(December 21, 2016 at 1:01 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: Extraordinarily complex deities require extraordinary complex evidence though. Evidence is expected and it isn't there. The maxim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence doesn't apply when evidence for something is very much expected to be there if it were really true. And when something is so absurd as to be unfalsifiable then that itself is very much evidence against its existence too.
Theologically speaking, God isn't complex but rather simple.
With respect to the idea that only falsifiable claims can be considered knowledge, that was certainly not a position Karl Popper would have accepted. Presenting "falsifiablity" as some kind of test is a red herring. I would refer you to this more comprehensive article on the subject which you can find at:
Do Theological Claims Need to be Falsifiable
Here is a quote from the article:
"Now, the fundamental claims and arguments of theology—for example, the most important arguments for the existence and attributes of God (such as Aquinas’s arguments, or Leibniz’s arguments)—are a species of metaphysical claim. Hence it is simply a category mistake to demand of them, as Flew did, that they be empirically falsifiable. To dismiss theology on falsificationist grounds, one would, to be consistent, also have to dismiss mathematics, logic, meta-science, and metaphysics in general. Which would be, not only absurd, but self-defeating, since the claim that only scientific claims are rationally justifiable is itself not a scientific claim but a metaphysical claim, and any argument for this claim would presuppose standards of logic." - Edward Feser in StrangeNotions.com
