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Permalink Reply by Jason Spicer on August 24, 2010 at 2:18am

Also a good point, Daniel. John Calvin worried that one to death.

And if Jehovah is so damn smart, why didn't he just send Jesus to meet Adam and Eve as they left Eden? "Have I got a deal for you!"

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on August 24, 2010 at 11:39pm

Oh, yea I love it. He knew Eve would eat the apple but he made her and put the apple tree there anyway...and thus women endure excruciating pain during child birth. Perfect logic. Wait, shouldn't Jesus's death have done away with this 'pain' punishment?

This leads me to another fun fact that the Churches like to ignore...the incest issue.

Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on August 24, 2010 at 5:54am

Determinism and free will (in the contra-causal sense) are rather incompatible too though, so free will is in quite some trouble either way ;)

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on August 24, 2010 at 11:25pm

This is hilarious.

The basic defense to this logic "theological fatalism" is the fundamental distinction that I would make between fatalism and determinism. I expected this much but the example that they use to provide an example of god's omniscience is a physic. More proof irrationality begets irrationality.

>>One simple illustration could be a psychic person foreseeing someone on the other side of the world tripping and breaking his leg when he runs to catch a bus. The psychic would not be altering reality be foreseeing this event, as this event would still happen regardless of whether someone had seen it or not.

Buy the story of a Christian god? Well, then you'll love these psychics, gypsy tears, witches, ghosts, etc... etc...!

It gets even better though. The guy goes on to mount a magnificent attack against fatalists and deists.


>>Those who blankly say or believe "what is to be, will be" are as wrong as the advocates of chance. It is true that events are certain, but only so because of the sovereign God who fulfills His own decrees. Actually, those who believe "what is to be, will be," without considering God, are as difficult to convince of the Bible doctrine of predestination as those who believe in chance or fortune.

Serious students of the Bible do not believe that things “just happen." They understand that a wise, holy, good and sovereign God has the control and guiding hand in every detail of life (Matthew 10:29-30).

Boy howdy do I love crazy on crazy hate. (On a side not this argument against deism really opens him up to a devastating rebuttal on the problem of evil.)

Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on August 25, 2010 at 6:15am

I'm going to disagree with you here.
I don't see how "theological determinism" (as in God knowing what you're going to do before you do it) is any more incompatible with free will than determinism is.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Terence Meaden on August 24, 2010 at 2:05am

Matt: Assigning a miniscule probability that the universe is not natural is not "infantile wishful thinking", it's intellectual honesty.

But Matt, what is not natural is supernatural, and I'll have no truck with anything supernatural thank you.

So, because of the scientist in me, I remain with the 100% expectation that physics in all its powers will continue to explain everything---the big and the little.

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on August 24, 2010 at 5:52am

Me neither, and there's nothing wrong with expectations. But saying that you have a 100% certainty on anything means that you could not possibly be convinced otherwise, no matter how much evidence you get to the contrary.

I don't believe in the supernatural either, but I can think of some things that could potentially convince me, if they occurred. Saying that you have 100% certainty rules that out, making your position unfalsifiable. Which also isn't very scientific.

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on August 24, 2010 at 6:30am

You can't express certainty of belief with a mathematical percentage. That's just a little quirk of our languages, and does not correspond to reality.
"I'm 99% certain that that is true!" is not someone saying that they think they will be right 99 times out of 100; it's just a verbal short-hand for saying "I'm really certain that this is true."

The idea of having "100% certainty" does correspond to reality though, in the sense that someone is claiming to possess absolute certainty.

Permalink Reply by joseph f logston on August 24, 2010 at 10:32am

I'm still an atheist till a deist g?d is proven but 100% sure it's not going to be proven, to me it's all a natural recycling cosmos that we acknowledge that we are in, no complicated rabbit holes here................

Permalink Reply by Jason Spicer on August 24, 2010 at 3:22pm

Just to be clear, if you say there is some vanishingly small chance that a god exists, I don't think that disqualifies you from being an atheist. Just because you're not 100% sure philosophically doesn't mean you act as though there is a god or give it any practical significance. I don't take this topic to be a means of discriminating "real" atheists from "almost" atheists.

That said, given the definitions of god that I have encountered, I can't see any logical way for one to exist, nor any reason to even entertain the notion seriously. I am therefore 100% certain that there is no god.

Matt, it seems like you're having it both ways if you say that 99% certainty doesn't correspond to reality but 100% certainty does. And that seems to be the reverse of your previous assertions that 100% certainty isn't scientific, but 99.9999...% is. Though perhaps I've misunderstood you.

Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on August 25, 2010 at 5:43am

Jason,

Yes, you misunderstood what I'm saying. I was replying to Fred who seemed to be pondering the difference between being 99,99% certain or 97% certain or 80% certain... and I pointed out that saying that you're 99% or 99,99% sure are just verbal shorthands for saying that you're almost certain that you're right but yet allow for a possibility that you're wrong. But there's no way of mathematically determining who believes something "99,99%" and who believes something "99%". That's not what we mean by those terms: they're not scientific statements about probability, they are verbal shorthands.

So someone saying that they are 98,56% certain that there is no God is making a worthless statement: all they are saying is that they are quite certain that there isn't a God. You can't compare someone who is 98,56% certain to someone who is 99% certain. It doesn't add any information.
Saying that you're 100% certain, on the other hand, does add information: it adds the information that you exclude the very possibility of being wrong. In that sense it's a useful verbal short-hand.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Terence Meaden on August 24, 2010 at 5:13pm

And yet I further suggest that even the concept and mention of “the supernatural” is itself a human invention, no less than Bertrand Russell’s orbiting teapot is a human invention---the orbiting-teapot level of which in our wondrous Universe is exactly zero.

The 'natural' is actuality, reality, rationality. It is everywhere we look.

The 'supernatural' is religious hogwash, balderdash and fictional nonsense.

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