The God Hypothesis

[Zhavric]

Quote by: Kamehameha34 Remember, you are trying to prove that a god does not exist, or at least that's the position you've taken in the OP.

"God does not exist" =/= "The god hypothesis is subject to scientific inquiry, unsupported, and contradicts existing known claims."

Subtle, but important difference... one that I have little doubt you'll ignore or fallaciously re-write.

I'm merely defending that the claim is unknown, so I don't have to prove anything for theists.

How is the claim "unknown"?

[Kamehameha34]

Quote by: Zhavric You have failed to quote the text you consider to be the "appeal to ridicule". I'll give you another chance as it looks like you misunderstood the request.

Read my post again.

Of course it is. Your job is to prove the god hypothesis is possible. Theists have to prove it's true.

No. I don't have to prove anything, you're the one with the position making the positive claim. The god hypothesis doesn't default to impossible.

As I stated before, you excel like few others at ignoring evidence.

I'm pretty good at ignoring "evidence" thrice disproven, or not proposed at all.

Support your claim. I don't have time for this style over substance bullshit. If you can't back up your argument without personal attacks at my intelligence, you have no place in a debate forum.

[Jagged]

I bought that book 3 days ago, so I'm gonna read it before i reply. :)

[Kamehameha34]

Quote by: Zhavric "God does not exist" =/= "The god hypothesis is subject to scientific inquiry, unsupported, and contradicts existing known claims." Subtle, but important difference... one that I have little doubt you'll ignore or fallaciously re-write.

Good thing I don't hold that the god hypothesis is supported, just as I hold that the negative isn't supported.

You really need to learn what an agnostic is. Also, you've yet to provide any unfaltering evidence against any claim of a god. The claim is, therefore, unknown.

How is the claim "unknown"?

*Points back*

You obviously can't prove that a god doesn't exist.

*Points at Italy*

They obviously can't prove that a god exists.

[Zhavric]

Good thing I don't hold that the god hypothesis is supported, just as I hold that the negative isn't supported.

You, CC and Fonceai are part of the volconvo.com "know-nothings". Anything that could threaten your cherished assertion that god is possible is automatically "unknown" no matter how well established by science.

PM me if you have an argument that's got something more than "what if?" as evidence.

[Autolykos]

If I may play to the other side for the moment...

Zhavric, is there any empirical evidence that suggests the universe (i.e. what we call "reality" or "existence") was not created (i.e. set into motion) by an intelligent entity from outside?

- Rob

[Zhavric]

Quote by: Autolykos Zhavric, is there any empirical evidence that suggests the universe (i.e. what we call "reality" or "existence") was not created (i.e. set into motion) by an intelligent entity from outside?

That's a highly "complex" assertion because it raises as more questions than it answers. What is outside our universe & how did it get to be intelligent? If it's outside our universe, how does it interact with our own universe? To date, we only have evidence of our own universe; to delve outside our universe is to delve into the hypothetical (or at best theoretical).

Think of it this way:

God is irreducably complex & shows all the signs of having an intelligent creator. So, what created god?

God isn't irreducably complex. What natural process lead to god's existence and how did that process start?

If we take the stance "god always existed" then why not just say "the universe always existed" and eliminate the need for a god hypothesis?

Too many questions issues & problems to be a valid hypothesis.

[Autolykos]

Ah, there we have it. Multiplication of hypotheses. Ockham's Razor cuts the idea of God off from the universe. As far as we know, that is.

Good show.

- Rob

[Kamehameha34]

Quote by: Zhavric You, CC and Fonceai are part of the volconvo.com "know-nothings". Anything that could threaten your cherished assertion that god is possible is automatically "unknown" no matter how well established by science. PM me if you have an argument that's got something more than "what if?" as evidence.

And anything that could threaten your assertion that Africa isn't inhabited by elephants is immediately "unknown".

Oh wait, you never made that claim?

Guess it's a bad idea to apply claims to people that didn't make them. Not only did you do that, you attacked these claims with demonstrably faulty arguments.

I provided a definition. You could not disprove it. You have failed.

[Zhavric]

Quote by: Kamehameha34 I provided a definition.

The definition provided in the god hypothesis is straightforward enough and applies to nearly any blind-faith-spawned agnostic incarnation of god you can imagine. All of the many definitions of god you / Fonceai / CC have offered all suffer from the flaw of the god hypothesis.

[Kamehameha34]

A conscious universal creator - Explain how you know that one couldn't exist, then?

[nm420]

Quote by: Kamehameha34 A conscious universal creator - Explain how you know that one couldn't exist, then?

The whole point of a scientific hypothesis is that you assume, by default, that it is not true. It is on the burden of the investigator to show the hypothesis is true. The god hypothesis posits that a God exists, with the various qualities described above. It is either true or not true, we do not allow any wishy-washiness here. In order to ascertain the verity of the hypothesis, we make a bunch of observations and see how well they sync up with the idea.

