Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist and indeed is almighty without ever having any measurable effect on the world whatsoever.
How is that not ignorant?
and taking your freedom.
I don’t support the statement that you personally take away anyones freedom.
But organized churches have a long standing tradition of suppression and if you are part of one you support that at least indirectly.
Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist
There is a whole area in Philosophy called Philosophy of Religion that would really like your disproof of the existence of such a being. They have atheists and theists alike.
I don’t have to proof something doesn’t exist, someone that wants to be taken seriously has to proof why they would believe something does positively exist.
“Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony (2010) argued that despite the use of Hitchens’s razor to reject religious belief and to support atheism, applying the razor to atheism itself would seem to imply that atheism is epistemically unjustified. According to Antony, the New Atheists (to whom Hitchens also belonged) invoke a number of special arguments purporting to show that atheism can in fact be asserted without evidence.”
If only you could read, maybe you’d be more tolerant, but I doubt it, sigh.
The sheer arrogance to post a philosophical minority opinion paired with an insult and then end it with a sigh.
And while I am not particularly familiar with Mr. Antony’s work I can tell you that he either didn’t understand or purposefully misused Hitchen’s Razor insofar as you indeed can not apply it to Atheism the same way you can apply it to christianity.
The reason for that being that there is no particular thing at all you have to believe to be an atheist.
Atheism in and of itself doesn’t assert anything at all.
So there is nothing that could be dismissed.
Atheism says there is no reason to believe in god.
How does Hitchen’s Razor dismiss that? It doesn’t.
Not to mention your quote still is no argument towards the positive existence of god.
And if you don’t show me how I am supposed to be intolerant, I will take it as the baseless insult that it is and will no longer discuss with you.
If you are claiming something doesn’t exist you should prove it. Why should I take your argument seriously without proof? You see how this goes both ways?
If something exists it should be easy to prove. There should be some form of sign of it.
This is absolutely not true. Things can exist without being accessible to you directly in a manner that makes it easy to prove their existence.
On the other hand it is hard to disprove the existence of anything at all. How do we know there is not some teapot in outer space?
Proving non-existence is not always hard. If we were arguing about the food in your fridge and I were claiming you had food in your fridge when you did not you could easily prove me wrong by just showing me the contents of your fridge.
More importantly, why does the hardness of doing a thing give you special status to make claims without proof? Seems like you are artificially constructing rules here solely because they benefit your position.
We can’t. But that is no reason to believe there is one.
The universe is massive. There are teapots here. Why is it not plausible to believe some other alien race would not also construct some kind of teapot? Also, consider the fact that all teapots here on earth are literally teapots in “outerspace” in some sense.
More importantly, why does the hardness of doing a thing give you special status to make claims without proof?
It doesn’t. But, “God doesn’t exist” is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim “God exists”. The very concept of a higher power didn’t even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it’s been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
The counter-claim of “God doesn’t exist” needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of “God exists” actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the “evidence” if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so… I’m not too worried.
ETA:
The universe is massive. There are teapots here. Why is it not plausible to believe some other alien race would not also construct some kind of teapot? Also, consider the fact that all teapots here on earth are literally teapots in “outerspace” in some sense.
The other person you replied to worded this bit poorly. The original analogy is trying to convince people on Earth to believe that there is a teapot(which is too small to see with a telescope) orbiting the Sun independently somewhere in between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits. It’s completely illogical to believe seeing as humans haven’t sent anything without scientific value beyond maybe the moon, and there’s no evidence aliens have visited our solar system let alone left a teapot in orbit. But since it can’t be proven there isn’t a teapot orbiting by itself, does that mean you should believe there is? No, of course not.
It doesn’t. But, “God doesn’t exist” is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim “God exists”.
I’d agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don’t agree that counter claims aren’t claims themselves. The wording “counter claim” seems to me to indicate that “counter claims” are just claims of a particular type?
“God doesn’t exist” is surely a statement right? If I tell you “god doesn’t exist” (in response or not to something you’ve said), this feels like I am claiming the statement “god doesn’t exist” is true.
The very concept of a higher power didn’t even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it’s been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
The counter-claim of “God doesn’t exist” needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of “God exists” actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the “evidence” if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so… I’m not too worried.
