(January 21, 2015 at 12:26 am)Esquilax Wrote: The other thing is that Bob's game is trivially easy to play in reverse, if he wants to prattle on this faith idea. According to his argument if you just define something as outside the universe and not subject to physical laws, you are absolved from ever having to demonstrate it, and you are justified in holding it just 'cause. So just make something up, and assign it the properties that he assigns to god.Indeed. It's easy enough by stating that the big bang gave birth to our universe, and therefore whatever caused it exists outside of our universe. Ergo, it is not subject to the rules of evidence and can be accepted uncritically.
But this may be what the theist wants, so that they can insist that "atheists have just as much faith as theists." Which is why I prefer to point out that I do not have to accept any particular premise in order to deny his premise. I simply have to find his premise sufficiently flawed. And a major part of his premise is that we cannot even detect god, which is a pretty big fucking flaw!
"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
