there was no agent planning all this ahead.

Why is it really unlikely, and can I see some math on that probability? As it stands, the probability appears to be 1in1, unity. Here we are, the known product of unconscious process, consciously apprehending as much....regardless of whether any god exists, and if so, is your god.

Has it ever occurred to you that the fact of conscious beings arising from unconscious process is a better argument for your hidden god and his mysterious plans? Maybe the plan was to let nature take it's course? Could have gone another way. Did go another way for so much life. Aren't you grateful for having life when so many have died? That would certainly explain why it looks like nature, and not god, is taking it's course. That would certainly explain why you're incapable of avoiding natural teleology in your god assertions. It would give some sense to this world being the only kind of world where we could never deduce a god. I ask you to consider this fact because you've referred to lifes' grand design as a fact which informs you of the existence of a god, or the probability of the existence of a god. You cannot insist that this is so - while simultaneously insisting that the grand design of life..evolutionary biology..isn't so. This either is or isn't a fact - which is informing you. Things appear to be adapted to their ends and this makes teleology comprehensible. If you want to dispute this as a fact - it cannot be a fact which informs you.

As a bonus, a god that can create unconscious processes which can create conscious processes is greater than a god who has to make every installation himself. A being capable of laying aside it's own interests to let such a process play out is infinitely more capable and wise and praiseworthy than a warlords lucky totem.

[no one]

 This guy:
Translation:
Life is scary, and confusing. Death is even more frightening. I am so god damned important, there must be something waiting for my significantly wonderful ass.

kloroform:
This is a stupid line of thought. There is nothing comforting with an afterlife, either. Ceasing to exist is much better than the slightest possibility of eternal damnation.

Exactly my point asshat, what makes you think there is a governing entity judging if you deserve eternal damnation? Your piss poor reasoning skills are on par with your beloved fairy tale's accounting for the natural sciences. 

Have mommy tuck you in, and give you some warm milk and cookies, your inept brain captain needs all the rest it can get.

[Mister Agenda]

Once again, with no additional information, I am being asked to believe we're being incoherent and dishonest if we don't infer from the direct experience of our own minds and the indirect evidence of other people (and to a lesser extent, some animals) of other people having minds; the existence of disembodied minds via an admittedly weak analogy. And somehow it's on me to do the research that would supposedly show this convincingly. I call BS.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Let me clarify again : the argument as I presented it here is complete, and valid. And you didn't bother raising any objection about either of its premises. And we're not arguing for the existence of some nebulous disembodied mind, we're arguing for the existence of the specific mind behind the existence of both the external world and other minds around us. If you think these other minds are uncaused,  or the product of a mindless process- which would need a starting point anyway, you have an irrational position.

Assertion that the argument is valid doesn't make it valid. I don't have a problem with the premises, my problem is that your desired conclusion does not follow them. The evidence that we use to infer minds in other people is not the same kind of evidence you're using to infer a disembodied mind. We can talk to people, cross-examine people, watch them design and build things. When we see a beehive or a beaver damn we can compare and contrast the evidence for those minds with the evidence for the minds behind the eyes of my fellow humans and also compare the evidence that would lead one to infer whether bees or beavers are conscious and the evidence that leads us to infer that other humans are conscious.

That a rock constitutes evidence sufficient to justifiably infer the existence of a disembodied mind that designed it and arranged the series of events that led to its existence not only doesn't follow from the presumed existence of other human minds; the reasoning to come to that conclusion is incoherent and dishonest; and frankly, ridiculous.

