Are "New Atheists" Too Obsessed With Religion?

[Bunyip]

So you admit that this:

was wrong?

No, I clarified that point ad naseum.

Plural. As in more than one.

Yes Abrahamic religions plural.

 

[Bunyip]

That either you have implicitly stated Stenger is wrong for having claimed to have proved what can't be proved, or you think he's wrong for believing that immaterial means doesn't exist

I agree with that, and have stated so repeatedly. As he defines it the immaterial does not exist.

and to say something is immaterial is the same as saying (i.e., tautologous) they don't exist. Either way, you've stated something that implies Stenger is wrong (unless you are right) and thus I not only have my example, you provided it.

I clarified that point so many times, but you keep, repeating it.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

No, I clarified that point ad naseum.

No, you contradicted what you had said. What you repeatedly said:

You can not prove the universal non-existence of an immaterial entity - a god.

You can not prove the absence of god Legion, you simply forget context.

But you can not prove the absence of god, that was the context.

Stenger does not rely on arguments for atheism - you refer to the non-existent. Atheists have never had to face evidence to counter, we tend not to feel the need to disprove the unproveable.

LOL No mate, none of the 'New Atheists' rely on such an argument anyway - you are tilting at windmills. They only mention that you can not prove gods absence in response to apologists endlessly trying to shift the burden of proof.

And no, you can not prove the non-existence of god, no matter how much you may delight in re-wording that fact into an argument you think you can refute.

The argument is: You can not prove the non-existence of god.

You were very insistent not only that disproving god was impossible, but also that the new atheists didn't do this and I was "tilting at windmills". Only they do make that argument and all of the above contradict your "clarifications"

 

[Bunyip]

No, you contradicted what you had said. What you repeatedly said:









You were very insistent not only that disproving god was impossible, but also that the new atheists didn't do this and I was "tilting at windmills". Only they do make that argument and all of the above contradict your "clarifications"

You are stuck on repeat again.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

You are stuck on repeat again.

That's because you are stuck on evasion. As for repeat, we can all see quite clearly how often you very explicitly stated what you now deny and, moreover, that Stenger didn't make such arguments as he clearly did, and NONE of the new atheists do, but they clearly do. This "repeat" is simply you "quibbling" and evading, trying to get away from the fact that you repeated over and over that what Stenger did was not only impossible, but that neither he or any other new atheists did this.

You were wrong. That you were wrong is clear as you stated Stenger didn't do what he clearly did and your contradictory, mutually exlusive positions both imply Stenger is wrong, but I do not know which of the two claims you've repeated ad nauseum you actually think true.

 

[Bunyip]

That's because you are stuck on evasion. As for repeat, we can all see quite clearly how often you very explicitly stated what you now deny and, moreover, that Stenger didn't make such arguments as he clearly did, and NONE of the new atheists do, but they clearly do. This "repeat" is simply you "quibbling" and evading, trying to get away from the fact that you repeated over and over that what Stenger did was not only impossible, but that neither he or any other new atheists did this.

You were wrong. That you were wrong is clear as you stated Stenger didn't do what he clearly did and your contradictory, mutually exlusive positions both imply Stenger is wrong, but I do not know which of the two claims you've repeated ad nauseum you actually think true.

Que? That was just a tantrum.
I addressed your concern, I clarified repeatedly. That was addressed specifically many, many times, many posts ago - but you seem stuck on returning to it,

 

[Sees]

@Bunyip and @LegionOnomaMoi - anybody win yet?

 

[Bunyip]

@Bunyip and @LegionOnomaMoia - anybody win yet?

Well apparently given that Legion seems only to be arguing for conceptual Gods ; Atheism wins.
If there is a material god or a way to argue that the immaterial exists other than conceptually we have not got that far yet, and Legion will do pretty much anything to ensure that we don't.
In terms of arguing against the existence of god - there is no winning, all you can do is demonstrate that your opponant is not holding any cards. Then the arguments are repeated, sadly that is the nature of counter apologetics. If logic and evidence were pertinent there would be no need for counter apologetics.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Que? That was just a tantrum.
I addressed your concern, I clarified repeatedly.

Is this your language game move again? "Clarify" means "I can blatantly contradict myself and act like I didn't?" Ok, whatever. I'm not interested in more of your "language game" technique. You've adequately shown that either you aren't familiar with the new atheists to defend them, or you do and believe they are wrong (or you aren't familiar with them and still think them wrong). We've also demonstrated that you are willing to completely contradict yourself when you find out what the new atheists have actually said, defending them by contradicting your earlier claims about them and about what was impossible for them to do.

