Does God exist?

[ClaysGhost]

No, he has pointed out that the LOGICAL CONCLUSION is that God does not exist. This is not faith; it is reason.

How can you logically conclude that something does not exist when you don't have access to most of the domain in which the something resides, even leaving any extra-Universal regions out of the search? Logic is only as reasonable as the assumptions fed into it.

The fact that it cannot be "proven" is irrelevant, since absolute proof is an empty demand, hence the term "tautology" (please look it up; it's obvious you don't know what it is, much like our trollish Village Idiot Raoul aka Visionrazor).

I'm not sure what the reference to "Village Idiot Raoul" is supposed to mean to me.

To drive that point home, I challenge you to do something: try to prove that we and the rest of the entire observable universe are all not just figments of your imagination.

Of course I can't prove that, one way or the other. Which is exactly what I'm saying about arguments concerning the existence of God. It's an undecideable question.

[ClaysGhost]

->ClaysGhost

If god doesn't effect the universe that we live in then to us god doesn't exist.

Also none of the believers in a god or multiple gods claim that he has no effect on the universe. By logic and reason we must go by the definition of those who believe, otherwise the word God has only meaning for atheists. When the believers claim that God exists and that he has an effect on the universe, that is when we ask = can you prove it?

I can claim to be God but if I want you to believe it, then I have to convince you of that.

Was that a better explanation?

You can't prove a negative, therefore all logical theories must come from a positive.

What if God is present on Alpha centauri at the moment, but not here at this time?

[ClaysGhost]

You've got parsimony all wrong. God is not a simple explanation, God is infinitely complex.

I wasn't claiming God was a simple explanation. The law of parsimony is a (very reasonable) assumption, not an incontrovertible rule

[ClaysGhost]

I could say "God is a bar of soap. and here he is!"... but have I made God exist? No. God and his actions are defined in the bible. You can't alter what God is to make him exist.

In fact, I was simply treating God as a being that created the universe, rather than any particular God. The particular God you mention has a number of interesting problems, my personal favourite being the properties of Noah's ark.

If some powerful alien directed the evolution of mankind... its not the Christian God. The bible states that you are required to worship the God of the Bible, any other being is not God. If not, then the people worshiping the golden bull were simply worshipping their own version of God... but they weren't. So says the bible.

The bible said God created the universe,.. OK. But, you can't ignore his other feats to make him exist. It also said God made the earth in seven days, he created humans (two to be exact), created the multiple languages on earth, earth-covering flood, etc,etc.

Therefore, I can prove God doesn't exist by disproving events of the bible.

I'm not arguing about the God of the Bible.

The problem is with your statement. Can I prove God doesn't exist? Yes. Can I explicitly prove the some powerful being exists that created the universe? No.

Thank you. I agree with those statements entirely and they were the point of my posts, although I seem to have managed to confuse some people along the way by sloppy use of "God" to stand for "Powerful being that created the universe".

[Utsanomiko]

Ohhhhhh.... kay.......

To recap, Darth Utsanomiko and I have the same philosophy. Here's the difference: Utsanomiko uses it to justify (basically) being an asshole. Which is fine; more power to him. I hold the same philosophy, but recognize that if I want to have any level of success in human society, I have to behave myself. Doesn't mean I can't be a free thinker -- just means that if I want to achieve my objectives, I can't go around treating everybody like shit.

Utsanomiko, on the ohter hand, has come to the Root Of All Existential Truth: it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. We're not human anyway. We're not even here. I'm not writing this post right now, and later, he's going to not read it.

Of course, Darth, I'm sure you won't have a response to this post, since this post doesn't matter.

Actually, I recall saying it was 'my' philosophy only in the sense that I was the one to lable it as 'choice #5'. You'd have to be pretty thick-headed to think that I, of all people, think that kind of crap is rational.

