Like I said disproving one myth about a being is not the same as proving that being does not exist, unless you are now claiming Geo Washing does/did not exist?
I haven’t made that claim
But that all has to be internally consistent, it has to work, it has to make predictions.
again, that is circular. It isn’t a step that you need to take unless you were already convinced that there has to be a god, it doesn’t follow necessarily from the world as we experience it. It is the theists being certain of the existence of god and then trying to find ways in which that existence is compatible with no evidence at all.
pain is something for which we have evidence, the complexity of the human brain and subsequent misfiring is something for which we have evidence
Which are not evidence of anything other than a functioning (and imperfect) human brain.
We know that humans fool themselves all the time, that our perception is imperfect, we hear things and feel things and see things that aren’t there. We make unwarranted assumptions and conclusions and…yes…we feel pain, when there is no physical reason for it. All because of our high-functioning brain.
We have evidence for all the above which perfectly explains any religious experience or revelation or phantom headache. And we have no evidence at all for a god or gods of any kind.
are we back to a god that does nothing, intervenes in nothing and causes nothing? if so, that is a deist god of no consequence to the world
If you mean that having a concept of god or gods makes me feel nice and helps me make sense of the world then that is trivially true and good for you but it in no way has anything to say about whether it actually exists. It is a concept exactly on the level of Santa and the easter bunny.
So? something can be not obscure but still utterly absurd. Islam makes the absolute concrete claim that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse, it is not a reliable source of fact. Not everything that can be said makes sense.
Fine, it is a shell-game as old as time. The god of gaps. That is the reason why theology goes out of its way to avoid defining god in concrete or detectable ways. He is unknowable and ineffable whilst cunningly still allowing people to know what he wants and how he wants it doing. Remarkable. Or he is defined in such a way as to need no evidence at all with his nature and powers retrofitted to the prevailing scientific knowledge and societal norms.
which advances the subject not one jot. Tired old arguments, appeals to authority with zero evidence and zero necessity. Assuming that god must exist and finding a place for it.
I’m still waiting for a strong argument. Don’t assume that you are telling me stuff I don’t know or have not heard many times before.
Geo Washing?
I asked for two simple things: A description of the deity you want disproved, and the place this deity resides. You failed on both counts, giving someone else’s description that you yourself think is wrong, and a location that is both a former residence, and a magical land that we have no access to.
edited to add: And thank you for bringing up the other obstacle. What would you accept as evidence that a deity doesn’t exist?
Then I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean by endorsing the quote that ‘What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence’, and your repeatedly asking for ‘evidence’ while I’m trying to explain how ‘evidence’ isn’t the right notion, necessarily. Could you elaborate?
Mathematics doesn’t make any predictions—not empirically verifiable ones, at least.
You could raise those same objections against mathematics. Pretend you haven’t heard about math before (you have not participated in knowledge of the Platonic mathematical realm, so to speak); then I come to you trying to convince you of a mathematical fact (a truth straight from that realm accessible to me by my mind participating in the ideas, forms, whatever of mathematics). Are you going to ask for evidence? If so, that just means you haven’t understood what I’m talking about.
There are, of course, other ways to criticize my mathematical knowledge. You could be skeptical of the Platonist account, taking a formalist stance; or you could simply uncover a mistake in my reasoning. What you can’t do, however, is rejecting that 2 + 2 = 4 because there’s no evidence for it—that merely shows that you haven’t understood what kind of claim I’m making.
Sure (although, again, the case that pain is identical to its neural correlates—that pain is C-fibers firing, to quote a popular slogan—is a very hard one to make, and many philosophers have abandoned this sort of naive type-identity physicalism), but you don’t know your pain through examination of evidence. You know it by experience. You don’t start out examining the symptoms of pain—ah, I’m screaming, cursing and jumping up and down on one leg, I must have stubbed my toe, therefore, I feel pain in my toe!—nor the neural correlates of pain—oh, C-fibers seem to be firing, I must be in pain!—; no, you are simply in pain, and no further mediation is needed to make you aware of that fact.
Similarly, a person whose mind partakes in knowledge of god might have that knowledge immediately present before them, just as unquestionably as your knowledge of the pain in your toe is, and just as non-reliant on evidence. What should they do, when they try to explain that knowledge to you? Does your pain get relieved when I tell you that there is no evidence of the pain? No, because that’s just not the right channel to connect to such phenomena.
That’s indeed true with knowledge reliant on evidential mediation, but you can’t be wrong, you can’t fool yourself about having a headache: because feeling as if one had a headache is the same as having a headache. You can’t have a headache that isn’t there, because the headache is just the having of a headache, the subjective impression of a headache.
Right, just as we have no evidence that 2 + 2 = 4.
No, not at all. I was proposing a god that is phenomenally present, i.e. part of the lived experience of at least a certain subset of people, as opposed to a god whose existence is merely inferred, typically in a flawed way—i.e. by way of ontological, or prime mover, or whatever other arguments.
No, I mean a god such that a certain subset of people participate in knowledge of that god, just as a certain subset of people participate in knowledge of a headache, or that there are more real numbers than natural numbers. A god accessible to these people via revelation, just as pain is accessible to us via smacking our toes. The thing is that your argument from evidence does exactly nothing to persuade a believer in such a god—and indeed, should not do anything, because it misses its intended target from the outset.
Of course, but in neglecting such views, your arguments fail to touch them—that is, you’re not arguing against occasionalism, you’re merely asserting it’s absurd. Which is fine and all, you can certainly believe that, but it won’t convince anybody who believes in that doctrine, and hence, your arguments fall short—because after all, without any viable counterargument showing its absurdity, occasionalism just might be true.
It’s not, though. The case I’m making includes a god that is present to believers in the same way a headache is to you, not a god that steps in to cover some gap in our understanding. It comes from (revealed, non-empirical) knowledge (which you, me, and other atheists merely happen not to share), rather than ignorance.
I have no idea what you might have heard or not, however, at least from your responses it seems that at least you haven’t really paid these ideas much mind, or understood them properly, hence my attempts at clarification.
It’s no good - once you get here, they make you go back to the atheist side.
How about if I phrase it as “I don’t disbelieve in a god or gods”?
It’s kind of my entire point. Even if I happen to stray as far as #5 or #6 on Dawkin’s Belief Scale, the central tenet of my belief system (for lack of more applicable terminology) is the agnosticism. You seem determined to divide the world into “theist” and “atheist” and then consider the agnosticism as a subcategory - even a side effect. I consider the agnosticism to be the main point, and any theist or atheist leanings to be side effects of that.
This shit matters to me and it makes me quite angry to be told that I’m “doing it wrong” simply because I’m not using someone else’s priorities and criteria.
Tahiti is a magical place.
It is simple, If a claim you make has no evidence behind it then it can be dismissed out of hand.
If you think that “evidence” is the wrong notion then I just can’t help you. We are talking past each other. Your musings on the evidential nature of maths and pain become impossible to discuss. If you don’t think that mathematics makes predictions that are borne out by real world evidence…I can’t move past that. Pain is a detectable and measurable physical phenomena…you think not…I can do nothing with that.
You stretch the concept of a god to something so tenuous that indeed, it can hide in the tiniest of gaps and bears no relationship to what the major religions claim. A thing of pure thought or concept, shape-shifting in nature and scope to avoid the burden of proving existence. Plus ca change.
That’s fine, but you and others who put it forward are merely dealing in word and logic games. Metaphorically prefixing your rebuttals with a condescending “aaaaaaah! but…” Theology of that type is of the sixth-form common room level and has been for the last few millennia.
and you show you own bias here when you write…
because, as you should know, I’m not the one making a claim at all. I find it absurd but I’m not making an argument against it because I don’t have to, the burden of proof is always with the person making the positive claim. You think “occasionalism” could be true? fine. Make the case. If you bring no evidence then I will dismiss it out of hand, just like I could do with the infinite amount of superficially absurd claims that a person could make.
You’d be wrong. I’ve read them all before and there is simply nothing new in the explanations you’ve given. I understand them all perfectly well, you seem to think that they are due some degree of respect just because they come out of the mouths of intelligent people. I don’t see that they have any special explanatory power or insight and offer absolutely no evidence of any supernatural being.
I think you’re right about that, at least.
Can I just ask you to clarify your own position? I think you’re asserting at least one, and probably both, of the following:
Claim A: “The only things worth believing are those for which there is evidence.”
Claim B: “One should only attempt to persuade others to believe something by offering evidence.”
Do you believe Claim A, Claim B, both, or neither?
And, do you have evidence for either of these claims?
I do not believe in you.
Lightning always travels the way that it does. It has not changed in some way. Either Zeus (or Thor) has always been defying physics or they are simply made up deities.
More importantly, in order for us to prove (or provide strong evidence) that a given deity does not exist, we need justification: you must first provide a good reason for anyone to believe that a given deity does exist. The first disproof of any deity is “why should I believe that?” which puts the ball in the believer’s court. That is a high bar to get over.
And yet, earlier, when I attributed that stance to you, you said that’s not a claim you made.
Furthermore, it’s manifestly false: for one, there’s no evidence at all for 2 + 2 = 4, yet it can’t be dismissed out of hand. Also, the claim ‘If a claim you make has no evidence behind it then it can be dismissed out of hand’ is itself one for which you have no evidence, and hence, if it were true, could be dismissed out of hand.