[Angrboda]

I'll have to get back to Klor's reply to me later, but the argument for the existence of other minds is itself pretty weak and shitty. If the argument for God depends upon being analogous to the argument for other minds, then you have a weak imitation of an already weak and shitty argument. We don't reason toward the existence of other minds, and, as things currently stand, we have no real successful way of proving the existence of other minds. That should give Klor and Plantinga pause when their argument for the existence of God is claimed to be "just as good as" a failed argument for the existence of other minds. Just as good means just as bad in this case. We don't reason toward the existence of other minds. It's programmed into our DNA to act as if other things in our environment are agents if they meet certain pattern matching criteria. Unfortunately, this same strategy has led us to conclude that an agent is at work in a waterfall, an automobile, and the song randomizer on Pandora. History is replete with examples of false positives in which we attribute agency to things that have no agency, so if the contention is that the argument for God is just as successful as our attempts to reliably detect agency, then I'd say you're pouring money down a black hole, never to be seen again.

[Apollo]

No conversation is relevant on consciousness without some understanding of Plato's cave, Desecrates' mind-body dualism, Thomas Nagel's "How does it feel to be a bat", David Chalmer's "Hard problem of the consciousness", and modern work in neuroscience (check out Anil Sethi and David Engles' works etc).

So while one can say all kinda gobbledygook shit about consciousness and monkeys' inability to write Shakespeare, it's merely crap pulled out of thin air due to ignorance on a topic.

[Angrboda]

Not true.  It's highly relevant, as if life conforms to the universe regardless of whether the universe is conformed to life, then the existence of life says nothing about design.

And now you run into the obvious problem... what would say anything about design, then ? If you think life with all its complexity isn't .. enough ..
Besides.. can you define design for me please ? Nobody so far gave a good definition.

I'm going to assume that you are using 'you' here in the third person plural and not meaning me specifically and ask what bearing this has on what I said?  If you mean me personally, that I supposedly have a problem, then I'll point out that I am not making an affirmative case here; you are.  As such, the responsibility for answering these questions is yours, not mine.  I have no obligation to answer them.  You, however, do.

That's assuming there is a reason behind our being here, which is a form of begging the question.  If there is no reason for our being here, then there is no accounting for it.

I'm not sure what you mean by reason. In any case, there is a cause to this universe, and one is forced to pick between first cause and infinite regress. There is no third option, no agnostic position.

It's not exactly clear what you're trying to express here.  If you're suggesting that natural processes cannot explain life, then I'd say you're mistaken.  You seem to mix parts of unrelated arguments freely, so it's not clear why you introduce the question of beginnings.  However, the fact that something needs a beginning doesn't lead to the conclusion that any specific endpoint was intended at that beginning.  Life is a possible endpoint that might have been intended.  Or, perhaps God likes heavy elements and designed the universe toward that end, and life was just an accidental byproduct.  Or perhaps God had no further thought to the universe than that he found this set of constants more aesthetically pleasing than any other, and he didn't care about life or any of the rest.  It echoes a point in a summary of objections to the common claim that the universe was fine-tuned for life that I'll link you to shortly.  The fact is, only the designer can inform us of his/her intentions, the universe itself is mute and uninformative with regards to any designer's intentions.  If I hand you a screwdriver, you might infer that I want you to tighten some screws.  Unbeknownst to you, I actually want you to use it to hammer some nails.  What you think the screwdriver might be best suited for is irrelevant.

So, no, you haven't provided any compelling justification for believing that the universe was fine-tuned for "life" -- whatever that might be defined as.

And finally, you're wrong about the necessity of starting points.  The Hawking-Hartle No-boundary proposal dispenses with beginnings, as does Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model.  And those are just two models that we know about from modern physics.  It's possible the explanation for the existence of the universe is something we haven't yet imagined.  As Rumsfield said, there are always the unknown unknowns.  So suggesting God, design, or creation events are necessary explanations because we lack alternatives becomes an argument from ignorance, with the corresponding conclusion that such arguments are invalid, and their conclusions not reliably true.

First of all, the models you're talking are proposals deduced from mathematical formulations, they're not related to any empirical observation, so you can't rely on them to run away from the problem of the first cause.
Secondly, it's logically forced that there either is a first cause or an infinite regress, this has nothing to do with appeal to ignorance or lack of imagination. Finite or infinite, not both, no third option. Now you say the universe itself is the first cause, I say everything we know about modern physics, most importantly the BB, makes your proposal highly unlikely.

