Its very easy to explain to an unbeliever theres a G-d. Sit down with them, give them as much paper as they want, and a calculator. List every item in the universe (the obvious ones) and then have them guess what are the odd's of that happening. When you're done calculating the odd's its so close to zero that we could exist the difference is the same as infinity squared and infinity cubed when compared to each other.
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Even if I accept your premise, that certainly doesn't prove your god. All it proves is that those things exist. When you look at the vastness of the universe, and how small and inconsequential we all are in comparison, that certainly doesn't make the case for us having some preferred Rome in it.
yes, please do sit down and list every item in the universe. i'll check back in with you, fundie, after you're quite done listing. until then, i'll be living my own life. no, keep listing; there's several billion stars in the Hercules A galaxy you've not mentioned yet...
The odds of winning the lottery are vanishingly small, therefore if one person wins the lottery presumably this stands as proof that the drawing of that persons number out of the spinning barrel didn't actually happen.
Or, you could be a fucking idiot.
Congratulations. You've devised the most time-consuming way possible to prove absolutely nothing. A few minutes in the person doing the calculating will figure out that none of the crap you're insisting upon doing proves the existence of your god.
Save you both some time and effort and agree to disagree.
I post on that forum and it's easy for them to post in the mixed christian and non Christian areas.
They have this silver bullet argument against atheists and they choose to only tell it in the Christian only section. I wonder why that is?
The odds of an event occuring are exactly 1 after it has occured.
Further, it seems many atheists have to prove the universe itself actually exists first as the Bible belives there is *only* Heaven and Earth. Everything else is a decoration or delusion, supposedly.
I don't need a calculator, even though I'm a very poor mathematician. As this is the way it happened, the odds of that happen is 1:1 (or however you show odds). Sure, 1:1 is fairly close to zero...
I might take you somewhat seriously if you could actually spell out "god." Why would I even want to worship a being which prohibits anyone from writing its name? To me, the G dash D crowd look like a bunch of terrified people who are afraid that their god will unleash his terrible wrath upon anyone who dares write his name, even though when they write "G-d" it means exactly the same as "God."
As a couple of other people have pointed out, the odds of a past event having happend are 1/1....
The odds are exceedingly small that any individual will win the lottery. They are actually smaller than the odds of having some other horrific thing like being mauled by a bear are greater. However, people actually do win the lottery.
The thing is that all though it took a lot of small probability events occuring to get everything to the state it is now, there were certiantly going to be events that occured, physics does not allow for the universe to just shut down and choose to have nothing happen.
Also, the whole "low/no probability of occuring" seems less like a good argument for a dieity, and more like another example of our cosmic irrelevance...
Shuffle a deck of cards. What are the odds of that particular order appearing just by chance? 8 followed by 67 zeros. (80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 to one)
So you obviously fixed the deck to have that exact order.
See how easy it is to explain to a fundie how hard they failed?
Even assuming you're looking at the chance of things happening the way they did out of all the possible permutations (as opposed to going with 1 because they did happen) , this argument is still silly, if the circumstances for intelligence life did not occur there would be no intelligent life discussing their non-existence.
@Doubting Thomas
But "god" isn't even a name, any more than "man" is a name. That just makes it more ridiculous, though.
Ok, time for a lesson in odds. "Close to zero" and "zero" are not the same thing. Given sufficient time, everything that CAN occur eventually WILL occur, regardless of how small the odds are.
Do this: play a few rounds of Poker, like 5 or so is plenty. Then calculate the odds of every hand for every person for all 5 rounds. The odds are "so close to zero" that the "difference is the same as infinity squared and infinity cubed" (which is still infinity). Therefore, God is a dirty stinking cheat who hands out the cards and Poker is a rigged game!
And if something else happened, you'd still say the same thing.
It's a trillion to one odds for each option, universe just happened to pick this one.
Give them a list of the last 100 numbers that came up on the roulette wheel at the Mirage and ask them to calculate the probability of that (it's about 1 in 10^156 power). Is it therefore impossible to have happened by chance?
Here's a hint: the probability of something that has already happened (including the existence of the universe) is 1. What the probability would have been before the fact is meaningless.
and the silver bullet response to this post is
"the universe is not like a lottery, its more like a chain of prize packets. The rules go something like this, you have one chance, and there are near infinite numbers of possible prizes of equal value, that in tern lead to another group of different prizes in the next round"
The chance of getting any one chain of prizes is near zero, but that doesn't matter, because no prize is better or worse than any other. Also the probability of the previous chain of prizes happening is precisely 1.
Anything can happen, and all of it is improbable. Just because its improbable, it isn't precluded from the laws of physics, and it certainly isn't impossible.
An exercise in wasting time and paper, and coming nowhere near proving a deity.
If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and love itself, why do children die horrible, painful deaths? Trailltrader, even if your God were real he'd have a very hard case to make.
That still wouldn't prove your point because, technically, anything you can think of will happen sooner or later, no matter how big or small the chances are, given enough time. As long as it doesn't break any law of physics, of course
For the sake of argument, ket's assume that the likelihood of the universe exsiting as it does, rather than existing but being very diofferent, could be shown to be very, very small. How would that a god exists, any more strongly at least than it would argue leprechauns, or pixies, or fairies, etc., exist?
Old Viking FTW!
... and Schrodinger's cat would like a word with you... or would he?
If there's a G-d, why does he need dopes to pull things like this out of their a-s to try and prove it?
The flaw in your reasoning is that you assume that there are only two possible explanations for any phenomenon: either it is the result of chance, or the result of God's will. This is a false dichotomy.
If I throw a baseball up into the air one thousand times, it will fall back to the ground one thousand times. This is not the result of chance, nor of God's will, but simply a result of the laws of physics. All activity in the universe is ultimately the result of laws of physics. None of that has any bearing on the existence or non-existence of God.
What's really sad is that I've heard more convincing arguments for God's existence than this one from fellow atheists . (Some of us like to compile the good ones.)
EDIT. That should of course be Thamex
With the help of a fully functioning drooloscope, a dribblemeter, and a drivelizer it may may be possible to persuade me to believe in G-d. But Bible God! There are not enough drooloscopes in the universe for that.
The probability of anything happening that has already happened is 1. If I flip a coin, and it comes up heads, the probability that it has come up heads is 1, never mind that the probability it will come up heads NEXT time is 0.5. An observed fact means a collapsed waveform.
Trailltrader should take one of my math classes. I use this kind of argument as an example of logic fail. My version: roll a D20 a few billion times and record the results. Now as we all know, the odds of producing this specific sequence of rolls is so close to zero that we have "proven" that the sequence we are holding in our hand cannot exist, or at least could not be produced through natural random processes such as rolling D20's a few billion times.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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