Posted: Oct 07, 2010 11:19 pm
Paul Almond wrote:Some ideas of God are incoherent, so they don't even get to be wrong. I am assuming, here, that we are starting with a reasonably coherent idea of God.
I mean that I view the existence of God as so unlikely, that while I am not absolutely certain that God does not exist, my degree of confidence in the non-existence of God easily matches or exceeds the degree of confidence I have about other things which, using normal, everyday semantics, I would claim to know about and would describe using the language of certainty, without probabilistic qualifications. I base this on the hyper-extreme nature of the claim and the lack of evidence needed to support such an extreme claim.
I expected you to say so but wouldn't it be more expedient to try and avoid ambiguities?
Instead of absolute certainty say fully convinced? Added equivocation obfuscates otherwise transparent communication, no? I say this because I myself often struggle to identify the intended meaning of the communicator's proposition when there's more than one definition given and more than one definition would equally apply in context.