Creation science or not?

Total agreement. I don't believe that tentative atheism is the same as agnosticism. But they're close. Agnosticism is what atheists call themselves when they're afraid to admit it. (Kidding!)

That's what confuses me. Santa Claus is defined as the figure who rides around in a sleigh with 8 tiny reindeer, shakes when he laughs like a bowl full of jelly, sees you when you're sleeping and knows when you're awake, etc. If an entity exists who does not have these qualities than this entity is not the putative Santa Claus.I mean, does a guy named "Santa Claus" exist? Sure, there's one in every mall around the Christmas season. Some weirdos even legally change their names to Santa Claus. But that's not what we're talking about. You conclude as well as I do that no entity matching the description of the putative Santa Claus exists. Why, then, the conclusion of agnosticism about Santa Claus? Haven't we just demonstrated the supportability of being atheistic about Santa Claus? When we look at every point in space within a room, and we find that my lost keys are not in the room, the reasonable conclusion is "my keys are not in the room", not "we must be forever unsure in regards to whether or not my keys are in the room, since all we have to base that on is lack of evidence." When we find a lack of evidence where the evidence must be if it existed, that is itself evidence. I know it's really trendy to consider the lack of evidence as nonindicative, I know it really makes us feel like we have graduate degrees in philosophy, but the simple fact is that the lack of evidence is evidence, and everybody here reasons that way. I mean, who here believes that Bush's invasion of Iraq was justified based on the idea that the lack of evidence for WMD's? I mean, we can't conclude that he didn't actually have them, right?Well, we can and do, and we're willing to cast our vote for president based on that reasoning. But somehow when the topic is God, the rules are different? I think it's just intellectual timidity on the part of self-described "agnostics."

I grant you that there's no way to disprove the existence of an irrelevant God; i.e. one who exerts no influence on the universe or on our lives. Such a God might as well not even exist. I must remain agnostic about such gods.But they're irrelevant. If I act like they don't exist, there's nothing they're going to do about it. About those gods, in addition to being an agnostic, I'm a practical atheist. I don't know that they don't exist but I act like I do, because there's no difference between those gods existing and not existing. I think you can. If I wanted to make a case that a ham sandwich didn't exist in my refrigerator, I would point to the lack of any evidence that there's a ham sandwich in my refrigerators.

I see plenty of evidence, not the lack of evidence. But you're committed to remaining ignorant so it's no surprise you see it the opposite way.

God is defined as omnipresent. Everywhere at once. By definition it's not possible for God to exist and yet not exist at an arbitrary point in space.Ergo if God is absent at any arbitrary location he's absent at all of them. The being that exists at one location yet not at another is not, by definition, God.

Well, we might define "Santa Claus" as "the President of Uruguay", and we can be sure that that entity exists. But what have we proved? There's not an infinite number of definitions of every word. When people say "God" they usually have a specific set of job requirements in mind. Entities that don't have those requirements cannot reasonably be called "God"; definitions of "God" that don't include those requirements are false definitions. If we define "Santa Claus" as an idea, or as an abstraction, then almost by definition he doesn't have a physical existence, and we can be atheist about Santa Claus, from that definition. There's only one way that this being can leave no evidence, and that's by doing nothing. A God that does nothing, as I've stated before, is indeed unfalsifiable. But such a being is also irrelevant so practical atheism - acting like we know he doesn't exist - is reasonable. It's an argument of connotations. Agnostics believe that atheists are overreaching; atheists believe that agnostics are too timid to reach a perfectly reasonable and obvious conclusion. But we don't really believe different things. I guess there's no resolution to the debate.

You're probably right. I don't have any reply to your post that I haven't posted before. (That's not a reflection of your post or your ideas but of my own lack of creativity.)

What they search for are human beings, and they do this by comparing what they find with what humans are known to do. But only by reasoning from known qualities of these intelligent agents. Life on Earth comes about several billion years before the appearance of human intelligence on this planet. Thus, because the only known designer in the universe wasn't avaliable to do any designing, we can dismiss the ID hypothesis based on known qualities of intelligent agents.What forensic science, archeology, and forensic accounting have never done is hypothesize an entirely new class of intelligent actor based merely on objects purported to be "designed" by that actor. Because ID attempts to do this, ID cannot rest on the legitimacy of these other sciences. Who intelligently designed the aliens? Who intelligently designed those designers? At some point you get back to designers who were not themselves designed, which invalidates the entire hypothesis that complexity in nature always has to be the result of design. ID is a hypothesis that refutes itself.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 03-22-2006 05:48 PM