The " no evidence" argument

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" there is no evidence for God. " therefore God doesn’t exist and belief in God is delusional
This is an untenable argument and here’s why.
You then proceed to make the argument that the fact that some believe, and that some convert, is some evidence for God.

Of course. Belief, and testimony of people about their belief, is “some evidence.”

For example, what if you tell me that our friend Joe stole some merchandise, and then I am called to testify in court that you told me that Joe stole the merchandise? Is that “some evidence” that Joe stole the merchandise? Yes, it is. But is it admissible evidence? No. It is hearsay (at least in US courts). In the end, you might run into someone outside the courtroom who would say that the prosecutor had no evidence…even if that person was aware of the hearsay evidence.

I think that is what is happening here when people say there is “no evidence” for God.

I think when someone says there is “no evidence,” they are saying that God’s existence is not a scientifically provable fact.

Of course, there is “some evidence.” Testimony is “some evidence,” and every earthly religion has the testimony of numerous people to support itself.

Thus, testimony is evidence for God, and for all the other gods…which means it is not very good evidence for someone trying to objectively decide between the many gods posited by humanity. Someone who recognizes that might say, “there is no evidence for God.” While that might be an exaggeration, it is not really that far off the mark. Nonetheless, when we argue with them, we should argue with what they mean (the evidence for God is exceedingly weak because it is not testable in a reproducible manner and therefore cannot be reliably adopted by an objective decision maker) and not what they say (there is no evidence for God).

Also, as Catholics, we cannot rest very easy for generic arguments for theism. If your argument works just as well for Vishnu as it does for God, then an objective listener could reasonably think that the argument is not useful evidence for God at all.
 
Tonyrey,

When you say ‘If you have no faith in mankind how can you have faith in God who created mankind?’

Are you suggesting that we can see evidence of God’s design in us?

🙂
 
Jocko, I think it is very easy to convince someone that we don’t know how universes happen, actually!

This will sound comfortingly agnostic, but we might as well assume universes can come out of nothing, just like that, as much as assuming that they have to be created by a self-generating immaterial god.

On the possibility of coming out of nothing, you’ve probably seen or would be interested in this:

youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

It’s a public lecture by Lawrence Krauss (a physicist) on the start and end of the universe. A few things which blew my mind - the total energy content of the universe is zero (and hence it could have come from nothing), and in the future, any intelligent life will lack the empirical evidence to understand what we know of the universe now. Because of the increasing rate of expansion of space, space will expand quicker than light, and the night sky will appear dark, but for one’s own galaxy! How utterly lonely!

James
 
Are you suggesting that we can see evidence of God’s design in us?

🙂
What we are seeing is natural selection. We are figuring out how we got to this point. Everything that looks like divine design can be explained, yet it remains to be said that we cannot know for sure if natural selection was the plan of God from the beginning or not. i.e. look where we are at today.

I can see what I consider goodness and beauty on our planet but It’s hard to connect how brutal nature is (and there are several good examples) with “God is good to all his creation.”
 
If God felt it necessary for people to believe in him, he would have made it evident in such a way that was undeniable. This is clearly not the case. Is belief therefore necessary for salvation? If there is indeed a God resembling the Christian conception of such, who has set up the universe as it is, this being will, from compassion and reason, accept honest unbelievers. If it doesn’t, it is unworthy of worship in the first place.
Catholic apologists have said that God hides himself so that only those who seek him will find him. The point is the knowledge of God is not available for men to take by force. Its an ask and receive, seek and find, knock etc. type of thing. There are bible verses to expound on my following point but for sake of some brevity i’ll omit most of them. To know that God exists is Thee blessing, and belief is not necessarily the precursor to salvation but it is a signof it. With that said,

**“Nobody can see the Kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.”-**Jesus. Spirit is important because without being born of spirit or -coming to spiritual consciousness- it is impossible to know God who is spirit. His substance being the Holy Spirit. We claim God is a spirit, therefore it is kind of hard to look for him in matter or its processes/laws. We see the beauty and goodness and harmony of the world. How it arrived at complexities can be explained well by the only workable solution Natural Selection. God, from the beginning of Christianity, is in the biggest -gap- possible, that is, the Spirit world. lol. So if you think your troubles with God are outstanding out there, they are much harder when on this side of the faith fence.