Now, you can go claim victory because you've "clarified" your position and somehow not said in multiple ways that Stenger and other new atheists were wrong, whilst simultaneously claiming untrue things about what I have written, implied, or failed to write combined with the customary derogatory flourish. I like that stack of quotes of you repeating ad nauseum something you've no claimed ad nauseum isn't true, and find it clear enough for anybody who could possibly want to follow my tedious attempt to get you to answer honestly to grant you the right to have the last word, claim victory, and so forth. Have at it. I'm going to read that post again.

 

[Bunyip]

Is this your language game move again? "Clarify" means "I can blatantly contradict myself and act like I didn't?" Ok, whatever. I'm not interested in more of your "language game" technique. You've adequately shown that either you aren't familiar with the new atheists to defend them, or you do and believe they are wrong (or you aren't familiar with them and still think them wrong). We've also demonstrated that you are willing to completely contradict yourself when you find out what the new atheists have actually said, defending them by contradicting your earlier claims about them and about what was impossible for them to do.

Now, you can go claim victory because you've "clarified" your position and somehow not said in multiple ways that Stenger and other new atheists were wrong, whilst simultaneously claiming untrue things about what I have written, implied, or failed to write combined with the customary derogatory flourish. I like that stack of quotes of you repeating ad nauseum something you've no claimed ad nauseum isn't true, and find it clear enough for anybody who could possibly want to follow my tedious attempt to get you to answer honestly to grant you the right to have the last word, claim victory, and so forth. Have at it. I'm going to read that post again.

I clarified the apparent contradiction you were concerned with many times. I will answer honestly to any God you identify and explore how the argument here applies.

 

[Sees]

Well apparently given that Legion seems only to be arguing for conceptual Gods ; Atheism wins.
If there is a material god or a way to argue that the immaterial exists other than conceptually we have not got that far yet, and Legion will do pretty much anything to ensure that we don't.
In terms of arguing against the existence of god - there is no winning, all you can do is demonstrate that your opponant is not holding any cards. Then the arguments are repeated, sadly that is the nature of counter apologetics. If logic and evidence were pertinent there would be no need for counter apologetics.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

For another's clarification:

Well apparently given that Legion seems only to be arguing for conceptual Gods

I'm agnostic, and don't argue for any gods.

If there is a material god or a way to argue that the immaterial exists other than conceptually we have not got that far yet, and Legion will do pretty much anything to ensure that we don't.

This is not a discussion about the nature of gods but the new atheists. I was accused of saying things about the new atheists that were untrue and unfair, and it turns out that in at least some cases (the ones that didn't involve my negative opinion of them but rather what they wrote/said and positions they held) I was right. Also, it turns out that multiple statements/claims I was informed that the "new atheists" hadn't made (contra my view) were in fact not true. They had made these statements/claims.

However, I was unable to sort out the "clarifications" of the various contradictions in order to determine in which ways the new atheists were implicitly described as wrong or as having said/written things contrary to what they actually did.

 

[Bunyip]

For another's clarification:

I'm agnostic, and don't argue for any gods.


This is not a discussion about the nature of gods but the new atheists. I was accused of saying things about the new atheists that were untrue and unfair, and it turns out that in at least some cases (the ones that didn't involve my negative opinion of them but rather what they wrote/said and positions they held) I was right. Also, it turns out that multiple statements/claims I was informed that the "new atheists" hadn't made (contra my view) were in fact not true. They had made these statements/claims.

However, I was unable to sort out the "clarifications" of the various contradictions in order to determine in which ways the new atheists were implicitly described as wrong or as having said/written things contrary to what they actually did.

Yes. And meanwhile I'm unable to fathom how that continues to confuse you so much.

 

[Bunyip]

Legion

As an aside; Great to hear that you like me and most of the NA are agnostic. Fantastic to find common ground between us.

But I have to ask - if you are not positing any God what the heck are you arguing about? The God you are not positing is surely not a challenge to the intellects of the NA? Or anyone else for that matter.

 

[Bunyip]

Legion

Wouldn't any meaningful challenge to atheism new or old have to begin with a posited God to be an atheist in relation to? The NA are not challenging agnosticism.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

But I have to ask - if you are not positing any God what the heck are you arguing about?

I provided you a link to a (non-academic) article by atheist philosopher Michael Ruse, who was highly critical of the new atheists and in particular in their dismissal of arguments that apologists have made and continue to make. He's an atheist. I am not an atheist, but an agnostic, and of the type that Huxley was. I want to know things, but I have this little problem: I am tend to doubt much until I am sufficiently aware of I believe I need to be to take a position (and when I have done so, I will argue to the death until I am quite clear that someone has shown me to be wrong, because I tend not to take clear stances unless I have gone over the matter to a degree that is likely clinically obsessive and neurotic). This is why I tend not to read the newspaper or keep up much with current affairs, as I have enough trouble determining the correct or most likely to be accurate position given many scientific topics/issues, where there is vastly greater clarity and ways in which one can determine what the evidence is, arguments are, and evaluate both. It's why I call studying my "hobby" because otherwise I can't justify the amount of time and money I spend outside of work on academic volumes & monographs (particularly given that my work involves studying and people paying for me to obtain materials related to my field).

It doesn't matter how much I read or learn, and I doubt it would matter if I were an intelligent individual capable of taking far more from what I've read/studied and reading/studying far more than I have, there remain questions haven't been able to answer and do not believe I will ever do so. One of these questions concerns the existence of god (or, more generally, religion). There exist extremely good reasons to doubt religious claims, but there exists some evidence for certain religious beliefs, some good arguments for re-evaluating how I should think of evidence or whether my basis for epistemic justifcation for my position on religious questions is itself justified, and many people far smarter and more knowledgeable than I that have become believers. Likewise, there used to be (and to a lesser extent still art) very smart people who know much more than I who are disbelievers. I depend on their arguments to help both continually question my own positions (and ensure that I am doing so, as it is easy to think one is questioning one's beliefs and fail to realize how much one is assuming without realizing it) and to help me determine them.

I do that here as well, but for various reasons (such as the length of posts and the general mechanisms for information exchange here), it's not equivalent to reading the past ~2,500 years of the greatest minds. Even though I realize how hard it is to simplify technical information such that it is both accurate and informative yet accessible, I remain extremely critical of popular academics whom I believe do not do this well. That may be unfair of me, but as I said I am obsessive when it comes to accuracy and trying to find truth. The new atheists are like (and sometimes are) bad popularizers, and do not provide me with the kind of balance I can find among atheists earlier in the 20th century and before. They've also dumbed down the other side, and too many theologians have settled for knocking down their errors and taking potshots at their failures and I get nothing from that either.

It is a combination of this decreased value of the discourse and the badly popularized nature of new atheists writings that upsets me. I can't be challenged or stimulated by lesser versions of arguments I've already heard or that are of little to no worth, and I see the promulgation of misinformation all around me to which the new atheists have added. I am not arguing for or against their atheist positions; I am objecting to the information and arguments they supply (their quality and accuracy in and of themselves and as compared to those of their forebears) .

 

[Bunyip]

Legion
Well sure, they have nothing to go on - nothing to contest after all these years. Sure, arguing against the immaterial runs out of puff after a few thousand years of nothing to argue against. How can they have brilliant new arguments against a howling wilderness of the absence of evidence to the contrary? What new way is there to say; Put up? Anything, then we at least can discuss it.
How many new arguments do you need to address no new evidence? How many does it merit?
Their forebears have the excuse of having been ignorant of the benefits of the last few hundred years of human enquiry.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Sure, arguing against the immaterial runs out of puff after a few thousand years of nothing to argue against.

It would have, were this the case. You defined immaterial as non-existent. There was a time when we thought physics was just about wrapped up, just a few details left to solve, and it turned out that the result was a theory of physics which (in the so-called Copenhagen or orthodox interpretation) holds that the subatomic systems we examine, and now even systems exhibiting macroscopic quantum coherence, have no relation to the physical world. They are mathematical functions. We can only speak of what we measure or observe. Of course, we call "observables" things that are never observed (more math functions) and are really just part of a schema to predict experimental outcomes given a particularly specified prepared system. The original formulation of quantum logic was a tremendous feat of brilliance and ingenuity by von Neumann and has served as a basis for subsequent models of the underlying logic of QM. This logic violates Aristotelian logic, in that it holds that "not A" and "A" can both be true or that "either A or not A" can be false. EPR and Bell set up a method to mathematically prove with minimal assumptions that if we could set up experiments in a certain way, we could show that there exists causal connections that cannot be explained by anything "local" (i.e., causal, according to classical causality). We've shown this many, many, times. Materialism and reductionism (two separate but frequently commonly held positions) involved both explanations in terms of "matter" (when matter was understood to be particles and the rest were just processes or effects due to interactions between matter) and the whole was the sum of its parts; the lower the level of an analysis of a system, the simpler things became until (it was hoped) we could explain everything in terms of the fundamental "parts" of all of reality.