My whole point is, the only way Raoul Duke Jr can come to his conclusions about 'proper behavior', when he admits to being irrational and can'/won't use logic, and certainly can't use some means of randomization/divination to come up with the 'right' beliefs, is through the fact that they're more or less the 'accepted' beleifs of the establishment.
Everyone starts off accepting the society they're born into, but they can only aquire new beliefs from either another belief system, logic & reasoning, or mindlessly subjective randomness. He has no means to conclude society is valuable except because society says it is. He only lets himself conclude God is a valid belief because the establishment says it is. He can only define proper behavior by what society says it is. He can only define his success by how society defines it. He wants to think all beliefs are valid, but at the same time hold the ones of the establishment higher. He wants a solipsistic authority to restrict the actions of neo-nazis, but not christians, based not on rational conclusions, but on the whim of what it defines is right. What kind philosophy requires the thinker to consider contradictory beliefs to be equal, but not ones that subvert the validity of the authority? Such garbage depends on the assumption the establishment isn't a bunch of wolves, becuase they say they aren't.

Duke, you've provided nothing but rediculous straw-man attacks on a extremist conformist and a nihilist that you've both claimed to be me, worthless, cliched, red-herrings to avoid rebuttals, and appeals to authority to hide your hypocritical soliphistic disapproval of non-establishment beliefs/actions. You're a thinly-veiled conformist, too pansy-assed to either conclude that some beliefs are invalid through non-conformity, or too stupid to do it through logical conclusions. Your only option is to doublethinkfully claim they're still 'okay in their own way'.

[Raoul Duke, Jr.]

Wow... Utsanomiko, have you ever considered becoming a writer? You know, we get paid to come up with frivolous bullshit like that, and I tell you, son, you could make a killing.

P.S. Just so you know, I've posted what I actually believe several times now. It bears no resemblance to anything you've written about me. You haven't much room to make accusations of strawman attacks, Utsanomiko, considering that your rebuttals are so weak that you can't even address anything I've actually said.

[Coyote]

You know, it seems to me that it is not the existence or non-existance of God that is the problem, but rather the extremes that this belief has driven humanity toward.

Let's face it-- what has God done to you? Personally? To pick a fight? Answer (I think I can safely speak for all of us here)-- nothing. Precisely that, nothing. God has not punched us in the nose or caused rocks to fall on us, struck us with lightning, gave us nightmares, a wedgie, or visited plagues, famine or pestilence upon us. So God, if he exists, is a pretty passive guy and mostly uninterested in doing anything to us no matter what kinds of mean things anybody says about him.

But many people here seem to have a pretty negative view of God, and since most of these folks are normally quite level-headed and rational, I'd conjecture that it is not that GOD has done something to them, but other asinine humans who've pissed in our Cheerios at one time or another. The annoying messionaries, the zealot flamers, the intolerant phobics and spreaders of fear that have taken an otherwise decent message and perverted it into an excuse for hate.

Once a smartass went to Rabbi Hillel and said, "If you can teach me the entire Torah while standing on one foot, I'll devote myself to a year of religious study in your yeshiva (religious school)". Rabbi Hillel knew a smartass when he saw one and promptly ran the bum out. So the guy goes to Rabbi Akiva and says, "If you can teach me the entire Torah while standing on one foot, I'll devote myself to a year of study with you." Rabbi Akiva also knew a smartass when he saw one but met the challenge head-on. He balanced on one foot and said, "Love thy neighbor as yourself. The rest is just commentary. Now start studying."

"Love thy neighbor as thyself". The most basic message that the Bible is trying to convey. I doubt that the rational, intelligent, and thoughtful among us could say that this is a crummy message and full of crap. The rest is just commentary, true or not, or embellished half-truths, or modified pagan legends of the day... who cares? The Bible was written when people expected legends and stories and much of it is allegory.

Commentary.

So God-- yes, I believe he exists-- shows up, creates all this for whatever reason, and says, "the rules are simple. There's just one, that thing about the neighbor. That's all. Go play." What humans piled on afterward to justify petty wars is just so much garbage that Popes and Kings and Ayatollahs and other hosers have invented-- not God. But it is being done in God's name, so he loses the PR war.

