I don’t know many religious people. Of those, I know fewer who are willing to challenge their religious point of view. Of those, none are close enough to me to be able to carry on a friendly discussion on the matter. So what happens?
I have conversations about religion in my head while I walk the dog, drive, wait at the train station. Do you do this? Man, I hope I’m not the only one. Its kind of funny, because atheist tech doesn’t always ‘win’. Sometimes I come up with something that I don’t know how to defend to explain.
I’m not writing this post to give ammo to one side or another, I just write what I am thinking about at the time. So here is my conversation as I had it (I had a stenographer present at all times).
Atheist TS: You can’t know that there is a god, because there is no evidence, nothing that can’t be explained, and as time goes on, the things we can’t explain at some point, through the scientific method, eventually gets explained. the Gaps continue to shrink.
Religious TS: There isn’t a God-O-Meter that you can wave around to find god. He lives outside of our universe.
ATS: How convenient, if he lives outside of our universe, that's the same thing as not being there.
RTS: No, it isn’t. He may live outside of the universe, but he certainly has strong influence on our universe and humans as a whole.
ATS: If he had physical influence on our universe then we would be able to measure him.
RTS: Yeah I hear that assumption a lot. Let me give you an example. Do you think I am real?
ATS (sniggers a little, since this is in his head): no, but for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll bite. Yes you are real.
RTS: OK, lemme use someone else. Do you think Alex Rodriguez, the baseball player is real?
ATS: Yes.
RTS: So presumably he has a father right?
ATS: Yes
RTS: So we definitely know this person I am talking about is real, but he is also someone that most people do not know.
ATS: OK (with a look of “where the hell are you going with this?”)
RTS: OK, lets say A-Rods father, Daddy-Rod, goes to Mumbai and kills someone without being caught on video. Do you think that is possible, leaving aside his morals?
ATS: Yes.
RTS: Then Daddy-Rod does to Rhode Island and drops 1000 dollars in a mailbox in a suburb of Providence. Is that Possible?
ATS: I guess
RTS: Then he does 100 other acts of kindness, creation, destruction, and pain, all over the world in a completely random fashion. All while not being detected. Do you think that is possible?
ATS: Well I guess.
RTS: Is it possible that this string of actions looks random to you and everyone else, but in actuality there is a method to his madness?
ATS: I guess.
RTS: Is Daddy-Rod no longer real? Hasn’t he performed significant acts that affect people in a significant way? But still, presuming that all the acts appear to be random, he would not be detected. Further, it may appear completely random to you, but he may have his own formula about who gets good things and who gets bad, and you would never know it.
OK, I’ve let this drama go on long enough. Yeah, I knew where RTS was going in a second when I really had this conversation. Some of the folks I have brought this to, have asked “If you can’t detect Daddy-Rod, how is that different than him not being there?”. But clearly he is there. Clearly for many people there is a difference because he is there. Further, if we knew his reasoning, we would be in a better position to avoid pain and be granted something good.
The best I can think of is that, we have been trying to find concrete evidence of Daddy-Rod for millennia, surely he would have slipped up by now. Been caught on camera, or done something that would not have been able to be done without his presence. But presuming omnipotence, that may not apply to a god.
I’m not going all Raving Atheist. There are many reasons to ignore the god hypothesis. And tons of unconvincing arguments for God. But I was just thinking about this. If someone brought this to me, I am not sure of how I would respond. So, I am bringing it to you.
Logging you in...
Valor Phoenix · 847 weeks ago
...and then it ate it again, more aggressively...
Techskeptic 69p · 847 weeks ago
Valor Phoenix · 847 weeks ago
- If Daddy-Rod leaves no physical evidence nor even eye-witness account, where does the idea that it was Daddy-Rod responsible for these supposed events come from? The Nigeria Scams for instance love to quote news articles about government upheaval and whatnot to help sell the story that they have millions and need your help in return for a sizable fee to get the money out of the country.
- The obverse side to the argument is that Daddy-Rod _is_ a supposedly real person, and thus there actually would be evidence. Paper/digital trails, trace evidence, observable patterns, conspirators/acquaintances, etc.
The one suggesting Dadd-Rod's exploits wants the veneer of believable evidence without the burden of such proofs. Looking too deep provides details, and those details beget patterns and plot-holes.
Techskeptic 69p · 847 weeks ago
Valor Phoenix · 847 weeks ago
What lead to the discovery of black holes? Oddly moving matter pointing to a higher mass content at the center point and gravitational lensing(predicted by Einstein). What lead to the discovery of Dark Matter much later? The outer rims of galaxies like ours were moving too fast, indicating unobserved matter and universe equations pointed to missing matter. Dark Matter distribution was mapped by gravitational study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino There are 50 Trillion (50,000,000,000,000) Solar Electron Neutrinos on average passing through each person on Earth, then passing through the planet itself, yet we can detect those.
As Carl Sagan pointed out with the 'Dragon in My Garage' example, if the supernatural entity is immune to every 'natural' evidence based test, then how does the claimant know it's there? Indeed, why would it matter if it was there? That sort of argument works just as well for the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and is indeed why the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created to illustrate just such reasoning.
The argument in the post basically makes Daddy-Rod a conceptual entity representing random chance, so the question is then why call random chance Daddy-Rod?
It's like testifying that I have a lucky charm that makes coin flips land in my favor with a 50/50 likely hood. Why bother? Why not just flip 10 coins 100 times and keep the one that came up with the highest number of heads as a lucky coin? At least then there is a chance that the tail side is ever-so-slightly heavier and thus more likely to cause heads to come up.
PS Intense Debate trying to use OpenID ate the posts.
Valor Phoenix · 847 weeks ago
Techskeptic 69p · 847 weeks ago
The issue with your examples here are that none of those things try to be undetectable. All of them behave according to a set of rules. The theist's god does not have to follow rules, and may act without apparent reason (god works in mysterious ways).
None of this is evidence for one god or another. I haven't gone loony. I'm just pointing out that I think a lot of atheists rely on a fallacy as ATS did. Its incorrect to say that if an unmeasurable god that lives outside of our universe acts on our universe, then we would be able to detect it. There is no reason that we would be able to.
Valor Phoenix · 847 weeks ago
... so how does this concept of this particular diety come about? The testimony of believers _is_ part of the body of evidence. If even that is removed to make the target less falsifiable, then where does the account for the target come from?
Acknowledging that anything is possible is a rather pointless exercise unless Occam's Razor gets sharpened first.
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