Just as a note, anything listed in red is his words and anything in black is mine. Also, I am only going to include the parts that I am responding to to keep this a little more clear. I am also not going to be using pictures in the actual text of the debate, just to keep it clean. I am going for clarity here, and if anyone has any suggestions on how to make it clearer, by all means, put that in the comments.

Anyhow, on to part 2!

A view is plausible just if it’s likely true. We’ll never have certainty in such things, but we can be justified in thinking things are real just if it’s plausible that they’re real.

Yet you are providing no mechanism to test if it is true, or even likely true. It all comes off like “it sounds good to me” which is irrelevant. Again, this is why we need evidence and a demonstrable mechanism for objectively testing the evidence to see if it is demonstrably and repeatably true. I am not seeing any kind of epistemic standard from you that would lead me to think that any of this is true. I am only seeing claims, not facts.

But if it’s plausible that Big Foot exists then it’s at least decently likely. I’m arguing that the existence of God is likely, not certain.

How do you determine that though? At least with Bigfoot, we know that animals exist. Bigfoot is supposed to be a large, humanoid mammal of some sort and those things are demonstrably real. We have never seen a verifiable example of any gods. If you go out into the woods and find a large footprint, Bigfoot believers will claim that Bigfoot caused it. They cannot demonstrate that, of course, as there is no direct, demonstrable causal link between the footprint and an actual large creature that made it. It’s just a claim but at least they have something to point to. Theists don’t even have that. They still only have claims, but the claims aren’t based on anything verifiably real. It’s “I’ve got a feeling”, which is really all that faith is, but “I’ve got a feeling” doesn’t mean anything. “God” is just an idea that you’ve got in your head. When I can replace “God” with “invisible, intangible, universe-creating pixies” and nothing changes, then your arguments are entirely empty. When we can take the exact same arguments and insert “Krishna” or “Allah” or anything else, even something we just make up, you haven’t demonstrated anything. In reality, most theists are just looking for something to call “God”, whether it’s real or not. They get emotional comfort from the idea of a god, but not the actuality of a god. If said god isn’t actually real in some defensible way, then it stops being reality and just becomes delusion.

To explain this framework I gave the example of a person cheating in poker. If you see a dealer get a bunch of royal flushes, you should think they are probably cheating. This is because the cheating hypothesis is a decently initially likely hypothesis and best explains the data. There are other theories that explain the data like that they just keep getting lucky or that a fairy did it. But these are bad theories because they’re less initially probable than the cheating hypothesis.

Yes, but poker is real. It’s actual people sitting around a table with cards that you can demonstrate exist. If you were to point at a person, sitting alone in a corner with their eyes closed and claim they were cheating at poker, that would be a ridiculous claim because there is no apparent poker game going on, except, perhaps, in their head. In that case, you don’t even have data, you just have a claim that falls apart upon the slightest critical evaluation. That is exactly what happens with all of the God claims. They are just claims. It is someone sitting in the corner with his eyes closed and someone else says “he’s talking to God!” No, not  by any evidence that we can detect. He might  be talking to himself, but that’s not a God in any demonstrable way. It’s why most theists, when they use “God” (or any other names), those deities are fluid, fitting into whatever situation the religious happen to find themselves in. They’re not talking about a real entity. They are talking about a concept in their heads.

The reason that it doesn’t make sense, in normal circumstances, to try to psychoanalyze people in order to figure out if they’re cheating is that this is a very fallible method. But it’s not totally irrelevant to ascertaining if they’re cheating. If Alex Bertoncini, famous Magic The Gathering cheater, keeps getting good hands in Magic, you should think he’s probably cheating, while if a random old loving grandmother gets good hands, you should think the luck hypothesis is likelier.

Because cheating isn’t in your head. It’s an action that you take that gives you an unfair advantage against other people. It’s why you can’t cheat in a single-player game. There’s no one else to affect. If you want to cheat, go ahead. If you want to break the rules, go ahead. There’s nobody else there to hurt! If Alex consistently gets better hands and no one can find any evidence of him actually cheating, then the better answer is probably skill. He’s a better player with a better grasp on building effective decks. You can certainly think he’s cheating, but he doesn’t  become a cheater until you can prove he’s cheating. You might think there’s a god, but you’re not going to convince anyone else who doesn’t share your preconceptions that there is an actual god until you can produce the evidence to demonstrate it.

An infinite number of views can always explain the evidence. To adjudicate between them, therefore, one must use prior probability. Evidence isn’t irrelevant, but it’s not the only thing that matters. How likely a hypothesis is before you look at the evidence is also important.

But we’re not interested in views, we’re interested in truth. For any catastrophic event in the real world, you can find tons of conspiracy theorists with their own personal takes on the cause. That doesn’t mean any of those wingnut ideas actually happened. Certainly, there can be some reasonable assertions, but things don’t move from hypothesis to fact without a lot of corroboratory evidence. No matter how much the believer really wants it to be true, that doesn’t make it true until it is supported.

But simplicity gives you evidence that a theory is true because it posits less stuff. If you deny simplicity is a virtue you have no reason to think that there is not a random Giraffe just created in your room.

