Sweet Lord Doug!!!

I step out of the debate for a couple of days and come back to this mess? Akrasia has taken the Atheists Burden upon his shoulders (taking it from one of the Grims as I recall) for the world, leading everyone from the dark wombs of their respective beliefs... mostly by insulting them wildly.

All this shouting, lots of injured bystanders... Mate, you are doing nothing to earn the respect of even your fellow ATHEISTS in this thread, much less making Academia, as you seem to represent it, look good.


Oh, and to whatever you are going to say in your defense, I'll say just this...


Umm.... No. Snoresville. You obviously haven't read what I said, 'cause I already covered that previously.


Did I miss any?

Yeah, you forgot the insult.

Quote from: James McMurrayYeah, you forgot the insult.

Ah, thanks.

Yes: You must be stupid.




Seriously, Akrasia, at least a significant number of posters... in this THREAD are Atheists or at a minimum sympathetic, yet none of them are exactly leaping to your defense, in fact a few of them have clamored for the same answers as the more religiously minded debators.  While I can understand if you feel a bit defensive, being in the middle of a firing line like that, you should understand WHY you are there.

You took a general dismissal of an article as an attack on athesim, which I can understand, then presented a vastly overlimited arguement for atheism, and when called on it you started lashing out.  Rethink your position, and your own beliefs.  Why it is such a problem for you to come to grips with the fact that you must take atheism 'on faith' is baffling to me.   If you have no faith in your atheism you wouldn't defend it with such vigor.

I'll leave off now. I was planning to go back and dissect your blanket claims of faiths in detail, but Jimbob has covered Judaic beliefs from an insider standpoint, and a few of your christian arguments have been shot down quiet enthusiastically by others... I see little point in continuing, especially since your responses have shown decreasing intellectual rigor and have been reduced to the likes of which that lead to this post.  I'll blame a trip to Ireland, complete with excessive drinking rather than continue an increasingly long and pointless shouting match.  If it makes you feel at all better, I concede the field, you have won, sir, as far as this poster is concerned.  I submit to your greater obtuseness and willingness to burn bandwidth.  Enjoy your Stalingrad.

Quote from: AkrasiaIn a nutshell, while the "free will" defense might help justify the necessity of "moral evil" (suffering caused by the free choices of individuals, and/or sufferieng necessary for the free choices of individuals), it cannot explain or justify the existence of "natural evil".

Horseshit.

I'm not saying "You must be able to inflict suffering in order to possess free will".  That's obvious on the face of it, and reducing what I've said to that is a cheap attempt to weasel away.

The solution to the problem of pain is that suffering is required in order to form the existence of will.  Where it is not provided by others, it is provided by the benevolence of the creator, in a natural fashion.

That's not evil.  Because this life isn't the main show.

Quote from: Hastur T. FannonUm, yes they do

Thanks for the link.

I should have been more careful in making that comment.  (Suffice to say that there is some debate amongst Catholic scholars on this matter, i.e., how to understand 'Hell'.)

Quote from: Spike... I see little point in continuing, especially since your responses have shown decreasing intellectual rigor and have been reduced to the likes of which that lead to this post.  I'll blame a trip to Ireland, complete with excessive drinking rather than continue an increasingly long and pointless shouting match....

You're quite right, Spike, that my posts declined significantly in terms of rigour and even basic coherence.  And you're also correct about the cause (long international flight + too much Guinness on my return).  I clearly should have simply taken a break.

Quote from: RPGPundit... Second, a. and e. are equally logically possible. "god exists but is working in ways we don't understand" is logically speaking just as provable as "god doesn't exist"; which is to say, neither of them are provable at all.  Both of them depend on having faith.
...

This isn't correct, though, since it does not require 'faith' to disbelieve (or simply not form a belief in the existence of) something for which there is no evidence (or that contradicts the available evidence).

I don't believe that invisible pixies are floating around me at all times.  That's not a 'faith-based' belief.

I don't really know what else to say about this.  If you think it requires 'faith' to not believe in entities for which there is no evidence, then you're simply working with a different definition of 'faith' than I am.

There a difference between not believing a proposition and believing the opposite proposition. It requires no faith to not believe that god exists. It requires faith to believe that he does not.

One is not accepting a proposition for which there is no proof, while the other is choosing to accept the opposite proposition, which is equally without proof.

Anyhow, I'd like to apologise for the various insults that I made in this thread, especially in the posts that I made late last night and early this morning.  I kind of lost it, due to frustration and weariness, and really regret that.  (I've tried to edit out some of the more egregious examples in my later posts.)

