In a YouTube short (Ricky Gervais Debunked) posted by Alex O’Connor, he criticizes Ricky Gervais’s use, on Stephen Colbert’s show, of what I call the ‘just one more god’ argument. Gervais is an atheist and Colbert is a Catholic. The idea is that humanity has posited thousands of gods, all but one of which Colbert rejects. Gervais rejects all of the gods that Colbert rejects but adds just one more: the Catholic God in which Colbert believes.
O’Connor shows a short clip of that part of the Colbert/Gervais conversation, which goes like this:
Gervais:
So you believe in one God, I assume.
Colbert:
Uhhh, in three persons, but go ahead.
Gervais:
Okay, so you believe– okay. But there are 3,000 to choose from, you know, of people —
Colbert:
I’ve done some reading, yeah.
Gervais:
So basically, you believe in– you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods, and I don’t believe in just one more.
O’Connor tries a reductio ad absurdum:
Which I think is the most, like, unthinking thing that you can say about the issue of God’s existence. Imagine you were sat around with your ten brothers and none of you had ever met your father, and you were discussing “What do you think our father was like?” One of your brothers says “Well, you know, I think he might have been French.” And someone says “No, no, no, I’m sure he was American. If you look at the kind of man that Mum’s into, I’m sure he might have been American.” And, you know, the next brother thinks he’s Italian, and the next brother thinks that he’s German, and it gets round to me and I say “You know what, guys? I don’t think we had a dad.”
And they’re like, “What? Of course you had a bloody dad. What are you talking about?” [I reply] “Oh, hold on, guys. Like, you don’t believe in the French dad, and the American dad, and the German dad. You don’t believe in any of those dads. I just go one dad further.”
I think you’re making a mistake there… Notice that there’s a huge difference between, say, the difference between ten and eleven, or the difference between five and six, and the difference between zero and one. It’s a difference of quality rather than just quantity.
He’s being unfair to Gervais. If you watch the full Gervais/Colbert segment and not just the part that O’Connor excerpted, it’s clear that Gervais isn’t trying to justify atheism, he’s just explaining it. Here’s the lead-up to the part I quoted above:
Gervais:
I’m an agnostic atheist, technically. ‘Agnostic’ means no one knows whether there’s a God. So everyone’s technically an agnostic. We don’t know.
Colbert:
That’s true.
Gervais:
An agnostic atheist is someone who doesn’t know whether there’s a God or not, as no one does.
Colbert:
So you’re not convicted of your atheism.
Gervais:
Well, I am. No, I am. Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a God. Atheism isn’t a belief system. Atheism– so this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, “There’s a God.” I say, “Can you prove that?” You say, “No.” I say, “I don’t believe you then.”
Then Gervais presents the ‘just one more god’ argument. To me, it’s clear that he doesn’t think it disproves the existence of God. He’s just explaining atheism and pointing out that Colbert is an atheist with respect to thousands of gods, while he is an atheist with respect to just one more.
When I use that argument, I use it to invite the believer to apply the same skepticism to their own religious beliefs as they do to the religious beliefs of others. If a Muslim tries to convert a Christian, the Christian will presumably demand evidence that Islam is right and Christianity is wrong. Without such evidence, the Christian won’t be persuaded. That same standard should be applied to their own Christian beliefs, and in my experience, that rarely happens. For most people, their religious beliefs are the default, and evidence is only required when they are asked to change those beliefs.
O’Connor is right that ‘just one more god’ would be a poor argument against God’s existence, but that isn’t what Gervais (or I) use it for.
Crap. I forgot the “continue reading” tag. Mods, could you insert one after the first paragraph?
I should mention that O’Connor is an atheist.
From his video, you might get the impression that he’s a theist and that he’s arguing that just as the ten brothers must have a father, we must have a Creator. He’s not. It was a poor choice of analogy.
He’s just pointing out that there’s a big difference between saying “I don’t believe in gods X, Y, and Z” and “I don’t believe in any gods.” That’s true, but it’s irrelevant to the point that Gervais was trying to make.
