Atheists believe in miracles more than believers

[PureX]

I did not 'insist' on any such thing as 'random chance'. And you ignored my actual point completely.

Baseless assertion and utterly shameless special pleading. And "transcendent of any of the logical 'rules' and limitations that apply to existence as we comprehend it." means about as much, and contains exactly as much reasoning, as "it's magic, innit?"

It's you who argued from intent, and it doesn't matter if you'd consider it a 'being' or not, that's why I put 'being' in scare quotes.

I'm just using your own 'reasoning' that you applied to the universe. You're now trying to excuse your preferred 'answer from your own argument by basically claiming "but...but... it's magic!"

It's just comical.

No, what you're doing is trying to fight the logical necessity of this great existential mystery source because it makes you think of "God", and for whatever reason that thought truly repulses you. So much so that you can't be bothered to try and understand anything I post, because you are SO intent on rejecting it by any means you can muster.

 

[ratiocinator]

Silly me. I checked one more time to see if I'd get an apology. Instead you double down on mean.

The philosophical basis of science consists of things like empiricism, realism, rationalism, falsifiability, etc. It was Karl Popper who was highly influential in establishing the modern philosophy of science. Perhaps you need to learn as much about philosophy as you clearly do about science.

 

[ratiocinator]

No, what you're doing is trying to fight...

Funny. Seriously, you've posted nothing that's worth fighting against. It's more of comedy value than something I'd have to think hard about, it's so obviously illogical and riddled with logical fallacies and blind faith assumptions.

...the logical necessity of this great existential mystery source because...

You don't even seem to be paying attention to what I say. I've repeatedly said that I accept there is a mystery, it's you trying to read endless things into a total unknown that's making me laugh (not fight).

I've also posted many times that the mystery faces a logical trilemma:

• Circular explanation, in which the explanation presupposes the truth of that very explanation.
• Regressive explanation, in which each explanation requires a further explanation, ad infinitum.
• Dogmatic explanation, in which some explanation is asserted rather than defended.

You seem to be going for the third option and trying to use meaningless 'magic spell' phrases (such as "transcendent of any of the logical 'rules' and limitations that apply to existence as we comprehend it") to try to disguise it or somehow exclude it from logical scrutiny (special pleading fallacy). You cannot possibly logically argue for something that defies logic.

I'm quite happy to live with a total mystery that I can see no prospect of ever solving, while you seem to be desperate to make it mean something you'd like. You really need to study more logic, basic probability, stop being so arrogantly confident of your own opinions and reasoning abilities, and perhaps read more about what has been said on the subject outside your bubble.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Münchhausen trilemma - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Above list adapted from second link.)

...because it makes you think of "God", and for whatever reason that thought truly repulses you. So much so that you can't be bothered to try and understand anything I post, because you are SO intent on rejecting it by any means you can muster.

You also need to stop assuming that you're a mind-reader. You're not.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

you still are trying to insist that all this complexity occurred by random chance.

Disagree. We're saying that we don't know that reality was intended or designed, not insisting otherwise.

You're claiming it was based in observing complexity in the universe, and to explain that you introduce something else complex to account for it and give that complexity a pass that you deny nature. That the fallacy called special pleading, or unjustified double standard.

Even when you can go to any gambling casino and witness for yourself just how difficult it is for a complex AND specific result to occur by randomized chance.

Trump's two casino bankruptcies notwithstanding, the house winning is pretty much guaranteed. Individual events might be difficult to predict, but pooling large numbers of them isn't.

it would by necessity be transcendent of any of the logical 'rules' and limitations that apply to existence as we comprehend it.

You simply declare that. This intelligence isn't exempt from natural law by fiat. Does this entity maintain structural integrity or does it, its intelligence, and its agency (power) dissipate like clouds? If you say the former, then it needs some higher order of natural law to exist, persist, and act.

