The Dink Network

Scratcher:

Sorry...been busy lately.

"There's a HUUUUUGE difference. Impossible is impossible, 99.~~ is possible."

That is hard to say and also of little import here because unless you can establish that God is NOT impossible we have no grounds to say that it is at all possible or how probable it is. Right now this 'God' is no more possible than a square shaped circle.

"If you're ready to change your mind then you're not completely sure to begin with, right? "

False. That I WOULD change my mind if I found out I weas somehow wrong only means that I am not dogmatic. I stand by the fact that God, as defined by most monotheisms, is impossible and I have even gone so far as to prove this with sound argument.

"That is what you've been coming across as."

Again, this is STILL a straw man fallacy. Reiterating that you happen to believe this or not realize that it is a straw man does not change the fact. If I were to go after you by saying "I don't think you should be defending child molestation!" then it does not matter whether I believe you are "coming across as..." a child molester. I am still beating down a position you do not actually hold adn one that is far easier to beat down than your actual argument/position.

"I haven't argued that god's existence is a rational thing to believe in, just that it's not impossible."

If it is not rational then how do you ascertain it being "possible"?! That does not make any sense. The only way to establish that soemthing is possible is through rationality.

"Knowing that you're at least open to possibilities, I have no objection with that."

Ah but I am also open to the fact that many things are NOT possible. Open mindedness is a double edged sword and most people are not aware of this and hypocritically seem to think that open mindedness entails believing that ALL things are possible.

"I said: "Doesn't the birth of the world itself go against the law of non-contradiction? Something can't just start existing from nothingness, this also means it couldn't have always existed." The previous sentece was there to support the latter, I didn't say anything about probabilities."

When you say "Doesn't the birth of the world itself go against the law of non-contradiction?" you are making the assertion or strong implication that the "birth of the world" is somehow, at the very least improbable. AS if there were some way we could retroactively assign any likelihood other than 100% to the "birth of the world". And while it is not true that the "world" has always existed, you seem to be ignoring the fact that existence ITSELF has always been. Something has ALWAYS existed and given rise to other things in an endless chain of cause and effect.

"I'm just not sure the logic you can apply to every day life will apply everywhere."

Well, as soon as you are able to find this other aspect of reality where logic does not apply then we can examine this and try to determine whether God is possible in this 'other reality' but until then you are just offering an appeal to ignorance here. It is even worse than the infamous 'God of the gaps' argument because you are not even referring to an actual 'gap' but rather to a 'potential gap' for which you have no grounds to even think is real.

"Free will doesn't necessitate ability to ponder."

False. The very definition of free will necessitates such. If you are NOT pondering decisions then you are merely acting according to your 'programming'/predestination.

"I used that analogy to drive the point that you don't even need to be omniscient to not ponder things. There's free beer, dawg! At no point do you ponder "to go or not to go", you just go."

First of all, the analogy is STILL a false one regardless of your above. It is false because it does not bear relation to the matter we are discussing. People are NOT omniscient so pointing out that we may or may not always ponder things to your satisfaction is irrelevant. My point remains that omniscience ITSELF is contradictory to free will and therefore a being which is said to posess BOTH of these at once cannot possibly exist.

Secondly, yes...we DO ponder decisions such as whether to go drink free beer or not and even in the extreme case of someone forcing us at gun point to go drink beer, we still have free will because our minds still work even in that extreme case. If guns had the magical ability to cause us to only ACT without contemplation then maybe we would lose our free will in that ridiculous case but as it stands...

"Pondering is a non-omniscient limitation. It's just a tool to determine the best course of action when the amount of known variables is limited. What we do is hard-wired to our personality, character, ego, whatever."

So you agree that God could not have both free will and omniscience then? That is my only point here. That a being so defined as having both of these traits cannot exist.

"Are you arguing that he can't have free will because he has always been omniscient? If I suddenly attained omniscience, for example, that would not strip me of free will? Or just that in order to have free will you need to make a superficial choice at some point?"

