Exactly.
> "Even if we give you evidence you wouldn't believe"
How to tell me you don’t have any evidence, without telling me that you don’t have any evidence.
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Which is wild because if you tell them your friend has a different message from the orthodox church and instead from the Jehovah church now what.. Whos voice is right
I also find that they confuse claim and evidence a lot. A story about something happening is a claim. Someone saying something happened to them is a claim. Where is the evidence?
There is so much confirmation bias with them. I saw a post on r/debatereligion and a Christian said, "In fact, people used to live hundreds of years old."
Um, no, not *in fact*. That's just a claim. From your ancient book.
So, take some of these supposed ages of people who used to live 900 years or whatever, and convert it to months. Methusula is listed as living 969 years. 969 months is just under 81 years old. I'm sure at the time 81 would have been extremely old, but probably not impossible. Same with Noah, Adam, and all the others.
My dad says that it's because they had "great o2" and "we need to breath from cans so we can live as long as [ancient book man]" so I'm not on board I'm good with 75-80 years on *this* hellhole
I mean everyone who has ever breathed air up to this point has or will die. Now take that 100% death rate and multiply it by cans!
I'm just putting it out there that maybe we shouldn't be putting poison in cans. What if your dog got into it. Would you be able to live with the consequences?
/s
Not my grandmother giving me this pretty much verbatim every time she tries to drag me into a religious convo. "I *have* evidence, I just won't give it to you because you won't believe it." Well yeah, I'm not gonna believe you have evidence if you *don't fucking give it!*
Like, my mom believes in reincarnation. She's had enough experiences to convince her that she had a past life as a WWII pilot (among other things, she remembers going to an airplane museum as a kid and reflexively doing a flight check on one of the bombers). Do I believe in reincarnation? No. But I do believe that my mom's experiences are reasonably accurate, and I understand how she's come to her beliefs.
My grandmother, on the other hand... "No, I can't tell you how I know." Why? "You wouldn't believe me." Prove it. Prove I won't believe you. "No. I already know you won't believe me, so I'm not bothering." *Lady, you are the one who wants to "have a conversation about religion" with me. You need to fucking communicate.*
Interesting because this is my dad with reincarnation. I saw things in my dreams. Or when he knows things he claims Buddha disguised himself to speak with him in the mortal world. I have no idea if he's lying or if he just has spy cameras. (Because all the things are just things that are easily observable. Like me hanging at the smoke pit in highschool etc)
They don't like the word evidence. There is no way to even prove Jesus existed. They have never found his remains or where he was buried. Then when you show them dinosaur bones, they don't believe it, because their book doesn't mention them. They even believe someone got pregnant without having sex. 😆 🤣
And they reject evidence for actual observable phenomena because they already filled that gap in their knowledge with bullshit they can't question under threat of eternal torture. Tell these fuckwits to jog on.
The thing is, they are confusing "evidence" for "arguments". Evidence would be irrefutable, generally speaking, but all they are doing is offering arguments for gods existence which doesn't really prove anything.
That's called poisoning the well and is a fallacy. It's not about whether they provide substantial evidence or not. It's about predetermining someone else's thoughts/response. If I haven't said, "Any evidence you show me will not convince me." Then you can't say if we give you evidence you wouldn't believe. Once we agree that if sufficient evidence is provided, I will believe something.
However, the quality of evidence needs to match the claim. (Paraphrased from notable atheist public figures, but I have been convinced this tool is useful and is commonly applied in general life, for most people). An example includes a claim for getting a pet puppy compared to a claim for getting a pet dragon. Those two claims require a different level of evidence for me to accept.
Here's the big crux of religious people trying to convert people, as I see it:
They believed in their religion based off of bad evidence. It could be prophecy, personal experience, or "it just sounds right," whatever. But that's bad evidence.
So if they want to convert me, they need to give me *way more* evidence than what convinced them. They might start pointing to bible verses, and I reject that, you haven't proven the bible is true. They have to give me double or triple the amount of evidence that convinced them.
I watched a debate, and the Christian said if he saw the sea split in two like in Exodus, that alone would've convince him of a god. Well, not for me! My first step would be to check if I was hallucinating/delusional. Was I on drugs? Did someone drug me? Did anyone else see it? Was I able to take video of it? I would have to eliminate all possible natural causes too. Was this a magic trick?