Have you heard the argument based in the idea that the physical constants of reality are fine-tuned? That's another argument that requires that the deity is subject to higher laws - laws that constrain it to discover and design a reality according to those parameters. That's not an omnipotent deity nor one responsible for all reality, since it is subject to reality itself.

This whole area of inventing reasons for why a deity is exempt from nature and reason and doesn't occupy any local time or space - i.e., is supernatural - is an irrational and mutually contradictory set of unsubstantiated claims intended to explain why something that can't be detected exists anyway. Real things are part of nature. If gods exist, they exist naturally. If they are causally connected to reality, they are just another part of it and are detectable.

So we would not be able to logically presume anything about this mysterious transcendent source.

You do. You called it intelligent and the source of visible nature. I do, too, as you just saw. If it exists, that means it exists somewhere while passing through consecutive instants of time, which is what existence implies and requires.

No so. Logically nothingness is perfect, eternal, absolutely self-sufficient and requires no source.

Yet you believe an intelligent source for our world exists anyway. That god must be in as much awe that it or anything around it exists as the rest of are that we exist. and it must feel quite fortunate exist.

I am not hypothesizing an "intelligent designer".

It sure sounds like you are. You've referred to an intelligence that you claim is the source of natural complexity. Why are you now seemingly contradicting that?

No one has any answers

That was a response to, "Whatever answers believers give for their gods existence can apply to what the god is thought to have created, and whatever reasons they can give for the universe needing a source apply to gods as well." Your comment is correct but doesn't address mine. Please agree, or if you don't agree with some part of that, present your falsifying counterargument, without which you can't persuade a critically thinking empiricist.

"Odds" (chance/probability) aren't going to apply to the source of all possibility and impossibility.

I asked, "What are the odds of a god existing by accident?" Once again, you invoke special pleading and simply make an unargued, unevidenced claim.

what do you mean by extraordinary?

In the context of Sagan's Razor , it means that the more unlikely the claim, the more robust the evidence needed to support it will be.

according to quick Google search, there are 127,000,000 people living in Mexico and only 1.2% of them are native English speakers,…………. So an English speaker in Mexico is pretty extraordinary.

That's a million-and-a-half people and requires only that a native English speaker move to Mexico. Claiming that that can or has happened is not extraordinary.

Contrariwise, to my knowledge, none of us nor anybody else has ever been resurrected.

Anyone who lived in that area and in that time, or anyone who knew someone who did would have been a well-informed person…………………..this person would be in a position to know it the reports are true or not.

Disagree. How many of the people around you now do you call well-informed? Anyone/everyone?

But that misses my point. Nobody is well informed enough to witness what looks like a dead body coming back to life and be able to conclude that that is in fact what they are seeing. The magician David Copperfield created an illusion in which the Statue of Liberty disappeared. Well informed people know it was an illusion, and that claiming that it wasn't is making an extraordinary claim. Structures that large don't vanish for magicians. And if a miracle occurred and a god made it disappear, you'd need to provide more evidence than the magician did.

I argue that The authors of the gospels where well informed on the basis that all (or at least most) of the testable claims that they report are true

They claimed that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, turned water to wine and loaves to fish, raised somebody from the dead and then was resurrected himself. None of those claims are testable or can be called true.

What incentives did the writers of the gospels had to make up stories?

They were promoting something valuable to them to people that would believe such claims.

why do you think that being anonymous is relevant?.

It's not just anonymous. I'm anonymous to you and you to me. Unlike you with me and me with you, we have no knowledge regarding these people's intelligence or character. All we know is that somebody said that several such people claimed to see a resurrection - an extraordinary claim not just because it's unusual - so are large asteroidal impacts on earth - but because it unknown to have ever occurred and we have good reason to consider it impossible:

Cells three days dead aren't metabolizing. Thier membranes leak contents out and allow surrounding substances in. The enzymes and gates in those cell walls fall out or apart. Other subcellular structures beside the cell membrane such as ribosomes and mitochondria begin dissolving. This is irreversible. If you want to make those ingredients into a living cell, you need to build it de novo from them.

There are posters on RF that I would believe until given a reason not to, or at the bare minimum, can make me question my conclusions when they disagree with them simply because I know enough about those people to take their opinions seriously. There are also others that I wouldn't believe if their claims seemed wrong to me. They'd need to give me reasons to believe them in the form of sound, evidenced arguments. This is why I included this as point [4]. These alleged biblical witnesses fall into the category of people who should not be believed even tentatively without extraordinary evidence.

 

[leroy]

I see that you either did not read or did understand the link that I gave you. Yes, energy enters and leaves the Earth all of the time. That is one of the traits of a closed system.

I learned something new, I was wrong I thought that closed and isolated systems where the same


However I still don’t understand why you think it is a relevant point?

Because you used a poor argument that demonstrated that you

what argument is that?

did not understand even the basics of thermodynamics.

Having a mistake on how to call something is a semantic mistake ………. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics

If you mistakenly call Pluto a planet instead of a dwarf planet…………….nobody would accuse you for not understanding the heliocentric model ……… people would grant that it was just a vocabulary mistake

I can point out tyour errors. I cannot think for you.

And I accept my errors

 

[leroy]

I see that you either did not read or did understand the link that I gave you. Yes, energy enters and leaves the Earth all of the time. That is one of the traits of a closed system.

I learned something new, I was wrong I thought that closed and isolated systems where the same


However I still don’t understand why you think it is a relevant point?

Because you used a poor argument that demonstrated that you

what argument is that?

did not understand even the basics of thermodynamics.

Having a mistake on how to call something is a semantic mistake ………. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics

If you mistakenly call Pluto a planet instead of a dwarf planet…………….nobody would accuse you for not understanding the heliocentric model ……… people would grant that it was just a vocabulary mistake

I can point out tyour errors. I cannot think for you.

And I accept my errors

 

[leroy]

I see that you either did not read or did understand the link that I gave you. Yes, energy enters and leaves the Earth all of the time. That is one of the traits of a closed system.

I learned something new, I was wrong I thought that closed and isolated systems where the same


However I still don’t understand why you think it is a relevant point?

Because you used a poor argument that demonstrated that you

what argument is that?

did not understand even the basics of thermodynamics.

Having a mistake on how to call something is a semantic mistake ………. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics

If you mistakenly call Pluto a planet instead of a dwarf planet…………….nobody would accuse you for not understanding the heliocentric model ……… people would grant that it was just a vocabulary mistake

I can point out tyour errors. I cannot think for you.

And I accept my errors

 

[Subduction Zone]

I learned something new, I was wrong I thought that closed and isolated systems where the same


However I still don’t understand why you think it is a relevant point?


what argument is that?


Having a mistake on how to call something is a semantic mistake ………. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics

If you mistakenly call Pluto a planet instead of a dwarf planet…………….nobody would accuse you for not understanding the heliocentric model ……… people would grant that it was just a vocabulary mistake



And I accept my errors

Okay, I am not playing the way back game. You made the error of trying to use thermodynamics against evolution when if you understand evolution it is a result of thermodynamics. Evolution increases the rate of the loss of energy available for work, and that is what the Second Law is all about.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

More childish foot-stamping about you being right and everybody else being wrong. No hint of reasoning or the tiniest scrap of evidence.

What's the point?

I'd be interested to know that too, but I can't see one that makes any sense.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Funny. Seriously, you've posted nothing that's worth fighting against. It's more of comedy value than something I'd have to think hard about, it's so obviously illogical and riddled with logical fallacies and blind faith assumptions.


You don't even seem to be paying attention to what I say. I've repeatedly said that I accept there is a mystery, it's you trying to read endless things into a total unknown that's making me laugh (not fight).

