BTW, note that Quiddity Glomfuster’s cite actually said that lack of evidence by itself is not evidence. Revenant added the additional condition that evidence should be expected, which makes his claim more acceptable.
I suspect that after further philosophical reflection, we would need to refine this statement quite a bit to make it more precise. Nevertheless, as a rough-and-ready guideline, I think that it’s basically correct.
Oh, i’m not claiming that Quiddity’s wrong while sneaking in another premise. She’s quite right, lack of evidence alone is not evidence.
“Merely a metaphor”? You and I apparently don’t understand the word “metaphor” in the same way.
Christians refer to the First and Second Persons of the Trinity as the Father and the Son, but not because they stand in the exact same relation to one another as a human father and son. The words are metaphors, but so are any other words we try to use to describe God, and God is more, not less, than the literal meaning of the words would imply.
Unfortunately, the name of the guest of honor is Godot. And you’ve been waiting for him to show up for a long time.
First, would you agree that those who make specific claims about God’s nature - like he hates gays, or he wants us to keep Kosher, or he has a son who is coming back real soon now, are wrong? Most god believers have actual beliefs in specific characteristics of their God, not the squishy belief you are talking about.
Second, how did you or anyone else find out about even the squishy god? Is it from scripture, or from reason, or from evidence, or just from faith? If you think it is the latter, than I’d ask you to think about the state of your faith if you lived in a culture with no god. What god, if any, would you come up with from scratch?
I know that when I believed, I sure didn’t worship the same God as Christians did. My God didn’t have a son, didn’t delegate prayers to that son, and sure as hell didn’t send anyone there if we didn’t kiss his ass. A very different god, going by the same name.
There’s no teapot orbiting the Earth.
You think this is on the same level as saying that there is a god that has properties x,y, and z?
You must go down different streets from me. On mine, and on most in the US, Joe would say, “of course there is a god, and the evidence is in the Bible, and I know because my preacher and my parents and the president said so.” I assume your philosopher would cry just as hard.
Now, for the rest of us, we’ve investigated the so-called evidence, and found it false or unsubstantiated. I certainly agree with you that there is evidence for god, but it is at the level of Alberto’s erratic memory. The Floodites have evidence also - is your’s any better?
One more thing - very few atheists claim to know that no gods exist - if only because there are lots and lots of gods, most of which we’ve never heard of, so knowing that the god snargle of Altair III doesn’t exist is a bit of a stretch. Believing that no gods exist, however, is different. If every god you’ve examined turns out to be bogus, and the gods you’ve heard of but have not examined seem no less bogus, saying that as a working hypothesis there are none is eminently reasonable.
Since proving existential negatives (not all negatives) is impossible, but disproving them is easy, why don’t you devote the keystrokes you’ve been using asking for impossible proofs to giving us a counter-example? If you can’t, then we have no reason to doubt the negative assertion.
You guys got the easy job. Time to get cracking.
Sorry, Jesus has to be the literal son of god as well as whatever metaphorical role you want to make up. If Mary was a virgin, then half of Jesus’ genetic material must come from god - since it can’t all come from her. Yeah, the writers of the NT were ignorant of genetics, but God isn’t. Zeus bonked Leda and God bonked Mary. Same thing.
No, it’s not on the same level. That doesn’t mean that such a claim should be accepted without any substantiation whatsoever, though. I do agree that it’s extremely unlikely that there are any beverage vessels in Earth orbit, but that’s vastly different from saying “There’s no teapot orbiting the Earth.”
If asked, I will heartly assert that I don’t believe there are any such beverage containers circling the globe. I will not, however, offer this as a definite statement that requires no substantiation.
They could well be. We don’t have much to go on.
I am discussing the existence of, not the characteristics of.
Well, here’s the interesting thing; seems pretty much all cultures came up with the notion; most independently of each other, at least at first. And interestingly, the folks who have done more extensive studies of world religions, and I who have done a study which was not as extensive but was still a survey study, discovered that the most basic principles of them all boil down to the same thing; honour a Divine and treat your fellow humans well.
Isn’t it fair to say you saw different characteristics in the Divine? Six different people might describe you differently; who’s ‘right’? Only you really know you. Everyone else is just guessing.
I suspect that you’re severely misrepresenting their views… but if you aren’t (which I doubt), I will heartily agree that they’re speaking fallaciously. Theists and atheists alike are often guilty of sloppy thinking.
Perhaps… but once again, that’s not the subject addressed in the OP.
And I don’t deny that. Remember, I was addressing Der Trihs, who makes the extravagant and unsubstantiated claims that there is NO God, and that there is no evidence for God. Both statements are absolute claims, and as such, they require substantation.
Again, untrue. In fact, I cited two such examples. The statement “There are no even prime numbers greater than two” is an existential negative, yet even a sixth-grade student can prove it. Ditto for the statement that there are no triangles in Euclidean space with more than one right angle.
As I said, people often claim that one cannot prove a negative. That is self-refuting and demonstrably false. Even if one waters the claim down by asserting that one cannot prove existential negatives, it’s still readily disproven.