I have a question; how would God reveal himself in matter so that the whole world would believe?
 
Jocko, I think it is very easy to convince someone that we don’t know how universes happen, actually!

This will sound comfortingly agnostic, but we might as well assume universes can come out of nothing, just like that, as much as assuming that they have to be created by a self-generating immaterial god.

On the possibility of coming out of nothing, you’ve probably seen or would be interested in this:

youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

It’s a public lecture by Lawrence Krauss (a physicist) on the start and end of the universe. A few things which blew my mind - the total energy content of the universe is zero (and hence it could have come from nothing),
Unimpressive. Like many, Krauss confuses the physical ‘nothing’ of the quantum vacuum with true, metaphysical nothing. See the response by physicist Stephen Barr to Hawking’s book:

firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/much-ado-about-ldquonothingrdquo-stephen-hawking-and-the-self-creating-universe

The universe cannot come out of nothing.
 
Unimpressive. Like many, Krauss confuses the physical ‘nothing’ of the quantum vacuum with true, metaphysical nothing. See the response by physicist Stephen Barr to Hawking’s book:

firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/much-ado-about-ldquonothingrdquo-stephen-hawking-and-the-self-creating-universe

The universe cannot come out of nothing.
We don’t know that. Remember the famous saying “Nothing more dense than air can ever fly.”

We now know the universe is full of somethings and not nothingness. It is possible that there could have never been nothingness at one point. It is now proposed that our entire universe is the offspring of parent universes in a megaverse. Each universe like little suds in a bath (multiverse) of soap suds. http://aggiechase37.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/20090513_multiverse2.jpg
 
I will accept the counter to Krauss provisionally, until I actually have a look at that, but Krauss is not saying a vacuum is the same as the conditions before the Big Bang. What he said was that virtual particle pairs spontaneously appear and annihilate in a vacuum (quantum fluctuations). This is accepted within physics theories because while the particles ‘borrow’ energy from a zero energy state, they almost immediately give it back in their destruction. This process of fluctuation also accounts for Hawking’s radiation from black holes, tho I don’t remember the details. The point is that real actual matter can come from a zero energy state, and his calculations demonstrate (within degrees of accuracy) that the universe if averaged out = zero energy.

This means that it is not inconsistent with current theories to say that all the matter etc we see around us came from nothing. Whether this nothing is the same as your metaphysical nothing I don’t know, but whether there was a metaphysical nothing or not may not be so easy to decide.
 
The total in both cases remains zero - that is the point of consistency which indicates possibility
 
Tonyrey,

When you say ‘If you have no faith in mankind how can you have faith in God who created mankind?’

Are you suggesting that we can see evidence of God’s design in us?

🙂
Of course! The amazing success of science is proof of the power of the human mind. How else do you explain it?
 
  1. All evidence exists in our perceptions.
All evidence exists in our perceptions because we base our reasoning on our perceptions **not **the objects of our perceptions which are forever beyond our reach - unless you believe our perceptions are infallible and never misleading…
  1. It is our minds that interpret the evidence of our perceptions.
    Our minds interpret our perception of the evidence.
To be precise our minds interpret the evidence of those perceptions we consider reliable. Not all our perceptions are evidence because they are not always accurate.
3. The astonishing success of science is proof of the power of the mind.
Yes. As is general conversation, riding a bike, tying one’s shoelaces, and so on.

Your equation of everyday skills with science is unsound. Your underestimation of the power of the mind throws doubt on the validity of your conclusions… 🙂
4. The power of the mind requires explanation.
It has one. Evolution.

I entirely agree.
5. The most adequate explanation is that there is a Supreme Mind.
No, because there is no evidence for this “explanation” (which is anything but an explanation, because it explains precisely nothing.) On the other hand, there’s bags of evidence for evolution.

You falsely assume that evolution excludes Design. It is evolution from purposeless particles that explains nothing. The “mind from the mindless” hypothesis is self-refuting.
6. The most inadequate explanation is that the power of the mind is derived from blind processes…
And you finish with your usual motif, the Argument from Ignorance.