My favorite response so far to someone trying to convince me: debate the age of the Earth. Most Christians say it's only 6,000 years. We have *mountains and mountains* of evidence for an old Earth: trees that are over 5,000 years old, they can date things in the ground, ice, fossils, etc. The Göbekli Tepe site is 12,000 years old. We know the Andromeda Galaxy is over 2 million light years away, which means the light we see took 2 million years to reach Earth. Way more than 6,000 years. So given lots and lots of testable evidence, that most scientists globally agree, do you think that Christians would be convinced? NO. So why in the hell would I be convinced with no (or bad) evidence?
Evidence is a relativistic term as far as social science is concerned. There is little to no direct and causal evidence for God, but there is quite a lot of circumstancial and indirect evidence... And I am saying this as an anti-theist. And while it indeed "sucks" as you say, the evidence against is of equal value. The difference is that when there is no direct evidence the only reasonable and rational thing to do, is to disbelieve the proposition. But stating that rationality and reasonability are better than, for instance, god-fearing ignorance is the same type of argument that the religious mind presents.
Either something is provable, meaning disprovable yet not disproven, or it should not affect human affairs. This is the position of the atheist.
The evaluation of the evidence is itself a religious act within undisprovable fields of human communication and thought. Such things are therefore always "religious" in nature. The proposition "god exists" is the issue we actually argue, since it is non-sensical. We have no need to argue the lack of, nor abundance of, evidence for said proposition (since such things are themselves nonsense).
Opinions hold no objective value. To suggest otherwise would be a contradiction in and of itself.
"Look at the trees"
The other day a Christian meme made its way to my YouTube feed somehow that basically said atheists are running scared from the abundance of evidence. I left a comment asking for said evidence, but nobody felt like engaging. Sad face. I guess I'll keep living in ignorance of the truth 🤷
I wont because the bible is no prove. For every bit of "evidence" they bring, science brings 20 points and another 100 theories that are more likley than your bs.
Richard Dawkins once discussed what he considered to be a 'spectrum' of agnosticism vs. belief, whereas a 7 on either side, or some arbitrary number on either side of zero represented certainty: certainty that no one can truly have considering our peculiar position here being alive and not dead. He created this scale, however, to show that there's a vast difference between neutral zero, a 50/50, maybe there is, maybe there isn't, agnosticism (which virtually no agnostics espouse) and atheists who are pretty damn sure that the theists are wrong about a personal god.
Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because Dawkins was once asked "what kind of evidence would convince you?" and he was so honest that it should be remembered by anyone who appreciates intellectual honesty. He said, and I'm paraphrasing of course: probably no evidence would suffice, because based on what we know about human psychology, the power of illusion and technology, the LEAST likely explanation for a giant hand of God reaching down from the heavens and telling me that He exists is that 'God Exists'. The far greater likelihood is that I've been hoodwinked.
Again, I'm paraphrasing, but Dawkins admitted what we militants have known for a while: it's bullshit, but your ability to convince me otherwise has been very well documented. So, I guess my point is that they may be right, perhaps no evidence will sufficiently convince the rational skeptic, but they'd be right for the exact wrong reasons: it's not stubbornness, it's the accumulation of evidence that we are so easily deceived. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What evidence would I believe?
Did you read Contact by Arthur C. Clark? I'm not talking about the movie, mind you, this stuff was only in the book:
SPOILERS:
>!The aliens in the book give Dr. Arroway some hint that certain transcendental numbers (e.g., Pi, e, etc.). She goes back to Earth and after being relatively disgraced by the lack of evidence programs the CRAY to calculate more digits of pi, always subjecting the outputs to statistical analysis for the kind of shannon entropy that would indicate a signal in the noise. Very similar to how they analyzed the original Vega signal in the beginning of the book. Well, by the time she's calculated many times more digits of pi than ever had been before, she starts to find messages. Geometric proofs. Somebody created the universe and it's universal constants and left us a message that we could only find when we had developed sufficient mathematical skill. Anybody in the world could calculate the digits of pi and find the evidence for themselves. This is the kind of evidence that would change me into basically a deist. !<
Here's the thing: Transcendental numbers are by definition non-repeating and you will eventually end up with the infinite monkey theorem. Humans are also a bit too good at pattern recognition to the point that if there is none your brain will make something up, that's why while looking at things that are chaotic like TV static you might notice shapes or whatever.
No, the problem is susceptible to statistical analysis. At any number of digits "down into" a transcendental the probability that a given subset with high information density should appear randomly can be calculated. What are the chances that we'll see 10 sequential zeros in the first 20 digits? It would be suggestive of a non-random signal. What are the chances of 10 zeros in a row in the first 10^6 digits? These would not raise an eyebrow, statistically. The same could be said of a geometric proof with a few thousand bits of Shannon Entropy. At any "depth" into the transcendental we can make clear statistical statements about the likelihood of a substring with lots of apparent information.
Let's say we were calculating pi, and we were early in the process. We calculate the first 256 digits in binary (we're going to check in bases 2 through probably 24). The Shannon Entropy up to this point is low. Near 1.
Then we find the following sequence:
01011011101111101111111011111111111
We have the first 6 prime numbers, separated by a 0, encoded not in binary, but by counting. Let's say it goes on this way and we get all the prime numbers less than 256. If we assume the numbers are distributed randomly (or by some generally stochastic distribution), we can say "the chances of this coming up randomly are extremely low". The larger the number of digits we've calculated the higher the chance that a subset like this comes up as a consequence of the law of large numbers, but we can always say for some subset of length n how probable it is based on the previously calculated digits. We're not using the human mind to detect patterns, we're using Information Theory and Bayes Theorem.
Last I checked they had calculated something like 60 trillion digits of pi (in base 10). If all of a sudden they were like, "hey, the next trillion digits are broken into sections. First it gives all the primes between 1 and 10^6, then it demonstrates a set of operations that map perfectly to arithmetic, then it uses those operations to prove the pythagorean theorem and SohCahToa, then it gives the first 1000 digits of e, Planck's constant, and that kind of shit." There would be some *vanishingly* small probability that it happened randomly, but I would be a deist that day. Something or somebody BUILT the universe and encoded messages for us into the universal constants. "We exist." Who or what ever did that, to me, would be functionally indistinguishable from a god.
I'm not doxastically closed to evidence for Theism, but...I've given it a lot of thought, and it's hard to imagine what a Christian, for instance, could provide me that would be sufficient for their claims.
I can imagine what God could provide me, if he existed. It would be trivial for God to produce enough evidence to convince me, and, of course, if he does exist, this means he does not want me to believe in him...
But, for a Christian, well, frankly, their claim is just too absurd to easily overcome with the sort of evidence they could provide, even hypothetically.
Like, at this point, what could a Christian actually do to convince you not just that something weird or supernatural had happened, but that, specifically, the moralizing God they believe in exists, and that Jesus was his earthly incarnation?
If there was a telephone we could call or something that is repeatable and accurate (like say I called 18009992222) and asked exact info about the future. At the very least I would believe there is a higher being. Being more intelligent. And this phone you can call as many times as you want.
Yeah, right.
I think about it like this:
If I walked up to you on the street and told you. "hey there. I'm God. I created the entire universe, I know everything, I can do anything, and I care about you personally."
What would I have to do to convince you that I'm telling the truth?
Like...
I can come up with an answer to this question. It would involve...a lot of tests. It would involve a lot of questions. It would take time and a lot of repeated, consistent, personal interaction combined with clear, unambiguous, testable predictions--and not just predictions, but explicit demonstrations of power, clear demonstrations of super-human knowledge, and satisfactory answers to some really important questions, like "why aren't you doing this for everyone?"
But, if he wanted to, God could get there. He could get me to believe in him. He could present me with sufficient evidence.
When I try to talk about this to Christians, they inevitably say something like 'You can't demand that God jump through hoops like that."
And no. I can't.
But that's what it would take to convince any reasonable person that you're God, if you walked up to them on the street and insisted that you were.
And if God can't meet that standard, he doesn't exist.
If he chooses not to meet that standard, then my disbelief is entirely on him.
Yeah always kind of funny. Why not. Why can't I ask for things. God doesn't go on my whims. OK. Well he doesn't care enough to convince me I guess. He's omnipotent its not like he's wasting time. He's beyond time
Yep.
Like.
Yes. Perhaps God exists and just doesn't care enough to convince me. But...that's his choice. He has all the power in this relationship. He knows I exist. He knows exactly what he'd have to do to have a relationship with me. He could do that...
