Honest question. Is this site a religious site?

Well I think yellow submarines pre-dated the song. So it is good analogy isn't it? I'd never heard of either the spaghetti monstor or a yellow submarine pre Dawkins or the Beatles.

Thing is, I think the word 'probably' (which is what UQD used in the first place) does have a legitimate usage outside the strictly mathematical one, in the same way that multiply does - if someone says the flies in the bin are are multiplying, you don't expect them to be able to specify by what factor.

Even if you do accept that 'probable' always refers to the mathematical concept of probability you then have to define that concept- which is what the Bayesian/Frequentist debate among statisticians is all about. The frequentists define probability as the expected frequency of occurrence in the long-run whereas the Bayesian view of probability is related to the degree of belief, and measures the plausibility of an event given incomplete knowledge.

Or, if you are being cynical, a frequentist is a person whose long-run ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time, and a Bayesian is one who, vaguely expecting a horse, and catching a glimpse of a donkey, strongly believes he has seen a mule.

Another joke about Bayesians may be of particular significance (and I am using that term in a non-statistical sense )to justaboutwhateversheistoday:

Bayesian: Breeding a statistician with a clergyman to produce the much sought-after 'honest statistician'.

justabout - ever thought of naming your next child Bayes?

anyone for a custard creme? [tries to get thread back to topic which got it into classics lest it be thrown out again]

Well, Yellow Submarine patently does come from the Beatles, even if it displays its influences. It's an original song written and performed by them. The Spaghetti Monster is one example of many cited in "The God Delusion". It was created, as far as I can tell, by a chap called Bobby Henderson. So I don't get the point you are making.

OMG! Swedes that is terrifying!

faith is at ease with the unknown and strives towards the knowable too. There are plenty of Christians [the majority] who are excited by the developments of quantum physics and the Hadron Collider [though tis broke].

That is not incompatible with faith UQD.

UQD on the right - he's perfected the flared nostrils and imapatient half smile but the hair's allwrong.

UQD - Saying 'spaghetti monster does not come from Dawkins' is a bit like saying Yellow Submarine doesn't come from the Beatles.

Science is totally at ease with the unknown, but strives towards the knowable. It doesn't accept that things are just ineffable or beyond human understanding - it just accepts that we don't know them yet.

Look UD, I really don't think whether God exists or not is the point. The history of humankind's struggle to make sense of his/her life, the aspirations to and inclinations of the divine [it is just a word that struggles to express something felt] Bach, all the sacred music motivated by a sense of the divine, the writings of Julian of Norwich, of other mystic writers [not just Christian] all of these have shaped humanity and help humanity evolve. The ritual of confession, the rituals of the church, of candlelight, of worship, the focus on the redemptive power of forgiveness and reconciliation, all of these have stemmed from a belief in God. And all of them are belittled by certain athiests who feel superior and just don't get it, when they compare a belief in God with a belief in the Loch Ness Monster. I don't know if God exists. I do know I don't want to be without all the other things, and those things depend on a yearning for something more, something uncertain, and something unknown, so forgive me if i do feel your arguments are reductive.

Science itself is at ease with things unknown, things uncertain. [loses will to write]

I am interested in cases of people moving from theism to atheism or vice-versa, and the difference in the processes. I'm not saying they are non-existent, but they are rare.

But you could replace "God" with anything you like in the above statement - that's my problem with it. Celestial Teapot, Spaghetti Monster, Thetans, Zeus, fairies, Great Green Arkleseizure or Ra. At some point, we have to take an informed decision based on the evidence, or lack of it.

I accept this is different from realisation, but then I have not been arguing that they are necessarily the same.

If we assume the Universe we are talking about is this one, and don't over-complicate the argument with parallel or speculative or alternative universes, then surely the answer to the God question is either Yes or No. It's fair enough to avoid the question and say "I don't know", but then you have to ask yourself if that's your answer to the existence of every supernatural phenomenon. If it is, then you are at least consistent.

Ah but then it wouldn't have ended up in Classics Fio. [there's a metaphor for the whole of religion in there somewhere. ]

I think Dawkins is a smart guy, and what he is doing should have been done long ago, but he has oversimplified the arguments in order to reach the masses and as a result looks a bit loony.

fio

Oh so that's where the spaghetti monster is from. As a satire on calls for Intelligent Design to be taught in science lessons I think it's quite funny and pertinent. It's only when applied to a criticism of faith generally that it rather falls down.

I'm interested by this comment UQD:

"I don't know of anyone who has been convinced by rational thought from theism into atheism." Really? I have been through this process of moving from theism to atheism through rational thought, and from there to agnosticism - I'm sure I'm not the only one. But if you're not trying to convince anybody then fair enough. (You've just got a very peculiar way of showing it )

Cote.

