A Fun Intellectual Exercise: Battleground God

The metaphysical engineers are happy to report that, to the best of their knowledge, the God you conceive is internally consistent and could exist in our universe. But they are less sure that what you have described deserves the name of God. She is not, for example, all-powerful. A God which knows everything or is totally benign may be a wonderful ideal, but is she really a God unless she has ultimate power?

We suspect that your God is not the traditional God of the Christian, Jewish or Muslim faiths.

create a deity is cooler.

The "philosophers" on this site seem to have a problem with man having a free will and God being willing to allow mankind to use that free will. They also seem to ignore Jesus, the specific Christian deity, and cling to a vague small g god.

Interesting. I took one direct hit and one bullet, resulting in the analysis that my beliefs about God "are well thought out and almost entirely internally consistent."

The bullet had to do with this question:

True of False: Evolutionary theory maybe false in some matters of detail, but it is essentially true.

This is a common error of ambiguity, because people on both sides use evolution to confuse very different things: the standard cosmology, autogenesis as an origin of life, and darwinian biology. Which one is this question referring to? Or is it referring to all three? I think they need to realize that this question is poorly worded for real communication:

"....One reason is that as noted earlier ... most popular creationists use the term evolution ambiguously-sometimes to refer to the cosmic evolutionary worldview (or model) and sometimes to refer to the Darwinian biological theory. Although a coherent position can be extracted from some of the major creationists (such as Morris, Gish, Wysong and Kofahl), this ambiguity has rendered some parts of their writings monumentally unclear. One has to read extremely carefully in order to see which evolution is being referred to, and some critics of creationism either have simply not noticed the ambiguity or perhaps have misjudged which meaning specific creationists have had in mind in specific passages." (—source)

The game results state "Of course, many creationists claim that the evidential case for evolution is by no means conclusive. But in doing so, they go against scientific orthodoxy."

Again, I wonder what they mean by evolution, and what they think I mean by evolution. There are are at least nine different possible combinations of answers to those two questions, meaning the probability that we understand each other is pretty low. Until you get past that, it is impossible for me to give meaningful answers, or for them to diagnose my logical consistency on that point.

On to my "direct hit":

Earlier you agreed that it is rational to believe that the Loch Ness monster does not exist if there is an absence of strong evidence or argument that it does. No strong evidence or argument was required to show that the monster does not exist - absence of evidence or argument was enough. But now you claim that the atheist needs to be able to provide strong arguments or evidence if their belief in the non-existence of God is to be rational rather than a matter of faith.

The contradiction is that on the first ocassion (Loch Ness monster) you agreed that the absence of evidence or argument is enough to rationally justify belief in the non-existence of the Loch Ness monster, but on this occasion (God), you do not.

It is actually they who are being logically inconsistent here, by begging the question. Their reasoning ignores the obvious possibility of cases where the preponderance of evidence in favor of existence is strong enough to warrant placing a burden of proof on those claiming the negative.

To put it another way, their logic is prejudiced in assuming that there is no more evidence in favor of God's existence than there is evidence in favor of the Loch Ness monster.

So for example, it is rational to believe that no silver exists in Russia "if there is an absence of strong evidence or argument that it does." But it is also rational to believe that someone claiming there is no silver in Russia needs to be able to "provide strong arguments or evidence" if their belief in the non-existence of silver in Russia is to be "rational, rather than a matter of faith." Why? Because even for one who has never seen Russia, there is strong evidence and argument that silver exists in Russia.

You cannot claim a logical contradiction with that unless you admit the assumption that there is no silver in Russia, which itself a logical error (begging the question).

My brain hurts. Haha.

I agree, Create a Deity is cooler.

This was a very interesting exercise :)

The game its self is epistemologically inconsistent. The game, like so many people in today's society, does not take into account that knowledge is contextual; and holds our lack of omniscience and our fallibility as a hole in the concept of certainty when in fact, these aspects are exactly what allows us be certain of something, within a context.

It is an interesting exercise.

No comments from the ' metaphysical engineers', just an acknowledgement that my views were consistent.