I Know That God Does Not Exist

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Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.

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I think you need a bit more discussion on that point.Ask yourself, is the absence of evidence for an elephant in your living room evidence that an elephant is not present in your living room ?

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a conscious intelligent being

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That's too anthropomorphised for me.

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How would something lacking awareness or the capacity for thought qualify as a "god" at all ?

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I'm not specifiying that it lacks those things.

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But that is what "conscious" and "intelligent" mean, and you objected to that description.

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Its just that we tend to think of things in human terms. Do you think God would have a brain that is made of cells and blood n'stuff? Seems dubious

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Neither "conscious" nor "intelligent" say anything about having a physical brain, in themselves. Most Dualists assume that it is perfectly possible to be conscious and intelligent without a brain - often going to the extent of claiming that the brain is only a "receiver" and that consciousness and intelligence reside in the "transmitting" entity.

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All I am suggesting is that there is, in my opinion, something to what the apologists say and have preached for many years. Perhaps one reason why all of this is so confusing is that we are in fact in a spiritual war and the bad guys don't want everyone finding out the truth.

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The problem there is that the apologists are usually the “bad guys” - they don’t want anyone to find the truth.

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blood on doorposts is physical
pillars of smoke and fire are physical
parting of Red Sea is physical
manna from heaven is physical. They picked it up off the ground.
There were also quails God sent when they complained about the manna: they littered the ground too. Real quails. Physical.
Dew on fleece physical. Wet stuff.

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And yet you don’t even have witness accounts of any of these things, let alone actual examples that have been investigated.
(I don’t even know why you list “blood on the doorposts” since that is something the Hebrews supposedly did themselves).

I did watch most of Andrew Neil’s interview with Ben Shapiro. Shapiro came off very badly. He was reduced to (laughably) complaining that Andrew Neil was a biased leftist and finally walked out.Craig is a professional - and skilled - debater - I’d expect him to eat Shapiro alive.

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I don't agree that it is irrational. We exist. We have consciousness. We have intelligence. We understand morality. Is it any more rational to believe that we are the result of non-consciousness; non-intelligent; non-moral chemical processes or of a conscious intelligent root for the processes involved in the formation of life as we know it.

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Yes, it is. We have some pretty good ideas about the origins of morality, some understanding of intelligence and if consciousness is largely mysterious you’d still be getting into an argument from ignorance.You are producing a “solution” to these issues which doesn’t really solve anything and begs the questions of where morality, intelligence and consciousness come from. Does your presumed creator also require a creator ? If not then how did it get these properties ? And is your answer any more than assumption ?That seems thoroughly irrational to me, to throw away the progress we are making in understanding these issues in favour of a pile of assumptions. It all looks like a very poor rationalisation to me.

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.....but you are doing the same thing. You point to "ideas" about how morality evolved and you can talk about processes all the way back to the BB if you like. But, ultimately those processes had either an intelligent basis for their existence or a non-intelligent basis.

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Before we get anywhere near the BB we have already left the area where we would find the origins of human morality, intelligence and consciousness.But I am not arguing from ignorance - I am arguing from what we do know. We do have good ideas on the origin of human morality which do not require an intelligent cause. We don’t see any need for an intelligent cause for human intelligence or consciousness- or any way that assuming such a cause would help us understand either.Parsimony is not an argument from ignorance either. And assuming an intelligent cause when one is not needed - even if we needed no further assumptions would go against parsimony. But we would need further and even more questionable assumptions.

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Just take evolutionary theory. It is an incredible process. Being incredible means it lacks credibility, but still, there it is. It is well evidenced. Then the question is, it more credible to believe that something that appears incredible is the result of intelligence or the result of virtually infinite series of incredible processes?

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Who says anything about “a virtually infinite series of incredible processes” ? Evolution is well-evidenced. It shows no sign of needing intelligent guidance. Assuming intelligent involvement - based on an argument from personal incredulity - is clearly irrational.

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If my view is irrational then so is yours.

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You are talking about gross violations of parsimony based on a purely subjective feeling. That is irrational. There is nothing irrational about declining to join you in your irrationality.

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I certainly don't advocate throwing it away. It answers an entirely different question than what I am talking about. That progress in knowledge is simply finding about how life as we know it happened, not why those happenings exist at all.

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The question of intelligent involvement is about how it happened. The “why’ questions you now prefer seem to me to beg the question by assuming intelligent involvement somewhere along the line. They aren’t arguments for an intelligent cause at all.

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Good ideas do not equate with "knowing".

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We are not talking about “knowing” - we are talking about which ideas are rationally preferable. Even if your ideas made equal sense and fit as well with the evidence - and they likely don’t - they are still far less parsimonious.

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I'm not suggesting that it would help in understanding how consciousness evolved. It is about why consciousness evolved.