Currently, it seems that the foundations of reality violate inviolate laws of logic that we aren't able to understand can exist as it defies all that is rational (how can we understand physics that tells us a thing has the property of being A & not A?), is ontologically vague (stems obtain "real" properties only when observed, and the properties depend upon the manner of observation), violates causality, and seems to be entirely alien to the world we experience (a realm where not only do basic laws of logic fail but distances don't matter, "no-time" effects are constant, and acausal behaviors are ubiquitous). Then we combined this with relativity and quantum field theory to obtain the standard model. What's interesting is that the standard model is fundamentally rooted in quantum mechanics (and the ways in which relativity, electrodynamics, etc., were combined to form the standard model were done almost entirely via mathematical work, not empirical study), and yet reading such literature one is struck by how seemingly certain, physical, and "real" everything becomes. We have all these particles with exact properties or nearly exact properties, yet they are built upon quantum mechanics which holds that the only thing we can say about systems we study is what we measure and how we can connect it with the specified preparation of the particular system studied.

The reason is that we have now gone so far away from the physical world and so deeply into the mathematical world that we aren't actually able to create the kind of dividing line that Bohr did when he banished QM to the netherworld of Hilbert space.

Things are no better at the macroscale. The increasing realization in the 20th and this century of the precision necessary for a few constants such that arbitrarily small departures from their exact values would make life impossible and the entire universe vastly different has prompted many physicists to adopt one or both of two approaches. On the one hand is the anthropic principle, which is simply a given in its weak form (it asserts that the universe exists in such a way that we are able to exist because we exist and can observe it). However, the next "level" (which is held by many physicists yet is not at all theistic or religious) is the abandonment of reductionism and the quest for fundamental principles. In the place of these long-held goals of physics is put the assumption that we are here so the first principle or fundamental principle we should start from is that there exists a universe in which we came to be such that we could observe it. Still stronger forms invoke deistic or other religious notions, but leave that aside here.

The other approach is multiverse theory. The oldest such theory is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that tried to connect the representations of physical systems with something that was actually "physical". The result was infinitely-many branching universes. Other motivations for multiverse theories grew out of astrophysics, theoretical physics, and cosmology. In particular, multiverse theory nicely explains how we happened to end up in a universe that is determined by a handful of constants that seem to be so radically precise that "fine-tuned" or "fine-tuning" is used even by physicists who don't actually mean there is or was any creator who actually finely-tuned these parameters. Physicists who don't like this idea of simply referring to fine-tuning because it suggests design but are still mystified about the apparent fine-tuning have used multiverse theories as a way to explain our universe as, given infinitely many universes ours just happened to hit the jackpot. Of course, as someone I don't recall remarked (mostly in jest), if the multiverse is truly all the uncountably infinitely many possible configurations of the universe, wouldn't that include heaven and hell?

To me, it is less about appeals to radical theories for various reasons (not just to "escape" design but more commonly for mathematical elegance), and more both the failure of reductionism in ways we never thought possible, a macroscopic world that emerges out of a quantum reality that is radically different from anything we experience, and the extent to which modern physics, perhaps the most venerable and "hardest" science reduced increasingly to mathematical theory rather than the predictions of Laplace, the optimism of Lord Kelvin, the advice of Philip von Jolly to his student Max Planck, etc., that all collapsed so thoroughly that built into our theory is an absolute limit to our knowledge.

Then there is the problem of consciousness. After Turing "invented" the computer (theoretically), it wasn't long before strong AI was just around the corner. And it has remained just around the corner for over 50 years. We know a lot about how the brain works. We know a lot about what is involved in various cognitive, perceptual, and regulatory processes in the brain. We are no closer to understanding how we understand than we were when Turing published his famous paper.

Then, of course, there is the bases of the interpretation for evidence and what one considers evidence to be. Rather than demonstrate this using religion or physics, I'll switch to clinical psychology, psychiatry, and related mental health fields. In the US, Australia, England, France, and most countries in the world hearing voices is a symptom of psychosis. In certain cultures, it is a common phenomenon that psychiatrists have fit into an umbrella category of culturally-specific "diseases" from running amok to ataque de nervios. People's worldview can literally kill them (as happened in one case I know of a man admitted to a hospital complaining of being cursed and despite ensuring he was properly cared for he died). Belief is enormously powerful and intricately tied to our worldviews. I have to consider the possibility that, given that I see those who ascribe to divine or magical influence this or that affect as deluding themselves or experiencing a kind of placebo affect, that my own worldview shapes my perception and evaluation of evidence just as strongly. As such, it should be subject to question, and apologetics (good apologetics) delves deeply into this matter.

We naturally tend to think of evidence and the chances of this or that as occurring in terms of probability. One of the most important, foundational works in probability theory was Laplace's "Essai philosophique dur les probabilites" or "Essay on the philosophy of probabilities." Apart from gambling, much of probability theory was philosophical and (thanks in part to modern physics) the philosophy of probability has returned in full force. Lot's of people aware of Bayesian analysis are entirely unfamiliar with Bayesian epistemology or the nuances of the philosophical Bayesian vs. Frequentist debate over the interpretation of probabilities. Frequentist interpretations of probability are easier to learn and even Bayes' theorem is taught in courses that assume a frequentists approach, and far more effective in idealized cases such as the toss of a fair coin. The frequentist position tells us that as the number of coin tosses increases, the distribution of heads vs. tails will tend towards a perfect 50/50 split. It takes this idealized situation and the assumes it to be true for individual cases.

Bayesian reasoning/epistemology makes no such assumptions. It is arguably mathematically proven to be the optimal way to update your current position given what you believe/know and new information (which is why it is all over fields related to machine learning, AI, computational intelligence, even neuroscience). A paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the chances of life existing anywhere else in the universe. The result was virtually 0. The frequentist approach takes as a given that since life arose here as it did, then it is at least minimally probable and therefore in a universe as vast as ours it is basically guaranteed to have occurred multiple times. There is no justification for this position. It is biased even in the case of a coin toss on an idealized model that, while useful, is not a good basis for epistemic justification.

That same method can be applied (and has been, basically all erroneously) to whether or not the universe was created. Theists argue that the results show evidence for a creator. The proper interpretation is that it shows we don't have enough information and can't conclude anything much like the case of extraterrestrial life.

Finally, there is the most basic, least reliable (in general), and least logically motivated reason to question whether there exists reasons to believe: experience. Assuming a position that admits only explanations that can be explained and leaves as unexplainable that which has yet to be explained makes such evidence negligible or nothing. In fact, even scientific case studies are generally regarded as extremely limited in value. Subjective experiences of the numinous or personal testimony of witnessed miracles have multiple explanations that are far more probable than that people actually experienced "god" or witnessed a miracle. At least, they are given one's particular worldview and how one justifies one's beliefs given new information. I have to acknowledge that certain changes in the way I evaluate evidence would drastically change how I evaluate evidence (making me anything from an anti-theist to a born-again Christian).

These are merely scattered shadows of summaries of the cliff notes of what exists in terms of the literature here. I cannot do justice to what has shaped both the sciences and "warranted belief" in the Christian god or the Deist god over several centuries.

All I can say is that if you are sure there isn't any evidence for religious beliefs, you will find that there isn't. And if you are sure there is, you'll find that evidence.

 

[Gerald Kelleher]

The reason is that we have now gone so far away from the physical world and so deeply into the mathematical world that we aren't actually able to create the kind of dividing line that Bohr did when he banished QM to the netherworld of Hilbert space.

It just becomes a namedropping exercise that may impress those who know no better but your notions are merely a progression of a disabling agenda that has been going on for centuries. I have watched over the last three decades when even physical conceptions are replaced by what is effectively unrestricted voodoo and bluffing -

"A Langrangian is not a physical thing;it is a mathematical thing - a kind of differential equation to be exact.But physics and maths are so closely connected these days that it is hard to separate the numbers from the things they describe.In fact,a month after [Philip] Morrison's remarks,Nobel Prize winner Burton Richter of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center said something that eerily echoed it:
Mathematics is a language that is used to describe nature" he said "But the theorists are beginning to think it is nature.To them the Langrangians are the reality " Discover Magazine ,1983

The Christians have flatlined and basically capitulated when they should really be dealing with a crucial component of belief as it links the individual to the Universal in a physical way.

