Fallaneze

Is someone irrational for believing that cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, and laziness are morally good?

Is someone who likes the flavor of vanilla ice cream better than chocolate irrational? 

That would violate the universality principle though. So exploiting people by being cruel and dishonest cannot be rationally endorsed as a universal principle. 

Haha okay, do you like a swirl of chocolate and vanilla ice cream or strawberry ice cream better?

Do you like the flavor of chocolate or vanilla ice cream better?

A high or low IQ doesn't necessarily translate into how well you understand how your actions affect others. This also isn't a legal matter - it's a moral one. Your motives play a large part in determining whether you acted immorally or not. Taking something from someone while not knowing it belonged to anyone is not the same as deliberately stealing from someone.

Be compassionate, honest, courageous, diligent, etc.

The moral proposition A: "It is permissible to steal" would result in a contradiction upon universalisation. The notion of stealing presupposes the existence of private property, but were A universalized, then there could be no private property, and so the proposition has logically negated itself."

Why is the person who believes murder isn't wrong just as rational as everyone else who believes it is? 

"Behave according to the maxim that your behavior can be rationally endorsed as a universal principle." 

Less moral culpability isn't necessarily a good thing since it also limits your ability to do good things. 

Correct. So in order to begin our inquiry about which one is real we must first be working from the moral realist perspective. It's a matter of determining which moral views corroborate the underlying facts. It's a matter of discerning which moral views are most rational.

Well if none of them are what would it matter?

There just needs to be a fact of the matter in order to resolve moral disagreements. Without moral realism, there's no fact of the matter. There's also no moral progress, no moral highground, no moral correctness or incorrectness, no instrinsic moral value attached to dispositions like compassion and cruelty, in the case of two competing moral views on something, one person can never be more right than the other, and moral discussions themselves would be no different than reaching a consensus on a favorite color. 

It isn't a false dilemma because it is either true that the Big Bang occurred by chance or it is not true that the Big Bang occurred by chance.

Since natural explanations lead to an infinite chain of events with quantifiable beginnings, the only recourse is to say that we don't understand how it happened. That may be true, but it doesn't address the logic in my argument.

Maximizing physical harm to you is good though according to their chosen standard. In any case, there's no moral highground between the both of you.

So the arguments given for atheism so far are:

* lack of evidence for theism

* propensity for people to make up supernatural explanations

An ISIS member can counter this by saying that your moral standards lead to irrationally harmful actions too. They just have a different objective than you. In comparison, neither you nor they have a higher moral standard.

Well it's interesting you bring up moral beliefs. Aren't you against moral realism? 

My objective is to have the most rational inference. There may be other logically possible explanations for something but that doesn't mean it's the most rational explanation. It's logically possible that the Rosetta Stone was written through wind and erosion. There is no testable physical evidence of logic, meaning, math (& geometry), and moral truth propositions. Nor of conscious experiences, free will, etc.

If numbers depended on objects we would only be able to do math on an axis beginning at 1. This is obviously untrue since we know of 0 and negative numbers.

When you think of the number "1" must you imagine it as an object, like an apple or an orange? When you think of "1,000,000" do you hold a million different objects in your mind? We understand the meaning of numbers without having objects associated with them. 

If math required corresponding objects for us to know of it then the works of Pythagoras or Euclid would've been impossible.

Define the word "evidence."

Lack of evidence when evidence was expected refers to an observed absence of something. Any time we have information that indicates the truthhood of a claim we have evidence. So in this instance we have evidence of absence, not absence of evidence.

It may be true that humans have an ingrained propensity to make up supernatural explanations. A supernatural explanation of what though? The Big Bang represents the expansion of all space-time and energy in the universe from a zero-dimensional point - a point where all of the natural laws known today, including physics and the law of conservation of mass were completely broken down according to Hawking. This actually indicates a non-natural (AKA supernatural) explanation.

The Big Bang was just one example. We need to rely on an inference to the best explanation for many things. Not everything can be reproduced in a controlled environment, even though that might be ideal.

God would have designed nature so there'd be a certain level of intellect exhibited in nature. That said, God is not "intertwined" in nature. A programmer is beyond the program he creates. He is not contained by it but he leaves signatures of his intelligence inside the program.

The number of versions of something conceived beforehand does not make it more or less likely that the next version is any more or less likely to exist. It 100% depends on the defintion. This also overlooks the commonalities in many different variations of God. One of those commonalities for instance is an eternal consciousness, not Christianity or Islam.