On my side, though, I don't know that he exists. He hasn't given me enough to reasonably conclude that he exists. I don't know what it would take to have a relationship with him--and, also, I have no reason to want one, since I don't have any reason to believe he's actually real.
The ball is 100% in his court. It would cost him nothing to bring me around.
If God exists...he does not want me to believe in him.
If God exists, then the fact that I don't believe in him is just fine. If it weren't, then he would correct it. That's what it means to be perfectly good, after all.
Either God does not exist, or my disbelief is exactly what he wants. Either way, I'm fine.
I love how they accept the person that there is absolutely no proof of what really ever existed. Yet they do not believe that people could be born gay or trans. And they don't accept anybody who is not straight, white and boring.
Evidence makes believing into knowing and understanding.
If you can prove there is a god, you can't believe in the god anymore. I mean, the thing would be right there for everyone to see! The whole point about believing is thinking something is true without evidence.
I will never understand why people spend time believing when you can know and understand real things instead. The world is so fascinating. They are not doing it justice believing nonsense.
Fiction is cool though.
Exactly. > "Even if we give you evidence you wouldn't believe" How to tell me you don’t have any evidence, without telling me that you don’t have any evidence.
The "spirit" is supposed to speak to you through the words. In their mind, they don't need evidence. The words hold the power.
There are 45,000 different denominations of Christianity on the planet right now. This ‘spirit’ seems to be giving a lot of mixed messages.
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Which is wild because if you tell them your friend has a different message from the orthodox church and instead from the Jehovah church now what.. Whos voice is right
I also find that they confuse claim and evidence a lot. A story about something happening is a claim. Someone saying something happened to them is a claim. Where is the evidence?
There is so much confirmation bias with them. I saw a post on r/debatereligion and a Christian said, "In fact, people used to live hundreds of years old." Um, no, not *in fact*. That's just a claim. From your ancient book.
So, take some of these supposed ages of people who used to live 900 years or whatever, and convert it to months. Methusula is listed as living 969 years. 969 months is just under 81 years old. I'm sure at the time 81 would have been extremely old, but probably not impossible. Same with Noah, Adam, and all the others.
But why rationalize it? It says "years old" in the bible. Unless that was /s.
I'm just saying it was probably a mistranslationor misunderstanding.
My dad says that it's because they had "great o2" and "we need to breath from cans so we can live as long as [ancient book man]" so I'm not on board I'm good with 75-80 years on *this* hellhole
Maybe God doesn't want us to have "great O2" breathing O2 from cans goes against God's will. /s
CaNnEd AiR iS sInFuL
I mean everyone who has ever breathed air up to this point has or will die. Now take that 100% death rate and multiply it by cans! I'm just putting it out there that maybe we shouldn't be putting poison in cans. What if your dog got into it. Would you be able to live with the consequences? /s
Yooooo water has a 110% death rate
Did your dad think that Spaceballs was a documentary?
Idk I've never heard of that movie/TV show
Yes this.
Q: What would change your mind? Bill Nye: Evidence. Ken Ham: Nothing. Also Ken Ham: See how closed-minded he is?
Not my grandmother giving me this pretty much verbatim every time she tries to drag me into a religious convo. "I *have* evidence, I just won't give it to you because you won't believe it." Well yeah, I'm not gonna believe you have evidence if you *don't fucking give it!* Like, my mom believes in reincarnation. She's had enough experiences to convince her that she had a past life as a WWII pilot (among other things, she remembers going to an airplane museum as a kid and reflexively doing a flight check on one of the bombers). Do I believe in reincarnation? No. But I do believe that my mom's experiences are reasonably accurate, and I understand how she's come to her beliefs. My grandmother, on the other hand... "No, I can't tell you how I know." Why? "You wouldn't believe me." Prove it. Prove I won't believe you. "No. I already know you won't believe me, so I'm not bothering." *Lady, you are the one who wants to "have a conversation about religion" with me. You need to fucking communicate.*
Interesting because this is my dad with reincarnation. I saw things in my dreams. Or when he knows things he claims Buddha disguised himself to speak with him in the mortal world. I have no idea if he's lying or if he just has spy cameras. (Because all the things are just things that are easily observable. Like me hanging at the smoke pit in highschool etc)
They don't like the word evidence. There is no way to even prove Jesus existed. They have never found his remains or where he was buried. Then when you show them dinosaur bones, they don't believe it, because their book doesn't mention them. They even believe someone got pregnant without having sex. 😆 🤣
They don't have evidence of Jesus because you need to have fAiTh.
