Thanks. That is wonderful.

A goat would be more convenient though… perhaps I could donate the cost difference to World Vision.

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God? …

Make one altar. Cut up lots of wood and one bull. Make it a perfect bull, please. Pile on altar. Add lots of water so as to make the bull and wood impossible to light.

Call on Richard Dawkins to set fire to it.

When his lighter blows out, call on God.

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Sire, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.

“Your Majesty, I had no need for this hypothesis”

As for prophecies and revelations, the problem lies not in their detectability but in the fact that they actually can be investigated and either disproved or explained by rational inquiry. It’s no accident that all the miracles happened so long ago.

Which takes us back to Laplace…

I don’t quite follow this. Why are predictability, repeatability, or universality requirements for being detectable? It seems that when we consider radioactive decay you can have events that are not repeatable, not predictable, not universal, yet are still detectable. We have a good understanding of the process based upon the statistics from many random events, but no individual event meets your proposed requirements.

“why not just go all the way …”

Because then they would be out of a job?

Good about not claiming to know god’s plan but then why not just go all the way and admit to knowing nothing at all and thus not talk about it any more?

Abraham Joshua Heschel (one of my heroes due to his involvement with the civil rights movement) wrote extensively on the nature of prophecy and revelation. For a believer, it is fairly easy to argue that the detectable signal/effect is that transmission of a message. This signal, however, would be immune to scientific investigation primarily because it is neither predictable nor repeatable. As such the most likely scientific explanation would be one of experimental error (or mental illness, take your pick).

“But then again we cannot know God’s plan. Unless we’re theologians, obviously.”

It seems many (most?) theologians don’t claim to know God’s plan either. I’m reminded of the book of Job which effectively says that you can’t possibly know what God’s plan is. More importantly from a theological standpoint is that the book of Job provides a counter argument to Deuteronomy.

Given how powerful God is he can easily commute to the universe and cause events at a level of subtlety that is below science’s ability to detect.

Like, you know, turning people into pillars of salt.

Quite why a perfect being would need to intervene in their own creation in that way I don’t know. But then again we cannot know God’s plan. Unless we’re theologians, obviously.

Well, yes and no. Some agnostics say that, and I think you’re right that it leads them to some wholly untenable epistemic positions. But other agnostics simply say that it’s impossible to prove the non-existence of God – to which every atheists says, “So what? I never claimed that it was!”

These agnostics – who contrast their agnosticism with a straw man version of atheism held by no actual atheist of my acquaintance – are the people I think IanB is perpetually annoyed with. Me too, come to think of it: I found the “I’m not touching you” analogy particularly apt and funny.

I think agnosticism is philosophically indefensible. Agnostics claim that if god exists then we can’t know that he exist, and if he doesn’t exist then we can’t know that either.

But if god doesn’t exist then there are plenty of people who know it: everyone who is an atheist due to the lack of evidence for god. If you wanted to deny that you would have to advocate an absurd epistemic theory.

So the proposition “god exists” is a logical consequence of agnosticism. Therefore any argument sufficient to justify agnosticism would also be sufficient to justify belief in god. But if such an argument exists then it is possible to know that god exists.

So agnostics who want to avoid absurd epistemic theories would have to claim that god exists, that it is not possible to know that god exists, and that it is not possible to provide a rational justification for this position.

In my experience, when agnostics stick their heads up, it is always to defend a theists right to have their ‘god’.

Either way it is maddening. I can understand someone being agnostic when asked which fast-food joint makes the best french fries, but on the hypothesis that there is a supernatural being living in and out of the natural world? Nonsense.

In the end, agnostics end up making philosophical room for individuals to assert what they please. That’s not an idea, that’s appeasement.

I am not really sure what you’re saying, but it seems to me that the agnostic position is the exact opposite – “you can’t prove either proposition so it’s irrational to believe either of them.”