You’re getting really hung up on this idea of “god” when that’s not what I’m really talking about lol

This whole thread was about the likelihood of God’s existence…

Maybe some people find the big bang theory far-fetched

Perhaps, but contrary to the god hypothesis there is a lot of science that makes the big bang theory very plausible.

just trying to keep your mind open

Forgive me, but I’m a person who follows science and the scientific method, so it seems ironic that YOU are trying to keep MY mind open. I will always change my mind according to new evidence, just as science does, being a self-correcting system.

There’s a HUGE difference between saying “this is real because we can’t prove it isn’t,” and “there’s a small possibility this is real, but we can’t prove it.”

True, but some things have an infinitesimal likelihood. And to me, the likelihood of God’s existence is, while not equal to zero, so extremely close to zero that it makes no practical difference.

Like, saying something DOESN’T exist simply because you HAVEN’T seen proof of it

I never said god doesn’t exist. I actually stated several times now that you cannot disprove the existence of anything.

you don’t believe in a god because you haven’t seen evidence of it. I’m just trying to point out the argumentum ad ignorantiam in that.

That’s not an argumentum ad ignorantiam. Wikipedia:

“The fallacy is committed when one asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true.”

I never asserted that the proposition of god is false (as mentioned several times above). I refuse to make any definitive assertions concerning the existence of god (neither true nor false).

I only asserted that the probability of god’s existence is infinitesimally small.

It’s fun to think about a lot of things for sure. But everything you just said is well summed up in your sentence “I just think there’s SO much we haven’t seen and so much we don’t know”.

See, just because we don’t know everything, saying that god probably hides somewhere in what we don’t know yet, that’s called “The God of the gaps”. It’s what Christians have done over the centuries.

They claimed that God created the sun and earth and the solar system, and that earth is the center of it all. Then Kopernikus came along. They claimed that god created the animal kingdom and that all species are unchanged since creation. Then Darwin came along. Etcetera, etcetera. Science has kept disproving religious claims, and it still continues to do so. The gap is becoming smaller and smaller for God to hide in. Christians always point to what science doesn’t know yet (and it happily admits it doesn’t know) and say, see, that’s why God is still possible. It’s why I used the word “desperate” earlier in our debate.

In general, believing in something because one doesn’t know better is called an argumentum ad ignorantiam - and that’s a logical fallacy. There is no good reason to come up with a far fetched claim, just because you don’t have evidence to the contrary.

Have you ever heard of Russell’s Teapot? It’s a thought experiment that claims that there’s a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere in between Jupiter and Mars. Just because it cannot be discounted, does that make it likely to exist? Is it sensible to assume it does exist? No.

I think about God the same way. Everything indicates that mankind invented God. After all, we know over 3000 different deities. It just doesn’t make any sense to assume he’s real.

By the way, I am well aware of the well known saying you keep alluding to, while using other words - if we fill a bucket with ocean water, doesn’t mean whales don’t exist just because there isn’t one in the bucket. Or something along that line.

In the entire human history, and in all of the observable universe, no matter where we looked, no evidence for a god could be found - I never claimed that proved the non-existence of a god.

I even said that you cannot logically disprove the existence of anything. But the likelihood becomes very, very small indeed, and the claim becomes extremely far fetched. So far fetched that the amount of people still willing to believe in a god is way out of proportion. To me this shows how gullible people are, and how easy it is to fool them.

But I submit to you that it makes the existence of a god unlikely. Why? Because everything we can observe has also allegedly been created by God. And you have to admit, although it’s a very tiny part of the whole universe, it’s still a huge amount of things. Earth, animals, plants, evolution, chemistry, particle physics, elements, galaxies, everything. Nothing in the entire human body of knowledge shows even the slightest sign of having been created by a god or points to a creation.

And science does postulate that the laws of physics are the same in the entire universe, so there’s no good reason to believe God could be hiding somewhere else. The “god of the gaps” is nothing but an argumentum ad ignorantiam.

The rule in the German language is quite simple, if it’s a noun, use a capital letter. That’s all there is to it.

Well, again, it doesn’t matter that we’re only able to observe a tiny fraction of the universe. The simple fact that billions of people haven’t been able to come up with proper evidence in over two millenia alone is a very good reason to remain extremely sceptic of any claims to the opposite.

I frankly do not understand your argument “we cannot disprove it, therefore it is possible”. Well yeah, you can never disprove the existence of anything.

What I was saying is that so far, noone has been able to prove it. Many people have tried over a long period of time. Therefore it is highly unlikely to be true, and we should refuse to believe in it until there is evidence - at which point I would be happy to change my position.

Will we ever find God? I don’t know, but we’re sure as shit nowhere near understanding anything enough to say a god DIDN’T do it.

By that logic, we can also not be sure that it wasn’t Ralph the Wonderllama who lives on Proxima Centauri and sings songs by Simply Red all day.

Also, you completely missed my point - which was that billions of people have been trying to come up with evidence for many centuries, and of course, they can only look at a tiny fraction of the universe, but that doesn’t matter. If you haven’t found even a trace of shit, you can’t possibly make a claim saying otherwise.

Well, you can, but in that case it’s such huge and extraordinary claim that frankly, noone in their right mind should even consider giving it a second thought.

Surely, that was only the last nail on the coffin?