What sorts of evidence might we expect if a Creator existed, that listened to our prayers and acted on them, that exerted His will to bring about various events for the greater good of mankind? We would certainly expect a lot more than we observe. We would observe miracles the kinds of which are described in the Bible, events which defy everything we think we know about the world. You see how this starts to circle back on itself, but the whole reason for that is because the observable world does follow orderly patterns, of which some we have deduced and of which an uncountable number have still yet to be discovered. The various laws of physics would be broken every now and again if there existed some omnipotent God who exerted some sort of personal will on the natural world. But we don't see that happening; the laws of physics we call laws because we have never observed them to not happen. This is exactly the kind of evidence you would look for to assert that this omnipotent God does not exist. We have millenia of such evidence, and scant in favor of God's existence.

If you believe in the power of deductive reasoning to uncover truth (and if you don't, think about the computer you're sitting at right now and how it came to be), it should be clear that there is no reason to believe in the version of God described by the various religions of the world and attacked by Dawkins. The first chapter or two of his book does describe the "God" alluded to by some of our greatest kinds and how that is not by any means the sort of omnipotent, omniscient supernatural being with a will, but rather a convenient metaphor for the universe and all of its trappings. For several years, this is the thing that I called God when I denied being an atheist (perhaps due to some unwillingness to discard the garments of my previous life), but Dawkins gives a decent argument as to why giving this conception the name of God is misleading, and even harmful, given the general consensus of God as some man in the clouds looking down upon us all, making a list and checking it twice. I know many may not think of God in such simplistic terms anymore, or at least have convinced themselves they don't, yet an honest reading of the monotheistic scriptures cannot come away with any other conclusion; even talk of some Creator speaks of a being with intent and the power to act upon it. (At least belief in a Creator which created the universe and then sat back to enjoy the creation, without ever meddling in it again, does not have a whole lot of observable evidence against it; but at the same time, it offers so very little that other scientific hypotheses could easily surpass it in terms of usefulness.)

Further, if one wishes to assert that there is a God, only that it is beyond the realm of natural inquiry, it seems patently absurd to claim one could know anything about it. Particularly any of the moral codes it prescribes. We of the natural world can obviously know nothing of the supernatural, including its existence.

[Kamehameha34]

The whole point of a scientific hypothesis is that you assume, by default, that it is not true. It is on the burden of the investigator to show the hypothesis is true.

Just as we'd assume that the claim "there is no god" is not true, for the purposes of experimentation.

The claim is unknown. Nothing, in logic, defaults to false.

[Jack]

A conscious universal creator - Explain how you know that one couldn't exist, then?

All our current knowledge suggests that consciousness is a function of our brains, which are physical in nature...meat. We have no evidence to suggest that consciousness exists in non-corporeal beings, and much to suggest it doesn't. So to be conscious according to our understanding of the term, this creator god you suppose would have to posses a physical brain.
Of course you can now suppose consciousness that doesn't require a brain to house it, in which case you're redefining the way we understand nature to work and making your argument undebatable.

[Kamehameha34]

We have no evidence to suggest that consciousness exists in non-corporeal beings, and much to suggest it doesn't.

Nothing in my provided definition suggested non-corporeality.

[Jack]

Then your hypothetical gods must have physical bodies, and evidence of their existence should be fairly easy to provide.

[Kamehameha34]

Hardly. Tangibility has nothing to do with falsifiability. Just look at Russel's teapot.

[nilan3000]

The one thing I dont get about God is, if it is so important to him that we beleive in him, why does he not just appear out of our windows as a 100 foot image and say "look at me, i exist". That would make it much easier for people to beleive in him instead of sending us his tireless list of prophets.

There are only a few possible suggestions to this:

He does not care whether we beleive in him or not (in which case what most religions teach us about God is untrue).

He is not that smart (in which case he cant be bloody God!).

He does not exist (which is the possibility that seems the most possible).

[ItsDarts]

Quote by: Kamehameha34 Hardly. Tangibility has nothing to do with falsifiability. Just look at Russel's teapot.

HUH??? What does Russels tea pot have to do with this? RTP was an atheistic analogy to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies with the skeptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religion.

Ish is just trying to get you to define how consciousness can exist without meat? The only answer I can think of is a computer that's developed self awareness, but even this would have physical properties that could be detected.

[Zhavric]

Quote by: ItsDarts HUH??? What does Russels tea pot have to do with this? RTP was an atheistic analogy to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies with the skeptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religion. Ish is just trying to get you to define how consciousness can exist without meat? The only answer I can think of is a computer that's developed self awareness, but even this would have physical properties that could be detected.

To build on this, consciousness / intelligence is evidenced to come from a gradual process with countless subtle steps. It's something that comes very "late" in existence. Not only do we have zero evidence of non-meat consciousness, we have no evidence that consciousness happens at the beginning of things.

I think I shall start a thread about Russel's Tea Pot...