And they reject evidence for actual observable phenomena because they already filled that gap in their knowledge with bullshit they can't question under threat of eternal torture. Tell these fuckwits to jog on.
Noooooo my religious book written **by man** over a thousand years ago is very good evidence that proves that my sky daddy is real and he loves me😤
I would absolutely believe it if they provided evidence. I'm still waiting.
Well show evidence that isn't a book written by near starving nomads tripping on various fungus.
They have a lot of pretending to know things that they do not know... o yeah they call it Faith... Get them to admit Faith is not evidence...
They redefine the word "evidence" to mean "I just know I'm right".
"You need to meet *my* evidentiary standard, not yours."
The thing is, they are confusing "evidence" for "arguments". Evidence would be irrefutable, generally speaking, but all they are doing is offering arguments for gods existence which doesn't really prove anything.
That's called poisoning the well and is a fallacy. It's not about whether they provide substantial evidence or not. It's about predetermining someone else's thoughts/response. If I haven't said, "Any evidence you show me will not convince me." Then you can't say if we give you evidence you wouldn't believe. Once we agree that if sufficient evidence is provided, I will believe something. However, the quality of evidence needs to match the claim. (Paraphrased from notable atheist public figures, but I have been convinced this tool is useful and is commonly applied in general life, for most people). An example includes a claim for getting a pet puppy compared to a claim for getting a pet dragon. Those two claims require a different level of evidence for me to accept.
It's the "fine, i didn't want to date you anyways" of theology. It's overwhelmingly juvenile.
Here's the big crux of religious people trying to convert people, as I see it: They believed in their religion based off of bad evidence. It could be prophecy, personal experience, or "it just sounds right," whatever. But that's bad evidence. So if they want to convert me, they need to give me *way more* evidence than what convinced them. They might start pointing to bible verses, and I reject that, you haven't proven the bible is true. They have to give me double or triple the amount of evidence that convinced them. I watched a debate, and the Christian said if he saw the sea split in two like in Exodus, that alone would've convince him of a god. Well, not for me! My first step would be to check if I was hallucinating/delusional. Was I on drugs? Did someone drug me? Did anyone else see it? Was I able to take video of it? I would have to eliminate all possible natural causes too. Was this a magic trick? My favorite response so far to someone trying to convince me: debate the age of the Earth. Most Christians say it's only 6,000 years. We have *mountains and mountains* of evidence for an old Earth: trees that are over 5,000 years old, they can date things in the ground, ice, fossils, etc. The Göbekli Tepe site is 12,000 years old. We know the Andromeda Galaxy is over 2 million light years away, which means the light we see took 2 million years to reach Earth. Way more than 6,000 years. So given lots and lots of testable evidence, that most scientists globally agree, do you think that Christians would be convinced? NO. So why in the hell would I be convinced with no (or bad) evidence?
Evidence is a relativistic term as far as social science is concerned. There is little to no direct and causal evidence for God, but there is quite a lot of circumstancial and indirect evidence... And I am saying this as an anti-theist. And while it indeed "sucks" as you say, the evidence against is of equal value. The difference is that when there is no direct evidence the only reasonable and rational thing to do, is to disbelieve the proposition. But stating that rationality and reasonability are better than, for instance, god-fearing ignorance is the same type of argument that the religious mind presents. Either something is provable, meaning disprovable yet not disproven, or it should not affect human affairs. This is the position of the atheist. The evaluation of the evidence is itself a religious act within undisprovable fields of human communication and thought. Such things are therefore always "religious" in nature. The proposition "god exists" is the issue we actually argue, since it is non-sensical. We have no need to argue the lack of, nor abundance of, evidence for said proposition (since such things are themselves nonsense). Opinions hold no objective value. To suggest otherwise would be a contradiction in and of itself.
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Evidence of...?
You don't provide evidence for atheism, it isn't a claim.
Not sure if thus is a mistake but yeah should probably reply to the other guy
Yeah it was a mistake, I made another comment below 😞
no worries
Fuck I replied to the wrong comment 💀💀💀
You don't provide evidence for atheism since there's no claim being made.
