Is there a God, Philosophical Debate

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What about QM? That would suggest you're presenting a false dilemma. You have two conventional or traditional states: Existence, non-existence. The third state, or middle state, would be simultaneously both/neither existence/non-existence. Your middle state is all you have until you can collapse the wave function.

No, there is no middle state. The state is only indeterminate until you measure it. It is definitely one or the other.

It was only a matter of time before someone broke out the quantum woo.

Quantum mechanics deals with probabilistics and uncertainty, and has negligible application on macroscopic scales.

Not before collapsing the wave, though. You just said it: "…until you measure it…" So what is the state before measurement? Do you even know?

Depends on your interpretation of QM.

I don't claim to be an expert on it, btw…honestly, I feel like I get more amusement from it than useful information. I was once fairly on the winning side of an argument when someone threw in QM, which I didn't know much about at all at the time. I looked into Schroedinger's Cat, which I realize is only useful as an analogy and lampooning some of the ideas of QM. However, while QM deals with probabilistics and certainty, there are also theories about wave-particles that need not be glossed over. If there's nothing going on at the quantum level, you don't have computers or data handling. While particles pop in and out of our existence, I'm aware I don't have to worry about my couch getting sucked into some inter dimensional vortex while I'm sitting on it.

On the other hand, I do wonder why nobody has applied this kind of study to the physical properties of socks and clothes dryers. I'm convinced the structure of socks lends them more readily to quantum forces that can transport them to alternate universes, and I believe dryers are, indeed, portals to those alternate universes. I can wash a load of laundry consisting of nothing but socks, and I can match those socks prior to washing. I can count them after washing before transferring them to the dryer, and all is well. As soon as the dryer goes off, I can unload the dryer and count socks one by one. There will consistently be either or both a missing sock (most often the case) and/or a mismatched pair. EVERY SINGLE TIME. I have yet to run across another plausible physical explanation. I'm open to demonic control of washer/dryers, but as far as a naturalistic explanation goes QM seems the best yet.

On another planet far far away, a stargate lights up, a vortex shoots out of the gate killing a couple of natives who were standing in front of it. A few seconds later a pair of socks appears and the wormhole closes. The socks become worshipped, gifts from the gods and a religion forms around the worship of these mysterious items.

A lot of effort goes into trying to prove that something doesn't exist.

That's the one thing I've learned from coming to the PPR.

The real effort is proving something to be true that really isn't true.

Yeah, you're right there.

Its axiomiatic that "its easier to prove a positive than to prove a negative".

If you stumbled upon the carcass of a unicorn then that would be hard positive evidence for the existence of unicorns.

But how do you prove that unicorns DONT exist?

All you can do is point to the centuries of the LACK of evidence (no carcasses, no droppings, no fossils, no photographs, no videos, no reliable eye witnesses, etc) and conclude "that a reasonable person would have to conclude that unicorns never existed (the absence of evidence is evidence of absense)".

The thing I've learned is there's no reasoning with myopia. It exists exactly because it's a demarcation of a person's perceptual limits.

When someone notes having been a YEC, went to school and learned science, and science proved to them roundly that there's no external Sky-god and therefore claim beyond reductive materialism has been disproven in their eyes - it doesn't inspire much confidence that they had a particularly deep understanding of either religion or science to begin with and it also makes their present level of understanding appear somewhat doubtful.

All you can prove is what's right in front of you. I can prove that unicorns don't exist within my house. I can't prove they NEVER existed. Many people find the fossil record compelling, but that ignores how fossils form and under what conditions formation is ideal. A gradual decay and disintegration under present-day conditions or something similar isn't going to yield much in terms of fossils. A sudden extinction event that leaves bones fairly protected and undisturbed would produce a larger number of results. Instead, I would investigate whether unicorns were KNOWN only to exist within the realm of legend rather than physical reality, as in one could point to a definite point in time that the "unicorn" idea was invented, or if the image of an ugly, one-horned mule itself was representative of some particular person or idea. If I already knew those kinds of things as fact, I likely wouldn't even bother arguing one way or another on unicorns.

Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence, though. A reasonable person would have to fall back on probabilities of existence based on what IS known to say the likelihood of our hypothetical unicorn being extremely low. But in absolute terms? All anyone could say is based on lack of evidence it seems highly unlikely, which leads one not to believe they didn't exist, but rather to not believe they ever existed. There is a fine line between saying "I believe X doesn't exist" and saying "I do not believe X exists." One is a statement of belief; the other is a statement of disbelief. One is absolute; the other is marginally open-ended.

Agreed.

Do you think the opposite is true? Someone who abandons science--for whatever reason…maybe too many unanswered questions, I dunno--that the same applies? More of what I've read involved people who became believers but felt that accepting a deity did not impact their field of study in any way. Some may have become more convinced or persuaded towards ID, but it posed no significant disruption to their work.

That may be so if they only doubted for one reason. But former Christians are often pretty well versed in the mythological claims of the bible. Because some crisis of faith often led them to a deeper examination of the biblical claims than the average believer. In my experience atheists with no religious background know less because they just don't care about that pap at all. Though one recent poll showed that atheists in total outperform believers when it comes to knowledge about religions.

It's also common knowledge that many liberal Christians don't accept many of the bible's claims. It's simply a socially acceptable channel to worship their own version of a deity. Ive known Christians who roll their eyes at Noah's ark, the Tower of Babel, Yahweh fighting water dragons, etc. They know it's mythological bs.

QM isn't about existence or non-existence, but the location of a quantum particle like a photon. We can say that the presence or absence of a photon is indeterminate, but that doesn't mean it's both.

In a rare case someone might throw science out the window in favor of faith just that I'd think it's more rare. When something's been road-tested enough to seem pretty well stapled into the laws of nature one gets the impression that they're seeing the will of God in action because what they're seeing is endemic to the natural system. If trying to reconcile that against something in public interpretation of religious texts that broke rank with it they'd probably trust what they know to be a consistent reality first.

ID's a tough nut to crack because in a lot of ways both evolution and ID can reach back beyond the scientifically examineable. ID can simply claim that there was a guiding hand in evolution and nothing would appear any different, evolution from the reductive materialist standards claims that every testable result proves reductive materialism. If the Signature In The Cell rarity of the chemical combinations needed in early cells or DNA prove to be true but there was some really wild catalyst that greatly lowered the 10 ^ whatever astronomical number that exceeds the atoms in the universe down to something very manageable on this planet - both sides would claim it as proof that they're right. To IDers rarity is evidence, to reductive materialists the 'we exist' is settled therefor rarity means nothing and so multiverse theory gains more backing for that reason more so than any other.

IMHO if the reductive materialism vs. theism thing ever gets settled I don't think either origins or cosmology will be where we find that answer because their both floating points that the interpretations of the data are going to precisely match your starting premise. Consciousness research sounds like it would be a closer bet.