Would there be less uncertainty about any God's existence if it was made clear in ancient times that he or she was an outer space alien?

It would be more likely to be possible, because of it being a natural explanation, but not any less uncertain if the same lack of actual evidence persists.

Why yes. That would make all the difference in the world.~

Any outer space alien would be different from my admittedly vague conception of what a god is. Even if aliens had genetically created us and established us on Earth as an experiment I wouldn’t call them gods. They would be superior to us as we are superior to apes but that would not make them gods.

It would be pretty peaceful. Some might even think it would be boring, could we do it? I doubt it. Some dipshit running around looking for something better to do would screw it up.

Ok, Adam and Eve couldnt even let it be. We’re fubard.

Also, who says that is not already the case? The entire mythology was passed down orally for generations before the first thing was written down, so even if this Goa’uld made clear that he was an alien, over the generations the whole story would have morphed into this supernatural nonsense that we have now.

Your premise, more than any religious argument, would beg the question of who/what created the God alien, since it be within our spectrum of physical reality.

The religious explanation doesn’t require the question of who/what created God, since their God supposedly exists outside of our dimension of reality, and is not subject to our physical notions of cause/effect, time, space. That’s the mistake many atheists make by asking who/what created God. The question presumes that God is subject to our physical laws which require such tautology.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
We ask this question because we realise the logical fallacy of special pleading which manifests itself in arbitrarily absolving the deity of the same attributes the supposed creation has that they say make the deity necessary.

Would a fish argument for the existence of a bird be a case of special pleading, by absolving the bird of fish attributes?

You need to put some actual effort into constructing analogies, because right now, your little sentence does not make a lick of sense.

It’s not a little sentence. It has over ten words. It’s not little at all. And it makes as much sense to “arbitrarily absolve” a bird from “attributes” of a fish as it does to “arbitrarily absolve” a deity from “attributes” of humans.

Did the bird create the fish?
That is the first thing that makes no sense.
The creationist’s argument is that because the universe is complex, it had to have a god to create it.
Now, because this god is even more complex than the universe it created, thus by the arguments own logic, this god requires a creator.
The special pleading fallacy here is that the creationist gives the god they conjured up special characteristics, such as being “outside of time” and being “eternal”, for no logically justified reason, solely to not make their argument fall apart on the spot.

Yes I understand. That understanding allows me to disagree.

The first point is the word “arbitrarily”. God is not “arbitrarily” absolved from being subject to the known physical laws of the universe. God is “specifically” absolved because it supposedly exists eternally, which envelopes the physical laws of before, during, and after. Anything less, would disqualify the notion of it being a God in the first place.

We should have a problem with a human being absolved from human attributes. But there is no fallacy in specifically absolving a God from human attributes, anymore than specifically absolving a bird from fish attributes. The question of “creation” is an entirely separate issue. The bird doesn’t need to create the fish for the fallacy to be used incorrectly. God being a different and separate being existing in a realm beyond physical reality does not preclude that it is also the creator of physical reality.

This obviously doesn’t mean much to the hard Marxist Materialist. But it weighs heavily upon the Quantum Physicist and Cognitive Scientists.

Second, the use of the term “complex”, is incorrect. Complexity is a term to describe physical phenomenon. Thus it would not apply to descriptions of non physical phenomenon. Thus God could not be “measured” as any more or less complex than the universe it supposedly created, if it created the universe at all.

Everything that begins to exist requires a cause. There cannot be any infinite regression of causes. Therefore, the universe must have a first cause: God.
If somebody were to dismiss this modified version of the argument with that’s special pleading! it would be an incorrect use of the fallacy. This is is because the modification explicitly exempts an eternal God from the need for a cause, so does not contain any special pleading. The underlying logic is on better and less fallacious grounds as special pleading is a formal logical fallacy – a problem with the structure, not content. Special pleading is stating ⇒, and giving ad hoc exceptions. If these exceptions are, in fact, built into the logical conditions then there is nothing special about the pleading, ergo, no fallacy.

Key term there, Everything that “begins” to exist. The idea of which God never “began” to exist. If you believe in that sort of thing.

