tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post1172607554505587171..comments2023-10-25T10:45:54.660-05:00Comments on Answers in Genesis BUSTED!: Common Nontheist MisconceptionsAIGBustedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232781356086767207noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post-60924735682441569632012-04-22T22:15:42.367-05:002012-04-22T22:15:42.367-05:00That definition is self defeating. A 'god'...That definition is self defeating. A 'god' with complete knowledge and with complete power cannot make decisions and is a mere robot since the consequences of any decision are known there are thus no choices possible.Analysthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12576054799471594617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post-26855372321237692242012-04-22T21:03:10.686-05:002012-04-22T21:03:10.686-05:00"The first problem with 'god' is that..."The first problem with 'god' is that no one can define what this concept means."<br /><br />I disagree, I think you can define God as a bodiless mind with all power, knowledge, etc.AIGBustedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03232781356086767207noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post-81694808980233729712012-04-22T02:19:06.294-05:002012-04-22T02:19:06.294-05:00The first problem with 'god' is that no on...The first problem with 'god' is that no one can define what this concept means. When they try, the definition defeats itself. Given that, all else is irrelevant.<br /><br />Bible 'god' is a poor sort of god indeed. 'He' knows less about the universe than Wikipedia does. Who can be impressed by that? Or by a 'Jesus' who never wrote a word?Analysthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12576054799471594617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post-22262815157015169242012-04-05T23:51:46.007-05:002012-04-05T23:51:46.007-05:00Wow I feel really sad for you two and I will pray ...Wow I feel really sad for you two and I will pray for the softening of your heats that you would see and that your hurts and pains might be healed. It is He whom you don't understand who is the only one who heals.jeramyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01863017106866517457noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post-51165312442882468292012-04-01T14:06:24.431-05:002012-04-01T14:06:24.431-05:00Part 2 of 2…
In mathematics, seemingly "infi...Part 2 of 2…<br /><br />In mathematics, seemingly "infinite" premises, such as "there is no largest prime", can be proven because it is possible to use mathematics to conduct infinite searches within such areas as "the set of integers". That might be why some people say "proof is for mathematics; for everything else, we accept things conditionally on the basis of mere evidence, not proof."<br /><br />(Myself, I don't think anything <i>besides</i> the infinite-search capability actually sets mathematics apart in this respect. Humans can make mistakes; there is a nonzero but unimaginably small probability that the proofs of infinite primes each contain some flaw which no one has noticed. So in a way, even math is really a matter of "mountains of evidence" instead of "proof", and thus we may as well say something is "proven" when we have reached a particular threshold of certainty. But I digress.)<br /><br />So whether or not God exists depends on the search space involved in our definition of "God". Are we saying: <i>There is no entity anywhere in or outside the universe which could be considered a deity by some reasonable definition.</i>? Or are we saying:<i>There is no creator-deity who is all-loving and all-powerful and thus impacts every single event in a maximally good way.</i>? The second statement is not really a "universal negative" with asearch space as large as the entire universe, but rather an "extremely local" negative along the lines of <i>Julius Ceasar is not the biological father of all humans throughout history.</i> We just need one father-who-is-not-Ceasar, or one impossible-to-justify-event, to truly disprove such far-reaching hypotheses.<br /><br /><b>What's Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the God<br /><br />It has gradually dawned on me that if this response is the only fallback response offered, the atheist position would end up being burdened with an awfully large number of arbitrary suppositions (that the universe exists as a brute fact, that it is suitable to life just by chance, and so on) whereas theism would only contain one supposition.</b><br /><br />But "God exists" isn't <i>really</i> just one supposition. It's a complex set of related premises, many if which derive from vague human intuitions about minds (for example, when I want to move my arm, it appears to move by a kind of magic, so a bodiless entity might also do just about anything by magic).<br /><br />We all live in the same universe, so we all have the same facts to try explaining. Some creationists have tried to argue that evolution is flawed because it does not predict exactly what species will arise in the future. But of course, creationism doesn't do that either – it doesn't even explain the patterns we observe in life forms today! A good hypothesis constrains the set of possible observations while remaining relatively simple; the God hypothesis fails on both counts, amounting to "We should expect exactly what we have seen, because God necessarily wanted it that way, and made it happen by magic."Lenoxushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10809085020841868387noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6802109362344250457.post-27330375792685254742012-04-01T14:02:43.568-05:002012-04-01T14:02:43.568-05:00Part 1 of 2
Well, it turns out my response was tw...Part 1 of 2<br /><br />Well, it turns out my response was two long for the comment form, so I've split it into two parts.<br /><br />I'm an atheist and agree with about half of your points. I'm going to spell out where I disagree…<br /><br /><b>Roy Abraham Varghese once pointed out that scientists don't know how bumblebees fly. Which is true, but how in the hell could God explain this phenomenon?</b><br /><br />Of course, the basics of bee flight have been known for quite a while, but it's still a good example of something that hypothetical scientists could be ignorant about.<br /><br />The real problem with the "God hypthesis" is indeed not the "just because I don't have a snappy answer…" but rather, well, what you wrote.<br /><br />Relatedly, the God hypothesis is almost as content-free as saying "just because." In the case of bumblebees, I suppose a hypothetical theist-who-didn't-know-better might say that God keeps bees aloft with divine powers, or in making bees, he used his powers to lend bees a small bit of magic of their own. Why exactly wouldn't he do so?<br /><br /><b>We can [prove that] the President is not Chinese, we can prove that one plus one does not equal three, I can prove that Julius Caesar is not my father, and so on.</b><br /><br />I've come to think that a better way of phrasing "You can't prove a negative" is: "In order to prove a negative, you must somehow exhaust the search space." For example, consider the statement <i>There is a ten-pound statue of an elephant somewhere in my refrigerator</i>. How do I disprove this? Well, all I have to do is search my entire refrigerator (or at least, every part capable of containing a ten-pound statue). If there were a statue, I would find it (or the probability of my finding it would be very very close to 1). So by modus tollens, not finding a statue means it isn't there.<br /><br />Conversely, consider the statement <i>There is an elephant statue buried somewhere under the surface of Mars.</i> Now the search space is too large to practically exhaust. And if you did do it, then by the time you finished, some alien trickster could hypothetically hide a statue on the other side (if there even were any Mars left after your search.) So that's a negative we "can't" prove.Lenoxushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10809085020841868387noreply@blogger.com