Probability of the existence of God

The probability of the existence of "god" is completely indeterminable.The problem is that there is no evidence of any deity's existence. The probability of any one deity existing, or any number of deities for that matter since they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, is exactly the same as the probability of an invisible, intangible pink unicorn existing right next to you.In the absence of any objective evidence whatsoever, all things are equally probable - which is to say, not very probable at all. Literally every deity that has ever been conceived for whom there is no objective evidence, every figment of your imagination, is equally possible and probable.This is the entire reason Atheists exist. If the probability of a deity existing is the same as the probability of fairies existing, there's no more reason to believe in "god" than in fairies.This is not to say we can actually assign a numerical probability for "god." The best we could say would be "1 chance in an infinite number of possibilities." That basically means that the probability of "god" existing based on all currently available objective evidence so closely approaches zero as makes no difference.Phat's suggestion that the chances are "50/50" follow the same line of thought that leads to Pascal's Wager, which we all know is a load of feces. There are more than two options. "God" can exist, or not, or many "gods" can exist, or basically any combination you can conceive of, and the probability for any one option is no greater or less than the probability of any other option. It gets worse when you define "god" as a specific religion's deity, as we see with Pascal's Wager. When hedging your bets by accepting the Christian deity, you'd be pretty disappointed when you find out Odin was the real King of the Gods all along and you should have tried to die in glorious combat. The 50/50 line of thought is a false dilemma.This is on top of the problem where (existence/non-existence) are not necessarily equally probable at all, as has been mentioned.Basically, when it comes down to it, any conceived-of entity for which there is no objective evidence of existence has an equal likelihood of existing. We cannot say it is impossible for any of these entities to exist, because you cannot prove a negative without proving a falsifying positive - which requires objective evidence. But there is no reason to believe they do exist, either. So while we cannot give a real numerical answer due to insufficient information, we can say that, since all things in this scenario are equal (there is no objective evidence at all), the likelihood of a deity existing is the same as the likelihood of fairies or trolls or goblins existing as well.I think the best answer is the basic response Atheists tend to give:"Maybe, but really, probably not."

And you're wrong. There are more possibilities than a binary "god/no-god." There could be two gods, or three, or a hundred. But the probability si not tied to the number of possibilities - not directly, anyway. First you have to show that both possibilities are equally probable...which you cannot do becasue there is no evidence. And what evidence and information would that be? If you have objective evideicne for the existence of a deity, then by all means, share. No. However, it is valid to say "if you cannot prove that somethign exists, it is unlikely to exist."What is the probability of a fairy sitting on your shoulder? There is exactly as much evidence surrounding the fairy as there is for "god." If you accept that the probability of a fairy sitting on your shoulder approaches zero (not disprovable, but highly unlikely), then how can you rationally claim that "god" has a 50% chance of existing?Conversely, do you honestly believe that every figment of anyone's imagination has a 50/50 chance of actually existing? After all, each figment either exists or does not exist.

Think much closer to zero. Not quite there, but infinitely close. You cannot develop a true mathematical model from which to deduce a probability. You can, however, say that "since there is exactly as much evidence in favor of the existence of fairies as there is in favor of the existence of a deity, they have the same probability."Do you really beleive that fairies have a 50/50 chance of existing? Becasue the evidence in favor of their existence is identical to the evidence in favor of a deity's existence - there is none whatsoever. Perhaps you have poor reading comprehension skills, as I explained it quite fully in my first post. Let me make it more clear:Evidence for "god's" existence: 0Evidence for the existence of fairies: 0Evidence for the existence of trolls: 0Evidence for the existence of goblins: 0See where I'm going with this? All four have exactly the same amount of evidence in favor of their existence. Since the number is 0, there is no reason to beleive in any of them. If you understand why you do not believe in fairies, you will understand why there is no rational reason to beleive in a deity, either.Since there is no evidence in favor of any of these thigns existing, it is reasonable to say "the probability of their existence given the information available to me is infinitely small." It would not be reasonable to say "there is no chance whatsoever of these thigns existing," becasue we have no way to prove the negative, either.But claiming a 50/50 chance quite seriosuly amounts to pulling a number out of your ass. I attempted to illustrate with my fairy-on-your-shoulder example that the likelihood of an entity existing is not the same as flipping a coin.Let's try another example:There are two options for the lottery: you either win the lottery or you do not.Should I run out and start buying lottery tickets? Is the probability of winning really 50/50 only becasue there are two options?