Many of you attack the truth or literality of the Bible, not God, and the Bible is not the issue. It's evil to see humans oppressing other humans in the name of the God of 'Love thy neighbor', but you have to take that issue up with humans.

My way of 'loving thy neighbor' means respecting the others who don't see as I do. At no point do I say that you are wrong, stupid, etc-- at worst I ask if you're really looking at the things from the right perspective. But our opinions/perspectives are different, not in emnity. I like the idea that there may be an afterlife, where we all get the rewards of decent life and loving our neighbors, and if this afterlife is real, then our actions on Earth may have been worth something.

So again-- is it really "God"...? Or the human interpretation of all the damn commentary?

[Darth Wong]

"Love thy neighbor as thyself". The most basic message that the Bible is trying to convey.

Well, that and the whole "worship me or you'll die horribly and I'll torture you for all eternity in unspeakable ways" sub-text ... which consumes most of the OT and from which we are to be "saved" by Jesus in the NT. Perhaps that part slipped your mind? Great Flood? Genocide of the Canaanites? Hell? Any of this ring a bell?

Does it ever occur to you that a person who sits down and reads the Bible as an adult, with no preconceptions, from front to back, will come away horrified?

[Coyote]

Lord Wong, then again the problem is with the Bible. Supposedly, the only actual inscriptions that are the direct dictates of God are the Ten Commandments. Let's check 'em out:

Honor parents, don't steal, don't kill, don't lie, don't be jealous, don't cheat on spouse, take a day off each week, don't worship false idols, don't take the name of God in vain and honor/worship God.

Pretty basic. I'll assume you see no argument with the lying, cheating, killing, stealing, jealousy parts. Honoring parents can be hard at times but I'm sure you see the basic idea as sound. A day off each week is certainly not an onerous chore. I doubt that you're interested in worshipping idols.

Taking the name of God in vain is basically something we all do every day and its very easy to do. The idea is to show respect for the being that brought all this about. In that light, it is kind of a subset of 'honor thy parents'.

But that 'honor/worship God' part, well that's a stickler, isn't it? Let's put it up to the light. When those crusty ol' Rabbis made their pitch about the Torah, they were talking about the Old Testament. That's the "Love thy Neighbor" essential wrapped within a lot of commentary. Lots of nasty stories in there, I don't deny that. Stories written in a time when people believed in sun-Chariots that could be driven recklessly across the sky, or when animal headed gods weighed hearts on scales against silver feathers... yadda yadda.

Yopu claim the Bible is a bunch of claptrap, I'm saying it may well be. It may be 10% reality and otherwise so full of allegory, rhetoric, projected emotions, modification to justify tyrant kings, and so on that there's no way to know what really got recorded and what didn't. Most of the cities and features physically described in the Bible actually exist-- Beer-Sheva is the first city mentioned in the Bible and believe me or not, but I've been there. I've also seen Jericho, Jerusalem, et al... but humans have a nasty habit of projecting their desires, dreams, delusions and wishes onto reality and trying to make something of it.

So let's take a desert tribe that happens to call itself "Israel". We know this exists because of archaeolgical evidence, including one such stelae from the Pharoah Shishoq in Upper Egypt describing a battle around 3000 BCE against 'the peoples of Israel' ("Biblical Archaeology in Ancient Israel" by Dr. Amnon ben-Tor). These folks move into a territory and create a great nationalist legend. A great tale-- full of kings and rebel heroes and an oppressed people yearning to be free. Great stuff! And it goes over well in a world where people dig dramatic stories about talking gods and miracle burning bushes and so on. So we end up with the Bible. A collection of legends and tales embellished and projected onto real sites that eventually fall into our hands as archaeology.

The truth? God didn't 'talk' to anyone any more than he does today. God didn't drown untold millions and so on in a worldwide flood. Probably a real flood happened one day that took peoplel by surprise. It wiped out a mud-hut village and when the tearful children ask "why?" the parents sieze on the idea that "God did it to punish bad people". So blame the parents, they obviously didn't catch the 'love thy neighbor' part or were simply too caught up in grief to answer any better. Maybe they actually believed it, even.

But when you say that God did this and that and caused millions to die horribly so why should I worship the son of a bitch? bear in mind that you are referring to what people SAID God did... unless God did come to you himself and admit his mea culpas. Religious leaders and kings have an agenda when they interpret the word of God... please don't forget this. A great way to keep peasants in line is to terrify them with damnation and hellish pain-- actually a Christian concept more than the original Hebrew-- so they obey corrupt kings and lords who by chance are the only ones who know how to read and can tell the peasants whatever they want about the Bible. You're argument is with the interpretation of God, not the actual existance or non-existance.

[Darth Wong]

Lord Wong, then again the problem is with the Bible. Supposedly, the only actual inscriptions that are the direct dictates of God are the Ten Commandments.

And what is this double-standard based on?

Let's check 'em out:

Honor parents, don't steal, don't kill, don't lie, don't be jealous, don't cheat on spouse, take a day off each week, don't worship false idols, don't take the name of God in vain and honor/worship God.

I notice you rearranged the order. It doesn't sound quite as admirable when you notice that all of the "worship me" dictates are at the top of the list, and "do not kill" is well behind all of those.

Pretty basic. I'll assume you see no argument with the lying, cheating, killing, stealing, jealousy parts. Honoring parents can be hard at times but I'm sure you see the basic idea as sound. A day off each week is certainly not an onerous chore. I doubt that you're interested in worshipping idols.

You're missing the point, which is that those things are being classified as EVIL. Killing, cheating, lying are evil. But worshipping idols? How is that evil? Refusing to worship God on Sunday? How is that evil?

Taking the name of God in vain is basically something we all do every day and its very easy to do. The idea is to show respect for the being that brought all this about. In that light, it is kind of a subset of 'honor thy parents'.

How is it evil to disrespect God? You're not hurting anyone, and surely God is not such a petty being that he would torture people for disrespecting him, would he?

But that 'honor/worship God' part, well that's a stickler, isn't it? Let's put it up to the light. When those crusty ol' Rabbis made their pitch about the Torah, they were talking about the Old Testament. That's the "Love thy Neighbor" essential wrapped within a lot of commentary. Lots of nasty stories in there, I don't deny that. Stories written in a time when people believed in sun-Chariots that could be driven recklessly across the sky, or when animal headed gods weighed hearts on scales against silver feathers... yadda yadda.

So how does that justify an obviously petty, narcissistic God whose NUMBER ONE commandment is to worship him?

Yopu claim the Bible is a bunch of claptrap, I'm saying it may well be. It may be 10% reality and otherwise so full of allegory, rhetoric, projected emotions, modification to justify tyrant kings, and so on that there's no way to know what really got recorded and what didn't. Most of the cities and features physically described in the Bible actually exist-- Beer-Sheva is the first city mentioned in the Bible and believe me or not, but I've been there. I've also seen Jericho, Jerusalem, et al... but humans have a nasty habit of projecting their desires, dreams, delusions and wishes onto reality and trying to make something of it.

L. Ron Hubbard was a real person too. Doesn't validate any of Scientology, though.

So let's take a desert tribe that happens to call itself "Israel". We know this exists because of archaeolgical evidence, including one such stelae from the Pharoah Shishoq in Upper Egypt describing a battle around 3000 BCE against 'the peoples of Israel' ("Biblical Archaeology in Ancient Israel" by Dr. Amnon ben-Tor). These folks move into a territory and create a great nationalist legend. A great tale-- full of kings and rebel heroes and an oppressed people yearning to be free. Great stuff! And it goes over well in a world where people dig dramatic stories about talking gods and miracle burning bushes and so on. So we end up with the Bible. A collection of legends and tales embellished and projected onto real sites that eventually fall into our hands as archaeology.

Except for a few lines of text which you arbitrarily decide are direct words from God, right?

