What are you claiming I misunderstood, please quote my post or part of it and i will address it, otherwise this simply smacks of more ad hominem.
Now can you make claims about a deity without first evidencing it exists, only you have made contradictory claims about this?
It requires sufficient objective evidence be demonstrated, as that is my criteria for credulity.
What’s that for God?
I don’t think (could be wrong) that I’ve made what could be called an ad hominem fallacy in this thread. Obviously, not every judgment of the quality of a person’s engagement is an ad hominem fallacy.
Some of you have criticized my approach here, and even refused to engage it. Or even even thought me dishonest or disingenuous. I shouldn’t assume this is an ad hominem fallacy…
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Point of logic here, and maybe of history. I actually prefer to reserve the name “ad hominem” for something else, which I think is the original meaning: a legitimate approach to refutation of fallacies, which consists in showing the ridiculousness of holding contradictory views. It’s “ad hominem” because it makes the person out to be a fool. This is something several of you have done here, and that’s a legitimate move. If the contradiction is real.
This is what @Kellii did here (see below). This is a great ad hominem, but the good, totally legitimate kind.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
Why not just present the most compelling reason you think there is that a deity exists outside of the human imagination. This long preamble involving unevidenced and even erroneous assertions about atheists and what they may or may not believe just looks like obfuscation.
People either will or will not accept your arguments or “evidence” as sufficient. but the long preamble serves no purpose. Also some of these assertions now seem to b leading to a special pleading fallacy, why should I not subject claims about deities to the same level of objective scrutiny as any other claims? We already know what works best in validating claims, and it’s methods designed to remove as much subjective bias as possible.
Well I think perhaps you are being rather generous to use the word “seem”.
It’s actually really important to realize that different kinds of claims require different kinds of evidence.
For example, claims of right and wrong require unique sorts of justification, and have limited certainty. Seeking the wrong kind of evidence and the wrong kind of certainty sets you on the wrong track.
In other words, there isn’t one scientific method, but many.
Correct, and claims of the extraordinary kind, like the existence of a supernatural being (“god”), requires extraordinary evidence.
Oh dear not this again, do you seriously expect others to tell you what the evidence if for a deity they hold no beliefs about should look like? I invite you to see why that question is absurd, especially since you haven’t even defined this deity accurately yet? It’s your claim and belief, it is for you to present your best reason for believing this.
I quoted one above in this thread.
If it attacked you, without specifically addressing any argument you’d made, then yes.
Ad hominem fallacy
“Ad hominem (Latin for ‘to the person’), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.”
Not all ad hominem is fallacious, something can be offensive, even perceived as personal and not necessarily be fallacious.
I see no ad hominem there it addresses a claim you made, and offers an rational inference derived from another claim?
Indeed, but that doesn;t address what I said, evidence can range from entirely subjective and anecdotal to objective fact, the amount is also important, hence my qualifying it with the word sufficient. Note again you are quibbling with what looks like a straw man, rather than attempting to give the best reason you think there is for believing in an extant deity, then you baulk when people suggest this is dishonest, do you see where they might be coming from?
Right and wrong are subjective, as is morality of course.
I know this, and I never mentioned science specifically. You have also failed to attempt to evidence your deity again. again just offer your most compelling reason, argument or evidence, and we can subject it to critical scrutiny.
Exactly so, hence again my inclusion of the word sufficient, but all I get is a lecture on standards of evidence, but no actual evidence, objective or otherwise. the problem is we’ve seen this preamble and deflection so many times, it becomes difficult not to draw an inference, as it never ends in any objective evidence, but in subjective anecdotal claims, and special pleading fallacies. However I shall try and keep an open mind, despite it seeming like a predator sniffing out the weak and the sick, or in this case the more suggestible.
Anyway i have to leave for Sunday lunch soon. I may rejoin this later.
One does not “set out to prove” random imaginings. Rather, claims should be judged by the evidence leading to the claim, and the acceptance of such should be proportioned to the veracity, quantity, and verifiability of such evidence.
The claimant of an existence is who is obligated to present any/all evidence, regardless of it’s form, without which, defining characteristics cannot be assigned.
Attaching ambiguous features to that which has not in any meaningful manner been demonstrated to exist, is indistinguishable from the ramblings of the psychotic.
Your deliberately narrow misuse of various terms such as “prove” or “certainty” are obviously chosen to obfuscate and mislead rather than to illuminate.
Now I am using illuminate in a narrow manner which you may or may not recognize.
As much as I appreciate dance (especially Samba) it would be nice if you would stop with dancing and get to the music.
Your profile indicates your general belief. You have tried to persuade others to buy the complexity argument so as to promulgate the notion of an ambiguously complex god which ostensibly would defy conventionally accepted definitions of evidence.
You have as well, resorted to the wearying tactic of insisting that others have a definition for your god, so as to have a great big ole’ scarecrow to set on fire.
While some here may appreciate your arguably more civil tone, your obstinacy when asked to be direct is revealing and I would argue, rather familiar…
The notion of a deity. (a conception of or belief about something)
Yah. Sure. Same with Bigfoot or alien abductions. History is full of deity “notions”.
Do you believe in mermaids?
My confidence in the existence of anything presented is a lower standard of evidence then some here may choose. I use a “civil court” standard for evidence.
Sigh… @Kellii hit the nail on the head here. @TheMetrologist is yet another theist who can’t answer the most fundamental question of all: What objectively verifiable evidence do you have for the existence of any god, or that one can even exist? He hems and haws and makes up excuses and strawmen to try to defend his position, and even offers Fermat’s excuse (“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain”) when asked for evidence.
