Is the evolution story really scientific?

[DarkWraith]

Farmageddon said:

DarkWraith said:

okay so no education on the topic, so you tout suppositions as counters? erm...you dont get logic do you? the extent of your counter to posted logic is "well im sure someone has argued against it, IT CANT BE SO SIMPLE" it is, why do you think philosophy is the field with the lowest amount of god believers? you cant inject reason into a faith position. doesn't work.

when you argue, you have to decide with which premise you disagree. if you accept the premises, the conclusion follows necessarily.

there are no "great thinkers" on the side of theim. you have ontological and cosmological arguments which purport some non-interventionist deity. no arguments even exist for personal gods because the idea is so silly and childish. 

nope, omnibenevolence is assigned as a trait by MANY christians (nothing about good is invoked in this argument). therefore it became an a priori truth. the argument simply uses the a priori truths as defined by christianity to argue that such a deity cannot possibly exist due to contradictions with reality.

then you reject Rationalism as a way to discover truth, which is fine. 

if you cant put it into words, you can't argue in favor of it and that reduces it to an argument from ignorance fallacy.

Maybe it was a bit of my fault, but I think you either missed or ignored some of my points. The actual relevan ones, actually.

For one, you provided no reason why any deity should be supposed to be bounded by logic, which was my main problem originally.

Then there's also, supposing a deity so bound, the definition of omnibenevolence - which of course does depends on our definition of "good", as benevolence is the will to do good  - and our hability to judge it. Your argument can only hold if you assume you absolutely know what's good and can with absolute confidence judge the "goodness" of the world. I ask why should it be reasonable to suppose that. I realize it makes more sense when speaking of very specific Gods, but the more generic it gets the less it does so.

That's the reason I wrote about some of the possible ways one might define "good", to illustrate.

I used theism on a broader sense, as in "there's some form of god". I realize now in our context it would mean a personal God. My bad.

I'm not saying "we don't know that it's not, so it must be". All I said was "We can't really say for sure it's not. Might be, might not". There's no fallacy in that.

DarkWraith said:

probably shouldnt even waste my time here as it will only give you another opportunity to present further piss poor arguments, but here we go. 

P1) A maximally Excellent being exists.

P2) A maximally Excellent being would create a maximally Excellent world.

P3) A maximally Excellent world would be the one best fine-tuned for its purpose.

P4) A maximally Excellent world best fine-tuned for its purpose would be one in which its purpose is maximally achieved.

P5) The purpose for this maximally Excellent world is human life.

P6) Humans are restricted to living on one planet, in one solar system, in one galaxy, in one Universe.

C1) Such a world does not exist. P3 & P6.

C2) Such a being does not exist, C1 & P2.

This is an original argument, so there may be flaws not apparent to me. But I think it's quite concise and gets to the point.

For this you need to suppose you are able to know and define this single, straight-forward objective of some supposed almigthy creator in two words - "human life" - and also give a very precise meaing to these two words in order to judge how well such goal is achieved. I don't think there's any reason to believe any of that to be true on light of a God, specially one from a religion which focus a lot on the concept of an after-life, which further complicates your simplistic vision of His "goal". It's a lot like my objection of your judgment of how much "benevolence" the world shows.

the reason we can evaluate a deity via rational argument is because the premises are drawn directly from definitions of that particular deity. for example, if the claim is made for omnipotence, it then becomes true by definition. this is simply testing for internal consistency and contradiction with what is observed.

you couldn't, for instance, have omnipotence as a trait while being unable to do something.

your point about knowing what is good is important. It is drawn from christianity from "god" as "good" is simply obedience to god. if its obedient, it's good. if not, bad. murder is disobedient, therefore bad/evil exists. 

it seems like you're arguing that the existence of god in some form is unknowable but we can know some concepts are invalid as I mentioned previously.

...

well the user put forward the purpose is human life, I simply used that in the argument. futhermore, the afterlife is obsolete. the only question is maximal purpose which is patently absurd given the rather tiny portion of the universe we can survive in.