Perry Hendricks vs PZ Does God Exist? 

i never understand why perfection is so important. Many bronze age religions had capricious, jealous and otherwise flawed deities. Why couldn't god be a jerk? Ultimately it forces theist to demand evil is necessary

Right from the outset, conflates god with the christian god and establishes a christianity vs atheism dichotomy... My condolences for you having your time wasted by Baby's First Apologetic Routine, PZ. You deserve to have your time respected more than this.

10 minutes in and I've already heard a litany of fallacies. I expect PZ to dismantle them in the rebuttal.

Thank you for pointing out the incredibly frustrating tactic of appealing to God's mysterious ways when theists are faced with data that contradicts their narrative of God being supposedly omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipowerful. Funny how God's ways are far from mysterious when it comes to things that fit with our modern moral worldview. Trying to apply Baye's Theorem to the God question is a really bad habit of apologists. The trouble with it is that superficially, it sounds pretty convincing. But all these 'prior probabilities' are just pure inventions. There's a great (if incredibly long) look at how apologists fudge Baye's Theorem on the Digital Gnosis channel - one of their 'Bad Apologetics' series.

As I'm listening to Dr. Hendricks' first remarks, I'm struck by how backwards his arguments seem to be. He's talking about the likelihood that human life evolved on Earth, a planet suited for human life, but he's got that all backwards. If no gods exist, then the likelihood is 100%. We wouldn't be here, given a completely natural world, if the Earth _wasn't_ suited for that. Just look at all of the other planets _without_ intelligent life. But if his all-powerful god exists, then this planet could be anything at all, and we'd _still_ be able to live here, if he wanted to put human beings on Earth, through god's magic. He's got this exactly backwards, doesn't he?

The main question should always be - what's in it for God? Why go through all the faff of creating a Universe counting North of 800 Sextillion stars (8 followed by 23 zeros), just to create everything on at least one of the planets including night, day, oceans, land, plants and every type of animal, fungi, bacteria and protists. The he goes through all the faff of creating a man and only afterwards creates a woman to be a help for the man (presumably to save him from the sin of wanking) and then yada, yada, yada. Why? Just so he can be worshipped? Where's the fun in that? He could have created the best golf course in the Universe and spent eternity perfecting his long game with a lot less fuss.

When an Apologist starts off their argument with "probability", they have already lost the debate as far as I am concerned. As they never understand how probability actually works. Then he next proves that he doesn't know how evolution works. The probability of something existing, that actually exists is 100%. Like arguing that the order of cards in a shuffled deck is so improbable that it can't possibly exist without God. Even when the shuffled deck is actually sitting there in the middle of the table. The God question is so important, I would want it to be proved "Highly Probable", not just claiming that it was probably 51% true without any evidence.

Unrelated, but what's with FreeThoughtBlogs' server problems? As a regular reader, it's annoying when down.

Perry Hendricks’s arguments were so underdeveloped, ignorant, and painful to listen to that I had to drop this video 13.5 minutes in. I feel kinda bad because I assume he’s like a teenager or something, but this kid needs to learn a thing or two about humility before presenting barely-defended assertions as truth before an audience in debate format like this. 😅

God is not poorly defined. Under classical theism, it has no definition at all.

Probability is not the way to go, rather we need to use the scientific method. A hypothesis must make a prediction and a subsequent observation must confirm what was predicted. This is what is meant by evidence. By doing things in this way no trust in your senses or in an authority is required. We have beliefs because beliefs make predictions that we can use to our advantage, but the way we generate our beliefs is not perfect and the scientific method is the best way to improve that generation of beliefs/ hypotheses.

So the bias towards conscience is we could only have this debate if we were conscience. You couldn't know you're a rock, so for you to exist it would have to be where consciences exists, it isn't exactly clear if the universe has a bias at all towards consciences, if could be common, it could exist only on earth. But what is happening here is he is using the hard problem of consciences to say, since that's a question we don't really have an answer for, we can just call it god's doing.

"Run into a human that existed, that didn't depend on a parent" - my brother in Christ, you believe in the Virgin Birth!

Thanks for your work.

A "perfect" (maximized in every conceivable way) being should have no needs or wants, much less the need to create *anything* or require "glorification" from it's creations, less it not be maximized in those areas. The Abrahamic god is logically absurd given it's attributes and actions.

Not just cats: We also know that it's wrong to set people on fire, and we refrain from doing so regardless of the crimes they may have committed. Oddly enough, under many forms of theism, setting people on fire was regularly endorsed for about one thousand years, and this alleged deity is supposed to do this for eternity as a punishment for finite crimes. Hmm, it sounds like either such a being doesn't actually exist or that being is actually cruel, unjust, and evil and not very good at all!

Probability? If it hasn't been proven possible you should have made the belt of watches because the rest is an even bigger waste of time.

Thanks for sharing, PZ!

passive aggression is entirely different from being nice

PZ back debating is what we all needed in our lives.

You can find the God of rabbits in Watership Down, the book.

Only in theism the human being is not necessary... as god could have thought other way.

Why don't you upload a video explaining the situation?

Comparing it to a game of cards would be useful if only, like cards, games, and poker players, the absurdity you're claiming is likely had ever even once been definitively demonstrated to exist! Your god is far more unlikely than even a single card, let alone several royal flushes in a row! 🤣

Unfortunately its 2 archytypical minds at work in believers & non believers. In both camps this gets in the way often. And you must understand current concesus science was authorativly imposed through actvist judges and politics it did not win over the arena of thoughtful science. It violated America's main rule that we would never impose physical prescriptions upon each other because they was a aware of newtons infinite sums of approximating probability and was very aware of how hard it is to tell where physicalism begins and ends. Interpretations are not hurtful but physical prescriptions are damaging to society and nations. Its the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought. What isn't God ,is the correct formulated question to ask. This is hard for a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind to think of because its dictated by a radicalized environment governed by these extreme physical lawism structuralisms. It rather stay in platos cave granting unification & simplicity in the top of the higher archy even if its made up , it needs to connect dots and force the evidence to fit the grand theory of everything to fill in missing links. It rather live in complexity of many different disciplines cults within cults. Its unaware of its triality navagating this dualistic system. War time powers of Ww2 & the modernization act traps America back under this chaldean mind model because the classical American mind triality recognized such necessary evil structuralism must give the unity & simplicity to the top so that 18 year old troops deal with Entropic turn over of infinite sums of approximating probability & complexity . This type of believer says God is universe big bang with math & time is his actual fingertips and through mult verses he chose this one here etc etc etc. The classical American mind is the only one to ever escape the chaldean mind or platos cave. It state man made language, time & maths are inspired by god, only by his grace do we have a mind that can read his left over fingerPRINTS that's legable. This mind follows the evidence where it leads it knows the human dashboard can never removed from the system thus this system is the proper place to unify individual systems . God is not in a rock or under a rock he was separated from his creation at different points but through us thy will be done. Through Jesus salvation the unification of tripartite nature of man past present and future. It is the grand unification of objects physica cause l,subjective secondary effect & idealogical minds. Mind body and soul. You know whole deal ,father ,son holy spirit represents the 3 natures of our reality .

The odds of making a five-card royal flush out of a 52-card deck are 4/2,598,960. This translates to a 0.000154% chance of making poker’s ultimate hand. The odds against making a royal flush are 649,739-to-1.