The truth? God didn't 'talk' to anyone any more than he does today. God didn't drown untold millions and so on in a worldwide flood. Probably a real flood happened one day that took peoplel by surprise. It wiped out a mud-hut village and when the tearful children ask "why?" the parents sieze on the idea that "God did it to punish bad people". So blame the parents, they obviously didn't catch the 'love thy neighbor' part or were simply too caught up in grief to answer any better. Maybe they actually believed it, even.

You just said that the only part of the Bible that came from God was the Ten Commandments. This means that "love thy neighbour" came from somebody else (Satan, perhaps?)

But when you say that God did this and that and caused millions to die horribly so why should I worship the son of a bitch? bear in mind that you are referring to what people SAID God did... unless God did come to you himself and admit his mea culpas. Religious leaders and kings have an agenda when they interpret the word of God... please don't forget this. A great way to keep peasants in line is to terrify them with damnation and hellish pain-- actually a Christian concept more than the original Hebrew-- so they obey corrupt kings and lords who by chance are the only ones who know how to read and can tell the peasants whatever they want about the Bible. You're argument is with the interpretation of God, not the actual existance or non-existance.

The Vague God to whom you refer is an unfalsifiable concept, and therefore meaningless. The Vague God is not even sketchily defined, and it exists solely for the purpose of giving people an excuse to believe in God without being honest and admitting that it is irrational to do so. The Vague God is a gateway drug; pushers try to hook you on the idea of the Vague God so that you will learn to ignore Occam's Razor and be in a mindset to try harder drugs later on, such as the Insane Biblical God.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Quick question Wong. Now it requires you to suspend disbelief, but lets assume there is a god, and when you die you are brought before him.....what do you say?

Just curious......

[Darth Wong]

Quick question Wong. Now it requires you to suspend disbelief, but lets assume there is a god, and when you die you are brought before him.....what do you say?

Just curious......

I say "where the fuck were YOU during all of the wars, the massacres, the tortures, the inquisitions, and the crusades of the last two thousand years?"

[Larz]

Quick question Wong. Now it requires you to suspend disbelief, but lets assume there is a god, and when you die you are brought before him.....what do you say?

Just curious......

I say "where the fuck were YOU during all of the wars, the massacres, the tortures, the inquisitions, and the crusades of the last two thousand years?"

That is actually a very good question... gee, now I feel sort of selfish with the first question I thought of was "where the fuck were you whenever I called upon you for guitdance and help when I still had faith in you. And why the hell did you do all that crap to me, you a sadist or something!"... I feel ashamed now *bows to Wong's true wisdom*

[Utsanomiko]

I would say: "How's your father, El doing nowadays? I bet he's pissed off with you since, right after Baal killed Mot and refused to tell Anat the secret of lightning, you stopped speaking to your 'wife' Astarte, and started telling all your followers that the other Canaanite gods were 'false idols', and you were more than just some bitchingly jealous mountain deity." Monotheism my ass.

EDIT: Whoops, got a few facts wrong, obviously. Leaving the question as it is, Yahweh would probably respond: "First of all, Baal actually did teach Anat lightning, but only to stop her from killing the rest of his followers. And Baal was killed by Mot, not the other way round."

Come to think of it, I'd also ask him why he let Og survive the flood.

[Durandal]

I say "where the fuck were YOU during all of the wars, the massacres, the tortures, the inquisitions, and the crusades of the last two thousand years?"

Why, Mike, don't you remember? He was the one behind them all.

[Nick]

But, since an eternal afterlife is an infinite reward, and you can't prove that there is a zero probability of it taking place, then the expected value of belief of any kind is infinite.

When the hell will people get tired of trotting out Pascal's Wager? It's old, it's tired, it's dead and buried.

Please provide an actual argument showing why an infinite reward and a non-zero probability of such a reward occuring is an invalid argument.

*sigh*

Because you have arbitrarily limited the situation to four possible outcomes - the four combinations of belief/disbelief in, and the existence/non-existence of God.

