Acccording to the ignotist argument, God is just a sound,the unimformative tautology that God wills what He wills and " hides our ignorance behind a theological fig leaf."Thus we have no reason to use God in our explanations as He means nothing. 
According to the Occam argument, granting meaning, Occamâs razor shows that God requires ad hoc assumptions,ones more than natural processes do, showing that those processes explain matters without outside intervention. 
Add to them the definitive refuation of the free will defense of God,[ See the the same named thread.] we have the basis of atheology. =D>
Iâve been wanting to ask for a while; Why pay respect to Occamâs Razor? What is itâs function, in what sense is it claimed to be true?
And you warned me not to feed the animals at the zoo.
Shame.
I have no excuse. But I do so want to talk about the Razor!
Occamâs razor doesnât show truth, but it does help point out what situations are most likely.
If I hear the trash get knocked over, I will assume my cat did it. Since I know I have a cat, and that he sometimes knocks things over, nothing ânewâ has been created here.
If, on the other hand, I assume that a ghost knocked it over, then I had to first invent the notion of a ghost and then say that it knocked over my trash.
Now, my assumption that my cat knocked over the trash could be wrong (it could be a clumsy burglar), but it is less likely to be wrong than my assumption that a ghost knocked it over.
The wiki article is pretty good:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occamâs_Razor
Well, letâs take the supernatural out of it for a moment. SUppose I go outside, and see my car right where I parked it. I could for the belief that
1.) My car sat there all night, or
2.) My car was stolen, driven around, gassed up, and returned to me, perhaps several times over the course of the night.
Occamâs Razor tells us the first one is the one to pick, but certainly the second once might be true, thatâs what it means to be a possibility, and it certainly is that. So is the razor just a system of good-guessing, or is it actually making a claim about the world that things like 1 really happen more often than things like 2, enough to use that as a principal to describe the world?
Just a tool for good guessing. There is no âtruthâ behind it, but it is a tool that can be helpful in finding the truth.
It is a guide rather than an authority.
=D> Thanks all! How about the ignotist argument that God cannot be an explanation as He means nothing? The contradictions of attibutes argument shows incohence in the term God. If the term is incoherent, then the ignotist argument stands as the major argument against God. Either God has no meaning or He is redundant .
That is the first not-god of the gaps argument that I have ever heard.
=D> If the term God is empty Xunzian, then He cannot be the god of anythingTheists give defintions of Him without showing how He can have His attributes based on facts. He has to be all this or that, but they give no reason for this or that. He doesnât have to be omnipotent as evil counts against that. He cannot be omniscient in seeing the future before it happens .They just guess that He has those attributes. The term has no empirical basis.
Theology is just a series of guesses for a series of mysteries to back the mystery called God, a pseudo- explanation for a pseudo-question.[ See Bede Rundleâs âWhy is there Something rather than Nothing?â We should advertize these two arguments as basic atheology. Many anaturalists just feel that there must be some force,energy, mind behind the universe. These two would answer that basic notion. We naturalists need to answer that. =D>
What more might one add to the ignostic and Ockham arguments! We no more need God,contrary to Richard Swinburne, as a personal or any kind of explanation , than we need demons in additon to mental illness for mental problems or gremlins in addition to mechanical defects to explain car problems or angels in addition to the laws of motion to explain the orbits of the planets. The presumption of naturalism imposes itself then that natural causes-causalism- reign as the efficient, necessary, primary,sufficient and ultimate causes and explanations.This,like Humeâs analysis of miralcles, neither question begs nor sandbags theists in that it merely demands evidence to override what we now know as Einstein provided evidence to override Newtonâs laws to restrict them.Where is the evidence for supernatural or paranormal powers? How can God be meaningful? What gives substance to him? One can no longer take for granted that saying God means anything of substance! How could theists meet these two challenges?
Jeez, let me put a little rest to this. Skeptic, you havenât argued for anything, youâve just made a string of assertions. Let me point out the ones that are controversial.
The validity of the cosmological argument is controversial.
