Are you not saying there is no evidence for theism?
That is a appeal to authority in something you think is false yet have no knowledge.
What am I missing?
Yes I am saying that there is no evidence for theism. So because of this lack of evidence, I have the opinion that there probably isn’t a God. So I live my life like I would if gods didn’t exist.
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How would you support this claim?
I don’t have to provide any support as it is just my own personal opinion. I am not claiming that I am right. I could be wrong. But after a lifetime of investigation, I am of the opinion that Zeus, Thor, and all gods are mythical and serve no useful purpose in modern life.
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Fair enough. If you said the evidence out their (documented evidence) and evidence of design in nature is not convincing to you I would get that. “No evidence” is a pretty hard stance.
The more I look at so-called evidence, the more I am convinced that all religions are a con. Yes, I am sticking to the no evidence stance. Certainly no evidence that I consider any where near convincing.
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I mostly agree with that. There’s a tendency to think of evidence as an objective entity. But it isn’t. What you consider as evidence can be very different from what I consider to be evidence.
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the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
We redefine faith to support our position
We redefine evidence to support our position
We do not support our assertion as it is only our opinion.
Where can I sign up 
There is plenty of evidence for designs existing in nature. Bird nests, beaver dams, spider webs, and of course everything built by humans are all designs existing in nature.
There just isn’t any evidence biological life was purposely designed. Not a single piece. None.
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I’m not quite sure that’s supposed to mean.
People disagree on what are facts.
In any case, I am not redefining faith. I am not redefining evidence, but I have had re-examine the idea of evidence. This is mostly because I have been studying human cognition, and that study requires that I better understand what a cognitive system would take to be evidence.
This.
There have been very few experiments on the origin of life that were anything more than rather naive and simple pot-chemistry(take a flask, add a few chemicals and some gases, heat it for a whileand analyze the results).
To claim that the concept has already been so thoroughly explored both theoretically and experimentally so as to start speculating about the putative insufficiency of naturalistic causes to explain the origin of life, appears to me nothing short of desperate in it’s desire to jump to certain conclusions.
It is especially ironic, given how there have recently been some very interesting headway made in both theoretical and experimental avenues of research. Results that might have seemed speculative if not totally hopeless as little as 10 years ago.
On the theoretical and computer modeling side of things there have been considerable progress in the understanding of autocatalytic sets, see for example:
And this:
Autocatalytic chemical networks preceded proteins and RNA in evolution
And this:
While on the experimental there have been promising experiments both analysing the condititions under which fatty acid vesicles composed of plausible prebiotic hydrocarbons, can form, see:
Promotion of protocell self-assembly from mixed amphiphiles at the origin of life
And in the areas of abiotic synthesis of relevant organic compounds it has also been shown that certain analogues of metabolic cycles can proceed under conditions thought to have been widespread in the earliest aqueous environments:
More:
Sulfate radicals enable a non-enzymatic Krebs cycle precursor
More:
Synthesis and breakdown of universal metabolic precursors promoted by iron
One will notice the undeniably mutually compatible, where not corroborative nature of these separate investigations. Does anyone really know that all of this will lead nowhere? Of course not, nobody knows. This field is only really getting started. Yet we have a bunch of hardcore religious literalists screaming no from the sidelines. It’s ridiculous.
Yes. Agreed.
How else might we know God that is Creator of the laws of physics without a gap. The alternative is some sort of Deist kind of Spinoza’s God, which isn’t a miraculous God.
The gap is either a gap in our knowledge or a real gap that can’t be explained by natural events, and I’m guessing there is no formal way to prove either case.
But relating to a specific event which I mention often, Astronaut Charles Duke prayed for a blind girl and she got healed instantly, so he claims.
Now, let’s say hypothetically someone was that little girl or that blind man in John chapter 9. If we were in their place, would we follow Jesus the rest of our lives after that one event or do we search for a naturalistic answer. I don’t think there is a formal resolution that a mere mortal can achieve, he simply has to make some choice on incomplete knowledge what he’ll put his faith and trust in – or not.
Duke’s account hit close to home since I think I’ve seen answered prayer in my life and others. So I’m more inclined that others here at Peaceful Science to think there is a God who hears prayers and occasionally (if not rarely) grants miracles. At the very least, the belief in miracles is bolstered by the problem of abiogenesis.
You have a different perspective, and I respect that.
But the point of a fallacy is that the conclusion doesn’t follow when you are using fallacious reasoning. Having a gap in your knowledge means there is something you don’t know. That doesn’t make some explanation you can imagine right by default.
There is an infinite number of possible explanations for some putative gap in your knowledge besides your pet brand of deities. Gandalf, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Pixies, extradimensional alien inventors with uber-technology, Santa Clause, the Void-Dragon, the Omnissaiah, Tzeentch(yeah, I like Warhammer 40K okay?)
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You are making the case that God is a human creation. Humans created God in their own human image, in order to fill a gap in their knowledge.
