A good case against God

[The Grand Nudger]

Easy, when they started blathering on about god, that's the point at which it became apparent that they were wrong.

[Jeffonthenet]

If the absence of demonstrable evidence for god fails to justify atheism, then that very absence continues to fail to justify theism. Agnostics belong to one of those camps by virtue of the excluded middle and the value of the term, "agnostic." Therefore, that absence would seem to fail to justify agnosticism, and the only way past the issue is to dispense entirely with the discussion of religion.

Please explain, I don't understand what you are saying. I know what the law of the excluded middle is, but I am not sure how it applies here.

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Certianly there are threads on the internet where theists can present evidence for the existence of God. This is not one of them. This is the atheist's chance to do likewise, and I have tried to defend with reason that even if there is no demonstrable evidence for God it does not justify atheism. Go ahead and be agnostic if you want, but if you refuse to give any argument against God or belief in God that can stand up to scrutiny, I contend that your atheism is unjustified.

So really in this thread I am not arguing that God exists.

I am arguing that the absence of demonstrable evidence for God doesn't justify atheism.

I am also asking atheists to give good reasons to think there is no God, and I can't say that I think I have seen any.

And that one shouldn't rule out God simply because of the apparent absence of evidence.

If there are any agnostics here I would invite you to join me.

Well, I'm not an atheist, but I can think of a reason that absence of evidence for God justifies (weak) atheism.

First, methods of drawing inference rely on evidence. There is a difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence (looking in a cage and seeing empty air is evidence of the absence of a polar bear; not looking into the cage at all is absence of evidence), and in the absence of evidence, we cannot draw valid inferences.

For suppose we could. Suppose we were to assume a principle whereby a hypothesis would be answered in the affirmative (or in the negative) in the absence of evidence, with confidence 0 < c < 1. In order to be consistent, c must be constant across all hypothesis tests (if we ask the same question again and again, each time with no evidence, we shouldn't become more or less confident in our answer).

So suppose we are asking whether some hypothesis H is true, but we have an absence of evidence. We then affirm H with confidence equal to c. Now, let us ask another question--whether ~H is true. We will also assign this c.

However, P(H) = 1 - P(~H), since P(H or ~H) = 1, and H and ~H are mutually exclusive, hence P(H or ~H) = P(H) + P(~H) = 1.

Thus c = 1 - c, hence c = 0.5

Now, any argument used to justify believing H on the basis of our confidence that H is true applies equally to ~H. Thus there is no way to probabilistically distinguish them; we must either arbitrarily draw an inference (which negates the whole point of having a method of inference), or decline to draw an inference.




This argument could be further developed using utility theory; choosing between H and ~H could be done based on both the confidence we have in them and the expected utility of each.

Hello Clive, I appreciate the time you took to reply, but despite understanding symbolic logic a little, I am not sure here what you are claiming, or how you are backing this up. (for one, what does "c" refer to, and what does 0 < c < 1 mean?

Also, if you are defining "weak atheism" the same way as I define agnosticism--simply as not knowing if God exists, we may not disagree here on anything but terminology.

I would also say in an ultimate sense that there is evidence for God, it is just non-verbal--experiential or intuitive. I believe if one seeks God from a pure heart, one will find out at some point in their life if God exists.

I would also say that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence only in a case in which we should expect to have more evidence than we do

[Taqiyya Mockingbird]

What's a god? You haven't even bothered to describe what it is that you are demanding a rebuttal of! And you are too fucking stupid to see how preposterous what you are doing is. You might as well wander into here and demand, "Can anyone give me a good case against the existence of Brufarian Fershniblets that can stand up to scrutiny?".

Have you no idea at all how stupid what you are doing is?

You are making a positive claim.

INCORRECT. I am challenging your positive claim. YOU, on the other hand, are attempting to shift your burden of proof.