That’s actually not how that works. The belief that disease was caused by demons was an incredibly simple belief, given the other irrational beliefs that people tended to hold at the time. People believed in demons, demons were evil, they wanted to harm people, therefore anything that harmed people, those things were caused by demons. Simple, right? It was also laughably wrong. The actual cause of disease is very complex. The cure of disease is even more complex because you have to kill the viral or bacterial agents without killing the host. Simplicity, in and of itself, is not the automatic mark of truth. It’s why Occam’s Razor is stated the way that it is, and misunderstood by a lot of theists. It states that we must not multiply entities unnecessarily, meaning that we get rid of the things that are unsupported in our search for actual truth. Whether you like it or not, God is an unnecessary, undemonstrated claim, not supported by any objective evidence whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if you want it to be true, you haven’t shown that it is, although certainly, you have your chance to do so here. Your desire for a god doesn’t make a god real, any more than someone’s desire for Bigfoot makes Bigfoot real. The only thing that makes Bigfoot or God real is Bigfoot or God  being real. You cannot  get to either with philosophy.

I agree that we can get evidence for the existence of a limit. My claim is that prior to getting good evidence for such a limit you should suspect that there is none. This is good news for theism because it lacks arbitrary limits. Any considerations of prior probabilities can be outweighed by sufficient evidence, of course, but they will still affect how initially likely something is.

Likely doesn’t mean true. It really sounds like you’re trying desperately to get to a point of “it’s good enough for me!” If that’s what you’re trying to do, then you’ve already lost. You’re not going to convince me of the truth value of anything if you don’t actually have anything to show that it is true. Not possibly true. Not “likely” true. True. Actually true in the universe that we all agree that we share. There has to be something that you can present that shows that this specific thing that you are calling “God” is real. Not that you believe it, not that you have faith in it. Real. Got any of that?

These are not a good theory because they don’t explain anything. If all you knew was that there were such beings you’d have no specific expectations about reality. Additionally, they’re inherently improbable. Why do they make universes rather than some other thing? You can always make up an explanation, but something isn’t a good explanation if it’s just gerrymandered to explain one data point.

“God” doesn’t explain anything either. God is just an ad hoc explanation slapped on things that people don’t currently understand, because they want answers that they simply do not have. People need to accept that they don’t know things that they don’t know. Inventing things out of whole cloth doesn’t make it true. Just wanting to believe in a god and getting emotional comfort from it, that doesn’t make that god real. You’re just assigning probabilities to things based on how much you like them. What demonstrable things are you basing these probabilities on? Show your work. Actual statisticians are rolling in their graves, if they have any. This is all “it seems to me” with a bunch of big words attached. Sorry, that doesn’t lend it any credibility.

I gave an analogy between theism and evolution. It makes sense to believe in evolution because it explains lots of otherwise puzzling things even though it’s always possible to come up with an alternative explanation. Theism is similar in that it explains lots of puzzling things. But to parse this out, we must look at the evidence.

Yes, we must. I’ve been asking for decades for any actual evidence for theism and haven’t seen any yet. Now I don’t know your specific position or anything, so I’ll keep this general, but pretty much every theist I run into who rejects evolution, does so on the basis of their pre-existing beliefs in a religion. They have never looked at the actual evidence for evolution, they just assert “my religion said God did it, so God did it!” The same goes for Flat Earthers who, almost entirely without exception, in fact I can only think of one exception, are virtually all religious. Their entire argument is “the Bible says…” Then they try to rationalize their way around the evidence because they can’t get beyond “the Bible says…” This is faith, not fact. Theism doesn’t actually explain anything. Theism makes CLAIMS about things. This is like saying: Gravity exists because Mongo, the giant spice worm on Arrakis says it should! That’s not an explanation for anything, it’s just a  bald-ass claim. It only works if  you only look at the world through the lens of there being a spice worm on Arrakis named Mongo who has the ability to make gravity exist. That’s just not demonstrated. It’s a claim and an entirely unsupported one at that. It doesn’t matter how much someone might want that claim to be true, it doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t explain anything but the gullibility of some irrational Dune fans.

My claim is that the evidence for theism works like the evidence for a rigged coin. No particular flip is decisive. It’s always possible that that particular flip came up heads because of chance. But if you see things over and over again that are explained by one hypothesis but not explained well by other hypotheses, then you should believe the first hypothesis.

Yet for a flipped coin, you have a coin. You have two sides that are demonstrable and three possible options. Yes, I have flipped a coin and had it land on its edge. Now, what do you have for theism that you can trot out here for us to examine in the same way that we can examine the coin? I am going to keep bringing this up and you are going to keep ignoring it because you don’t have anything. If we saw someone walking down the street and they were making a coin flip motion, but they didn’t have a coin, would we accept that they were flipping an invisible, intangible, completely undetectable coin? I certainly hope not. It’s in the demonstration that shows that the belief is rational. Demonstrate something!

This is just an assertion. I gave an argument for why theism is, in fact, simple. It posits just one kind of thing—goodness—to an unlimited degree. That’s very simple. That of course entails being powerful but it doesn’t assume it. The goodness explains the power, not the other way around. I won’t address the claim about it not being demonstrable yet, for that’s about the evidence for theism—right now I’m just talking about its prior probability.

