Note: It mangled my footnote symbols. Simply go in order of appearance if you wish to find them.
As a strong agnostic, I must say I find the numbers given here amusing. Simply put, there is very little evidence either way, and it is highly likely that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have decent evidence either way about an omnipotent god. I believe that there is an infinitesimal possibility that there is any significant way to tell which way you should lean.* Therefore, I find these probabilities meaningless (but not uninteresting).
Now, probabilities on whether or not Zeus exists are much more doable. Within reason, the less powerful the god, the easier it should be to get evidence. At the extreme low end, a sufficiently advanced alien could truly be Prometheus. We could prove he exists just by finding him.* Though that level of technology advantage would mean we might need to doubt the evidence anyway.
There are certain theologies that rule themselves out, but this is hardly a convincing argument against the remainder of them. It is true you should not unduly elevate religious beliefs out of the possibility that a particular one is true, but there is actual evidence in favor of them, such that people are not necessarily crazy to come to the exact opposite conclusion than the readers of this blog favor. The weighting of scant evidence can drastically skew the results, and the weighting is probably not rational on either side. Additionally, it is clear that Christianity as a whole is not logically contradictory, because they have direct postulates that contradict the postulates used to show they are logically contradictory, which means you cannot add those postulates in if you want a deductive proof.
*Honestly, I believe that the idea of having any sufficient evidence of whether or not an omnipotent being exists is a logical contradiction. There is no state of the universe which an omnipotent being would be unable to implement, and thus no state of the universe is evidence that an omnipotent being does not exist. (Technically, evidence for an omnipotent being could be gathered due to an extremely unlikely configuration of things, but similar evidence could be created by any sufficiently advanced being).
**That means he gave humans the advancement that was control over fire, and got punished over it by other sufficiently advanced beings. The punishment described in the legends could simply occur in VR, or in some grizzly fashion.
*Evidence against him would be much harder, but perhaps sufficiently advanced aliens have been recording all of humanity the entire time, and have proof we discovered fire independently.
**This may be a slightly self serving way of seeing things, but you can always include me in that statement if you think agnostics incorrectly weight the evidence.
*Their postulate: P Your Postulate: ~P
The contradiction therefore only means one of the postulates is wrong, not that the conclusion is wrong.
One such postulate would be that an omnibenevolent being would not allow such suffering if they could help it, but theirs is that they would. There is no proof either way; suffering might sometimes be beneficial. We cannot even eliminate certain forms of suffering as possibly being beneficial overall. This is usually where the free will arguments start being brought up, but chaos theory can explain it as well.
Note: It mangled my footnote symbols. Simply go in order of appearance if you wish to find them.
As a strong agnostic, I must say I find the numbers given here amusing. Simply put, there is very little evidence either way, and it is highly likely that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have decent evidence either way about an omnipotent god. I believe that there is an infinitesimal possibility that there is any significant way to tell which way you should lean.* Therefore, I find these probabilities meaningless (but not uninteresting).
Now, probabilities on whether or not Zeus exists are much more doable. Within reason, the less powerful the god, the easier it should be to get evidence. At the extreme low end, a sufficiently advanced alien could truly be Prometheus. We could prove he exists just by finding him.* Though that level of technology advantage would mean we might need to doubt the evidence anyway.
There are certain theologies that rule themselves out, but this is hardly a convincing argument against the remainder of them. It is true you should not unduly elevate religious beliefs out of the possibility that a particular one is true, but there is actual evidence in favor of them, such that people are not necessarily crazy to come to the exact opposite conclusion than the readers of this blog favor. The weighting of scant evidence can drastically skew the results, and the weighting is probably not rational on either side. Additionally, it is clear that Christianity as a whole is not logically contradictory, because they have direct postulates that contradict the postulates used to show they are logically contradictory, which means you cannot add those postulates in if you want a deductive proof.
*Honestly, I believe that the idea of having any sufficient evidence of whether or not an omnipotent being exists is a logical contradiction. There is no state of the universe which an omnipotent being would be unable to implement, and thus no state of the universe is evidence that an omnipotent being does not exist. (Technically, evidence for an omnipotent being could be gathered due to an extremely unlikely configuration of things, but similar evidence could be created by any sufficiently advanced being).
**That means he gave humans the advancement that was control over fire, and got punished over it by other sufficiently advanced beings. The punishment described in the legends could simply occur in VR, or in some grizzly fashion.
*Evidence against him would be much harder, but perhaps sufficiently advanced aliens have been recording all of humanity the entire time, and have proof we discovered fire independently.
**This may be a slightly self serving way of seeing things, but you can always include me in that statement if you think agnostics incorrectly weight the evidence.
*Their postulate: P Your Postulate: ~P The contradiction therefore only means one of the postulates is wrong, not that the conclusion is wrong. One such postulate would be that an omnibenevolent being would not allow such suffering if they could help it, but theirs is that they would. There is no proof either way; suffering might sometimes be beneficial. We cannot even eliminate certain forms of suffering as possibly being beneficial overall. This is usually where the free will arguments start being brought up, but chaos theory can explain it as well.