Fine, then show me the evidence that an infinite set contains an infinite subset.
That’s not to say you can’t apply math to make predictions; but this requires more than pure math, namely, what’s often called the ‘minimal interpretation’ that connects abstract mathematical entities with concrete physical ones.
What can be measured are neuron firings and the like; these may correlate to pain, but they are not pain, themselves. One argument is from multiple realizability: if pain truly was C-fibers firing, then, say, a robot lacking C-fibers, or an alien being with different physiology, could never experience pain. But if they do—and there seems no reason to believe they couldn’t—then pain and C-fibers firing can’t be identical.
But really, the question is not whether pain is physically measurable. For the purposes of this discussion, I will readily grant you that it is. The point is that this is not the way pain is present to you—i.e. you don’t collect the evidence and then conclude that you must be in pain. You’re simply in pain, end of story. So, this is another example of knowledge readily present to you that doesn’t come via evidence.
Occasionalism, to remind you, is something a major religion holds among its tenets.
Yes, you have made a claim, repeatedly now: “If a claim you make has no evidence behind it then it can be dismissed out of hand”. You have offered neither argument nor evidence for it. All I’m doing is showing you—by example—how it’s wrong: it’s wrong in the case of mathematics, it’s wrong in the case of subjective experience, and it’s wrong if something like occasionalism were true. This doesn’t require any commitment to the truth of occasionalism.
You’ve proposed an argument that you seem to think dismantles all religious claims: “If a claim you make has no evidence behind it then it can be dismissed out of hand”. This argument doesn’t hold up for certain religious claims, like occasionalism. Hence, further argumentation is needed in order to defend your argument against that possibility.
“You think ‘2 + 2 = 4’ could be true? Fine. Make the case. If you bring no evidence, then I will dismiss it out of hand.”
No. I think you should pay them some respect because they show, by example, a way the world could be such that ‘having no evidence’ for religious claims is no grounds for dismissing them, thus showing that to be an insufficient criterion.
neither
If there being no evidence at all is not a criterion for disbelieving something, then nothing is.
Okay, then what is your position with respect to evidence and belief?
What some of us are asserting is that “evidence” is not (or at least, not necessarily) synonymous with “good reasons to believe.”
That’s partly an issue of whether there are (or can be) good reasons to believe something besides evidence (i.e. whether “evidence” is a proper subset of “good reasons to believe.”)
And it’s partly an issue of how you’re defining “evidence.” Different people (scientists, historians, statisticians, criminal investigators) use the term in different ways.
For some reason the fact that there is no evidence isn’t a hindrance to those who believe without evidence that there is a god…until they come across those that believe that the lack of evidence to believe in gods is a good reason to dismiss beliefs in gods, which sometimes leads to the silly question, “Can you prove there isn’t any god?”.
I take it that you are a Zeus worshipper then?
If you cannot disprove the existence of Zeus, then he MUST exist. And if he does exist, you best be worshipping him, else you may get a thunderbolt crammed into a very uncomfortable place.
I’m not making a factual claim here, I’m telling you what my response is to a claim backed up by inadequate evidence. You tell me what you think is going on, you present inadequate evidence, I don’t find that claim credible. At no point am I telling you it is wrong or making a counter claim.
However, even if you were to say it were a claim, it clearly does have evidence behind it as I have read the claim of “occasionality”, seen that it is lacking in evidence and have now dismissed it. I cannot say that it is definitely wrong as it is carefully constructed so as to be immune to rational enquiry…theology in microcosm.
When I say “dismiss out of hand” I mean, to be accurate to the original quote, that it can be dismissed without me having to say why it is wrong, or create a counter-claim or present evidence to the contrary. The burden remains with the person making the claim.
And that is where I’ll leave it. Linguistic and logical tricks don’t make for interesting discussions though the business of religion has made itself a tidy business out it.
That’s the opening to an essay and a thread in and of itself rather than a quick post and seeing as I’m bowing out anyway I’ll not expand but I’ll give you a quick answer.
You can certainly say that I think an assertion or a claim, in and of itself, is not evidence and I hope that any belief I hold is only as strong as the evidence that backs it up. If that evidence changes, my belief changes.
And with that, I’m out.
Well, of course he does. And he has a PhD. Great guy, created the grinch and the lorax and a bunch of other magical creatures.
I get that you’re trying to “win” an argument on the internet, but you missed the point of my post.
Atheists, by definition, don’t believe in any god. This they have in common with rocks and tables. They also, by definition, don’t believe in Thor. This they have in common with you.
There’s nothing particularly complicated with the idea of not believing in a god. It’s not hard to understand.
