(Side question: how long ago was that nonce error—recent?)

To your question, the answer depends on which things you mean. For example, if you want to know why matter arises from energy, the article you are commenting on provides a proposed answer (interdimensional geometry can explain the entire Standard Model). If you want to know why energy could have arisen from nothing (assuming it even did; that has not been established), I discuss the Lincoln-Wasser model. If you mean metalaws like the metalaws of evolution (from cosmic to biological), I discuss the Wong-Hazen model; or metalaws of uniformity, I discuss that in respect to the Argument from Uniformities. If you mean specific laws, like the Laws of Thermodynamics or Hydrostatics, I have covered things like that in All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical.

And so on.

Pick a lane, and we can drive down it and see.

(A lot of this has also been done across the whole range of physics by Victor Stenger in very technical terms in Comprehensible Cosmos.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/01/05/how-did-the-matter-in-our-universe-arise-from-nothing/?sh=3b3766f24c2e

I don’t know what you are asking about then. It sounds like you are asking how we can mediate between conclusions when we have operating biases. Which is well-studied cognitive science. It’s what we invented the scientific method, for example, to address. Basically, sound critical thinking strategies, when applied, will protect you from strongly biased conclusions. That’s what we invented them for (and we developed ways of testing they worked that are immune to bias; which is why empiricism is the dominant epistemology today—you can’t “mistakenly think” you’ve landed on the moon, for example; not without extraordinarily improbable Cartesian Demons).

That’s not a question about defining God. It’s a question about how we know whether a particular defined God probably doesn’t exist.

Thanks for your reply Dr Carrier, I do get your point and thanks to show me that fallacy.

Maybe I didn’t explain it well enough. My point is: can we use any logic to tell if there is a God or no God ? Or is it our human brain that tries to make a sense out of it…

Isn’t it that we make the reality from what we want to see?

Let say I’m a believer and I will think what is going on it’s God’s will and so on.

I’m agnostic and my lenses will make me see same things differently.

And same for an atheist, but there will be no God in the picture.

I go in a room and first thing to catch my glance is whatever is of any significance to me.

Even if we do use Science the more rationaly we can, that bias will still affect the result in some way.

I want to find or reach this or that conclusion, then my findings will correlate with X results, that fits my core beliefs.

Like you mention in your previous answer: “atom are mostly empty space, depends on how one defines empty space…”

Sorry for my last part, which is less rational, but my question to you, is what you think of having intuitions toward things that happen trully later on.

For a simple example, last year I bought back in DVD the movie “The Name of the Rose” from 1986 with Sean Connery and then the Author died within two weeks of my purchase and again with Jerry Lewis’ death and few others.

It also happened in other sphere of my life which have helped me out. Even my spouse have noticed some with me.

I’ve no medium pretention or any beliefs in such and I find those events odds, especialy if there is nothing outside the human experience to explain them.

“Could it be there is a God and No God at the same time?”

Not on the same definition of God. That’s logically impossible. And logical contradictions are devoid of meaning. They describe nothing, by definition.

And if you switch definitions mid-argument, that’s an equivocation fallacy.

So at most you can say, there are some definitions of the word “God” on which the entity described would exist. For example, “any real human hailed a god” (like Julius Caesar). On that definition, yes, there have been lots of gods. For example, “any superhuman entity, even if fictional, that people believe exists.” Yes, millions of those gods exist. For example, if you covertly define God as simply a feeling, an emotion, humans have. Then gods exist. But really all you mean is an emotion generated by brains. Etc.

But as you can see, there isn’t any practical use in doing that.

I’ve read your both articles and as I agnostic with deist and even some pantheist views as Spinoza, could that be both ways at the same time ?

I mean could that be there is a God and No God at the same time ?

Us human with our two sides brain tend to have a black and white thinking toward life and it takes a lot to step back and have a new look upon any given issue or situation, etc. Like some kind of a third way to consider everything.

Why I do consider the answer to be possible it is both ways, it’s Paradox. Something and his contrary can cohabits or coexist.

And as atheists sure I don’t believe in that religion personal God or gods, as I know that even if I pray to anything, mostly nothing will happen.

But with times passing and having experience things that I do consider spiritual, much like the book of James Redfield The Celestine prophecy, makes me wonder… And those said spiritual experiences are more frequent since 2 or 3 years now than ever… So what’s that ?

Indeed.

It’s worth pointing out that the notion that atoms are mostly empty space, depends on how one defines empty space. This is a good article on that question. In physics, every fraction of space is always filled with virtual particles, and so even a vacuum (in earth orbit for instance) is actually never “empty” (and there possibly can never be such a thing as a completely empty space). Likewise, electrons are usually described as ripples in a field, and the field occupies the whole atomic radius (that’s in fact how that radius gets defined), but that then raises the question of what exactly is the electron: the dimensional space or field that is rippling, or the ripple itself? (Which has an indeterminate location, statistically being “located” everywhere around an atom at different probabilities.)

That linked article explains how we get different answers for “how large is an electron” based on which thing we decide to call the electron, or how we decide to even say the electron “has a location.” For example, the field description, where the electron is just a blur occupying the whole atom, assumes the “location” of the electron is “the whole atom,” which is one way to talk about the electron’s location. But the Uncertainty Principle entails its location actually cannot be known within the atom, except to a probability. Which on Superstring Theory is the fact that the “bumps” (the ripples) that defines the electron, in the sense of what we have to “bump into” to notice there is an electron there, is constantly moving around the atom, in ways we can’t predict.

So in one sense, the electron occupies the whole atom; in another sense, it has no clear location but is constantly moving around the atom, in ways that place its location randomly at different times through the whole volume of the atom. But the “spread out” or “blurry” sense, makes the electron more analogous to air in an “empty box” than to anything we would call solid.

So, in ordinary English, “outer space” is empty and not solid; but in physics, it’s entirely filled, without a single gap, with electromagnetic and gravitational and Higgs and other fields, and entirely filled, without a single gap, with virtual particles (in a particular sense, the same thing). But that doesn’t match what ordinary English means by “solid” nor does it contradict what common usage means by “empty” (which frequently is used to refer even to, for example, “an empty box” that is of course filled with air). In what sense is a “field” or an “electron cloud” actually a solid object in ordinary English parlance? None, really. In what sense is a space entirely occupied by a “field” or an “electron cloud” actually still describable as “empty”? Pretty much the same sense as when I describe a box on my desk as empty. And really, even more so than that.