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Comment by Kednicma | Hacker News Reader

I've not confessed to or recanted anything, silly; I merely have outlined my position more clearly so that you don't have any ridiculous dodges like "that's what an atheist would say."

I don't have a straw man. I have any deity which is like Jehovah, with Jehovah himself as a special case. Any deity is subject to self-defeating arguments and open to criticism from science.

I am not a naturalist, but that's the closest position that you can imagine, I guess.

Anyway, if you don't actually want to talk about QM, then we'll just have to talk about how Jehovah's followers keep trying to do something about COVID-19, but all of their appeals have led to nothing. Meanwhile, science and technology give us models for understanding, combating, and preventing the pandemic. Are you really going to pledge yourself to your deity and cough your lungs out?

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Broskie, take it from an agnostic/natural theist, who actually ended up going down the Philosophy of Religion rabbit hole. Throwaway is right. You've lost before you even got started. The arguments you brought up have been well trod, and very influential pieces of theistic philosophy built around them.

Science can only posit the how. Not the who or the why. Throwing quantum mechanics at the problem doesn't solve anything either, because ultimately you at some point at the end of a nigh infinite chain of why are left with the question "Why something rather than Nothing?"

The answer is either silence, or God, the recognized nominative signpost of the answer , even by the Wittgensteinian approach.

Your COVID-19 related rantings commit the fallacy of assuming the nature of God, or committing the anthropocentric fallacy of thinking God even gives a rat's arse about us, or that there is enough of a working understanding of prayer to count on it in a technological way. It's not a terribly uncommon itis for the modern theistic skeptic, but does demonstrate a horrendous lack of effort in having grounded one's skepticism through actual effort to confront and dismantle the theistic construct at it's core, or to understand it's place in human society.

Religion has no beef with science, nor the other way around.

All you're showing is that you don't know much of quantum mechanics either. Should you choose to change that, MIT has published a nice lecture series on quantum physics [0], the first in a group of three.

Your bold claim "why something rather than nothing?" assumes that there is, in fact, a something to refer to, and QM directly challenges the simplicity of that assumption. So many words to fight against the lack of an ontic wavefunction!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...

this claim is contested , and some would even say disproven; why do you keep bringing it up like a life raft.

Show your work. Prove for us that the wavefunction of the universe is ontic.

Again, strawmen and worse. Theism hardly excludes science or technology. 3 children down you attempt to change the subject again. You have already admitted that you could only argue against deism. I don't expect everyone to come to the light (Strong links between autism & atheism); I do expect a higher level of commentary on HN ...

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