re: #406 Liet_Kynes

Sorry, still not convincing.
Justice and belief in a god, examples you give, are not innate. They are taught. That’s exactly what growing up means. That is why babies and small children often seem selfish: they are not born with innate beliefs, they are born with instincts, like every other animal.
Those innate beliefs are internalized as they grow up and watch their family and society behave. You have provided no evidence whatsoever of it being innate. Just because ancient societies worshiped gods (and the king-god of the pantheons was still not omnipotent, just so you know) does not mean it was innate. In fact, history has long explained ancient religion (in Egypt, Babylon, and other early civilizations) as the creation of a chaste that established rituals, protocols and behaviors to keep its monopoly on the word of the supposed deities, as a way to maintain their social status and basically live out of thin air.

(Incidentally, as far as I’m concerned, the Vatican today is the last living example of just that.)

My point about the wackiness was that the fact that ancient civilizations believed something does not make it true in any way. If that was the case, your Mayan and Chinese horoscopes would never conflict. Also, the world would end in 2012.

Also, I do not believe for a minute you are not arguing for an Abrahmic/Christian deity, even if you are not a Christian literalist (which I do believe you are not). Are you arguing for Zeus? For Krishna? Or just for a non-descript abstract deity who, even though he imprinted our brains with an innate idea of his existence, failed miserably to make us understand just what kind of god he is, to the point that humanity has vainly tried to identify who exactly this innate deity seems to be?

If the last case is what you are arguing for, I believe you are making a case for the god of Spinozza, a god which did not matter. I personally think that Spinozza was pretty much an atheist (or as close to an atheist as you could be in the 17th century), so he turned god into basically, nature. A god that is in everything and everyone and cannot affect anything is the same as there being no god (do I even need to use my Occam razor here?).

Anyway, you keep saying how there are 4 possibilities:

1.) creation nature indicates that there is no god and there is in fact no god.
2.) creation nature indicates that there is no god and there is in fact a god.
3.) creation nature indicates that there is a god and there is in fact a god.
4.) creation nature indicates that there is a god and in fact there is no god.

First things first: the fact that you use the term creation shows us that you are not trying to logically see whether there is a god, but rather you already believe so and are trying to prove it to us.

But anyway: you correctly eliminate position 2) and say that 4) means that we should believe in god even if he does not exist (which sounds very much like a sad version of Pascal’s wager), when we should in fact eliminate it for the same reasons as 2). So what about 1) and 3), which seem to be the key part?
You have not yet proved that 3) is more conceivable than 1), which is where we non-believers stand.
Your only proof is that “ancient civilizations believed in gods”, which is a pretty lame form of evidence. Or your personal experience, which might be good for court, but is useless to our discussion, since my personal experience stands in opposition to yours - and there is no footage of god that we can use to solve who is right here.
Therefore, if you want to use logic to convince us, your personal experience (in logic and in the scientific method) is completely unreliable and unconvincing.