as i post this i realize it stinks of a mysterious answer along the lines of lord kelvin. To clarify, i do not glory in this, i don't even like it. But if I am to stay dedicated to rationalism, I must look for ways to disprove my postition and it so far has informed me that to do battle with an almighty creator or the delusions of him, we must first find solid ground to work from, and we have yet to find it. I also recognize that the flying spaghetti monster argument is used to make the exact opposite statement of what i used it for, but thats what makes it good. Its not just a satire, its an observation of what things would look like in the presences of an all powerful god.
an atheist argument in support of an almighty god.
this is not meant to be a straw argument but rather a (hopefully) rational aspect on the futility of disproving religion and god.
To set out what i currently think i understand about Eliezer's argument, He conceives as god as the programmer. our reality is akin to the matrix and God is they guy who has total control. He can rewind his scenario, review it as a whole, and can basically do anything he wills. With this definition in mind, Eliezer takes roughly two or three methods of disapproval.
1) disappro...
Again, please help me and let me know if I am wrong, badly wrong, or very badly wrong but a little right, but Eliezer's argument seems to suffer from a couple basic flaws, the use of replacing emergence with magic being the first. It certainly serves its point to draw the parallel's between the current use of emergence and magic, but i could just as easily say, A: The car moves because of (combustion being directed into useful kinetic energy that causes parts to move and the car to run) B: the car moves because of magic as you noted, magic fails to expla...
You will have to forgive me, as i am over three years late to get here since inception, and about six months late since the last comment, but surely rationality waits for all. I seek the help of rationalists more advanced then me because something still seems very flawed with the argument when I account for my previous understanding of emergence. As I understood it, emergence most recently came about when psychology hit a serious recursive (is that the right word?) question, that is namely "where is consciousness located in the mind?". To fram...
good point, let me go back and refine, the model that I perceive Eliezer talking about. I think you are the one confused but only because i was confusing. my original point was that spending time working on proving or disproving a religion is a waste of time because of what I pointed out above, either we have a regular and consistent universe to discover or we are having the wool pulled over our eyes at every turn and which ever way it is, it's meaningless to worry about it until we find any sort of solid evidence in either direction. I wasn't even refe... (read more)