the God mechanism

Ummm...and you know all this to be true, because....?????

Gotta agree with Frank. How did you come to this conclusion?

Hi existential:
How about this as an illumination. a primitive woman watches the sun rise: it is a natural question for her to ask. Wow. Who made that happen.
It is very difficult for anyone to believe in pointlessness. It is a sophisticated concept. We have hung on to the explanation of a divine deity or other piffle. I mean people can't predict what I want for my birthday, but can know for sure what god want us to do.
If religion was just a harmless delusional fantasy for the primitive to share it would cause no harm. But it is not.
Clearly it is a scam intended to persecute women. Witch trials. Mormons top heaven doesnt let women in: how anyone can think of a bunch of woman haters talking sports for eternity is paradise is beyond me. You notice all religious movement tend to hate women? anti choice. If blokes had to carry a millstone for nine months because because they made a mistake they might feel different.
Women had to agree to obey men: the men didnt have to reciprocate.

Back to the philosophy: there are too many vested interests involved in defending the status quo. Heres to Salome, the only person in the bible who could dance.

For a 160 IQ, Fount, you are very careless--both in your arguments and in your gammar! Your last post is filled with inaccuracies...and with lots of grammatical errors.

One, simply because nobody has been able to make any sense of a description of any gods…is not proof that gods do not exist. If every comment made by every religion that has ever existed on this planet were proved beyond a doubt to be false or an invention of a human mind…that would not prove anything about whether or not a GOD or gods exists or exist!

I’ve pointed that out to you before"but you keep making that same argument which is illogical (both the argument and the repeated attempts to sell it.)

You wrote:

Surely someone with a 160 IQ would know enough to use the conditional subjective mood for the to-be verb here!




Hinduism doesn’t. The Baha’I faith doesn’t.




You wrote:



King David danced; a very famous dance!

My argument is that it is much easier to invent a cause that to accept the absence of one.
It is actually very difficult to prove the existence of anything, for example, ghosts and UFOs. My argument is again Occams razor, the principle that the most simple explanation is the best.
My explanation of the world doesnt involve an invisible all powerful thingy that somehow we are told wants us to worship him. Religions tend to be AD hoc meaning they are made up as they go along. Altho it quite plainly say that certain people should be put to death. Gay men, women who wear two colours, etc. This gets forgotten. AS god is all powerful things can be added and taken away at will. He no longer throws lighting bolts at people, since Ben Franklin uncovered the science.
I accept your point on hinduism, possibly, on the grounds I don't know it enough. I would say that I can't see anywhere where holding a religion has helped women. Certainly since the birth of Mary.
Local dialect: in Yorkshire people transpose was and were. I accept the correction:

Fount, thanks for your response. I'm enjoying the discussion even if I occasionally get testy or petty.

And don’t get me wrong…I understand where you are coming from. Fact is, we are on the same side! But there are times when arguments are being made by someone “on your side” that make you wish they were arguing the other side of the issue.

The post that I responded to is one of those.

Just a few comments about your last post:

You wrote:




I have written a half dozen essays trashing Occam’s Razor. It is a pathetic philosophical stance.

Apply Occam’s Razor to explaining the sun vis a vis any location on the Earth…and you will end up with “the best” answer being: The Sun goes around the Earth! Apply it to the Earth itself at almost any spot (other than mountain tops)…and “the best” answer becomes “The Earth is pancake flat.” Apply it to celestial mechanics (the sun, moon, planets, stars)…and “the best” answer becomes: The Earth is a pancake flat object smack dab in the center of the known universe--and the rest of the universe circles it.

Occam’s Razor sucks.



Let me repeat what I said earlier, because apparently you didn’t understand it…or chose to ignore it for some reason.

Simply because nobody has been able to make any sense of a description of any gods…is not proof that gods do not exist. If every comment made by every religion that has ever existed on this planet were proved beyond a doubt to be false or an invention of a human mind…that would not prove anything about whether or not a GOD or gods exists or exist!

I’ve pointed that out to you before"but you keep making that same argument which is illogical (both the argument and the repeated attempts to sell it.)

Forget about all that crap, Fount. There may be a god…and the god may have created the heavens and the Earth…and the god may not give a **** about what we do or do not do or about us in any way!