I've also posted many times that the mystery faces a logical trilemma:

• Circular explanation, in which the explanation presupposes the truth of that very explanation.
• Regressive explanation, in which each explanation requires a further explanation, ad infinitum.
• Dogmatic explanation, in which some explanation is asserted rather than defended.

You seem to be going for the third option and trying to use meaningless 'magic spell' phrases (such as "transcendent of any of the logical 'rules' and limitations that apply to existence as we comprehend it") to try to disguise it or somehow exclude it from logical scrutiny (special pleading fallacy). You cannot possibly logically argue for something that defies logic.

I'm quite happy to live with a total mystery that I can see no prospect of ever solving, while you seem to be desperate to make it mean something you'd like. You really need to study more logic, basic probability, stop being so arrogantly confident of your own opinions and reasoning abilities, and perhaps read more about what has been said on the subject outside your bubble.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Münchhausen trilemma - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Above list adapted from second link.)


You also need to stop assuming that you're a mind-reader. You're not.

I've noticed there is a lot of that not paying attention to what others say from several sources here. Makes trying to discuss and debate hardly worth while and I'm even beginning to lose interest in trying to figure how a person can come to think in some of the special ways I see depicted here.

I get more out of reading posts of yours, @It Aint Necessarily So, @Subduction Zone, @gnostic and @mikkel_the_dane than anything that several others have to repeat.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Well, if I understand you correct then your example rests on what assumptions and other forms of reasoning and auxilary evidence are accepted for beyound that corn field.

Now I learned this from the soft end of social science as for what in the Nordic countries is termed social pedagogy.
It relates to how to understand what is in effect real and I will start with an example from philosophy of science.
Are electrons real? There are 3 schools on that. They are real as the instruments show the effect of something real. It is not real, as we can't see them. Just do the experiments and don't worry about real.

That relates to what is real about being a human, because what you assume a human is and what evidence you accept will color your view.
E.g. there at least 5 different schools of thought on how to help a human with a psychiatric diagnosis.
- Psychodynamik
- Cognitive
- Exsistential
- Systemic narrative
- Anti psychiatry

Now the point is that in a sense none of them are really true or with evidence in the strong sense. Rather they represent different views on the situation of a human and have different relevance depending on the actual life situation of the human.
And here is the joke as back to real and in effect what is evidence? It depends on what you think it is.
Now there is still an objective reality, but you can't remove the human cogntive element.

So here is a philosophical text on Cognitive Relativism:

Cognitive Relativism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

iep.utm.edu

"

• “Reason is whatever the norms of the local culture believe it to be”. (Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 235.)
• “The choice between competing theories is arbitrary, since there is no such thing as objective truth.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II (London, 1963), p. 369f.)
• “There is no unique truth, no unique objective reality” (Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), p. 84.)
• “There is no substantive overarching framework in which radically different and alternative schemes are commensurable” (Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 11-12.)
• “There is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours—uses in one area of enquiry” (Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 23.)

"

So to end it, there are parts of the world which are objective, but when we look closer, even in science there are cognitive assumptions for what evidence and all the related terms are.

Regards
Mikkel

You do have to know much about the biology of the beetles in question and their interactions with corn. As well as corn. There is much evidence that goes into the development of economic thresholds that go beyond the simplified version I presented.

I'd like to come back to this when I'm more fully rested and have the proper time to devote to it. But interesting even in my sleep-deprived thinking.

 

[Bharat Jhunjhunwala]

Yeah, that is your understanding.
I don't believe in an "us" for the objective of this inquiry or that "we".

Let me substitute you and me for us. Whether you believe in us or not. I request you to answer whether the objective will decide what is objective and what is subjective. That is my understanding, I would be happy. I'm sorry if I use the word, we in a happy and cooperative sense. I shall try not to use it in future.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Let me substitute you and me for us. Whether you believe in us or not. I request you to answer whether the objective will decide what is objective and what is subjective. That is my understanding, I would be happy. I'm sorry if I use the word, we in a happy and cooperative sense. I shall try not to use it in future.