This has at least the following problems:
1. It assumes that God will find such 'fake belief' appealing. Perhaps the real God would prefer an honest disbeliever to a dishonest sycophant who is just hedgind his bets. (Terry Pratchett points this out in 'Small Gods', where a group of gods get together to beat the hell out of the Discworld's equivalent of Blaise Pascal)
2. Which God do you believe in? This is what the Odin comment was about - what if you believe in the wrong God, hence attaching a non-zero probability of potentially infinite negative consequences to the act of holding a belief. (E.g. What if the God of the Universe just annihilates anyone who accuses him of being as irrational as they are, simply because they aren't worth the effort of trying to talk to over the course of eternity?).

Pascal's Wager is fallacious, because it attempts to reduce a broad spectrum of possibilities down to a simple binary fact and a binary selection of actions. In fact, it is just a slightly modified form of the false dilemna fallacy (describing two options, and only two options, without demonstrating that there aren't any other possibilities).

[Graeme Dice]

Because you have arbitrarily limited the situation to four possible outcomes - the four combinations of belief/disbelief in, and the existence/non-existence of God.

No, I have done no such thing. I stated that there was a non-zero probability of an eternal afterlife which would have an infinite value. I did not state how such a thing was to be achieved.

This has at least the following problems:
1. It assumes that God will find such 'fake belief' appealing. Perhaps the real God would prefer an honest disbeliever to a dishonest sycophant who is just hedgind his bets. (Terry Pratchett points this out in 'Small Gods', where a group of gods get together to beat the hell out of the Discworld's equivalent of Blaise Pascal)

Irrelevant to my argument, because the probability is still greater than zero.

2. Which God do you believe in? This is what the Odin comment was about - what if you believe in the wrong God, hence attaching a non-zero probability of potentially infinite negative consequences to the act of holding a belief.

Except that those consequences are still positive, because they are still an eternal life.

Even if you do pick the wrong god, or no god at all, your expected value of such a belief is the same, as the reward or punishment is infinite and the probability non-zero.

(E.g. What if the God of the Universe just annihilates anyone who accuses him of being as irrational as they are, simply because they aren't worth the effort of trying to talk to over the course of eternity?).

Annihilation ends you immediately and therefore has a smaller value than infinity.

Pascal's Wager is fallacious, because it attempts to reduce a broad spectrum of possibilities down to a simple binary fact and a binary selection of actions. In fact, it is just a slightly modified form of the false dilemna fallacy (describing two options, and only two options, without demonstrating that there aren't any other possibilities).

Of course, if you had actually read my argument instead of constructing a strawman based on Pascal's Wager, you would see that belief is not required for my argument. In fact, a person does not have to do anything in order to obtain an infinite expected value, because every possible action has a non-zero probability of achieving that reward.

[Nick]

But, since an eternal afterlife is an infinite reward, and you can't prove that there is a zero probability of it taking place, then the expected value of belief of any kind is infinite.

OK, you're right - I may have misinterpreted your argument slightly. However, your line of reasoning above is still invalid because it does not construct the decision matrix correctly - it fails to properly account for all of the possible outcomes. In fact, it appears to consider only 3 of the possible 9 outcomes (if one interprets it as covering only 2 of the possible outcomes, then it describes Pascal's Wager - obviously, this is the way I interpreted it intiially).

Let us assign annihilation on death a utility of zero (0). It's neutral - you're not around to care, so it isn't going to bother you. Let us assign an enjoyable eternal life a utility of infinity (+inf). Let us assign an eternal life of suffering an infinite negative utility (-inf). (Once the infinities get involved, considering any outcomes with finite, non-zero isn't particularly valuable - with one exception which I will describe later)

Now, we let us narrow ourselves to two options in life (we'll assume that what matters is actions not words - if you look at the way agnostics live, they've generally made a decision, but just refuse to admit it consciously):
1. Atheism
2. Faith (in something - we won't be specific here, since this decision matrix can be constructed to compare atheism to any arbitrary faith, or any two faiths to each other, for that matter)

Now, what are the possible outcomes?
1. No afterlife (annihilation for everybody)
Atheism: 0
Faith: 0
(This outcome is considered by your comment & Pascal's Wager)

2. Good afterlife for everyboy
Atheism: +inf
Faith: +inf

3. Bad afterlife for everyboy
Atheism: -inf
Faith: -inf

4. Good after life for atheists, annihilation for believers
Atheism: +inf
Faith: 0

5. Good after life for atheists, bad after life for believers
Atheism: +inf
Faith: -inf

6. Annihilation for atheists, bad after life for believers
Atheism: 0
Faith: -inf

7. Annihilation for atheists, good after life for believers
Atheism: 0
Faith: +inf
(This outcome is considered by your comment, but not Pascal's Wager)

8. Bad after life for atheists, good after life for believers
Atheism: -inf
Faith: +inf
(This outcome is considered by your comment & Pascal's Wager)

9. Bad after life for atheists, annihilation for believers
Atheism: -inf
Faith: 0

If we assume that all outcomes (with the possible exception of the first) have equal probability, then you will find that all of the positive infinities and negative infinities cancel out, and both faith and atheism end up with an expected utility of zero.

Since faith has the non-negotiable cost of requiring you to suspend rationality with respect to part of your life, an argument based purely on decision theory is going to favour atheism, not faith.

The only way to get the outcome to favour faith is to adjust the probabilities such that faith gives you a better chance at an enjoyable eternal life (for example, assigning 0 probability to the powers that be choosing to annihilate or eternally torment believers in a particular faith - this is something both your comment and Pascal's Wager do). And what could possibly justify arbitrarily altering the probabilities like that? Why, faith, of course!

Atheists distort the probabilities too - but we just assign outcome 1 a much greater probability than any of the other outcomes. And that doesn't have any real effect on the decision matrix, since the expected utility of that outcome is always 0. (The finite negative value of faith only has an impact because the other 8 outcomes cancel each other out whenever they are assigned equal priority - and this is the case regardless of how much more likely we consider outcome 1 to be).

[Larz]

We're talking about afterlives in terms of probability now... why can't everyone be content that everyone in the modern world is evil and we are all going to burn in one of the many layers of hell, so the best hope is to be nothing than to burn for eternity. I'm going to get pounced for this but oh well.

[Nick]

We're talking about afterlives in terms of probability now... why can't everyone be content that everyone in the modern world is evil and we are all going to burn in one of the many layers of hell, so the best hope is to be nothing than to burn for eternity. I'm going to get pounced for this but oh well.

*shrug* Graeme asked why the 'infinite expected utility' argument was invalid. I demonstrated by constructing the full decision matrix, which points out that, in the absence of faith, the decision matrix approach is always going to favour atheism.

I never claimed it wasn't a silly argument

[Raoul Duke, Jr.]

We're talking about afterlives in terms of probability now... why can't everyone be content that everyone in the modern world is evil and we are all going to burn in one of the many layers of hell, so the best hope is to be nothing than to burn for eternity. I'm going to get pounced for this but oh well.

There is also the possibility (however fanciful) that after you die, you experience what you expect to experience. If you think you're going to Heaven, or Valhalla, or Detroit, that's where you go.

[Raoul Duke, Jr.]

Darth Utsanomiko seems to have disappeared... this should lure him back:

The irrational belief in a god or gods is no more objectionable than the irrational belief that thieving, lying, raping, murdering primates are the ultimate form of life in the universe, or that their feeble grasp of that universe equates anything remotely approaching true understanding.

[Newtonian Fury]

Until there is solid evidence for superior forms of life, it's safe to assume that humans are the ultimate form of life. But to be less arrogant, one could say humans are the ultimate form of life on earth until proven otherwise.

[Raoul Duke, Jr.]

Of course, that statement was pure rhetoric and not based on any kind of logic even I'm aware of... but (as weird as this will sound) I've grown to enjoy the sparring matches Utsanomiko and I get into, and you have to admit, that was damn quotable...

[Newtonian Fury]

Blah, if you embelish things you say just so they can be "quotable", you're already hampering your speech.