standard of evidence

[Brian37]

I think the problem that Irrational AKD is having is equating "I don't believe in X because there's no evidence for it" with "X is impossible because there's no evidence for it." The former is logical and rational, and the latter fits his irrational fallacious argument idea. But when we say we don't believe, we're not totally closing our mind to other evidence and concluding beyond any doubt that there not only is no god, but it's impossible for one to exist.

If he refuses to realize this then it's not my problem. He can continue to make claims of "You're being irrational and fallacious!" all he wants, but he'll be wrong. Saying "If there's no evidence, I don't believe" is not argument from ignorance.

Says you, my invisible pink unicorn is real until you prove it is not, NEENER AND MIGHT I ADD NEENER! So there!

[Simon Moon]

I think the problem that Irrational AKD is having is equating "I don't believe in X because there's no evidence for it" with "X is impossible because there's no evidence for it." The former is logical and rational, and the latter fits his irrational fallacious argument idea. But when we say we don't believe, we're not totally closing our mind to other evidence and concluding beyond any doubt that there not only is no god, but it's impossible for one to exist.

If he refuses to realize this then it's not my problem. He can continue to make claims of "You're being irrational and fallacious!" all he wants, but he'll be wrong. Saying "If there's no evidence, I don't believe" is not argument from ignorance.

Yep.

He seems to arguing against an army of straw men.

[bennyboy]

lastly, you don't seem to want to answer the questions I have. I have 2 simple questions. what kind of evidence is acceptable to show God exists, and how much evidence is adequate? it would be much appreciated if these questions were answered rather than dodged.

What kind of evidence is acceptable to show that boobledyboo exists? I don't know. But if you want to make a positive assertion about the existence about boobledyboo, you'll have to show that something I can observe, or infer from observations, should be considered evidence for boobledyboo. YOU have to tell me what your evidence is, and why it's evidence for more than what I happen just to be looking at.

As for quantity-- ONE piece of evidence is sufficient. Define God, and show me one thing that can be attributed to God and nothing else, and you've proven God.

---

any belief proposing a certainty of more than 50% in truth value and by its nature less than 50% for the negating proposition requires burden of proof. if they are exactly the same in plausibility, you can't say one is more rational than the other. you must say they are equally plausible if both sides have equal evidence or no evidence.

Prove that boobledyboo doesn't exist. Prove that magic space monkeys don't exist. Prove that there isn't a microscopic society of superior aliens living in my socks? You can't prove any of those things-- but even if I find them highly plausible, my feelings about plausibility are not going to get you to take my claims seriously.

Belief is evidence only of belief. The REASON for believing something is as important as the belief itself. The reason the atheists don't believe there's a God is that they are familiar with Christian evidence, and don't find it of sufficient quality to accept positive assertions about the existence of God. Nothing in the Bible, or said in church, has sufficient credibility for them even to consider the God idea as representing something real.

The reason YOU believe in God is not based on physical observations of the universe, presumably. So what IS it based on? What evidence is it that you feel is better than a good pair of eyes and a telescope or microscope?

[DeistPaladin]

there's more to establishing truth of a claim than just explanatory power, though it is a factor. you may be the first rational response. but just a correction, burden of proof doesn't just apply to claim of "X" exists, but also "X" does not exist. to be more accurate, it would be proposition X is true. this includes not just positive existence claims, but also negative existence claims.

In spite of what you've read in the dictionary, if you ask atheists, they will tell you it's a lack of a belief in any god or gods. It's a skeptical position of the claims of theism. You will be hard pressed to find any atheists who will make the positive claim "there is no god" (except perhaps when they're just being provocative). I have known only one who will do so and even he will tell you it's a position of faith.

Most atheists, if not all, are quite aware that it's impossible to prove a negative, that any "X" does not exist. Recently, I hear they combed Loch Ness with sonar looking for any trace of the supposed dinosaur who legend says resides there. They couldn't find anything. Perhaps Nessie was just hiding really well that day?

When it comes to "God", we have even deeper problems disproving the existence of this being because the definition is really vague (I'd disagree with most of what you define as "God") and unlike a dinosaur in Loch Ness or Bigfoot, it's not a physical being you can detect through normal means.

