5
" To lay it more bare, look at how the varying faiths interpret the same evidence. Fundamentalist Christians have interpreted earthquakes as punishment from God for giving homosexuals a chance at equal treatment before the law. Fundamentalist Muslims have interpreted earthquakes as warnings from Allah for women dressing immodestly. Some more liberal believers have interpreted these events as having been caused or allowed to happen so as to teach people personal lessons of strength or compassion. Neither can these claims can be verified directly, nor do any of them have utilizable explanatory power. They also follow, and do not lead, belief. Notice, for instance, that the fundamentalists' claims could easily be tested (while the liberals' are exercises in solipsism). Unsurprisingly, however rigorously the tests were done, the fundamentalists' beliefs are unlikely to be shaken. This is how confirmation bias works. "
― James A. Lindsay , Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly
11
" Axioms have to be judged against how “self-evident” they really are, how useful they are, how little they assume, and in other such ways. This, then, is why the theistic worldview axioms seemed more reasonable in the past than now; we now see that the purported existence of God is not self-evident, has limited utility with little or no explanatory power, and yet assumes an awful lot. "
― James A. Lindsay , Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly
16
" Kurt Gödel, who was able to prove in 1940 that given any axiomatic system that can produce arithmetic, we have to choose between completeness and coherence. Completeness means that the truth value of every statement in the system is determinable—that is that all statements can be assigned the appropriate truth value (usually true or false, for us). Coherence means that there are no contradictory statements, which is to say no paradoxes, within the system. We can have one or the other, but except in very special cases that have little applicability, we cannot have both. "
― James A. Lindsay , Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly
17
" Thus, while perhaps we cannot assign a zero, almost surely, prior plausibility with regard to the existence of God, we can still make a clear statement about what direction the evidence is pushing the posterior. The posterior plausibility of the God hypothesis has been uniformly decreased as we've collected evidence that should bear upon that question. In Carrier's metaphor, the God hypotheses, in any form specific enough to consider, has lost millions of races and simply should not be bet upon to win any in the future.[25] "
― James A. Lindsay , Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly
