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  • Stardusty Psyche replied to the topic Can being come from Non-being ? in the forum Religion and Secularism 5 years, 1 month ago

    Adonai888

    Either there is a God, or not.

    That is monotheistic personified god limited thinking, shared by Barnes, so let’s use his trillion.

    If one can speculate 1 god then 2 gods or 1,000,000,000,000 gods are equally likely.  As long as we are making wild unevidenced speculations (god) I can just as well speculate that 999,999,999,999 gods acting in cooperation lack the power to create material existence but 1,000,000,000,000 gods acting in cooperation have sufficient power to create material existence.

    I can speculate any number of such coopering gods from 1 to any particular number.

    I can further speculate that god(s) do not exist anymore because they committed suicide in the act of creation, making material out of themselves to their own demise.

    Or I can speculate that the sort of material that created our material can be past eternal but transformed itself into our sort of material at some finite time in the past such that it no longer exists.

    The only evidence we have is that apparently material cannot be created or destroyed, and material exists, and therefore the conclusion is obvious, material has always existed, our inability to rationally account for that past eternal existence being due to our limited rational faculties.

    That requires to select 1 out of 40^224.000!

    Post hoc statistical citations are a particularly bad theistic argument.  Every particular material arrangement is vastly improbable.  A single particular shape of a snowflake is highly improbable, so consider the odds against all the particular shapes of all the snowflakes being what they are.  Yet those shapes are all what they are.

    Your error is in looking at the arrangement of a system that developed over time and considering the probability of all those particular arrangements as if they all appeared suddenly and randomly.

    When it comes to the truth of any given proposition, one only has three logical options: affirm it, deny it, withhold judgment (due to ignorance or the inability to weigh competing evidences).

    More limited theistic thinking.  The human brain is multifaceted and a person can and typically does hold multiple perspectives simultaneously within the space of the brain.

    Humans assign personal probability estimates.  A person can become personally convinced there is no god and also assert that position is not absolutely provable because it would require the proof of a universal negative.  This is not a logically strong affirmation, a logically strong denial, or withholding judgement.

    I am convinced there is no god due to a preponderance of negative evidences, a lack of positive evidences, the universal failure of all logical arguments for god put forth by even the most brilliant of theists, and the availability of observable alternative naturalistic explanations for nearly all phenomena asserted to be the work of god.

    My atheism is strong in the human sense of being thoroughly personally convinced, just as I am thoroughly personally convinced Russel’s Teapot is not in orbit even though I cannot reasonably claim to be able to absolutely prove a universal negative.