I’ve found that the headgear worn by Pastafarians is lighter and fits more securely.

I think that pandeism is an attempt to paper over the cracks in pantheism. The problem with pantheism is that when God and Nature are coextensive across time and space, it turns out to be nothing more than atheism with a verbal tic. So pandeism comes along to say that God and Nature are coextensive across only most of time and space. But not only does this seem rather ad hoc, I’m not convinced it actually solves the problem. If “God” is just what we call Nature when it’s crunched up into a gravitational singularity, then the two are still coextensive across all of time and space. We’re just choosing to obscure that fact by way of our vocabulary.

or in other words, it’s bullshit :-)

Like all forms of theism, it pleads special knowledge for which one lacks evidence.

My reaction to this, as with most religious matters, is what difference does it make? Can you use it to make a moral decision? Does it make any statement that is falsifiable? It is all words, signifying nothing.

No matter how you serve it up, there is no “God.”

@kritiper There is no evidence either way

@NerdyKeith And yet I still don’t believe. But what you say is exactly what an Agnostic would say.

@NerdyKeith while it’s true that there’s no evidence either way, that argument always smacks of those Publishers clearing house letters claiming that my prize of $5000 a week for life might be lurking in one of those letters arriving here weekly. Now “there is no evidence either way”, but somehow my “faith” in those letters no longer sustains me.

If you are not persuaded to believe in a deity that is your own choice and I respect that. I have no desire to tell any of you what to believe.

There’s not evidence that God doesn’t exist. This is true. There is also no evidence that giant invisible space hamsters don’t exist, but I see no compelling reason to entertain the notion that they might.

@Darth_Algar GA!

Addendum to my earlier response: if you accept the theory of evolution by natural selection, then you already acknowledge a way in which complexity can arise from the laws of nature “running on automatic.” That’s what evolution is, after all: a story of complexity arising from simplicity via a massively iterative, but completely undirected, process.

Also, there is plenty of evidence both for and against the existence of God. It’s just that some of the evidence isn’t very good and people disagree on whether the rest of it is conclusive. But there are scores of arguments on each side, and arguments are a form of evidence.

“Arguments are a form of evidence”

That’s a new one on me.

I find an important part of proving out disproving something to be defining it. Since the definition of “God” changes almost to the person, the parameters of what would constitute evidence change as well. One will note that when the Aztec empire fell and human sacrifices ceased, the Sun did not fail to rise. That’s proof that their god did not exist, and those sacrificed lives wasted.

If anyone would like to come up with a falsifiable definition of God, I’d be happy to argue against it.

@Seek Not all evidence is empirical. It can’t be because not all issues relate to empirical questions. When someone says “prove it,” they are asking for evidence. And sometimes the relevant proof can come in the form of a logical argument. If someone asks me to prove that ((P ↔ Q) ↔ ((P ∧ Q) ∨ (¬P ∧ ¬Q))) is a tautology, I can’t find the answer using a microscope.

But I agree that defining things is an important element to an argument. In formal logical proofs, you actually have to start out by defining what is called “the domain of discourse” (which involves defining all constants and predicates that will be used in the argument). Many philosophers who discuss religion and the existence of God do present such definitions—and, indeed, they often disagree over what the best way to define “God” is. But having the same definition is less important than having a clear definition since the latter at least gives us a place to start the argument (though, of course, it is entirely legitimate to question the definitions themselves; I’ve written a few papers doing exactly that).