There is No Evidence for God

8 Responses

  1. Baxter says:

    I’ve only made it through a couple of your linked videos, but here’s a comment I made on one of them:

    “Religion exists at the edge of knowledge”, Before we understood the
    mechanics of cell division, humans thought it was divine. Now we know
    better. We can explain what is happening with physics and chemistry.

    You discount chance with a specious argument, right at the end of your commentary on chance. (beautiful video, by the way). But you are missing the concept of eternity. If something has a chance of 1-to-the-10-to-the-120 of happening, that’s pretty unlikely, but infinity looks at that number and laughs at how tiny it is.

    How about this: The Universe (physics and stuff) tries (and here I’m anthropomorphising, but that process is still unknown to us) and in the ten-to-the-ten-to-the-thousand-to-the-ten times, one of these tries gets it right. Perhaps that’s where we are now. A chance. An infinite number of monkeys in a room with typewriters randomly recreating the works of Shakespeare.

    If you discount chance and call it GOD, you’re no different than the medieval alchemist doing his chants to turn lead into gold.

    • John DeRosa says:

      Baxter,

      Thanks for the comment.

      Re: “Religion exists at the edge of knowledge”. . .

      This seems to imply that all of the arguments for God are “God-of-the-gaps” arguments. This is not the case. Some of the strongest arguments for God are rooted in philosophy not in the natural sciences. I think you’ll appreciate this analogy: some of the strongest arguments against the minimum wage are rooted in theoretical economic reasoning not in empirical case studies of the minimum wage.

      Re: but infinity looks at that number and laughs at how tiny it is.

      This assumes there was an infinity (or sufficiently large number) of chances of producing the universe. But if there is only one universe (and note that we don’t have empirical evidence of any other universes), then that does not refute the point.

      Re: How about this: The Universe (physics and stuff) tries (and here I’m anthropomorphising, but that process is still unknown to us) and in the ten-to-the-ten-to-the-thousand-to-the-ten times, one of these tries gets it right. Perhaps that’s where we are now. A chance. An infinite number of monkeys in a room with typewriters randomly recreating the works of Shakespeare.

      What do you mean by “The Universe tries”? Doesn’t “The Universe” already have the constants and quantities in question? If so, are you proposing that the constants and quantities have changed tons of times in the past? I’m a little unclear on what you’re arguing here.

      Re: If you discount chance and call it GOD, you’re no different than the medieval alchemist doing his chants to turn lead into gold.

      The fine-tuning argument doesn’t merely discount chance with hand waving. It aims to show that chance is not the best explanation of what we observe. To counter that, you will need to show why chance (or something else) is the best explanation.

  2. Baxter says:

    OK, I’ve gone through the rest of the videos. They are all on the same YouTube channel. All but one has the comments disabled. It’s obvious to me that you are proselytizing, even though you are pitching this site as some logical proof of GOD. There is no such thing.

    To say that there can be no good or evil without GOD is placing a razor-thin subjective definition of good and evil.

    I came here as a link from Tom Woods. I would expect that someone who appreciates Tom and the libertarian ethos would not try to paint his faith through deceptive arguments full of strawman arguments and painting theories and faith as fact.

    Deception is one of those things that a lot of people would call “evil”.

    I’m what you would call an atheist, but I believe that good people respect the rights of others as long as their actions don’t impinge on the rights of me or other people. I would consider myself a good person, but by your theory, good doesn’t exist in my universe.

    Believe what you want, but when you peddle deceit, I think we can both agree that such an act is the genesis of evil. In your bible, I believe the serpent used deceit to fool Eve into eating the apple.

    • John DeRosa says:

      Baxter,

      I’m sorry to disappoint your curiosity, but I appreciate you stopping after hearing the Tom Woods Show and leaving some comments.

      Re: OK, I’ve gone through the rest of the videos. They are all on the same YouTube channel.

      4 of the 5 are from reasonable faith but the Aristotelian argument is not on that channel. I would suggest you look into that one at some point. It is the closest argument to the one Tom presents on his show episode 272.

      Re: I would expect that someone who appreciates Tom and the libertarian ethos would not try to paint his faith through deceptive arguments full of strawman arguments and painting theories and faith as fact.

      These are hand-waving assertions. Care to elaborate?

      Re: Believe what you want, but when you peddle deceit, I think we can both agree that such an act is the genesis of evil.

      It is not my intention to “peddle deceit” and I’m very confused as to what deceit I am peddling. If you read the intro, the point of this article is to counter the assertion that “There is no evidence for God’s existence.”

      Whether or not you return, I’m glad we have some common ground as Tom Woods Show fans.

      Peace,
      John D.

  3. Thomas Jones says:

    John:

    I think the Aristotelian Argument Link needs to be updated I think to:

    Sincerely,

    Tom

  4. Mike says:

    2 of the 5 links are dead.

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