Correct. But we can determine that there is no reason to believe a deity does exist. Absense of evidence is evidence of a likelihood of absence. I believe there are only two possibilities: either fairies exist or they do not exist.You see how this looks? You're actively disengaging rational thought and giving "god" a free pass, while you agree wih me on the likeihood of fairies existing even though the same amount of evidence exists for both. You could just as easily attribute all of those things to fairies. You have no, and in fact cannot provide any sort of conclusing link between the existence of the Unvierse, the complexity of life, and human life and the existence of your specific deity. You're making an irrational leap in logic of the highest order. You presuppose that your examples must have been casued by your deity. If that were true, you would be right - but it's not. There are many other possible explanations for morality, complexity, and simple existence that range from other deities, various religions with no deities, and naturalistic explanations.To make another analogy, you have a dead body, and before examining it at all, with no information whatsoever other than that the body is dead and has a "wound," you are claiming the victim was stabbed. You're claiming the existence of a "wound" proves that the victim was stabbed, even though there are many explanations possible for a "wound." It's an unfounded logical leap.So once again, you have no objective evidence for the existence of a deity. You have only your subjective opinion...which is exactly the same as the evidence in favor of fairies, trolls, and goblins.To remain logically consistent, you must apply the same rationale that causes you to not believe in fairies to the existence of "god." If you do not, you are purposely giving your deity a "free pass" and bypassing rational thought.So, in order to remain consistent, you must either accept that:a) the probability of god existing, like the probability of fairies existing and any other entity ever imagined for which there is no basis in objective evidence, is near-zero becasue there is no evidence to suggest that they do existORb) the probability of god existing and fairies existing and any other seemingly binary choice regarding the existence of any entity ever imagined for which there is no basis in objective evidence is 50/50, since they all rely on the same objective evidence and assumptionsORc) the probability of god existing and fairies existing and any other entity ever imagined for which there is no basis in objective evidence is near-100%, sicne they all rely on the same objective evidence and assumptions.You seem to be taking choice C), which I find both interesting and amusing. If you insist that "god" has a near-100% probability of existing but agree that fairies do not likely exist, then you are logically inconsistent, and your argument is destroyed.

You are obviously not a scientist. No reasonable definition of "life" contains a reference to DNA. DNA is nothing more than a molecule - there is nothing inherently different about the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements that make up DNA from those same elements in non-living material.As a matter of fact, there are many life forms, including plants, which take abiotic organic compounds (that means non-living carbon-based material) and metabolize them into their own bodies - it's how they grow and reproduce. Quite literally, non-living matter becomes "living."Also, not all forms of life have DNA - viruses are commonly referred to as living things (though the line blurs as they require a host cell to reproduce, but that's another subject) and they utilize RNA.When it comes down to it, Wumpini, life is nothing more than a series of chemical reactions that results in reproduction, metabolization, and responses to the environment. You and I are nothing more than an extremely complex series of chemical reactions with delusions of grandeur.To further follow your ignorance, DNA doesn't "tell" an organism how to do anything. DNA is a molecule which codes for various proteins in sequence. It's not like a blueprint, despite the analogies you've seen on TV. The structure of the DNA molecule directly causes the proteins in the organism, once again due to the simple laws of chemistry - it is inevitable and it does not require any "reading" or intelligent factor on behalf of the organism.Not to mention we can manufacture DNA in the lab, and you wouldn't call it "alive" - it doesn't metabolize, it doesn't reproduce, it doesn't respond to its environment (those three being the common definition of "life").DNA has nothing to do with what denotes a living thing.

