MNb wrote on 06/12/10 at 22:05:20:
Mortal Games wrote on 06/08/10 at 11:08:13:
What I said was not to be read to the letter but to the spirit of the problem and any intelligent person knows this and I know you know!
Then you know something about me I don't know myself. No way I can subscribe this. The whole point of Popper is that there is an essential difference between proof and confirmation. Essentially you accuse Dawkins of
sloppy usage of words with the goal of giving his personal opinions an appearance of scientific objectivity. I hope you realise that is close to scientific fraud. Note your logic implies this; as I haven't read his books it's not what I say.
Exactly this accusation has been levelled on Dawkins countless times, and now that I've looked at the other side (I used to be a 100% Dawkins fan) I must say it's with some justification. I still think he's right on a lot of things, but he sometimes argues poorly (though eloquently and persuading many) for his points and I suspect he relies on his intuitive judgement more than he wants to admit.
MNb wrote on 06/12/10 at 22:05:20:
Stigma wrote on 06/08/10 at 14:16:14:
The point is that an omniscient, omnipresent and perfectly good God is a worse fit with the evil we see in the world than alternative conceptions of God (evil, indifferent to human suffering, or simply not there).
This means you temporarily accept that an oop god exists. (Btw, I am not surely about this myself, so go ahead and show that I am wrong).
I might say I accept the existence of such a God for the sake of argument. We can't really discuss how likely the existence of God is if we have ruled out the possibility from the outset! That would be very unscientific
MNb wrote on 06/12/10 at 22:05:20:
Stigma wrote on 06/08/10 at 14:16:14:
I find there are suspiciously many references to doubts and even crises of faith in religious literature. Maybe they don't have such solid evidence after all? Even Mother Teresa confessed to losing her faith.
They don't have any evidence. That does not mean there is evidence for the opposite.
No, but personal experience or feelings is a very common reason people give for believing. When I point out how capricious such experience and conviction based on it can be, the existence of God becomes a little bit less likely. A bit like Darwin taking away the argument from design as applied to biology. Step by tiny step the arguments for God get weaker.
MNb wrote on 06/12/10 at 22:05:20:
Stigma wrote on 06/08/10 at 14:16:14:
MNb wrote on 06/08/10 at 02:35:13:
Stigma wrote on 06/07/10 at 21:00:14:
The problem of natural evil/pain and pleasure (Paul Draper)
Same as the evil argument.
No, this argument is a bit more sophisticated. Draper's point is that the specific pattern of experienced pain and pleasure in the world fits perfectly with an evolutionary explanation.
I am not arguing this, how could I being an atheist myself. My point is that the pain/suffering argument suffers from the same flaw as the evil argument. There is no need to treat it separately.
What flaw? I think I may have missed your point here.
MNb wrote on 06/12/10 at 22:05:20:
Stigma wrote on 06/08/10 at 14:16:14:
"Gods ways are inscrutable" is almost the definition of unfalsifiability: It can solve every problem and therefore no problems whatsoever.
That's what I have been arguing this whole thread: you can't say anything significant about this subject with the aid of science exactly because of this reason.
That's like saying you can't say anything about Freudian psychoanalysis with the aid of science (another example of an unfalsifiable theory, as Popper pointed out). It sounds a bit backwards: If Freud is unscientific we should drop Freud, not science! An unfalsifiable theory has no explanatory value and therefore doesn't deserve our attention as a serious explanation of the world and a source of morality. So the shoe is really on the other foot: It's the religious folks who should be trying hard to put their ideas from the Bible, Koran, Bagavad Gita etc. in a falsifiable form, to get a hearing and participate in the real discussion. It's really a bit sad how many mistakenly see this unfalsifiability as a strength of religion rather than a flaw.
Though theism itself is unfalsifiable, many of the specific claims of the world's religions are of course testable in principle, and can be shown to fit well or poorly with the world around us.
MNb wrote on 06/12/10 at 22:05:20:
Trying to prove that god does not exist is just as hopeless. From a scientific and a philosophic point agnositicism is the only reasonable point of view. There can be reasons - see Kierkegaard once again - to have faith or not, but they are always subjective.
I'm certainly not trying to
prove that God does not exist, as I said earlier I don't think that's possible. The evidential arguments from evil can still tell us something about the
probability of God. It's very easy to lazily assume if we can't prove or disprove God, that atheism and theism must be about equally likely. Both Dawkins and Draper have pointed out that this is false: the options are not simply 0% (God certainly doesn't exist), 100% (God certainly exists) or 50%-50% ("even" agnosticism). Right now I would give God a 5% to 10% probability of existing, and that's low enough that I call myself an atheist. If we're intellectually honest there can be no 100% certain atheism. The question then becomes: How unlikely must the existence of God seem to someone before they stop being "agnostic" and become "atheists"?
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