# Can Someone prove to me that God doesn't exist? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 2, 2001, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042 "2001-10-02T20:42:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 15
**Author:** ![andros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e480ec/32.png) [@andros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andros)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2001, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/281 "2001-10-05T22:14:45Z")
Just to continue Lib’s aside, “Occam” is also an accepted spelling. ---
**Author:** ![glee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b5a626/32.png) [@glee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glee)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2001, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/282 "2001-10-05T22:28:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > Glee, > You must purposely be acting dense. > Or you have a very immature and arrogant mindset of human capability. At least I know what a force is, and when the sun will rise tomorrow. Why don’t you reply to my questions? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > We perceive a Newtonian world but the universe does not really behave in a Newtonian fashion at scale much bigger or smaller than us. Is this news to you? I find it difficult to follow the reasoning of a man who thinks God and religion are different subjects. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > Three spatial dimensions, one of time. No human can really picture an object of greater dimensions than that even though we can mathematically describe such objects and can become convinced that they exist. And this is relevant how? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > And take down your basic physics text about on light’s particle/wave duality. It behaves like a particle, waves can’t do that! It behaves like a wave, particles can’t do that! Quantum physics and String physics still trying to come up with the best way to say what it “really” is. It was just a handy book. Feel free to cite something yourself. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > As to the different descriptions of God and individual religions, we are all as to the blind men describing the elephant. We cannot perceive all that is God, so we all describe that which we can. Perhaps if two of the blind men both felt the trunk, they could agree on something. How do you know we cannot perceive all that is God? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > Human cultures start out with a belief in God in some form or another. No doubt early man didn’t expect the sun to rise in the morning. Some of us have progressed beyond that. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by DSeid \* > The onus of proof is on a new hypothesis (concerning God) to prove that it explains observable evidence better. What observable evidence? ---
**Author:** ![Spiritus\_Mundi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c68b51/32.png) [@Spiritus\_Mundi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiritus_Mundi)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2001, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/283 "2001-10-05T22:55:18Z")
> [@](#): > > **One cannot prove a negative** > > \*\*Lib: \*\*If that were so, you’d stand no chance of proving your own assertion. Of course, it isn’t true anyway. Nice link. Of course, the only example offered that meets a rigorous definition of proof, which seems to be quite clearly implied in this context, is a proof over the domain of a decidable set. That property clearly does not hold for this discussion. Certainly negative existentialist proofs exist for decidable sets. They exist trivially for any set which can be fully induced. > [@](#): > > “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” Beyond necessity. Beyond … necessity. Ignoring one’s own experience is a violation of Ockham’s Razor. I cannot deny God’s existence Of course not. Likewise I cannot postulate it. ---
**Author:** ![Cyrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Cyrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cyrin)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2001, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/284 "2001-10-05T23:10:30Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Spiritus Mundi \* > \*\*Of course not. Likewise I cannot postulate it. \*\* I don’t think he was asking you to. He was defending himself from being called ignorant. _I know I said I wasn’t comming back here but it’s just soooooo Hard_ ---
**Author:** ![marsupialicious](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@marsupialicious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marsupialicious)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/285 "2001-10-06T00:01:12Z")
First off…Cyrin; Shame on you for coming back. You lied to me. For that I wept uncontollably…now moving on. Here’s a thought provoking thing that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: The Pascalian Wager. I’m not good with links, so I’m just going to write the site and see what happens. It’s a very thought-provoking concept…really. [http://www.saintmarys.edu/~incandel/pascalswager.html](http://www.saintmarys.edu/~incandel/pascalswager.html) thanks… have a great day. ---
**Author:** ![pldennison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9fc29f/32.png) [@pldennison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pldennison)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/286 "2001-10-06T00:07:21Z")
And, in response, the [standard refutation](http://fp.bio.utk.edu/skeptic/Essays/pascal%20weager.htm) of Pascal’s Wager. ---
