RE: the slippery "F" word - my solution
October 24, 2010 at 12:30 am
(This post was last modified: October 24, 2010 at 12:36 am by Volt.)
(October 23, 2010 at 12:15 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:Quote:What reason do you have not to believe in God?
Personnally non-belief in god is my default position.
There is no evidence to that I have encountered to make me change that position.
So I dont believe.
Why dont you believe in unicorns?(I assume you dont)
I would guess that it is because in all likelyhood they dont exist and so there is no REAL evidence that they ever did. (I have seen what was said in the middle ages to be a unicorn horn but turned out to be a Narwhal tooth)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal
I bet your default position is that there is a god and that you require evidence to knock you out of that belief.
I prefer evidence for the things I believe in.
You're correlating a situation with closed parameters to one with no parameters.
The most natural default view you could have is "don't know," so lack of evidence is not the factor that predisposes you to take an opposite belief.
We know unicorns don't exist, on the planet Earth, because Earth has been investigated and there are no unicorns, and its found that the narwhal tooth was misattributed evidence. Now, how would you know there are not unicorns or unicorn-like creatures on another planet somewhere? In another dimension or parallel universe or something?
Since we haven't explored every possible location within existence and much less any alternative existences if they happen to exist, a broad claim like "unicorns don't exist, anywhere" isn't very rational, right? Unicorns are still in the realm of possibility, even if unlikely. But how do we even determine likelihood, when we don't even have all the information about where unicorns could possibly reside?
You believe there are no unicorns, rather than stating that you don't know whether or not there could be unicorns. With no evidence for your belief.
Your statement, that you prefer evidence for the things you believe in, is false.
This is presuming you meant your statement as a universal claim, because you were correlating it with a universal claim.
