Not all definitions of a god require omnipresence, eternalness, or omnipotence.
And what definition is this, exactly?
Probably something along the lines of the invisible fire-breathing dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage.
The problem with your question, FD, is that under most circumstances you cannot prove or falsify a negative.
Luckily, I do not have to. He who asserts must prove. So he who asserts God exists must prove it. Failing production of such proof, the non-existence of God is the resonable default position.
Proponents of various things from Bigfoot to UFOs to God use the clever but illogical statement “Absence of proof does not constitute proof of absence.”
While this makes a cute aphorism that is constantly used by such people as if it contained great wisdom, the saying itself flies in the face of normal reason and scientific method.
Now, there are very limited cases in which I can prove the non-existence of something. I have a mug in front of me on the desk as I write. If we can agree on the meaning of the term “full-grown African elephant”, including the average and minimum size and weight of this animal, there are a number of ways I can prove that a full-grown African elephant is absent from my cup. We can weigh it, we can look inside it, etc.
But did you know that I CANNOT prove that there are no Leprechauns in Ireland? The only way I could prove that there are no wee people about 10 cm high living in the Emerald Isle would be for me to have the capacity to see every single place in Ireland at once, just as I can see the whole of the inside of my mug at once.
Similarly, I cannot proove a negative regarding Bigfoot. I cannot see the whole of the Pacific Northwest at once in order to proove that he does not exist.
So in both cases, and with God as well, the default position, for lack of evidence, is that Leprechauns, Bigfoot and God do not exist.
But all you have to do is produce a Leprechaun, a Bigfoot or a God, and the default position will have been falsified. Just as the default position that giraffes did not exist was falsified when soneone produced one in Europe.
But until we have fasification of the natural default position, while it remains true that the non-existence of anything is more or less impossible to prove, it IS possible to give perfectly good reasons for not believing something.
Any anatomist can explain to you why a 10-cm high human being with a human form would have trouble just existing. Or why something with that small a brain and that limited a number of brain cells would have trouble thinking, let alone being very clever.
Consistent absence of proof may not be irrefutable proof of absence, but it does support the suspicion, at least temporarily, that the being in question does not exist.
For example, scientific tests have been done with double-blind protocols in which sick persons were prayed for. The groups were large enough for statistical validity. The prayer for a speedy recovery without complications was done by groups of believing Christians praying for specific persons, all of whom had the same affliction. There was no difference between the prayed-for group and the control group.
Similarly if you go to places like Lourdes, you will see many claims that a cancer has been cured. But the one thing you will NEVER see is the one thing that would prove absolutely that something miraculous had occurred. There are NO cases of a human limb growing back. Yet, we know that this is possible in biological entities on Earth such as lobsters.
So, consistrent absence of proof year after year, century after century may not be proof of absence, but it sure gets atheists wondering. :dubious:
As I see it:
“There is no God” – Falsifiable by objective manifestation of a God (though you’d have quite a few folks insisting that this is really a trick being played on us by Aliens From Another Dimension, and I don’t mean the Atheists but all the people whose gods are not like the one who showed up. THEY are the ones who’d make trouble).
“There is a God” or “There are Gods” – Falsifiable only if you come up with an experiment that can objectively and irrefutably produce such a result as would be impossible if a god or gods existed(*), and you provide an exhaustive, specific, comprehensive definition of a god or of all possible gods each of whose defining characteristics is itself falsifiable, and ran the experiment on all of them; otherwise each falsification is only of THAT god or type of god.
(*You cannot have an experiment that requires the god(s) to cooperate, it must work even if the deity/ies were to hold a sit-down strike against any manifestation).
Many atheists I know do not so much make a categorical “There is no God” decree, but more along the lines of “There is no verifiable evidence of a god and no aspect of the Universe that compels the existence of a god, so the presumption shall be of non-existence of a god.”
Y’know, then there is a whole another different question – which is, say we DO run into such entities as can only be “gods” or a set of phenomena that can only be “the spirit world”. Does it necessarily follow that there must be a religion involving them? I mean, we already from classical Buddhism know you can have religion (or something that looks a lot like it) *without * gods, can one have gods w/o religion (not necessarily “organized religion”, but just worship/reverence/moral modeling based upon the gods or the spirits)? Or can one simply have “the gods next door” who just are there and have no impact on you?
So long as the being or beings aren’t bound by any rules (omnipotent and omnicient, I suppose), I don’t see why we couldn’t imagine a scenario where this particular universe was created (perhaps as an experiment?) and forgotten so that the deities took no role whatsoever in its happenings.
However, if such entities were revealed to man-kind, I imagine many would attempt to appeal for intervention from the gods so that their lives would not be considered meaningless. Thus, I’d bet that “religion” would be quick to follow, even if the deity expressed absolutely no interest in being worshipped or recognized.
Fine, I’ll accept that the statement “God doesn’t exist” is unreasonable if you accept that the following statements are equally unreasonable:
Zeus does not exist.
Jesus didn’t sacrifice babies to the devil.
When you die, your soul will not be transplanted into a bowl of pudding.
I will not rule the world tomorrow.
In other words if atheism is “unreasonable” for denying the existence of an unprovable positive claim, then so is any religion that affirmed any of the above.
Eh. It could be just very technologically advanced physical beings like ourselves. If you want to call that “god”, then OK, but that doesn’t fit the usual definition.
