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Author | Topic: What are the odds of God existing? | |||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: 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.
quote: 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
quote: 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".
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
I notice that you don't address the major point which invalidates your whole argument.
quote: This argument is incorrect. Option 2 is
2. The universe has always existed in some form
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)
quote: 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.
quote: 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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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: 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.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
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 schema A The universe exists contingentlyA' The universe exists necessarily According to your argument the probability of each of these is 0.5 If and only if A' is true: B The universe had a natural causeB' The universe had a supernatural cause And the conditional probability of each of these given A' is 0.5 If and only if B' is true: C The supernatural cause of the universe was not a GodC' The supernatural cause of the universe was a God And the conditional probability of each of these given B' is 0.5 The 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 = 0.125 Since 0.5 != 0.125 your method of assigning probabilities is shown to be invalid by reductio.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
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.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
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
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
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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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: 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..
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
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 ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
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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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: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 ?
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