There is no evidence for God

Oh dear! You don't look far for rebuttals, do you? They are obvious.

Swinburne is the chap that invented two principles:

The principle of credulity: without any reason to disbelieve, one should accept what appears to be true.

The principle of testimony: without any any reason to disbelieve, one should accept eyewitnesses or believers are telling the truth.

These are nonsense, of course. If I saw someone apparently walking on water or making an elephant disappear I would first consider that he is an accomplished magician and using deception to create the illusion. I don't expect I'd be wrong.

If someone came to me and told me they had seen someone rise from the dead I would immediately look into their motivation for the lie and also seek evidence to support or refute them.

I think the wonders of modern TV demonstrate to everyone that his principles are just plain silly.

Plantinga believed in intelligent design. Enough said.

I know nothing of Alston but he'd better have something rather better to offer than the other two. I suspect he doesn't.

Regardless of what you think of those arguments, those are not the only arguments, his case for God is a cumulative case. Plantinga has also made significant contributions to philosophy such as the free will defence and riviving the ontological argument. The names I listed as well as others are very strong theists, not to say ther aren't strong opponents though but each recognising the others significance

The ontological argument has no credibility. It has been exploded, probably in this very thread, countless times on TSR.

When you say the case is cumulative, I presume you mean they have made many wrong-headed philosophical and pseudo-scientific arguments, all of which have been destroyed by people of sense, bu that they keep being trotted out in case they come across someone who can be fooled.

As God's supposed to exist outside of reality nobody can really make any definitive statements for or against him/her/it, given that there's no hypothesis one could form that you could then run a definitive experiment for. So you can't really get any "evidence" for or against him either way. Making statements about God as though they're factual is stupid.



Didn't Plantinga do that ontological argument where in infinite possible worlds you'd have a (to paraphrase) "most great being" in one of them while ignoring the fact that in infinite worlds you're never going to a reach a maximum because it's infinite?

Something like that...

It is taken seriously by philosophers, even if it's false. And that is a chareceture of these philosophers, even if you don't agree with them you should at least recognise their significance as swinburne, alston, plantinga, Adams etc are among the best philosophers of religion of the last century, even including atheist philosophers.

Anyone who takes seriously a point of view that is so obviously wrong deserves no credit for those views. If they are the best then the humdrum must be a poor lot, so none of them encourage me to think philosophy deserves the kudos it attracts among its participants.

The proposals we have mentioned are just examples of shoddy thinking. That philosophers take those theories seriously says more about the philosophers that do so than it does about the existence of gods.

To define God outside of reality is to beg the question against God as it entails his non- existence lol. Outside of physical reality yes, but that doesn't mean that evidence can't be given for and against, eg problem of evil, cosmological argument etc

I wouldn't call those evidence, most are more hypotheses, really.

Okay so the whole of philosophy of religion composed of highly reputable professional philosophers both theists and atheists at elite universities is all just undermined by TSR posters?

That is not what I said. The arguments mentioned have been exploded EVEN here. Obviously other philosophers have destroyed them too.

Are you defending the ontological argument, Swinburne's principles and intelligent design? Are do you accept they are somewhat silly and easily argued against?

The Atheist Delusion movie...

... is sensibly reviewed here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/07/30/a-review-of-ray-comforts-the-atheist-delusion-yep-i-watched-the-whole-thing/

Why do believers come up with such tosh? Surely they know that these kinds of attempts to persuade people are doomed to fail and obviously flawed from the outset? If they don't they are even more foolish than they appear.

watch it for yourself m8, and then give me your own review...

The Atheist Delusion movie...