None of the garbage contained in the Bible or other so-called holy books is even indicitive that gods do not exist.



Hindus and Baha’i both argueably have a sense of equality of genders…and even if not, neither goes to the extremes of other religions in trivializing women. I offered these religions in rebuttal of your point that all religions hate women. (The god of Abraham…and all the religions derived from that god…certainly treat women like ****! That I agree with!)

Try to be as careful as possible with your arguments, Fount. If you get careless you open them up to all sorts of attack for no good reason.

The idea of God the indifferent is argued in Sirens of Titan. I am trying to stick to the post which is to argue a possible reason how god came to be.
I did not read your post carefully enough first time round, it is deeper than it first looks.
I would always use Occams razor only if two correct theories were proposed. The sun obviously doesnt go around the Earth, you get retrograde motions. The Earth is not flat: watch a ship leave harbour: the mast will disappear first the hull last.: paraphrasing Archimedes I believe: the radius of the Earth was calculated around 200 B.C. People still believed it was flat. Shows how difficult proof is.
I'm sure you are familiar with arguments regarding proof, and how problematic this can be.
Given the choice between an ad hoc argument and one based on Occams razor I'd choose the latter. On probability it would more likely to be true than in terms of absoluteness.
The problem I have with an agnostic position, is that skepticism is a position that can be argued for most cases. It is the position a scientist should take as a default.
I am not a believer in deconstructing an argument: if you assume that there are many more incorrect than correct answers then it is always easy to quibble. I generally argue holistically: I accept that at times this is imprecise: espescially as I strive to be thought provoking too.
My problem with religious arguments is what I call the stuff theory. Scientists have produced more stuff than the religionists. If this computer breaks down: I will call for an engineer not a priest.
Nietsche had no evidence for any of his theories: he was more of a dreamer than a philosopher. Seeing as we are speculating on his idle dream, I think we should make our answers more poetic.

Your objection, Frank, is not to "Occam's Razor," it is to the **** people peddle and claim is the Razor. The core of the message is: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem--"causes are not to be multiplied beyond necessity." In fact, a helio-centric cosmology owes its existence to the application of this principle, because positing the sun at the center of a system around which the earth and the other planets revolve involves the fewest number of causes to explain the apparent motion of the planets as viewed from the earth. The word planet comes from the Greek word for wanderer, and this is because they appeared to be "stars" which wandered around the "celestial sphere." When the motion of the planets and the Earth is referred to a solar centric system, all of the mystery disappears, and the fewest causes (in this case, only one cause) can be assigned to explain the apparent "behavior" of celestial bodies.

The principle known as Occam's Razor (which wasn't new when William of Occam articulated it) is hardly to be blamed for idiots who use it in ignorance.

Setanta is right in principle, however his lack of historical knowledge prevents him from being accurate.
Occam's Razor is basically the scientific tie-breaker. Basically there are some arguments which have their own internal logic, and which fit the facts, so on the face of it would appear true.
One case of these is ad hoc arguments: e.g. Answer god wills it this way. This can be used for any argument, even to argue logical contradictions.
Ptolemaic astrology explained the universe in terms of circles and cycles. However it didn't fit the universe. Every time his predictions were wrong he just added a few more circles and cycles.
Kepler and Copernicus (much later---say a millenia) argued in favour or a new explanation. The Ptolemaics argued in favour of more circles and cycles.
Keplers system involved elliptical orbits in a heliocenctric system. Sadly he fiddled his results which didnt help his cause.
The argument was seeing as there were two explanations, lets pick the simplest case. In practice Occams razor is partly political: Astrology had been around several 1000 years, and its followers weren't going to go away.
They would be arguing for more circles and cycles to this day. Occam's razor helped us all move on. Until the Russians and Sputnik anyway finally gave the last rites to Ptolemy.
It can be argued that god wills it for any proposition: its why Creationists, despite being proved wrong repeatedly, continue to exist.
Darwin was preferred by Occam's razor as it at least that way the religionists could be side stepped. Logic wasn't going to beat them.
Back to the topic: I am often amazed by watching the sun rise and moved to give thanks for each new day. But thanks to who exactly?
In the end the world is a wonderful place with or without god.
As for Nietsche's primitive, evolution saw him off. Scientists have better guns. I'm on their side. Praise the lord but pass the ammunition.