What are the odds of God existing?

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Now, if all we consider is the fact of creation (rather than the nature of that creation--problematical to say the least), there is no reason to choose either option 1 or option 2. We might as well flip a coin. The odds are 50/50.

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Mathematically speaking this argument is best described as bollocks. The "probability" is solely an artefact of the way you carve up the available options. So your schema does not produce a valid probability.The rest of the argument is even worse.

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1. it was created by an eternal Being
2. The universe has always existed in some form

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This list is not exhaustive. The universe could, for instance, be a product of a being that is not eternal. Therefore you have failed even to correctly make a bogus argument

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A Pagan-style God, for example, a God that arose from nature, would reduce to option #2. Such a God would be logically unnecessary.

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And this is a clear non-sequitur. Apart from the fact that pagan Gods do not always arise from nature, a God that did arise from nature might be logically necessary.And that is without getting into the questions of what it means to say that the universe "always" existed or the meaning of "eternal".

I notice that you don't address the major point which invalidates your whole argument.

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"Eternal"--that which has existed forever. If it had not existed forever, it would have arisen from nature--revert to option #2.

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This argument is incorrect. Option 2 is This is not the same as the idea that the universe did not always exist in some form, but was instead created by a being that was not eternal. It is also false to say that a being that is not eternal must have arisen from nature (to use an obvious alternative it coudl itself have been created by an Eternal being - doubtless you would say that that devolves to your option 1, although it is clearly not identical to it)

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a God that did arise from nature might be logically necessary.

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Such an possibility would revert to option #2.

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Your response here is an irrelevance. The stated point was that you were in error to state that a being that arose from nature could not be logically necessary.

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The point is that there had to be something or some being always around.

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Even if this is correct you cannot validly calculate probabilities just by arranging the possibilities in a way you like.However it is not what you stated in the OP - you allowed precisely two options - the universe "always" existed or "an Eternal being" directly created our universe. I don't think that the ekpyrotic theory, for instance, neatly fits into either option.

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There are other factors we can consider in regard to your chances of death (your health, etc.). But if we consider the fact of creation only, there are no other factors to consider.

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The last sentence is tautologous. If we consider only one factor then naturally we cannot consider any others. But we can apply this principle to other examples - including the one you object to. And of course, even if you could argue that there were no other factors that could be considered it would still not make it valid to conclude that the probability was 0.5.

But of course if it is equivalent to option 1 it can't also be equivalent to option 2 as you claimed. And it still contradicts Option 1 as it was written in the OP. So the point that your list in the OP was not exhaustive stands.But here's an alternative schemaA The universe exists contingently
A' The universe exists necessarilyAccording to your argument the probability of each of these is 0.5If and only if A' is true:B The universe had a natural cause
B' The universe had a supernatural causeAnd the conditional probability of each of these given A' is 0.5If and only if B' is true:C The supernatural cause of the universe was not a God
C' The supernatural cause of the universe was a GodAnd the conditional probability of each of these given B' is 0.5The probability of C' being true is p(A') * p(B') * p(C')By your method of assigning probabilities this is 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125Since 0.5 != 0.125 your method of assigning probabilities is shown to be invalid by reductio.

Why couldn't a supernatural cause be something other than a God ? Personally I would consider the Gnostic demiurge to be exactly that - a supernatural cause of our universe that is not a God.

To be correct you claimed that you had grounds to evaluate the probability as 0.5 But, as I have pointed out, that does not work.s

The only objection I am aware of is not only contentious but fails to deal with the real point. The fact is that your method of assigning probabilities is depenendant on how the options are divided. It necessarily generates contradictory results and thus is logically invalid. A

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Your way is inductive; mine is deductive.

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How is my way stupid? I said, IF we take into account only the fact of creation, there is no evidence one way or the other to lean us this way or that. There are beings; there are things. That's all there are and all that can be. It has to be one or the other.

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Your way is stupid because ti tries to turn a lack of information into information. And it does do ny seixing on somethign that is irrelevant to the actual probability - the way you choose to divide up the options.And if your method is deductive I really suggest that you show your work. Because I haven't seen any real deduction going on..

Yes, but that is because you interpret "logical" in a way peculiar to yourself.Seriosuly what is logical about assigning a proability of 0.5 because you happen to have divided the options up into 2 possibilities ? What if you had divided it up into 3 ?

Given that you could frame the problem in terms of a choice between two options that are exhaustive and mutually exclusice, why would that make the probability 0.5 ?Any proposition could be phrased in such a way, yet we know that many do not haver a probability of 0.5. So, if we have no addiitonal information that would let us better estimate the probabilities, would it not be better to say that we have insufficient infomation to assign a probability with any degree of reliability ?And if you really do believe that you can reliably assign probabilites based purely on the way that the problem is framed, how do you deal with the fact that it is possible to produce contradictory results just by framing the problem in a different way ?

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Logic is the fabric of the universe you could say. Therefore any God who created it is eminently logical and invented the rules of logic and made the universe run by them, and in His universe one and one always = two. That cartoon is just a strange misrepresentation.

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THe cartoon is silly (becase it relies on a silly definition of omnipotence). However your idea seems just as silly. How do you "invent" the rules of logic ?