Philosophers are often dealing with logical proof, so I would expect that to be their common usage. I somewhat doubt, however, that a pragmatist, for example, would use the word only that way. In fact, I’m sure philosophers frequently talk about proof by induction, which is always less than absolute, and is the exact means by which leprechauns have been proven not to exist. (Not that any scientist has set out to prove whether leprechauns exist, but the mass of scientific evidence does so anyway.)
As for scientists, you are simply wrong. Do you think that when the FDA talks about tests “to prove the drug is safe and effective” they mean something other than the preponderance of evidence? If the FDA isn’t scientific enough for you (they are bureaucratic than scientific, after all) how about theseexamplesofscientificpapers? (Search for “proof” or “proven.”) The last even talks (speculatively, I admit) about something being “proven not to exist.”
My point from the beginning has been that the alleged distinction between “strong” and “weak” atheists has been a stupid semantic battle that has no bearing on any substance in the argument. How you expect me to argue that without recourse to how people actually speak is beyond me.
By showing that the claims about gods are mutually contradictory ( which means that most MUST be wrong ), and by pointing out all the claims about gods that violate physical laws; a point I and others have repeatedly made, and you have refused to address.
There is no evidence for gods. There is no evidence that they are even possible. So, the “probability” that gods are “involved in the Reality of existence” ( whatever that’s supposed to mean ) or involved in anything else is pretty much zero. And for most versions of gods, just plain zero; logically contradictory things cannot exist.
But the chance that someone would exist was nearly certain. That’s the “argument from rain”; the chance that a particular drop of rain will hit a particular spot is really tiny, so that shows how there must be some kind of purpose behind it, right? Wrong; it just shows that with enough random raindrops, everything gets blanketed.
What does that have to do with the probability of a god existing? Nothing, which is exactly the point. The probability of you personally existing is an entirely different kind of hypothetical than the claims that gods exist. Among other things, humans are already known to exist; gods aren’t.
I take a handful of dust and fling it to the ground, and it makes an extremely complicated pattern. Would you say the chances of anyone else flinging a handful of dirt to the ground and creating that exact same pattern were “pretty much zero”?
Diogenes, the statement in dispute here is the sentence fragment you wrote: “if it is currently unknown, it is currently unknowable.”
I was not being obtuse when I called your attention to the fact that it is a single statement, not two. I called it a single statement because it is a single statement.
In effect, it is saying: If “x”, then “y.” “X” and “y” are different…but the statement is a single statement.
It is a worthwhile comment to make, because it calls attention to the fact that posting in anger (as you seem often to do) causes errors in logic (as well as punctuation and spelling and typos)—which detracts from the worthiness of your posts. (You can see further example of that in this next quote from you.)
That is such an absurd distortion of logic; I am amazed you are letting your uncontrolled anger allow you to post it. If a thing is knowable…it is knowable whether anyone knows it or not. While it is “currently unknown”…it can be “currently knowable.” In fact, one of the reasons science builds things like particle accelerators is to try to get to “know” some of the things they do not know about things that are “knowable.” One of the reasons NASA wants to get to Mars is to “know” some things that ARE knowable…but simply are not currently known.
Yes, Diogenes…it is possible for things to be currently unknown…but to be knowable.
Obviously, we do not know if there is a GOD or not…but if there is a GOD, the fact that we do not know there is has no effect on whether or not it is knowable. A GOD could easily make ITSELF known if IT chose to…which means it currently is knowable…even if it is not currently known.
You really ought to get a rein on your temper, Diogenes. You are out-of-control.
In any case, you originally wrote: “Gods can, however, be shown to be highly unlikely to exist.”
I asked, “How?”
And you are responding, “All you have to do is show that something else is more probable. Fucking child’s play.”
So…you are saying that if I can show that it is more probable that we will have rain here in Jersey this next April than that we will have no rain…that will show that gods are highly unlikely to exist?
Wow.
I have to say, though…that that IS “fucking child’s play”…and the same kind of logic!
Really is tough for you to avoid nastiness, isn’t it?
“Reality of existence” means….the reality of existence.
I have to assume you know what “existence” is…and what “reality” is…and you should be able to figure out how they go together.
“Involved” you can look up in a dictionary if you do not know the word.
If I asked: “Are dice involved in the game of Backgammon?”—would you understand the question? If so…you should be able to understand the question, “Are gods involved in the Reality of existence.”
