(July 23, 2013 at 7:29 pm)Kim Wrote: I'm actually pretty surprised at the responses thus far, considering this is a philosophy forum!
Let me rephrase that again, for the sake of argument, what evidence would make you believe in the existing of a supernatural being that created the universe?
If no evidence, none whatsoever is sufficient, then you are no different from the theists. You claim you will change your mind when provided with evidence? Give me an example of an evidence that would change your mind. Is this clear enough? Geez.
Okay, since you invoked the p-word, let's look at it philosophically.
What is evidence? It is something you present to support your assertion. Reasonable and sufficient evidence would mean that it should convince your rational, average person of the truth of the assertion.
But what are the philosophical grounds for evidence? That is, why should I think that any given argument/data/physical specimen support the truth of anything at all?
We are assuming a few things to be true.
We assume that there is a natural world.
We assume that this natural world works in a specific way and its workings can be understood as natural and logical laws, such as cause and effect.
And we assume that we are, in fact, observing this natural world understanding its rules and principles.
Without the given assumptions, the concept of evidence is pointless. For example, if there is no cause and effect, then anything presented as evidence (effect) does not point to a particular cause and thus cannot support any particular assertion.
Now, getting to the evidence for a supernatural being. That is a tall order indeed, because all we can tell from a word like supernatural is that it transcends atleast some of the natural laws. Supernatural could be something entirely different with its own, independent set of rules. It could be something different with no rules at all. It could be something that follows all of physical laws of nature but goes against certain biological laws, e.g. vampires and werewolves. It could be something that goes against the physical laws but still, broadly, follows rules of logic, e.g. ghosts and spirits. Or it could be any weird combination of any of the above. The point is, unless a specific nature of this "supernatural" is given, we cannot even begin to conceive what evidence it would require. It may very well turn out that this supernatural is such that the concept of evidence doesn't apply at all.
Moving on, the best description available to us regarding this supernatural being called god is that he is someone who transcends all laws of nature. A common attribute given to him is that all the laws of nature are due to his will. So the evidence required would be his capacity to break all the laws of nature. And that means laws of logic as well, i.e. such a being would not be subject to causality and he would be able to make a rock that he can't lift and then lift it. It'd also separate this being from sufficiently advanced aliens, since these aliens, while working according to certain supervening laws of nature that we happen to be ignorant of are still subject to them.
And the funniest part of this experiment would be that after this, the whole concept of evidence would be rendered useless. We assumed in the beginning that evidence is valid because everything in nature works according to certain set of rules and yet, here we see something capable of changing those rules on a whim. Which means we can no longer rely on evidence to correctly support any claim - which would apply to this evidence as well leading us back to where we started.
