(May 4, 2025 at 5:07 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 4, 2025 at 4:38 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Is this the kind of thing you're thinking of? I'm curious about what you mean.
Hmm to summarize the conversation: I think that openness to evidence requires openness to possibility. Meaning, the very act of seeking evidence for X implies that X is treated as possible. But of course, many here do not think the existence of God is even possible, and therefore I think them asking for evidence is illogical.
My threshold for possibility is simple: If a proposition is at least conceivable and coherent, and not contradictory, then I'm open to its possibility. But people want me to give objective evidence for possibility itself. And I think that's a weird request. So, with your boar example, I would say the possibility is already there, and the evidence you showed simply makes the case for its actuality. I don't think there is such a thing as objective evidence of possibility itself, because possibility is abstract, it is rational rather than empirical.
Edit: For context, I'm imagining a scale that roughly progresses thus: Conceivable, Possible, Probable, Actual. Most here concede to the first, but we've been stuck on the second for the last 20 pages.
Thank you, I'm a little more up to speed now.
Yes, in the wild boar example, the possibility of there being a boar is not in question. We know such animals exist, we know there have been similar sightings elsewhere. So in that case, we are not looking to demonstrate the possibility of their existence, but whether or not they happen to exist in this case.
To go a little further down the scale, suppose one of my crazy neighbors told me that there's a colony of wild hippopotami in the neighborhood. I would reject this claim as impossible, because I know that certain conditions would be required to support such a colony, and those conditions don't exist. So the boar example is more about true or false, the hippo example is more about possible or impossible.
So to apply this to the God debate: the argument that there is or is not a God is different from the argument that a God is or is not possible. Different kinds of arguments would apply.
There might be ways of defining "God" in such a way as to guarantee that such a thing is impossible. Something like the square circle. But that would be different from saying that God is possible but not in evidence.
It might be that some people are so committed to an empirical epistemology that they believe only those things which are empirically demonstrable are possible. But that isn't self-evident, and of course it's not a position that can be demonstrated empirically.
So, yeah, I don't see how anyone could demonstrate that it's impossible for God to exist. If they're making that claim, it would require some serious argument.
