(July 5, 2013 at 9:44 pm)genkaus Wrote: The problem here for me is that the refusal to take up the challenge shows a degree of intellectual callousness.
Without context, I would say that your statement is correct.
But the demand (prove that god does not exist) is not a random claim and the motive can be guessed at. In my experience, when I see that question it is the result of an inability to present evidence of god that can stand up to basic scrutiny. I find that quite a bit of the discussion here takes the form of 'instead of proving god exists, let's discuss why he can't NOT exist.' So I see the demand in that context.
And so my response would be what I stated earlier: acceptance of the claim that I cannot prove god does not exist. This would allow the person making the challenge to proceed to whatever his next point is, assuming he has one aside from what amounts to an admission of defeat. At that point we may be able to have a potentially constructive discussion. If he didn't have any other point, then I didn't waste time establishing a position that he wasn't interested in considering.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