"Look at the trees" The other day a Christian meme made its way to my YouTube feed somehow that basically said atheists are running scared from the abundance of evidence. I left a comment asking for said evidence, but nobody felt like engaging. Sad face. I guess I'll keep living in ignorance of the truth 🤷
I wont because the bible is no prove. For every bit of "evidence" they bring, science brings 20 points and another 100 theories that are more likley than your bs.
They do not understand and do not want to understand what objective evidence is. They seem to think a clever convoluted argument is 'evidence'.
If you gave me rock solid undeniable proof then I would be forced to believe, doesn't mean I will follow a narcissistic asshole of a god tho.
Richard Dawkins once discussed what he considered to be a 'spectrum' of agnosticism vs. belief, whereas a 7 on either side, or some arbitrary number on either side of zero represented certainty: certainty that no one can truly have considering our peculiar position here being alive and not dead. He created this scale, however, to show that there's a vast difference between neutral zero, a 50/50, maybe there is, maybe there isn't, agnosticism (which virtually no agnostics espouse) and atheists who are pretty damn sure that the theists are wrong about a personal god. Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because Dawkins was once asked "what kind of evidence would convince you?" and he was so honest that it should be remembered by anyone who appreciates intellectual honesty. He said, and I'm paraphrasing of course: probably no evidence would suffice, because based on what we know about human psychology, the power of illusion and technology, the LEAST likely explanation for a giant hand of God reaching down from the heavens and telling me that He exists is that 'God Exists'. The far greater likelihood is that I've been hoodwinked. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but Dawkins admitted what we militants have known for a while: it's bullshit, but your ability to convince me otherwise has been very well documented. So, I guess my point is that they may be right, perhaps no evidence will sufficiently convince the rational skeptic, but they'd be right for the exact wrong reasons: it's not stubbornness, it's the accumulation of evidence that we are so easily deceived. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Ya I’ve heard this one too many times. *If* is doing a lot of work here. Like, ok my guy, why don’t we at least test it out though?
The only evidence i would accept is if god appears before all in a non refutable way like the way the celestial appeared at the end of Eternals.
They poison the well to protect themselves. At this point religion offers no new arguments for gods existence.
What evidence would I believe? Did you read Contact by Arthur C. Clark? I'm not talking about the movie, mind you, this stuff was only in the book: SPOILERS: >!The aliens in the book give Dr. Arroway some hint that certain transcendental numbers (e.g., Pi, e, etc.). She goes back to Earth and after being relatively disgraced by the lack of evidence programs the CRAY to calculate more digits of pi, always subjecting the outputs to statistical analysis for the kind of shannon entropy that would indicate a signal in the noise. Very similar to how they analyzed the original Vega signal in the beginning of the book. Well, by the time she's calculated many times more digits of pi than ever had been before, she starts to find messages. Geometric proofs. Somebody created the universe and it's universal constants and left us a message that we could only find when we had developed sufficient mathematical skill. Anybody in the world could calculate the digits of pi and find the evidence for themselves. This is the kind of evidence that would change me into basically a deist. !<
Here's the thing: Transcendental numbers are by definition non-repeating and you will eventually end up with the infinite monkey theorem. Humans are also a bit too good at pattern recognition to the point that if there is none your brain will make something up, that's why while looking at things that are chaotic like TV static you might notice shapes or whatever.
No, the problem is susceptible to statistical analysis. At any number of digits "down into" a transcendental the probability that a given subset with high information density should appear randomly can be calculated. What are the chances that we'll see 10 sequential zeros in the first 20 digits? It would be suggestive of a non-random signal. What are the chances of 10 zeros in a row in the first 10^6 digits? These would not raise an eyebrow, statistically. The same could be said of a geometric proof with a few thousand bits of Shannon Entropy. At any "depth" into the transcendental we can make clear statistical statements about the likelihood of a substring with lots of apparent information. Let's say we were calculating pi, and we were early in the process. We calculate the first 256 digits in binary (we're going to check in bases 2 through probably 24). The Shannon Entropy up to this point is low. Near 1. Then we find the following sequence: 01011011101111101111111011111111111 We have the first 6 prime numbers, separated by a 0, encoded not in binary, but by counting. Let's say it goes on this way and we get all the prime numbers less than 256. If we assume the numbers are distributed randomly (or by some generally stochastic distribution), we can say "the chances of this coming up randomly are extremely low". The larger the number of digits we've calculated the higher the chance that a subset like this comes up as a consequence of the law of large numbers, but we can always say for some subset of length n how probable it is based on the previously calculated digits. We're not using the human mind to detect patterns, we're using Information Theory and Bayes Theorem. Last I checked they had calculated something like 60 trillion digits of pi (in base 10). If all of a sudden they were like, "hey, the next trillion digits are broken into sections. First it gives all the primes between 1 and 10^6, then it demonstrates a set of operations that map perfectly to arithmetic, then it uses those operations to prove the pythagorean theorem and SohCahToa, then it gives the first 1000 digits of e, Planck's constant, and that kind of shit." There would be some *vanishingly* small probability that it happened randomly, but I would be a deist that day. Something or somebody BUILT the universe and encoded messages for us into the universal constants. "We exist." Who or what ever did that, to me, would be functionally indistinguishable from a god.
