A good case against God

[Jeffonthenet]

If the absence of demonstrable evidence for god fails to justify atheism, then that very absence continues to fail to justify theism. Agnostics belong to one of those camps by virtue of the excluded middle and the value of the term, "agnostic." Therefore, that absence would seem to fail to justify agnosticism, and the only way past the issue is to dispense entirely with the discussion of religion.

Please explain, I don't understand what you are saying. I know what the law of the excluded middle is, but I am not sure how it applies here.

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Certianly there are threads on the internet where theists can present evidence for the existence of God. This is not one of them. This is the atheist's chance to do likewise, and I have tried to defend with reason that even if there is no demonstrable evidence for God it does not justify atheism. Go ahead and be agnostic if you want, but if you refuse to give any argument against God or belief in God that can stand up to scrutiny, I contend that your atheism is unjustified.

So really in this thread I am not arguing that God exists.

I am arguing that the absence of demonstrable evidence for God doesn't justify atheism.

I am also asking atheists to give good reasons to think there is no God, and I can't say that I think I have seen any.

And that one shouldn't rule out God simply because of the apparent absence of evidence.

If there are any agnostics here I would invite you to join me.

Well, I'm not an atheist, but I can think of a reason that absence of evidence for God justifies (weak) atheism.

First, methods of drawing inference rely on evidence. There is a difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence (looking in a cage and seeing empty air is evidence of the absence of a polar bear; not looking into the cage at all is absence of evidence), and in the absence of evidence, we cannot draw valid inferences.

For suppose we could. Suppose we were to assume a principle whereby a hypothesis would be answered in the affirmative (or in the negative) in the absence of evidence, with confidence 0 < c < 1. In order to be consistent, c must be constant across all hypothesis tests (if we ask the same question again and again, each time with no evidence, we shouldn't become more or less confident in our answer).

So suppose we are asking whether some hypothesis H is true, but we have an absence of evidence. We then affirm H with confidence equal to c. Now, let us ask another question--whether ~H is true. We will also assign this c.

However, P(H) = 1 - P(~H), since P(H or ~H) = 1, and H and ~H are mutually exclusive, hence P(H or ~H) = P(H) + P(~H) = 1.

Thus c = 1 - c, hence c = 0.5

Now, any argument used to justify believing H on the basis of our confidence that H is true applies equally to ~H. Thus there is no way to probabilistically distinguish them; we must either arbitrarily draw an inference (which negates the whole point of having a method of inference), or decline to draw an inference.




This argument could be further developed using utility theory; choosing between H and ~H could be done based on both the confidence we have in them and the expected utility of each.

Hello Clive, I appreciate the time you took to reply, but despite understanding symbolic logic a little, I am not sure here what you are claiming, or how you are backing this up. (for one, what does "c" refer to, and what does 0 < c < 1 mean?

Also, if you are defining "weak atheism" the same way as I define agnosticism--simply as not knowing if God exists, we may not disagree here on anything but terminology.

I would also say in an ultimate sense that there is evidence for God, it is just non-verbal--experiential or intuitive. I believe if one seeks God from a pure heart, one will find out at some point in their life if God exists.

I would also say that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence only in a case in which we should expect to have more evidence than we do