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Judaism

0 (0%)

Christianity

17 (23.3%)

Islam

1 (1.4%)

Hinduism

0 (0%)

Taoism

0 (0%)

Buddhism

0 (0%)

Scientology

2 (2.7%)

Other (please tell)

7 (9.6%)

Athiest

35 (47.9%)

Undecided

1 (1.4%)

Agnostic

10 (13.7%)

Total Members Voted: 70

[Paxiecrunchle]

PTWTMU, Posting To Watch The Madness Unfold.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Nah, I can't take this. Look, I'm not telling you I don't understand your definitions. I'm telling you I think your definitions are bad, because they do not match the non-rhetorical states of theism-atheism as held by people not in an internet debate.

[Egan_BW]

Oh, now you're just being provocative. Using an Oxford Comma, indeed! I can't discuss things with someone as misguided as you!!

Joke! As if I need to say it...

aaaaaAAAAAAAAARGH. >:|

yes, I read the transparent bit. still. that's unforgivable.

[Starver]

Nah, I can't take this. Look, I'm not telling you I don't understand your definitions. I'm telling you I think your definitions are bad, because they do not match the non-rhetorical states of theism-atheism as held by people not in an internet debate.

And, to think, I didn't even mention ignostism..!

[Reelya]

Though it is odd for someone of my persuasion, I have to object to this idea of God as inevitably the perfect simulator. One of the best, and indeed in my eyes the only valid answer to the paradox of omniscience and free will besides denying one or the other is that an almighty God is not obligated to exercise maximum knowledge in all circumstances in the same way that it is not obligated to use maximum destructive power all the time even if it has that ability.

This applies to this situation as well. An almighty mind is not forced to imagine things in perfect resolution and may choose to imagine them below simulation level.

Of course this enters all sorts of other problems and God doesn't exist, but you know, as a thought experiment.

Not really my original point. Let me explain it another way.

- an omniscient being is very improbable.
- an omnipotent being is also very improbable.
- omniscience doesn't require omnipotence

So if we're speculating an "all knowing" being, then they could in fact use the simulationist approach to create a working universe without needing omnipotence.

The argument that this probably isn't the case because we can add in another highly improbable variable (omnipotence) to explain it is fundamentally at odds with principles like Occam's Razor, that you shouldn't add in extraneous variables without a good explanation of why they must be present, or that they should explain otherwise intractable problems.

As for the multiverse thing, I'd argue that an all-knowing God would contain all knowledge just by default. So saying there was anything hidden from his knowledge (e.g. he chose not to simulate some possibility) would seem to be contradictory. He's no longer all-knowing then. He knows the outcome of every possible life in every possible universe, but those outcomes are dependent on the chain of cause and effect within every universe, so God's already computed and stored the result of every step - hence all the states are already simulated and actualized. Every point in the multiverse simulation is processed and stored in his memory, already.

As for a possible "free will" argument here against the simulationist scenario, that's not going to work either. e.g. you have God creates matter according to Laws he determines, and those laws leave room for "free will", or you have God creates a simulation of the exact same Laws, and the simulation has the same properties as the matter. There's no fundamental reason "matter" outside God would be able to have different properties to the simulation of that matter in the mind of God. In fact saying God couldn't simulate it properly so he had to create "matter" external to Himself to achieve that would seem to contradict the whole all-knowing / all-powerful thing.

[Maximum Spin]

[whole lotta bad philosophy]

Nah, man, sorry, nah.

I'll just focus on your invocation of Occam's Razor. It doesn't work like that. Your theory would unify omniscience and omnipotence to mean the same thing, so the whole structure in which you are trying to invoke the Razor to favour one over the other is invalid.

[Reelya]

Why would omniscience require omnipotence?

It's not hard to imagine a being that could know all fact but not influence anything outside it's own mind. My point was that it wouldn't need anything outside it's own mind to create a simulation. That's not the same as omnipotence, but for the beings inside the simulation they wouldn't be able to tell.

My use of Occam's razor was to point out that the being capable of perfect simulation wouldn't need to be omnipotent outside of it's own mind, to be capable of simulating a whole reality that we know of. So to say that an omniscient being must create something outside itself for their to be subjective reality is an un-necessary complication.

if there is an omniscient intelligence behind everything then, then the most likely scenario by a huge margin is that it's a simulationist universe, because that adds the fewest extraneous concepts onto the core "infinite intelligence".

... Otherwise you're positing an infinite intelligence, plus this other bit of stuff added on which is finite.

[Trekkin]

Eh, I think there are important distictions to be made about the specific sense in which a given atheist regards a god not to exist, or a given agnostic argues that existence to be unknowable.

For example, I'm an agnostic, an atheist, and a maltheist, roughly in that order. Insofar as someone wants to call whatever is responsible for the observable Universe "God", the point is largely semantic. It is easy to ask what caused the last first cause ad infinitum and thereby create a space big enough to fit whatever deity or lack thereof most appeals to you, but it's also true that the Big Bang wasn't causally linked to anything "before it" as we normally understand time. There was no "before", so whether the current random result is the result of a sapient creator or a nonsapient process is kind of moot from a predictive standpoint. There's no implicit plan either way, so I'm agnostic and apathetic. I can't see what happened and it had no way of knowing I'd try.

On the other hand, there are rules. These rules are well-tested and follow each other in a way that does not account for statistically significant miracles and are mostly true in the sense that they are predictively useful. Yes, we can't really "know" anything in some abstract philosophical sense, but if I want to know how many apples I have in my hands, counting them is a lot more useful than navel-gazing (unless my hands are resting on my abdomen.) In that sense, we know that prayer doesn't do anything better than placebo and we know that bad things happen to good people and bad at about the same rate, all else being equal. We also know that if we stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm holding a metal rod, our chances of being struck by lighting don't need to take into account whatever blasphemies we may be shrieking. So I'm an atheist with respect to the observable universe: if there is a sapient, conscious God who thinks in ways we can grasp, let alone affect, they must be very content to pretend otherwise.