In Ancient Rome, Romans perceived that Christians deployed this argument, teaching people to believe in just one god – or none because there was no statue. The result was the charge of atheism against Christians.
In Indian Scholasticism, atheism (i.e. anti-theism or irreligion) was recognised as its own proper category distinct from religious practices.
In the modern form I know the “one less/fewer god” argument from Christopher Hitchens, but it must definitely be earlier, because nothing Hitchens said was original.
Erik:
I’m sure it’s much older because it’s a fairly obvious argument for an atheist to make.
Tangential, but your “one less/fewer god” phrase made me think about the fact that in standard English we say “one less god” instead of “one fewer god” even though the general rule we’re taught in school says to use “fewer” with countable nouns such as “gods”. I never thought about it before, but the number one is an exception to the rule. I’ve always ignored the rule anyway because as with most English usage rules, I learned it implicitly as a kid and never have to think about it consciously. “One less” just sounds better than “one fewer”, so that’s what I say.
keiths,
Hi Keiths
What about starting from the argument from design or no design and then arguing for specificity depending on which way you land on the design argument?
My stance: there are thousands of religions, and every culture ever known has some belief system with religious elements. It is an anthropologically-based empirical fact that people make up religions, and there is no reason to think any one of them is less made up than any other. They are all fictions.
aleta,
Who decides the rules anyway? There’s “more” but no “morer”, “many” but no “manyer”, “less” but no “lesser” (not in that sense, at least).
Alan:
No one, to the dismay of prescriptivists (like the Académie Française).
Or everyone, in the sense that language is a communal exercise and we all make personal usage choices that contribute to its evolution.
aleta,
Likewise; it was the realisation that the multiplicity of religions and subsects – not gods per se – could not all be right that led me, aged 11, to reject ’em all.
colewd:
The ‘just one more god’ idea applies, with a slight alteration, even to someone whose religious beliefs amount to nothing more than “there is a Designer”. Such a person may be agnostic regarding the truth of any particular belief system — Christianity, Hinduism, Rastafarianism, etc — leaving that question as a TBD, but it remains true that most if not all of them are false, since they’re contradictory, even if you don’t specify which are true and which are false.
Semi-related: Nathan Hawkins criticizes Matt Dillahunty:
Matt Dillahunty embarrasses himself when he says this
Hawkins is disputing Dillahunty’s oft-repeated statement that “claims are not evidence”, and he’s right to do so. Claims can be evidence, and we rely on this all the time. If I ask Katherine “Where did you leave the car?” and the answer is “It’s at Susan’s”, then Katherine’s claim is evidence that the car is indeed at Susan’s, assuming that I have no reason to doubt Katherine’s veracity or sanity. Claims aren’t proof, but they can definitely be evidence.
As Hawkins points out in the video, this is a straightforward application of Bayesian reasoning. Suppose I think it’s unlikely that the car is at Susan’s. In other words, I regard the prior probability as low. Then I ask Katherine, and she makes her claim. I now believe that the probability is much higher that the car is at Susan’s. That’s my posterior probability. The posterior probability is higher than the prior probability, which means that the claim counts as evidence for the proposition.
Katherine’s claim doesn’t prove that the car is at Susan’s. Someone might have stolen it, or Katherine might be lying for some reason. But evidence doesn’t have to be proof, and often it isn’t. In such cases we need multiple pieces of evidence before we conclude that a proposition is true, but the individual pieces are still evidence even if they aren’t individually dispositive.
I don’t yet know if Dillahunty has responded to the criticism.
Back a few posts: I don’t know what rules Alan is talking about, but I like Keith’s reply” “ language is a communal exercise and we all make personal usage choices that contribute to its evolution.”
Each of us has internal understandings about the meanings of words, and through the “communal exercise “ (I like that phrase a lot) of communicating with each other, we build a language system by which we can express commonly-held knowledge systems. But the process is imperfect, sometimes badly so, because there is no guarantee that our various understandings will always be broadly shared. Evolution is another good word, because both inside each of us and in the larger community with which we interact, relatively strong knowledge systems are built because of the practical advantages they bring.
keiths,
I think this is a black and white statement in a grey world as you are not considering partially true or partially false. Components of different faiths are contradictory some claims may not be. Muslims believe Jesus is the Jewish Messiah yet they do not believe he is above the other prophets. Most all popular religions believe there is a deity.
colewd:
Two faiths don’t have to disagree on every single point in order to be contradictory.
Christians believe Jesus is God. Muslims and Jews don’t. That’s a huge difference. Those religions are contradictory.
But they don’t all believe in the same God, and many of them believe in multiple gods. That’s where the ‘just one more God’ argument comes into play.
You don’t believe in Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Shiva, Xiuhtecuhtli, or thousands of other Gods. I don’t believe in them either, but I also don’t believe in the Christian God. I reject just one more God than you do.
And as I mentioned above, even a person who just says “I believe in a Designer” without specifying anything else about that Designer is still implicitly rejecting thousands of gods, because their Designer, whoever he/she/it is, cannot simultaneously be Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Shiva, Xiuhtecuhtli, or the Christian God, because those god concepts are contradictory. The person may not be specifying which gods they’re rejecting, but they can’t believe in all of them.
Another point: I know that people like to argue that the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) worship the same God, the God of Abraham, but I disagree. It’s more accurate to say that they worship different Gods, all of whom evolved from the God of Abraham. To say that Lutherans and Presbyterians worship the same God seems reasonable to me, despite their differences, but I think the differences between the Muslim and Christian Gods are too great to call them the same God.
Which points to something interesting about entities such as gods that are only fictional, or at best hypothetical. If you change a god’s characteristics, one after another, at some point it makes more sense to regard it as a new god. You can get from Yahweh to Orisha via a long series of changes, but Yahweh and Orisha are not the same god. Ditto for Yahweh (the God of Abraham) and the modern Christian God.
I did a related OP years ago (God and Identity) in which I argued that the evidence for an old earth doesn’t merely falsify young earth creationism — it falsifies the young earth creationist God, since an essential characteristic of that God is having created the earth merely thousands of years ago.
Just think this through properly. It is an anthropologically-based empirical fact that people make up food utensils. Does it follow that the utensils are fictions?
Facts are not fictions. They are facts. It is a fact that people have religious instincts the same way as they have any other instincts, like eating or sleeping. Even atheists have religious instincts and their religiousness plays out explicitly often enough to be noted. I grew up in USSR where atheism, for all practical purposes, was the official state religion. Who can deny that e.g. Stalin’s personality cult had the features of religion?
Instead of trying to argue religion into non-existence, pay attention to your own dogmatism where you declare that some inconvenient facts must be fictions.
Erik, to aleta:
Utensils aren’t propositions or concepts. They’re objects, and the utensils that people make aren’t true or false — they just are. Their existence is a fact, but they themselves are just utensils, not facts. Also, we can conceive of utensils that don’t actually exist, in which case they are fictions: utensils that only exist in our imaginations.
The fact that at least some people have religious instincts doesn’t mean that the religious beliefs they form are factually correct. Analogously, it’s a fact that some people deny the existence of viruses (Hi, J-Mac!), but it isn’t a fact that viruses don’t exist.
It follows that food utensils are artefacts.
keiths,
You’re using a lazy label “contradictory”. The religions don’t agree on the exact nature of the Messiah. This is the fact and it is a single point of disagreement. The real substantive theological disagreement is atonement and how that is dealt with. Christians believe it is the Crucification and resurrection that covers atonement.
Religions that believe in multiple gods are very different than the Abrahamic religions. We agree on this point. I don’t see this a rejection of alternatives but deciding on the best explanation for the incredible design that is part of the world and universe we live in. Rejecting all now puts you in the difficult position of not having any explanation for the universe,. and our world that contains life.
Erik writes, “Just think this through properly.” That’s good advice – let’s try it.
Erik: “It is a fact that people have religious instincts the same way as they have any other instincts, like eating or sleeping”
I agree, and in fact emphasized, that all cultures have religions. The reasons are many, but the need for some of the things that religion supplies is universal.
Eriik: “Instead of trying to argue religion into non-existence, pay attention to your own dogmatism where you declare that some inconvenient facts must be fictions.
I wasn’t trying to “argue religion into non-existence”, or deny the fact that religions exist.
I am saying that the metaphysical beliefs that religions claim are fictions.
That is different, and not at all, it seems, what you responded to.
Your turn to think this through properly. 🙂
Colewd write, “Rejecting all [religions ] now puts you in the difficult position of not having any explanation for the universe,. and our world that contains life.”
Yep, that’s in part why people have invented religious stories: we’ve invented explanations for something we in fact don’t have, and can’t have, an explanation for. That’s only a “difficult” position if one thinks that human beings somehow might have the ability to explain existence. If one accepts, as I do, that that ability is beyond us, then there isn’t any difficulty. The issue we face is to understand the universe, nature, and humankind as we find them, which is difficult, but understanding how they got to be that way, in the ultimate metaphysical sense, is not something we can address empirically.
Hence, religious fictions.
Human beings are dependent on learning, and therefore we are meaning-making creatures. Narratives to help us structure our understanding is a necessary part of our nature. Therefore, all cultures make up stories about metaphysical things that are beyond empirical investigation. If we look at humankind as a whole, the fact that none of these are true is not a difficulty: it is just a fact about human beings to understand and accept.
aleta,
You are asserting it is beyond empirical investigation. What do you base this assertion on? For example I cannot personally image or infer the origin of finely tuned matter so therefore an inference does not exist. Back 3000 years…I cannot image or infer the existence of microscopic matter (atoms) so therefore the inference does not exist.
The design argument is the inference that points to a mind behind the origin.
colewd,
It is a common sleight of hand to flip from an observation about arrangements of matter, using energy, to the origin of matter. and energy. The design argument face-plants out of the starting blocks, if it attempts to find in it the origin of STEM itself. I can whittle a stick; does this mean I can make wood and a knife out of nothing?
Allan Miller,
It’s an argument that has existed for hundreds of years or more. There are many forms of the argument including the ones you dismiss out of hand. I infer you dismiss it for ideological reasons. Why have you been arguing against it for the 10 years I have known you as if it truly face-plants you would be able to ignore it?
colewd, to Allan:
Right, so it must be correct. Likewise, people have argued for millennia that the earth is stationary, so how could anyone doubt it?
He definitely does. He’s like those egghead scientists with their fancy-schmancy theories and observations and space probes and whatnot who dismiss geocentrism for ideological reasons.
Exactly! You don't hear Republicans arguing against socialism, or Christians arguing against atheism. They just ignore them. Why does Allan keep arguing against design? Methinks he doth protest too much.
Colewd writes, “The design argument is the inference that points to a mind behind the origin.”
And that inference of a Designer, as well as the additional inference of a source of Creation—a Creator with the agency to create a world that embodies that design—has been a central part of all religions as far in the past as we have knowledge of. All religions (perhaps there are a few exceptions) have creation myths.
The issue in this thread is about, out of all the hundreds of possible religions that have existed, whether we can say that one conception of the source of Design and Creation is right and all the rest are wrong. Or is it more reasonable to say we don’t know, and can’t know, any of the details about the source of Design and Creation, and should accept that all our attempts to do are a type of story-telling fiction?
The design argument is an argument for one class of hypotheses about the metaphysical foundation of the universe—that mind precedes matter. But using the most general word for that mind, God, it says nothing more about the details of that God, much less does it give us any reason to believe that any of the culturally derived notions people have invented about God are in any way true.