Jeez!
Your statement was: : “Gods can, however, be shown to be highly unlikely to exist.”
As much as I agree with you Mr. Smithee, I must dispute the quote above. There is a difference between “inductive reasoning” and “proof by induction”. The latter is a mathematical tool that is just as absolute as deductive proof, and in fact is simply another form of deductive proof.
One simply must show that “such and such” is true for the first item in an ordered group, and then show that if it is true for any item, it must also be true for the next item in the series. Bada bing, bada boom, we’ve proved that “such and such” must be true for all of them. It’s like knocking down dominoes by only touching the first one.
I’d say “end hijack” but this thread is pretty much one big hijack. Obviously religion isn’t just wish fulfillment and now we’re discussing the finer distinctions between agnostics and weak and strong atheists. Which I agree is mostly a distinction without a difference.
In one of the other discussion forums where I participated, we pretty much agree that the term “non-theist” allowed for more agreement between people who consider themselves agnostics or weak-atheists.
There is a subtle distinction and difference in agnostic, weak atheist, and it has to do with focus.
The weak-atheists tend to focus more on the “although I acknowledge I do not know and the evidence is ambiguous, I tend toward the ‘there are no gods’ as being the stronger position.”
The agnostics tend toward the “I just do not know…and the evidence is so ambiguous, any perception I have toward either side is probably gratuitous rather than truly a function of evidence evaluation and weight.
Non-theist works for me, Doctor…even though I always initially identify myself as an Agnostic.
Once people get to the point of simply stating, defining, defending, and arguing positions rather than titles…the going gets easier—although in discussions of these issues, anyone expecting truly easy going is probably begging for disappointment.
I once had this fairly complicated puzzle, in which you had to put 2 or three hole pieces on a board (the holes were of different shapes) to fit a pattern given in a book. There were maybe 100 patterns, each one being a different puzzle.
I told my daughter and her friend, who were in third grade, that I would give them a dollar if they could solve one of the puzzles. I didn’t specify which. They put the pieces together some way, looked up which puzzle it solved, and brought it to me. I of course paid up.
If you have a bowl of 1,000 marbles, and have sampled from it 2,000 times and have never gotten a green marble, you can say that green marbles are unlikely to exist in the bowl - though the probability is not zero, of course.
We have sampled reality both on earth and in the universe, almost up to the event horizon. We have seen no indication of any god. I think it is fair to say, given that, that they are unlikely to exist.
Not even in the “real universe” that we presume exists.
We have no idea of what is or is not in existence on the moons of the planets that share Sol’s heat…let alone what exists on planets circling other nearby stars. We don’t know what exists on the planets circling the other billions of stars in our galaxy…nor in the billions of other galaxies that we know exist.
We know about as much about what exists in this supposedly material universe, as an ant knows about quantum physics.
And we have absolutely no idea if this thing we refer to as “our universe” is but a micro speck in a greater megaverse.
A better marble analogy than the one you proposed would be:
If you were to pull out five marbles from a collection of billions of billions of bushels of marbles…and there were no green marbles among those five…what could be said about the chances of some of the marbles being green.
I agree that a definition of “gods” is important (perhaps vital) to discussions of this sort.
We do not know if “the laws of physics” hold everywhere. Much speculation, for instance, whether we can expect what we consider to be “the laws of physics” to hold in black hole environment.
And we always have to consider that 1000 years from now, our impression of what “the laws of physics” are may seem as quaint as what scientists 1000 years ago considered those “laws” to be.
Yeah, that god is a piece of garbage…and does more to screw up these kinds of arguments than anything atheists or agnostics can offer.
My hopes are that cartoon will go the way of Zeus and Jupiter sometime soon.
In any case, the notion of “beingness” is so astonishing that I suspect the answer to what the Reality actually is…is way beyond the speculations of theists, scientists, or other “ists.”
If you want to play analogy wars, try this one on for size:
Say you have pulled 100k marbles out of a bushel of untold trillions of marbles. You’ve studied the marbles you pulled and they all obey similar physical laws. You can see the vast majority of the marbles you haven’t pulled (the bushel is transparent) and you can perform some non-invasive tests on them. From every observation (and you’ve made millions) all marbles seem to possess similar physical qualities. Some have flecks of glitter and some have wisps of paint, but they all seem to follow the same laws.