My personal choice is to accept that our knowledge is incomplete. I am agnostic, because there’s a possibility that a god could be involved. But all of the evidence that I see, is of humans creating gods. And that won’t do.
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Yes. If one looks up the Greek word PISTIS from the New Testament in a lexicon, it will say: “faith, trust, confidence.”
In our culture, the English word faith is often (but not always) assumed to mean “blind faith”—so I don’t blame @Patrick all that much for believing (having faith??) that the word faith means nothing beyond believing in something for which there is no evidence. And people like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss have popularized that mistaken definition. (I don’t care if they choose to characterize “religious faith” with that kind of personal commentary. But don’t pretend that their pseudo-definition defines the NT Greek word PISTIS, which usually but not always gets translated as faith in English Bible translations.)
I even hesitate to be so concise in describing the meaning of PISTIS because the semantic domains of PISTIS and faith do not line up exactly. This topic is one where equivocation fallacies in debates over the meaning of faith soon lead to chaos and fallacies. (It reminds me of another equivocation fallacy discussed on another thread today where @Puck_Mendelssohn and others of us reflected on different definitions of the words prove and proof.)
There are similar pitfalls in equating faith and belief.
Yes, that is an application of yet another application of the English word faith but not the Greek word PISTIS. The Greek word often entails a covenant relationship, a confidence based on a trust in another. Not merely a belief in some fact or likelihood.
I’ve never looked up the word faith in the Oxford English Dictionary but I would expect that there are many definitions listed under the noun entry. Of course, that is why Biblical scholars don’t start from a lexicon definition from a target language. They go back to the source language and investigate PISTIS in its original contexts. (I don’t think that Richard Dawkins has done that.)
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A miracle is a surprising event which is not explained by known factors (such as scientific laws or common human experience.) To the Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands, my demonstration of flying with my jet-backpack is a miracle. They have no natural explanation for my ability to fly. Would that make me Divine? (Perhaps to them it would. I don’t know much about their culture and religious views.)
Most would say that once a natural explanation has been discovered for something, it is no longer a miracle. So does the eventual explanation for my “miracle” serve as a “de-deification” agent? (That is, once I discover a “natural explanation”, do I lose my god-like status?)
I forget who first made the observation that it can be extremely difficult (or even impossible) to distinguish a miracle versus a new technology demonstrated to a surprised audience. When isolated tribes have witnessed antibiotic treatments for the first time, they consider them miracles. When they see fire emitted by a butane lighter, they consider it a miracle. When they see a rifle “magically” down an animal 100 yards away with no apparent connection between the firearm and the fleeing creature, they assume a miracle. (They have no idea that a bullet traveled from the weapon to the animal because they can’t see it.) If I demonstrated all of these “miracles” on demand, would I take on a god-like status among them?
" Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke.
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I was once told by a colleague that Clarke adapted a prior maxim (from some German philosopher) but I’ve never researched that claim.
Indeed. And part of what often gives rise to these language problems is that people can use a word in ten different senses in half an hour, and then insist, when some particular use of it is challenged, that it means precisely whatever would best serve.
I have usually thought of “faith” in terms of a thing that was said to me by Christian teenagers back when I was a non-Christian teenager: that “you have to take a leap of faith.” And while I am sure I hadn’t thought it all through sufficiently, I at least had the sense that I didn’t owe them, their gods, or myself any such obligation. My Mormon brother insists that if I do not take a “leap of faith,” I will “never find anything.” But I must have been born an empiricist, because I feel that not finding anything is, in fact, itself a type of finding.
So, I suppose that this “leap of faith” notion which I have had drummed into me by Christians by way of argument since the 1970s has, perhaps, colored my view of what people mean by “faith” inaccurately. In the “leap of faith” context, it absolutely DOES mean acceptance of some state of facts without evidence sufficient to justify the acceptance. But it need not always mean that. I would say that it is not a misconstruction, however, by atheists if we DO find that meaning in it, because it often has precisely that meaning as used by Christians.
I felt that something Henry Wace clearly did not understand, in his arguments with Huxley about agnosticism, was that Huxley was less interested in believing, or trusting, than in understanding. Wace came close – at one point suggesting that Christians did not claim to know as a matter of science that their various doctrines and claims were true – but never did get the point, leading to a bizarre attempt to stick the word “infidel” to Huxley as though Huxley had been unfaithful to something to which he owed fealty.
But those of us who are born empiricists ( I heard the voice of God in answer to my prayers as a child, and then wondered whether I could, in fact, get God to say any set of words I liked. I could, and that ended forever that particular line of communion with the divine!) do not extend trust, or hope, without reason, either. One must, now and again, trust something or someone without having good reasons to trust, simply because life does deal a person a variety of challenges. But when the situation is not urgent and careful deliberation is available, it is very hard to see why I would extend “trust” in a set of facts or in a set of perceived covenants or promises, without having good evidence that this trust was well placed.
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That’s an important point: the fine-tuning argument and the “life can’t arise naturally” argument are antithetical to each other. You can’t pick more than one of them.
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