The design argument does not address the central topic of the thread.
colewd,
I don’t care how long it has existed, it fails for the purpose you invoke it for the reason I gave.
keiths,
I certainly doth! Likewise I have been known to argue against flat earth, virus denial, moon landing denial, proteins-first abiogenesis, Boltzmann brains and whether “sensical” is a word. All of which I would just ignore if they were wrong, the way Creationists ignore evolution.
keiths:
colewd:
“Lazy label” is your get out of jail free card, isn’t it? There’s nothing lazy about noting that those religions are contradictory. Would you be comfortable calling yourself a Muslim? Why not, if Christianity and Islam aren’t contradictory?
colewd:
They disagree on the nature of God. A trinitarian God is vastly different from a monolithic one. A God who has taken human form is vastly different from a God who has not.
keiths:
colewd:
The Abrahamic religions aren’t the only monotheistic faiths. Ahura Mazda isn’t part of a pantheon, after all.
How could it not be? You don’t worship Ahura Mazda or Zeus, do you?
Right. I lack an explanation for the universe’s existence, while you lack an explanation for God’s existence, which is a much better lack to have. I envy your lack and will become a theist as soon as I finish my lunch.
Allan Miller,
The design argument is obvious by just observing nature. The “how” explanation is nice but it does not take away from the obvious conclusion. Its sustainability is important as it makes your counter very unpersuasive. Especially as we continue to unpack the complexity of the universe.
keiths,
God is the explanation for the Universe existence. One peel of the onion further than you current position.
But the next layer down may be something else entirely. I vote for the Tao.
And the onion is a poor metaphor, because the peels get smaller and smaller until they end. I’ll vote for a fractal, like the Mandelbrot set, where no matter how deep you delve, you get the same level of complexity.
By the way, for more on these topics see Terry Pratchett, and Lakoff’s book “Metaphors We Live By.” Korzybski would be good also.
The other alternative is to skip the “God” level: something entirely beyond mind and matter underlies and manifests the universe. Then, much later the idea of God arises in the minds of creatures like us, who anthropomorphically project our understanding of ourselves back into our stories about the foundational nature of the world in a completely misleading and inaccurate way.
I did not respond to it because that’s not what you said. And now you say there is something called “metaphysical beliefs that religions claim”, which certainly gets at least metaphysics wrong. And I’m not in the mood to fix it.
Earlier I discussed Matt Dillahunty’s statement that “claims are not evidence” and agreed with Nathan Hawkins’ critique of it. Hawkins in turn was responding to a video by Alex O’Connor and Joseph Schmid that was also critical of Dillahunty’s view.
I found Dillahunty’s response to their criticism:
Atheist Debates – Alex O’Connor and Joseph Schmid shockingly wrong on Claims, Evidence and Science
Early in the video, Dillahunty characterizes Schmid’s position thus:
That’s not what Schmid (whom he keeps calling ‘James’ for some reason) is saying. He’s saying that the statement “claims aren’t evidence” is false, not that all claims are evidence, which is different. If I know that a person has a strong incentive to lie and is habitually dishonest (why does Donald Trump immediately spring to mind?) then their claim might not be evidence for the proposition, and in fact might be evidence that the proposition is false. Not all claims are evidence, but it’s a mistake to say that none of them are.
Dillahunty continues:
Schmid’s example is simple and obvious:
Dillahunty chooses to dispute that:
Unless Schmid has reason to think that his friend is deluded, or dishonest, or yanking his chain for some reason, then the claim is very strong evidence that his friend did indeed buy a soccer ball.
It’s true that we often weigh a claim against other evidence to decide if it’s feasible, but that doesn’t mean that the claim itself can’t be evidence.
The friend’s claim isn’t merely consistent with the proposition. It makes the proposition more likely to be true, and that’s why it qualifies as evidence.
Evidence doesn’t need to be strong in order to be evidence. Evidence can range from weak to strong. The fact that stars appear to circle the earth is evidence for the claim that they do so, but it’s weak evidence when compared to the much stronger evidence against geocentrism.
I have no idea why Dillahunty thinks Schmid is ignoring that evidence. I’m sure he takes it into account. If soccer balls were mythical objects like the Golden Fleece, for instance, then Schmid would have far less reason to believe that his friend got one at the local sporting goods store. It’s the totality of the evidence that convinces him that his friend bought a soccer ball, and the claim is a crucial part of that evidence.
