Why do Athiests require 'proof' that God exists?

[The Grand Nudger]

Book sales, tax evasion, haven't we been here before?

[Norfolk And Chance]

There are some things we cannot prove.

For example one cannot prove ones own existence - I could argue that you are a figment of my imagination, like a person in a dream. You would be unable to prove that you were a self aware, autonomous human being.

Using atheist logic I should therefore consider all other humans to not be self aware, sentient, concious beings as they cannot 'prove' they have these qualities.

Would it not be better to accept that I can never know if other people are self aware like me? That I can never know if God exists or not?

Why do atheists require proof that god exists? Because if we didn't require proof, we'd be theists.

I mean, d'uhhhhh!

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We require proof of existence because positive claims have to be proved. If there is no evidence for something, it is irrelevant and should be assumed false. For example, in Physics, nothing is assumed true, or fact, it is described as a "model" or a "theory".

I may not be able to prove my own existence, but my existence is ultimately irrelevant.

You can easily prove your own existence!

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Why do we require "proof" that "God" exists?

What if I claimed that people were created by the Keebler elves who sprinkled magical powder on people shaped cookies, and that we should pay homage to the elves (who, we all know, live in a hollow tree) by gathering in a park once a week, joining hands and singing to the largest oak. And that we should let the elves know we appreciate them by eating Keebler cookies after every meal. And what if I showed you a book that proved all this is true? Would you believe it? Or would you demand to see evidence?

Don't forget that this hollow tree would have to be non physical and outside the boundaries of time and space too.

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he exists in all things at all times, inside and outside of the universe. He is incomprehensible.

Can you provide evidence to support, or even a reason to believe, that claim?

You wouldn't be able to comprehend the evidence Paul, it's incomprehensible.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

You can easily prove your own existence!

Not sure that's actually ever been done. Not everyone accepts Rene Descartes' "cognito ergo sum". Me? I'm agnostic on the matter,but lean towards the positive.

Of course you may have another argument ,which I would probably find incomprehensible; I barely grasp the criticisms of Descartes.

There have been a number of criticisms of the argument. One concerns the nature of the step from "I am thinking" to "I exist." The contention is that this is a syllogistic inference, for it appears to require the extra premise: "Whatever has the property of thinking, exists", a premise Descartes did not justify. In fact, he conceded that there would indeed be an extra premise needed, but denied that the cogito is a syllogism (see below).

To argue that the cogito is not a syllogism, one may call it self-evident that "Whatever has the property of thinking, exists". In plain English, it seems incoherent to actually doubt that one exists and is doubting. Strict skeptics maintain that only the property of 'thinking' is indubitably a property of the meditator (presumably, they imagine it possible that a thing thinks but does not exist). This counter-criticism is similar to the ideas of Jaakko Hintikka, who offers a non-syllogistic interpretation of Cogito Ergo Sum. He claimed that one simply cannot doubt the proposition "I exist". To be mistaken about the proposition would mean something impossible: I do not exist, but I am still wrong.

Perhaps a more relevant contention is whether the "I" to which Descartes refers is justified. In Descartes, The Project of Pure Enquiry, Bernard Williams provides a history and full evaluation of this issue. Apparently, the first scholar who raised the problem was Pierre Gassendi. He points out that recognition that one has a set of thoughts does not imply that one is a particular thinker or another. Were we to move from the observation that there is thinking occurring to the attribution of this thinking to a particular agent, we would simply assume what we set out to prove, namely, that there exists a particular person endowed with the capacity for thought . In other words, the only claim that is indubitable here is the agent-independent claim that there is cognitive activity present[5] The objection, as presented by Georg Lichtenberg, is that rather than supposing an entity that is thinking, Descartes should have said: "thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a thinking thing, the reference of the "I," is more than the cogito can justify. Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks." In other words the "I" in "I think" could be similar to the "It" in "It is raining." David Hume claims that the philosophers who argue for a self that can be found using reason are confusing "similarity" with "identity". This means that the similarity of our thoughts and the continuity of them in this similarity do not mean that we can identify ourselves as a self but that our thoughts are similar.[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum

[Norfolk And Chance]

Who gives a shit about all that philosobabble blurb that you quoted and I can't be arsed to read? I can prove I exist to you. There are so many ways it would take days to list them all.

