JohnCorrespondent

I forget whether I replied to this yet. I don't think I did. There's something more I want to say about my "abstract god": It doesn't have to be an entity with its own existence, like a person. I mean it as a way we can describe and name concepts. And the "abstract god" doesn't have to be just about what's "good" or "important". It can also be about other qualities, such as, for example, all-knowing! (omniscience).

So, for example, as I live day-to-day, I think of the worth of what I do, or the good or bad in what I do, and I feel that God knows _everything_ that I do or think. Even if there is no God entity with its own existence, which knows everything, I still imagine it as a concept and call it the abstract all-knowing "god" and that's a useful concept for me to describe how I feel that all things matter _as_if_ all things were known!

It feels right to me, to suppose that all things are somehow known. So, if I'm in a room by myself, and no human will ever know the good or evil thing I do there, still, it matters to _me_, and I rationalize this by imagining that there's an omniscient god.

It's just kind of a label or a conceptual convenience.

JohnCorrespondent

Weird.

I actually knew someone who didn't know where the road went. She'd been living in a country house for several months, and always went into town by starting in the eastward direction. She'd never gone in the westward direction.

Oh, about that question of where did everything come from, sometimes expressed as "what created God?": Aside from an answer I posted earlier (that what appears as empty space isn't totally empty; and that there's no such thing as absolute nothingness) (and never has been), another approach which is probably valid is to sidestep (or even outright refuse to answer) the question. After all, just because someone can phrase a question doesn't necessarily mean there exists an answer to it, or that the question even makes sense.

"Why did God create Martians?" is a grammatically correct question but doesn't make much sense if there have never been any Martians, and we don't have to feel obligated to answer the question as it is phrased.

Oh yeah, and there's another thing I've been wanting to say for awhile: People say: there's a universe, so somebody must have _created_ it. I puzzled over that for a long time. I felt there was something wrong with how that was conceptualized. Eventually it occurred to me to ask: "If a meteorite falls on me, who is the guilty party who caused it to happen? After all, if a bad thing happens, there must be someone guilty for it." The answer is that a bad thing happening does _not_ imply that there's a guilty party. And similarly, the existence of a thing does _not_ imply that something else "created" it. (The End. Or, one could also say, The thing may have _always_ existed. Or, the thing may have developed out of some unthinking random process.)

JohnCorrespondent

The automated quote left off part of the message.

This refers to the post of Sep 19, 2019 19:56:22.

straightup had written "The IPCC actually attaches percentage estimates of how certain they are with their reports."

Then Voice of Reason replied, "... You still haven't realized that's a ploy to eliminate them ever having to admit they're wrong? ... "

Attaching percentage estimates like that is just good explaining. It's very common and normal that a person (whether a scientist or some other kind of person) will not know a thing absolutely. Usually it makes sense to understand that there is some chance of error.

It could also be a "ploy". But _anything_ could be a "ploy". Maybe the person who accused them of a ploy is himself engaging in a ploy.

As I was saying, there is some chance of error. Some people, and some fields (such as Statistics or Probability), have ways to reasonably derive good estimates of certainty or uncertainty, which can be expressed as percentages. Some of these estimation methods have been tested and found to be useful.