So "sorry" James, Pundit, Spike, Bill, etc.!  :imsorry:

Now, that aside, it seems clear that I've done a rather poor job of explaining why the 'problem of evil' argument should be taken seriously.  

However, simply because I've failed to do this, doesn't mean that the argument is not worth taking seriously!  Surely, if the argument was as manifestly implausible as some of you seem to think, theologians and philosophers would not have struggled with it from the time of Epicurus onwards.

But rather than waste more of your time here with my own apparently inadequate attempts to explain the argument, I'll mention two links.

This one at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a good overview (including a summary of the different versions of the argument that have been developed):

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/

And this entry at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy focuses on the 'evidentialist' version of the argument (which is quite convincing, IMO):

http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evil-evi.htm

Well that's it for now.

Once more, my apologies for my poor behaviour!

Quote from: James McMurray.... It requires no faith to not believe that god exists. It requires faith to believe that he does not...

Well, we're going around in circles here.

For a rigorous explanation for why one ought to believe the proposition 'There is no God with the following attributes ....' based on the available evidence, check out:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evil-evi.htm

I'm not talking about evidence. I'm talking about proof. One leads to the other but does not gaurantee it. If I drop a block, a chair, and a helium balloon I am presented with evidence that round objects fall upwards and pointy objects fall down. That's a simplistic example, true, but I think it applies.

From the second link: Alston's analogies are argued against by saying "God is good, so he would tell us why he does stuff." That ignores the very fact that the matter being discussed is why God does things. Perhaps a) we can't understand the reason, or b) God has another, more important, reason for not telling us. It's basically saying "God would tell me everything because that's what is best for me" or in other words "see, I understand the mind of God."

I didn't read much into the Theodicy discussion. After it said that an explanation of why evil might be allowed is invliad unless it includes evolution I chuckled and moved on. I personally have more faith in evolution than in creationism, but denouncing a logical argument if it doesn't hold your world view is self defeating.

Quote from: James McMurrayWhat part of "proof" don't you understand? Probabilities are not proof.

I already explained that all of our beliefs about the external world are based on induction, and that induction involves probabilities.

I still don't know what you mean by 'proof'.  If you mean something like 'adequate evidence' to believe something, than that's just plain old induction.  In which case we should believe propositions on the basis of the available evidence and arguments.
 
One version of the 'problem of evil' argument, the evidentialist version, holds that the available evidence indicates that a benevolent God, etc., does not exist (just as, for example, the available evidence suggests that Aristotelian physics is not true).  

Quote from: James McMurrayYou personally have seen that water = H2O? Or are you taking it on faith that the scientific community is correct?

I don't take it on 'faith' that the scientific community is correct.  Rather, the 'scientific community' makes claims that can be subject to independent critical scrutiny (testing, peer review, etc.).  So I have good grounds to believe many of the claims made by the 'scientific community' (although those grounds will obviously vary depending on the claim in question).

In any case, you could expand the definition of 'faith' to include all of our beliefs.  But that would render the term 'faith' effectively meaningless.  Most religious people would be reluctant to use the term 'faith' in such an expansive way.

QuoteI still don't know what you mean by 'proof'.

Again, I'm just speaking English here. If you don't know what proof means, how do you teach logic? http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/proof

Quoteavailable evidence indicates that a benevolent God, etc., does not exist (just as, for example, the available evidence suggests that Aristotelian physics is not true).

Available evidence 1,500 years ago gave no indication of the existence of atoms. Did they not exist? Not "should Akrasia have believed they didn't" but "did they"?

QuoteMost religious people would be reluctant to use the term 'faith' in such an expansive way.

Why should I care what most religious people think? I thought we were discussing logic here, not religion.

Quote from: beejazz... Or, as long as we're making uninformed claims about one another's respective faiths, let's see you defend the mechanistic universe. Let's see you toss aside free will. Or will you defend free will with shaky science the same way the religious will defend evil with shaky religion?

See? Isn't it so much more fun to "disprove" someone else than to make any point of your own and have to defend it?

Well, I don't think 'libertarian' free will exists.  I'm not sure why you think that should be hard for an atheist to acknowledge.

Quote from: James McMurrayAgain, I'm just speaking English here. If you don't know what proof means, how do you teach logic? http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/proof

My point was that the term 'proof' can be used in many different ways (as made clear in that link).  It was unclear to me what meaning you were employing.  It's still somewhat unclear

Quote from: James McMurrayAvailable evidence 1,500 years ago gave no indication of the existence of atoms. Did they not exist?  

All of the available evidence indicates that yes, atoms existed.