In my understanding the objective can do it in one sense, but it is only knowable as subjective.
In the end I am a cognitive relativist for knowing the objective, yet I believe in it.

But for certain aspects of the objective you and I are not one. We are same, similar and/or different for same/similar/different senses of understanding.

 

[leroy]

Okay, I am not playing the way back game. You made the error of trying to use thermodynamics against evolution

What? When did I ever use thermodynamics against evolution?............what are you talking about? Aren’t you confusing me with a different user?

when if you understand evolution it is a result of thermodynamics. Evolution increases the rate of the loss of energy available for work, and that is what the Second Law is all about.

If you say so, no comments on my part, I don t feel well informed to ether agree nor disagree with that

 

[leroy]

In the context of Sagan's Razor , it means that the more unlikely the claim, the more robust the evidence needed to support it will be.

Ok an how unlikely is a resurrection in this context?....lets break it down

1 how likely is the existence of God

2 given the existence of God, how unlikely are miracles occurring every once in a while?

3 given that miracles occur every once in a while, how unlikely is the specific miracle of the resurrection.

Would you say that any of these is “very unlikelly”? if yes……..how do you know?

That's a million-and-a-half people and requires only that a native English speaker move to Mexico. Claiming that that can or has happened is not extraordinary.

Granted, while it is more less unlikely that a randomly selected person in Mexico is a naive English speaker …………. Given your testimony, other alternatives such as you are lying, or you are being being delusional, or some other alternative is far more unlikely. Agree?

Contrariwise, to my knowledge, none of us nor anybody else has ever been resurrected.

That is not a big of a deal, many events only happen once.

Disagree. How many of the people around you now do you call well-informed? Anyone/everyone?

But that misses my point. Nobody is well informed enough to witness what looks like a dead body coming back to life and be able to conclude that that is in fact what they are seeing. The magician David Copperfield created an illusion in which the Statue of Liberty disappeared. Well informed people know it was an illusion, and that claiming that it wasn't is making an extraordinary claim. Structures that large don't vanish for magicians. And if a miracle occurred and a god made it disappear, you'd need to provide more evidence than the magician did.

I agree, the difference between you and I is that I already think that there is good evidence for the existence of God…………which would be analogous to having prior evidence for the existence of real magicians that can really disappear things

I agree that form the point of view of someone who thinks that the existence of God is very unlikely, miracles and resurrections would also be very unlikely………..and no amount of historical documents would be good enough to trump that intrinsic improbability.

But would you agree that from the point of view of someone who already thinks that the existence of God and miracles are probably ………the resurrection was not very unlikely and the historical documents that we have (gospels Paul acts etc…. are good enough to justify believe in such an event?

They claimed that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, turned water to wine and loaves to fish, raised somebody from the dead and then was resurrected himself. None of those claims are testable or can be called true.

Would it be fair to consider as a probable historical fact that events that where interpreted as miracles occurred 2000 years ago?

They were promoting something valuable to them to people that would believe such claims.

It's not just anonymous. I'm anonymous to you and you to me. Unlike you with me and me with you, we have no knowledge regarding these people's intelligence or character. All we know is that somebody said that several such people claimed to see a resurrection - an extraordinary claim not just because it's unusual - so are large asteroidal impacts on earth - but because it unknown to have ever occurred and we have good reason to consider it impossible:

Cells three days dead aren't metabolizing. Thier membranes leak contents out and allow surrounding substances in. The enzymes and gates in those cell walls fall out or apart. Other subcellular structures beside the cell membrane such as ribosomes and mitochondria begin dissolving. This is irreversible. If you want to make those ingredients into a living cell, you need to build it de novo from them.

