lol at the Little Buddha reference

But what's the percent chance that Jesus looked like Keanu Reeves? CONSPIRACY!!

This book also proves that 87% of statistics are just made up on the spot.

Actually it is 88%...you forgot to round up.

"The probability that God exists is 67%."

But there's only a 10% chance of that.

What's the chance of a boobies link appearing any time soon?

Old news

Hey, two outta three ain't bad.

I'd start with zero since there's no direct observation. Increase the odds with each detectance.

They start with a 50-50 chance. Those are damn good odds for something that has never ever been directly observed.

All of this "presence of good" and "presence of evil" factored in...Nothing quantifiable, of course.

I will say this. If indeed the known universe was begun by an extra-terrestrial with cognition and volition, IT would be nothing like the religious people claim it to be.
It either doesn't participate in our daily lives, or capriciously allows bad things (9-11, the holocaust, cancer) and good things (kittens and puppies, craft beer, orgasms) to exist.

Again, I'd start with zero and await direct observations.

In other news, there's a 100% chance that god exists in the minds of believers.

Give it up already. Religion is a matter of faith: proof of things without evidence. Quit trying to "prove" fantasy. If people want to believe in the superstitious that great, just keep it out of government and keep it to yourself, missionaries.

" Unwin begins with a 50 percent probability that God exists (because 5050 represents "maximum ignorance"

So anything is 50=50 now? There's a firebreathing dragon in my garage, but he's invisible and undetectable. That's 50% right there? Err, not the best method here.

Damn, I knew he got laid.

If people want to believe in the superstitious that great, just keep it out of government and keep it to yourself, missionaries.

Why isn't that sentence chiseled in stone and erected in public courthouses instead of the xtian big 10?

By this wackjob's rationale, I can make anything assumed of "maximum ignorance" now have a 67% probability.

So, just so you know, there a 67% chance that a magic genie will pop out of my ass and grant you three wishes. The odds are for you.

The only thing left for you to do is rub my magic lamp.

Awwwwwww yeah.

Oh my various gods! This can't be true.

HA!

This has been debunked countless of times already by REAL scientists. This man has made himself a total joke. Unless you're a christian, then it's all Totally True and Unrefutable and the Final Truth.

/the invisible man in the sky really exists
//and so do goblins, fairies, sasquatch, aliens, trolls, gnomes, unicorns.

There was some heavy bombing in Afghanistan a while back,
and it was said that bin Laden was dead, buried and burned
up in a cave bombed to oblivion. There is as far as I know,
no concrete proof that bin Laden is alive.

The question is, there are people that say he is alive,
they produce no evidence other than saying he is alive,
so is he alive, or not? If bin Laden doesn't want to show
himself, does that make him non-existant? Does that make
the people saying he's alive, liars, insane, or stupid?
Or does it mean that some know he's alive, and some don't?

Sorry, but 67% just isn't enough. Now, if it over 68.6% this might be worth looking into.

The possibility that Jesus died (and was resurrected) a virgin, would be proof to me of the non-existence of a God..
That would just be too cruel..

Does this mean that there is only a 67% chance that chemistry and physics will be reconciled mathematically?

I think it means that there is a 100% chance that any such thing defined and delimited to what is superstring theory shall explain and delimit which such things may define and delimit what constitute physics and chemistry theories and observations.

Yay for definitions!

The Planet of Plork

Funny.... The opposite has also been proved countless times.

Fact of the matter is, no one knows for sure, and each of us won't know until we die.

binnster [TotalFark]

"The probability that God exists is 67%."

But there's only a 10% chance of that.

Nice Naked Gun reference.

jpboaty

You make a great point up until someone realises (as I did) that NOBODY has EVER seen god. Yet we KNOW that Osama bin Laden HAS existed, even if he doesn't now, we've seen him in videos, many people have seen him in person.

The only people who ever saw god lived 3000 years ago and were probably fictional anyway. We heard about them long after they actually lived and the events which occured do not occur nowadays, hence it is reasonable to assume that these things never did occur. (why would god lose interst in his poeple when there are so many more of them now?)

wPiPeSw

The Planet of Plork

Funny.... The opposite has also been proved countless times.