Namely, you are saying that God less plausible to exist than Brufarian Freshetc… by the standard of evidence of seemingly all the atheists here, this requires evidence.

I am pointing out that you (plural) have provided no more evidence for your positive claim of your gawd-figure than anyone has of Brufarian Fershniblets, an imaginary placeholder that I made up for the purposes of this discussion.

I am not trying to fight with you, I just think your comparison of God with Mr. Freshetc is misleading, and if such claims were removed, your point would not stand up to scrutiny.

My use of this imaginary placeholder is no different from the popular Flying Spaghetti Monster, Invisible Pink Unicorn, teapot in Space, etc. All are examples of Reductio Ad Absurdum.

I also defined God in one of my previous posts to this current one, so I would refer you to that at this point.

Which one? I just went through this thread and couldn't find it. I was reminded, however, of the full scope of your disingenuousness here.

Arguments are not evidence, whelp. And the arguments you reference -- the kalam and the moral, along with hundreds of other similar abortions -- are long-debunked laughing stock. The fact that you consider them to be valid, along with the fact that you think any such arguments can replace evidence, tells us the level of self-delusion you are willing to inflict upon yourself in order to cling onto your silly superstitions.

They seem like decent arguments, and they use evidence.

NO, they don't.

For example, for the Kalaam, the evidence would be the scientific evidence for an absolute beginning of the universe.

Meaning the existence of theories that speculate about its origins. That's not evidence.

And I think you are mistaken that these are absurd arguments which cannot be defended, or have somehow been debunked. I don't think this is what the scholarly literature shows,

Your standard for what qualifies as "scholarly literature" seems quite low, what with your endorsement of Craig and his flim-flam kalaam.

while popular literature and internet sites might say something else

Exactly what is this reference being made to? I smell straw burning.

You are making all sorts of positive claims here, even from your first of a non-defined "gawd"-thing. The onus of proof is yours.

I am quite sure that there is wide agreement among philosophers that properly basic beliefs must be assumed and cannot be argued for. And it seems quite evident that it would be impossible to show that the past didn't pop into being five minutes ago with the appearance of age (the atheist Bertrand Russel's example), as it would look exactly the same as it does now if it did. The same thing with the reality of the external world.
Likewise there is the, I believe, unsolved problem of induction the atheist David Hume which means that casuality itself cannot be proven. How do we know things like this happen then? I submit it is intuition. It is surely possible that the way we know these most important beliefs could be the way we know God exists as well.

Retreating behind a wall of textual word salad is not going to absolve you of your burden of proof (meaning extraordinary evidence to support your extraordinary claim), or shift your burden of proof onto us. This entire thread has been an exercise in your disingenuousness and intellectual dishonesty. You of course have a right to reject intellectual honesty, genuousness, rationality and reason. When you do do -- and you have -- no one is under any obligation to take you or your harangues seriously, ot to treat you politely.

Because there are still plenty of idiots like you who cling to their superstitions and delusions so hard that, lackiog even a shred of evidence to support their fantastical assertions of any sort of deity, they convince themselves that those pieces of shit could be convincing.

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I really have spent a lot of time looking at the evidence myself.

WHAT evidence? Present it, and make believers of us all.

My own rigorous adherence to following reason where it led which I learned from reading the Dialogues of Plato eventually caused me to lose my atheism as I found that I had been convinced that there was no God by faulty reasons. I still constantly question my faith and subject it to every objection I can think of to the point of almost an unhealthy obsession. I try to do this with all of my beliefs.

Reason and evidence go hand in hand. I don't believe your testimony to your supposed intellectual honesty. Your actions here betray you.

That verbose bit of word salad does nothing to address your responsibility -- and your deceitful, dishonest, disingenuous attempt to shirk your responsibility -- to the burden of proof.

Certianly there are threads on the internet where theists can present evidence for the existence of God. This is not one of them.

Yes, and the funny thing about them is that they can go hundreds of pages with various forays by theists, and not a single shred of evidence has yet been presented. Funny that.