I don't want to get into a meaningless argument, just take it as read that I exist and I can prove it to you, thanks.

[Jackalope]

You can easily prove your own existence!

Not sure that's actually ever been done. Not everyone accepts Rene Descartes' "cognito ergo sum". Me? I'm agnostic on the matter,but lean towards the positive.

Of course you may have another argument ,which I would probably find incomprehensible; I barely grasp the criticisms of Descartes.

When it comes to proving my existence to a skeptic, I propose the following proof: I simply slap the skeptic upside the head until he acquiesces to my argument.

Crude, but effective and undeniable to a skeptic.

As to the problem of proving it to myself, I see little reason to doubt the matter, and am willing to accept my own existence as axiomatic to a high degree of probability.

...but that's only because I'm not in the mood to kick my own ass.

[Ryft]

It seems to me that whether or not God exists a person's understanding of rationality ultimately comes from [the] universe.

First, perhaps it "seems" that way to you because, as you admitted, this is an area that you have not properly studied. Second, your statement follows only if granted the assumptions with which you approach the question; but they most certainly are not granted—nor should they be—since those assumptions regard the very question itself. (It is illegitimate to simply assume the very thing to be proved.)

The blue ball cannot be the red ball.

But your observations do not support that conclusion, Tegh. What they support is that the blue ball is not the red ball, a descriptive fact of ‘a posteriori’ knowledge. And your further observations from trying to "mash them together" as hard as you can confirms that "they are still separate entities," that "the red ball is still itself and the blue ball is still itself" (emphasis mine), which again are descriptive facts (is and is not) of ‘a posteriori’ knowledge. But to say that the blue ball cannot be the red ball is an altogether different thing, a normative fact (can and cannot) of ‘a priori’ knowledge. You do not succeed in bridging the deductive gap between these two distinct categories (descriptive and normative) by conflating them, for that is a basic logical error.

Perhaps this is ultimately where the law of non-contradiction comes from.

No, and for the above reason. The law of non-contradiction is normative, not descriptive.

It's inconceivable for the red ball to be the blue ball because I have no experience of this being possible.

First, one's inability to conceive of X has no bearing on the truth of X; that is an argument from incredulity, which is a logical fallacy because it ignores and fails to eliminate the possibility that something can be both inconceivable and nevertheless true. Second, the law of non-contradiction is normative, objective, absolute, and necessary truth, by which I mean that it is not descriptive, subjective, relative, and contingent (such as what your mind is able to conceive). It is not as if the universe was existing and behaving contrary to itself for several billion years until philosophers finally arrived on the scene to put a stop to it with the law of non-contradiction. Reality itself is ‘non contra se’ quite apart from our existence.

Also, I don't see how positing the existence of God helps in this matter.

I already answered that.

If all our knowledge comes from experiences and memory of the space-time universe ...

It does not. We also have knowledge apart from experience (‘a priori’).

... and God is [transcendent and] eternal, perhaps he could have created a universe made up of something other than space-time, and we would then have completely different "logical" laws.

That is a contradiction. If God eternally decreed to do X, then it contradicts the eternal nature of God to say he could have decreed to do ~X; in other words, to say that God decreed to do X but could have decreed to do ~X is to imply temporality (mutable), not eternality (immutable).

(P.S. We are at risk of hijacking this thread, which is supposed to be about why atheists require proof that God exists. If you want to pursue this further, then perhaps you might consider starting a new thread.)

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

@Ryft

Yeah, I can't answer these points right now I'm afraid. I'll do some reading on the subject and might raise the issue on the forums later in a new thread.

[Adjusted Sanity]

I do accept that god is unknowable at present. With that in mind I conclude that god is also irreverent at present. I don't reject god. I only see god as a possibility. One that I shouldn't worry too much about right now or base my life on.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

I don't want to get into a meaningless argument, just take it as read that I exist and I can prove it to you, thanks.

No;why should, I because you say so?

I'm not arguing; I have not made any claims, you have. Put up or shut up.Two empirical proofs will be just dandy.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sigh, the application of the law of identity is normative, the law of identity itself is descriptive (as are all laws in the system we call logic). You "answered" nothing, you made an assertion. Anyone is free to assert whatever they wish, this does not qualify as an "answer" in anything but the most glib and shallow of senses. Probably ought to call it a "response".