An Atheist cannot disprove the existence of a God within a range of absolute certainty.
Personally, I’ve never even tried to disprove ”a God.”
Do any other atheists really try to disprove the existence of ”a God(sic)”?
I always thought the onus was on the theist to provide the evidence for the existence of their god?
Ark.
A Tale Unfolds 
That’s the part your general apologist has trouble with. Massive presuppositions are fun… until someone reminds you it’s a presupposition.
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What I have found John is that even when you point out to them that they are presupposing, they invariably try to argue that their starting point is ‘so self evident’ that effectively they are not.
I sort of know how they think as I used to think like that. It is know only after after a passage of about five years post faith that I start to see how the narrative of faith warped almost every aspect of my thinking.
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Appealing to faith was the game changer. Either they stumbled on this by chance or it was a calculated move to snare humanity at turning belief into a virtue. Overcoming belief mode is the biggest hurdle facing humanity. Now we debate endlessly who has the best imagination but have spiritually arrived at a oasis without enough water for everyone.
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Dr David Eagleman’s TED talk I think summed up the matter best.
I am paraphrasing him here:
“We don’t know enough about the universe to be able say there is no God, but we know way too much to accept the God any of the world’s religions”
The thing is that most religious folk really don’t care about whether you believe in ‘a’ god, what they care about is whether you believe in ‘their’ God.
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Exactly. If you do not commit to a belief in any god, then by my definition, you are an atheist. You can invent another word for it and that is clever, but….
Not one of us knows if there is a god, and atheists say “I don’t know” often, which seems to infuriate those of the certainty hypothesis or who find evidence in scripture.
Good TEDx. Thanks for sharing it. The whole point of a god it is that it is framed in such a way as to be impossible to disprove or even to test.
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I think saying ; ‘I don’t know”, while annoying, gives them something chewy for them to work on–saying ‘I really don’t care” is the infuriating part. The apathetic atheist, the rock in the yard that you can’t move and have to mow around…
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I love this quote and sums it up exactly as I feel.
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I agree!
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Who cares for absolute certainty? What is important is what rational people can agree to universally. ( I know this to open a can of worms)
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Such as, hatred of Donald Trump’s hair, Daylight Saving, and Manchester United?
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Exactly.
Plus no theist has absolute certainty about their gods
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Except if one believes in Jesus – because he talks to believers and answers prayers, apparently. Oh, and he watches while you go to the loo!
Whereas, Hanuman just wants fruit and nuts.
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That would be a gross exaggeration. “Nobody goes to the father, except through me” means he is not the father & it is this that is in contention even if for a moment we pretended Jesus was.
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That would be a gross exaggeration. “Nobody goes to the father, except through me” means he is not the father & it is this that is in contention even if for a moment we pretended Jesus was.
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Knowledge is simply the absence of delusion. Anything true would be true for believer and non alike. Filling in the blanks with belief is not helping.
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Of course, there is always miracles, and I suppose an oil-leaking bible that can cure certain ailments would have to be ”up-there.”
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Gather and consecrate your salt. …
Or try this:
Obtain some water from a natural source if possible. …
Exorcise the water. …
Pour the salt into the water in the shape of a cross. …
Bless the holy water. …
Use your holy water to bless your home and family.
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Is this for real?
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This is what we’re up against Ark. This is where belief supplants accomplishment
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Your-Own-Holy-Water
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Good grief, and our friend Lander 7 wonders why I tend to mock at how pretentious he is.
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When you reason your way out of faith without the aha moment, that little bit of doubt, “what if I’m wrong” can stick with you. Does he really believe it? I remember saying “I don’t believe” was trepidatious at first. You wonder what part of your world will unravel, but when you fully realize you don’t believe that fear vanishes.
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Knowledge is justified true belief those this too has its detractors. So belief in itself is not bad. The content of our belief is what is sometimes questionable
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I think you need to go one step further. Everyone thinks their beliefs are special. It’s pure bias. Belief is the problem. What was intended as a waypoint to prove a premise has become a destination
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Not exactly. If I say I believe my daughter is beautiful, this is not a problem. It would be problematic if I insisted my daughter is the most beautiful person ever.
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Is that belief an ideology like Islam, Christianity, Left or right? That is not the type of belief that influences divisions
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If you mean beliefs around dogma, that is a different thing altogether.
There is belief ala faith and belief that can almost be used interchangeably with knowledge- if I say I believe we are 5 people and I know we are five people- in the second case, there is an element of certainty ( it would be called a true a statement) the first scenario is open to confirmation.
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But with knowledge or actual evidence we don’t need belief or faith. Evidence always supplants faith. The moment you have evidence the belief is shelved for utility.
