The absurdity of atheism

[Lion_IRC]

…Let’s consider a scenario: “I say that there is an invisible pink unicorn in my basement and it demands that you turn over all your assets to a charity under my supervision”. You can either accept this claim, or reject it. Would you accept it on my say-so? I hope not.

I frequently accept claims made which have no consequence in my life. Scientist asserts Pluto is a planet. I take their word for it. End of story. And I have no reason question the claim.
Even if an Invisible Pink Unicorn really did tell you to tell me to hand over money to charity, that can still be true and yet (like the taxonomy/classification of planets) it doesn’t affect me.

…The point is that positive claims must be substantiated before they can be accepted.

Why? Why must I go all the way to Pluto and take measurements for myself when I can just take the word of people who did?
If you want atheism to be the default truth position, I have to ask WHY should your (unpersuasive) belief about God occupy that intellectually lazy position?
Even Richard Dawkins is reasonable enough to know that there is a theistic spectrum with agnosticism in the middle, degrees of atheism at one end and degrees of theism at the other.

…try to “wiggle out”, then I will ask: “can you prove that there is no IPU in my basement”? If you cannot “prove” it, then please give me all your money.

I thought you said the unicorn wanted me to give my money to charity. Now I’m supposed to give it to you instead?
Tell your ontological unicorn I said “NO”.

…Negative claims cannot be “proven” (except in axiomatic systems, like mathematics).

That’s not true. Science/empiricism can materially prove (or disprove) negatives.
…Is there water on the surface of Mars?
…Is that man the child’s biological father?

 

[Peter_Plato]

I have considered the CLAIM that God exists and the evidence provided has led me to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that He doesn’t exist (atheism).

Brad, I get the feeling you are jumping the shark here.

In order to claim anything doesn’t exist, you would need to have a well-formed concept of what it is that you are denying existence to, along with providing sufficient warrant for claiming that the said thing does not or cannot exist.

In order for us to take your statement seriously you have to provide the “evidence” you claim leads you to “conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt,” that God doesn’t exist.

You also need to provide a well-formed concept of God, that you further can show, the aforementioned evidence demonstrates, does not or cannot exist “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So let’s start with YOU providing …

1. A well-formed concept of God that most of those on this thread can agree is a fair and adequate representation of God.
2. Your evidence which proves “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the God detailed in 1) does not or cannot exist.

If you can provide a compelling accounting for both 1) and 2) then we would be led to think your atheism is reasonable. Otherwise, we’ll be forced to conclude you are a mere dilettante, a superficial poseur regarding your purported atheism – all for show with no substance.

 

[Lion_IRC]

Lion IRC;13531347:

Great.
God yes? (Theist)
God no? (Atheist)
God maybe? (Agnostic)

There’s no fourth option.

Ignostic? Someone who claims it is impossible to know because the question is inherently unanswerable or nonsensical.

Yeah, maybe. Good catch.
But I have always still put ignostic into the agnostic category.
Explanations for ones inability to answer don’t really change the basic final answer given - I don’t know.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Yeah, maybe. Good catch.
But I have always put ignostic into the agnostic category.
Explanations for ones inability to answer don’t really change the basic final answer given - I don’t know.

Let me think on that a bit.

 

[Bradski]

To Peter…

It’s YOUR God in which I don’t believe. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to give you MY concept of something in which YOU believe?

If you say that X exists and ask me if I agree, then YOU have to define X and give evidence for its existence. How am I supposed to define what you believe?

 

[zyzz]

I frequently accept claims made which have no consequence in my life. Scientist asserts Pluto is a planet. I take their word for it. End of story. And I have no reason question the claim.

Indeed. But the point is that such a claim has “no consequence on your life”. That is not what God’s existence is supposed to mean.

Even if an Invisible Pink Unicorn really did tell you to tell me to hand over money to charity, that can still be true and yet (like the taxonomy/classification of planets) it doesn’t affect me.

You would not care if you lost all your money to a (possibly bogus) charity? I rather doubt that. Actually, I am quite certain, that you would DEMAND a proof for my IPU and his existence.

Why? Why must I go all the way to Pluto and take measurements for myself when I can just take the word of people who did?

Is the existence of Pluto important or not?

Even Richard Dawkins is reasonable enough to know that there is a theistic spectrum with agnosticism in the middle, degrees of atheism at one end and degrees of theism at the other.

I already wasted time and effort to explain the difference between metaphysical claims and epistemological claims. Please go back and consider them.

I thought you said the unicorn wanted me to give my money to charity. Now I’m supposed to give it to you instead?
Tell your ontological unicorn I said “NO”.

