The Existence of God is unlikely

I'll have another go at explaining the complexity/improbability of God. I'll quote portions of an essay I'm currently writing: Dawkins considers God complex in the sense that he has the powers to receive, store, create, and piece together information in meaningful ways… Even a spiritual mind with no physical parts whatsoever would still be constructed in a very complex and non-random way, in the sense that this mind would be, in some way, structured in the manner and order of steps that it took to process, store, create, and link together information. Dawkins never takes up the burden of showing why complexity in that sense would be improbable. However, I think his intuition is right. Consider the number of possible minds. I think we can safely say that it is incredible high, as I will show. If we are considering positing a single spiritual mind as an inexplicable brute fact, what are the odds that this mind would be anything like the mind of God? I suggest that we apply the principle of indifference and assign each possible mind the same likelihood of existing uncaused. When we do this, it seems that the probability of God's existence would be much less than one in ten billion (after all, there are six billion unique human minds in existence today, plus the minds of chimpanzees, gorillas, other intelligent animals, and fictional characters and invented gods that occupy the space of possible minds). "Necessary existence is a more perfect mode of being than contingent existence. God, being the greatest possible being, would thus have this mode of existence." Why is necessary existence more perfect? Even if there was a greatest possible being, wouldn't it be quite possible that this being lacked the attribute of necessary existence? It seems to me that it could lack the attribute of necessary existence while still being "greater" than other beings in one sense or another. "Pro responds the skeptical theist's response to the evidential problem of evil in two ways. First, he accuses it of violating Ockham's razor... It is not evident how it is unparsimonious." Oh yes, it is evident. You are stuck postulating the hypothesis that "God has some mysterious reason for allowing evil" which you have no justification for outside of the circular reasoning I mention below. Your hypothesis is an ad-hoc one which you depend on to even get theism consistent with the data. Naturalism depends on no ad-hoc hypotheses to explain evil. Naturalism is the simpler and more probable explanation for Evil. "As outlined before, given what we _do_ know about God, it is very likely that there is indeed an explanation, and hence I am warranted in postulating one." No, there's no reason to think Evil is consistent with the existence of God unless you presuppose that God exists and reason that since evil exists, God must have a reason for allowing evil. But of course presupposing God's existence is circular reasoning. "Pro argues that theism is a priori less likely than naturalism because it postulates an additional entity (God). I would happen to agree with him provided that the evidence for both sides were equal and that the theistic hypothesis is not necessary. But since our background information is *not* equal, Pro cannot rule out theism on the basis that it adds another entity. To rule out theism a priori by using Ockham's razor is to beg the question, because it presupposes that theism is not necessary to explain our background information." No. Occam's razor does not conclusively rule out theism. I simply hold that unless/until you show theism has more explanatory scope/power, etc. then I am justified in being a naturalist. "I stated that ‘Though both theism and naturalism can account for these phenomena, theism's explanation is superior in that it tends to affirm the reality of phenomena that we find basic to life.'" And you have not taken up your burden of proving theism is a superior explanation. "It is perfectly plausible to suppose that the origin of the universe was simultaneous with the first moment of time, such that the first moment of time marked the beginning of the universe." But if there was no moment prior to the first moment of the universe, how could it have been ‘caused' to exist? Its causation could not have occurred within time because there is no time before the universe. So its causation could have only occurred outside of time. But what does the word ‘cause' mean here? Its important that you define it because causation is often defined temporally. Indeed, your prev. reference to everyday experience suggests that you were originally referring to causation in the temporal sense. You object to my use of the ekpyrotic model on several grounds. I don't necessarily dispute that the ekpyrotic model has problems. I only brought it up to show that it was quite possible that the universe may be eternal. But there are other models: For example, Lee Smolin postulates that new universes are born in black holes. It could be the case that there have always been universes giving rise to more universes through black holes. You may object that this is speculative, and I will reply: in comparison to what? The notion that an immaterial person brought the universe into existence? "Cosmologists produced a theorem (the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem) which requires such a universe to have a beginning." The BGV theorem only applies to a universe that is (on average) expanding [1]. All eternal models are not (on average) expanding (see above). Con's objections to the big bang argument against God: 1. "God is not required to create a universe that contains life." No: if life is a good thing then God would be very likely to create it because it is good. I suppose one could object that life is not a good thing. If so, then God would not be likely to create it because he is good, and therefore the existence of life would constitute evidence against the existence of God. 2. God can miraculously intervene to create life… Why must we suppose that God must have created the universe pre-programmed with life-permitting properties? Because we would not expect a perfectly rational being to do things he had no reason to do, like create the universe in a way that requires immediate miraculous intervention when he could just as well have created it to suite his desires from the get-go. I suppose you could say that God did have a reason for creating the universe this way and that we are not aware of what that reason is. If so, that means you have to add another ad-hoc conjecture to the God hypothesis to make it fit the data. "There is no good reason to suppose that the universe is necessary -- nothing about it seems to indicate that, and thus it is ad hoc to postulate it as necessary." It is ad-hoc to postulate that a Godlike being is necessary, as discussed above. Furthermore, if we have to suppose that something is necessary, it may as well be the universe rather than god. "Pro's analogy begs the question by assuming the prior existence of reason." Notice that the human beings in my analogy did not rationally and consciously design anything, they simply destroyed whatever did not suit their needs out of primitive anger and not in a conscious attempt to rationally design a better computer. "Pro has not given a good reason to suppose that reason can arise out of non-reason." You have not even given us good reason to lean towards the notion that it cannot. In fact, the existence of computers gives us good reason to suppose that reason can come from non-reason because their reasoning comes from the workings of material parts. Just because humans may create the computer does not negate the fact that the reasoning of computers is arising from the workings of its material parts.