What are the odds of God existing?

I would say that it falls under the category of "anything is possible until there is reason to rule it out."

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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Some suggested there's a third alternative: it came into being with no cause whatsoever, just appeared out of nothing (to my mind, this is totally unreasonable, but they insisted on it).

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And for some reason you are having trouble explaining why this is so unreasonable.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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I'm not having any trouble to my satisfaction explaining it....

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Heh. I'm sure you're not. If all we had to do was convince ourselves, then we'd all be debate champions.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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Once unreason enters the picture, "anything's possible."

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"Unreason" is not simply whatever you decide you don't want to deal with.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Just because you "get a head ache" doesn't make something "sci-fi babble".

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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That's a pretty good premise. Science itself is all about understanding cause and effect. I'm trying to think of an example of an action which occurred with absolutely no cause but I'm coming up short.

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And if we cannot come up with an example, what would this prove? We humans have not even come close to observing all the phenomena that have occurred, is occurring, and will occur.At any rate, I am not aware of an example of anything causing space or time to appear, are you? If you can point to an example where a known cause created space and/or time , then that will be a pretty good candidate for whatever caused the universe to exist. Such an example would be illuminating.Be careful that you do not commit the Fallacy of Composition; that the whole must have the same properties as its parts. Even if it can be established that everthing that exists within the universe has a cause, it doesn't necessarily mean that the universe itself has a cause.Also, science is the study of phenomena that exists within the universe. The existence/cause/creation of the universe itself is of such a singular nature that science may not have much to say about it.At any rate, since the creation of the universe ex nihilo involves the creation of time and space itself, I don't even know what "cause" would mean in this context.-

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The probability that God exists is either 0 or 1.

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And if I flip a coin, the probability that it will land heads is either 0 or 1. The probability that the next person to enter this building is over 6 feet tall is either 0 or 1. The probability that it will rain tomorrow is either 0 or 1. Hey, we have completely eliminated the need for statistics!

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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Just because you say it's perfectly reasonable and logical doesn't mean it's perfectly reasonable and logical.

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To say that it is not logical means that it must contradict some accepted fact or assumption. What is being contradicted in this case? A universe that has no cause and has existed for only a finite time seems self-consistent to me. I see nothing that is contradicted. Where is the contradiction?

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

That is true. And if a contradiction can be shown, then I will be wrong.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

All this talk about using "logic" to discuss the existence (or other attributes) of God reminds me of a Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon: