Murtak wrote:My computer being real is 99.9.. % likely. God being real is 0.0...1 % likely. You are essentially stating that the statements "my computer is real" and "God is real" are both equally rational.
Where did those numbers come from? How did you determine that it's very likely (but not certain) that your senses are reliable, and determine that it's very unlikely (but not impossible) that God exists? You didn't. Seriously, you just made those numbers up. There's no reason to believe one of them any more than the other. You just believe that your senses are reliable because that makes you happy -- you don't know if you're in the Matrix, but if you were that would suck, so you assume that you're not. Believing in God is the same thing.
FrankTrollman wrote:Since his choice will countermand mine, and my choice will not countermand his, his choice is the only one that counts.
Unless he chooses to let you act freely. Just because he can choose to take away your free will -- so your free will only exists because he allows it to -- doesn't mean that you don't have free will.
Kaelik wrote:See, this is you being retarded. You apparently never considered the option of "God doesn't exist" being an option for what you can say.
Because it either means "God could exist, but I don't believe he does" (which is agnostic), or you're saying "God doesn't exist, and I know for a fact he doesn't" (which is just another way of stating the atheist position "God can't exist"). When you say "God doesn't exist", you may be expressing an opinion that you admit may be mistaken (agnostic), or you're stating a fact that you believe to be objectively true (atheist).
"I won't be hit by a car", as in your example, is more formally "I may be hit by a car, but I don't believe that I will", which (when applied to God) is agnostic, not atheist.
Kaelik wrote:You presuppose a specific god that is in every way not possible, instead of addressing the god you tried to define earlier, or the god you actually think it possible.
Explain this. How was what I was talking about (in reply to the comments of others, mind, not something I defined myself) impossible?
Kaelik wrote:'God' doesn't care if people rape other people. [...] People don't have free will, and cannot ever act against it's wishes.
That's just begging the question. Stating your belief as a fact isn't an argument. It's perfectly consistent for rape to exist even if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and doesn't want rape to happen, if he believes that free will (eg the ability to choose whether to rape or not) is a greater good than not raping. Given that without free will, no morality can exist at all, it's not even hard to prove that free will results in more good than not.
violence in the media wrote:Ahem.
You don't read the things I write, do you.
I did, I'm just not sure what your post has to do with the bit you quoted, or with the larger "god can't exist/atheism is irrational" debate in general. Yes, our will is constrained by the laws of physics and the physical makeup of our bodies and whatever else you want to mention, all of which were presumably dictated by God. That doesn't mean that we don't have free will within the confines of what is possible for us.
You ask whether "do X or I'll shoot you in the face" is a free choice. It depends on what you mean by "free". In the most general terms, we're free to do whatever we can do. It sounds like a tautology, but the fact of the matter is that we're free to choose to do whatever is physically possible for us to do. If someone says "do X or I'll shoot you in the face", we can choose to do X, or we can let them shoot us in the face, or we can try to keep them from shooting us in the face, or we can do anything that we're capable of doing. So that is, by the strictest definition, a free choice. What's
not a free choice is that if we
are shot in the face, we die. We can't decide not to die after being shot in the face.
There's a lot of philosophy about free will and self-determination, but my favorite has always been the existentialists. The existentialists say that mankind is doomed to freedom -- we are always free, no matter what. We can't
not be free. Even if you're in prison, or a slave, or almost any other situation you can think of -- you're free to choose whether to do as you're told, or try to escape, or attack your captors, or whatever. The situation we find ourselves in may have limited our options -- in some cases very severely -- but we're still free to choose between the options available to us. Even if those options are only "do X or get shot in the face".
Boolean wrote:Sure, there's other gods like the Watchmaker God who you totally can have faith in, and SHOULD if it makes you happy. Just don't try to twist that into a concession toward bullshit fairy-tale monsters.
I can agree to that. My only point here is that proving that God exists and proving that God doesn't exist is equally impossible. If you want to believe that God exists, that's fine. If you want to believe that God doesn't exist, that's fine too. Just don't say that you can prove that you're right, because either way, you can't.
TarkisFlux wrote:But aside from that, it's an especially odd position given that Kaelik says you explicity denied that consciousness must be an aspect of god (though I can't be assed to go find where you did say that and he may be wrong).
Kaelik is a special individual and sees what he wants to see rather than what's actually there. I never said that God was or was not conscious, or that he had to be or didn't have to be. What we've been talking about here is clearly a consciousness of some sort -- or so it seems to me (if I'm wrong, someone feel free to correct me). So that's what I've been talking about, because that's what's been under discussion.