There are posters on RF that I would believe until given a reason not to, or at the bare minimum, can make me question my conclusions when they disagree with them simply because I know enough about those people to take their opinions seriously. There are also others that I wouldn't believe if their claims seemed wrong to me. They'd need to give me reasons to believe them in the form of sound, evidenced arguments. This is why I included this as point [4]. These alleged biblical witnesses fall into the category of people who should not be believed even tentatively without extraordinary evidence.

Would you say that there is good enough evidence to support the claim that the authors of the bible and early Christians honestly and sincerely believe that Jesus Resurrected?

Cells three days dead aren't metabolizing. Thier membranes leak contents out and allow surrounding substances in. The enzymes and gates in those cell walls fall out or apart. Other subcellular structures beside the cell membrane such as ribosomes and mitochondria begin dissolving. This is irreversible. If you want to make those ingredients into a living cell, you need to build it de novo from them.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if you are already open to the possibility of miracles

 

[Subduction Zone]

What? When did I ever use thermodynamics against evolution?............what are you talking about? Aren’t you confusing me with a different user?



If you say so, no comments on my part, I don t feel well informed to ether agree nor disagree with that

Okay, you did not quite get that far. You made a rather pointless statement that everyone agrees with. But that statement is often followed by creationists arguing against evolution based upon their lack of understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. I may have jumped the gun adn perhaps you had some other idea that you were supporting.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Ok an how unlikely is a resurrection in this context?....lets break it down
1 how likely is the existence of God
2 given the existence of God, how unlikely are miracles occurring every once in a while?
3 given that miracles occur every once in a while, how unlikely is the specific miracle of the resurrection.
Would you say that any of these is “very unlikelly”? if yes……..how do you know?

If by God you mean the god of Abraham, who Christians believe resurrected Christ, that deity doesn't exist. That god is said to have created the world and the first two human beings in six days. The possibility of that has been ruled out, so I can reject (2). If we accept that your god exists, then everything changes. And I don't accept that miracles ever happen, if by miracle we mean a suspension of the laws of nature.

We can also say that interventionist gods of any type ought to be detectable when they modify nature by modifying natural law supernaturally. If their intervention were resurrection, we ought to be able to confirm that resurrection actually occurred. If their intervention were revelation, it ought to be perfect. If their intervention was answering prayer, that would also be detectable. We can say that since we have none of that, the idea that such a god exists and modifies our reality is unlikely.

It's the noninterventionist deity like the deist god that we can make no comment about the likelihood of its existence, because we don't expect to find evidence for or against it having created our universe and then leaving it to evolve from an initial seed to what we see about us today.

it is more [or] less unlikely that a randomly selected person in Mexico is a naive English speaker

That's irrelevant. It's also unlikely that a randomly selected car is a Ferrari, but that doesn't make the claim that asserting that Ferraris exist extraordinary to the degree that claiming that a specific resurrection occurred.

I've never seen either a Ferrari or a resurrection in my Mexican village, but if you told me that one of each had been witnessed here, I'd find the claim about the Ferrari tenable but not the resurrection. Why? Because we know that Ferraris exist and can be driven here, so it's not incredible that that has happened recently, but we not only don't know that resurrections can occur, we have no adequately confirmed examples of even one and we have strong technical evidence that they can't.

Given your testimony, other alternatives such as you are lying, or you are being delusional, or some other alternative is far more unlikely. Agree?

Yes. My claim is not extraordinary. You've already confirmed that there are over a million of us native English speakers that have moved to Mexico.

That is not a big of a deal. Many events only happen once.

I can only think of one category for that - the initial expansion of the universe with its symmetry breaking, force and particle formation, inflation. and the universe becoming transparent. And I can't say that initial expansion hasn't happened countless other times in other universes, but there is no evidence for that today.

The sun and earth formed only once, but stars and planets formed commonly. You were born just once, but there have been billions of human births.

But to our knowledge, resurrection has never occurred. To believe otherwise, one needs faith.

