Grim

Thank you for your sublime post - poetic and inspiring, unfortunately to be followed by the ridiculous and hysterical from UOG.

We are all energy, we are all connected, we are indeed the stuff of stars.

Pelican,
I’d like to highlight one of your comments. That is, where you claim that by reasoned assessment the probability of God existing is low.

It’s a comment I’ve heard quite a bit by various people in these forums, but it is unsound.

I’m quite a fan of studies in probability. Probability is a useful tool to have in the kit. It is particularly useful if deciding whether to bet on a horse or football team, or if wondering whether to take your umbrella out with you on a cloudy day.

However, for the question of the existence of God, you should leave that tool in the bag.

God either exists or he doesn’t. Consider if someone told you there was an elephant in your bedroom. There may be some evidence for or against, but the only thing that matters is whether there is or not. I’m not really interested in the probabilities; I want to know definitively one way or the other.

A personal God to whom we are accountable either exists or does not.

"A personal God to whom we are accountable either exists or does not."
And that's the hanger; that word 'personal'.
It's probably impossible to prove one way or another, whether such a thing as 'God' exists or not; first we have to agree on what the word 'god' means.
As to a personal God, however...
In a world where more than half the population goes hungry on a fairly regular basis, regardless of their religion,
Where 30,000 children die every day, for the crime of simply being too poor to live,
The case for a personal God seems shaky indeed.
In fact, I'd much prefer such a God did not exist.
I see very little to like about Him.

george, thanks for your reply.

re the 54%, i agree the question is ambiguous. i searched for the precise question as asked, but couldn't find it. but frankly, i think you recognize the point and are ducking it.

i acknowledge that there may be non-literal interpretations of such matters, and i don't buy trav's insistence that what was said in 325AD must define current christian belief. but i still claim many, probably most, christians believe in very literal interpretations. for example, what can possibly be the point, or substance, of claiming a non-literal miracle?

i am aware of your maths background, and sometimes your analogies make much sense to me. here they do not.

i agree that there is more to 2+3=3+2 than meets the eye, and most merely accept it. but they don't have to, and most initially didn't. cuiseniere rods, for example, give young children a perfectly solid and reliable model of addition of natural numbers. or, you can build the natural numbers formally from axiomatic set theory.

i can see no sense, for either children or mathematicians, that acceptance of 3+2=2+3 resembles faith in the resurrection.

you in fact acknowledge that it is not convincing. you do so with reference to non-commutative rings, but this seems off the point. you don't need abstract unification and generalization of algebra to understand 3+2=2+3.

a more interesting example would be "imaginary numbers", which in some sense were an article of faith for about 250 years. even so, i don't think it's a great example. and it's not an article of faith now (except for poorly taught students)

"A personal God to whom we are accountable either exists or does not."

No. I'm neither an atheist nor an agnostic, but I find religions contemptible because their concept of god is so pitiful, so human and contrived that it is clearly no more than an idealised, all-powerful father figure.

The greatest force in the universe, architect of all that is and can be - if it even has what we can call a consciousness - isn't concerned with adolescents masturbating or the sexual preferences of individuals, and certainly isn't glaring balefully over our shoulders, looking for reasons to condemn us to eternal suffering. What sort of masochist takes comfort in that?

The god you're talking about, Dan, is just part of a reliable mental strategy for addressing one's anxiety by breaking down the complex and confronting world into simple-but-false concepts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_infinitum
The Victorian era mathematician Augustus De Morgan wrote:

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Grim wrote:

In other words, an infinite regression.
I look at my hand and think, this hand is made of atoms.
Every atom is a Universe.
In every universe there is a world.
On that world there is a man, looking at his hand and thinking;
this hand is made of atoms...

De Morgan was a mathematician, and Grim’s thought was an aftermath.

One of the arguments used for the existence of God is that an entity so wonderful as our world must have a creator.

However, we can continue to use the argument and maintain that an entity so wonderful that he could create a world must have a creator. That creator must have a creator etc. so it follows that we have an infinite regression of creators.

However, it’s only a countable infinity since it can be put in a one to one correspondence with the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) rather than a higher order infinity like the number of points on a line which is non-denumerable and cannot be put in a one to one correspondence with the natural numbers. Therefore the number of creator gods is a low order infinity.

The concept of a non-denumerable infinity speaks to the glory of the human mind.