The charity was under my supervision. But you are right to decline my request due to insufficient evidence (or proof). That is EXACTLY what I do with your claim about the unfounded existence of God. There is exactly the same amount of evidence for God and my measly IPU… NONE!

That’s not true. Science/empiricism can materially prove (or disprove) negatives.
…Is there water on the surface of Mars?
…Is that man the child’s biological father?

These are not UNIVERSAL negatives. And they cannot “prove” these assertions. All they can say: “we have not found any evidence AS OF NOW for the existence of water on Mars”; and “we have not found any evidence for the paternity claims for that child”.

 

[Lion_IRC]

To Peter…

It’s YOUR God in which I don’t believe. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to give you MY concept of something in which YOU believe?

If you say that X exists and ask me if I agree, then YOU have to define X and give evidence for its existence. How am I supposed to define what you believe?

Props for your open honesty Bradski.

So many atheists and counter-apologists argue against Gods existence yet, like you they struggle to explain that which they think is non-existent.

See that zzyz?

Agnostic as opposed to atheist.

 

[987mk]

How would it be possible for you, a being with limited knowledge and limited power, to KNOW FOR CERTAIN that no being (or Being Itself) could possess the power to act in a manner not restricted by any other force, power or being?

How would it be possible for you, a being limited within time and space, with limited knowledge and limited power to KNOW FOR CERTAIN that no being (or Being Itself) could exist outside the restrictions of time and space?

Care to demonstrate how you KNOW any of those with certainty?

A logical proof would be appreciated, since you are claiming logical impossibility for those attributes.

Keep in mind that an assertion of certainty does not count as a logical proof.

I liked everything you had to say and you understand exactly what I’m getting at.

I’m not afraid to admit that I can’t know for 100% certainty that there isn’t an all knowing, all powerful and everlasting God.

Without evidence that such a God exists, I’ll put it in the impossible category.

 

[Lion_IRC]

Indeed. But the point is that such a claim has “no consequence on your life”. That is not what God’s existence is supposed to mean.

Yep - big difference. But still the same freedom to take your word for it or not.

…You would not care if you lost all your money to a (possibly bogus) charity? I rather doubt that.

I wouldn’t give all my money to charity even if you did hear the voice of a pink unicorn.

…Actually, I am quite certain, that you would DEMAND a proof for my IPU and his existence.

No. I believe you. You seem honest enough.
But as I said to you earlier, go back and tell your unicorn my answer is “NO”.

…Is the existence of Pluto important or not?

Yes. Obviously.
Otherwise science wouldn’t make such a big deal out of it. A planet. Here today. Gone tomorrow. How can empirical science do that? Name it as a planet, then change their mind and declare otherwise? How can we be sure either way?
Normally you’d say science relies on empirical evidence. And that should be trusted over beliefs and guesses. But…

…I already wasted time and effort to explain the difference between metaphysical claims and epistemological claims.

You think I don’t understand those words? LOL

…Please go back and consider them.

Thanks but no thanks.

…The charity was under my supervision. But you are right to decline my request due to insufficient evidence (or proof).

I’m not declining the request for lack of evidence. You provided me with testimony.
You are either telling the truth or you aren’t. And since I’m not going to obey you or your unicorn I don’t need to give you a lie detector test.

… That is EXACTLY what I do with your claim about the unfounded existence of God.

Suit yourself.
You seem under the mistaken impression that the biblical theist feel obligated to persuade you according to YOUR standard of proof. Or that God, like an obedient dog, must jump thru YOUR evidentiary hoops.
…first prove to me that you exist God and THEN I’ll decide whether or not to obey you

…There is exactly the same amount of evidence for God and my measly IPU… NONE!

So your reporting to me that you heard a talking unicorn was not evidence.
Fine.
What do you make of a newspaper report about a past event which can’t be repeated and which you can’t go back in time to verify if it happened?
What about eye witness evidence in court. Worthless or not?

…These are not UNIVERSAL negatives. And they cannot “prove” these assertions. All they can say: “we have not found any evidence AS OF NOW for the existence of water on Mars”; and “we have not found any evidence for the paternity claims for that child”.

If a paternity test finds no paternal DNA they have proven someone is NOT the father.
That’s proving a negative.

…but perhaps you are such a medodological skeptic that DNA tests can’t be trusted as evidence.

shrug

 

[Peter_Plato]

To Peter…

It’s YOUR God in which I don’t believe. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to give you MY concept of something in which YOU believe?