You’re talking about pulling a marble that can talk and created the universe out of the bushel. It’s unlikely. Nothing supports it but childish fantasies.
Huh? No. Wow, you’re really inexperienced at this, aren’t you?
No, “god” is a hypothesis. It’s something posited as an expanation for observed phenomena in the universe. If you can show that any explanation is more probable than, “a magical fairy did it,” then you have shown the “fairy” hypothesis (which is all the god hypothesis is) to be a less probable one. If you can show that the non-fairy hypothsis has a MUCH higher probability of being true, then you’ve made the fairy hypothesis HIGHLY improbable, especially when it has no corroborating evidence.
Taken together, “reality of existence” isa redundant and meaningless phrase, but my curiosity was really more focused on what you meant by gods being “involved” with it. If you mean any kind of actual, observerable, physical intervention in the universe, then that is something that actually can be tested. If you’re talking about “involvement” which does not affect the physical universe, then the question isn’t worth asking.
But your analogy does not take into consideration the very, very, very limited view we may have of what exists. You have all the marbles in view…when in fact, most of the marbles are not only NOT IN VIEW…we don’t even know where they are.
We do not, for instance, know about what actually constitutes existence…what there might be outside the finite dimensions we normally consider to be “the real world.”
Bottom line: It is my opinion that the best, most honest answer that can be given to the question: “What is the nature of existence…what can be ruled in; what can be ruled out?”…is: I do not know.
Many theists seem to think otherwise; many atheists also. Many theists agree to the “I do not know”, but suppose the evidence leads in favor one way: many atheists agree to the “I do not know” but suppose the evidence leads in favor the other.
Of course our idea of ‘the laws of physics’ will be different 1000 years from now. But that doesn’t change what we have now. We have to make our decisions based on current knowledge. Just because something might be different later doesn’t mean we can never have a correct conclusion now.
To the best of our knowledge, gravity behaves a certain way, and we have a lot of corroboration on this. If someone comes along and says that they know something that can make gravity behave in a completely different way, and furthermore can do it at will, that can be considered improbable. Not impossible, but it’s going to take some hefty evidence.
That’s fine, but right now we can only work with what we have. Right now, what we have is no evidence of god. Not that every definition of god is totally impossible, but that we have no reason to think god exists as we currently think of it. This allows us to behave as if there was no god, and a quick and dirty abbreviation of this that can be used when you don’t want to take the time to explain probability and levels of evidence is ‘there is no god’. Yes it might change. Of course, it might not. Just because we don’t know for sure doesn’t mean we have to be frozen in indecision.
Irrelevant, since we are not talking about marbles that are not in view, but only what is in view. “Do magical sky gods exist anywhere, in any form?” is not a scientific question. The question is only whether they are a probable explanation for anything we can see (which is quite a lot, actuially). The answer is a resounding no.
What you’re talking about is not even God of the gaps, it’s God of the hypothetical gaps. It’s not worth spending any time or consideration on.
It is true that it cannot be technically proven that gods don’t exist in some part of the universe we can’t observe or test. It’s also true that fairies might exist in the universe. That doesn’t mean that either of those ideas is worth any serious consideration, and neither of them has any value as a hypothesis for what we CAN observe.
Nope. Over a decade of this kind of thing on the Internet…and several decades before that in essays and op ed pieces. QUESTION: Is that the way insults have to be presented in order not to receive a warning?
Only to an atheist who wants to combat that kind of god. To some of us…who claim we do not know if gods are involved in the Reality of existence…we make absolutely no claim that in order for gods to exist they have to be used as an explanation of observable phenomena in the universe.
That has been mentioned several times.
Really!
So when primative people saw the Earth as a flat disk with lights circling it (obviously the more probable explanation)…that made it more probable than one that had the Earth as a sphere circling something else?
Damn!
No it isn’t…and you saying that it is doesn’t make it so. There is a reality to existence…what actually is…IS. We may not be able to understand what actually is…we simply may not have the capacity at this moment in our evolution…but whatever actually IS…IS…whether we understand it or not.
That is the Reality of existence.
If you consider that to be redundant and meaningless…perhaps you ought not to be discussing this.
By involved…I mean involved; to be a participant (active or inactive) in some form. A spectator; a facilitator; whatever.
If you consider it not to be worth asking…why are you spending so much time on it?
I am spending time on it because I see it as well worth asking.