Yes, but there's too much to say. Each argument would need to be its own separate topic.

Yep. 

A preponderance of evidence is subjective to an extent. The objective is to have (1) all of the available evidence and (2) the most rational interpretation of it. Those two factors will vary from person to person so it's subjective in that sense.

Yes because there is no physical component to that. No matter or energy 

Same with math. If everyone died it's not as though 0 = 1 instead of 1 = 1 anymore.

Would the world still be spherical and not rectangular if nobody was around? The law of identity would still be at play. There just wouldn't be any language to describe it.

Logic can be useful towards that end but it's not as if logic is a useful fiction. The law of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle would be true regardless if anyone was around or not. The laws of logic do not derive from physics since a world in which the laws of physics are different is conceivable but a world with different fundamental laws of logic is not. There is not sufficient evidence of logic or math based on your criteria for "sufficient evidence."

Well either God exists or God does not exist. One of those two options is more rational to believe than the other.

The laws of logic are true regardless of whether we use logic or not. We recognize the laws of logic. They're abstract, invariant, and universal.  So how do you account for these truths since they don't have physical measurable effects?

"Sufficient evidence" is subjective but the threshold for when a belief is more rational than not is when there's more information indicating it's true than false.

The law of identity states that each thing is identical with itself. It doesn't need to refer to anything in particular. 

A tautological truth is just something that's logically true but physically unaccounted for. Do you have sufficient proof of logic? I'm concerned with whether it's more rational to believe God exists rather than not, not whether there's sufficient proof either way.

How do you account for something that's tautologically true if it has no measurable physical effects? 

God is defined as a prime, eternal consciousness. God's existence would'nt be physically measured just like logic and math aren't 

Logic truths like "A = A" are self-validating. Pure geometry is a branch of mathematics and is used to build a theoretical framework before an applied framework.

If "God" had no conceptual meaning it would be impossible for us to be here having a discussion about it.

The universe does not describe math though, math describes the universe. We can imagine a universe with different laws of physics. We cannot imagine a universe with different laws of math where 0 =1, for example. Math is not meaningless without referring to a physical force or object. Applied math must first be theoretically sound. 

We made up the mathematical symbols but not the structure. Isaac Newton and Leibniz independently discovered calculus. We were able to predict the Higgs particle,  also empirically verified decades later, using pure math alone. Math was discovered, not invented.

You need a way to account for how the fundamental laws of logic are true when they have no "physical measurable effects." Otherwise, you're special pleading to have this standard necessarily apply to the question of God's existence but not math or logic.

There are things we accept to be true that don't apply. 

Ok, so if you adhere to mathematical and logical truths then you've conceded that not everything that you accept to be true has a measurable physical effect.

You could say that God has the same "measurable physical effect" by looking at the brain states of believers. 

The fundamental laws of logic, math, moral truths, information to name a few 

We accept that some things are true without them having a measurable physical effect. How do you account for those exclusions?

If you require "testable evidence" but can't define what the term means other than giving an example of something that meets the criteria then you need to first work out your epistemic framework.

Lack of evidence isn't evidence against anything unless you actually have evidence against something.

The number of different versions of God don't make the claim any more or less unlikely. That wholly depends on the defintion.

We don't always have the luxury of reproducing something under controlled conditions. Searching for the best explanation of the Big Bang for instance. 

Theists and atheists both believe that nature exists. The naturalist however believes that nature is all there is and that there is nothing beyond nature. Merely observing nature does not inform us one way or the other whether there is nothing beyond nature. And in fact, I'd say that our ability to apprehend abstract mathematical, logical, and moral truths is evidence against naturalism.

Well you either accept that a claim is true, neither accept a claim to be true nor reject it to be untrue, or you reject the claim as untrue. The extent to which you agree or disagree depends on how strong the evidence is.

Disbelief and belief with varying strength and mere non-belief.

But if you set an artificially high threshold of evidence you're left with room that the belief is more rational than not.

The scale (so to speak) from 0-100 should be based on the preponderance of evidence for and against the claim. Belief or disbelief should be based on whether the body of evidence favors or disfavors the claim. When the scale is above 50, the claim should be accepted. When the claim is exactly 50, the claim should neither be accepted nor rejected. When the claim is below 50, the claim should be rejected.

Why does a belief need to reach a threshold of "incontrovertible" rather than simply "more likely true than false"?