There is no “evidence” for your cartoon magic man in the sky.
You and your fellow mythology fanboys have had 2,000 years to provide even an atom of genuine evidence for your cartoon magic man, and have FAILED DISMALLY to deliver.
Your favourite Bronze Age mythology isn’t “evidence” for your cartoon magic man, it’s evidence solely for the propensity of its piss-stained nomad authors to make shit up. Such as that cretinous bilge about genetics being controlled by coloured sticks, an assertion that was utterly destroyed by a 19th century monk, when he launched modern genetics as a properly constituted scientific discipline.
Likewise, ex recto apologetic fabrications that an astute child would point and laugh at, aren’t “evidence” for your cartoon magic man, they’re evidence for the desperation and duplicity of the pedlars thereof. See, for example, every piece of duplicitous “design” apologetics ever peddled by the usual suspects, all the way back to Paley himself, and I’ll explain in detail why said apologetics are duplicitous in a subsequent post if need be.
Third, we and our surroundings aren’t “evidence” for magic poofing by your cartoon magic man, they’re evidence for testable natural processes, as documented in several million peer reviewed scientific papers.
Furthermore, the moment that testable natural processes are found to be SUFFICIENT to account for a real world observable, then cartoon magic men from pre-scientific mythologies are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant. Hint: this has already happened for vast classes of observables, and the list is growing.
Methinks you need to learn some elementary lessons.
Oh, and your lame attempt to peddle Pascal’s Wager, as if it constitutes some startling brand of wisdom we’ve never encountered before, instead of the apologetic horseshit that people with functioning neurons have known it to be for at least two centuries, is just that - lame.
Garbage. First of all, we have ZERO evidence for magic poofing of the sort asserted to have taken place in your ridiculous goat herder mythology. Likewise, we have ZERO evidence for your cartoon magic man. See above.
Learn once and for all, that “My favourite Bronze Age goat herder mythology says so” only constitutes “evidence”, for the obsessive manner in which the piss-stained authors thereof made shit up. and anyone who paid attention in a science class KNOWS that your favourite goat herder mythology is littered with made up shit, an example of which I’ve already provided above.
Second, “I treated the voices in my head as real” is about as worthless a reason to believe in your cartoon magic man as it gets. “Treat my mythology’s assertions uncritically as fact, and my magic man will talk to you” is lame in the extreme.
Third, genuinely open minds don’t accept uncritically whatever bullshit is passed to them. Genuinely open minds ask the question “what proper tests have the assertions in question passed?” Before moving on, learn quickly that “it appeals to my infantile emotional yearnings” isn’t a proper test.
Fourth, no amount of pompous sanctimonious panhandling on your part, is going to sway those of us who learned FACTS.
Meanwhile, dealing with this important tangential diversion …
BINGO. I’ll take this a step further.
Quite simply, intelligent people in the past, determined that there were two methods of determining the reliability of an assertion. Namely:
[1] The assertion is in accord with observational reality, and supported by data therefrom;
[2] The assertion is consistent with the axioms of an appropriate deductive formal system.
Now before we move on, [2] is applicable to abstract entities primarily, though it also places restrictions upon concrete entities as well. So that, for example, a concrete entity cannot possess properties that are contradictory or absurd. This rules out every fantastic magic entity asserted to exist in the numerous mythologies humans have fabricated, yours included.
[1] of course, applies to concrete entities, and effectively applies thereto, constraints arising from the known laws of physics. Which basically rules out magic.
If your assertion cannot be placed into the above two categories, then it is either false, and discardable on that basis except for pedagogical reasons, or it possesses the status “truth value unknown”, and can be safely discarded on that basis. If the latter holds, we then ask the question of whether the assertion is actually testable. Because resolution of that latter issue is only possible, if a proper, rigorous test of said assertion can be both devised, and conducted in a manner independent of the tester’s presuppositions. Without this in place, and actual conduct of said test, you have nothing.
Now, returning to the matter of the definition of “agnostic”, Mordant correctly points out above, that the term was originally defined, to describe someone who regarded the question of the existence of a god type entity in its most general form, as unanswerable even in principle. Since then, of course, rigour has been applied to the matter, and we need to draw a distinction between the aforementioned, and those who regard the question as potentially answerable but unanswered. CapriMark1 refers above to the latter persons as undecided, but I would refer to them as having insufficient data to make a decision.
This should be informing you of the depth of thinking required here, and which we almost never see among mythology fanboys like you. the above should also be informing you, that apologetics won’t cut it here. We prefer clarity and rigour, both of which are all too often absent from apologetics.
Oh, and in case you’re unaware of how much discourse has been conducted on the matter of god type entities here, I’ll provide a link to some column inches of mine on the subject, that constitute merely a small fraction of the discourse in question here. You would be advised to persevere with that thread (ignoring the rat spit diversions of course), because it will tell you much about the level of discourse here, and how a fair proportion of that discourse sweeps aside your superficial, naive and at times infantile pretensions.
Meanwhile …
Read the above, in detail, and slowly if need be, then follow the recommendations provided.