Schmid already knew that soccer balls exist, that they can be purchased, that his friend likes soccer, etc, but that evidence didn’t suffice to convince him that his friend had just purchased a soccer ball. And for good reason — even people who like soccer don’t buy new balls every week.
What made the difference was the claim. Before the claim, it was unlikely that his friend had just purchased a soccer ball. After the claim, it was highly likely that the friend had just purchased a soccer ball. Why Dillahunty thinks the claim shouldn’t count as evidence is beyond me.
The video goes on for another 20 minutes, but I stopped watching at that point because it’s clear that Dillahunty is hopelessly confused about this.
keiths:
colewd:
We can add hypothetical layers all day, but they’re meaningless if we don’t have good reason to believe that they’re real.
As a Christian, you presumably believe that God is eternal and uncaused. You’re wrong about that — God was actually created by a MetaGod. Checkmate! My model has one more layer than yours. Christianity is therefore false, and I’m right.
I hope you can see the fallacy.
I missed this earlier:
colewd:
I didn’t realize that Jesus had been crucificated. Fortunately, he was resurrecticated on the third day.
aleta:
There are a lot of parallels, including the fact that languages form evolutionary trees in the same way that species do. Another parallel is co-option, as in the fact that ‘infer’ is being co-opted to also mean ‘imply’, much to my chagrin. (I’m a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist, but I’m still entitled to be annoyed at the decay of a useful distinction.)
Erik writes, “I did not respond to it [my previous post] because that’s not what you said. And now you say there is something called “metaphysical beliefs that religions claim”, which certainly gets at least metaphysics wrong. And I’m not in the mood to fix it.”
I wrote, “Every culture ever known has some belief system with religious elements.” I didn’t use the word “metaphysical”, but I was referring to “religious elements” like belief in the existence and nature of Gods, which is the subject of this thread, and those are metaphysical notions. I don’t what you are thinking about when you write that I “certainly get at least metaphysics wrong”. It is certainly clear that religions make metaphysical claims, but unless you get in the mood to explain, I guess I’ll never know what you are referring to.
Good grief. Dillahunty posted a second response video trying to justify his “claims aren’t evidence” position, and it’s just as bad as the first.
He’s a former programmer, so he tries to draw an analogy between claims and pointers. For any non-programmers reading this, a pointer is just a variable that contains the address of another variable — that is, the pointer points to the second variable.
Suppose you want to access a data variable stored at address 374 in memory. If you know that it’s at 374, you can directly access it. However, sometimes you won’t know where it is; the reasons for that situation are beyond the scope of this comment. In those cases, you’re unable to access it directly, because you don’t know its address. But if there’s a pointer to the variable, you can access it as follows: suppose the pointer is at address 866. You read memory location 866 and find that it contains the value 374, which is the address of the data you’re trying to access. Now you read memory location 374 and get the desired data.
In other words, there are two ways to access the data: directly, in which case it can be done with one memory read; or indirectly, in which case it requires two memory reads: one to read the pointer, and then one to read the desired data.
Dillahunty asserts that a claim is like a pointer — it isn’t itself evidence, but it points to the evidence. In Schmid’s example, Dillahunty says that the friend’s claim that he bought a soccer ball isn’t evidence that he bought a soccer ball, but rather it only points to the evidence that the friend bought a soccer ball, including the fact that the friend is trustworthy.
This is wrong, and it’s easy to see why. Schmid already knows that his friend is trustworthy, that he likes soccer, that soccer balls exist, that they’re available for purchase, etc. If the claim were merely a pointer to that evidence, then the claim would change nothing. It would tell Schmid nothing that he didn’t already know. But we can easily see that before the friend makes his claim, Schmid has no particular reason to think that his friend just bought a soccer ball. After he hears the claim, Schmid has a strong reason to believe it.