You haven’t shown where anything that I said was untrue. Religions, at least organized religions, they have books and creeds and bald rationalizations for why people ought to believe it. They usually have churches and often an entire organization designed to move money around and keep the member churches on track. That is anything but simple. Now I suppose it is possible for an individual, completely of their own accord, to say “I believe in a god”, but what are they basing it on? They would have to leave behind all the books and the churches and the teachers and the other believers, all the things that add complexity to modern religions, and they still wouldn’t have a rational simple answer. “Because I do!” isn’t rational. What is the justification for this belief that you cannot demonstrate in any objective way? It just adds all of that complexity back in. It ceases to be simple. The people who tend to think that it’s simple are the ones who buy into it emotionally, lock, stock and barrel and then sweep all of that other stuff aside and declare “It’s simple!” Well sure, if you accept all that other stuff, which there goes the simplicity!

You are asserting “goodness” but you haven’t shown that “goodness” is even a thing. How do you know what is “good”? Not what you believe is good, what is good? Objectively. Keep in mind that the very definition of “objective” is that it is beyond the realm of any mind. Yours, mine or any gods. We get right back to “it seems to me” which is not objective in any way. What you think of as “good”, what your society thinks of as “good”, those are not objective definitions. In fact, they are the very definition of subjective. So you are asserting a thing that you can’t demonstrate, you can’t even rationally define it, then you’re just stapling “that’s God!” on the end because it sounds good to you. Do you think that’s a rational thing? It’s not.

Simplicity is determined by the fundamental posits of a theory. One has no reason to reject the multiverse, even though it means there’s lots of stuff, because it follows from simple fundamental mathematical laws. Theism is like that—all of the various properties follow from the single, simple, fundamental property of unlimited goodness.

Which again, doesn’t matter because you haven’t shown that “goodness” is a thing. Asserting a thing is not demonstrating that thing. If you look in the Bible, a book that a lot of Christians claim is the inerrant word of God, then you’ll see that God condones slavery, genocide, abusing women, murder, the list  goes on and on and on. Are you going to call those things “good” now? Are  you going to just sweep them under the rug and pretend they don’t exist?  A lot of Christians these days simply declare “God wouldn’t do that!” even though their own book says he demonstrably did. Most Christians don’t worship a real god. They worship a concept in their head that they made up and arbitrarily assigned characteristics to because it makes them happy to believe it. That doesn’t make it true.

For the record, I’m not religious. God is defined as a maximally great being. That’s the thing we’re arguing about, as I clarified prior to the debate in an email to BSB. It’s not an empty claim—I in fact gave an argument for it that was not addressed.

Then what the hell are you even here for if you don’t believe any of it? You can’t just define things into existence, which granted, that’s all the religious are doing. This is what they WANT to be true. That doesn’t make it true. I am not concerned about what anyone wants, only what they can demonstrate.

How do we know the definition of a unicorn then? When we’re arguing about something, we should start by assuming the definition, and then argue about whether the thing as defined exists in reality. Which is what I’m doing.

We don’t, we made it up, just like we made up gods. The same goes for leprechauns and dragons and tons of other things. It’s called having an imagination. That doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t mean that there’s a war going on in a galaxy far, far away with laser swords and magic. That doesn’t mean there’s a Hogwarts. You can define things however you want. That doesn’t make those definitions consistent with the real world. It is that consistency that matters, or at least ought to matter, but for far too many people, religious and otherwise, it doesn’t.

You could, of course, invent the word shmow, which is defined as a cow with wings. That wouldn’t mean it exists, but it would be a fine definition.

Which is exactly the point. Yes, you can have a discussion over the finer points of Quidditch and what’s the best broom to fly around on, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s all fantasy. It might be fun to discuss how phasers work in Star Trek, but they’re still not real. Anyone who takes these ludicrous ideas seriously, they have some serious problems. I say that as someone who knew a woman, many, many years ago, who ran around in a Star Trek uniform all the time and couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t get a job. These are not people we ought to look up to or aspire to be. These are people with issues.

I wasn’t giving the story as evidence, just introducing it as a way to think about the evidence. Obviously, the fact that I felt like atheism didn’t solve many big puzzles isn’t the evidence but the fact that, as I went on to argue at length, atheism doesn’t solve many big puzzles is. The evidence is the relevant facts, not my feelings.

I understand what your story was, I was just pointing out that it means nothing. For many Christians, their own personal “testimony” is usually the strongest thing they can present. They just FEEEEEEL God, but feeling doesn’t mean anything. If you talk to these people, and I’ve talked to many hundreds at least over the years, they will all relate a story they cannot personally understand, or simply don’t like the reality, and then they leap to “God did it!” There’s an awful lot of steps in there that they completely miss and they refuse to talk about it.  They’re not interested in the actuality of God, although they certainly assert that it’s true. They only care about the feelings they get and the dopamine shot in the head that they get when they hold these beliefs. It’s delusion, nothing more. Religion is a drug. It’s just a way to feel better about the world that you live in because you can pretend that it is something that it objectively is not.

Atheism doesn’t have to solve anything. This is a massive misconception among the religious and I’m surprised that you, as an atheist, don’t know this. Atheism is the answer to one and only one question: do you believe in any gods? If you say yes, you are a theist. If you say anything else, including “I don’t know” and “I don’t care”, you are an atheist. It’s a binary system. You either believe or you don’t. The second you start talking about solving problems, you’re no longer talking about atheism. You’re just not.

Now is the fact that some theory explains otherwise unexplained things evidence for the theory? Yes.

