10 Arguments for the Existence of God

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ApostateltsopA
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by ApostateltsopA » Wed Sep 30, 2015 2:11 am

brody196 wrote:Have you ever looked into the "Presuppositional" approach? I personally find this way of presenting the truth of God to be very effective.

Here are a few instances where the above approach is used:

The most famous one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VosqLqhms68

This is one of my favs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056zh7VPxDc
Please don't do this.

It has been my experience that the presupositional approach leads only to an argument over the definition of terms. There is a lot of word play that tries to ground the discussion in a deterministic universal model without acknowledging that. There is also a lot of bending of the word faith, and perhaps most annoying of all the regular insistence on having 100% "proof" of anything.

I'd be happy to go into detail on a breakdown of why this argument does not convince, if we can avoid the kinds of theatrics someone like Sye Ten Bruggencate will push a discussion to with the endless repetition of "How do you know that?" and "I don't debate the bible with nonbelievers."

-Apos

steve7150
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by steve7150 » Wed Sep 30, 2015 12:43 pm

Hi Apostate,

One thing that persuaded me to believe in a Creator God was things like this. We each have about 37 trillion cells working and doing things in our bodies all the time. IMHO I can't imagine how these cells all could have evolved on their own with no input or direction from a higher power to create humans. So the sheer math is 37 trillion cells per person times 50 billion people who have ever lived ending up with functioning human beings, at least 99.9%.

What are your thoughts?

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ApostateltsopA
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by ApostateltsopA » Wed Sep 30, 2015 11:02 pm

Hello steve7150 (Steve?),

That specific response, "I can't imagine how...." is known as the argument from personal incredulity fallacy. I see it coupled with an appeal to unlikelyness, but you are basing your math on very shaky ground. A key to the number's problem is when you say you can't imagine how they evolved on their own as though 37 trillion cells just happened to form a human. That is not how evolution or biology work.

I don't know where you are in what you believe about evolution or biology so I won't lecture. If you have a specific question about either I'll be happy to talk about them, with the understanding that I'm an interested lay person, not an expert. You can also get answers to a lot of the "gotcha" type quotes on Talk Origins Website.

steve7150
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by steve7150 » Thu Oct 01, 2015 8:01 am

That specific response, "I can't imagine how...." is known as the argument from personal incredulity fallacy. I see it coupled with an appeal to unlikelyness, but you are basing your math on very shaky ground. A key to the number's problem is when you say you can't imagine how they evolved on their own as though 37 trillion cells just happened to form a human. That is not how evolution or biology work.









Well I don't see why my question is a personal incredulity fallacy, it seems to me to be a straightforward observation about the mathematical likelihood of 37 trillion cells working in unison in each human times 50 billion people over human history. Plus we would then add on animals who operate on instinct. Birds and fish who just know where to migrate and when to migrate and a million other things like that plus insects plus the workings of the universe etc etc.

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ApostateltsopA
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by ApostateltsopA » Thu Oct 01, 2015 9:30 am

I believe it is the way you are framing the events that makes our biology seem unlikely. It seems to me that rather than examine the various biological systems in the context of millions of years of evolution you are looking at what you call the odds of each individual segment of the whole of Earth's biosphere just happening to work out. However they don't just happen to work, they work based on the interactions of chemistry, and physics which we call biology.

It would be similar to me saying, what are the odds that every particle of Earth manages to stick together and orbit the sun? Well there are how many trillion trillion particles with mass? times each degree of the arc in the ellipse of the orbit? However whatever number I came up with would be misleading. We know from observation that Mass has certain properties, and one of those properties is gravity. Furthermore we know that an object with the mass of earth, in the proximity to an object with the mass of the sun can only orbit exactly as it does. So the odds are actually 100% not amazingly unlikely.

In the same sense, your body and mine are governed by complex electrical, chemical and physical interactions we call biology. Your cells and mine don't just happen to all work, they are the latest person shaped formation of a complex system we call life on earth. It would be amazingly unlikely for them to stop working in concert, not for them to continue to do so.

On an odds maker scale though, if you want to look at that. There are more galaxies full of stars in our universe, than there are grains of sand on our planet. If each star represents one attempt at an unlikely event, life, then there have been many, many, many chances for that event to happen, and even if life is unlikely at any given point in the universe, it is very likely to happen somewhere. It is absurdly unlikely that any given person will win the lottery, or get struck by lightening. However people win and get hit regularly.

Finally, we don't know that life is unlikely. We do know that organic compounds form from inorganic compounds as a necessary result of chemistry in certain circumstances. We know that there is a very blurry line between life and not life when we look closely. Case in point, the debate over whether or not viruses constitute life. I take any argument for the statistical probability of an event with a grain of salt, until I see how the person making the claim is deriving their numbers.

Does that make more sense?

steve7150
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by steve7150 » Thu Oct 01, 2015 10:12 am

In the same sense, your body and mine are governed by complex electrical, chemical and physical interactions we call biology. Your cells and mine don't just happen to all work, they are the latest person shaped formation of a complex system we call life on earth. It would be amazingly unlikely for them to stop working in concert, not for them to continue to do so.









Yes what you said makes sense but where we differ is that these complex electrical,chemical and physical interactions which we call biology (as you put it) were created either by a Creator or happenstance. If you refer this happenstance to the Law of Physics or another physical law I would refer you to the Lawgiver which IMO has to be God.

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ApostateltsopA
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Re: 10 Arguments for the Existence of God

Post by ApostateltsopA » Thu Oct 01, 2015 11:33 am

Which reflects a deterministic worldview. Law in the sense of "the laws of physics" is not a admonition telling physics how to behave. It's a human language device used to describe how physics behaves. You don't stick to the planet because gravity told you to, you stick because gravity is a property of the mass interaction between you and the planet.

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