I don’t think we need proof to reject a claim like “god exists”. There’s no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn’t say X too.
I agree with your points. I just want to add that what OP was talking about is that the existence of a deity or higher power is not falsifiable and thus is impossible to logically disprove. I’m sure many, many, many people have tried on both sides.
My favorite proof against any higher power is from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Edit: changes “logically prove” to “logically disprove” as that’s why the concept of a higher power cannot be disproven.
My issue here is with what I perceive as bad argumentation, double standards and general ignorance to the field of study where these sorts of questions are applicable on the part of the person I am replying to.
Edit: I want to be clear that I’m not saying you are doing that. I am referring to the other people I have been replying to.
It seems like you should understand my point/position before you reply to me if you want this conversation to be productive? Why is understanding those things irrelevant to you?
Corporations have been stealing ever since the dawn of time, anyone working under a big company willingly is not the one to blame, and also what’s with this ‘I know everything’ stuff in the comments section? Is your only basis of hating 90% of the world’s population is that they believe in a god? If anyone can tell for a fact that God doesn’t exist, go on, but everyone knows its a matter of choice and you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist
But I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and reply to your specific points.
Corporations have been stealing ever since the dawn of time, anyone working under a big company willingly is not the one to blame
That is a strawman argument.
In most societies people are more or less forced to work for some employer, so I think it is hard to blame a worker for the company he works for.
And additionally I think one can blame a worker if they choose to work for the ethically worst companies.
Is your only basis of hating 90% of the world’s population is that they believe in a god?
That is very insulting.
I don’t hate religious people, my mother is deeply religious and I truly love her.
But she is misguided and gives time, effort, believe and most of all money to an organization that still to this day promotes homophobia, suppresses women and staunchly defends child rapists.
I don’t like that and I won’t stop criticizing it.
but everyone knows its a matter of choice and you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist
Off course it is your prerogative to believe in god.
I wouldn’t ever want to ban you from believing in whatever you want.
But you shouldn’t be surprised if people put you in the same category with people believing in a flat earth or something like that.
If you just choose to believe random stuff without evidence than it is only natural that your opinion is not taken seriously.
It is not like there are two equally valid theories about what to believe.
One group believes in things if there is proof and one group believes in things because some dude from the bronze ages wrote it down.
I am gonna make an apology for the fact that I am getting a little bit excited, which might be becoming apparent, religion is a complex subject and discussing so much matter is a bit complex and no one here in the comments seems to be interested in having a discussion but rather spouting nonsense against 90% of the world
But I will agree that I am also against giving money to organizations that promotes hate, whether it’s affiliated with religion or not, that money is better spent on a better cause, and I also respect the fact that you don’t hate religious people, but also there are lots of institutions affiliated with religion that work for a good cause, a lot of churches and mosque provide shelter, gurudwaras are famous for providing food, atleast where I live
The thing is I don’t think a person should be judged for their beliefs but rather they should be judged based on their actions, a person kills someone, it should be condemned, no matter if he is a priest or the pope, a person donates money to the charity and helps someone, that should be praised, no matter what he believes personally about god
Me believing in a flat earth is me disbelieving in a proven fact, you would be right to call me dumb, but there is no study that disproves the existence of god, so if anyone believes in one, you can’t call him/her dumb because it’s not against any proven fact, it’s just that he thinks that life around him is enough evidence that someone out there exists, and there is nothing unscientific or unreasonable about that, and spouting hate comments against them and claiming they are dumb, banning them for wearing a piece of clothing is just wrong, no matter how you look at it.
Hey first and foremost, thanks for the good faith discussion.
I want you to be reassured that I don’t hate you for your religion.
And I don’t think you or any religious person is necessarily dumb.
We just happen to fundamentally disagree on certain points that seem to hold at least some value for both our lives.
And I will gladly admit that believing in god has the fundamental difference to believing in a flat earth that you described. The flat earth is soundly disproven and the existence of god is not.
I would in reply try to refine my point to saying that I think believing in god is comparable to believing in the easter bunny or the often quoted flying spaghetti monster (that I purposefully didn’t want to invoke earlier).
Yes you are absolutely free to believe in any of those things.
I would fight to defend your right to believe in them.