I really get the feeling Dawkins is tone deaf.

ruty - Quite

I thought it may have been a compliment, actually.

I'm not saying Dawkins coined the term "Spaghetti Monster". I'm saying he popularised it. And that it is only one example where you use his arguments.

Re Loch Ness Monster - Obviously there is no real evidence, otherwise nobody would doubt it. But I do realize I confused the issue with that statement, so consider this simpler one:

Lack Of Evidence Does Not Affect Probability.

Probability of an outcome is different than our realization of it ("Oh yes, I see the monster! There he is!"). Flipping heads on a coin has 50% probability. This probability does not decrease to near-zero if we can't at the time see the coin. The point is that you cannot assign probability unless you know how many sides the coin (or the die) has in advance.

That is, if you knew many universes, knew how many were created and how many just came into being, then you can say the probability of a universe being created by a god is high or low.

Sorry you feel I am being patronising. I would think believers on this thread and elsewhere would think the same of you. And anyway, I have been quite patient with your insistence on "No evidence so low probability of God" argument you made on every single thread on the subject, despite having been told over and over why that is not true. Most recently, you said "those who get it already have and those who haven't never will", which is rather patronising, wouldn't you say? People living in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones outside and all that.

LOL UQD about Cote being patronising. Pot calling kettle....

Threadworm Dawkins tackles the thing in human beings which seems to go against the 'selfish gene' advancing self preservation
here

What some may call 'compassion' or 'unconditional love' etc he calls 'super niceness'

''The singularity is a product of blind evolution itself, not the creation of any unevolved intelligence. It resulted from the natural evolution of the human brain which, under the blind forces of natural selection, expanded to the point where, all unforeseen, it over-reached itself and started to behave insanely from the selfish gene's point of view. The most transparently un-Darwinian misfiring is contraception, which divorces sexual pleasure from its natural function of gene-propagation. More subtle over-reachings include intellectual and artistic pursuits which squander, by the selfish genes' lights, time and energy that should be devoted to surviving and reproducing. The big brain achieved the evolutionarily unprecedented feat of genuine foresight: became capable of calculating long-term consequences beyond short-term selfish gain. And, at least in some individuals, the brain over-reached itself to the extent of indulging in that super niceness whose singular existence is the central paradox of my thesis. Big brains can take the driving, goal-seeking mechanisms that were originally favoured for selfish gene reasons, and divert (subvert? pervert?) them away from their Darwinian goals and into other paths. ''

For the last bloody time, the Spaghetti Monster is one of many examples of "stupid" gods and was not invented by Dawkins. Am I speaking Swahili?

I don't think believers are stupid. Some I've met are obviously extremely intelligent in the academic sense - but I do wonder how that intelligence can be reconciled with belief in fairies.

I can see how the pursuit of faith can be an interesting intellectual exercise, in the same way that studying the languages of Middle-Earth can be. But ultimately, studying Elvish is pointless as it is a made-up language for a fantasy world, and the study of theology is pointless as the basic underlying assumption - that there is a god or gods - is a flawed one.

Cote, I think you could be a little less patronising. "you never understood it" is very We have to assume a correlation between evidence for something and the likelihood of something existing, otherwise what is the point of collating evidence? Surely the more evidence one collects for the Loch Ness Monster, the higher we have to assume the likelihood of its existence is? At the moment, the evidence is there, but sparse and debatable, so the likelihood is low.

Threadworm - That was from "The Demon-Haunted World", Carl Sagan's last book. Written in 1990 or so. It bludgeons quite a few indefensible beliefs other than God, such as astrology. Quite a gem

I don't agree that "we can safely say that 'There is a god' is not a true statement". I think we can safely say that religions are all bogus and based on silly stories that god sillier through generations of Chinese whispers.

However, there might very well be a Creator. A "watchmaker" who set things in motion, whether that be a super duper deity or aliens conducting an experiment in a lab (Actually, I remember reading a quite convincing paper written by a philosopher, which argued that we are living in a simulation)

I like that a lot, cote. The final sentence ('Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?') is my worry that the apparent idea of god that we have is actually no idea at all, because we have no 'operational definition' -- no way of seeing what might count as making it true.

I am an atheist in the sense that I think we can safely say that 'There is a god' is not a true statement.

But I am also aware of the possibly many ways in which that observation misses the point. I think that there might be such a thing as religious truth, and that is more interesting than making a fetish of the existence/non-existence of God. After all, there is moral truth without us having to substantiate that there is some objective something-or-other out there.

I just find it very hard to progress with that idea -- and to comprehend the religious perceptions of the believers here. That's why I keep chatting about it. I wonder why UQD bothers, since he plainly thinks believers are incredibly stupid and irrational.

And absolute lol at Iorek getting Dawkins tatooed on her tit. UQD, keep on trying. I'd like to see Iorek's tatoo.