No it’s not, just like my aforementioned “invisible, intangible, universe-creating pixies” or “Mongo the spice worm” don’t actually explain anything. They are claims, nothing more. If you think you can just make something up out of whole cloth and declare “see! I explained something”, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not a legitimate explanation, it’s a bald-ass lie. I don’t care who believes it’s an explanation, it still doesn’t coincide with demonstrable reality, so it is utterly worthless except as an emotional bandage over things people don’t really like. Too bad. Reality is what’s real. Now let’s get to your example.

To use an example I’ve given in a previous article:

John (speaking to his three year old son): who ate the chocolate cake?

Little Timmy (his son): I’m sure it was the dog.

John: Then why do you have chocolate smeared all over your face?

Timmy: The dog eating it caused it to be on my face.

John: What? That makes no sense. Why would the dog eating it get chocolate on your face?

Timmy: That’s just how things work.

John: That makes no sense.

Timmy: You’re committing the appeal to personal incredulity fallacy. Just because something doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. For many years, a naturalistic explanation of lightning didn’t make sense to people to they inferrred Zeus did it. You’re just like that—just because the view doens’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it’s true.

Except you’re just proving that it’s nonsense. Sure, when you’re talking to a child, your standards are going to be a little more lax because kids don’t know better, but when you get to an adult, you have to raise your standard. Kids are dumb most of the time. Sadly, most adults are dumb too. Most adults have never matured into actual adulthood. Most adults are just terrified little kids, hiding under the bed, wishing for an imaginary father figure in the sky because it’s a lot easier than having to deal with the real world. That is not respectable. That is not something we should look at and want to emulate. The fact that half the planet is like that, more in some areas and less in others, doesn’t make it a good thing. Yes, I am defining “good” as I find it most useful because it’s a completely subjective thing. Personally, I’d like people to stop being dumb, but that’s not the world that we live in, is it?

The reason it doesn’t make sense to make up explanations like that Zeus did it is that they either have a low prior probability (why would a being throw thunderbolts out of all the things it could do) or poorly explain the evidence (why would random pixies make a universe?) But if a theory genuinely explains phenomena, such that the phenomena are likely if the theory is true but unlikely if it’s false, then that’s good evidence for the theory. The more things there are like this the better evidence that is.

But this is not evidence, any more than presents under the tree with Santa’s name on them is evidence for Santa Claus. There is no direct, demonstrable, causal link between a demonstrably real Santa Claus and presents you find under your tree. I just had  someone over on the channel tell me that they didn’t buy into Santa as a kid because they had no chimney. These are the rational questions that we need to be asking ourselves. Granted, kids are exempted, at least when they’re young, because they don’t know any  better. We need to have the expectation that as you grow up, as you mature, that you will figure this stuff out. If you haven’t, then that’s a problem with you. You have failed to learn how to be a rational individual. Sure, you can make all kinds of excuses for why someone remained dumb, but at the end of the day, excuses only go so far. Unless there is something really wrong with you, you need to grow up.

The reason to believe evolution is that things like morphology are deeply mysterious if it’s false but likely if it’s true. But that’s the same way I’m reasoning: lots of things make no sense if theism is false but are explained by atheism.

No, because it’s demonstrably true. Because it is repeatedly confirmed by multiple lines of inquiry. Because it’s testable and verifiable. It’s like when creationists complain about radiometric dating, but we can confirm those tests in a lot of cases with entirely different methods that have nothing to do with radiometric decay. We can count tree rings, for crying out loud and look at where specific events occur. The people who deny it are the ones who are doing it for other reasons. They don’t have legitimate complaints about the methodology, their only complaint is “the Bible says…” Sorry, the Bible doesn’t matter.

Of course, it’s always possible that there’s an unknown explanation. But even if there might be, if theism better predicts the evidence, then that still favors theism. There could be an unknown non-cheating explanation of why someone keeps getting royal flushes in poker, but you should still expect they are cheating.

It doesn’t though. It just invents things out of whole cloth. Not once has any religious “prophecy” ever been shown to have happened in any testable way. If you take your guy cheating at cards and someone says “the devil made him do it!” how is that an explanation? It’s a CLAIM. It’s an unjustified claim. It’s an unjustifiable claim. It’s just what someone CLAIMS to be true. That doesn’t make it true. Now sure, if there is a  guy cheating at cards, there is going to be an explanation. We might not know what it is. We might be fooled forever. That doesn’t mean just inventing something that sounds good to you is an actual explanation. “God done it!” is just a claim that has nothing demonstrably to do with actual reality.

This is, again, just a claim. As Hitchens said “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Exactly. The religious sure don’t like it when you just dismiss their faith out of hand because it has no evidence for it, right? Yet that is exactly what I am doing for all of your examples. Saying “it could have been this” doesn’t mean it was that. That’s just a claim. Now go back and show that it WAS that. Provide evidence to examine. You’re not doing that at all.

This is on the section on fine-tuning:

What? I didn’t say that God exists because it’s a nice idea. I gave evidence. Any time B is evidence for A, B will be something where we think it’s unlikely that it would happen absent A but likelier if A is true. Imagine if someone reasoned in the same way about evolution. One way we know evolution is true is that there are transitional fossils.

