If you travel in the South, you will hear people saying God bless you all the time. When I was in Charlotte NC the paper actually ran a column saying that the residents were scaring the tourists. In the Bay Area, where I live, which has both less and different god belief, you never hear it. Are you really claiming that god belief does not affect how people act?
And I covered both cases. Any God that supposedly interacts with us is testable. Any God that doesn’t interact with us is effectively nonexistent. Or as existent as tea pots orbiting Saturn. The standard variety Western theist wants it both ways - they say God has given us a set of rules, and also say God is untestable when challenged to demonstrate that there is a God behind those rules.
But if someone tells you that the bear and his friend Boo-Boo come out every day at 3, and they never actually show up, you can doubt. If you find no bear poop in the woods, you can doubt. If someone tells you that he heard the roar of the bear, and you find a tape recorder in the front of the cave, then you can doubt. But you can’t prove there is no bear, he might be hiding with his other friend the dragon.
And, as I know you agree, if one sees no sign of the bear for a year, and live in fear of it, then one is a nincompoop.
I am making the claim that it is not necessarily so. Hell, Jesus is quoted in the Bible as admonishing his worshippers to keep their worship as private as possible.
Supposing God whispered a voice in my ear every day that said “Don’t talk about me. Just do what I tell you” and a list of innocuous generally altruistic commands. How would you determine the difference between me-as-worshiper and me-as-generally-nice-guy?
How do you distinguish “God interacts, but (as an intelligent actor) refuses to interact when being measured” from “God is not interacting because he doesn’t exist”?
How would you prove or disprove the existence of a God who interacted solely by influencing the thoughts of some, apparently arbitrarily selected people?
How would you prove or disprove the existence of a God who interacted solely by influencing the physical processes of the world such that an occasional very-low-probability event happened or an occasional very-high-probability event didn’t happen?
I haven’t seen anything from either **DtC **or I to disagree with this. The point is not “you can prove or disprove the specific God that **Voyager’s **fellow humans annoy him with”.
But if you can’t enter the cave, and the bear never comes out, who cares? If a physicist describes a particle that moves faster than the speed of light and has no interactions with any other kind of matter or energy in the universe, it doesn’t matter how pretty and consistent the equations he uses to describe it, it is untestable and irrelevant to the world and the advancement of science. The only purpose I could see it serving is as a math exercise.
An untestable God only has similar utility. The description of said untestable God may be an exercise in philosophy or logic, but the God itself offers us nothing.
That’s what Jesus said. That isn’t how they act. They worship about as privately as a nudist in a glass house.
Well, you would be acting identically to someone who is just a nice guy. But you also would be a bit incurious. How do you know it isn’t some self-help guru broadcasting through a filling or something? If it were me, I’d say, “Okay, God, enough with this Dr. Phil bit already. Give me some evidence. Give me a cure for AIDS. Give me a proof about P = NP. Give me the winners at Belmont tomorrow if you can’t do that. Otherwise, I think you’re an alien who has watched too much Oprah.”
Any interaction at all which provides some falsifiable data can be measured. God predict something - did it happen? God talks about how the world works - is it true? If believers say God does not interact in any way outside of vague generalizations, or doesn’t interact at all, then it is indeed identical to God not existing.
If their modified thoughts are such that they know something they couldn’t otherwise know, easy. Otherwise, how to distinguish these people from your average garden variety loony?
In any case, prove or disprove are not the right terms. If God actually showed up, the way he did during the Exodus, he could be shown to exist with high probability. If there is a certain variety of God who leads to logical contradictions, or whose knowledge is supposedly perfect but who has said demonstrably incorrect things, he can be falsified to a high degree of probability. You can’t prove anything about wishy washy gods, but the sensible person will no more believe in them than in the IPU.
By definition, low-probability events sometimes happen and high probability events sometimes don’t. Why would it make sense for God to be involved?
No, the point here is the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis here is that there are no gods. All you have to do is to demonstrate a god’s attributes and effects on the world that are different from chance or what you would see if there were no gods. God is hiding from us doesn’t cut it. God got it all wrong, but it was just to test us doesn’t cut it. God told me that love is grand and that puppies are fuzzy doesn’t cut it either. And evidence for God in the supposed miracles of the natural world all turned out to be, well, natural. Is that evidence for or against God?
Only some God hypotheses are untestable. Most of them are very testable, and have failed. Like any one which has God telling us what we should be doing.
Because this particular bear has the power to give people fatal diseases, grant their wishes, and punish them after they die, all from the comfort of his cave.
But those are potentially testable things(except the after they die part). If the bear can do that in a non random way, then it is falsifiable. We can prove or disprove that the those things are happening. We may not be able to prove the bear did them, but it is a step in the right direction.
Then the bear is irrelevant and belief or non-belief is meaningless in this world. Really if God is that arbitrary and undetectable, and there is no proof, all that is left is Pascal’s wager. Only you are betting on a coin flip, but a nearly infinite roulette wheel.
It is evidence against a god that is claimed to have both the ability and desire to do such things. The preceding description does not even remotely begin to describe qualities held by every entity in the set of “entities claimed to be God”.
Right. You seem to be missing my point: Unfalsifiable=irrelevant to the material world. Anything that has any kind of interaction with the world is theoretically, if not feasibly, falsifiable. If an unfalsifiable god existed it would, by definition, have no traits we could know anything about and therefore belief in it is taking a random gamble, spinning Pascal’s infinite wheel.