Consequently, most atheists will explain to you that the label is a lack of a belief, describing what someone is not. "I see no reason to believe in any god or gods" would be a statement most, if not all, would agree with.

a negating position such as "God doesn't exist" is not a default position. the default position is one of ignorance such as "God may or may not exist but I don't know."

This position would also be consistent with atheism. If you don't know whether or not "X" exists, you still lack a belief that "X" exists. This is why many atheists are also agnostics. Agnostic is about what you admit you don't know. Atheism is about what you lack a belief in.

likewise, a host of witnesses would be enough to establish having dinner with your dead father is more rational than grand conspiracy or mass hallucination. you may not believe it, but that's not the point.

If you seriously believe that eye-witness accounts alone are sufficient to seriously believe a dead man came back from the grave and had lunch with his son, I would strongly advise that you take your mom or dad with you when you buy your next used car.

actually, no you haven't. you've only established the difference between accepting something common and accepting something extreme. none of that has anything to do with burden of proof.

It has everything to do with the burden of proof. The more outlandish the claim, the more evidence is required. It's how we operate in all areas of life outside of a favorite religion.

Oh, by the way, God spoke to me just now and told me to tell you to renounce Jesus. Do you believe me? Why not?

did I ever suggest that? I said from the start, would arguments with empirically backed premises be sufficient? this would be a logically valid argument with premises with enough empirical evidence to be almost uncontroversial.

I have not seen any "proofs" for Christianity that had much empirical evidence. Most are highly abstract with many assumptions.

Christians can't produce any of the hard evidence we should expect, reading the Bible. Christians can't demonstrate faith healing under medical peer review, using double-blind testing to eliminate the placebo effect, despite how Jesus said those of faith should be able to. They can't produce magical artifacts like Paul's magic handkerchiefs that can cast out demons. They can't find any angels nor arrange an interview with their god, despite how angels and booming voices abounded in the Bible. All they have is "blah blah blah, therefore Jesus".

that's not at all what I was talking about. this would be how I would structure an argument. if A is true then B. A is true, therefore B. and I would show empirical evidence for A. the only way to debunk such an argument is to show A is false or my logic is invalid. if you can't refute it, then it is most rational to believe it even though it may be hard (assuming you looked into it yourself before determining the conclusion is true).

I think you're going to have to provide me with some specific examples for me to understand what you're talking about.

so a sound argument doesn't meet burden of proof even though a sound argument has a necessarily true conclusion?

Correct for extraordinary claims like the ones religion makes.

if that were necessary to prove Jedi's existed then there would be no way to prove it when they all die.

The Force would still surely exist and such energy could be discovered. There would still be video documentation and other forms of reliable evidence.

[ManMachine]

I've noticed a lot on these forums there are those who claim either that there is no evidence that supports theism or not enough. this brings a couple questions to my mind. what do you consider positive evidence to support a religious proposition such as theism? is there only empirical evidence and if so why can't deductive and inductive arguments work as well? lets say there's an argument that consists of premises that are supported by empirical evidence and in and of themselves have no religious implication. the conclusions drawn from such premises would have religious implication and would logically be supported from the premises. would this count as empirical evidence?

the next question I have is what is considered an adequate amount of evidence for theism? sometimes it seems people demand an unreasonable amount of evidence to the point where it is impossible to prove the proposition. I myself have a standard burden of proof for every proposition.
-if a proposition has more supporting evidence than its negating proposition, then it is most reasonable to believe that proposition (note that doesn't make the proposition itself true). if there is an equal amount or no evidence for a proposition and/or its negation, then it is most reasonable to believe in a neutral skeptical agnosticism concerning the propositions.
do you think this is fair?

This is essentially a philosophical question.

It is easy to get bogged down by recursion (the evidence for evidence) which is a fruitless exercise. You could employ formal logic, but as Wittgenstein said, logic, in and of itself, is not a value system, it is simply a framework upon which we hang facts about our world. Demonstrating that any premise is logical simply shows there is a reasonable route to the conclusion, it is not a qualitative analysis of the information used. As it is the very nature of those facts that you are questioning then it seems to me this too would be fruitless.

It is right to question the nature of empirical evidence and exactly what it tells us about what we are observing. We also have to consider the audience for who any conclusions drawn from that evidence are aimed at. Nobody goes to a fish market to buy a car, often people are resistant to ideas that challenge their fundamental beliefs, I know that from personal experience in this forum.

When I challenged the notion of scientific progress I was hit with a barrage of what essentiually amounted to, 'science is progress because that's what it is to me', which is no logic at all but still a valid point. The debate did not change my opioion on the idea of scientific progress beling an anthropocentric delusion, but it did change my opinion about how important the belief in progress is to people, and that, for me, is the root of this.

Evidence (empirical or not) is only as good as the person accepting it wants it to be. It's a value judgement, sure there is a level of mathematical probability to which some evidence can be shown to be accurate - lies, damn lies and statistics, perhaps - but at the end of the day, it all comes down to what it means to people.

After all, those who proport to be adherents of Evolution Theory are not driving humanity to extinction - which the theory tells us is the only possible outcome - but rather they believe and behave as if they can delay it or in some cases even prevent it, which is arrant nonsense.


MM

[Rational AKD]

It's not just lack of evidence, but evidence to the contrary.

alright, you'll have to explain what the "evidence to the contrary" is. I really hope you don't mean the lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, because you were the one who said it's irrational for you to believe in Christianity due to lack of evidence to the contrary. surely believing God doesn't exist can't by justified simply by lack of evidence.

And again, why are you not committing a fallacy by not believing in Zeus?

because Christianity has much more explanatory power than Greek mythology, and accepting Christianity as a belief means I can't accept Greek mythology as well because the two are not compatible. i'm not committing the fallacy because lack of evidence isn't my reason for believing they are false.

Well then, show me a claim and its negation where both have equal plausibility.

what I was speaking of was the proposition "God exists" and "God doesn't exist." just about all atheists here would agree that the negating proposition here is more rational, yet I haven't seen a single reason why that is so. all they've been doing is saying the first is an "extraordinary claim" and requires extraordinary evidence. but as I've stated, this is purely subjective. it may seem to some that a God existing is an extraordinary claim, but to others the proposition that God doesn't exist is even more extraordinary as a claim. there is no way you can objectively determine how extraordinary a claim is. the closest they've come to answering this is saying it's all about believability, but the problem is this is also subjective. the claim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" just doesn't work and i'm not bringing up radical or even controversial stuff. most philosophers recognize the fallacy of this statement. David Hume may have been a great advocate of this statement, but to be honest he wasn't a good philosopher at all. an almost complete refutation of all his works exists in a book by John Earman titled 'Hume's Abject Failure.'

And no, it's not your god claim since there is no way to determine the plausibility of the claim.

really? well, there are many pieces of evidence I use to rationalize theism, but I really don't want to get off topic here. i'll be really generous and grant you there is absolutely no evidence supporting the existence of God. what evidence do you have against it? and please, don't say i'm shifting burden of proof. that would only be the case if I was trying to prove God exists by saying you can't prove he doesn't. i'm not doing that, i'm giving you opportunity to rationalize a claim against a claim that is not substantiated at all. just one piece of evidence I can't refute would be good enough so it should be too hard right? but if you can't find a single piece of evidence to show God doesn't exist, then you can't say it's more rational. they would be equally plausible.

I think the problem that Irrational AKD is having is equating "I don't believe in X because there's no evidence for it" with "X is impossible because there's no evidence for it."

no i'm not. I've said to you over and over again disbelieving a claim due to lack of evidence is not irrational. but if you want to say the contrary claim, "God doesn't exist" is more rational than the claim "God exists" you must have reason to justify it as more rational. and no, you can't say lack of evidence for God makes the proposition "God doesn't exist" more rational. you must have separate reasons supporting your proposition. even if I said there is no evidence for God (this is hypothetical) I haven't seen a single atheist show a single shred of evidence supporting the non-existence of God. if there is none, than at minimum the two propositions are equally plausible and equally rational (though maybe not as rational as neutral skepticism).

but it's impossible for one to exist.

i'm a bit confused here. by one, do you mean God? if so, that seems like a very closed statement. if you've concluded it's impossible for God to exist, then there should be no evidence that could convince you otherwise. by the definition of impossible, it can't possibly be true. so I don't understand why you would explain how open you are to evidence then say God is impossible (unless I misinterpreted what you mean by one).

Saying "If there's no evidence, I don't believe" is not argument from ignorance.

indeed you are correct. but as I've said, no evidence for the proposition doesn't substantiate the negating proposition. yes, I understand you don't necessarily believe that proposition, but if that's the case you still can't conclude it is a more rational position. at least, not without extra reasoning.

you'll have to show that something I can observe, or infer from observations

empirical evidence is not the only evidence that can substantiate a proposition. inductive and deductive arguments also work.

