Friday, August 24, 2007

Delusion XI - The great circle debate

Page 51 quote "It is superficially tempting to place PAP (Permanently Agnostic in Principle) in the middle of the spectrum, with a 50 percent probability of God's existence, but this is not correct. PAP agnostics aver that we cannot say anything, one way or another, on the question whether God exists. The question, for PAP agnostics is in principle unanswerable, and they should strictly refuse to place themselves anywhere on the spectrum of probabilities."

And I do refuse to. Essentially this correctly disqualifies me from judging the merits of his reasoning. To a PAP agnostic all proofs of God's existence can only use circular reasoning. Equivalently all disproofs also can only use circular reasoning. That the complexity/design/creation conundrum discovered with Darwinism ought to extend to supernatural beings as believed by the religious cannot be verified - only believed or disbelieved. He relies on this factor but didn't specify it in his original hypothesis (*citation required)

2 comments:

Dr Clam said...

Gosh, I do get sick of these one-dimensional spectra... "You mean you're not a tree-hugging collectivist? Then you must be a ruthless corporate shill..."

The idea of 'God' is not a point at one end of a continuum, but a vast volume in n-dimensional Ideaspace!

winstoninabox said...

Thanks for the quote marco 8-)