**Author:** ![dalovindj](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/65b543/32.png) [@dalovindj](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dalovindj)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/287 "2001-10-06T01:39:23Z")
Rod Stewart sell millions of records. If that don’t prove there ain’t a God I don’t know what could. DaLovin’ Dj ---
**Author:** ![dalovindj](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/65b543/32.png) [@dalovindj](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dalovindj)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/288 "2001-10-06T01:59:42Z")
Rod Stewart sell millions of records. If that don’t prove there ain’t a God I don’t know what could. DaLovin’ Dj ---
**Author:** ![dalovindj](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/65b543/32.png) [@dalovindj](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dalovindj)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/289 "2001-10-06T02:01:32Z")
Man, not only did I have a typo I double posted. What a maroon . . . DaLovin’ Dj ---
**Author:** ![Spiritus\_Mundi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c68b51/32.png) [@Spiritus\_Mundi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiritus_Mundi)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/290 "2001-10-06T02:23:01Z")
> [@](#): > > I don’t think he was asking you to. He was defending himself from being called ignorant. I don’t think he was, either. I also don’t think anyone has ever called **Lib** ignorant for not slicing off his belief with a razor. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/291 "2001-10-06T02:23:38Z")
Oh, God, nooooooooo! Not Pascal’s Wager. We all bow to the perfect logic of the Wager. (This is complete sarcasm. Anyone that has been around here for a few months has seen this one hashed through, what, — once, twice, forty-two times). ---
**Author:** ![SatyrDave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@SatyrDave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SatyrDave)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/292 "2001-10-06T02:51:52Z")
I have faith that there is no God. ---
**Author:** ![marsupialicious](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@marsupialicious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marsupialicious)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/293 "2001-10-06T02:56:07Z")
Well then, I apologize sincerely for my newness to this forum, however, the one refute that was posted here is one that I have studied and had a great laugh about at times previous to this. I mean no disrespect to the poster of this view, nor the author of this well written and insightful journal, however, it may dispell Pascal in a roundabout way, but it really does not answer any questions as clearly as Pascal’s Wager does. If you’ve all had a shot at the Wager (and let me be clear, I have much more deeply rooted reasons for my belief than Pascal) then I would be anxious to hear them so that I would be better equipped for debates such as this in the future. Similarly, for my own benefit I would enjoy a discussion giving me reason to doubt such concise (yet not flawless) logic. You are, all of you, seemingly learned individuals. I beg you to teach me. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/294 "2001-10-06T07:31:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Spiritus Mundi \* > > > [@](#): > > > > **One cannot prove a negative** > > > > \*\*Lib: \*\*If that were so, you’d stand no chance of proving your own assertion. Of course, it isn’t true anyway. > > Nice link. Of course, the only example offered that meets a rigorous definition of proof, which seems to be quite clearly implied in this context, is a proof over the domain of a decidable set. That property clearly does not hold for this discussion. Certainly negative existentialist proofs exist for decidable sets. They exist trivially for any set which can be fully induced. Despite whatever ancillary arguments there might be against the notion that “one cannot prove a negative”, the weightiest, most compelling, and decisive argument, in my opinion, is merely the proposition itself. If one cannot prove a negative, then one cannot prove that one cannot prove a negative. An unprovable assertion is, at best, an axiom. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/295 "2001-10-06T10:05:01Z")
I meant to add: And that particular axiom is self-contradictory. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/296 "2001-10-06T10:22:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by marsupialicious \* > If you’ve all had a shot at the Wager (and let me be clear, I have much more deeply rooted reasons for my belief than Pascal) then I would be anxious to hear them so that I would be better equipped for debates such as this in the future. Perhaps you meant “eager” rather than “anxious” unless, of course, you find anxiety in the hearing of (I suppose) reasons. Giving Pascal the absolute _maximum_ benefit of the doubt — allowing that the set {God} has one and only one element, allowing that Pascal has identified the correct One, allowing that there are no other possible contingencies than those he enumerated — allowing all that, his Wager still fails. It fails because it is amphibolous. He equivocates between God the Eternal and God the Frivolus, between faith and impiety (i.e., lip service). You cannot, on the one hand, require of a man his faith, and on the other, accept his pretense as a substitute. Were God to require mere intellectual belief, then a man might rationalize his way to “faith”. But it isn’t enough to belly up to the bar; you must climb into the coffin. It isn’t enough to surrender; you must die. It’s not enough to declare “I believe” — hell, even [Fred Phelps](http://www.godhatesfags.com/) does that! — you must give yourself over to God. God is not a casino jackpot. ---
**Author:** ![gex\_gex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/94ad74/32.png) [@gex\_gex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gex_gex)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/297 "2001-10-06T15:56:56Z")
…according to theories that have been ‘proven’\* \*in a scientific sense. (1) fermions must obey the exclusion principle. bosons do not have to. i am made of fermions, so no fermions may exist where mine do. (2) thus, god is made of bosons. neutrally charged bosons, as he certainly isn’t interacting with my protons and electrons. they probably should be massless bosons as well, since all that extra weight caused by god’s bosons should be playing havoc with the universe in ways that observably aren’t happening. so, interestingly, god can travel at the speed of light. hardly surprising, since he is god. (3) now, according to the bible, man was made in the image of god. since man is made of fermions, and god is made of bosons, man wasn’t made in the image of god. (4) god doesn’t exist. see all the trouble we get when you try and mix things like proof and theology? it’s not worth it. then again, we could try mathematical induction. (1) prove god exists for n=1 (2) assume god exists for n=k (3) prove god exists for n=k+1 pretty easy, huh? ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/298 "2001-10-06T17:00:54Z")
> [@](#): > > see all the trouble we get when you try and mix things like proof and theology? it’s not worth it. Proof? Proof of what? Did you know that logic is a branch of philosophy?[sup]1[/sup] Whatever you might think you are proving with logic, math, or any other epistemology, you are, at root, merely going in circles. You take _on faith_ the validity of your underlying assumptions and axioms. You cannot even define some of your terms (because in defining them, you introduce _new_ terms that must themselves be defined). At some point, you must simply stop and say, “Okay, I believe this, this, and this.” And that applies to bosons, existential metaphysics, Peano’s Axioms, and God. [sup]1[/sup] [Philosophy Pages](http://www.philosophypages.com/), Garth Kemerling. “Philosophers do not merely state opinions but also undertake to establish their truth. The methods employed to support philosophical theses can differ widely, but most of them will be expressed one of the forms of logical argumentation. That is, the philosopher will (explicitly or implicitly) offer premises that are clearly true and then claim that a sound inference from these premises leads inexorably to the desired conclusion.” ---
**Author:** ![hansel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@hansel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hansel)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/299 "2001-10-06T17:18:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Libertarian \* > \*\*You take _on faith_ the validity of your underlying assumptions and axioms. \*\* No, you take as provisionally granted those assumptions on which your theory rests, and you’re free to toss them if they prove unsatisfying. To equate faith with those conditional foundations is to degrade faith. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2001, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042/300 "2001-10-06T17:20:18Z")
Lib, Thank you for the exact quote and correcting my spelling. I knew it didn’t look right! Glee, 1. If you want a good book to go through modern physics in plain english I would recommend Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” Well written and explains why gravity isn’t really a force between masses (eg that light, which is massless, bends around stars) and why light is really neither a particle or a wave. Further discussion of this is a bit too tangential. 2. What question have I not responded to? I must have missed it. 3. Re the difference between God as a hypothesis and religion. They are related but are NOT the same thing. I’m sorry that you can’t comprehend why. Let me try again. This is not a perfect analogy, but it will have to do. Shakespeare romantic sonnets, rock and roll love songs, teen aged mumbled expressions of true emotion, Henry Moore’s “Mother and Child”, etc. are ALL about love. They are all trying to describe what love is, and how love effects them. None of them are love. None of them are the same. Yet all are true expressions and descriptions of love as percieved by that person. Religion can be compared to these artistic expressions of an emotion. Some art resonates with me and some I don’t get; another person will experience the pieces that I perceive as crap as “Yeah, that’s it, that’s Love, Man!” Is love any less true? Is the poem “love”? Of course “love” may not really exist. It may just be a reflection of neurotransmitters and neuronal activity evoking a variety of physiologic responses. I won’t bang my head against the wall on the other bits. If you can’t understand that there are things that we can’t understand and that that inability doesn’t stop us from tryingg … well, I can’t change that. At least I know what I don’t know. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042.md?page=14) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-prove-to-me-that-god-doesnt-exist/85042.md?page=16)