No, you didn’t. You just made claims. Evidence is “the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid”. It doesn’t matter what sounds good to you, it has to be demonstrably true in reality. Evidence is how we separate the true from the wishful thinking. What you think about a claim doesn’t matter. If we take a red ball, how do we prove that it’s red, even to someone with red/green color blindness? Today, we can measure the spectrum of the color. Red has the longest spectrum at about 700 nanometers. It doesn’t matter if your brain can perceive that, it still is the color that it is. This is why we have to take people and their feelings entirely out of it. Pretty much all of us agree that reality is what reality is. There’s the question of hard solipsism, but once we agree that there is a real world out there that we all accept is there, that reality exists entirely beyond our perceptions. There either is a red ball or there isn’t. How do we get there without just handing the ball around and everyone says “I see this color”? There either is a god or there isn’t. How do we determine it without people just throwing out their own personal interpretations and faith? Where is the objective evidence for that god and you’re just running around with the goalposts because you’re trying to avoid admitting that there isn’t any.

But someone could always say “it’s fallacious to infer that evolution did something just because you don’t understand it.” No, it’s not, and neither is this. In both cases, we have something very unlikely happen that’s naturally explained by some theory. That’s therefore evidence for the theory, especially because it’s deeply mysterious conditional on the theory being false.

Yet no one is doing that. The things that we say evolution is responsible for are the things that we can show that evolution did. Now I don’t have a background in evolutionary biology, my degrees are in physics, but that is not how any of this actually works. It’s a lie told by the religious  because they have no other way to combat the things that they dislike for emotional reasons. It’s why this thing is so silly. You get theists running out to get degrees in the sciences and then, when they have some letters after their name, they ignore everything they learned because they were only doing it to impress others. Now, they’re just spouting faith, not fact. It’s why I say that degrees don’t matter. The value isn’t in the person saying the thing, it’s in the science and the evidence. Henry Morris, who started the Institute for Creation Research, he had a degree in hydrology. Then, he just ignored everything that hydrology taught when it came into conflict with his religious beliefs. The people don’t matter. The science does. The evidence does. The data does. If people are not in congruence with the evidence, then nothing that they say matters.

The way one determines how strong evidence is for a theory is they look at the probability of the evidence if the theory is true and divide that by the probability of the evidence if the theory is false. Theism makes it very likely that there would be fine-tuned laws and constants—but let’s be conservative and say the odds are only 50%. Well, as I argued, the odds are minuscule—well below 1 in 1000—on atheism, for any of the initial conditions is possible on atheism, and the ones that aren’t life-permitting vastly outnumber the ones that are and are simpler. Because any values of entropy are equally initially likely on atheism—for there’s no special reason to think one is likelier than others—then the odds we’d get such a low entropy range are, as Penrose suggests, 1/10^10^123.

There is no fine-tuning. This is just an ASSUMPTION on the part of the religious because it gets them where they want to go. The entire failure here is the ASSUMPTION that our universe was the way it was supposed to be. Go look at Douglas Adams’ puddle analogy. We are here because that’s the way the universe was. If the universe was different, then we wouldn’t be here. We’re not special. We’re not planned. Some other lifeform might have evolved in our place and they’d probably be marveling at how perfect the universe was for their form of life. If the universe was so different that no life could evolve, then no life would be here and nobody would be having this conversation. This is a failure in perspective, brought on by the desire to think that we are special. We’re just not.

I’ll skip the next few things he says because they’re basically just repeating the same point about how appeals to emotions aren’t good arguments.

Maybe  you should stop making the same bad claims and I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. Just saying.

But if a theory explains otherwise unknown things then that favors the theory. You can always hold out for an unknown explanation—like in the case where you guess the coin isn’t rigged despite being heads 125 times in a row. But if a theory explains some otherwise unlikely event, that’s evidence for it. Then, to figure out which theory is right, we’ll have to stack up all the evidence. I think that will favor bare theism over a specific religion—and it certainly favors it over a being like the flying spaghetti monster which isn’t at all simple and has totally arbitrary limits and makes no predictive expectations.

But gods are totally arbitrary. How many gods has man made up over the years to bow down and kiss the ass of and allay their fears? You’ve got people who worship rocks. You’ve got people who have water gods. You’ve got people who worship mountains. These are all completely arbitrary. I’m sure they’re important to the people who do it, but that doesn’t make any of it true. Here’s the reality though, for anyone who doesn’t understand statistics, but if you flip a coin 125 times, whatever result you get, no matter what it is, has the same likelihood as flipping 125 heads in a row. We only recognize the slim odds because of the pattern and we are pattern-seeking animals. Roll a die 100 times and whatever sequence you get, no matter what it is, it’s unique and exactly the same as rolling 100 6’s. Welcome to the real world.

By definition! That the God I’m talking about is my God—where my God is just defined as the God I’m talking about—is a triviality. Of course, we can argue about the properties of God, but that’s outside the scope of the debate—we’re just arguing about whether there is such an entity.

But you don’t get to make up a definition of a real thing. By the same token, I can’t just decide to define a cow as a 2-headed animal that has 6 legs, wings and flies. It doesn’t work that way. If I want to know what a cow is like, I have to go look at a cow. I need to report on the demonstrable reality of the cow. Cows aren’t how we define them, cows are how they are. The same goes for any real gods. If you want to know what a god is like, then you have to have some way to go and look at the real god so that you can describe the characteristics that it actually has.