But I cannot ever accept it as truth or even an educated opinion to hold without any proof pointing specifically towards the existence of any god.
And not to end on a negative note.
I love life around me, I love nature, I love animals.
I think the world is a wonder.
I do not believe any god made it the way it is.
I have no reason to believe that.
I just love it for itself.
Nobody is saying that people should be judged by their religion. People here are saying Religion itself encourages anti-science and bigoted views.
Secondly, it’s absolutely unscientific to believe that the lack of disproof is sufficient evidence for belief. This is fundamentally unreasonable and is just as much proof as saying that pigs can fly when nobody observes them.
No, religious people are not morally wrong for being religious, and they are not to blame. Religion itself is.
Listen everyone! According to cowbee, we should make sure that from now on, nobody will ever put out any hypothesis ever again! It’s absolutely unscientific! Any claim should be absolutely 100% correct and if not, we should leave it at there!
Believing firmly in a hypothesis without confirmation of said hypothesis is not sound. Again, pigs flying when nobody can see them, and firmly believing in it.
This gets additionally dicey when religion is used as a tool to restrict women’s rights, and uphold homophobia, transphobia, and racism.
The scientific method works by creating a hypothesis, and testing it to verify. It does not work by creating a hypothesis and firmly believing in it until its disproven. You take an agnostic approach until confirmed one way or the other.
Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist and indeed is almighty without ever having any measurable effect on the world whatsoever.
How is that not ignorant?
I don’t support the statement that you personally take away anyones freedom.
But organized churches have a long standing tradition of suppression and if you are part of one you support that at least indirectly.
There is a whole area in Philosophy called Philosophy of Religion that would really like your disproof of the existence of such a being. They have atheists and theists alike.
I don’t have to proof something doesn’t exist, someone that wants to be taken seriously has to proof why they would believe something does positively exist.
“what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
“Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony (2010) argued that despite the use of Hitchens’s razor to reject religious belief and to support atheism, applying the razor to atheism itself would seem to imply that atheism is epistemically unjustified. According to Antony, the New Atheists (to whom Hitchens also belonged) invoke a number of special arguments purporting to show that atheism can in fact be asserted without evidence.”
If only you could read, maybe you’d be more tolerant, but I doubt it, sigh.
The sheer arrogance to post a philosophical minority opinion paired with an insult and then end it with a sigh.
And while I am not particularly familiar with Mr. Antony’s work I can tell you that he either didn’t understand or purposefully misused Hitchen’s Razor insofar as you indeed can not apply it to Atheism the same way you can apply it to christianity.
The reason for that being that there is no particular thing at all you have to believe to be an atheist.
Atheism in and of itself doesn’t assert anything at all.
So there is nothing that could be dismissed.
Atheism says there is no reason to believe in god.
How does Hitchen’s Razor dismiss that? It doesn’t.
Not to mention your quote still is no argument towards the positive existence of god.
And if you don’t show me how I am supposed to be intolerant, I will take it as the baseless insult that it is and will no longer discuss with you.
Removed by mod
Reported.
Well, shutting you up was that easy, who would have guessed.
If you are claiming something doesn’t exist you should prove it. Why should I take your argument seriously without proof? You see how this goes both ways?
No it doesn’t go both ways.
If something exists it should be easy to prove.
There should be some form of sign of it.
On the other hand it is hard to disprove the existence of anything at all.
How do we know there is not some teapot in outer space?
We can’t.
But that is no reason to believe there is one.
This is absolutely not true. Things can exist without being accessible to you directly in a manner that makes it easy to prove their existence.
Proving non-existence is not always hard. If we were arguing about the food in your fridge and I were claiming you had food in your fridge when you did not you could easily prove me wrong by just showing me the contents of your fridge.
More importantly, why does the hardness of doing a thing give you special status to make claims without proof? Seems like you are artificially constructing rules here solely because they benefit your position.
The universe is massive. There are teapots here. Why is it not plausible to believe some other alien race would not also construct some kind of teapot? Also, consider the fact that all teapots here on earth are literally teapots in “outerspace” in some sense.
It doesn’t. But, “God doesn’t exist” is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim “God exists”. The very concept of a higher power didn’t even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it’s been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
The counter-claim of “God doesn’t exist” needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of “God exists” actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the “evidence” if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so… I’m not too worried.
