Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply

Lets simplify things down a bit to two basic hypotheses:


 * H1: There is a god.
 * H0: There is no god.

From what I can piece together you are trying to say that these two hypotheses should be treated as fundamentally on equal footing because the absence of direct evidence does not disprove H1, and that because there is no observational evidence available we can not calculate relative probabilities of the hypotheses based on empirical observation. Therefore, these things are some how axiomatic in their own separate sets.

I pointed out that at best this approach can only be taken somewhat serious in a hardcore frequntist framework where calculating the probability of data given a hypothesis can not be used to calculate the relative probability of each of the hypotheses. In this framework an absence of evidence does not allow us to be a make claim about H1 or H0. But in a Bayesian framework it absolutely does. When we observe a universe that does not show any sign of what we would expect if there were a God then that makes the relative probability of H0 > than H1.

The only way out is to keep redefining God and the predictions of what a universe with a God would look like until you have made all possible observations of universe H1 equal to H0. So in other words there is a God but he has made the universe look and act exactly like a universe without a God. At that point I feel you have argued yourself into the oblivion of the gap.

However, you are making the more practical claim that some how specific religions that do make very specific claims about how God should effect the universe can not some how be addressed empirically. Anything that makes a claim about something observable can be analyzed empirically, and if no empirical observation can be made regarding a hypothesis then it is completely irrelevant.