No, the existence of god has never been proved, and probably never will be.

Fact of the matter is, no one knows for sure, and each of us won't know until we die.

Who says we'll know when we die? We could just as well remain ignorant. Or know nothing at all, for that matter.

Thats stupid, you can't use probability like that. Something after the fact either is or isn't, theres no percentage chance of it being one way and another percentace chance being another. Say you guess a coinflip before i toss it up, you have a %50 chance of being right. Now I flip it again and hide the result. If you make a random guess again you have a 50 percent chance of getting it right, but there isn't a 50 percent chance of it being heads or 50 percent chance of being tails: its 100 percent one or the other, but hidden from current knowledge.

But there's only a %10 chance I'm making sense.

What do you expect? It's Godmath, where pi=3 and 2=14 (Noah's Ark).

I think it's interesting, though, that the author apparently admitted his results were subjective. It's very rare that you encounter an author of a book of this type who is willing to admit that his subjective experience is anything other than god talking to him directly.

Oh yeah, you know Jesus was tapping that ass.
He was only human after all.

Moses could have been tripping on really strong acid.

Putting an unknown at 50% is reasonable. Here's why:

Consider an quantity for "confidence in a statement". If you know nothing about a statement, then that confidence is (obviously) 0. On the other hand, if you have full confidence , then we're 100% confident in it. So let's give that a value of 100.

However, suppose we have full confidence in the OPPOSITE of the statement. Well, then let's give that a 100 too, but in the opposite direction, let's call it -100.

Now we have a scale of confidence, from -100 to 100, with the middle being complete non-confidence, or in other words, a complete lack of knowledge of the validity of the statement.

From this point, it's merely a matter of transposition and scaling. To get a range from 0-100%, then it's obvious that the "lack of knowledge" point is at 50%.

lol, I'm not sure which is more hilarious, that someone actually wrote a BOOK on this crap or that a "science magazine" actually deemed it necessary to comment on it.

as a side note, the authors use of his "divine indicator scale" was something to behold. "Recognition of Goodness", "Existence of moral evil" ... wtf??

it seems God is not dead afterall, he just migrated to America

daveuf,

Well spotted.

Farker Soze: That just made my head hurt.

This has got me rethinking my concepts of probability. I always figured it was fair enough to base all things off 50-50 logic and go from there... based on the "anything can happen" philosophy. I don't understand the world well enough to completely eliminate the probabilty of anything happening, so I at least give things a shred of chance... :)

/goodnight... stupid headache

WastedYouth

The only people who ever saw god lived 3000 years ago and were probably fictional anyway. We heard about them long after they actually lived and the events which occured do not occur nowadays, hence it is reasonable to assume that these things never did occur. (why would god lose interst in his poeple when there are so many more of them now?)
---

So add 3000 years to now... in 5000 AD, what will they say
about bin Laden existing? Sure, lots of people say now
that he's alive... but what will they say in 5000AD? About
then, there's only going to be written up statements both
for and against him being alive... maybe some, by then,
unproven and questionably sourced videos. Were they
fraudulent videos? So for people off 3000 years from now,
which is right? Were the ones saying it liars, stupid or
insane? How can you tell if you're off 3000 years after
the fact?

With God, the claim is that he outlasts everyone, so who
ever is saying it at the time, they could be telling
the truth... and you 3000 years later, how can you know
that they weren't?

The fact is, you end up making a decision about it, you
weigh the stuff and decide for yourself... but that doesn't
mean you're automatically right if you don't have any
evidence showing a hoped for non-existance, any more than
someone can claim bin Laden is dead just because they
hope he is. There are many that claim b.L. is alive and
claim they have proof of it... but not sufficient proof
for many people. Some want to see him standing in front
of them, or a dead body to look at, for them to know
100% one way or the other... yet that didn't change
whether or not bin Laden was actually alive or not. Them
knowing it, knowing of it, or hoping for it, didn't change
it actually being true or not.