Well, that’d fall under sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. In any case, I never understood how the existence of creatures with godlike abilities somehow translated into a need to worship said creatures.
And if I’m wrong, may we all be horribly crushed from above somehow.
We are manifistations of the Cargo Cult. Except we do not see the planes. We have to pretend a lot more.
It’s possible that it’s aliens, but not likely. Coordinating the movements of stars separated by hundreds or thousands of light years so that they appeared to move into the proper position with respect to earth in a single afternoon would require breaking the laws of physics as we know it. The distances involved mean that the stars will need to be transported at greater than lightspeed. Consider also the fact that the message is written in modern English, but many of the stars would have had to been moved into position before English even existed as a language. That implies control over time itself. And consider that we’ve never observed such an event before targeted at another planet in our galaxy. It’s a one-off just for us.
A one-time demonstration of overwhelming transcendent power? Power that clearly is unbounded by the laws of physics and causality?
In such a case I would argue that “God did it” is a more reasonable explanation that “super-intelligent aliens did it”.
I’ve seen the “you should not test God” thing brought up in conversations about looking into the Christian God; with the suggestion that God himself would cause experiments designed to learn about him to fail.
That God is a transcendent being who lives beyond the bounds of normal time and space. As opposed to a god who lives in the clouds, or on top of a big mountain, or on the moon.
Furthermore he is a god who “works in mysterious ways”. Although in the past he is credited with having done overt miracles that all could witness and acknowledge, he currently limits himself to working through indirect means. So, for example, rather than teleporting orphans out of a burning building, he lends some subtle and insubstantial aid to the firemen who carry them outside.
Most people who lived in the past believed in a much more engaged and ever-present god or gods. But as our capacity to put supernatural beings to empirical tests has increased, our conception of god has retreated further and further from the immediate, physical universe.
I do not know any atheists who sprung from the loins of atheists. We were brought up in a church background. Somewhere logic overcame our indoctrination. We asked questions and answers were not there. You must have faith fails miserably.
Not that I don’t disagree with the whole “logic over indoctrination” business, but you do realise your point about atheists not having atheist children would also make the same argument for theism?
Valteron, although I agree with your post in every other respect and in its intended meaning, I must take issue with this part:
That experiment is polluted as there is no such thing as an “unprayed for” group. Catholics everywhere (and many others, I am sure) pray for all the diseased and infirm. Unless prayer is a quantifiable effect and you are trying to measure a difference caused by a specific prayer (which makes a huge untested assumption about how prayer works), there is no way to shield the control group from unwanted and unaccounted for prayer.
Plus, how did they determined if these “believing christians” were really believing. Or that they were praying “right” or that they were not praying for those poor guys in the control group (and if they weren’t then they were very bad christians).
That experiment was a total crock.
And for those expecting miracles and the such to prove God. Would a real omnieverythingiant God have to break his own rules to make something happen?
If God wanted the Red Sea to open, he would have made the universe so that, from its very beginning, the Brownian movements of every atom and molecule that would eventually come to be part of it at that time would align in the right way at the right time. Or cause an earthquake, or wind or whatever needed. Ditto for all other miracles. They must all have natural explanations. Otherwise this is a very sloppy God that needs to break his rules to correct for his mistakes.
Maybe this is why we have such a flipping huge universe to hold just a few billion little humans on just one planet. It takes all the rest to manipulate/compute our existence here.
Even if God set up the universe in such a way as to make “miraculous”-seeming but actually natural events occur, i’m afraid that doesn’t explain Jesus… unless the universe was set up to require his death in order to absolve sins, and set up to naturally raise him from the dead? Nah. Miracles are central to most faiths. The lack of them is certainly a lack of evidence where there should be some.
What isn’t explained about Jesus? All the “accidents” are explainable with enough cooperating muons and pi-mesons doing the Lord’s Will. If it is the need for him that troubles you, I believe that our Free Will is supernatural in nature (with life AWKI being just a by-product of this elaborate billiards shot that is our universe) and that his coming and dying is as necessary as everything else. They are just the “natural” workings of our supernatural decisions being played out. As for the need for the Universe existing at all if we are all supernatural, well, there is a mystery for you.
There is absolutely no basis for that statement and it is in no way true. All else aside any statement can be phrased in the negative or positive. If we were to believe your assertion that you cannot prove or falsify a negative then we can not prove or falsify anything.
“Bigfoot exists” is a positive statement, but can be readily be rephrased as “Washington is not a Bigfoot free state”. By your argument it is now impossible to prove or falsify simply because we have rephrased it. The same applies to any statement at all. “Hawaii is an island chain” can be readily falsified or proven, yet it can be simply rephrased as “Hawaii is not contiguous with any continental mainland” and somehow this becomes impossible to falsify. Why can I no longer circumnavigate Hawaii just because we change the phrasing?
Conversely “Bigfoot does not exist” is, according to you, impossible to prove or falsify, yet we can readily phrase it as “This US is bigfoot free” which somehow then becomes falsifiable. “Gravitational attraction does not depend on mass” is somehow impossible to prove or flasify because it’s a negative, yet magically becomes flasifiable simply because we rephrase it as “Gravitational attraction is constant at all masses”.
Sorry, but whoever told ytou that it is impossible to falsify a negative has sold you a pup. The claim makes no sense whatsoever, as you will see if you just think about it for a moment.