I agree that form the point of view of someone who thinks that the existence of God is very unlikely, miracles and resurrections would also be very unlikely………..and no amount of historical documents would be good enough to trump that intrinsic improbability.

That's not how I would word that. From the perspective of a person who has no reason to believe in supernaturalism and who has never seen good evidence that one ever occurred, there is no reason to believe that one could or has occurred.

But would you agree that from the point of view of someone who already thinks that the existence of God and miracles are probable ………the resurrection was not very unlikely

I won't disagree with that. If you think the god of Abraham exists and that the Bible is reliable, then you would believe the report in it and call the resurrection more than likely. You'd consider it fact.

Would it be fair to consider as a probable historical fact that events that were interpreted as miracles occurred 2000 years ago?

Yes. It's also "fair to consider as a probable historical fact" that most if not all such interpretations were errors. nor that people might invent a resurrection and alleged witnesses to promote a new religion.

Would you say that there is good enough evidence to support the claim that the authors of the bible and early Christians honestly and sincerely believe that Jesus Resurrected?

I expect the first person to suggest that one had occurred and also that it was witnessed was Paul as he was embellishing the story of Jesus' life, and he knew that he was embellishing that biography, but that since then, billions have believed it as you do notwithstanding the paucity of evidentiary support for that belief or the evidence that is unlikely to be correct.

Once faith takes over, the reasoning faculty stops trying to discover what is correct and is tasked with finding whatever it can to support that belief. That's not the best way to decide what's true and what is not. That's a good way to acquire false and unfalsifiable beliefs, which I and many others who want to hold only correct beliefs consider to be undesirable. Only critical thinking can defend one from that.

I guess that you have no interest in addressing my comment to you maybe a week ago about the definition of evidence and the distinction between what is evidence and what it is evidence of. I would have enjoyed that discussion, but you've never been interested in what others want from you, just what you want from them.

The consequences of that are that I won't respond to you just because you address me. The topic has to be interesting to me. That's not my attitude toward posters who engage me in discussions of my choosing. I feel like I owe them the courtesy of returning the favor.

 

[leroy]

Okay, you did not quite get that far. You made a rather pointless statement that everyone agrees with. But that statement is often followed by creationists arguing against evolution based upon their lack of understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. I may have jumped the gun adn perhaps you had some other idea that you were supporting.

You made a rather pointless statement that everyone agrees with

What statement is that?

Are you sure you are not confusing me with someone else?..................I am not even making comments related to evolution in this thread …………..and I don t think that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics

 

[leroy]

If by God you mean the god of Abraham, who Christians believe resurrected Christ, that deity doesn't exist. That god is said to have created the world and the first two human beings in six days. The possibility of that has been ruled out, so I can reject (2). If we accept that your god exists, then everything changes. And I don't accept that miracles ever happen, if by miracle we mean a suspension of the laws of nature.

I just mean a “generic” type of God, a being that has the ability to perform miracles (do things that are impossible according to the natural laws of science)……………how unlikely is the existence of that type of god?

I am not expecting a specific number like 10% or 1% or 40%............. but a general idea would help.

1 would you put God in the same category than Santa Clause (someone that almost certainly doesn’t exist)

2 would you put god in the same category you would put Intelligent Aliens (perhaps they exist perhaps not, who knows)



3 somewhere in between? Santa clause and Aliens?



My response to most of your points depends largely on your reply to this, which is why I would rather to reply after knowing and understanding your answer on this specific point



*and yes, if you think something valuable can flow from the post about evidence, I will respond to it.............I apologize for ignoring it, sometimes I get like 8 different people answering to me and I simply cherry pick 3 or 4

 

[ratiocinator]

I just mean a “generic” type of God, a being that has the ability to perform miracles (do things that are impossible according to the natural laws of science)……………how unlikely is the existence of that type of god?

Since there is zero evidence for it, and zero sound logical arguments, it's extremely unlikely, as is any other blind guess in a space of possibilities that is vast, if not actually infinite.