And, given the above, if there is some asshole deciding what to do with my heretofore undetectable soul on the basis of what I did with the dogma it inserted into the Universe in contravention of all observable laws, I pity Them. They've put a lot of time and energy into tricking people They made incapable of seeing the truth except by blind and otherwise useless faith, much like many insecure children invent playground games with complicated and unfair rules in order to ensure they win. If They can't find a better use for their time than Hell, or a better way to be worshipped than making us fear it, I don't know what else to do but see about getting Them some help.

So there you go: IMO, whether there is a god at all is unknowable, but whether there exists a god whose existence is statistically significant is a pretty firm "no", and if it turns out there is one anyway and their opinions matter in an afterlife, they're pretty messed up. I'm also a Discordian and part of The Satanic Temple, though, so take the above with a grain of salt, ideally on a hot dog.

[Maximum Spin]

Why would omniscience require omnipotence?

I didn't say it did, I said that omniscience yields omnipotence. It's a consequence, not a prerequisite.

Your use of Occam's Razor is still faulty.

You're also totally wrong to say that the simulationist theory is "most likely" because that's entropically nonsensical. In the space of possible universe arrangements that has measure zero. Infinitely unlikely. Occam's Razor isn't even intended to tell you what is likely.

[TD1]

How does knowing all lead to all-power? I may know how lightning strikes. Doesn't mean I can make it happen.

[Reelya]

You're also totally wrong to say that the simulationist theory is "most likely" because that's entropically nonsensical. In the space of possible universe arrangements that has measure zero. Infinitely unlikely. Occam's Razor isn't even intended to tell you what is likely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

His principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. The razor's statement that "other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones" is amenable to empirical testing. In science, Occam's razor is used as a heuristic guide in the development of theoretical models, rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.

it was a commonly held belief that nature itself was simple and that simpler hypotheses about nature were thus more likely to be true.

The razor's statement that "other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones" is amenable to empirical testing. In science, Occam's razor is used as a heuristic guide in the development of theoretical models, rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.

By "better" and "heuristic" they mean "more likely to be correct"

In fact:

There are various papers in scholarly journals deriving formal versions of Occam's razor from probability theory

^^ THIS ^^

It can't be clearer than this, it really can't. Occam's Razor has exactly one reason for existing, and that's for picking a model out of contending models which has the highest likelihood of being correct, and the formalization of Occam's Razor is in fact a branch of probability theory.

That's what it's for, that's the only thing it's for. It's about relative probabilty of competing models, given constraints.

In this case the constraint was "an omniscient God exists", and then Occam's Razor can be applied to pick the likeliest model given that constraint. Occam's Razor means that with that constraint, the model which adds the least other constraints is the most likely one. Of course Occam's Razor isn't testing the constraint "an omniscient God exists" here, but it can damn sure tell you that a version which only requires an all-knowing God is more likely than one with both an all-knowing and all-powerful God than can create stuff outside itself. Because that is adding extraneous abilities to the God which weren't strictly required to produce the phenomena we're considering.

[Maximum Spin]

That's definitely a common misconception about Occam's Razor and it's a real shame that wikipedia is propagating it, but that doesn't really change that Occam's Razor is a subjective (mainly aesthetic) selection heuristic, not a physical or mathematical law, and cannot functionally tell you what is more likely. For example, if nature really was all that simple and simpler hypotheses were more likely to be true, we'd (statistically probably) still be using Newton's law of universal gravitation. What can tell you what is more likely, though, is an entropic assessment: ceteris paribus, things which have more distinct ways of happening are more likely, like rolling a six on one die versus rolling a six on at least one of twenty dice. If the possibility set is infinite, any finite subset of it has measure zero and is therefore infinitely unlikely - like rolling a 3 on a d∞.

[wierd]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObwmwnbSw-A

[Trekkin]

it was a commonly held belief that nature itself was simple and that simpler hypotheses about nature were thus more likely to be true.

The razor's statement that "other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones" is amenable to empirical testing. In science, Occam's razor is used as a heuristic guide in the development of theoretical models, rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.

By "better" and "heuristic" they mean "more likely to be correct"

In fact:

There are various papers in scholarly journals deriving formal versions of Occam's razor from probability theory

^^ THIS ^^

It can't be clearer than this, it really can't. Occam's Razor has exactly one reason for existing, and that's for picking a model out of contending models which has the highest likelihood of being correct, and the formalization of Occam's Razor is in fact a branch of probability theory.

That's what it's for, that's the only thing it's for. It's about relative probabilty of competing models, given constraints.

It can't be clearer, but it can be far more accurate. "Heuristic", in the computational sense of the term, has nothing to do with accuracy and everything to do with what information is required to make decisions based on trial and error. It's just an attempt to guess right in as little time as possible. See that "heuristic guide rather than rigorous arbiter" bit? That's the bit that means "it tells us what to test first, not what the results of those tests will be."

Did you actually go read those papers on formal versions of Occam's Razor, Reelya? They're on arXiv, so even people who don't have academic access can go read them. What they describe (in philosophical terms) are decision-making engines, not magic oracles.

Occam's Razor does indeed do one thing, and one thing only: it tells you what to check first. That's what it's for, and that's the only thing it's for. Heck, even William of Ockham said that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected, not that it is more likely to be right.

[Ggobs]

ptw