If you say that X exists and ask me if I agree, then YOU have to define X and give evidence for its existence. How am I supposed to define what you believe?

But, Brad, I never asked you to agree to anything.

You are the one insisting that you don’t agree with me. What is “God” that you don’t agree with and in which you don’t believe?

If I were to say to you, “I think a Kettierungsübunesetz exists,” and you answer, “I don’t think it does,” my proper response to your negative assertion would be to ask you what it is that YOU think is meant by ‘Kettierungsübunesetz’ and why you are so certain none exist.

And if you were to answer, “It’s YOUR Kettierungsübunesetz in which I don’t believe. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to give you MY concept of something in which YOU believe?” Can you not see that it is you who are denying the existence of a proposed something, yet are refusing to provide warrant for why you don’t think it exists?

Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?

In other words, in order to deny the existence of anything YOU have to have a well-formed concept of that thing and reasons why YOU think none can exist, otherwise you have no business denying the existence of such things in the first place.

You don’t need to “define what I believe,” what you do need to do is define what it is that you believe don’t exist.

Your proper response to my statement, “I think a Kettierungsübunesetz exists,” is for you to ask, “What is a Kettierungsübunesetz?” Otherwise, by not being able to “define what I believe,” you cannot provide any warrant for thinking Kettierungsübunesetzes cannot possibly exist."

And if I were to answer that a ‘Kettierungsübunesetz’ is a supreme example of a ‘rungsübunesetz,’ you would still have no warrant for claiming anything whatsoever about the existence of Kettierungsübunesetzes.

So, you see, to claim you are an aKettierungsübunesetz (a non-believer in Kettierungsübunesetzes,) requires that you are able to provide…

1. A well-formed concept of Kettierungsübunesetz that most of us on this thread familiar with Kettierungsübunesetzes can agree is a fair and adequate representation of a Kettierungsübunesetz.
2. Your evidence which proves “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Kettierungsübunesetz detailed in 1) does not or cannot exist.

Otherwise, I have no assurance that you even know what I am talking about when I claim that Kettierungsübunesetzes do, in fact, exist.

You are claiming God does not exist. You claimed that you knew that “beyond a reasonable doubt,” yet you cannot even provide a coherent concept of what YOU mean by God, nor are you will to provide any evidence whatsoever that God does not or cannot exist.

Brad, how can we possibly take your claims seriously?

 

[Peter_Plato]

Without evidence that such a God exists, I’ll put it in the impossible category.

Except that is illogical.

Snow leopards were not known to exist until the 1930s when reliable evidence was obtained. Did that make their existence “impossible” or put them in the “impossible category?”

 

[Bradski]

I am not claiming anything. I am telling you, as plainly as I possibly can, that what you and other Catholics and other Christians have as a concept of God, as far as I am concerned, from the evidence that has been presented to me for that concept, does not, beyond any reasonable doubt that I have, exist.

I, personally, have no concept of God other than the ones that have been presented to me. I have no personal concept of God myself. If I describe God, I am using other people’s descriptions of that concept.

I REALLY didn’t think I would ever have to explain that.

 

[PRmerger]

Lied, wut?

What would you call it when a man does this: “I’ll give a million dollars to any person who can do what I describe in this envelope!”

When candidates arrive, willing to do the deed, you declare “Haha! There’s NOTHING in this envelope, so you all can go home!”

You see he never really intended to give a million dollars, did he?

What I’m saying is that your God is impossible.

This is a nonsensical statement.

There is nothing in this which is impossible: God is a necessary, eternal, transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe.

 

[PRmerger]

I have considered the CLAIM that God exists and the evidence provided has led me to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that He doesn’t exist (atheism).

I have considered the PROPOSAL that the MV exists and I am open to the possibility. No evidence has been provided so the matter remains in my ‘pending’ tray (agnosticism).

So despite there being no evidence, you consider it possible?

 

[PRmerger]

I obviously have no problem with blasphemy. It is strictly a matter of freedom of speech. What each of us considers to be over and above what should be allowed is a personal matter. But we should all bend over backwards to uphold the principle.

Yipes.

You disappoint.

There is many an atheist who would join us in declaring a Satanic mass on Christmas Eve blaspheming the Eucharist to be a vile and obscene display.

Despite their avowed atheism.

Then again, if someone claims the right to call into doubt my daughter’s virtue, then I will similarly claim the right to smack him in the mouth.

Although this sounds to me to be a peculiarly old-fashioned type of thinking coming from you. Virtue?

Would you smack a woman in the mouth, or just a man? I’m just curious.

 

[PRmerger]

God yes? (Theist)
God no? (Atheist)
God maybe? (Agnostic)

There’s no fourth option.