Meaningful to us. "Meaning" is a human concept. There is nothing special about living vs nonliving matter.Nice of you to ignore most of my post and focus on how "sad" you are for me. That would be the "delusions of grandeur" part I was talking about.News flash: all of humanity is compeltely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. If all of us were to die out tomorrow, life on Earth would not stop. Hell, most life would do better without us messing around with the environment. On a grander scale, in a few hundred milion years when our Sun reaches its red giant stage and vaporizes the inner solar system including Earth, the Universe will not notice. Space will continue expanding, stars will continue to die and be reborn from the ashes of their predecessors, and the series of chemical reactions that were the essence of your life will have absolutely no effect on anything.But that doesn't mean that life has no meaning. Life has whatever meaning we assign to it. I place a value on my life despite the fact that my life is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The fact that we are nothing more than an incredibly complex set of chemical reactions does not prevent that.Are there things about humanity that cannot be explained by science? That's a difficulet question to answer, since science isn't quite finished examining us yet. But we were talking about life, not specifically human life.So I'll repeat myself. There is nothing whatsoever that distinguishes a Hydrogen atom that happens to be part of a DNA molecule from a Hydrogen atom in a water molecule. There is absolutely nothing that seperates living matter from nonliving matter. In a very real way, non-living matter is turned into living matter as it is incorporated into living creatures for growth, energy, and reproduction - and that matter does not change in any detectable way. It simply becomes part of a series of chemical reactions that we identify as "life.""Life" is defined primarily in three ways: living organisms reproduce; living organisms have some sort of metabolism, though the methods of metabolization vary; and living organisms respond to their environment. We do not define "life" as containing DNA, because we have examples of both DNA that is not alive, and examples of life that do not contain DNA. There is nothing "spiritual" or "special" about life that we have detected or have required in our models (that is, everything we know about life works just fine without mentioning any sort of "spiritual" component, and we have no reason to believe such a "spiritual" component exists, so at best "spirits" are irrelevant and at worst nonexistent).Your "sadness" at my opinion over the meaning of life is a gigantic, irrelevant appeal to emotion. How you "feel" about reality is irrelevant, ironically just another series of electro-chemical reactions in your brain."Logic" and "reason" seem to be foreign concepts to you. You insist on a 100% probability of the existence of your specific deity, and when asked why, you respond with circular reasoning ("I have faith so obviously I am convinced," which as mentioned previously boils down to "I believe so I believe"). You ignore anything posted of substance and focus instead on an appeal to emotion. You make bare assertions with absolutely no evidence or even a rational chain of thought to lead to them.So let's stop the intellectual dishonesty. If you really think you can be 100%, absolutely certain of anything, whether that be the existence of a deity or even your own existence, you are being intellectually dishonest. There is an infinitely small chance you are a figment of my imagination, or being mind controlled by aliens, or living in the Matrix, and that everything you know with "100% certainty" is completely and utterly false. If you refuse to acknowledge this, you are unwilling to participate in any form of honest debate and are instead here only to have your own subjective beliefs preached back to you for your own personal validation. That's not what this site is here for.There is most definitely not a 100% chance of god existing. If there were even a 99% probability, you would be able to produce some sort of objective, observable evidence that suggests as much. You are incapable of doing so. There is no objective evidence in this Universe that we have so far detected that directly, objectively lends evidence suggesting a deity exists. In the absence of any objective evidence whatsoever, the probability of any entity existing is not 100%, nor 99%, nor 50%, but rather almost 0% - exactly the same probability of fairies, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, goblins, trolls, zombies, vampires, werewolves, and His Holy Noodliness the Flying Spaghetti Monster existing.Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It doesn't prove that the entity does not exist, but it acknowledges that, in the absence of any objective evidence whatsoever, there is no reason to believe it does exist.

You are "attacked" becasue your statements have a tendency to be logically inconsistent and demonstrate intellectual dishonesty. You have not demonstrated an actual intent to debate.If you would like to learn about the positions of science, by all means ask. You won't be attacked for asking an honest question, just as you were not attacked for your OP here - that didn't happen until you decided to claim 100% certainty, which is an impossible position.You may be surprised to learn that science does not deny the existence of the supernatural. There is no scientific theory that states "there is no god." You seem to be confusing "not talking about the supernatural because we have no objective basis from which to form a model," with "positively affirming that the supernatural does not exist."Science deals with the observable Universe and the objective evidence we gather through observation. From a certain point of view, it certainly is "anti-religion" in that it proposes naturalistic mechanisms for phenomenon like lightning rather than continuing to attribute such occurences to "god" or "Zeus." But that's not the point - the point is to make predictive models of the observable Universe with the highest degree of accuracy possible. In this way, our current understanding of lightning (an electrical discharge between the ground and atmosphere due to compeltely natural static charge differentials) is extremely accurate, and so has replaced the intellectual dead-end of "well, Zeus must have thrown it there. No, I don't know why. Who knows the mind of the gods?"The opposition to science displayed by many religious people is curious, becasue they do not deny that the scientific method makes sense, and they accept many scientific theories such as electromagnetism. They only oppose the scientific method when it is applied to a "sacred cow," the stories of their particular religion. Scientific investigation, observation, experimental verification, all of these are solid enough to allow religious people to say, board a plane and know they will not likely plummet from the sky. But for some reason this is all dismissed with evolution or cosmological origin models, becasue it "takes god out of the equasion.""God," if he exists, has removed himself from the equasion by not giving us objective evidence of his existence. If we do not need "goddidit" to explain the movement of planets, then how is "god" relevant to planetary motion? Even if he exists, even if he is responsible, neither of those things would tell us what determines a planet's orbit - and this means that discussing "god" is simply not relevant when modeling the motion of planets, even if he does exist and is responsible.It's exactly the same with evolution. The Theory of Evolution models all of the objective evidence we have accumulated to date. It makes predictions based on that evidence that have been verified through futher observation to have an incredibly high degree of accuracy. As a model for learning how and why populations of living organisms change over generations, it is a very successful theory. The fact that we can tell all of this without mentioning "god" does not mean his existence is impossible, or that he is not responsible. There may not be any objective reason to think so, but there's no positive evidence of his nonexistence, either. It simply means that discussing "god" is not necessary when speaking about the origin of species, becasue we already have a model that works very well. Even if "god" exists and is responsible for all life, it does not change the fact that the Theory of Evolution has proven to be a highy accurate model of the way populations of living organisms change over time.So nowhere in science is it said that "god doesn't exist," or "the supernatural is impossible." As an Atheist, even I don't say that. I say "I have no objective reason to beleive they do exist." Science is even more circumspect - it doesn't say anything at all on such subjects becasue science can only model that which we can objectively observe.Feel free to ask questions. You won't be attacked. This is a debate site, so we pick apart and criticize arguments that are flawed or inconsistent or not based on evidence. But if all you want is a better understanding of why science doesn't make statements regarding the supernatural, or what scientific theories like evolution actually say rather than what you've seen on TV (because I guarantee you it's wrong), then you're in the right place.

