Evidence that God exists

[Mark]

What's this sudden attraction to the word 'truth'?

You brought it up by claiming that I said that everything required evidence to be true, which I didn't. I said that everything required evidence to be held as "truth" in the scientific sense of the word.

Truth is a good philosophical term. Evidence is scientific. Don't confuse the two.

I'm not, I just spent the last post explaining how they were different. Whilst scientific truth might be close to absolute truth (or even spot on) it can never know for certain.

Adrian, have you read David Hume? I suppose you may have, but if not, you should, since he is the touchstone of modern Anglo-American philosophy. So should your colleagues on this site, whom I take to be intelligent young Englishmen like yourself.

In any case, Hume argued that there were exactly two kinds of statement that can have meaning, statements of fact and statements expressing conventional truths. The later explain how terms are manipulated within a conventional system such as Logic or Mathematics, and an example would be the statement, "2+2=4." Such a statement is true or false depending on whether or not it is consistent with the conventional system that it explicates, and usually, with a specified set of assumptions. "2+2=5" is false for example. Conventional statements could be said to be "exempt from evidence," a term fr0d0 likes to use, in the sense that they simply are not about facts; there is no evidence that is relevant to their truth. Statements of fact, such as "That bird over there is a crow" are statements that make an assertion about the state of the world, and so are capable of being confirmed or disconfirmed. We can kill or capture that bird, and see if it really is a crow.

You can't always tell into which class any statement falls, for example, "All crows are black" could be a statement of fact, or an explication of the linguistic convention that if a bird is not black, it is not appropriately referred to as a crow. If it's a statement of fact, you could disconfirm it by finding, say, an albino crow. If it's a statement of convention, the question merely is whether it is in fact the case that, within some specified set of usages, nonblack birds are never referred to as crows.

Obviously there are many statements that express neither conventional truths nor allegations of fact. Hume and his followers argued that all statments in this class are without meaning. Poetry, for example, is emotionally suggestive by not meaningful. In most interpretations, nonmeaningful statements would include both "God exists" and "God does not exist," on the basis that neither is this capable of being checked against evidence, nor does it exhibit a convention of any kind.

Necessarily Hume was wrong in at least one regard. If you consider the statement, "There are exactly two kinds of statement that can have meaning, statements of fact and statements expressing conventional truth," which kind of statement is this? There must be a third meaningful class of statements that embraces statements concerning the meaning of statements. Some people have referred to this class as "meta-statements."

I have my own answer to Hume that I may articulate at some later time. But as a sometime follower of Hume, I recoil when I see fr0d0 comparing religion and mathematics so freely. Mathematics is a conventional system of quantitative analysis; religion is not a conventional system of any kind. The propositions of mathematics are capable of being checked for formal consistency with a given set of assumptions; religious statements have no such possibility of disconfirmation (Spinoza, for one, suffered under the delusion that religion can be expressed as a purely deductive system, but his proofs of God's existence were false).