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It’s pretty obvious that you started talking about the “how” questions, not the “why”. But the “why” questions are even less help to you.

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Well firstly we cannot tell whether there was guidance or not, but I'm personally ok with no intervention. The question is why evolution at all. If it didn't have an intelligent root cause what is the process that allowed the evolutionary process to begin - and what was the process that kicked that process off and on and on and on.

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Evolution is an inevitable (or close to inevitable) consequence of imperfect reproduction. There doesn’t need to be anything special to “kick it off”. And why exactly do we need an infinite regress ? It’s your ideas that call for it.

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It is only partly about arguing for an intelligent root cause but I accept that the answer is subjective. However, the view that we are the result of mindless chemical processes that started from lifelessness is every bit as subjective.

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I don’t think that preferring rationality to fantasy is subjective. But if that is the way you want to go, I guess you had better stop trying to pretend to be rational.

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I'm not saying that the processes can't have produced life. What I am claiming is the incredibly high degree of improbability that the processes themselves existed without an intelligent cause.

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I would think that an intelligent cause would be far less likely. And your own arguments would tend to suggest that you should have an even lower estimate. But of course this is all rationalisation intended to support a predetermined conclusion.And of course, you can’t substantiate your claim of “incredibly high degree of improbability”

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..you too have a predetermined position. Mine is that we are the result of intelligence and yours is that we aren't.

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The difference is that I am not the one indulging in obvious rationalisation. You are assuming your idea as the default, immune to examination or criticism. I am not.

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My view is subjective as is yours. Here is a secular site that outlines the high degree of improbability of life forming.
Odds of life emerging]

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And yet more rationalisation. For a start you were talking about the probability of the processes that lead to life. If those processes have a poor chance of working - which is what your new claim amounts to - why assume they had an intelligent cause.Moreover the page does not outline the probability at all.

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The default position, in regards to "intelligence" is that humans are the most intelligent creatures, beings, or living cognizant beings thus far in the universe. Right or Wrong?

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I don’t think that there is a default. Humans are the most intelligent that we know of. But we don’t know almost nothing about life elsewhere in the universe. Odds are that there’s someone smarter than us out there.

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No, he can't. And yet the claim is out there. Does anyone have an argument that refutes it? After all...the concept of Intelligent Design makes more sense to me than random chance. The only valid criticism of Intelligent Design is that it fronts for Creationism...but again whats so silly about the idea of a Creator?

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The silly thing is that there is no good argument that a Creator is necessary, nor any good independent evidence of any potential Creator. Accordingly the argument that a Creator better explains even the existence of life is clearly wrong.Remember that I am refuting GDR’s argument that his position is the rational one. And he’s being very helpful there.

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It is interesting that some of my internet friends have accused me of the same thing that you point out that GDR does. I tentatively would conclude that it is more important for us as Christians to be right. To be absolutely certain that what we believe is valid.

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No, it is not important for you to be right. It is important for you to shore up your belief that you are right. And you are quite prepared to be wrong if that is what it takes. That’s what makes it rationalisation and not rationality.

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No I am not. I agree that my view is subjective and is not absolute knowledge as Stile claims his views are. I am fairly sure that we don't disagree on the stuff that you know. Our differences are in the stuff that we don't know but have subjective views on.

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I think you are disagreeing with objective fact right here. It is objective fact that your ideas tend to support an infinite regress more than mine. It is objective fact that you offer nothing to support the idea that your assumed creator is any more probable than the unguided emergence of life. It is objective fact that you do nothing but try to take potshots at the opposing view - and most of them miss. Did you not notice the fact that the article you cited in your last reply to me didn’t support your claim ?It is pretty clear that you want to convince yourself that your view is rational, no matter how irrational you have to be to do it.

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I did kind a allow myself to get dragged off topic but, the fact remains that the improbability of life, IMHO, is more easily rationalized by assuming an external intelligence, (Which I agree does set up a new set of questions), than does natural processes driven by chance.

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You can explain anything by the assumption that an intelligence with the desire and the capability did it. That’s why it is not rational to do so. The alleged improbability of life is still beset with massive uncertainty - as the article you cited actually says. So the easier - and better - solution is to assume that it is not so improbable after all. It is a much smaller and more defensible assumption.

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Good point, but I can say the same thing for materialists...

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And if you did you would be telling a falsehood. You really should stop repeating this misrepresentation.

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My subjective explanation for a creative intelligence is that this creative intelligence is outside of time as we perceive it.

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That is obviously not an explanation (unless you think that being “outside time” automatically makes a being intelligent, conscious and moral). Worse, it only creates more problems for your claims.

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That is simply my own philosophical view, with no evidence to support it, but it works for me

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Because you don’t care that it doesn’t work at all.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.