But hey… you can have it. I didn’t really come to debate. Just wanted to answer the question. Always enjoy reading your posts @ragingloli. Last word is yours my friend.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
Yes, it is arbitrary, because you have no justified reason to believe that this god actually has these attributes, even if it were to exist in the first place.
And no, not having these attributes would not disqualify it from being a god, because such a definition of a god is in itself arbitrary, and by the way contradicts religious history, which has gods that are indeed neither nor outside the physical laws, like almost the entire greek pantheon.

“We should have a problem with a human being absolved from human attributes. But there is no fallacy in specifically absolving a God from human attributes.”
God is not absolved from human attributes, it is absolved from the attributes of everything we know to exist.

“Complexity is a term to describe physical phenomenon. Thus it would not apply to descriptions of non physical phenomenon. Thus God could not be “measured” as any more or less complex than the universe it supposedly created, if it created the universe at all.”
Wrong. Complexity is not limited to physical phenomenon.
A god that creates something needs to employ a process to create, and that process necessarily has to have complexity.
A god that has conscience and intelligence also has to have complexity, because it needs to form thoughts and reasoning to come up with, and comprehend what it wants to create.

“Everything that begins to exist requires a cause. There cannot be any infinite regression of causes. Therefore, the universe must have a first cause: God.”
There are several problems with this argument, as it applies to the universe, and in general.
You can not assume, for one, that the universe began to exist, because we do not know that to be true. All we do know is that all matter and energy in the currently known universe was once compressed into one infinitesimally small point.
This singularity could have been ‘eternal’ in nature, especially since time itself did not exist prior to the big bang.
M-Theory also suggests that the universe is just one of countless n-dimensional membranes in an 11 dimensional hyperverse, which itself could also very well be eternal.
Which brings me to the last problem of this argument: There is no reason for this first cause to be a god, which comes with the unnecessary baggage of consciousness, will and intent, neither of which are necessary for being a cause to an event, especially in light of the alternatives of a prior eternal singularity and an eternal 11 dimensional hyperverse.

@ragingloli What if we changed the wording thus:

“Everything that begins to exist requires a cause. There cannot be any infinite regression of causes. Therefore, the universe must have a first cause:” Shit Happens.

Would that change the equasion either positively or negatively?

The ‘believers’ would never even begin to accept that aliens were that external source. This is a complete non-starter.

Someone’s been watching History Channel’s Ancient Aliens I suspect. Although I mentioned this in a recent Q as well, because if the Mayans or anyone else learned technologies from aliens and simply called them ‘Gods’, which was shortened over time to ‘God’, it’s feasible that that is reality.

@elbanditoroso I’m a believer and I disagree with you. There is no real definition of God the father that I know of that would conflict with biblical teachings.

“There cannot be any infinite regression of causes”. What is evolution then?

Both Bible and “Ancient Aliens” are bad fiction. No ETS ever visit Earth, surely cannot visit us. Theory of Relativity show matter cannot travel near velocity of light, inertial mass increase exponentially when velocity increase. Interstellar distances too great any spaceships make such trips at feasible amounts of time. My lover’s cousin say some scientists calculate fastest possible spaceship require about 200 years travel here if crew live nearest extra-solar planet. Require 200 more years return home. Distances isolate any life forms.

Shinimegami makes good sense here. She told me about Fluther. Now, she says she cannot sign in. I wonder why. Nobel Prize winning physicist Edward M. Purcell and other top scientists calculate that interstellar travel is not feasible. They point out that the fuel requirements for such travel in reasonable amounts of time can never be met, so no life forms can travel between stars in feasible amounts of time. Can we ever harness hydrogen fusion that is so enormously destructive? Even if we could, and that is doubtful, the amount needed would be billions of times larger than the ship. How could we carry and accelerate such a mass of fuel? We need more fuel to do that, and even more fuel for accelerating the first fuel. We have infinite regression, so it’s quite impossible to accelerate a spaceship fast enough to make such a long, long trip in a lifetime of any being. It’s illogical to say everything must have a cause and then exempt gods from that requirement. That is special pleading and is illogical.

Where’s the evidence? Give me some rational reason to believe what you’re suggesting..