Egg-zactly.

The above are the answers to the question: Does God exist.

 

[PRmerger]

Without evidence that such a God exists, I’ll put it in the impossible category.

This is the most anti-scientific thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Imagine if scientists in the past had embraced your parochial point of view:

“Without evidence that we can prevent polio, I’ll put in in the impossible category”.

“Without evidence that we can fly to the moon, I’ll put it in the impossible category”.

“Without evidence that I can chat with a man in Australia while I am sitting in my living room in Nepal, I’ll put that in the impossible category”.

 

[PRmerger]

But, Brad, I never asked you to agree to anything.

You are the one insisting that you don’t agree with me. What is “God” that you don’t agree with and in which you don’t believe?

If I were to say to you, “I think a Kettierungsübunesetz exists,” and you answer, “I don’t think it does,” my proper response to your negative assertion would be to ask you what it is that YOU think is meant by ‘Kettierungsübunesetz’ and why you are so certain none exist.

And if you were to answer, “It’s YOUR Kettierungsübunesetz in which I don’t believe. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to give you MY concept of something in which YOU believe?” Can you not see that it is you who are denying the existence of a proposed something, yet are refusing to provide warrant for why you don’t think it exists?

This, excellent. :clapping:

 

[zyzz]

No. I believe you. You seem honest enough.
But as I said to you earlier, go back and tell your unicorn my answer is “NO”.

That is what I say to the hypothetical God. Even when you say that the consequences are eternal torment. Your honesty is not being questioned. Your knowledge is. Even honest persons can be mistaken.

You seem under the mistaken impression that the biblical theist feel obligated to persuade you according to YOUR standard of proof. Or that God, like an obedient dog, must jump thru YOUR evidentiary hoops.

Well, it depends. As long as we are only passing time discussing some irrelevant question, like the existence of an Invisible Pink Unicorn, there is no “obligation” on either side. But you are commanded to spread the “good news”, you are supposed to bring everyone into the church, so we all can be “saved”. And God allegedly “desires” that we could be saved. If you take these assumptions seriously, then you are under obligation to come to MY turf and present your evidence according to MY standards. Of course if you disobey God’s command, and if God is indifferent to my fate, then you have no obligation and neither does God.

As for the IPU, you failed the test. You should have pointed out that “invisible” and “pink” are mutually exclusive, therefore such entity cannot exist, just like a “married bachelor” is an impossibility.

…first prove to me that you exist God and THEN I’ll decide whether or not to obey you

Not just that. Also tell me personally in a language that I understand what are your “do’s” and “don’t’s”, so I can make a meaningful decision. Now if you threaten me with everlasting torture for disobedience, then I would comply. But such threats would not be the best way to elicit “love”. When I was working, I had a sign on me wall: “The beatings will continue until the morale improves”.

What do you make of a newspaper report about a past event which can’t be repeated and which you can’t go back in time to verify if it happened?

It depends on the claim. If I would read a story in the “National Enquirer” about some Little Green Men landing in a spacecraft, I would not accept it, even if there were some photographs accompanying the story. Photoshop is my friend.

What about eye witness evidence in court. Worthless or not?

It is still dubious. Investigators know how unreliable the eye-witness testimony can be. Take ten eye-witnesses describing the same traffic accident, and you will get at least ten different descriptions. This is why the testimony of an eye-witness is not accepted unconditionally. There are cross-examinations, the different eye-witnesses’ testimonies are compared to each other.

But you don’t have any eye-witnesses. You only have hearsay evidence, and that in INADMISSIBLE in criminal court.

If a paternity test finds no paternal DNA they have proven someone is NOT the father.
That’s proving a negative.

You don’t get it. That is a “specific” negative and not a “universal” negative. A universal negative would be “present evidence that there are no purple-green checkerboard elephants ANYWHERE in the whole universe”. In mathematics you can prove a universal negative: “there are no integers ‘P’ and ‘Q’, for which their ratio ‘P/Q’ equals exactly the square root of two”. There are infinitely many integers, and they cannot ALL be empirically checked. But the above “universal” negative still can be proven.

 

[Peter_Plato]

To Peter…

It’s YOUR God in which I don’t believe. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to give you MY concept of something in which YOU believe?

If you say that X exists and ask me if I agree, then YOU have to define X and give evidence for its existence. How am I supposed to define what you believe?

The problem is the disconnect between what I believe and what you say I believe.

I can define X, but if you cannot provide a substantial rendering of X then it isn’t clear to me that you understand what I mean by X.