So far, this is a description of what is commonly called “weak” atheism. “Strong” atheism is the idea that, given a specific god or gods, the atheist claims to “know” the god in question doesn’t exist. When challenged about this claim they are expected to be able to back up their knowledge with evidence or arguments.
Many atheists find these demands to be a little silly and hypocritical, because theists commonly claim to “know” their god is real based on shoddy or nonexistent evidence, and because nobody demands ironclad evidence about the nonexistence of unicorns or Frodo.
But the more argumentative among us will sometimes rise to the challenge, in the hopes of achieving the ultimate accomplishment in human history: winning an argument on the internet. And so we sally forth on this hopeless quest: to prove a negative.
Step one of proving a negative: determine what you’re supposed to be disproving.
So we ask.
You answer. With a wiki article.
I refer to the factual, cited statement in the wiki article, and construct an effective disproof.
You move the goalposts.
Oh no! I have “lost” an argument on the internet! Flings hand to forehead, faints.
Except I didn’t actually lose the argument - I successfully disproved that version of Zeus, exactly as you asked me to. You want to present some other version of Zeus, then we can look at how it’s described and determine if there’s anything about that version of Zeus to determine whether it’s provably fictional or merely normally fictional. But we can’t discuss that until we know which version of Zeus you’re talking about. (k9bfriender’s client’s dog?)
And of course this is entirely beside the point - whether any specific fantasized deity can be objectively disproved or not is just a game, or under worse conditions a desperate attempt to push back against evils done in the name of that fantasy. But either way the game is beside the point; the basic lack of belief, provable or not, is the real defining property of an atheist.
The version of “Geo Washington” that can chuck coins across an eleven mile wide river is fictional, and provably so. Of course there was another version of George Washington that wasn’t fictional, and, shockingly, that Washington didn’t do any impossible things and everything he did do actually happened. That version of Washington was real.
When talking about a god, there tends not to be an objective referent that can be easily pointed out to “anchor” the definition of that entity. This means that rather then pointing at Washington’s grave and saying “that’s the Washington we were talking about”, you have to pick which stories and descriptions you want to believe apply to the entity, and that’s the entire definition of the deity. So if the stories and descriptions don’t hold up, then that’s that - until you grab your goalposts and toss together some other set of definitions, and the game starts all over fresh with your new, different deity (of the same name).
Existential in the sense of “does a prime exist with certain characteristics?” Not the class of existence that is very interesting here.
And there are refutations to those “proofs.” Not to mention that they are not very useful in showing the existence of any particular god. But that’s my point. In natural philosophy there were equally cogent proofs of things we now know are not correct. Logic may be perfect but human use of logic is not. There are two tests of a proof. The first is examination by others - but that has rarely settled anything since the flaws are often based on assumptions not shared. The second is a test against reality, which for natural philosophy at least was much better. In fact tests against reality replace proofs.
And science of course recognizes this and thus demands the ability to replicate results, especially controversial or revolutionary ones. It often works - see cold fusion.
Your are conflating your internal sensation, a headache, with an external one, god. No one doubts that people do “experience” god. That internal state exists. But is there an external cause? Say your headache feels as if someone was pounding your head with a hammer. That doesn’t mean someone actually is. You can tell that by looking for evidence of a hammer. Likewise, the experience of god does not mean there is a god, and to show that there is requires a search of reality.
We can study and understand why your headache happens, and we might study and understand what is behind the experience of god. But that doesn’t mean there are hammers or god.
But I could convince you that your headache is not being caused by hammers. I wouldn’t dream of telling someone they didn’t have an experience of god. I wouldn’t even tell that asshole in Nashville that he didn’t have the experience of being stalked by whatshername.
But you can test whether these experiences have mappings to the external world. In the god case, do the experiences of god over a range of people match? A person on an Asian island having the same experience of God as a person in Utah would be powerful evidence. But if their experiences matched the visions of god of their particular cultures, you might find the cause to be cultural not supernatural.
It’s just like the descriptions of aliens and UFOs by saucer sighters matched the latest movie with aliens in it.
Subjective observations in science are fallible also, see the Martian canals. That’s why we use instruments which don’t have hangovers or blurry vision and which can be calibrated. Their readings can be viewed by multiple people, and are a lot more reliable than subjective vision.
Now if someone would just invent a God meter.
But we have. It’s called archeology. Religions make testable statements about the past, much of which have been shown to be false. (Their past - that a resident of Jerusalem and accurately describe Jerusalem is not much evidence for the divine.) They make predictions about the future, often before the events are supposed to occur. Haven’t been too accurate about those either.
There is one type of non-religious advocate who care about subjective things. Quacks like homeopaths. They talk about subjective feelings and unseen forces, and are allergic to testing. You want to be like them?