Yeah, but it’s just an argumentative option. People don’t actually worship such a god, or if they do, not in sufficient enough numbers to make it notable. I am concerned with what people actually worship en masse.
This is exactly the sort of question that philosophically minded people, for the lack of a better phrase, get so up their asses that they forget about what’s really happening in the world.
Philosophy is a vast ocean. Everything is, but it takes a philosopher to tell you that. Anyway, philosophers are on the sidelines now, only popping up in our radar as theism/atheism. There’s no Nobel for philosophy while there’s one for literature. Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance is noteworthy.
I brought up Deus malus as a better option to Deus bonum. This is nothing new and should’ve appeared on your screen, so to speak.
Yes, that was the intention of the question, really. They claim that God is “ineffable” but when pushed on it there’s at least something to say about it, e.g. is an “intelligent designer” and is “one-of-a-kind”.
Religious belief is quite common, yes.
That may or may not be true, but it doesn’t change the likelihood of a god existing.
As to the rest of your post, I only have a few comments.
Sure, in theory that makes sense. In practice my experience is the quagmire of abstractions. No one was ever harmed by the belief in an ineffable god… although they frequently eff about it a lot. 
That’s an interesting point, arguing that the unlikeliness of a God is reduced to zero because miracles are ridiculously unlikely. However, I don’t think this point works well at all.
Firstly, I’d like to clear up a misconception about God and god. You didn’t explicitly make the mistake, but I’d like to clear it up all the same. Supposedly, there are thousands of gods that appear throughout history. However, when you refer to Gods (capital G) you refer to a non-physical, timeless and spaceless God, and an extremely powerful one. That reduces the God pool from thousands to perhaps dozens and none of these Gods are compatible with each other because of their divine properties. If you successfully argue the point for a God, you’d need to figure out which of the dozen Gods this God is, because the Creator would only be one.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll now get to the reasoning problem. You say that miracles are extremely unlikely making Gods more unlikely. However, this doesn’t make sense. If a God (or even a god) exists, then it won’t at all be unlikely for a miracle to happen. Scientifically, it’s extremely improbable for a miracle to occur, but theologically, whichever God is the one true God could easily intervene and cause a miracle. If a God exists, the unlikeliness of a miracle is negated.
I don’t argue that it reduces to zero, I argue that it reduces to almost zero, and I happen to believe that is functionally the same as zero in almost every context.
That’s not correct. You refer to God when speaking of a proper noun… the singular entity known by that title. You refer to god when speaking of the broader category. That’s just the conventions of the English language. Your distinction is imagined, invented, or at very least highly specialize to a particular community. It is not conventional.
Not at all. If miracles were commonplace, then we wouldn’t consider them miraculous, we would consider them the way life normally unfolds. I think the stronger version of your claim is to say that in a world where an interventionalist god existed, miracles would be predicted, and you would be correct.
The problem is, we are starting from the point where we aren’t assuming the existence of a god, we are trying to see what we can infer from our observations about the question at hand. Can we reasonably infer the existence of a god or is it vanishingly unlikely? If we follow the first part of the reasoning involving the fact that it appears to be in people’s mature to make false god stories about such things as miracles (remember, we aren’t talking about your specific god, we are discussing all the god stories in human history) we can conclude that even if everything else was equal, we should doubt every religious story. Based solely on that fact, our credence about god claims should be low, as it seems much more likely that whatever it is in humans that encourages us to create false god claims accounts for specific god claim. Are you following?
So if we have established that, all things being equal, god stories that include the requirement that we accept something that, apart from divine intervention, would be impossible (or even highly improbable), then we should deem that even less likely. If miracles are a defining aspect of religious belief (which they are in most religions), then that belief is less likely than just a normally improbable god. If this seems counter-intuitive to you, it’s because we frequently don’t think correctly about probability in regards to multiple factors. See the conjunction fallacy
Things are miraculous because they have no scientific explanation, arent they? Its not the rarity its that its magic, a manifestation of gods will.
I would still consider it a miracle for someone to bring the dead back to life by touch even if it happened all day long. Or transforming water to wine or whatever.
We have many commonplace things we can’t understand that we don’t consider miracles. We don’t know why yawning is contagious, but I don’t think anyone considers that it’s miraculous. We don’t even know why gravity works in a universe where quantum mechanics explains everything else, but no one is saying gravity is a miracle, and it happens to everything everywhere, literally all the time.
I don’t think it’s fair to speculate on what you’d think was miraculous if it were commonplace. People generally tend to misestimate their own psychology in hypotheticals. What I do know is that in fact, the things people non-metaphorically call miracles, happen infrequently.
Sorry, the point about zero vs almost zero was a mistake by me. I considered those two to be the same. My intention was almost zero.
When you think of Zeus, you think of the god Zeus, not the God Zeus. Come across any Christian and they’ll distinct the separate properties of a god with the properties of a God, so it’s certainly not specialized to a particular community. A God is a necessary, uncaused being, whereas gods are contingent.
So consider this. There are four possibilities. 1. No God or gods exist, 2. God (the necessary Being) exists, 3. gods (the contingent beings) exist, or 4. God and gods exist. Regardless of how many interpretations of gods there are, only one of these is true, and the probability of one of these is not skewed by the large amount of people who have their own gods. The probability of miracles existing at the same time as a god is lower than just a god, but that doesn’t make gods any less likely, and quite commonly, if a God of one view is true, say, Christianity, then it’s a 100% chance that miracles exist, so in this scenario, the probability of miracles and God existing at the same time doesn’t change when you only consider God existing.