Here's one of them. Have a go at it with the evidence you just claimed you have: http://www.atheistforums.com/viewtopic.p...d610de7c73

But I caution you that the folks there aren't nearly as tolerant of intellectual dishonesty and bullshit as they are here. Good luck. Heh.

This is the atheist's chance to do likewise,

The atheist's chance to do WHAT? To buy into your attempt to shift your burden of proof onto us. Step right up, folks...

and I have tried to defend with reason that even if there is no demonstrable evidence for God it does not justify atheism.

That is a positive claim, and one which you have provided no support for. Of course, you have every right to be irrational and unreasonable. But you forfeit your right to be taken seriously or to call your semantic prestidigitation here "reason".

Go ahead and be agnostic if you want, but if you refuse to give any argument against God or belief in God that can stand up to scrutiny, I contend that your atheism is unjustified.

Which argument is just another flim-flam attempt to shift your burden of proof. And we have been through this already. You don't believe in Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, do you? And again, you have not defined this "god" that you are demanding we provide arguments against. How very fuckind convenient for you. You are playing a semantic shell game and cheating at it.

So really in this thread I am not arguing that God exists.

What you are doing, in reality, is trying to weasel your way out of your responsibility to the burden of proof.

I am arguing that the absence of demonstrable evidence for God doesn't justify atheism.

And you have failed miserably in your efforts.

I am also asking atheists to give good reasons to think there is no God, and I can't say that I think I have seen any.

Fallacy: Appeal to Personal Incredulity.

And that one shouldn't rule out God simply because of the apparent absence of evidence.

Yours is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. You don't even have a little bit of evidence. And again what you are really arguing is the rejection of reason and rationality. Again, your right to do, but you forfeit other rights.

If there are any agnostics here I would invite you to join me.

Nice try at building a troll army. that's not going to work for you either.

I have been reading and answering the posts in the order I have received them. Unfortunately I don't have time to do this faster than I am. I simply can't respond to the 14th page of them by now and hold a social life as well… though maybe I will do things differently like only respond to the most relevant comments since people are insulting me about not noticing things on pages that I haven't seen yet. (though just now I looked at the most recent replies) Thanks everyone for participating though.

People are insulting you because you are insulting our intelligence by attempting to run this disingenuous little con game of yours on us. You get what you give, cupcake.

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A good case against the existence of which God? The deist God? The Christian God? Is the God you're referring to omniscient and omnipotent? Does it have perfectly free will? Is it omnibenevolent? Does it condemn people to hell? There are a lot of Gods, would you be more specific, please? I can tell you that the God of Theodicy doesn't exist: an omniscient being can't do anything it does not foresee and an omnipotent being can do anything. Omniscience also contradicts free will.

Eh, bad definition of "omnipotence", I think. "Omnipotence" is self-contradictory; you'd have to be able to do things that you can't do--and do impossible things, like draw a square circle, or create a married bachelor, or give an example of a non-commutative group of order 2.

I think a better definition is something like, "Everything willed can be actualized", and you just say that you can't will to do impossible things.

And just saying "omniscience contradicts free will" isn't giving a reason. It's just stating a conclusion, without any reason to think that it's true. How do you know that the Molinists are wrong?

We aren't the ones making the claims of omnipotence, omniscience, etc., you idiots are. Your equivocating those terms only destroys your own god-claims even more, just like every other bit of semantic prestidigitation you have tried to float here does.

[LastPoet]

Hello Clive, I appreciate the time you took to reply, but despite understanding symbolic logic a little, I am not sure here what you are claiming, or how you are backing this up. (for one, what does "c" refer to, and what does 0 < c < 1 mean?

If you can't answer that, I'd advise an algebra course, In the real number set, its an order function that means c is a number between 0 and 1, but different from them.

Also, if you are defining "weak atheism" the same way as I define agnosticism--simply as not knowing if God exists, we may not disagree here on anything but terminology.