 

[Bunyip]

It would have, were this the case. You defined immaterial as non-existent. There was a time when we thought physics was just about wrapped up, just a few details left to solve, and it turned out that the result was a theory of physics which (in the so-called Copenhagen or orthodox interpretation) holds that the subatomic systems we examine, and now even systems exhibiting macroscopic quantum coherence, have no relation to the physical world. They are mathematical functions. We can only speak of what we measure or observe. Of course, we call "observables" things that are never observed (more math functions) and are really just part of a schema to predict experimental outcomes given a particularly specified prepared system. The original formulation of quantum logic was a tremendous feat of brilliance and ingenuity by von Neumann and has served as a basis for subsequent models of the underlying logic of QM. This logic violates Aristotelian logic, in that it holds that "not A" and "A" can both be true or that "either A or not A" can be false. EPR and Bell set up a method to mathematically prove with minimal assumptions that if we could set up experiments in a certain way, we could show that there exists causal connections that cannot be explained by anything "local" (i.e., causal, according to classical causality). We've shown this many, many, times. Materialism and reductionism (two separate but frequently commonly held positions) involved both explanations in terms of "matter" (when matter was understood to be particles and the rest were just processes or effects due to interactions between matter) and the whole was the sum of its parts; the lower the level of an analysis of a system, the simpler things became until (it was hoped) we could explain everything in terms of the fundamental "parts" of all of reality.

Currently, it seems that the foundations of reality violate inviolate laws of logic that we aren't able to understand can exist as it defies all that is rational (how can we understand physics that tells us a thing has the property of being A & not A?), is ontologically vague (stems obtain "real" properties only when observed, and the properties depend upon the manner of observation), violates causality, and seems to be entirely alien to the world we experience (a realm where not only do basic laws of logic fail but distances don't matter, "no-time" effects are constant, and acausal behaviors are ubiquitous). Then we combined this with relativity and quantum field theory to obtain the standard model. What's interesting is that the standard model is fundamentally rooted in quantum mechanics (and the ways in which relativity, electrodynamics, etc., were combined to form the standard model were done almost entirely via mathematical work, not empirical study), and yet reading such literature one is struck by how seemingly certain, physical, and "real" everything becomes. We have all these particles with exact properties or nearly exact properties, yet they are built upon quantum mechanics which holds that the only thing we can say about systems we study is what we measure and how we can connect it with the specified preparation of the particular system studied.

The reason is that we have now gone so far away from the physical world and so deeply into the mathematical world that we aren't actually able to create the kind of dividing line that Bohr did when he banished QM to the netherworld of Hilbert space.

Things are no better at the macroscale. The increasing realization in the 20th and this century of the precision necessary for a few constants such that arbitrarily small departures from their exact values would make life impossible and the entire universe vastly different has prompted many physicists to adopt one or both of two approaches. On the one hand is the anthropic principle, which is simply a given in its weak form (it asserts that the universe exists in such a way that we are able to exist because we exist and can observe it). However, the next "level" (which is held by many physicists yet is not at all theistic or religious) is the abandonment of reductionism and the quest for fundamental principles. In the place of these long-held goals of physics is put the assumption that we are here so the first principle or fundamental principle we should start from is that there exists a universe in which we came to be such that we could observe it. Still stronger forms invoke deistic or other religious notions, but leave that aside here.

The other approach is multiverse theory. The oldest such theory is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that tried to connect the representations of physical systems with something that was actually "physical". The result was infinitely-many branching universes. Other motivations for multiverse theories grew out of astrophysics, theoretical physics, and cosmology. In particular, multiverse theory nicely explains how we happened to end up in a universe that is determined by a handful of constants that seem to be so radically precise that "fine-tuned" or "fine-tuning" is used even by physicists who don't actually mean there is or was any creator who actually finely-tuned these parameters. Physicists who don't like this idea of simply referring to fine-tuning because it suggests design but are still mystified about the apparent fine-tuning have used multiverse theories as a way to explain our universe as, given infinitely many universes ours just happened to hit the jackpot. Of course, as someone I don't recall remarked (mostly in jest), if the multiverse is truly all the uncountably infinitely many possible configurations of the universe, wouldn't that include heaven and hell?

