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Pulling together threads of this conversation, plus some inductive reasoning from Richard Carrier this morning. My post was intended to be a bit more subtle than Carrier. I was envisioning a world where some god-like powers were acting to make life better. Carrier calculates the odds that such a being exists by looking at the world we actually live in. It’s the same conclusion. He does this while commenting on a recent exchange at Skeptic magazine about the possibility of a good god.

Carrier advocates for something called Bayes Theorem, a way to calculate the probability of something being true. You can look in to the details of that, but the basic data he works with is the observed good done by people, trillions of acts. That good is done according to our limited abilities, but if you make excuses for not doing good, that’s considered bad. It’s all a matter of degree of course. A god is defined as something vastly more powerful than us, so any excuse for say, not preventing a murder, should at least be considered evidence for God being bad. But we see evil and injustice every day, what is crippling God from dealing with it? Whatever it is, we have seen people prevent murder or at least try to, on a regular basis. There are trillions more examples, but where is God? The odds then are trillions to one that God even exists.