More importantly; how do you know you can trust your eyes.
Well, you certainly can’t verify it as false, that’s right (:p). You’re right about the difficulties in deciding supremacy, though; however, that’s more of a consequence of the less-than-rigorous definition of the notion. After all, what constitutes a being’s being ‘higher’ than another? If you have two candidate beings, one able to, I don’t know, lift in excess of 100 tons, the other able to read minds, which is the higher?
However, I trust that omnipotence is sufficient to establish supremacy, since there can’t be anything more powerful than that. This, then, is falsifiable again: find something the supposedly omnipotent being can’t do, and it’s probably not omnipotent. Same goes for omniscience, if you’d want to include that.
My point, however, was that your conclusion – that you can’t logically decide whether to believe or not – does not follow from the non-falsifiability of either stance. The examples I gave were just generic ones, contingent on what, exactly, you’d want the properties of the particular godhood under scrutiny to be. For all such properties, it’s possible to either logically reject or accept them, and thus, to either reject or accept the existence of a god with these properties, completely independent from the issue of falsifiability. You can reject omnipotence because god can’t create a taco so hot he couldn’t eat it, or you can reject omnipotence and omniscience being possessed by one singular entity because it couldn’t both know everything and be able to do everything, since either it would be unable to do something it didn’t know it would do, or unable to know its own actions. You can thus reject a god possessing these properties in a logical way, whether his existence is falsifiable or not.
Then the default stance on everything has to be ‘maybe’, and it is impossible to formulate any theories of nature at all, since there are infinitely many other theories explaining the observed phenomena equally well. You can’t start from a ‘maybe’; you have to start from an assumption and seek to disprove it. And in this case, the only assumption that it’s sensible to start from is that of disbelief.
On the contrary, it is necessary to assume the non-existence of anything not either in evidence or suggested on compelling theoretical grounds; otherwise, there would not be such a thing as science, since everybody could happily hang on to their pet theories about unicorns, orgons, leprechauns and angels providing the force to glue atoms together.
Those wanting to derive predictions from a theory care. What if the fairies get bored with their job one day? Or they get a new foreman that makes them work twice as hard? They decide to reduce to a 35-hour workweek? You get the idea: if you permit superfluous explanatory entities, you lose the predictive value of your theory. Restricting these entities does, of course, not guarantee your theory to be right, and its predictions to come true – but it allows testability. Without that, trying to find any scientific account at all is simply pointless.
Howabout, “If God exists, God is (a) a power/love-hungry asshole, (b) indifferent, or (c) irrelevant, so I’d rather believe that there just isn’t one”?
You realize humans have more than one sense, no?
In fact, we have more than five. The sense that gives us knowledge of the position and existence of the parts of our bodies is called kinesthaesthia. Admittedly, it is not infallible, as evidenced by the phantom pain sometimes experienced by amputees–but then, none of our senses are infallible.
And why is it off kilter?
And what if I told you that somewhere out there is an apple that falls upwards instead of down? You can’t prove there isn’t, because you can’t prove a negative. And if such an apple exists then the theory of gravity falls apart completely. We can’t know. So drawing conclusions about the existence of gravity isn’t “scientifically rigorous” either.
Erm. I guess I’m taking issue with yours then.
But yes. I’m taking issue with the implication that I am an idiot for choosing to believe God doesn’t exist rather than choosing to accept that I cannot know he/she/it/they exist.
It is a fairly extreme example of pedantry. My argument is that given the amount of reasons to believe God doesn’t exist, and the amount of reasons (none) to believe he does exist - it is reasonable to take the stance that he/she/it/they don’t exist.
So you’re starting from the assumption that god does not exist, and trying to disprove his nonexistence. How’s that working out for you? Published any papers? What kind of studies have you designed? Schrodinger’s boxes where 50% of the time, the water comes out as wine?
You’re applying science to an inherently nonscientific process, and that’s kind of my point. If a supreme being exists, it’s beyond the capabilities of the scientific method. That doesn’t mean science is useless, or that we have to assume that wine ferments because goblins dip their feet in the barrels.
You form a hypothesis that is testable and you TEST it. You cannot test ‘god does not exist.’ It is a question to which the scientific method does not apply.
Further, the default stance for science is ‘I don’t know.’ If the default stance were ‘I believe in X.’ or ‘I don’t believe in X.’ then there’d be nobody testing. If you believe in a conclusion before you start your experiment, then confirmation bias is going to color your results.
That’s an entirely rational and valid belief. It fits in category #3.
I think that’s where we part ways – neither 1 nor 2 can be shown to be true, and thus, they are both unsupported, I agree so far. But they are not equally unsupported – there’s no fifty-fifty chance of god existing, so to speak. Else, every position is a total crapshoot – you could believe in unicorns, disbelieve in the Christian god, worship Shiva, poo-poo belief in Leprechauns, and expect the delivery of a nice, warm cup of tea from somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Earth any time now, and claim to have just as reasonable a position as a Christian or an atheist or Linus waiting in the pumpkin patch. Obviously, there’s no great utility to such an economy of metaphysics.
If all positions are equal, none carries any explanatory power. Thus, you take a look at what position is the more reasonable one to take, while always acknowledging that you may well be wrong – nobody’s ever demanded reasonableness from the universe, to my knowledge. And you’ll soon find that if you want to be able to make predictive statements about the world in a testable fashion, the only way to go is the Occam’s razor minimal one, forcing you into disbelief until proven otherwise.