YOU have to tell me what your evidence is

I will share them in time. right now, I don't want to stray off topic and have a huge tangent.

As for quantity-- ONE piece of evidence is sufficient.

finally, a reasonable answer relevant to one of my questions. thank you, I didn't think anyone would actually answer my question without dancing around and dodging the point.

Define God, and show me one thing that can be attributed to God and nothing else, and you've proven God.

that's fair. I just wish other people would have said something like this.

You can't prove any of those things-- but even if I find them highly plausible, my feelings about plausibility are not going to get you to take my claims seriously.

true, I can't prove any of those things don't exist. I would have to conclude that they all exist in at least one possible world, and thus have the possibility of existing in the actual world... somewhere. and when I say a possible world, i'm using a modal logic term just to let you know.

The reason YOU believe in God is not based on physical observations of the universe, presumably.

it's partially based on observations, but not completely. I kind of hinted to it in the OP of the thread. I am convinced by arguments I find to be valid, and those arguments have good empirical evidence supporting their premises. i'm not revealing what those arguments are here because I don't want to stray off topic, but if you stick around you will get to see them.

[Tonus]

I've noticed a lot on these forums there are those who claim either that there is no evidence that supports theism or not enough. this brings a couple questions to my mind. what do you consider positive evidence to support a religious proposition such as theism?

That depends on the claim. How do you approach other claims of fact or truth in your everyday life? You either believe, or disbelieve, or doubt to some degree until you can learn more. Theism may simply be making one claim ("a god, or gods, exist") but it encompasses many more claims and claims to evidence that must be considered. I don't think that there are any theists here who would feel that the matter was settled if the best they could do was create some doubt as to whether the existence of god is necessary.

So which claims are you purporting to have evidence for, and can we examine that evidence?

the next question I have is what is considered an adequate amount of evidence for theism?

See above. What are the claims, and what is the evidence? Some claims are easy enough to accept on their face: if I claim that I have a user account for this forum, you can accept that without any need of evidence apart from what is already evident. If I claim that I can read and write, it's much the same. If I claim I live in New York, you accept that this is possible and may even take my word for it. If I claim I live in a 100-room mansion you may begin to suspect that I'm having you on, although you might believe that it is not impossible for this to be the case. And so on. Each claim requires different levels of evidence to accept as true, and some are easier to accept on their face than others.

Again, what are your claims? What is the evidence for them?

[Faith No More]

Rational AKD, I addressed the OP here, but you didn't reply. I'm curious as to what you think, as I think this is an interesting conversation.

[ManMachine]

the next question I have is what is considered an adequate amount of evidence for theism? sometimes it seems people demand an unreasonable amount of evidence to the point where it is impossible to prove the proposition.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, if I told you I have a car in my garage, you wouldn't require much evidence. If I had a ferrari f-40, you may be in need of more evidence. If I told you that my ferrari is invisible and it may be seen only by those that truly believe™ it is there, how do you go about proving that?

If you understood the analogy, there is also the fact that there are alot of religions, how do you go about proving yours is the right one, since there is no way to show it?

I have the invisible Aston Martin DBS Ultimate.


MM

[bennyboy]

true, I can't prove any of those things don't exist. I would have to conclude that they all exist in at least one possible world, and thus have the possibility of existing in the actual world... somewhere. and when I say a possible world, i'm using a modal logic term just to let you know.

I think you can assume that everyone else here has seen WLC, and is prepared to address this idea.

The reason YOU believe in God is not based on physical observations of the universe, presumably.

it's partially based on observations, but not completely. I kind of hinted to it in the OP of the thread. I am convinced by arguments I find to be valid, and those arguments have good empirical evidence supporting their premises. i'm not revealing what those arguments are here because I don't want to stray off topic, but if you stick around you will get to see them.

Since you aren't thumping your Bible, I assume you'll go to cosmogonical philosophical arguments and arguing a kind of deism rather than Sky Daddy. Or, since you've already shown an interest in Craig's ideas, you might be looking to absolute morality. I think you'll find that the givens required to arrive at a theistic conclusion will be shot down before you even begin arguing.

Good luck.