To me, it is less about appeals to radical theories for various reasons (not just to "escape" design but more commonly for mathematical elegance), and more both the failure of reductionism in ways we never thought possible, a macroscopic world that emerges out of a quantum reality that is radically different from anything we experience, and the extent to which modern physics, perhaps the most venerable and "hardest" science reduced increasingly to mathematical theory rather than the predictions of Laplace, the optimism of Lord Kelvin, the advice of Philip von Jolly to his student Max Planck, etc., that all collapsed so thoroughly that built into our theory is an absolute limit to our knowledge.

Then there is the problem of consciousness. After Turing "invented" the computer (theoretically), it wasn't long before strong AI was just around the corner. And it has remained just around the corner for over 50 years. We know a lot about how the brain works. We know a lot about what is involved in various cognitive, perceptual, and regulatory processes in the brain. We are no closer to understanding how we understand than we were when Turing published his famous paper.

Then, of course, there is the bases of the interpretation for evidence and what one considers evidence to be. Rather than demonstrate this using religion or physics, I'll switch to clinical psychology, psychiatry, and related mental health fields. In the US, Australia, England, France, and most countries in the world hearing voices is a symptom of psychosis. In certain cultures, it is a common phenomenon that psychiatrists have fit into an umbrella category of culturally-specific "diseases" from running amok to ataque de nervios. People's worldview can literally kill them (as happened in one case I know of a man admitted to a hospital complaining of being cursed and despite ensuring he was properly cared for he died). Belief is enormously powerful and intricately tied to our worldviews. I have to consider the possibility that, given that I see those who ascribe to divine or magical influence this or that affect as deluding themselves or experiencing a kind of placebo affect, that my own worldview shapes my perception and evaluation of evidence just as strongly. As such, it should be subject to question, and apologetics (good apologetics) delves deeply into this matter.

We naturally tend to think of evidence and the chances of this or that as occurring in terms of probability. One of the most important, foundational works in probability theory was Laplace's "Essai philosophique dur les probabilites" or "Essay on the philosophy of probabilities." Apart from gambling, much of probability theory was philosophical and (thanks in part to modern physics) the philosophy of probability has returned in full force. Lot's of people aware of Bayesian analysis are entirely unfamiliar with Bayesian epistemology or the nuances of the philosophical Bayesian vs. Frequentist debate over the interpretation of probabilities. Frequentist interpretations of probability are easier to learn and even Bayes' theorem is taught in courses that assume a frequentists approach, and far more effective in idealized cases such as the toss of a fair coin. The frequentist position tells us that as the number of coin tosses increases, the distribution of heads vs. tails will tend towards a perfect 50/50 split. It takes this idealized situation and the assumes it to be true for individual cases.

Bayesian reasoning/epistemology makes no such assumptions. It is arguably mathematically proven to be the optimal way to update your current position given what you believe/know and new information (which is why it is all over fields related to machine learning, AI, computational intelligence, even neuroscience). A paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the chances of life existing anywhere else in the universe. The result was virtually 0. The frequentist approach takes as a given that since life arose here as it did, then it is at least minimally probable and therefore in a universe as vast as ours it is basically guaranteed to have occurred multiple times. There is no justification for this position. It is biased even in the case of a coin toss on an idealized model that, while useful, is not a good basis for epistemic justification.

That same method can be applied (and has been, basically all erroneously) to whether or not the universe was created. Theists argue that the results show evidence for a creator. The proper interpretation is that it shows we don't have enough information and can't conclude anything much like the case of extraterrestrial life.

Finally, there is the most basic, least reliable (in general), and least logically motivated reason to question whether there exists reasons to believe: experience. Assuming a position that admits only explanations that can be explained and leaves as unexplainable that which has yet to be explained makes such evidence negligible or nothing. In fact, even scientific case studies are generally regarded as extremely limited in value. Subjective experiences of the numinous or personal testimony of witnessed miracles have multiple explanations that are far more probable than that people actually experienced "god" or witnessed a miracle. At least, they are given one's particular worldview and how one justifies one's beliefs given new information. I have to acknowledge that certain changes in the way I evaluate evidence would drastically change how I evaluate evidence (making me anything from an anti-theist to a born-again Christian).

These are merely scattered shadows of summaries of the cliff notes of what exists in terms of the literature here. I cannot do justice to what has shaped both the sciences and "warranted belief" in the Christian god or the Deist god over several centuries.

All I can say is that if you are sure there isn't any evidence for religious beliefs, you will find that there isn't. And if you are sure there is, you'll find that evidence.

If you re-post a brief summary I will read it. I scanned it, but no relevance to the discussion in hand was apparent.