RE: My argument for atheism +
December 3, 2019 at 12:51 am
(This post was last modified: December 3, 2019 at 12:55 am by Belacqua.)
(December 1, 2019 at 10:46 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: Evidence: lit trans That which can be shown. As opposed to that which plays epistemological hide-and-seek for no good reason.
I don't think "evidence" means "that which can be shown." It means something more like "what we use to show something."
Here is what Google tells me:
Quote:evidence
/ˈɛvɪd(ə)ns/
noun
the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
"the study finds little evidence of overt discrimination"
What I've been talking about here is what we consider to be good evidence, in order to show that a thing is true or not.
Religious people think that their God has been shown to be real. They accept tradition, authority, revelation, metaphysical arguments, personal feelings, and other things as evidence. So they think that God's existence is a thing that can be shown.
You don't agree with them, and it may be that -- like most people on this forum -- you don't accept those things as good evidence. Most people here are only willing to call something evidence if it is empirical, repeatable, quantifiable, obtained through methodological naturalism, and fitted into currently widely accepted theory about how the world works -- in other words, science.
And I'm certainly not arguing with you. Science works really well because it limits what it accepts as evidence in that way.
I'm only saying that what you consider to be shown is based on criteria such as these. You have a viewpoint, and it is not nothing. So when you consider and reject the claims of religious people, you do so based on something.
(December 2, 2019 at 1:36 am)Rahn127 Wrote: Real tables are visible & tangible, but imaginary tables are not.
Having a delusion about an invisible & intangible table is not a reasonable position to hold.
Why do you think that God, if it existed, would be visible and tangible?
Pre-Christian Greek philosophy, for example, thinks of God as something more like the laws of mathematics, which are neither visible nor tangible, but real in a different way.