You know, if you had just never replied at all, it would have been just as productive.
I'm remembering why I had you on ignore.
Something having to do with the Truth being Paineful to you no doubt.
Epistemologically, we have all of those things on a level playing field, so it's not really a straw man.
The straw man argument is arguing against man made "revealed" gods and claiming that's an argument against an unrevealed laissez-faire God.
Unless of course you can 'reveal' (lol) some evidence for any of them(presumably whatever god concept tickles your fancy) that sets them apart?
I've been arguing against there being evidence for any god forever. But the only one that isn't eliminated, by the elimination of hearsay, is said laissez-faire God.
My guess is that I can provide an equal portion of evidence for the existence of the Easter Bunny as you can for any deity, and without even posting
Which is the same a the lack of evidence for a spontaneous universe. You can show the Easter Bunny to be just as totally based on hearsay as the biblical God. That says nothing about the cause of the universe.
So is your God unrevealed, and what difference does that make? Lack of evidence is still a problem presumably? Does it mean you can believe what you like?
Atheists know you can't prove a negative, which is why the question is how come the universe? That puts the unrevealed God on a veritable equal footing with no god.
1. What evidence do you have FOR a Creator God?
2. What evidence do you have FOR other gods?
There is no evidence for either, though the revealed gods can be disproven or at least dismissed. The question is the source of the universe, which must necessarily an unrevealed, laissez-faire God, or no god.
Don't bother
Nobody can deny the existence of god
Dark matter and dark energy are invisible does it mean they don't exist??
Something that we can't see or sense doesn't necessarily mean that is non existent
It's been detected indirectly, like gravity, which we only recently discovered the gravity waves for.
Hi Paineful,
The free will argument is not based on sound reasoning, though. A deity with the intelligence and power ascribed to him by traditional western monotheistic religions could have easily created a humanity with the innate wisdom to be an enlightened species and still be free, thereby precluding us from bombing each other for instance NOT because we are not free but because we all recognize the folly and inhumanity of such an act and voluntarily refrain.
Being created with an "innate wisdom" is the same thing as saying we'd been preprogrammed to be wise. Ostensibly, the object is to give us an ego, and then see what we do with it--i.e. try to put our rights above the
equal of
all others or not. A legal/moral double standard is the root of all evil. The source of our free will is our full self-awareness, full due to the awareness of our inevitable, universal mortality.
This is a test which can only have meaning if we have free will.
"If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If not, it never was."--Johnathan Livingston Seagull
The free will argument essentially boils down to the premise, "People need to be stupid in order to be free." Quite the opposite is true, in fact.
That's similar to my definition of moral freedom: having the ability to be as dumb as you want,
on your own dime.