The reason for this is simple: if you have a set of observational facts about this world, you propose a theory to account for these facts. If you are working under the requirement that you should keep explanatory entities at a minimum, you can then take a look at your theory and conclude that if it holds, you should be able to make another observation. Failing to make this observation, or making an observation contrary to your theory’s predictions falsifies it, while making this prediction allows you to hang onto it a little longer. Once you eschew this minimalism, though, you can make infinitely many predictions with equal justification, by simply positing the entities necessary to cause certain observable events; you theory can never be falsified, can never lead to any certain predictions, can never explain anything.
Hence, in my view, disbelief is always to be favoured. It could, however, also always be wrong.
Combining replies, because I don’t have the time to reply individually.
Any implication of idiocy from the categorization I offered is imagined. The most rational conclusion is that we can’t know the answer to the question. That doesn’t mean the other two are irrational, just not as well-supported. (In that there’s no hard evidence for either one.)
You’re missing the point. If you TOLD me of such an apple, it wouldn’t effect the theory of gravity one iota. We have ample, measured and consistent evidence about how gravity works. We have NO evidence of whether or not god exists. Ergo, the situations are not analogous. However, if you actually SAW an apple fall up instead of down, then we’d have reason to investigate further, and we could find out why it did so.
Well, unless you’re positing Special Unicorns that leave only the fresh scent of pine instead of a corpse like most of their horsey cousins when dead, then there’s an evidentiary problem to overcome. There’s also the greater problem of the whole ‘supreme being’ issue - a deity would be consistently undetectable until it didn’t want to be, whereas a fallible being would sometimes make mistakes and get caught on tape.
In my view, it is always damaging to the scientific process to form a belief or disbelief until the testing has concluded (or at the very least, started). A hypothesis is not the same as a belief. To borrow from Kevin Smith’s Dogma, a belief is distinct from an idea. A “belief” is an idea with emotional or intellectual attachment. You defend beliefs.
And the distinction I am drawing is between a lack of belief and the presence of a belief in the opposite position. Belief and disbelief are both conclusions that hamper further discussion. A lack of belief indicates an open mind suitable for inquiry.
But that is not what I said or implied. It is idiotic to assume non-existence is the “Truth” to the exclusion of all other theories and/or to mock those who do not accept this “Truth”.
I firmly believe there is no god. I know many people equally well educated, intelligent, etc. that firmly believe there is a god. None of us know for certain either way.
The way science works is that you form a hypothesis and then look for ways to prove or disprove it. For example, my hypothesis is that light is propagated through a medium in the same manner that sound is propagated through air. So you set up an experiment where you look at the speed of light in different directions. If the hypothesis is true, then light sent in the direction of the medium (ether) will appear to be faster than it will when sent in a direction opposite the medium. Experiment done, and there is no evidence the hypothesis is true. Therefore we conclude there is no evidence that light propagates through an “ether” and we move on.
So, lets apply this to the question of whether God exists. We need a hypothesis that says if this type of God exists, then this type of phenomenon will occur. Now if you say that God is beyond our ability to perceive (a stance contrary to both the Old and New Testaments), I would ask how is that different from God not existing? It’s just another case of “Last Thursdayism”; i.e., saying that the universe was created last Thursday in a manner that makes it look like it always existed. Not only is there no way to show if this is true or not true, it doesn’t matter if it is true because nothing would be different about the world if it was true.
So there are two types of Gods:
- An active God who affects daily life in some manner.
- A God that exists but has no measurable effect on the universe.
The former can be tested once you say how God affects the world. For example, if you say that God will heal the sick if people pray for them we can set up a double-blind experiment to test that hypothesis.
The latter is not only non-testable, it makes no difference even if it were true, just as it would make no difference if I were to believe that every night all the items in my house were replaced by items identical in every way.
Excellent. So spend the next three hundred years getting hypotheses about the nature of god from random folks and disproving those hypotheses. And it won’t ultimately prove anything of significance, merely that those people’s interpretations of the nature of god were wrong.
But I guess it’ll keep you busy.
Metaphysics isn’t science. It’s not practical. It’s not useful at all, really.
But there’s a difference between “There might be a god who doesn’t do anything of significance and is therefore irrelevant” and “There is no god, you yokels!”
I for one know the truth. It’s just that some people can’t handle the truth.
Mostly the point was simply that there’s no such thing as a freaking gravity-defying apple. You know it and I know it. We know this, not because we’ve disproved it’s existence, but because people have been dropping apples since the dawn of time and they ALL drop downwards. Same way we know there’s no god.
I think you have define “God” first. As others have said, there is a whole suite of belief systems wound up with the idea of “God”, and certainly many, if not most, of those belief systems are no more likely than fairies or goblins. The only sense of “God” that I can accept as an intelligent one is “that about which we know nothing”. An active, sentient being that interferes with reality cannot be distinguished from a space alien with sufficiently advanced technology.
No it’s not. There are plenty of plausible supreme beings that are entirely provable. (For instance, a God who cares for people who believe in said God, intervening when they’re in trouble. Angels swooping down to carry me out of the path of an onrushing car, and handing me a lovely card inscribed, “Dear Megan, Please watch out for drunk drivers! Love, God”? That would be some pretty nice proof.) None of them, however, exists in this universe.
I say again: nonfalsifiable positions are useless.
No, there is no difference. Saying that there is “something” you can’t see, touch, or feel, and that makes no difference if it exists or not, and can never be determined to exist or not, is effectively the same thing as saying it does not exist, if reality is to have any meaning at all.