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We might not need faith when we have evidence. But we can believe. And there is actually nothing out of place saying I believe Trump is the president of the US of A</b . That statement is correct/ factual.
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Or … It is my understanding that, …. etc etc
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Exactly. You can put it that way.
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In this case,this sounds more like a type of speech pattern/word usage
There are five people present or there aren’t.
Omitting the word ”believe” might be better?
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You are right
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I believe I could be.
🙂
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😀 touche
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If you ask someone if they’re a believer they know exactly what you mean. I avoid the word anymore as much as possible because it’s been hijacked. If you carry belief full spectrum you get the monotheistic stall or a conspiracy theorist. A new word is needed or belief always prefaced, ie; religious belief, etc. When it comes down to the brass tacks, belief and practice are conflated but are two different things.
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Then it is time to reclaim the word belief.
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BTW, getting ready for the game this afternoon?
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What do you think Mister Z?
Klopp told reporters (paraphrase) ”If Flamengo win they will have a huge party. Win or lose we still have to play Leicester next week.”
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Bunch of Carioco twits, but they have been playing pretty well this year. Swept every competition.
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As long as it’s a good game.
You know me, not partisan at all .
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Never, nope, wouldn’t hear of it.
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*Carioca
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If we believe that God exists, we can only honestly do so by faith alone. Any god who is “super” natural is beyond our ability to detect him by “natural” means, and therefore His/Her/Its existence is unprovable by definition. Shifting the burden to those who don’t believe to somehow “prove” the unprovable, God’s nonexistence, is inherently and Knowingly dishonest.
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Well, this atheist has a hobby of taking every philosophical argument for the existence of a god or gods and transform it into the exact opposite. I have yet to find an argument of this kind that could not be turned.
But I do not go around to local social clubs and deliver speeches to that effect or write scholarly papers or create YouTube videos, etc. There is, also, a quite lovely work by a professional philosopher called “The Non-Existence of God.” This book evaluates all of the philosophical arguments for the existence of a god or gods and shows that they fail. I do not know whether the author is an atheist, however.
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What an infuriating comment! Disbelieving that a claim is true does NOT mean one is saying they know for certain it is false. It simply means the claim being made is not backed by enough evidence to be blindly believed! OMG! Theists like this piss me the eff off! UGH!!!
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One cannot prove the non-existence of God with absolute certainty, in the same sense that one cannot prove anything with absolute certainty. Even with apparently indisputable statements like “Paris is the capital of France” or “the planet Mars exists”, any claim of proof could be met with objections like “you might be a brain in a vat perceiving a virtual-reality illusion and the real universe might be completely different” to affirm that the standard of absolutely certain proof has not been met. In that sense, and only in that sense, we can’t prove the non-existence of God with absolute certainty either.
But in the normal usage of the word “prove”, for any normal definition of “God” which is not deliberately contrived to be immune to proof or disproof, we can indeed prove it. A universe created and ruled by a God like the one described in the Bible would show abundant and unmistakable evidence of the existence and acts of that God. The Bible is, after all, full of descriptions of God’s actions which would be unmistakable if the same kinds of things were actually happening today.
In such a case, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. Suppose you were trying to prove that there is not an elephant in the room with you right now. You could argue that if the elephant were there, you could see it, smell it, hear it breathing, feel it if you touched it (or it touched you). The total absence of any such sensory evidence would “prove”, by any normal definition of the word, that there’s no elephant in the room.
The non-existence of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God can be considered “proven” by the same standard. “Absolute”-ness doesn’t exist in the real world and is generally irrelevant to it.
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I wonder what that person meant by “within a range of absolute certainty.” I think there has to be some wiggle room there for some theists. Otherwise, different denominations and thoughts on deities would tend to indicate that nobody’s really sure about the existence of deities.
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I just look for the contradictions. (To recap: there can be no contradictions, just false premises.) For example:
* God is everywhere
* God is all powerful
* God is all knowing
* God is love, love, and
* God is infinite mercy too
Yet God allowed the Nazis a free hand?
Was he also not around earlier when His very own personal Godly Holy Inquisition was strappado-ing folks (and roasting them alive)?
So if in all His mighty omnipotence He allowed Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and many others to do unpleasant things to (how many?) millions of innocents—is there perhaps just the hint of an apparent contradiction here?
God’s very own chosen people too, if the truth be known. (No wonder those German scamps lost the war …)
AND thank God, from the bottom of my heart, that God doesn’t love ME like He loved them … brrrrr …
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A certain amount of evil is aloud in the world but it never exceeds the good, you know
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At last! Someone has me sitting stunned in gob-smacked silence.
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I am glad I could help
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Hee Hoo time again:
“Hee Hoo alleges must prove …”
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