Why is it then, when I make a similar claim about the existence of gods, I get told that this is my “belief system”, or even that this is my “religion”?
Only in the case of religion. In the case of everything else, the assumption is one of nonexistence, and the people claiming that something exists must come up with evidence. This is because religion is so utterly stupid, such an example of complete, mindless gullibility that it can only be believed by tossing out all judgement and reason, all concern for facts or evidence or usually even logical consistency.
Because of fear. Fear of losing one’s job, of harassment, of assault, of being outcast from one’s family. As I’ve said again and again, it’s religion that’s being held to a lower standard. Very few people feel the need to carefully parse words about disbelief in fairies or trolls, even though fairies and trolls are more plausible than gods and have just as much evidence for their existence.
Except for the ones that say to hate all other gods, or certain other gods. And the ones that say to kill all unbelievers, or certain unbelievers, or the wrong kind of believers, or people who used to be believers but aren’t any more. It sounds like your alleged “extensive studies of world religions” consisted of a study of modern liberal Christianity and not much else.
No, they are a statement of the apparent reality, and a challenge to people like YOU. Who not only claim there is a God without evidence, but claim that there is evidence for God without evidence.
Yes, the signifier is not the signified. :rolleyes: In Christian theology the Son is begotten of the Father but, yes, the relationship is not identical to the relationship between a human father and a human son.
But all this has drifted far away from my original point – namely that Christians and Muslims define very different relationships between Jesus and God. In Christian theology the Son is begotten by the Father but both ARE GOD. In Muslim theology Allah caused Jesus to be born, but Jesus is NOT GOD. Either the Nicean creed is TRUE and the teachings of Mohammed are FALSE, or vice versa, or (as atheists believe) BOTH are wrong.
But no matter which of the three situations holds, a substantial chunk of theists are utterly and completely mistaken about their religion and the nature of the universe. The fact that most theists are wrong about most things suggests that we shouldn’t put a great deal of stock in their claims as to how the universe may or may not be structured.
There is a difference between arguing about the characteristics of a subject and arguing about existence of a subject, you know. BTW, I find “The Divine” to be a catch-all phrase that is both an excuse not to have to define the characteristics of your particular goddess/god and a way to inflate the number of worshipers. By saying that all the religions are just different ways of worshiping “The Divine”, you have created a new deity that has all the characteristics of all the different deities, thus managing to insult most, if not all, the different religions at the same time. Either have the courage of your convictions and stick with the god you believe in, or just tell people right out that it doesn’t matter what they believe or what religious text to follow because it just doesn’t matter.
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty and back to the OP. Why don’t you list, to the best of your ability, all the characteristics that all the currently worshiped gods have in common? What, exactly, do all the theists have in common?
While I would not put it as harshly as Der Trihs, I believe he has a point; that is your interpretation of the “basic principles”. I’m reasonbly certain if I asked you what the basic principles of Christianity were, for example, you would give that answer. Yet were I to ask someone else, they might suggest different ones; perhaps honouring a Divine is the only important thing, even if they tell you to treat your fellow humans badly. Perhaps their methods of honouring a Divine (perhaps through dietary rules, or times of worship) are different, yet mandatory. Perhaps not all humans are to be treated equally.
Oh, and you’re forgetting polytheists and religions without gods. No matter, of course, you’ve included all the important ones. Oh, except Buddhism. And Hinduism. And Sikhism. And Shinto. And… well, you get the idea. Could you possibly cite some of these studies? I’d be interested to know if you’re repeating their conclusions or interpreting them in turn.
To be fair, that’s an argument to popularity. You can’t tell whether something is right or not just by how many people think it is. Even in the case of gods, which generally are supposed to have plans that involve us believing, doesn’t work like that. I would say that the fact that most theists don’t agree is an important lesson in terms of the importance of “feeling” the existence of gods, though. That’s probably the point on which I disagree with theists the most; feeling god exists seems to be (in many cases) the hinge point of their faith, yet it’s really not a good reason by itself at all.
You can’t understand the Constitution by observing the behaviour and statements of selected groups. You need to do your evaluation at a meta level.
Yes! And this is why my argument above isn’t merely an argument to popularity.
Most theists are wrong. But they all profess faith. It follows then that most people who believe in their religion through faith alone are sadly mistaken. Maybe it’s the Christians. Maybe it’s the Hindus. Maybe it’s the Jains. Maybe it’s all of them. But clearly there are huge swaths of humanity whose faith has led them to hold utterly wrong ideas about how the universe is organized. Clearly faith is a very poor tool for understanding reality.
That leaves only empirical evidence. And unfortunately for the theists, there is no empirical evidence for their position.
Now in all fairness, we cannot say that there is no empirical evidence for their position-they just haven’t provided any yet. I think we should be fair about this and allow them to present such empirical evidence, don’t you?
Sounds fair to me. Let’s give 'em an hour and see what they can come up with.