Which, which is what makes it fallacious as a starting point for any investigation of the purportedly non-natural.
Hume was very explicit with regards to miracles that there was no reason to ever believe something miraculous occurred [i]regardless[/i] of the evidence presented, based on his understandings of 'nature' and 'miracle'. To take a Humean stance that 'no matter what, a naturalistic explanation is better', and then try to make something of the 'fact' that non-naturalistic explanations are found wanting is the very definition of begging the question.
There are holy sites and holy relics to which hundreds of miraculous events have been attributed. If you havenât experienced one yourself, then the testimony of those who have is certainly evidence.
Iâm not sure what you mean here, but it sounds like a completely different question that would take itâs own thread to address.
stance.
Of course they can, on the same grounds that they can take for granted that everything else they say means something of substance- weâre in control of the meaning of our own words. Verificationism is dead.
I pointed out facts;you made assertions about them . In short, I maintain that one should have a meaningful defintion of God and evidence for Him.
I stand by my comments. =D>
As I point out Hume and I do not question beg but ask for evidence. See Foegelin's book on Hume and miralcles that shows that old canard is just that.We do not assume no miralcles or one cannot override the pesumption of naturalism, but one has to have evidence. =D> Einstein used evidence to partially override Newton's laws of motion. No question begging.. <img src="/uploads/default/original/2X/a/a8041fe32d5c63bbc6616e748e6b50af85839764.gif" width="20" height="16" alt="[-X" title="Shame on you"/>
As God is omnibenevolent,He is,by necessity, unable to do wrong;but as omnipotent, He sure can!That is incoherent. As,He cannot do wrong, He has circumscribed free will.[ And as the thread on the problem of free will and Heaven shows, we should be similar.]
With that form of free will,He is limited.More incoherence.
In short, God cannot exist! =D>
skeptic griggsy
'Pointing out facts' and 'making assertions' are the exact same thing if your audience doesn't accept your facts as such. 'We no more need God than we need demons as explanation' is not a fact, it is an assertion. On and on and on. If you're seriously considering the things you listed 'facts' and the things I listed mere 'assertions', it can only be because you are absolutely settled in your issues and not actually here to discuss anything with anybody, but rather to preach,
as evidenced here. I annihilated your argument, and youâre standing by it anyway, even though youâve made no effort to defend it, simply because you donât know to do anything else, and engaging in any kind of debate was never your purpose.
If you were asking for evidence in a non-circular fashion, you would have it, because there's plenty. If you've read Hume, you'd know that his point is that no evidence for the miraculous could possibly be good enough [i]even in theory[/i], and so to cite a lack of evidence while referencing him [i]is[/i] circular, yes.
I donât care what âweâ assume. Iâm telling you what Hume stated. If you think differently than him, I would leave him out of it, and go on to explain your standard for evidence. As I said, if your standard is non-circular, there is evidence.
Your definition of omnibenevolent is incorrect, and even if it were acceptable, the fact that two definitions you came up with clash with each other can't be used to say anything about the existence of a discrete entity.
Let me try to sum things up.
Many people believing something might be evidence, but itâs evidence of the least convincing variety. The reason a large majority of intelligent and reasonable folks donât accept such âevidenceâ as having any relevance to the truth is due to history.
There have been many cases throughout history where a large number of people (in some cases the majority) believed something, and it turned out NOT to be true. We found it wasnât true due to no other evidence outside of what those people thought, or evidence to the contrary.
So we can play the word game and say there is evidence for miracles, but the evidence in no way leads to the conclusion that what people believe or say is true, which is the argument Iâve seen most often from you Uccisore.
I would be interested in discussing why you think the evidence of people believing something for a long enough period of time is sufficient to point to truth, without having any other kind of evidence.
I donât know how much we can discuss âwhyâ something is sufficient evidence, because itâs been my contention all along that âsufficiencyâ is completely subjective, and depends on the personâs upbringing, temperament, and background knowledge. We can compare bodies of evidence and usually say that one is more or less than the other, but to say that one is enough doesnât have any absolute content- it simply depends on the individual.