First causes are an interesting topic in their own right, but as noted, they do not in themselves imply that the universe is fine-tuned for life, regardless of how you answer them, so in the context of our current discussion about whether the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life, your objections are irrelevant and constitute red herrings.  If you want to concede that you have lost the argument regarding fine-tuning and life so that we can change the subject and discuss first causes, I'd be more than happy to answer your concerns and objections which you have voiced here.  I addressed them initially out of courtesy, but if you are going to insist on them being addressed, I'm going to insist that you finish what you started or acknowledge defeat and accept that the universe is not fine-tuned for life.  Otherwise you need to provide some cogent objections to my points, because these red herrings aren't relevant.

[Spongebob]

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Let me clarify again : the argument as I presented it here is complete, and valid. And you didn't bother raising any objection about either of its premises. And we're not arguing for the existence of some nebulous disembodied mind, we're arguing for the existence of the specific mind behind the existence of both the external world and other minds around us. If you think these other minds are uncaused,  or the product of a mindless process- which would need a starting point anyway, you have an irrational position.

Assertion that the argument is valid doesn't make it valid. I don't have a problem with the premises, my problem is that your desired conclusion does not follow them. The evidence that we use to infer minds in other people is not the same kind of evidence you're using to infer a disembodied mind. We can talk to people, cross-examine people, watch them design and build things. When we see a beehive or a beaver damn we can compare and contrast the evidence for those minds with the evidence for the minds behind the eyes of my fellow humans and also compare the evidence that would lead one to infer whether bees or beavers are conscious and the evidence that leads us to infer that other humans are conscious.

That a rock constitutes evidence sufficient to justifiably infer the existence of a disembodied mind that designed it and arranged the series of events that led to its existence not only doesn't follow from the presumed existence of other human minds; the reasoning to come to that conclusion is incoherent and dishonest; and frankly, ridiculous.

I assert that Santa Clause is a real person who delivers 100's of millions of toys to 100's of millions of children around the world.  My argument is complete and valid.  You can't disagree because I said no backsies.  

[Chas]

Logical proofs are unnecessary and insufficient.  What is needed is evidence. 
Get back to us when you have some actual evidence of the existence of any gods at all.

[Angrboda]

Logical proofs are unnecessary and insufficient.  What is needed is evidence. 
Get back to us when you have some actual evidence of the existence of any gods at all.

I think what you may mean is that there is no empirical evidence. Evidence simpliciter is simply anything which supports the belief in a proposition being true, and I think logical proofs certainly qualify under that definition. Whether it is in some undefined sense better to have empirical evidence than logical proofs as evidence, or even necessary that one's evidence be empirical, is a different matter. I can't help but notice, however, that if one is going to argue that empirical evidence is better or even necessary, the evidence for that proposition will have to take the form of logical proofs, so you're in a bit of a catch-22 situation.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Logical proofs are unnecessary and insufficient.  What is needed is evidence. 
Get back to us when you have some actual evidence of the existence of any gods at all.

I think what you may mean is that there is no empirical evidence.  Evidence simpliciter is simply anything which supports the belief in a proposition being true, and I think logical proofs certainly qualify under that definition.  Whether it is in some undefined sense better to have empirical evidence than logical proofs as evidence, or even necessary that one's evidence be empirical, is a different matter.  I can't help but notice, however, that if one is going to argue that empirical evidence is better or even necessary, the evidence for that proposition will have to take the form of logical proofs, so you're in a bit of a catch-22 situation.

Agreed. Logical proofs are, by their very nature, evidentiary. It's also not immediately apparent that empirical evidence of a sufficiently subtle god is even possible. If Yahweh can cook up an entire universe in under a week, it's not unreasonable to assume that he could also hide his tracks.

Boru