Likewise, God existing, is independent of you knowing it,
or not knowing it, hoping for it, or not hoping for it.
The guys back 3000 ago, they said God is there. It's up
to you to decide whether or not you think they were right.

The only people who ever saw god lived 3000 years ago and were probably fictional anyway.

Where is this "fictional" line drawn? Is Julius Caesar real? How about Cleopatra? Pontius Pilot (sp?)? There admittedly lots of evidence J. Caesar and Cleopatra existed, but not as much about JC, but there IS evidence. I would think the bible itself could be viewed as some corroboration.

2000 years ago actually isn't that long.

I liked the 'math' he employed to get there. Use a slightly complicated formula input totally objective bullshiat and you get out a number that looks to the casual observer like you haven't actually pulled it out of your ass.

He should refine that a bit. I want to know the exact chances for the number of different gods. Is a christian God more likely than a muslim or jewish one? What are the numbers for a catholic god vs protestant or orthodox? What is the likehood that the Raëlians and scientologist were right?

And most importantly what are the chances of Cthulhu existing?

We have to know those numbers to adjust Pascal's wager acordingly. Imagine betting on wrong God. Most of them are Jealous Gods and will punish you severly for guessing wrong.

Ps: According to my calculations there is a less than 75% chance that Santa Clause is real.

I would think the bible itself could be viewed as some corroboration.

That'd be great except for the fact that many parts of the old testament are just a collection of different religious/moral stories from all the other cultures that were in the Babylonian era.

While the philosophical idea of god existing is interesting, using such "holy" texts as fact just goes against the very idea of what facts are. They were written by primitive people attempting to explain the world around them which they understood very little of.

Not trying to start anything, just kinda working out some ideas after doing some research for a paper recently.

Wow! This thread is going to go infinity when the religious nuts on the west coast wake up.

I'll tell you one thing if he made us there's a 100 percent chance he sucks.

Remember Douglas Adams?

God is nothing without faith.

Proof of God's existence means that faith is no longer required.

God dissapears in a cloud of logic.

QED

Pseudointellectualicious.

My favorite part was the use of the arbitrary "Divine Indicator Scale".

"Sir, the possibility of a fully omnicient, omnipotent God existing are approximately 3,720 to 1!"

"Never tell me the odds!"

we won't find out when we die.

>Where is this "fictional" line drawn? Is Julius Caesar real? How about Cleopatra?

Its drawn when the main character starts doing miracles. Caesar also claimed a virgin birth, most nobles did. It was pretty common. So did many religious figures. Yet, are you willing take his claim as seriously as the Xtians do?

Obviously not. There are very good odds thats the historical Jesus existed. A carpenters son who became a rabbi, caused some trouble, and was killed. No need to insert magic, destiny, gods, etc into a bland story about a rouge rabbi.

You're using a very simple and dead stupid rhetorical trick. Its the classic "I've never been to China how do I know it exists?" ploy. Just because you're uncertain of something doesnt mean all uncertain things are true.

There is a 50/50 chance that I peed my pants in my sleep last night. I slept a long time and was smelly from a hard days work. So could I have peed my pants and maybe it dried? The smell of urine couldn't overpower my stink BO so it is hard to tell.
I may never know, but I would have to say the chances are about -3847% because I haven't peed the bed sober in 25+ years. I wasn't drunk. I peed before I went to bed. My girlfriend would have woken up and slapped me.

Sure, some of you are thinking that I should just look at my sheets. My sheets are the color of dried urine so I couldn't tell.

There is a 92% this post is at an end. Or is it? Maybe what you are seeing is only half of it. The other half is a virus eating away at your pr0n collection.

There's a 0% chance of there being any proof lying around that suggests that Jesus existed.

There's a 100% chance that the Buy-Bull "god" is merely a little imp.

Putting an unknown at 50% is reasonable

Please tell me I missed the satirical nature of that post.

Well this about sums it up...

"To those with faith, no proof is necessary. To those without faith, no proof is possible."

-St. Thomas Aquinas

The Planet of Plork, Skallas, JohnGaltDiscGolfer, Loki-L and others...

Read the article again with the knowledge that the author is a huge atheist.