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RE: Why Religious Proof Or Disproof Is Unimportant
October 31, 2013 at 8:53 pm
(October 31, 2013 at 11:08 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Gods, by their very nature, are not particularly subject to proof or disproof in any meaningful sense. A sufficiently subtle deity isn't going to provide direct evidence of its existence. Logical constructs (for and against) seem to always start with or to contain premises which are arguable enough to render the entire construct suspect, if not invalid.
What about when you have a deity which is absolutely not subtle at all in any of its official depictions, like God in the Bible?
RE: Why Religious Proof Or Disproof Is Unimportant
October 31, 2013 at 9:37 pm
To me, the proof, the evidence, the reason I know there is no such thing as a god or many gods (which is part of a larger group of stuff I know to be untrue such as fairies, ghosts, demons, magical powers, spells, gnomes, elves for the shoemaker, etc.) is kind of a compilation of so many things I can't pin it down to one. Henceforth the above grouping of stuff will be referred to as - stuff
For instance;
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist because the account of one stuff is eerily similar to the account of another stuff that was around some time before and far far away.
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist because christians have so many contradictions within the one book they really have to stand on (... this book is like a leg that's infested with termites, so it's a short matter of time before the mites have chewed through it, you ask me.) that when you ask for an explanation, excuses or misdirections are stated rather than a true reason as to why this book says one thing here and within a number of pages says something that can in no way be construed as the same or even a similar statement to the prior one.
I know stuff is highly unlikely because fairies themselves branch from an old pagan belief which created them, as with other mythological beings.
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist because of all the religions that existed before and are now relegated to mythologies, no longer held to be true.
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist. Science proves how old everything is. No, not to an exact number but we now know what sorta numbers we're dealing with. If it's not that number, it's probably only going to get higher.
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist because we now know what is under our feet. It's not a burning eternity for anything, it's liquid heat fucking molten lava.
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist because we now know what is above our heads. There are no cloud houses and pretty little fences where winged human like creatures sing and dance and tell stories around the campcloud. There's space, particles, planets, quasars, black holes, stars... and the absence of all those things.
I know stuff is highly unlikely to exist because so many stuffs around the world have gotten lenient from their own moral codes to 'keep up with the times'. Nuh-uh. Owlix don't dig that. You take it all literally because that's how it was written. When those books talked about women who exposed themselves deserve to be raped, when those books talked about slaves being beaten and owned, when those books talked about doing good to others in this life means your next life will be better, when those books talked all that stuff, it was written to be taken verbatim. If not, those books would've stated as such.
I know all this stuff is very, very highly unlikely because of every unlikely situation I just stated above. I noticed all these things, learned these things, discovered these things, researched these things. All of this seen separately isn't a big deal. And then everything came together at once and I realized it's all connected in myth and fairy telling, albeit unintended.
But that's just me.
Thanks to Cinjin for making it more 'sig space' friendly.
RE: Why Religious Proof Or Disproof Is Unimportant
November 1, 2013 at 6:33 pm
(October 31, 2013 at 11:08 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Theists (all franchises) are often asked to prove that their god(s) exist. Non-theists (all franchises) are often asked to disprove the existence of god(s). Proofs of this sort seem to fall into two broad categories - evidentiary and logical. My contention is that exercises of this kind are about as useful as a fart in a spacesuit.
Gods, by their very nature, are not particularly subject to proof or disproof in any meaningful sense. A sufficiently subtle deity isn't going to provide direct evidence of its existence. Logical constructs (for and against) seem to always start with or to contain premises which are arguable enough to render the entire construct suspect, if not invalid.
A much handier way to evaluate whether gods exist has sometimes been called 'The Reasonableness of Belief'. Hume's argument regarding miracles (which I won't repeat here) is a good example of this sort of evaluation, as is the faeries-at-the-bottom-of-my-garden problem: It may indeed be the case that there are invisible, undetectable faeries living in my garden, but in the absence of evidence for them, it isn't reasonable to believe that there are.
As long as we can propose naturalistic, mundane explanations for mysterious phenomena, it simply isn't reasonable to propose others. And, given the track record or naturalism as an explicatory mechanism, it isn't reasonable to propose non-naturalistic explanations for things which we do not, as yet, understand.
This strikes me as the strongest support imaginable for non-theism. Until and unless theism can point to a phenomenon or group of phenomena for which no naturalistic explanation is possible, it leaves theism as an unreasonable belief.
I'd write more on this, but my painkillers are kicking in.
Boru
The question is then: Can we truly know EVERYTHING?
". . . let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." -G. K. Chesterton
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