With regards to your statement about what a âlarge majority of intelligent and reasonable peopleâ believe, I think thatâs something that you canât even come close to demonstrating to me, considering the slim number of people in the world that donât believe in a higher power. If you would have confined your remarks to scientists, you would have a moderately slim majority, not a large one, but you broadened your remarks to âintelligent and reasonable peopleâ, so unless you have something against doctors, engineers, police detectives, lawyers, accountants, composers and philosophers, I donât think you have any idea what proportion of intelligent and reasonable people are theists, beyond a guess. But, apparently youâve seen some evidence that you find to be enough that you feel justified in making statements like this, and thatâs really my point. The amount of evidence you consider to be enough to convince you of something is dependent on who you are, and what youâre ready to believe.
With that in mind, to your last question, what makes me think the evidence for theism is sufficient to point to truth, all I can say is that the evidence is sufficient because it manages to convince many people. I would go on to say that the people it convinces are not just any old people, but a good-enough margin of reflective, intelligent, and rational people, but you donât seem to think thatâs the case. That seems obvious to me, though, and without knowing why you donât think so, thereâs little I could do to persuade you otherwise.
I agree that it doesnât have absolute content, as there is nothing that could ever be absolutely certain. This doesnât mean modern society hasnât established criteria for determining what is sufficient evidence to believe something without a doubt. Word of mouth simply isnât one of those things.
Iâm not sure where theism entered the discussion, but I assure you I have nothing against any of those groups of people youâve mentioned. Iâm sure there are some doctors, engineers, and lawyers that believe in astrology, magnetic healing, and alchemy; however, I wouldnât consider them intelligent and reasonable if they do.
Agreed, but still irrelevant to whatâs true. Just because a person finds it sufficient evidence if a large group of people believe something still doesnât make it true.
Thereâs no other way to put it: this stance is unreasonable. If in every case throughout history, when a large group of people believed something or are convinced of something without any other kind of evidence, and it turned out to be true, then Iâd say it would be a pretty good guide to use for truth. As you and I know, that hasnât been the case, which is why it is reasonable to only believe something a large group believe after more evidence enters the picture.
Intelligent people are convinced of many things often times that turn out to be false. Con artists exploit this. Religion exploits this. Cult leaders exploit this. Thatâs why more evidence is necessary before reasonable people believe something to be true, other than a large enough and diverse enough group believe it.
Word of mouth is the only reason I believe in black holes, am I then unjustified? And you're right, what I've claimed so far doesn't mean society hasn't established criteria for determining what is sufficient evidence to believe something without a doubt. But I don't think they have, and it wouldn't matter if they did, since 'sufficiency' is still subjective. Modern society may well have established criteria for determining which of two women is more beautiful, but what of it?
But we're not talking about those things. This was a discussion about sufficiency of evidence for theism. Then you came in to say that a large majority of people don't accept some kind of evidence for something. I assumed you were talking about the evidence for theism, but apparently you weren't. So now I'm confused.
Absolutely true, agreed 100%. But I'm sure you'd agree that we ought to believe what the evidence seems to us sufficient for, right?
Also, what you've said here about what large groups of people consider sufficient evidence might work against whatever point you'd like to make considering what modern society has established for criteria of sufficiency.
Well, let me draw a fine line. I didn't say that people should believe in theism (for example) because many other people do*. What I'm saying is that there is exists a total body of evidence for any claim (observations, measurements, historical findings, philosophical arguments, etc.), and we call that total body of evidence 'sufficient' iff it manages to convince most reasonable people who become aware of it. You're right, that the beliefs of most people often turn our wrong. But that doesn't change the fact that when most people believed the world was flat, the total body of evidence for the flatness of the world was sufficient- that's just what sufficiency [i]means[/i]. Someone who believe the world was round back then, without the benefit of any of the evidence we have today, would have been no more justified than someone believing it was a cube.
*(though I do think thatâs a portion of the total body of evidence).