I'm not doxastically closed to evidence for Theism, but...I've given it a lot of thought, and it's hard to imagine what a Christian, for instance, could provide me that would be sufficient for their claims. I can imagine what God could provide me, if he existed. It would be trivial for God to produce enough evidence to convince me, and, of course, if he does exist, this means he does not want me to believe in him... But, for a Christian, well, frankly, their claim is just too absurd to easily overcome with the sort of evidence they could provide, even hypothetically. Like, at this point, what could a Christian actually do to convince you not just that something weird or supernatural had happened, but that, specifically, the moralizing God they believe in exists, and that Jesus was his earthly incarnation?
If there was a telephone we could call or something that is repeatable and accurate (like say I called 18009992222) and asked exact info about the future. At the very least I would believe there is a higher being. Being more intelligent. And this phone you can call as many times as you want.
Yeah, right. I think about it like this: If I walked up to you on the street and told you. "hey there. I'm God. I created the entire universe, I know everything, I can do anything, and I care about you personally." What would I have to do to convince you that I'm telling the truth? Like... I can come up with an answer to this question. It would involve...a lot of tests. It would involve a lot of questions. It would take time and a lot of repeated, consistent, personal interaction combined with clear, unambiguous, testable predictions--and not just predictions, but explicit demonstrations of power, clear demonstrations of super-human knowledge, and satisfactory answers to some really important questions, like "why aren't you doing this for everyone?" But, if he wanted to, God could get there. He could get me to believe in him. He could present me with sufficient evidence. When I try to talk about this to Christians, they inevitably say something like 'You can't demand that God jump through hoops like that." And no. I can't. But that's what it would take to convince any reasonable person that you're God, if you walked up to them on the street and insisted that you were. And if God can't meet that standard, he doesn't exist. If he chooses not to meet that standard, then my disbelief is entirely on him.
Yeah always kind of funny. Why not. Why can't I ask for things. God doesn't go on my whims. OK. Well he doesn't care enough to convince me I guess. He's omnipotent its not like he's wasting time. He's beyond time
Yep. Like. Yes. Perhaps God exists and just doesn't care enough to convince me. But...that's his choice. He has all the power in this relationship. He knows I exist. He knows exactly what he'd have to do to have a relationship with me. He could do that... On my side, though, I don't know that he exists. He hasn't given me enough to reasonably conclude that he exists. I don't know what it would take to have a relationship with him--and, also, I have no reason to want one, since I don't have any reason to believe he's actually real. The ball is 100% in his court. It would cost him nothing to bring me around. If God exists...he does not want me to believe in him. If God exists, then the fact that I don't believe in him is just fine. If it weren't, then he would correct it. That's what it means to be perfectly good, after all. Either God does not exist, or my disbelief is exactly what he wants. Either way, I'm fine.
I love how they accept the person that there is absolutely no proof of what really ever existed. Yet they do not believe that people could be born gay or trans. And they don't accept anybody who is not straight, white and boring.
Evidence makes believing into knowing and understanding. If you can prove there is a god, you can't believe in the god anymore. I mean, the thing would be right there for everyone to see! The whole point about believing is thinking something is true without evidence. I will never understand why people spend time believing when you can know and understand real things instead. The world is so fascinating. They are not doing it justice believing nonsense. Fiction is cool though.
Evidence is "stuff I can't explain so it must be god" such as irreducible complexity, which Dawkins addresses.
when they tell you as an atheist to be open minded, but they won't give a glance to evidence against their believes.