The claim is crucial, and it makes all the difference. The mere fact that the friend made the claim is what allows Schmid to go from not believing to believing that his friend bought a soccer ball.
Dillahunty says he’s going to speak privately with Schmid to hash this out. Let’s hope Schmid can set him straight.
keiths, to colewd:
Writing that reminded me of a video I saw around the time of the Rapture mania last year, in which God gets in trouble with his boss for forgetting when the Rapture was supposed to happen: I got raptured
You are not addressing the objection to it. “It’s obvious” is not an argument. And it really is not ‘obvious’ that a manufacturer can create the atoms of clay, energy conservation laws etc, and not just crockery..
If you use an argument from analogy (which this is) you cannot transcend its limitations, nor ignore its other entailments (such as that multiple designers exist).
You are, one may infer, adhering to it on ideological grounds…
keiths,
This is simply based on an assumption that there is little or no evidence supporting the claim of a Creator God. Since IMO the opposite is true I think your argument strategy here is flawed.
Btw my hat is off to you for keeping TSZ going with your posts. Thanks.
Allan Miller,
The support of the argument “Its obvious” is based on the history of the argument ie pre evolutionary theory. The problems evolutionary theory has trying to explain genetic changes and the amount of people that believe a Creator is obvious based on human intuition.
While evolutionary theories problems are not critical for the design argument the lack of a credible explanation for the genetic changes makes the “we don’t know” argument even more challenging.
How will Atheism get out of its niche belief status like the flat earth guys? What evidence is there that the universe was able to Create itself without an intelligent plan?
It is MetaGods all the way up, just as it is turtles all the way down.
Yes, that’s why I mentioned fractals.
More seriously, to Erik: given the inference that a designer and a creator exist, how do we know which of the many concepts of that source, if any, are true about any further details?
keiths:
colewd:
You’re missing the point.
There’s nothing inherent in the concept of a creator god that requires that he/she/it be uncreated. Hence my invocation of a MetaGod who created God, and Neil’s quip that it could be ‘MetaGods all the way up’ — God was created by a MetaGod who was created by a MetaMetaGod who was created by a MetaMetaMetaGod…
I’m not arguing for those MetaGods, of course. I’m just pointing out that when you write:
…you’re applying a bogus criterion. The fact that you’ve tacked on an extra layer doesn’t make your explanation superior, because anyone can tack on layer after layer for free. MetaGods upon MetaGods. By your criterion, my MetaGod explanation is superior to Christianity in explaining the universe’s existence.
Adding an extra layer doesn’t solve anything. Just as I lack an explanation of the universe’s existence, you lack an explanation of God’s existence. Asserting that God is uncreated is special pleading. If you’re allowed to assert that God is uncreated, why shouldn’t I be allowed to assert that the universe is uncreated?
colewd, to Allan:
Lol.
I commented on Dillahunty’s video last night and he isn’t happy.
keiths:
Dillahunty:
And:
keiths:
That was last night. We’ll see if he responds today.
I have seen people claim that the reality we live in is constructed by processes made possible by certain chemical and physical constraints. Therefore, we necessarily seen “design” everywhere we look. Others see exactly the same reality (or close enough) but they attribute the designs to a (hypothetical) mind rather than a remarkably creative combination of material processes. Both of these views are amenable to testing, and both pass all tests!
I’m reminded of the claim that those moving lights in the sky are alien spaceships, and this is “proved” by the fact that everyone in town sees them. I suspect that all religious faiths rest on the interpretation of a wide set of facts and observation. The facts and observations are common; the interpretations get byzantine in their complexity, to the point where a believer in any one interpretation can consider himself to have grasped the truth.
I’d argue that it’s not that there are as many gods as their are religions, but rather there are as many gods as there are theists. Disputes about the nature of god have split the Christian faith into may thousands of sects, and continues to do so because of the difference between faith and science. In science, agreement among scientists converges as research continues, but in religion, a new schism occurs every time someone see things differently, there being no possible other metric for validation other than assertion backed by devout confirmation bias.