Can we conlude this?
- Yes, we can
- No, we cannot
- Not sure
0
voters
Tell me what do you think about it?
I think I’d like to try a bud of that herb you’re smoking.
I can give it to you, but can you take it?
In thrity-four years of heavy budsmoking, I have never encountered one I couldn’t handle.
No… we can not conclude that. I think as a general rule of thumb it is quite difficult to talk about God in this sort of numerical speculation. It’s interesting but isn’t really a powerful argument because it’s so easy to poke holes in. For example how does God decide to exist – this would imply that at one time he was not existing. If he can make decisions from this sort of logical void… he can probably stay unrestrained to percentages.
I’ll take some weed though.
It’s worse than that, Gobbo. It starts by claiming that since there are two basic conditions in question, that of God’s existence and that of his nonexistence, that the odds of either are 50/50. That’s just wrong.
This sort of “heads or tails” analysis only works when you already know that the coin has two sides - that both exist. You can’t play the percentages when you are talking about the existence or nonexistence of the members of the set itself. If you don’t know that the two members exist, then there is no applicable probability at all.
Just do the math.
Is this “On Being and Nothingness” again???
This is… on being a nothingness argument. 
But seriously folks… I’ll be here all week.
Gobbo - a Sartre pun. Good show.
Wish I had thought of that. Is your straight man staying for the whole gig?
And infinities are not subject to finite mathematics like probabilities.
The interest is hardly whether God exists, it’s just a question of the extension. Atheists tend to argue that God refers only to a figment of the theists’ and deists’ imaginations. Theists and deists argue that God refers to some demonstrable entity. It’s not whether he exists, but to what exactly the word refers.
Damn straight.
Also, how can God “decide” to exist? In order for a thing to decide anything, it has to exist in the first place. I think it’s impossible for that which does not exist to choose ANYTHING, including to exist.
It doesn’t really matter whether he exists or not.
If you try to find proof in the world that he exists then you have to oust science’s explanations, which are pragmatically better. I.e. You’ve become a fundamentalist.
No proof can be found in speculative logic applied to what, by definition, cannot be observed. Predictions of what you will see in the future can never be disproved.
So basically, if you say “his hand is in everything” you can’t say that science’s is too. If you don’t claim the aforementioned then you have to base your faith on data you can never observe.
So, whether god exists or not doesn’t matter except pragmatically.