Obviously you chose not to read what I said, so I'll post it again:
All that demonstrates is cases where it works both ways. Functionally a memory is a sincere belief, since, in the shirt instance, a memory does not constitute empirical evidence, and is thus a belief (by definition, a belief is something held to be true without evidence). So, in the worked example we can use the term "remember" and "sincerely believe" interchangeably.
You keep attempting to draw in examples from outside the framework of the worked example. Unsuccessfully. Please focus on the topic at hand.
Now.
But memory, as you know, and amply demonstrate yourself, is subject to confirmation bias. See the classic "pictures of horses" example. And as we have just discussed, within the confines of the worked example, sincere belief and memory are functionally the same.
So by agreeing that the shirt exists, you are still saying that non empirical methods are sufficient to establish that something exists, even when there is no physical evidence.
How are you getting on with you homework? I'm now almost certain that you cannot actually devise a response.
theological noncognitivists start with an unproven assertion ""God" does not refer to anything that exists."
. Once they prove their assertion, they can sit at the adults table.
Now it's your turn
How are you progressing with your homework? I'm starting to suspect you can't prove your central argument.
All that demonstrates is cases where it works both ways. Functionally a memory is a sincere belief, since, in the shirt instance, a memory does not constitute empirical evidence, and is thus a belief (by definition, a belief is something held to be true without evidence). So, in the worked example we can use the term "remember" and "sincerely believe" interchangeably.
How are you getting on with your homework? Nearly ready?
So - you DID read what I said on this subject. Guess you made a mistake.
You failed. You didn't read the arguments on the atheist page. For example, you didn't address the ontological arguments. At least make an attempt to lie convincingly.
We did address the ontological arguments. You silently ignored it and edited it out of you reply - twice. Guess your memory is wrong.
Still waiting for you to do your homework, by the way. Will you make it by the due date?
Yes, it's true. I did show what I set out to show. That saying: "I remember the shirt existing" is a subset of "I sincerely believe the shirt exists" - and therefore a proof by memory can be considered a proof by sincere belief.
Please don't so openly demonstrate your ignorance by equating a linear equation with the default proposition that there's no god.
There is no default proposition of the kind - don't you remember the 3 year old and the TV?
I ask again: How many deities do atheists propose exist?
Besides, you yourself admit that you dont' believe in a Zokooloo. So what gives?
What I believe is irrelevant. You believe the Zokooloo is analagous to a deity. Which means the shirt must also be analogous.
"Yet you believe the shirt exists even though it is also unproven by experiment."
As I said (for the umpteenth time), there are many experiments to prove that the shirt existed.
What are these experiments? Describe them in detail.
"Your evidence so far has been that it is okay to believe stuff and people who don't believe the things you do are insane. Any other evidence you would like to put forward?"
My evidence is that since there's no physical evidence for god and since no experiment can ever be devised to prove/disprove it, it's by definition a pure thought experiment.
"Ah. so you aren't retracting your earlier postulation - sincere belief suffices where physical evidence is unavailable. Gotcha."
I'm not sure we're speaking the same language here. You see, I speak English where memory is not the same as belief.
Not sure about England, but in the brains of the rest of the world, a memory (a recollection of past events) is nothing other than a sincere belief that the remembered sequence of events is what transpired. Memory (recollection) is subject to confirmation bias, just as heuristically derived belief is. This has been demonstrate many times experimentally. In the absence of the empirical method (and we can't go back in time to observe the sequence again), memory is non-empirical.
Either you're speaking another language, or you're drunk. I'm not sure whether you're old enough to drink or not, but please learn in the future going forward to make sure you use your words correctly.
Thanks for the advice!
"Precisely how does the psychologist determine the veracity of the proposition that Life is Suffering?"
Belief != Memory. This is getting tiresome.
I guess swimming against the big ole tide of scientific and philosophical opinion on the subject would tend to make one tired.
>
"That's what we are doing here. What did you think we are doing?"
I leave it as an exercise to you to go through the page, isolate the arguments we HAVEN'T addressed yet, and get back to me on those. Otherwise, in the absence of that, you agree with me that atheism is the only valid system of thought in today's world.