I think of the whole universe, the whole “creation”, as some kind of cosmic crime scene, and billions of Christians over the centuries have very thoroughly and desperately scanned it for evidence as to who did it.

That scene is the largest possible scene - there literally exists nothing else - and the number of investigators looking for clues is vast. Yet despite these odds, nobody has ever found any kind of undeniable evidence that God did it all.

I don’t need to read a book to understand that you can’t believe in a claim that contradicts that reality.

Psst. You forgot the megameters.

Farting in an elevator is wrong on so many levels.

Thank goodness, there are 2⁷ ways to cure that.

You’re right, but I did manage to make the device show up as a compliant Linux laptop in their Intune UI, and that was all that mattered to them.

They don’t care that you have to make Intune think the distro is Ubuntu when it’s in fact EndeavourOS. Some necktie people were satisfied with the result and devs can now use Linux. Après moi, le déluge.

Boss told me I couldn’t use EndeavourOS because “it doesn’t work with M$ InTune”.

So I said if I could make an old unused laptop work with that setup, maybe the company could turn that into a pilot system and we could be more sexy to new developers we want to hire.

Boss said why not. IT said sure, here’s your laptop, have fun.

A few months later, a couple of devs have switched to Linux. Some have kept Windows. Some didn’t care because they have Macs. Everyone’s happy, we have more options, and everyone can choose what they subjectively feel is the best tool for the job - which is what professionals do instead of fighting.

And we actually hired a new dev who uses Linux.

Wow, okay. At least I got my wife to appreciate a decent sauce, and I got her off the store-bought sauce mixes.

It’s been many years but I still remember which recipe did the trick: Salisbury steak.

Make steak patties using ground beef, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, pepper, breadcrumbs. Fry until brown. Set aside. In the same pan, sauté 250g mushrooms and a chopped onion until brown, add tomato paste, add some flour, add 500ml beef stock and a pinch of sugar (ketchup works well too). Salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce to taste. Add steaks to sauce. Cook until steaks done.

She loves this and it kinda cured her from buying Maggi crap, lol.

I never heard of Moqueca and googled it, and it does look very delicious!

I like a good steak. However, my wife does not prefer it medium rare - she belongs to those heretics who would shamelessly order it well done (that’s why I never go to steakhouses with her). She also hates spicy food. Or some kinds of traditional German food which I grew up with.

So yeah. Whenever she’s away, it’s usually steak, some spicy Asian dish or Berlin style grilled liver.

Same here, except I also use the opportunity to cook stuff for myself that my wife doesn’t like. Fuck pizza.

No, I’ve never told anyone what to call themselves except Christians. I don’t care what denomination or special kind of Christians they insist on being.

But now that you’ve started the Ad Hominems, calling me uneducated instead of explaining the “huge difference”, apparently you’ve run out of arguments. Or knowledge. Or both. Someone who claims to be an expert on logical fallacies like the No True Scotsman should also understand that you’ve sunk very low if you need to resort to Ad Hominems.

So you just stopped being as respectful to me as I was to you during the whole discussion and now I’ve lost interest in talking to you. You proved yourself undeserving of my time. Good day.

The difference between atheism and agnosticism has no practical meaning to the vast majority of unbelievers.

You can’t positively state that something does not exist. You can’t logically be 100% certain there is no God. We know that. So if you love going by definitions, yes, most unbelievers are agnostics, not atheists.

So why do we keep calling ourselves atheists? Because we view the likelihood of God’s existence as so infinitesimally small, the difference between agnosticism and atheism becomes negligible. If we rate the odds of God’s existence at 0,000000001% we can as well just call it zero.

In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.

If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.

And that is not an objective statement that’s verifiably and objectively true. It DOES depend on personal opinion and interpretation. Other Christians might say other stuff in the Bible is more important. Like killing homosexuals. Or burning witches.

There is no clear definition of an ideal Christian. Never was. Never will be. Every century has its own view on what Christianity has to be like, we just happen to live in one which tends to agree with your views.

In other words, according to your statement, there were almost no Christians a few centuries ago, which is verifiably untrue.

“No atheist believes in God” is a factually correct statement. It’s like saying “One does not equal two” - a verifiable, objective truth that does not rely on anyone’s opinion.

Therefore, person B made a contradictory statement, and person A would be correct in responding “Then you aren’t an atheist”, because person B stated a verifiable falsehood. Same as saying “One equals two”. We all know it’s wrong.

Christianity has a much looser definition. You quoted it yourself:

A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

So anyone who follows this religion and calls himself a Christian is a Christian. Nothing in the definition says “You must follow the Bible to the exact letter” in order to be one. There wouldn’t be ANY Christians if that were true.

So that leaves us with a whole bunch of people who all claim to be Christian, but have different opinions on…

• how strictly you have to follow the Bible,
• whether racism is condoned or forbidden by the Bible,
• whether slavery is forbidden by the Bible,
• who you can fuck,
• what kind of funny hat you have to wear,
• what food you can or can’t eat,
• whether you have to kill any non-believers,

… et cetera, et cetera.

And all of these people claim the others aren’t the true believers.

Now here’s a very simple question: What gives you the confidence, why should we believe you that it’s YOU, out of all these people, who follows the correct interpretation of the Bible?

That’s why the No True Scotsman fallacy applies to the whole bunch, including you, when you claim the others are no true Christians. Not a single Christian can objectively, verifiably prove that their individual view of Christianity is the correct one.