IbnAbdulHakim:
just out of curiosity i wanted to ask, have you ever actually completely opened up your mind and thought, "you know what, its very likely there might be a God and im going to try to find him!" or anything of this sort? Or have you forever been the "there is no God, otherwise i would have seen Him/Somthing/An Evidence!"
this also goes out to all other aethiests, whats with the closeminded approach? Rejecting God completely is something strange, it always has been and it still is.
In response, I’d ask you if you’ve ever tried to estimate the probability that your god exists?
Granted that making such an estimate is fraught with huge uncertainties, yet some progress can be made. One example is given in Stephen Unwin’s recent book “The Probability of God”, but as I show elsewhere (at
http://zenofzero.net/docs/IhHypothesesandProbabilities.pdf ), his analysis (based on Bayes’ method) is plagued with major errors.
Another approach (at least to estimate the probability for the existence of a specific god, namely, one claimed to have created our universe) is to estimate probabilities for different ways our universe (and ourselves!) could have been created and then seek confirmatory evidence of the different possibilities. This approach, too, is fraught with huge uncertainties, but as I show elsewhere, some progress can be made. I won’t go into details here (for them, see
http://zenofzero.net/docs/IiIndoctrinationinIgnorance.pdf ), but let me at least sketch some of the results.
First, the probability that you would come into existence is almost certainly less than 10^(-100) [i.e., 0.0000…1 (with a total of 99 zeros)], yet the probability that you do exist can be confirmed to within about 1 part in 10^25 [i.e., the probability that you exist is about 0.9999… (with a total of 25 nines]. To obtain the result for the probability that you would come into existence, I assumed (with essentially no justification) that the probability that the universe could “pop into existence”, presumably by a symmetry-breaking fluctuation in a total void, leading to the Big Bang, was 10^(-40) – but a more accurate number may be hugely different, e.g., 10^(-400). Yet, for reasons that I describe in the reference, the final answer (re. god) actually doesn’t depend on what value one uses for the probability for the “spontaneous, natural” creation of the universe.
Then, if one examines the possibility that a god created our universe, more uncertainties enter. Thus, one needs to estimate the probability not that our universe could “just” pop into existence out of “total nothingness”, but that “total nothingness” could first pop a god into existence, who then would proceed (when so inclined) to create our universe (and us). Estimating such a probability is, of course, hugely subjective, but given the assumptions that the probability that the universe got around to making us (after about 10^10 years!) is essentially certainly less than 10^(-100), then if nothing else, it “seems fitting” that the probability that a god could have been created is less than at least 10^(-200) – although if that’s not small enough, if it underestimates the “power and glory” of God, the final results of the analysis aren’t modified if one chooses a probability as small as 10^(-1,000) or even smaller.
The final step in the analysis is to seek confirmatory evidence of the possibility that such a god exists. Here, it seems appropriate to invoke Sagan’s idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and since one’s own existence can be confirmed to within about one part in 10^25, it thereby seems appropriate to seek confirmation of the existence of god to within one part in, say, 10^50. Yet, instead of such confirmation, one finds claims for the existence of god (e.g., by all the theists in the world) to be supported NOT to within 1 part in 10^50 or even 1 part in 10^25, but only by about 1 part in 2 (i.e., about half the people in the world – and even this “confirmatory evidence” is extremely weak)!
Further, when evidence of god was claimed to be more available and reliable, the confirmation is even weaker. For example, the Bible’s New Testament states that, after Jesus died, only 120 people (from among what, a million Jews?) “believed” in him, and in the Qur’an, it’s stated that, at first, only the prophet’s wife “believed” him (from among what, a million Arabs?). Given such “evidence”, it then seems that the probability that any such god exists is the same as the probability that he could exist, namely, almost certainly smaller than 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
(assuming I counted all those zeros correctly).
But then, maybe I shouldn’t have responded to your question, since it was addressed to “atheists”, and clearly I’m not one. Instead, I admit that I don’t know if any god exists, but add that the probability seems extremely small – far too small to have any influence, whatsoever, on how people choose to live their lives. Yet in contrast, approximately half the people do consider the matter to be important enough to influence (even dominate!) their lives. But I expect that, as the critical thinking skills of people improve, the “god idea” will disappear, as did the primitive idea that the Earth is a flat plate around which the Sun circled. Of course, all the clerics of the world will object to such “heathen ideas from infidels”, but surely after not too many more generations, the clerics will fail to maintain their privileged positions supported by the people’s ignorance. And what a glorious change for the better it will be when all the pompous, pious, arrogant clerics of the world finally do something useful for humanity!
eace:
