(June 9, 2014 at 7:47 pm)JimmyNeutron Wrote: This form of belief defies all logic, and here's why: It is impossible to prove a negative. This is a well known logical principle. Therefore, you cannot be logically sure that there is no god. That would be completely absurd.It seems to me that the phrase "you cannot prove that X exists" depends on your parameters. The claim "there aren't any dogs in my bedroom closet" is easy enough to prove as long as the parameters don't preclude it (ie, we don't define them as intangible and invisible dogs).
Which is where we stand with claims of the existence or non-existence of god. Having defined god as a being that cannot be detected in any manner unless he wishes it, we cannot prove the negative claim "god does not exist." But by that token, we can describe a lot of things as being undetectable, and the list of un-provable negatives becomes very long. Just applied to god and goddesses, it would likely run into the thousands, if not millions.
"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
