Why God stopping the sun in the sky is utterly stupid.

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Also the conservation o momentum. Make that RA + 2.

ruveyn

It appears the the religious person has never heard of Occam's Razor.

Gravity does indeed exist; the laws of Newton are just approximations of it. Einstein redefined gravity--he did not describe it as a force, but as a curvature in space/time,

Divine attribution has always been more parsimonious than purely naturalistic explanations. Interestingly, it was a religious person who came up with the idea.

Proof?

Occam was a Christian. A Franciscan friar to be precise. Wiki it up.

Very predictable response. Let me rephrase my question, then.

What is your proof of the following claim: "Divine attribution has always been more parsimonious than purely naturalistic explanations".

Exactly what is there to prove? Attributing everything to divine origin is always the most parsimonious explanation. It isn't ad hoc because the only assumption required is that there even is a God to attribute anything to.

Granted, "Goddidit" doesn't help us understand our world any better. But on the other hand, it isn't meant to. In looking at a complex universe and understanding how it all works, sure, you favor the simplest explanation for what you see. You're observing a physical world, not a supernatural one. And it's a complex world. Copernican heliocentrism wins hands-down over Ptolemy's epicycles. But once you find out that planets don't orbit the sun in neat little circles and that the mass of one planet can affect the orbit of another, suddenly our solar system ain't so simple.

"It is all physics" is a very simple explanation. The mathematical representation of physics is also simple. Massive equations incomprehensible to all but the most intelligent and highly trained scientists do not dispute this fundamental fact. It is still simple. Humans (including myself) are just as dumb as a bag of hammers.

It is either pure mathematical logic or statistics (the latter applies to quantum mechanics - and strictly speaking, it can be seen as just another branch of mathematics).

The claim that something *else* than physics explains the nature of the universe is not simple, however. It introduces an entirely different paradigm of explanations. As such, it is *not* a proper application of Occam's razor to claim that divine origin is the most parsimonious explanation.

In fact, it's not really an explanation at all. "Supernatural" explanations usually just substitute one unknown for another, with the result that we don't understand anymore than what we did before.

That and a lot of the traits attributed to God - including, but not limited to, omnipotence - create simplicity issues by managing to contradict themselves.

Yeah but the 3-O argument has failed to convince the religious for centuries. IF I remember correctly it was Epicurus that came up with that in ancient Greece. It's a very simple argument, but for some reason believers always manage to ad hoc themselves out of it.

Then there are the numerous contradictions between various scriptures and reality. We can establish this thanks to the countless scientific claims presented in scripture. Such as creation stories, resurrection stories, and other less outlandish claims.

There are the moral teachings which really do not hold up if examined under the constraints of moral philosophy and logic.

There are the stories themselves which cannot be source verified in any way, nor the character and integrity of the authors examined.

However, none of that matters because while the atheist/non-believer is busy reading and constructing valid arguments, the believer wouldn't know the difference between ad hoc and ad block. While the the atheist concerns him or herself with proof, the believer concerns him or herself with belief and faith. There is a reason why every argument presented in favor of the existence of a divine being inevitably gets lost in the dark space of logical fallacies, lack of proof and general fallacy.

It seems like the believer is stuck in the renaissance when a deist point of view could be defended, because in the end that's what they usually argue, not a theist belief but a deist one.

That's because theodicy blows the Epicurean trilemma argument out of the water. All a believer has to do is show that the presence of evil is compatible with the existence of God. A just God, for example, wouldn't create a being in His own likeness without giving that being the choice between good an evil. That is a step for man to take, not God. Thus the world as we know it is a creation of man, not the world as God originally intended it.

Man created the world, eh? That's a bit of a Creationist twist. So, what was God's original intention?

Your argument doesn't work. A god that is omnipotent and omniscient, would have known the result of the world he created before he did so. I.E. he would have seen which steps man would take before creating man, thus the world he created is the world as he intended. Being omnipotent and omniscient he would also have been able to alter the world and avoid man taking such steps.

Some defenses exist that potentially can difuse aspects of the argument, but all theodicies are based either non sequiturs, ad hoc or argument from ignorance. Present me with a theordicy and I shall tell you why its a fallacy.

The only other options is that such a god is either as credulous as his followers or utterly incompetent.

The other issue, since your argument is based on free will, is the existence of multiple free wills, or rather where evil comes as a result of free will, and thus prevent someone else from exercising their free will.

Then there is the argument where God could have put limits on our free will by making moral actions pleasurable to us. Finally, there is the question of evils that are not influenced by free will, such as earthquakes.



Secondly, you have to prove that God is in fact a just god and to which moral philosophy he adheres.

This only proves you have no idea of what an 'explanation' is. You are just uttering 'God' 'God' and pretend you 'explained' anything.


Indeed AngelRho has no basis whatsoever to define what is just or not. All he is doing is uttering nonsense.