And you finish with your usual motif, the Appeal to Ignorance!
The fact remains that faith in blind processes is unjustified precisely because they lack insight which you claim to have… 😉
 
There’s no direct evidence for anything except the existence of your own thoughts, feelings, perceptions and decisions!
Yes… but “it’s obvious” that other people and the real world exist! 😃
 
The “Pro-Religion” website is only quoting an unbiased World Religion study:

adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

God Bless
This doesn’t excuse the fact that the site you linked arbitrarily dismisses the cited findings and inserts its own baseless estimate, in direct contradiction of the Encyclopedia Britannica stats which show atheist and non-religious totalling 18.5%.

None of which has any impact on the subject of this thread, which is about evidence for God, or so I thought. Evidence, of course, being something that your linked site also utterly fails to deliver!
 
Again, its interesting how writings over 5,000 years old (Old Testament) outline a creating scenario similar to the most widely accepted “Big Bang” hypothesis?

“The most widely accepted scientific creation scenario is the Big Bang theory, which holds that everything in the Universe was created from nothing. Coincidentally, the Christian Bible likewise asserts that God created everything from nothing (Genesis 1:1) (Hebrews 11:3)

God Bless
Big Bang Theory doesn’t propose ex nihilo in any literal sense.
 
Big Bang Theory doesn’t propose ex nihilo in any literal sense.
Jocko,

If the big bang theory isn’t the creation of the universe from nothing, what is it?

Scientifically speaking, according to the BB theory, there was nothing - no matter, no time, no energy, no space - before the singularity erupted. Sounds like “nothing” to me. You got something different?

Yppop
 
All evidence exists in our perceptions because we base our reasoning on our perceptions not the objects of our perceptions which are forever beyond our reach - unless you believe our perceptions are infallible and never misleading…
No, I don’t believe our perceptions are infallible, but it doesn’t follow that evidence is entirely within our perception. In fact, if our perceptions are fallible, then that makes a mockery of the idea of evidence existing within them! How can it be called evidence if it’s subject to our subjective perceptions?

You’re putting the cart before the horse here. The way you phrase it, you can state that you have evidence for anything you like, simply because of how you perceive something! Evidence becomes entirely subjective. You subjectively perceive our environment as having been created by God, therefore you believe you have evidence that it was. What a ridiculous philsophy! Or maybe you just have a different definition of evidence to most people - you seem to be saying that “evidence” is the same as “what I think.”

No - the evidence is what we perceive; we may perceive it wrongly and draw false conclusions, but this doesn’t make the evidence faulty. The evidence is what it is, whether we perceive it correctly, incorrectly, or not at all.
To be precise our minds interpret the evidence of those perceptions we consider reliable. Not all our perceptions are evidence because they are not always accurate.
That might be precise, but it’s utterly wrong.

Our perceptions are not evidence itself, they are simply perceptions of evidence. Our minds perceive the evidence - the perception and the interpretation are the same thing.
None of our perceptions are evidence - although as I said above, your insistence that they are may go some way towards explaining why you consider there to be evidence for the existence of God!
Your equation of everyday skills with science is unsound. Your underestimation of the power of the mind throws doubt on the validity of your conclusions…
It looks more like your reading skills are unsound - I didn’t equate them to science. I said that they are, like the success of science, indicators of the power of the mind. They all demonstrate the capabilities of our brains.
I entirely agree.

You falsely assume that evolution excludes Design.
No, I don’t falsely assume anything. The Theory of Evolution most definitely excludes Design. You, on the other hand, falsely assume the existence of design without even the slightest evidence to support such a hypothesis.
It is evolution from purposeless particles that explains nothing.
Well, it explains the process in sufficient detail for it to have become settled science. It’s only really agenda-driven nutjobs or the uneducated who still try to deny it.
The “mind from the mindless” hypothesis is self-refuting.
How so? This seems to me simply another of your baseless assertions, a product of your dogmatic refusal to embrace the possibility of anything you don’t instantly understand.
And you finish with your usual motif, the Appeal to Ignorance!
Accepting ignorance is not the same as relishing it. But either is more intellectually and ethically honest than denying it, as you do. It’s clear that you would rather pretend you know something, than accept that you don’t - this is a strand that I’ve seen in every single one of your attempted arguments (although to be fair it’s a fundamentally necessary tenet of religious belief). The entire success of science is predicated on the idea of “I don’t know - let’s try and find out.” You appear to consider such an approach a weakness!
The fact remains that faith in blind processes is unjustified precisely because they lack insight which you claim to have…
Here you are just repeating yourself. Another strain of your Argument from Ignorance. “I don’t understand how ***X ***can have occurred. Therefore it can’t have done.”

Luckily, most scientists replace the second sentence with, “Let’s see if we can find out,” which is why we’re not all still living in the dark ages.
 
Are you suggesting that we can see evidence of God’s design in us?
That’s one of the key issues, atheist for some reason or other are unable to extrapolate these signs and evidence in creation.

“Consider a child in Disneyworld, unaware of the network of underground tunnels necessary for exhibit functions. The parent is aware that there is more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye. Likewise, the earliest cultures realized that there is more going on regarding creation than meets the eye. Most people are able to reason that there must be an intelligent design to the formation and maintenance of the Universe. Yet, even today, there are small minorities who are unable to comprehend that connection.”

ArguingWithAtheists.com
God Bless
 
So, Tonyrey and Insight - do you both think that we can see design in humans, or do you say respectively in humans/the natural creation? Tonyrey, you mentioned the mind as an example, and Insight I think you’re talking about the non-human.

Apart from the mind, what else do you think is evidence of design?
 
So, Tonyrey and Insight - do you both think that we can see design in humans, or do you say respectively in humans/the natural creation? Tonyrey, you mentioned the mind as an example, and Insight I think you’re talking about the non-human.

Apart from the mind, what else do you think is evidence of design?
There are proofs in everything. For example; planets inherently have unstable axial tilts. Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc. tilt 90 degrees going around the sun. Our moon is the exact size and distance to act as a perfect outrigger keeping our Earth’s stable. Remove the moon and the North and South poles would be at a different location on the equator every 11 years. All life on earth dies.

To do this, the moon being exactly 1/400th the diameter of the sun, is exactly 400 times closer than the sun. This also makes it appear in the sky exactly the same size as the sun, notice that solar eclipses are perfect size matches. There are currently 174 known moons in our solar system, but no other moon even comes close to doing this.

Furthermore, the moon moves away from the Earth 1 ½” every year. 4 billion years ago it was 15 times larger in the sky and there could be no life on Earth because of its overwhelming effect. 4 billion years from now we will loose the moon completely.

The point is; consider how God introduced humans on Earth at the exact focal point when the moon has its most stable effect on the Earth’s axis, right at the 400 ratio mark. Its perfect planning.

It also shows that when scientists rave over finding planets in the Goldilocks belts of other solar systems, they are not considering the additional requirement of having one large moon orbiting at the exact right distance.

God Bless
 
There are proofs in everything. For example; planets inherently have unstable axial tilts. Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc. tilt 90 degrees going around the sun. Our moon is the exact size and distance to act as a perfect outrigger keeping our Earth’s stable. Remove the moon and the North and South poles would be at a different location on the equator every 11 years. All life on earth dies.

To do this, the moon being exactly 1/400th the diameter of the sun, is exactly 400 times closer than the sun. This also makes it appear in the sky exactly the same size as the sun, notice that solar eclipses are perfect size matches. There are currently 174 known moons in our solar system, but no other moon even comes close to doing this.

Furthermore, the moon moves away from the Earth 1 ½” every year. 4 billion years ago it was 15 times larger in the sky and there could be no life on Earth because of its overwhelming effect. 4 billion years from now we will loose the moon completely.

The point is; consider how God introduced humans on Earth at the exact focal point when the moon has its most stable effect on the Earth’s axis, right at the 400 ratio mark. Its perfect planning.

It also shows that when scientists rave over finding planets in the Goldilocks belts of other solar systems, they are not considering the additional requirement of having one large moon orbiting at the exact right distance.

God Bless
Big deal. Sorry to crash your party, but having a perfect Goldilocks scenario with a perfect moon is statistically almost bound to happen somewhere in a universe with 300 billion galaxies, each containing on average 300 billion stars, with many (or most) of them having planets.

The ‘Rare Earth’ argument is useful for arguing that intelligent life in the universe is probably very rare (while microbial life may be abundant), but it is not a good design argument. The fine-tuning argument that is even conceded by atheist cosmologists (who then turn to the multiverse as a ‘rescue’) is much better:

home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/cosmological-arguments-god.htm
 
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