You have to concede that the chance exists that a person throwing chairs could accidentally stack them. The probability of this happening is extremely small, but it does exist. If you repeat this experiment often enough, it is bound to happen eventually. If you entered just one room and the chairs in it were stacked, it would indeed be most rational to assume intent behind it. However, if you entered billions of rooms and the chairs were scattered around in all but one, you would assume that in the single room where they are stacked this structure came to be by accident, an aberration if you will.
There is no such thing as "believing a little bit": If you don't fully believe something, you lack belief by definition.
It is very possible to believe in the existence of some god who exists outside the realm of our experience.
However, is the existence of an unknown, abstract, imperceptible god not indistinguishable from the absence of one?
How does one approach the task of verifying his existence?
A physicist can cherish the belief that there is a grand unifying formula that unites all branches of physics. He doesn't know what it looks like or even whether it exists at all, but he can search for it.
What sets this quest apart from the search for a god is that the physicists have the scientific method at their disposal and they are working in a (mostly) well-defined framework.
These tools are not available to those who search for a god. Attempting to use them would amount to a category error: "God does not exist because his existence cannot be scientifically proven" is a nonsensical argument.
Is then not all we are left with blind faith?
Given the choice of blindly believing or not believing at all, why should one choose the former?
Personally, I have never been one for blindly believing in anything, so unless I am presented with convincing evidence, I will always opt for nonbelief as my default position.
Some theories may seem more plausible than others, but if they are unfalsifiable their apparent plausibility does not change the fact that blindly believing in them is all one can do.
Let the philosophical bloodsports begin!
1. Allegation: "When you try an infinite number of times something that IS possible, but is very unlikely to happen, eventually it happens,
which to someone that does not take into account the infinite number of trials would seem like the product of intent or intelligent design".
Notice how I uppercased "is" in the allegation. This is crucial, because in your first argument it is implicitly assumed that the event that we are arguing about (the emergence of life) is something that can happen randomly when tried enough times (10 billion years x seconds in every year = 435 quadrillion times assuming each second it was tried). But herein lies the fallacy, which I served to you in a silver plate, admittedly: it's very easy, and would take much less than a quadrillion times, to get stuff stacked,
but not to get stuff that is stacked and from that point on can stack more stuff on it's own, and with each generation devise much more functions than stacking. So you are right in dismantling my analogy, it just so happens that life is a very different type of event than a simple unlikely, static happenstance like things getting piled up. Life is a dynamic, self-perpetuating, self-perfecting event. We don't know anything like it.
2. Allegation: "You either believe in something, or think it is real or you don't. There are no nuances in terms of knowledge or belief".
This is illogical. Knowledge and belief are quite probabilistic in terms of how we invest in them. Many things we do are based in things we think are possible, but might not exist or happen at all.
But this takes us to a fallacy you fall into, a strawman.
3. Allegation: "You are arguing for the existence of God and believing in such God in blind faith".
Not quite, no. I am arguing for the possibility of intent or design (or just a "supernatural" origin) behind the beginning of life, a kind of event that seems to have only happened once and that we cannot repeat or understand. The idea of an anthropomorphic God is infantile. Now, you cant prove that life came about by coincidence, because you cannot prove your idea that trying enough times the inert elements in the Universe would become alive. We haven't seen this, we can't reproduce it. I argue that your idea that life came about by chance is also infalsifiable, just as the idea of God (particularly in the usual terms) seems to be infalsifiable scientifically.
We couldn't even simulate the emergence of life with a program, since we don't know how inert matter becomes organic. That parameter is missing. What we are talking about is so complex that we cannot yet emulate it with automatons, but even if we did we would have only proven that a self-perpetuating, self-perfecting system of multiplying entities can be DESIGNED or CREATED (as we did), certainly not that it can happen by chance. And our automatons wouldn't even be sentient at that point, and I doubt we could ever make them with materialistic means.
