Debate God's Existence

This is all nice and theoretical, and stimulating and stuff, but practically speaking it's irrelevant.

Belief in God is not based on proof - at least not in any scientific way. You either believe God exists or you don't.
Proof doesn't enter into it despite all the philosophical and theological rants.

Originally posted by XanthosNZ
Yes. You were claiming that the evidence of God is there I just have to open my eyes or some crap. For one it's funny that you should be telling anyone to open their eyes let alone me. For another my comment was in fact related to yours.

I see what you call evidence and find that it isn't evidence for God at all.

You are attempting to read something into it that isn't there, so once
again you are missing the point. Did I tell you to open your eyes? You
should practice just reading the words others post, you might find
understanding what others are saying will come a little easier for you.
Kelly

Originally posted by telerion
I'm not even going with the problem of evil. In fact, I'm not identifying any particular inconsistency at all. I'm simply asking the theist if their specific god(s) could be incompatible with any hypothetical state of nature. Often times, they have to concede that the answer is "No." In such a case, their is no evidence for or against their god. Any state of the world would contain zero information about whether or not their god exists.

example?
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
You are attempting to read something into it that isn't there, so once
again you are missing the point. Did I tell you to open your eyes? You
should practice just reading the words others post, you might find
understanding what others are saying will come a little easier for you.
Kelly

Does God exist?
Is there proof of that?

Originally posted by KellyJay
example?
Kelly

I'm not sure what you mean by "example?" especially since that is the essence of my question in that post, but I will try my best. Here's an analogy that I hope may shed light on my point.

Imagine that you find a letter on the table. It has marks on it. The question is "did Joseph make those marks?" Now keep in mind that you know nothing in particular about Joseph including how he makes marks on a page. That is any set of marks on a page could be made by Joseph for all you know. Now if I say, "Look at that page. Evidence that Joseph made marks on that page," you would be correct to disagree. You might say, "That is not evidence that Joseph made those marks because any set of marks on a page could be made by Joseph. Upon examination, we have learned nothing more about whether those marks were made by Joseph than before we examined them. The marks are "uninformative" in regards to Joseph's authorship."

The same goes for any god that can be made compatible with any imaginable state of nature. Nature becomes uninformative in regards to the existence of god because upon viewing any given state of nature we have learned nothing more about whether god exists than we did before viewing that state.

This is a very standard way of thinking about information problems (I'm not just making it up to be argumentative.) Does my explaination make sense?

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
God exists...True, or false?

False. Nice, simple answer to a nice, simple question.

B.

Originally posted by telerion
I'm not even going with the problem of evil. In fact, I'm not identifying any particular inconsistency at all. I'm simply asking the theist if their specific god(s) could be incompatible with any hypothetical state of nature. Often times, they have to concede that the answer is "No." In such a case, their is no evidence for or against their god. Any state of the world would contain zero information about whether or not their god exists.

This statement seems wrong as "no evidence" is concerned. There are times when the same facts can be presented as evidence to support the opposite conclusions. When Andrea Yates called 911 to inform them that she had just killed her children did that show A) That she knew right from wrong; or B) She was completely nuts? It was argued both ways by different people. Thus, one could state that this fact yielded "zero information" according to your statement when, in fact, it is evidence but that evidence can lead to differing conclusions.

To be more on point, it seems fairly clearly that the basic forces of the universe had to be within a fairly narrow range or life at all would have been impossible. Surely this is at least some evidence of some sort. I don't think it can be stated that this fact yields "zero information" because it might lead to differing conclusions (i.e. Many Universes or MegaLaws or intelligent design in small caps, not the fraud proposed by Fundamentalists).

Originally posted by no1marauder
This statement seems wrong as "no evidence" is concerned. There are times when the same facts can be presented as evidence to support the opposite conclusions. When Andrea Yates called 911 to inform them that she had just killed her children did that show A) That she knew right from wrong; or B) She was completely nuts? It was argued both ways by differe ...[text shortened]... MegaLaws or intelligent design in small caps, not the fraud proposed by Fundamentalists).

I guess that's the difference between the way a lawyer looks at information and a scientist looks at information.

I would say that Andrea's 911 call is uninformative in regards to the question "Does Andrea know she did something wrong or is she just nuts?" We would need to look for other facts that would be more consistent with some one who was really nuts. Still I can see where in a courtroom this definition wouldn't be as useful.

Would you say that the "marks on a page" I talked about above are evidence both that Joseph made them and that Joseph did not make them?

See I have one (amongst others) big problem with religion:

Generally we all know about God(s) through what we have read in a certain book/ books or by what we have been told by other people...thing is, where did their knowledge come from? in the case of the person they probably acquired their knowledge from the same books and from different people who acquired this knowledge by the same means....you can continue this line back to a point where there was only a handful of people that actually had this knowledge in the whole world, is it not fair to say that scientific understanding at this time was not sufficient to account for all the strange things they experienced experienced and thus the idea of a god made sense of everything they couldn't account for?

In the case of books/writings on stone etc...they had to be written, and who by? If people, then again where did this knowledge come from?. If God, who's telling you it was written by God?, who told them?...how do we know that someone along the line wasn't lying?...what if someone(s) just made it all up?

What I'm driving at is that millions upon millions of people all subscribe to this idea of a god(s)/afterlife/reincarnation etc...but it all traces back to ancient times when groups of people were trying to explain things happening around them, explain theirselves and might have just *invented* the concept of religion (whichever you subscribe to)...all we can ever do is take it on faith!

What if **(hypotetically)**I tried to invent a new religion and just made up all sorts of crazy sh*t like invisible leprechauns etc, perhaps I might find a bunch of crazies (or likeminded people) willing to accept this idea...what if one of us wrote down this sh*te and allowed generations of other crazies to read it, perhaps some of us will get our heads together and refine the original writings such that it fits better with whats people are prepared to believe...what if the group of crazies gets so large that amongst some of these crazies are people that aren't actually crazy after all, they're just believing what they have been told (or perhaps they have the same desire to take the p*ss out of the world as its founder), perhaps it will get big enough such that enough members of the group have enough real world influence to make it even bigger by publishing these writings, selling this idea to the masses etc...perhaps some people not in this group will be inspired to show how crazy this belief is but for any argument they throw at it I just hit back with some spurious claim that they have to go and disprove...and cannot because I assault their arguments with anything I care to that gets me off the hook...any tricky spots and I just tell them to take it on faith

...or perhaps I'd be sent to a loony bin before this would ever come into fruition

Originally posted by telerion
I guess that's the difference between the way a lawyer looks at information and a scientist looks at information.

I would say that Andrea's 911 call is uninformative in regards to the question "Does Andrea know she did something wrong or is she just nuts?" We would need to look for other facts that would be more consistent with some one who was really n ...[text shortened]... ed about above are evidence both that Joseph made them and that Joseph did not make them?

Statistical information is of the same nature and yet it contains more than zero information.

Interpreting the same sets of statistical information can often lead to radically different conclusions, but both logically defendable. Obviously, it doesn't mean that everyone is correct, but that the evidence may not yet be enough to form a definite conclusion. I'd say this is definitely different from zero information.