(October 3, 2013 at 6:09 am)Rational AKD Wrote: what I was speaking of was the proposition "God exists" and "God doesn't exist." just about all atheists here would agree that the negating proposition here is more rational, yet I haven't seen a single reason why that is so.
You don't think the lack of demonstrable evidence is a rational reason?
Maybe you put a lot confidence in the various philosophical arguments for the existence of god? They are demonstrably fallacious, and therefore unreasonable by definition.
Is more or less rational to believe in miracle claims? I'll bet you reject them for every other religion, but not your own.
Is it more or less rational to base your beliefs on ancient texts written by unknown authors, decades or more after the alleged events, than to think they are most likely unreliable?
Especially considering that eyewitness accounts (even if the Gospels were eyewitness accounts, which they're not) are not reliable evidence for supernatural events. If you question this, think about all the 1000's of people that claim they've been abducted by UFO's. Do you give their accounts any credibility?
Quote:all they've been doing is saying the first is an "extraordinary claim" and requires extraordinary evidence. but as I've stated, this is purely subjective. it may seem to some that a God existing is an extraordinary claim, but to others the proposition that God doesn't exist is even more extraordinary as a claim.
It is an extraordinary claim for several reasons.
1. It explains a mystery with a bigger mystery.
2. Explaining something by saying that "god did it" does not really explain a thing. You might as well be saying "magic did it",
3. There are natural explanations for almost everything attributed to gods. Where there isn't, the intellectually honest answer is "we don't know yet".
4. There is insufficient supporting evidence for the claim.
A supernatural explanation is by default the more extraordinary claim, because it is adding a layer mystery that is not required to explain anything. Saying "god did it" creates more questions than it answers.
Quote:there is no way you can objectively determine how extraordinary a claim is. the closest they've come to answering this is saying it's all about believability, but the problem is this is also subjective. the claim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" just doesn't work and i'm not bringing up radical or even controversial stuff. most philosophers recognize the fallacy of this statement. David Hume may have been a great advocate of this statement, but to be honest he wasn't a good philosopher at all. an almost complete refutation of all his works exists in a book by John Earman titled 'Hume's Abject Failure.'
"I have a pet dog". Extraordinary or ordinary claim?
"I have a pet invisible dragon". Extraordinary or ordinary claim?
See, it is not too hard to tell the difference.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