The religious can’t do that though. How do they know anything about their gods? They don’t. They just made it up. “My book says a thing!” Okay, how did the people who wrote the book know that? The answers just keep getting sillier and sillier. “Well God told us!” Really? Prove it. Provide any evidence that God demonstrably did anything! They can’t do it, which is why religion relies on faith, which is nonsense. Faith means nothing. I can have faith in the 2-headed cow but that doesn’t make it real. The Hindus have faith in a lot of gods, depending on who you ask, and think the Christians are wrong. The Christians believe in one god and say that the Hindus are wrong. Who is right? I don’t mean who feels the rightest, I mean who can demonstrate their case and the answer, whether anyone likes it or not, is neither of them. Faith is not a demonstrable path to truth. It’s just a way to coddle your feelings and that’s not rationally worthwhile.

Through reasoning, as I’ve done here.

Except you’ve done no reasoning. You’ve just made claims. You’ve just said things that you like the sound of. You have engaged in faith. That’s not reason. That’s wishful thinking. A lot of people, religious and otherwise, think that “reason” is “if I can come up with any reason that sounds good to me, for any reason, I’m being reasonable!” That’s not how that works.

But if a theory does actually naturally explain things, in the sense that those things are expected on the theory and surprising if it’s false, then that theory will be supported by explaining those things.

Here’s where it’s useful to define terms up front and we probably could have done that, because I don’t know what you mean by “theory”. In science, a theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts“. It’s not the wild-assed guess that gets used in popular parlance. When science says it has a theory, it is an explanation for demonstrable facts, based on demonstrable evidence, testing and observation. It’s not a guess. It’s the best explanation we currently have for things that demonstrably happen. The theory of evolution isn’t a guess, any more than the theory of gravity is.

Well, the way we know things is ultimately through seemings. The reason I trust induction, the truth of moral and mathematical claims, and the existence of an external world is that they seem real. But I wasn’t just arguing that God seems to exist but instead adducing evidence for it.

Not really, no. Nobody actually works like that. If you take your stereotypical drunk and they see pink elephants, do they still think they really saw them when they sober up? No, of course not. We know that our senses are not that accurate. In the aforementioned red/green color-blind person, red and green still exist in reality, that individual simply can’t perceive them. People who have synesthesia have messed up senses. Their brains are wired wrong. They see sounds and taste colors. Is that how the world really is, because it seems like it to them! You seem to be suffering from the problem that you can’t take yourself out of things. Correct me if I’m wrong, of course. You are looking at the world the way you want the world to be, not the way the world is. What you want doesn’t matter. Just because you want an objective morality to exist, that doesn’t mean an objective morality exists. In fact, it demonstrably doesn’t. That’s why the religious have to continually make excuses for why the world doesn’t look the way that their beliefs insist that it should. It’s why they make up sin, because clearly, everyone doesn’t have the same morals written on their hearts. It’s just bald rationalization. That’s not impressive.

Now we get into Pyschophsyical harmony, which he starts, in part with:

The problem of psychophysical harmony is the problem of explaining why the mental and the physical go together in such a harmonious way.

Except they don’t. If they did, then the aforementioned synthestetes wouldn’t exist, would they? We wouldn’t have mentally ill people whose perceptions of reality, filtered through a malfunctioning brain, show them a world that isn’t actually real. There are lots of examples of this, as I mentioned last time, with people who have suffered brain damage, their perception of reality can change dramatically, as can their reaction to it.

All you are doing is making claims and every time you’re called out on it, you just grab the goalposts and run down-field. I ask direct questions and you provide no answers, other than the empty claim that “I was right all along!” Repeating your previous claim doesn’t make that claim true. You’re not explaining anything, you’re not providing evidence for anything, you’re just saying “this is what I feel!” I don’t care what you feel. I care what you can back up.

I think I’ve already suitably addressed this. Yes, sometimes we should think the answer is unknown. But othertimes, we should think it is known if there are lots of puzzles that are resolved by one simple posit.

Wrong. The answer is unknown until we demonstrably know it. Sometimes we get the wrong answer, some of which I went over last time. Sometimes people think that the Earth is the center of the universe. They’re wrong, but they become so emotionally attached to the idea that they refuse to give it up when the actual answer is found. Talk to the Catholic Church about that. It took them centuries to apologize to Galileo. A fact is a fact, only when it’s a fact and everything that we think we know is provisional. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Too bad it’s still the case.

But we still have a mostly accurate map of reality. Our conscious state isn’t random noise—it’s influenced by the world. I see a table in front of me because there really is a table. The claim isn’t that we’re omniscient but that there is a pairing between the mental and the physical in a way that’s striking and unexpected. It thus has nothing in the slightest to do with religious pluralism.

How do you know that? It is an honest question. How do you know how accurate our map of reality is? Provide your evidence. At one point in time, we thought that the sun went around the Earth. We were wrong. At one point, most people thought the Earth was flat. They were wrong. Some people still are, and virtually all of them only believe it for religious reasons. We continue to refine our knowledge, we continue to find new things but there will always be new things to find. We’re never going to know it all because everything we learn introduces new questions. Again, this is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but too bad. Reality isn’t what you want it to be, it’s what it is. Knowledge isn’t what you want to have, it’s what you have. That’s why a lot of people vastly overestimate their own knowledge because they want to think that they are special. That’s the whole point of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They’re not special. You’re not special and I’m not special. We’re just what we are. Deal with it.