It looks like you may be committing a fallacy somewhat similar to the gambler’s fallacy.
“Zeus” is the proper name of the god Zeus. While “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” are two versions of the proper name for the Judeo-Christian god, “God” is also commonly used. I’m not going to argue about it, because it’s like arguing over whether the earth is round or flat. It’s not a subject of contention. You are mistaken on this point. Google it and you won’t get lots of disparate answers, you’ll get proper noun and common noun.
Nope, I won’t consider this in this thread. I specifically am not talking about “necessary” gods or “contingent” gods or other abstractions. If you want to talk about that, start your own topic, don’t hijack mine.
Or none.
Nope. we can reasonably assign values to our credence. Claims of gods existing aren’t independent events that we’re predicting, which is what the gamblers fallacy deals with, they are a category of events… data categorized, that help us decide between competing explanations. They are logically completely different. It’s no different than the fact that mass is attracted to mass every time we look (repeated events turned into categorized data) and we look at that data and try to find the best explanation. It’s how all empirical science works, as well as most of our daily lives.
The FSM is an entity consisting of attributes of our world. Composed of various food substances, on a ceramic plate and flying rapidly across the room. As such it is an imaginary confection.
A hypothetical entity is constructed using rational concepts for example the Noumenon. When we talk about the noumenon we are not imagining an entity, describing it, or defining it, other than stating what it isn’t.
That’s not what I said, rather it is inapplicable to hypothetical miraculous, or supernatural, entities. This is because it measures, or compares probabilities of empirical things in the world. Miraculous, or supernatural, entities don’t fit this manifold, because we can’t get an empirical purchase on them.
It’s a pointless exercise because measuring, defining etc such an entity is impossible, you would always fail to describe, or record it.
I haven’t defined God, all I did was look for what the majority of Gods talked about in the world have in common. That they are somehow outside of our world.
Yes, I’m not disputing that, but if you ask them, they will invariably say that their God is somehow outside of our world, miraculous, or supernatural.
God can be both entirely outside our world and intimately involved in it at the same time (according to these believers).
There’s a lot of baggage around what it means to say God exists. Such as all the religious dogma, and accounts of people saying God has spoken to them directly and that different regions around the world have their own versions of all this.
So I think we need to tease out the essence, or common denominator of what people mean when they say God exists.
I think we can boil God down to two attributes which can allow the argument to be developed.
1, God is the origin of us/our world.
2, God plays a role, or is involved somehow in our world.
Now if Foo was the origin of our world, and played a role in the world, then Foo would be a good candidate for being God.
But if Foo was a cute furry animal found in the world, then it wouldn’t.
Now I can’t say, if God were cute, furry, an animal and found in the world, that it would be Foo and not God. Because God by virtue of being the origin of our world is a precursor to our world and therefore can’t be found in the world. Although due to point 2, God could play a role with Foo in the world, but would not be Foo and not the origin of the world. Or in other words if God were an furry animal, God would also be the origin of the world aswell.
This is a common line of argument. There could be infinite other ineffable things out there, so why is focus in on this one, God. Well, this is because God, while being ineffable is also the origin of and deeply involved in our world. So one could say that God is the set of all ineffable things that are the origin and play an important role in the world.
We have to be able to conceive of something involved in the world, but at the same time ineffable. Because this is what most believers in Gods hold to be the case.
Either way, both things are hypothesized and the hypotheses can be evaluated methodically. There is still nothing metaphysically special about the act of hypothesizing something. They are still both entities that we don’t experience that are thought in our heads.
Holy special pleading Batman! If we can observe something, then we can get “empirical purchase” on it. Calling it a miraculous or supernatural before we consider if it is of divine origin, and then claiming it is immune from empirical analysis is just circular reasoning. It’s the most obvious sort of question begging I’ve seen.
That’s an abstract god, what I am explicitly not referring to. Such a god is, so far as we know, impotent, opaque, and meaningless to the world. I am explicitly concerned with gods that affect the world. Saying “my abstract god might effect the world in ways we don’t know about” doesn’t solve anything, it’s a rhetorical trick, and worse, I highly suspect is an intentional outright misrepresentation of what you believe about God (based on the fact that you previously mentioned revelation then dodged my challenging of it as an example of god affecting the world). If we know nothing, then the null hypothesis is in effect. It is assumed as false until we have some reason to believe it is true.
I don’t know if you believe this yourself or not, because it’s so patently inconsistent with what you’ve been saying.
The majority of gods perform miracles and affect the world. The majority of gods have wills that are supposedly knowable to some degree. Those are the only restriction I put on the use of the word in this argument. If common use is your standard, then apply it fully, and then you can’t keep introducing your non-miracle performing god that we can’t possibly know anything about.
I am unconcerned with where God resides, and it has no bearing on my argument. If God is known to people by the way God affects the world, then my argument stands. If God doesn’t affect the world in any way man is aware of, then it isn’t the god I am concerned with, nor one of the gods of the major current or historical religions. If you would prefer, we can skip the nonsense, and I can edit my OP to read that I am concerned with gods that are known by their affects on the world.