On the nature of evidence.

[trmof]

There is reason to discount one form of evidence when another form is better: the first form has never been demonstrated to be sufficient for anything, much less a thing for which so much has been claimed.

But it has. Just not to you. Billions of people disagree with this statement. Simply asserting that such means exactly as much to them as their asserting their opinion of what constitutes evidence would mean to you. They hold the exact same weight as evidence according to your statement, because your statement is backed by no evidence of the type you claim is required in the statement itself. Your statement is a philosophical Catch-22.

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Nothing can be 'easier' or 'harder' for God to engineer. According to the handbook, God is omnipotent. Such a being would require no more effort to speak to me in a gnat's whisper than he would to turn the Himalayas into bread pudding.

As to what evidence (as opposed to argument) would convince me, waking up one morning with my left eye re-grown and fully functional should do. I've had a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people tell me they've prayed for this to happen. So far, bupkiss.

Boru

Good point. If God gives a fuck about me believing, then he needs to fix this:



That would constitute more than sufficient evidence.

It looks like you have a sufficient artificial knee and it's already been fixed well enough for you. What more would constitute fixing it at this point?

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The respondents are the ones who have asked me to define myself. I've never expressed any interest in doing so. All of philosophy can be asserted without evidence; for example, there is absolutely no evidence that anything but my consciousness is real, or any way to prove to me otherwise besides an appeal to your personal authority, which, if you are not real, is meaningless. Wow, what an interesting topic to explore the connotations of, which is what this entire post was about in the first place. If you aren't interested in philosophical dissecting a philosophical question such as this without constantly reminding everyone about your beliefs or lack thereof, then it kind of makes one question why you are commenting on a post headed under "philosophy" if you are not interested in discussing the philosophical implications behind the question.

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The topic of this post is asking what are your personal standards for examining non falsifiable evidence, and getting an interesting cross-section of opinions about that topic. You are trying to change the point to being about my personal beliefs and whether or not I can prove them; if I wanted to discuss that, I would have started a post about that. If you would like to have arguments about the existence of God with non-atheists I'm sure there are plenty of more suitable threads to do that on. Not this one.

If it is nonfalsifiable even in principle, then it is noise, not evidence of any kind. Now what is yours? I suspect your is noise is noise unless it sounded like what you wanted to hear. So your standard of evidence is whether you like it to be true, not whether there is reason to believe it has heightened probability of being true.

Who said that it's a non-falsifiable principle, How do you know that its non-falsifiable, and what scientific data did you use to come to this conclusion? Because it sounds like just your opinion. That's a very unscientific way to look at an unsolved problem, to claim that it could never be solved. If you are saying that there is no way to test for the presence of God EVEN IF HE DOES EXIST, then you have already conceded that science is an insufficient method for addressing the question. Hence my post under PHILOSOPHY and not SCIENCE.

Also, you are trying to change the commonly understood definition of evidence to SCIENTIFIC DATA. Evidence is a legal and philosophical term which includes both strong and weak evidence of different varieties, the value of which is decided on by subjective experience and intuition. You are engaging in a semiotic fallacy, which I have already pointed out to several other people.

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In my experience God is much more likely to communicate with people through strange circumstances which speak to them personally, as these are much easier to engineer.

Nothing can be 'easier' or 'harder' for God to engineer. According to the handbook, God is omnipotent. Such a being would require no more effort to speak to me in a gnat's whisper than he would to turn the Himalayas into bread pudding.

As to what evidence (as opposed to argument) would convince me, waking up one morning with my left eye re-grown and fully functional should do. I've had a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people tell me they've prayed for this to happen. So far, bupkiss.

Boru

The Bible does not call God omnipotent. The God you are describing is not the God I worship, so your opinions about this particular potential form of God are not something I can address.

Also, you have an incredibly high standard of evidence, which is fine, but the fact that God hasn't grown you an eyeball has no bearing on whether he exists outside of your intuition. That's fine, as your intuition is perfectly valid in your own mind, as long as you recognize that for what it is: An opinion based on a LACK of personal experience with the thing you are disclaiming. This is philosophically less valid to me than my opinion of things I HAVE had personal experience with.