All knowledge is ultimately based on seemings, as I described before. Of course, if something is an arbitrary or absurd seeming then one shouldn’t take it seriously. But my claim is pretty straightforward and obvious—laws that produce simple consciousnesses are simpler than ours that produces a complex and rich variety of internal states.

It’s just not, otherwise we’d have the aforementioned pink elephants. We’d have Oprah and her stupid “your truth and my truth”. There is no “your truth”, there is only the truth. The way we get closer to that truth is by comparing our observations and experiences and testing them to see if we can get  consistent results. Gravity is a thing because we all experience gravity in the same way under the same conditions. It’s why we can put satellites in orbit and they stay where we put them. It isn’t “it seems to me” with no external confirmation. That’s ridiculous.

Reality! Something is complex if there are lots of different components to it.

You are interpreting reality through a lens that gets you where you want to go. There is no objective, universal metric for “complexity”. Just  because you think it’s complex doesn’t make it complex. It’s just your opinion and I don’t care about your opinions. I care about your facts.

If you don’t think that complexity exists then you can’t have a reason to favor simpler theories. But if you can’t do that then all of science is ruined, which looks for the simplest explanation. It’s always possible to posit more things, but there’s no reason to do it absent any explanatory advantage.

Of course complexity exists, it’s just a completely subjective term. What is complex for you might not be complex for me and vice versa. What the religious are doing is saying “X is too complex for Y” as a way to just slip their god in. No. Prove your  god is real, prove your god is responsible, then we’ll talk. Assertions don’t mean anything and that is everything that you have done so far.

Then he presents something from Richard Chappell, who is a philosopher out of the University of Miami, which I don’t think adds anything and this is already very long. This is really why philosophy becomes so pointless when you come to reality because it’s a whole bunch of people saying “it seems to me”. Who cares? This turns into yet another case of people who want something to be true, but  can’t back it up evidentially. I already provided at least some evidence last time and playing dueling citations isn’t a lot of fun, so I’m going to try to minimize it. When Chappell can actually show that the mind exists external to the brain, we’ll talk. Until then, I’m just moving on.

Next, we get to a priori information.

Yes, we do, for the reason I explained. Both the theory that the world will and won’t turn into a cucumber tomorrow explain all the evidence up until this point. So absent a priori knowledge, one can’t have any reason to think one of those worlds is likelier than the other.

I don’t think you’re going to turn into a cucumber because we have no evidence that anyone, in the entire history of the world, has ever done so. I can’t even imagine the circumstances under which anyone possibly could do that. It would be a world-altering situation if such a thing did. Therefore, until something like that does happen, or there is a reason to think that it is even possible, I see no reason to even consider the possibility. The same goes for any other fruit or vegetable that you’d like to name. The same goes for people turning into werewolves. I didn’t just wake up one morning and magically know it wasn’t possible. I didn’t look into it specifically, but my experience with the real world, as well as the experiences of others that I have compared to my own, shows that it is not possible, given our current understanding. Of course, all knowledge is provisional, so let me know if this ever happens so I can re-evaluate my position.

It seems like torture is wrong and would be so even if no one believed that. You’re justified in following your seemings in the absence of a defeater—which we don’t have. I am justified in believing in the external world absent a good reason to doubt it. But morality is analogous.

This is just your interpretation. If this was wrong, universally, then nobody would ever torture, would they? The concept of torture wouldn’t even be a thing since nobody would have ever tortured, anywhere at any time. So clearly, you are confusing what you think and what the society in which you live thinks, with what is objectively true in reality. You are just wrong. This is why objective morality is nonsense because for any moral precept you come up with, you can find people or societies who not only disagree, they may actively practice it. They will think you’re wrong. There goes objectivity, right out the window.

Does BSB realize that I’m not a Christian but instead a generic theist? He keeps making this error! The argument is not that we get morality from the dictates of a book but instead that only theism accounts for how we can come to reason about morality and correctly intuit facts about morality—and other types of a priori knowledge.

I don’t care. Now this is something that we’ve seen before, and I’m not saying that he’s doing it himself, but there are a lot of theists who will play some “vague, random theist” specifically so that nobody can back them into a corner on their beliefs. I don’t care. If I respond and say that here’s a thing that Christians do, since Christianity is still the majority religion in the western world, then that’s an example, not an accusation.

These are about what the right moral view is, not how we come to know about it. They thus have nothing to do with the puzzle as applied to moral knowledge, and certainly nothing to do with it as applied more broadly to a priori knowledge. BSB then notes that lots of people think torture is fine. True but irrelevant. People can be wrong about morality.

There is no right moral view. There are views that are useful within a particular society or for individual people, but there is no single right thing that is true for absolutely everyone. That’s why, when you look at someone who is  doing something that you don’t approve of, you can’t say “you’re wrong”. I mean, you can physically do that, but not intellectually. The best you can say is “I don’t  agree with you”. You might not like that but too bad. Society collectively has the ability to punish those who fall outside of established moral and legal bounds, but that doesn’t make any of it right or wrong, just legal and illegal.

Then he gets into anthropics, just so you can go back to his original post and follow along.