Many people said this: atheist is a person that lacks the belief in god, agnostic is about knowledge, it says we can't know if X can be believed. This makes you a gnostic theist, since you claim to know that god exists. Either you believe in a god, or you don't, is that hard to understand? The main point is that you claim that god exists, its your burden to show us that such exists, in a surefire way we all can know it. Since the dawn of man, its been a futile quest.

I would also say in an ultimate sense that there is evidence for God, it is just non-verbal--experiential or intuitive. I believe if one seeks God from a pure heart, one will find out at some point in their life if God exists.

I would also say that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence only in a case in which we should expect to have more evidence than we do

Well, your extraordinary god requires extraordinary evidence, or why is it hiding? Ah yes, people with pure heart, whatever that means. I guess you mean people that think exactly like you... typical. Your arrogance is showing.

[Opsnyder]

And if I won't give a good case against existence of God it means that he exists right? Stupid bullshit.

[Taqiyya Mockingbird]

So here is relevant information from CUNY's Phillip A Pecorino's Philosophy of Religion online textbook:

http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/p...-Proof.htm

Philosophy of Religion

The Burden of Proof

BURDEN OF PROOF

You cannot claim that "miracles exist unless someone proves that they do not exist."

You cannot claim that "souls exist unless someone proves that they do not exist."

You cannot claim that "angels exist unless someone proves that they do not exist."

You cannot claim that "deities exist unless someone proves that they do not exist."

The burden of proof is always on the claim that X exists rather than on the claim that X does not exist. It is a fallacy to claim that X exists unless you prove that there is no X. What is improper is for a person to claim that "X exists" and when asked to prove it, then the person who made the claim uses as a defense of "X exists" the next claim that no one has proven that X does not exist.

If a person claims that X exists and is real then the burden is on that person to supply some support for that claim, some evidence or proof that others can and should examine before accepting it. It is incorrect to think that X exists and is real until someone can prove that there is no X. It is also wrong to think that just because you can not prove that X exists that does not mean that X does not exist and therefore X does exist.

Why is it that the burden is on the person who makes the claim? Well think whether or not it is a better way to proceed through life to accept anything and everything that people claim to be so. Experience should instruct every thinking human that there is a high probability that not everything that people claim to be true is actually true. Some claims might be made with the claimant aware that the claim is not true and some claims might be made with the claimant thinking that they are true but being mistaken. As it is for most humans not a very good idea to proceed through life based on beliefs that are false and thinking things to be true when they are not, most humans and those who would use reason to guide them will want some evidence and reasoning to support a claim being asserted to be true. So the burden is on those who make claims to offer reason and evidence in support of those claims.

SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF PROOF

The burden of proof is always on the person making an assertion or proposition. Shifting the burden of proof, a special case of argumentum ad ignorantium, is the fallacy of putting the burden of proof on the person who denies or questions the assertion being made. The source of the fallacy is the assumption that something is true unless proven otherwise.

The person making a negative claim cannot logically prove nonexistence. And here's why: to know that a X does not exist would require a perfect knowledge of all things (omniscience). To attain this knowledge would require simultaneous access to all parts of the world and beyond (omnipresence). Therefore, to be certain of the claim that X does not exist one would have to possess abilities that are non-existent. Obviously, mankind's limited nature precludes these special abilities. The claim that X does not exist is therefore unjustifiable. As logician Mortimer Adler has pointed out, the attempt to prove a universal negative is a self- defeating proposition. These claims are "worldwide existential negatives." They are only a small class of all possible negatives. They cannot be established by direct observation because no single human observer can cover the whole earth at one time in order to declare by personal authority that any “X” doesn't exist.

Burden of Proof

From X, which is the assertion, is not yet disproved. Therefore, X.

This is a Fallacy. X is unproven and remains unproven.