People have claimed for millennia to have evidence for the existence of god(s), yet none of them ever deliver the goods, instead offering excuse after excuse, or simply evading the question altogether. Looks like @TheMetrologist is yet another of this ilk.
Yeahhhhhh, and I had such high hopes 
. I really have more respect for people who just flat out admit they’ve taken the suspiciously bad advice from a very flawed book and that they just take the existence of their god on faith.
Hi @skriten
I think this may be my last or one of my last posts on this thread because this has become a bit as a conversation between deaf men. So I’ll want to start fresh, with something a little narrower in scope — I’ll need think through what a good narrow, not too difficult topic of debate would be to address next. I’m even tempted to jump into what I think is a convincing argument for God’s existence next because of how much it has bothered folks that I haven’t. Maybe then they’ll have more trust and be more willing to actually listen? Don’t know.
A friendly acquaintance of mine, Ed Feser, professor of philosophy of religion, characterized his early intellectual attitude towards classical theism as “read it, read into it, dismiss, move on.” (A bit how my posts have been treated here all too often) But at some point in his teaching career, he got bored of the refutations of classical theist argument he had been taught and was teaching himself and decided to study classical theism more deeply to bolster his refutation of it. Instead of new ways of refuting these classical “proofs” he became convinced of them, and now teaches them as valid and sound. (He tells his story here:
) Anyway, his story is one that shows how even someone smart and quite well trained may look at the same ‘evidence’ and understand it very differently over time.
But before turning the page, I wanted to respond to your post. Let me speak to some specific things you said.
I was trying in an earlier post to explain that, even though you cannot make claims (of existential import) about the nature of something, prior to showing it even exists, still as researchers we
(The rest of that post has clarification that you may find helpful to understand me.)
And this often happens before we know something exists. Examples: aliens, dark matter. The example of mermaids was suggested by @Sheldon, and I think it’s a fun one. Even though we have not shown them to exist we have a notion of them, and someone might still look for evidence of mermaids, looking in the places this putative inquirer thinks most likely to find evidence of their existence. Or it could be a species of bird that has only been reported once and from a dubious source, and now you are trying to find it. Depending on how the initial report describes the bird, you’ll look in different places, even if you’re not sure the supposed new bird even exists.
In this thread, in passing, I proposed for God the following initial description: first cause of all being. Remains to be seen: if such a thing even exists, and if this initial description is even any good.
These are questions of scientific method I’d love to discuss. It’s possible (likely) I’ve been unclear, or was careless about a word (somewhat less likely), but I’m not trying to obfuscate anything. It’s just part of my profession to think about these questions of method, and I have my own views and understandings. I think these sorts of questions really merit their own thread though.
No actually, I think God is not complex at all, but rather “primeval simplicity,” understood a bit differently from what Dawkins had in mind, because his simplicity still has too much complexity. Because only simplicity can be the necessary foundation of all being. (A bit abstract and a sneak peak at a future tread’s content.) But I think it is a huge obstacle to understanding any actually good proof for Gods existence to start from notions of God as complex, which is common because conceiving simplicity is a bit unusual for us and takes a big and long effort of abstraction. It’s a kind of negative concept.
In this post, I just wanted to understand how people thought, and made some general and provocative claims about what I thought were some of folk’s views. I listened and learned about the particular views and attitudes to be found on the atheist republic’s forum, and I’m happy overall with this thread and folk’s spirited contributions. I’m also learning what folks are finding obscure. I do wish I was read more carefully and at times responded to more relevantly, but this is an Internet forum, so it’s on me to manage expectations. Following the advice of at @CyberLN, I’ll do what I can to keep things focused in the future by choosing a narrow topic. More often than not, I expect I will fail, but that’s just the nature of a free discussion.
Seems you made relevant claims about being a scientists, without proving it first.
I think you are confused.
The order of claims would be this:
(1) I, some human, exist
(2) I am a scientist
(3) I know the scientific method.
If I wanted to “prove” or “demonstrate” these three claims, I would have to evidence them in that order. (That’s not totally right, but I’m running with this example anyway.)
This means:
I could not meaningfully show that I’m “scientist” prior to showing I exist.
Then, supposing that every scientist knows the scientific method, once I “demonstrated” (maybe via some sort of credentials) that the attribute “scientist” is truly said of me, then I could validly come to the further conclusion that I know the scientific method.
The point is that in (proper and deductive) demonstration, there must be an order to the claims, and the starting claim is the existence of the subject studied.
That said, discovery is not always deduction-like. Also, there may be all sort of prior things that need to be known before coming to know the existence of any particular subject (ie thing about which we want to make further claims). For an obnoxious example: a cave man could not have simply shown the existence of a black hole! He needed to discover how to sling rocks first.
Or more accurately between a single man who wants to reel off endless claims about some sort of deity,while refusing to even try to evidence them.
Halleluiah…so to speak…
Oh dear, that’s it, after all this preamble we get an appeal to authority fallacy, dear oh dear.
When do you plan to do this?
And I will withhold belief until they are objectively evidenced. Yet you believe a deity exists, so can you explain the objective difference between two imagined things?
Come on, you must surely have something more than bare assertion?
Dawkins had nothing in mind, he was drawing an inference from the claims of theists.
I do wish you’d cut to the chase, and offer something beyond bare assertions and irrational arguments for your claim a deity exists.
And you have not, so maybe you are the one who is confused, and leaving aside your unevidenced claims about your own scientific credentials, you have made several claims about deities you imagine to be real, yet have filed to satisfy your own criteria for such claims
Dear oh dear?
I didn’t make any claims about a deity on this forum yet. Not even that one exists. I disclosed I was a theist, yes, but I did not make any claim about god yet. (I did make some occasional and rare statements about my views on God. That’s all.)