I looked - didn't see anything I disagreed with that we haven't already debunked. I've no issues with atheism as it goes - people are free to believe whatever they want, including atheism.
It's people who say that atheism is NOT belief that I have a problem with.
Your aren't very good at insults are you? Interesting that you seem to perceive yourself as better than people who believe a particular proposition, even though your own state of mind is a mish mash of contradictory theories and cognitive dissonance.
And, you lost it all.
The teapot - lost. The original state theorem - lost. Occam's Razor - lost. Extraordinary Evidence - lost. Subjective/Objective evidentiary basis and bias - Lost. Zokooloo/FSM/Zeus/IPU - dead. Agnostics are atheists - lost.
Every favoured strawman and fallacy in the atheists bag - you lost every one. Tried insults. Failed. Claimed your opponent was insane - the same criteria proved you were insane.
I guess you can try speculative insults, making jibes at the worlds billions of theists and agnostics. But that is all subjective. We have objective evidence of how much a loser you are.
Again, epistemologically speaking, belief and recall are the same thing.
The difference is merely an abstraction - how we percieve that we came by a particular element of knowledge.
SO artists will recall seeing horse run, and draw them in a particular manner. They also believe that horses run in a particular way. OR I recall having a shirt (in the abstract). I tell my colleague "I had a blue shirt". He stores that proposition in his memory. He, literally BELIEVES I own a blue shirt: and so do I. It's the same information.
SO if you would like to contradict mainline thinking on the relationship between the abstract ways we treat our memories and the relative reliablility of those mechanisms - go ahead. However, I'm going to need you to cite some authorities on the subject, and explain you epistemology in detail.
And complaining to teacher won't help. Do your homework, or fail class. And I ask again: are you claiming to be insane? You have previously said that the shirt exists..
Mmm. You've failed to even begin addressing the question. So I'll pose it again.
Now elaborate (in detail) on the necessary circumstances in which sincere belief will or will not suffice to prove something non empirical. And show working.
So to be clear - you are now retracting your earlier proposition that "physical memory" will suffice as proof in instances where no empirical evidence is available?
Isn't your view on this something you should have settled before engaging in a week long discussion about it?
Sure it does. There are receipts, credit card charges, the memory of clerks who sold it to you (even if it's too weak to recall), fibers of the shirt in your house, the memory of those who have seen you wear it, CCTV cameras and a whole bunch of other stuff. Everything physical leaves a trail all over the place if you really want to find the evidence.
Not in this case. It's an old shirt, and as I said, there is no trace of it - I meant that literally. In any case, from YOUR perspective, none of this physical evidence is available, since you have no idea where I live, and no access to my records.
Does the shirt exist?
A strong memory can even be sufficient if insanity is ruled out.
Ah. so you aren't retracting your earlier postulation - sincere belief suffices where physical evidence is unavailable. Gotcha.
And what does god have going for it? Zip. Zilch. Nada. And so you can compare them...how exactly?
The shirt is analogous to a deity in this example. You therefore need to demonstrate why a Zokooloo would by analogous, whereas the shirt is not. Carry on.
"You've already said that (in the shirt example) in the absence of empirical evidence other non-empirical evidence will suffice to make belief in the shirt reasonable."
No, I said a MEMORY of the shirt CAN be reasonable if it's a true memory. And contrary to what you think, there are way to distinguish between a false memory and a true one. Psychologists do it all the time.
Is my memory of the shirt true or false?
And tell us more about this method employed by psychologists to examine the veracity of a concept. Let's say a Buddhist goes to see a psychologist. Precisely how does the psychologist determine the veracity of the proposition that Life is Suffering?
Please respond to the arguments made here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism [wikipedia.org]. Otherwise they will be considered proven. I will hold you to counter EACH AND EVERY point.
That's what we are doing here. What did you think we are doing?
And just so you don't forget: Respond to the counterarguments made (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot), or they will be considered proven.
This is what happens when you don't read everything assigned to you. Refer to my previous post on how a false sincere believe can also be caused due to insanity.
This would be the post you wrote *a day after* the one I was replying in which you indicate (a) 6 billion people are insane, on account of their opinion being different to yours and (b) you are, yourself, insane.
I was being charitable to you by not taking that route, but you seem to want to rub your face in it - well, your choice.
Go for it fella. Threats work *so* well to convince everyone that yours is the rational side.
No, you didn't. Zero as a number is equivalent to atheism...how exactly?
Did you even think before composing this reply?
How many deities to atheists propose exist? Careful! I know you find maths pretty tricky.
Citation please. These lapses of memory are really bogging you down here.
You said before you don't accept citations as evidence. Whose memory is failing who?
While there's nothing extraordinary about the behavior of greenhouse gases, the amount of evidence proving the scale of it is extraordinary.
You are missing the point. Again. Please concentrate!
"So to be clear, if one party doesn't reply to a point made by the other, that point can be considered true?"
At least have the grace to say "Yeah, that was a stupid example". Since YOU brought it up, I assumed you would have followed it. I never started spouting mystical wisdom about extrasolar planets. Don't start something you can't finish. The fact that we found star wobbles is good evidence. If we didn't find them, that would have been a blow to the extrasolar planet theory. Occam's razor at work again.
None of what you just said has anything to do with what you were replying to:
So to be clear, if one party doesn't reply to a point made by the other, that point can be considered true?
Just looking for confirmation.
With respect to the extra solar planets example: in fact we went looking for star wobbles because we wanted to find extra solar planets. And we wanted to find extra solar planets, because the question of their existence is interesting.
Are you saying that the question of the existence of a deity (or deities) is not interesting to us?
Feel free to try again.
What experiments have been proposed to validate the existence of a deity? None. Hence it fails the Occam's razor test.
Yet you believe the shirt exists even though it is also unproven by experiment. You also say that sincere belief suffices where there is no physical evidence. Whaddya know. I guess you believe some things exist and other things do not - regardless of the lack of empirical evidence in either case.
"None of your remarks in support of Zokooloos being analogous to a deity have panned out."
A la contraire, YOU haven't shown how god is not a thought experiment since there's not a shred of physical evidence for it. My burden of evidence has already been met. If you don't think so, you have to show HOW it has not been met. Neither of which you have done. So my point has already been proved. Waiting for your attempted rebuttal.
Your evidence so far has been that it is okay to believe stuff and people who don't believe the things you do are insane. Any other evidence you would like to put forward?
A physical memory? So (according to you) in the absence of any empirical evidence, a sincere belief will suffice as evidence for the existence of something?
Not necessarily. The other possibility is that you're insane. Let me know if that explanation suits you.
You do make me laugh sometimes.
Now elaborate (in detail) on the necessary circumstances in which sincere belief will or will not suffice to prove something non empirical. And show working.
"That is *exactly* what people do."
Then they are insane.
Well, that's a tragedy. Wait - you said that the shirt exists! Does that not mean that you are insane? What a quandary!
"Your homework"
Just admit that you can't understand your own references and can't place them here in your own words. It's a lot more honest than hiding behind a link.
Note how you still fudge the issue and run away from addressing precisely how you believe that a Zokooloo is not like god. You're damning yourself with every successive post.
I've just shown you how a shirt that can affect the physical world is different from a thought experiment like the Zokooloo. Please refer to the previous points.
And as we discussed there, there is no trace of the shirt. It does not affect the physical world as we observe it. And then you said that a memory (belief) concerning the shirt will suffice. I remember that.
"You've applied a fallacious mechanism by assuming that a deity can only exist if we need it to explain some observable phenomena."
Refer to Occam's razor.
Per previous remarks (which you didn't respond to) Occams razor is not a proof mechanism, for the reasons outlined before.
If not, you're assuming that a Zokooloo can exist even though there's no observable phenomena to indicate it. God == Zokooloo.
You've already said that (in the shirt example) in the absence of empirical evidence other non-empirical evidence will suffice to make belief in the shirt reasonable.
As for the other counterarguments, I'm afraid I have to repeat what I said earlier - if you have a point to make, make it here. You won't see me asking you to go read a book and then respond to every statement made there. Take the trouble to make your point here and I will do the same. Otherwise you're just being lazy. Sorry, you don't get off that easily.
You aren't going to read books?
got a problem with book learnin'? Them fancy professors don't know what they doin'?
Respond to the counterarguments made (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot), or they will be considered proven.
1. You cannot compare a shirt which is a physical object and one for which you can have memories to a deity. So while Occam's razor correctly predicts there's no god, it does not do the same for a shirt.
But as I said "there was no sign of it". The existence of the shirt cannot be empirically proven. Anyway, didn't you just say that it is entirely reasonable to assume something exists based on sincere belief?
2. In the math example, there is no precept that unknown values default to zero. Zero is no more nor no less special than any other real number.
That is what I just said.
Hence you've disproven your own assertion: when dealing with an unknown value (y=the number of deities) it is not reasonable to assume zero (atheism).
3. As far as climate change is concerned, I'm pretty sure the evidence is quite voluminous and falls well into the category of "extraordinary"
That is not the point. The point is the "extraordinary" is a subjective measure and can be defined by either side. In the case of AGW, ordinary evidence suffices. There is, in fact, nothing extraordinary about the behaviour of greenhouse gases.
Also recall that I debunked your other incorrect usages of Occam's razor like your extrasolar planets example.
So to be clear, if one party doesn't reply to a point made by the other, that point can be considered true?
Just looking for confirmation.
With respect to the extra solar planets example: in fact we went looking for star wobbles because we wanted to find extra solar planets. And we wanted to find extra solar planets, because the question of their existence is interesting.
Are you saying that the question of the existence of a deity (or deities) is not interesting to us?
I hope this aspect of the debate has ended at least now.
Now that I've shown you how your usage of Occam's razor was incorrect (amongst other things), you still haven't told me how god is different from a Zokooloo.
On the contrary. None of your remarks in support of Zokooloos being analogous to a deity have panned out. Try working through the counterarguments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot - once you've done that, then you can work through mine.
Slashdot Mirror
All that demonstrates is cases where it works both ways. Functionally a memory is a sincere belief, since, in the shirt instance, a memory does not constitute empirical evidence, and is thus a belief (by definition, a belief is something held to be true without evidence). So, in the worked example we can use the term "remember" and "sincerely believe" interchangeably.
You keep attempting to draw in examples from outside the framework of the worked example. Unsuccessfully. Please focus on the topic at hand. Now.
You've failed to address the counterarguments made in : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot.
So by agreeing that the shirt exists, you are still saying that non empirical methods are sufficient to establish that something exists, even when there is no physical evidence.
How are you getting on with you homework? I'm now almost certain that you cannot actually devise a response.
Now it's your turn
How are you progressing with your homework? I'm starting to suspect you can't prove your central argument.
How are you progressing with your homework? Must be ready by now.
How are you getting on with your homework? Nearly ready?
"You said you were yourself insane."
Another lie. Citation please.
Here are the two posts in question: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3120575&cid=41423773 And my reply, demonstrating that by your logic, you were, yourself, insane: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3120575&cid=41424109 Not surprising your memory has failed you - you do have quite a confirmation bias when it comes to the rememberin' of my dismemberin' of your propositions.
Remember that three year old you referred to earlier?
Distinctly.
If this is the way you got them to agree with you, no wonder you're trying to use it on everyone else.
Who said the 3 year old agreed with me?
You failed. You didn't read the arguments on the atheist page. For example, you didn't address the ontological arguments. At least make an attempt to lie convincingly.
We did address the ontological arguments. You silently ignored it and edited it out of you reply - twice. Guess your memory is wrong.
Still waiting for you to do your homework, by the way. Will you make it by the due date?
Feel free to claim victory as you lie on the ground covered in dust. You just look all the more pathetic.
I'm glad I have you permission, should that ever happen.
By the way - what happened to the detailed refutation of every single point in the atheist wiki page?
Maybe you should read what I said on the subject.
All you've shown is that memory implies belief.
Yes, it's true. I did show what I set out to show. That saying: "I remember the shirt existing" is a subset of "I sincerely believe the shirt exists" - and therefore a proof by memory can be considered a proof by sincere belief.
Glad we agree.
Please don't so openly demonstrate your ignorance by equating a linear equation with the default proposition that there's no god.
There is no default proposition of the kind - don't you remember the 3 year old and the TV? I ask again: How many deities do atheists propose exist?
Besides, you yourself admit that you dont' believe in a Zokooloo. So what gives?
What I believe is irrelevant. You believe the Zokooloo is analagous to a deity. Which means the shirt must also be analogous.
"Yet you believe the shirt exists even though it is also unproven by experiment."
As I said (for the umpteenth time), there are many experiments to prove that the shirt existed.
What are these experiments? Describe them in detail.
"Your evidence so far has been that it is okay to believe stuff and people who don't believe the things you do are insane. Any other evidence you would like to put forward?"
My evidence is that since there's no physical evidence for god and since no experiment can ever be devised to prove/disprove it, it's by definition a pure thought experiment.
So the shirt also does not exist?
You said you were yourself insane. Think you cried wolf on that one.
"Ah. so you aren't retracting your earlier postulation - sincere belief suffices where physical evidence is unavailable. Gotcha."
I'm not sure we're speaking the same language here. You see, I speak English where memory is not the same as belief.
Not sure about England, but in the brains of the rest of the world, a memory (a recollection of past events) is nothing other than a sincere belief that the remembered sequence of events is what transpired. Memory (recollection) is subject to confirmation bias, just as heuristically derived belief is. This has been demonstrate many times experimentally. In the absence of the empirical method (and we can't go back in time to observe the sequence again), memory is non-empirical.
Either you're speaking another language, or you're drunk. I'm not sure whether you're old enough to drink or not, but please learn in the future going forward to make sure you use your words correctly.
Thanks for the advice!
"Precisely how does the psychologist determine the veracity of the proposition that Life is Suffering?"
Belief != Memory. This is getting tiresome.
I guess swimming against the big ole tide of scientific and philosophical opinion on the subject would tend to make one tired.
>
"That's what we are doing here. What did you think we are doing?"
I leave it as an exercise to you to go through the page, isolate the arguments we HAVEN'T addressed yet, and get back to me on those. Otherwise, in the absence of that, you agree with me that atheism is the only valid system of thought in today's world.
I looked - didn't see anything I disagreed with that we haven't already debunked. I've no issues with atheism as it goes - people are free to believe whatever they want, including atheism.
It's people who say that atheism is NOT belief that I have a problem with.
And, you lost it all.
The teapot - lost. The original state theorem - lost. Occam's Razor - lost. Extraordinary Evidence - lost. Subjective/Objective evidentiary basis and bias - Lost. Zokooloo/FSM/Zeus/IPU - dead. Agnostics are atheists - lost.
Every favoured strawman and fallacy in the atheists bag - you lost every one. Tried insults. Failed. Claimed your opponent was insane - the same criteria proved you were insane. I guess you can try speculative insults, making jibes at the worlds billions of theists and agnostics. But that is all subjective. We have objective evidence of how much a loser you are.
The difference is merely an abstraction - how we percieve that we came by a particular element of knowledge.
SO artists will recall seeing horse run, and draw them in a particular manner. They also believe that horses run in a particular way. OR I recall having a shirt (in the abstract). I tell my colleague "I had a blue shirt". He stores that proposition in his memory. He, literally BELIEVES I own a blue shirt: and so do I. It's the same information. SO if you would like to contradict mainline thinking on the relationship between the abstract ways we treat our memories and the relative reliablility of those mechanisms - go ahead. However, I'm going to need you to cite some authorities on the subject, and explain you epistemology in detail.
So there is no circumstance - and therefore the shirt does not exist?
No evidence for that assertion. Just your sincere belief.
And complaining to teacher won't help. Do your homework, or fail class. And I ask again: are you claiming to be insane? You have previously said that the shirt exists..
Now elaborate (in detail) on the necessary circumstances in which sincere belief will or will not suffice to prove something non empirical. And show working.
Isn't your view on this something you should have settled before engaging in a week long discussion about it?
Sure it does. There are receipts, credit card charges, the memory of clerks who sold it to you (even if it's too weak to recall), fibers of the shirt in your house, the memory of those who have seen you wear it, CCTV cameras and a whole bunch of other stuff. Everything physical leaves a trail all over the place if you really want to find the evidence.
Not in this case. It's an old shirt, and as I said, there is no trace of it - I meant that literally. In any case, from YOUR perspective, none of this physical evidence is available, since you have no idea where I live, and no access to my records.
Does the shirt exist?
A strong memory can even be sufficient if insanity is ruled out.
Ah. so you aren't retracting your earlier postulation - sincere belief suffices where physical evidence is unavailable. Gotcha.
And what does god have going for it? Zip. Zilch. Nada. And so you can compare them...how exactly?
The shirt is analogous to a deity in this example. You therefore need to demonstrate why a Zokooloo would by analogous, whereas the shirt is not. Carry on.
"You've already said that (in the shirt example) in the absence of empirical evidence other non-empirical evidence will suffice to make belief in the shirt reasonable." No, I said a MEMORY of the shirt CAN be reasonable if it's a true memory. And contrary to what you think, there are way to distinguish between a false memory and a true one. Psychologists do it all the time.
Is my memory of the shirt true or false?
And tell us more about this method employed by psychologists to examine the veracity of a concept. Let's say a Buddhist goes to see a psychologist. Precisely how does the psychologist determine the veracity of the proposition that Life is Suffering?
Please respond to the arguments made here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism [wikipedia.org]. Otherwise they will be considered proven. I will hold you to counter EACH AND EVERY point.
That's what we are doing here. What did you think we are doing?
And just so you don't forget: Respond to the counterarguments made (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot), or they will be considered proven.
This is what happens when you don't read everything assigned to you. Refer to my previous post on how a false sincere believe can also be caused due to insanity.
This would be the post you wrote *a day after* the one I was replying in which you indicate (a) 6 billion people are insane, on account of their opinion being different to yours and (b) you are, yourself, insane.
I was being charitable to you by not taking that route, but you seem to want to rub your face in it - well, your choice.
Go for it fella. Threats work *so* well to convince everyone that yours is the rational side.
No, you didn't. Zero as a number is equivalent to atheism...how exactly?
Did you even think before composing this reply?
How many deities to atheists propose exist? Careful! I know you find maths pretty tricky.
Citation please. These lapses of memory are really bogging you down here.
You said before you don't accept citations as evidence. Whose memory is failing who?
While there's nothing extraordinary about the behavior of greenhouse gases, the amount of evidence proving the scale of it is extraordinary.
You are missing the point. Again. Please concentrate!
"So to be clear, if one party doesn't reply to a point made by the other, that point can be considered true?"
At least have the grace to say "Yeah, that was a stupid example". Since YOU brought it up, I assumed you would have followed it. I never started spouting mystical wisdom about extrasolar planets. Don't start something you can't finish. The fact that we found star wobbles is good evidence. If we didn't find them, that would have been a blow to the extrasolar planet theory. Occam's razor at work again.
None of what you just said has anything to do with what you were replying to:
So to be clear, if one party doesn't reply to a point made by the other, that point can be considered true?
Just looking for confirmation.
With respect to the extra solar planets example: in fact we went looking for star wobbles because we wanted to find extra solar planets. And we wanted to find extra solar planets, because the question of their existence is interesting.
Are you saying that the question of the existence of a deity (or deities) is not interesting to us?
Feel free to try again.
What experiments have been proposed to validate the existence of a deity? None. Hence it fails the Occam's razor test.
Yet you believe the shirt exists even though it is also unproven by experiment. You also say that sincere belief suffices where there is no physical evidence. Whaddya know. I guess you believe some things exist and other things do not - regardless of the lack of empirical evidence in either case.
"None of your remarks in support of Zokooloos being analogous to a deity have panned out."
A la contraire, YOU haven't shown how god is not a thought experiment since there's not a shred of physical evidence for it. My burden of evidence has already been met. If you don't think so, you have to show HOW it has not been met. Neither of which you have done. So my point has already been proved. Waiting for your attempted rebuttal.
Your evidence so far has been that it is okay to believe stuff and people who don't believe the things you do are insane. Any other evidence you would like to put forward?
Pure speculation on my part.
A physical memory? So (according to you) in the absence of any empirical evidence, a sincere belief will suffice as evidence for the existence of something?
Not necessarily. The other possibility is that you're insane. Let me know if that explanation suits you.
You do make me laugh sometimes.
Now elaborate (in detail) on the necessary circumstances in which sincere belief will or will not suffice to prove something non empirical. And show working.
"That is *exactly* what people do." Then they are insane.
Well, that's a tragedy. Wait - you said that the shirt exists! Does that not mean that you are insane? What a quandary!
"Your homework" Just admit that you can't understand your own references and can't place them here in your own words. It's a lot more honest than hiding behind a link. Note how you still fudge the issue and run away from addressing precisely how you believe that a Zokooloo is not like god. You're damning yourself with every successive post.
Get on with it stop moaning. I'm not your mummy.
Wow - the incompetence is strong in this one.
I've just shown you how a shirt that can affect the physical world is different from a thought experiment like the Zokooloo. Please refer to the previous points.
And as we discussed there, there is no trace of the shirt. It does not affect the physical world as we observe it. And then you said that a memory (belief) concerning the shirt will suffice. I remember that.
"You've applied a fallacious mechanism by assuming that a deity can only exist if we need it to explain some observable phenomena."
Refer to Occam's razor.
Per previous remarks (which you didn't respond to) Occams razor is not a proof mechanism, for the reasons outlined before.
If not, you're assuming that a Zokooloo can exist even though there's no observable phenomena to indicate it. God == Zokooloo.
You've already said that (in the shirt example) in the absence of empirical evidence other non-empirical evidence will suffice to make belief in the shirt reasonable.
As for the other counterarguments, I'm afraid I have to repeat what I said earlier - if you have a point to make, make it here. You won't see me asking you to go read a book and then respond to every statement made there. Take the trouble to make your point here and I will do the same. Otherwise you're just being lazy. Sorry, you don't get off that easily.
You aren't going to read books?
got a problem with book learnin'? Them fancy professors don't know what they doin'? Respond to the counterarguments made (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot), or they will be considered proven.
But your analogies are false ones because:
1. You cannot compare a shirt which is a physical object and one for which you can have memories to a deity. So while Occam's razor correctly predicts there's no god, it does not do the same for a shirt.
But as I said "there was no sign of it". The existence of the shirt cannot be empirically proven. Anyway, didn't you just say that it is entirely reasonable to assume something exists based on sincere belief?
2. In the math example, there is no precept that unknown values default to zero. Zero is no more nor no less special than any other real number.
That is what I just said.
Hence you've disproven your own assertion: when dealing with an unknown value (y=the number of deities) it is not reasonable to assume zero (atheism).
3. As far as climate change is concerned, I'm pretty sure the evidence is quite voluminous and falls well into the category of "extraordinary"
That is not the point. The point is the "extraordinary" is a subjective measure and can be defined by either side. In the case of AGW, ordinary evidence suffices. There is, in fact, nothing extraordinary about the behaviour of greenhouse gases.
Also recall that I debunked your other incorrect usages of Occam's razor like your extrasolar planets example.
So to be clear, if one party doesn't reply to a point made by the other, that point can be considered true?
Just looking for confirmation.
With respect to the extra solar planets example: in fact we went looking for star wobbles because we wanted to find extra solar planets. And we wanted to find extra solar planets, because the question of their existence is interesting.
Are you saying that the question of the existence of a deity (or deities) is not interesting to us?
I hope this aspect of the debate has ended at least now.
Now that I've shown you how your usage of Occam's razor was incorrect (amongst other things), you still haven't told me how god is different from a Zokooloo.
On the contrary. None of your remarks in support of Zokooloos being analogous to a deity have panned out. Try working through the counterarguments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot - once you've done that, then you can work through mine.
Did you seriously think The God Delusion might be about you? Are you megalomaniacal?