Examples:

(1)Of course God exists. Has anyone ever proven otherwise?

(2)Of course pink elephants inhabit Mars. We don't see them because they blend in. Can you prove otherwise?

(3)Of course Santa Claus exists. No one has ever proved, to my knowledge, that Santa Claus does not exist. And if one were to fly to the North Pole and say: Well, look, there's no toy factory there. A believer could argue: Well, Santa Claus knew you were coming and moved his operations to the South Pole. So you fly down to the South Pole. No Santa Claus factory, toy factory there. So the believer would say: Oh, he moved it back up to the North Pole.

(4) Of course leprechauns exist. Has anyone ever proven otherwise?

(5) Of course ghosts exist. Has anyone ever proven otherwise?

(6) Of course yellow polka dotted aliens exist. Has anyone ever proven otherwise?

(7) Of course X exist. Has anyone ever proven otherwise?

QED.

Time for all disingenuous snake-oil-selling cunts to put away their sad attempts at shifting the burden of proof.

/fucking thread

[Skepsis]

To make the concept abundantly clear to Clive, lack of evidence is an indisputable hallmark in those who reject a claim as unfounded.
In the case for God you are trying to shift the burden of proof onto the skeptic, a decidedly vacuous and elementary mistake. Or, perhaps it wasn't a mistake, in which case you are simply goading atheists for the sake of the action.
Being versed in your ABC logic course, I'm sure you'll tell me why Mr. X disagrees- this won't, however, change fundamental rules of logic in argumentation.
Here we have an unfounded claim, namely God. Beside the pathetic attempts at contemporary apologetics (which are rarely any more than a rehash of Aquinas' incongruous burble) we are left with not a single piece of attempted evidence to support the claim. Now, what do you do when there isn't evidence for a claim? You can either refuse to believe the claim as unfounded or downright reject the claim, if it is practical to do so. You cannot, however, accept the claim if it lacks evidence.
The things one would be driven to accept if they could simply cherry-pick reality like they do their cherished (insert holy text here) would be numerous. The problem with saying atheists are wrong to disbelieve an unfounded claim is that you are saying that anyone who disbelieves anything on the basis that the claim lacks evidence is wrong to do so.
Clearly you wouldn't actually assert such a thing, though; I wouldn't want to strawman your position.

[Cato]

Hello Clive, I appreciate the time you took to reply, but despite understanding symbolic logic a little, I am not sure here what you are claiming, or how you are backing this up. (for one, what does "c" refer to, and what does 0 < c < 1 mean?

Also, if you are defining "weak atheism" the same way as I define agnosticism--simply as not knowing if God exists, we may not disagree here on anything but terminology.

I would also say in an ultimate sense that there is evidence for God, it is just non-verbal--experiential or intuitive. I believe if one seeks God from a pure heart, one will find out at some point in their life if God exists.

I would also say that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence only in a case in which we should expect to have more evidence than we do

Thought experiment time....

If I took a baby tomorrow and fed it intravanously (no taste input), strapped it down (no touch input) in a perfectly dark (no sight input), oderless (no smell input) and soundproof room (no hearing); how would this person discover your God? Imagine that we could let loose this being as an adult into the world with no human knowledge history. This being could conceivably re-discover all the laws of nature, but could never discover your God without a Bible or someone to indoctrinate him/her.

[Epimethean]

Ah, Play-doh's allegory of the sensory deprivation chamber! You scoundrel!

The counter will come in the form of the effect of nutrient input. Deus ex machina in venas!

[NickB]

the burden of proof is rubbish! perhaps you are assuming that theists have the burden of proof just because you are atheist. this is just assuming from a theological standpoint, you could twist that logic e.g. a person from the flat earth society might say ' i don't need to present evidence that the world is flat but you must give evidence of the world being round'. your logic is lazy. in order to prove the non-existance of god you must present your own arguments. otherwise its looks like you are just trying to cop out of an argument. come on people!