Let me see if I got this right Old_Gobbo
P1 - debatable
P2 - how do we assess the probability of such a statement?
P3 - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the Bible provides no such thing given that many of its claims, including the one that Gallileo was persecuted for contradicting (that the Earth is stationary and all planets & the sun revolve around it)
C1 - inductively improbable. Obviously if you “pretend” (as you are so fond of having me do) that all your premises are true then your conclusion will be as well. The problem is that you keep wanting the reader to suppose these things (or “pretend” they’re true) without giving them any reason to and without even assessing their probability! Take a look at a similar argument: Pretend there are there are magical elves (1), pretend elves have been hunted to near extinction (2), and pretend some elves can turn invisible and that all the ones that couldn’t died off (3). Now, obviously, it’s inductively probable that magical invisible elves exist! They could even be standing right next to you! Moving onwards…
P4 - How do we know this? Should we just pretend here as well?
P5 - I agree with you here; this is nearly self evident
P6 - Again, how do you know this and, further, what do we make of all of the “confirmed” miracles recognized by the Catholic Church? What of the stigmata and virgin mary grilled cheese sandwiches? What of peoples’ prayers being answered and of countless millions thinking they’ve witnessed sure signs? If P6 is true then you implicitly acknowledge that all of the supposed evidence since the time of Jesus is just 2000 years of self delusion and fanciful imagination, and if this is the case then how can you be sure that your argument is any different? Further, if your God is really trying to test our faith then why are you trying to make a definitive argument that such a God even exists? Wouldn’t a successful argument counter itself precisely by virtue of its efficacy? Are you a heretic trying to subvert God’s Plan?
C2 - Not only are your premises dubious at best, but you’ve also failed to consider alternative explanations. You state that when we ask God if he’s there we recieve no answer as a test of our faith, but it could also be that there is no answer because there is no God and Occam’s Razor would be in overwhelming favor of such an alternative explanation as it requires none of your specious assumptions. Given the leap of faith that we make by magically “pretending” that all of your premises are true I find it appalling that you can even begin to think that we can reason our way to God through the use of this argument. You ask me to assume all your premises and then marvel at the strength of your conclusion! I would like to meet this intellectual giant, this bastion of hope and rationality, from whom you took this argument for I can’t help but marvel at the genius of this fellow! Perhaps he could even explain why we need this test of faith in the first place - and that would be true genius - for it seems to me that your test of faith is merely thinking of the worst caliber and that anyone that couldn’t see through it would possess the credulity of a toddler and, therefore, need no test of faith at all!
Yes, we can test causality in this way. The difference between causality and God, the really critical one that you left out, is that causality requires none of the assumptions that you’ve made and we can observe it directly. Ball A hits Ball B. It’s there, right in front of us, in plain sight with no ambiguities and we can do it over and over again, day and night, until the inductive probability that Ball B will react to Ball A hitting it is overwhelming even to the most jaded of pool ball causality skeptics (I fall into this group and was convinced after 47 days of continuous trials I performed without sleep). The simplest explanation is that A causes B, whereas the simplest explanation for no response is that God doesn’t exist.
My pleasure.
What I’m actually arguing is atheism. Agnosticism is implicit atheism, if you actually want to be technical, actually. I am not proving “true” atheism. I don’t feel we can prove anything outside of a priori knowledge of mathematics and logic. What I’m saying is that when there is no evidence for something there is no reason to believe in it, plain and simple. You don’t believe in elves do you? Can you prove to me that they don’t exist? How do you know there aren’t some deep in the forests of Siberia in an underground cavern that nobody knows about? You can’t! We can propose an infinite amount of such unprovable things and, as soon as we realize this, it becames patently clear that proving a negative is, generally, impossible. However, we can assess the probability of a given proposition. I find that of our Siberian elves to be no higher than your God, as neither has been shown or reasoned, in any way, to exist. If you don’t like that line of reasoning then you must concede that the evidential grounds for your God are the same as Siberian Elves, Australian Unicorns, and green elephants on Mars. Why can’t we find any of these things? Oh well… I like to “pretend” they’re just testing our faith for some wholly incomprehensible reason or another 