Which means your entire point was a red herring in the first place, since the existance of an "impact" on one's life is not the topic of this thread, and that's a subjective point in any case.The point of the thread is the probability of the existence of an entity, not whether that entity has had an impact on your life.Known-fictional characters have had an "impact" on people's lives since the first person told a story. Santa has an "impact" on children's lives. Zeus had an "impact" on the lives of the ancient greeks.Does that mean they actually exist, iano? Does it mean they are more or less likely to exist than a fictional character that does not have an "impact" on your life?Do people who do not have any impact on your life not exist?Your argument could just as easily be used to describe "evidence" for Santa, fairies, trolls, Zeus, or Thor as for "god" or even your wife. Entities that have a "large impact" on your life do not necessarily exist at all.

Perhaps you were not aware - this is a debate forum. Arguing is what we do here.And your "probability" post was nothing more than a series of numbers pulled from the thin air of your imagination. It has nothing to do with actual probabilities at all, let alone the probability of the existence of a deity. If you don't want to have your posts torn down, post something more relavent to the topic than personal speculation, and do so with logical consistency. If you continue as you are, you can expect mockery and suspensions in your future.

Apparently the rather simple argument slipped right past you, Phat, and you descended once again into meaningless nonsense.The debate is about probability, Phat. It's an old thread you've raised fromt he dead, but even you could read the thread title. What we hypothetically allow for the sake of argument is irrelevant to this discussion.What we're talking about is the false estimation of the likelihood of god(s) existing. Many people like to think that, since god(s) either do or do not exist, there is a 50% chance of god(s) either existing or not existing.But that's flat wrong, a mistake that wouldn't be made by anyone with the most basic understanding of probability.Analogously, despite the fact that any given lottery ticket is either a winner or not a winner, the chances of winning the lottery with a given ticket are nowhere near 50%.When I say "figment of anyone's imagination," I mean "anyone's unfounded hypothesis about some way the world actually is, without any evidence to support that hypothesis." If you take some offense to me calling god(s) figments of the human imagination, well, that's the same way I see ghosts and souls and leprechauns and Santa.What you posted, instead of having anything even remotely to do with the actual topic of the long-deceased thread whose rest you took upon yourself to disturb, was a feeble attempt to restore face through appealing to semantic irrelevancies.No, Phat. God does not become real "by definition." Believers obviously do not believe that God is a figment of the imagination, but their raw belief doesn't make them right. God exists or does not exist, regardless of your beliefs. Your statement (I cannot even call it an argument) implies that we can somehow defines things into being, calling them up from nonexistence through our belief in the words that represent them.This is not so.Without evidence, Phat, the probability of any hypothesis, any imagined explanation of the real world, any figment of the imagination, actually accurately reflecting the real world, is no better than a random guess. Any hypothesis about god(s), bereft of evidence or any way for us to actually test for accuracy, floats in a sea of equally likely mutually exclusive hypotheses.The chance of god(s) existing is no better, and I am not exaggerating, than the likelihood that a fairy rests at this moment on your shoulder. It is possible. However, since I can see no reason to believe such a thing, since there is no evidence to suggest that such a thing might be so, since there is no way to test among the infinite variety of similarly unsupported yet mutually exclusive hypotheses as to which among them might be more or less probable than the others...I see no reason to consider your God to be anything more than a fairy tale. I'd be more likely to win the lottery a dozen times in a row, than for your personal belief in God to actually accurately reflect the real world.