Convict on 19/1/2007 at 01:24

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I swear you haven't been to sleep all your night! :eek:


TBH I personally don't have a problem with StD (or anyone) going on about their beliefs and trying to disprove God.

mopgoblin on 19/1/2007 at 02:01

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There are a lot of problems with this. For a start, it examines one god with the assumption that no incompatible god exists. Christianity says something like "don't worship other gods", and I expect Cthulhu says much the same thing (if not, substitute someone who does). This gives you a lot of calculations with ∞-∞ in them - this is undefined. In the end, if two or more incompatible gods could exist then there's no way to reliably choose the right one.

Incidentally, if p=0 in your calculations (i.e. Cthulhu definitely doesn't exist), then you are better off not worshipping him (unless you like self-flagellation), as 0*∞=0 is quite reasonable in probability theory.

Another assumption you've made is that worship with some other motivation behind it - such as avoiding pain or acquiring pleasure - counts the same as a genuine commitment. It could well be that when you die, the god you've been worshipping will be quite pissed off because you tried to trick him, and perhaps also because you've been telling others to do the same thing.

I've also got a few problems with your calculus of pain, in particular the notion of infinite pain. It seems reasonable to assume that a finite interval of time can contain only a finite amount of pain, thus infinite pain requires infinite time. But this would imply that all infinite pain is equivalent - getting a paper cut or a mild headache once every thousand years is the same as constant torture.

This suggests to me that only finite pain is meaningful, so taking the integral of the intensity with respect to time is not an accurate representation - I've had any number of minor cuts and similar things that I don't remember at all, for example. Rather, we should consider the intensity at a given instant, or better yet the mean intensity over all time (which would consider constant torture much worse than occasional paper cuts, although still finite). Finally, it may be impossible to prevent an increasing tolerance from ultimately blocking out all pain, unless you could revert to a previous state (which would necessarily destroy memory of all pain after that time, effectively negating it).

Shug on 19/1/2007 at 02:22

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dawkins? more like dorkins

on a related note, perchance the discovery of recognizable life / intelligence of some sort on planets other than our own would disprove the existence of God and make it a more likely explanation that everything "just happened"

fett on 19/1/2007 at 03:14

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Why?

Convict on 19/1/2007 at 03:16

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I've wondered about alien intelligent lifeforms and Christianity. The Bible appears to be saying that humans are the ones God will save so that would mean that intelligent aliens wouldn't be saved surely? :confused: I'm still very skeptical about the existence of intelligent aliens even in our large universe (although I may obviously have some bias here).