But anytime you apply Bayes theorem you look at what we’d expect if a theory is true vs what we’d expect if it isn’t. The reason that you should think a coin is rigged if it always comes up heads is because that’s what we’d expect if it were rigged but not if it weren’t.

That’s assuming that I accept that Bayes is worthwhile as it is applied by a lot of theists. That’s often not the case, so unless you want to talk specifics, there isn’t a lot of reason to hash it out. Again, here, if I suspect that someone has messed with a coin, I’m not going to lay out a chart and figure out the odds, I’m going to look at the coin. Going back to the guy flipping the invisible coin from earlier, I have no reason to suspect that there is a coin at all. The question is kind of silly at that point.

Well, I gave an argument for it: that a perfect being would make every possible persons because making a happy person is good. BSB did not address this argument, preferring to posture and repeat the otiose claim that believing something or wishing it doesn’t make it so.

That’s not an argument, that’s a claim. First off,  you have no demonstrably perfect beings in evidence. You can say nothing about what they may or may not do, as the proposition is wholly imaginary. All you can do is say what you THINK they would do, which isn’t worthwhile. Because here’s the thing, I don’t buy into the whole “human flourishing” thing either. I am not a humanist. In fact, I’m ardently not a humanist. I’ve done videos on it. I don’t play the whole “here’s my arbitrary definition of what I think flourishing is, therefore that’s what’s objectively right or good to do, because I say so!” This is all about enlightened self-interest. I want to be treated a certain way, therefore I try to treat others in the way that they want to be treated, which may or may not be the same way that I do, in hopes that they will respect my desires and treat me accordingly. It’s purely transactional.

Atheism is the position that there are no Gods. Otherwise, how does one argue about it? No one doubts that BSB doesn’t believe in God. We’re arguing about what’s reasonable to believe. But fine, if you go with the silly lack of belief definition—according to which most atheists are brainless atoms, for atoms aren’t convinced of God—then replace my claim about what atheism predicts with what the non-existence of God predicts.

No, it’s not. It is the position of not BELIEVING that gods exist. I am not convinced that any god concept that I have ever been presented with is objectively true in the real world that we all share. You do not get to redefine my terminology as you will. Language is descriptive, not prescriptive. You don’t get to play language police.

But the number of possible people is more than the number of possible arrangements of DNA because there can be multiple people with the same DNA.

Of course there can, I even agreed and spelled out how it can happen. Why are you bringing it up like it’s a victory for you. It’s obvious that it’s true and anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron. Moving on.

No, it’s probabilistic reasoning. I exist, so that favors theories that make it likelier that I’d exist, like theism. This is exactly the way I’d reason about anything.

We could have a really long debate over whether you actually exist or not, but that’s off-topic, so we’ll bypass it. You exist, for the sake of argument, but that doesn’t mean there has to be a reason why you exist. You exist because your parents had sex. You’re here because perfectly natural  circumstances conspired to bring you about. You were not planned, you are not special, you’re just here because specific genes came together in a certain way that you were born. Whether you like the fact or not, doesn’t change the fact.

The absurd results I talk about are that you could guarantee that you won’t get pregnant by making sure that you’d have a lot of offspring if you did and that you could move boulders with your mind. It’s not that I don’t personally approve of them, it’s that I can see that they’re mistaken probabilistic judgments.

If you want to guarantee that you won’t get pregnant, don’t have sex. Actually, that’s not a guarantee since other things could happen. You could have yourself surgically sterilized. Then, there is no chance, no matter what happens, that you will become pregnant. We understand how getting pregnant works. Don’t do the things, voluntarily or otherwise, that could make that happen. Easy enough. When it comes to moving boulders with your mind, we have no evidence of that, so it shouldn’t be a rational consideration until there’s some reason to make it one.

The idea that he’s debunked anything is a bit silly. All he’s done is repeat that feelings aren’t evidence and erroneously assume that you can’t get evidence for A from B if there might be some unknown explanation of B.

There absolutely could be, which is why I’ve repeatedly said that all claims of knowledge is provisional. We “know” what we know when we know it and only at the moment that we know it. Tomorrow, we might make a discovery that completely blows away everything that we previously thought that we knew. That’s how the world works. Then, we’d have a new set of provisional knowledge, which survives only until we find other information.

However, this makes lots of people uncomfortable. They are looking for eternal facts that withstand the test of time because actually caring if your positions are rationally defensible takes work and most people are inherently lazy. They just want to believe, but that doesn’t make any of those beliefs factually true.

So far, I’m sorry to say, you’ve just taken a position that you happen to like and then you’ve run around with the goalposts, looking for anything that can get you to that emotionally comforting belief, at least that’s how it looks from where I’m sitting. Unfortunately, while you’re doing your best to justify it to yourself, you’re doing absolutely nothing to justify it to me or anyone else. When people tell you what it will take to convince them of the truth-value of your claims, you ignore it and run back to the goalposts for another run at the end-zone. You have done, so far, the same thing we see every time a theist tries to debate. They assume that everyone is just like they are, that the things that convince them will convince everyone else and when they don’t, they really have no clue what to do because they are incapable of stepping back from their blind faith and just dealing with reality. That’s not an insult, just an observation, but “it seems to me” isn’t going to convince anyone. That’s a very poor epistemology for dealing with reality and one that I don’t think you would apply to anything else in your life. Double standards don’t work. We only need one.