False. You WOULD lose your free will for the very reasons I have repeatedly outlined for you. If you became omniscient tomorrow then at that point you would KNOW whether or not you walked to the pub for free beer night on Tuesday. Therefore you CANNOT make a decision to do other than what you KNOW you are to do. The future becomes indistinguishable from the past for an omniscient being and you can no more decide on a future course of action than you can decide to un-eat the bowl of cereal you had for breakfast and instead have pancakes yesterday.
Even worse for God since he is defined as being ETERNALLY omniscient. There is NO point in his history when he did not know exactly every detail that would come to pass.

In order to have free will you do not need to make a "superficial choice". You have to be able to make a CHOICE. To ponder multiple courses of action and chose one(or more). If you KNOW with absolute certainty that you WILL do *THIS* then you CANNOT choose to do *THAT*.

"I didn't say they have good proof, just proof on par with "god can't exist because omniscience cancels free will." A large part of my posts has gone into contesting that statement, so by disproving your proof, that's what I have been doing by proxy."

But that is exactly what I am contesting here. You are asserting that they have "proof"(which is itself absurd!) and going so far to put their poor evidence on equal footing with the rational arguments against God's existence and thus far you only offer the bald assertion fallacy to support this. You are basically saying "Your(meaning MY) argument is just as bad as their arguments!" without showing this to be so.

And I wish you luck with disproving my argument. A few have tried over the years...

"And your "proof by contradiction" is right down there with "god can't exist because there is evil in the world! If he is all-powerful and good, how could he let this happen?"

Wow. I will take that as a compliment since Epicurus' famous 'Riddle'(now commonly known as "The Problem of Evil") remains a sound argument against omnibenevolent gods. But you are again trying a straw man here by painting the "Problem of Evil" in a simplistic light(but you have not done so badly that this is worth getting into).

Both the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Problem of Evil are sound arguments against specific God-concepts being possible. Simply asserting that you don't like them without being able to show them to be flawed does nothing to help your case.

"Right, right. About Occam's razor, though, while it's a nice principle, even if you CAN'T apply it to a theory that doesn't mean the theory must be wrong.

Yes, it does! It cannot even BER a "theory" without adhering to the principle of Parsimony/Occam's razor. At best it can only be a groundless hypothetical speculation.

"Not that good though. If someone suddenly did that, a lot of scientists would be seeking "logical explanations" for how it was done for decades to come, even if the experiment was reproduced multiple times."

Yes and no(and I am perplexed that you think scientists looking for rational/understandable explanations is a BAD thing?!). Science is basically the study of that which exists, regardless of how it exists. Science does not deal with groundless speculations of things which, by definition could not be understood. When making assertions about the nature of reality, there are a few types of assertions relevant here.

1)Sensible/understandable assertions: These may or may not be ultimately true or false and they ultimately fall under the jurisdiction of science.

2)Nonsense statements: These cannot be understood...only asserted. Science deals with nonsense by dropping it in a bucket labeled "Nonsense" and ignoring it.

There are no se4nsible statements that are "beyond" the reach of science and there are no nonsense statements which science is able to confirm as true.

The default status of an existential claim(barring actual evidence supporting said claim's veracity) is FALSE. Look up "Rules of Inference" sometime for a better understanding of this.

If scientists discover a vampire they will label it Homo Nocturnus and classify it as "a non-reflecting hemoglobin dependent nocturnal humanoid with an aversion to garlic" and then study it to figure out how it operates/works.
They will not just look at it and go "Hmmm...must be supernatural and we can never hope to understand it. Let's move on...".

"I agree, but as I said in the part of my post that you didn't quote, the default position should be neutral, not negative. You may be as open-minded as you say but plenty of skeptics, scientists and researchers wouldn't accept proof at odds with their opinions if it was branded into their foreheads."

But 'Neutrality' does NOT mean we should believe ALL claims are possible. What you consider "negative" I believe IS the 'neutral' stance of science. We get fooled by the semantics here into believing that the "neutral" stance is to grant an undeserved "possibility" to all manner of silly claims and this is not only false but an absurd way to go about the study of reality.