ETA:
The other person you replied to worded this bit poorly. The original analogy is trying to convince people on Earth to believe that there is a teapot(which is too small to see with a telescope) orbiting the Sun independently somewhere in between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits. It’s completely illogical to believe seeing as humans haven’t sent anything without scientific value beyond maybe the moon, and there’s no evidence aliens have visited our solar system let alone left a teapot in orbit. But since it can’t be proven there isn’t a teapot orbiting by itself, does that mean you should believe there is? No, of course not.
I’d agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don’t agree that counter claims aren’t claims themselves. The wording “counter claim” seems to me to indicate that “counter claims” are just claims of a particular type?
“God doesn’t exist” is surely a statement right? If I tell you “god doesn’t exist” (in response or not to something you’ve said), this feels like I am claiming the statement “god doesn’t exist” is true.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
I don’t think we need proof to reject a claim like “god exists”. There’s no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn’t say X too.
I agree with your points. I just want to add that what OP was talking about is that the existence of a deity or higher power is not falsifiable and thus is impossible to logically disprove. I’m sure many, many, many people have tried on both sides.
My favorite proof against any higher power is from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
Edit: changes “logically prove” to “logically disprove” as that’s why the concept of a higher power cannot be disproven.
My issue here is with what I perceive as bad argumentation, double standards and general ignorance to the field of study where these sorts of questions are applicable on the part of the person I am replying to.
Edit: I want to be clear that I’m not saying you are doing that. I am referring to the other people I have been replying to.
Point me to a god and I’ll dismantle them.
What do you mean?
That no god can survive empirical investigation
Do you think I believe in a god?
Edit: Bonus question, do you think I’m claiming a god exists?
It’s irrelevant.
It seems like you should understand my point/position before you reply to me if you want this conversation to be productive? Why is understanding those things irrelevant to you?
Richard Dawkins has demonstrated that you don’t need to know a lick of philosophy to be an atheist. Simply cite anecdote as universal knowledge.
Corporations have been stealing ever since the dawn of time, anyone working under a big company willingly is not the one to blame, and also what’s with this ‘I know everything’ stuff in the comments section? Is your only basis of hating 90% of the world’s population is that they believe in a god? If anyone can tell for a fact that God doesn’t exist, go on, but everyone knows its a matter of choice and you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist
You are all over the place.
But I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and reply to your specific points.
That is a strawman argument.
In most societies people are more or less forced to work for some employer, so I think it is hard to blame a worker for the company he works for.
And additionally I think one can blame a worker if they choose to work for the ethically worst companies.
That is very insulting.
I don’t hate religious people, my mother is deeply religious and I truly love her.
But she is misguided and gives time, effort, believe and most of all money to an organization that still to this day promotes homophobia, suppresses women and staunchly defends child rapists.
I don’t like that and I won’t stop criticizing it.
Off course it is your prerogative to believe in god.
I wouldn’t ever want to ban you from believing in whatever you want.
But you shouldn’t be surprised if people put you in the same category with people believing in a flat earth or something like that.
If you just choose to believe random stuff without evidence than it is only natural that your opinion is not taken seriously.
It is not like there are two equally valid theories about what to believe.
One group believes in things if there is proof and one group believes in things because some dude from the bronze ages wrote it down.
I am gonna make an apology for the fact that I am getting a little bit excited, which might be becoming apparent, religion is a complex subject and discussing so much matter is a bit complex and no one here in the comments seems to be interested in having a discussion but rather spouting nonsense against 90% of the world
But I will agree that I am also against giving money to organizations that promotes hate, whether it’s affiliated with religion or not, that money is better spent on a better cause, and I also respect the fact that you don’t hate religious people, but also there are lots of institutions affiliated with religion that work for a good cause, a lot of churches and mosque provide shelter, gurudwaras are famous for providing food, atleast where I live
The thing is I don’t think a person should be judged for their beliefs but rather they should be judged based on their actions, a person kills someone, it should be condemned, no matter if he is a priest or the pope, a person donates money to the charity and helps someone, that should be praised, no matter what he believes personally about god
Me believing in a flat earth is me disbelieving in a proven fact, you would be right to call me dumb, but there is no study that disproves the existence of god, so if anyone believes in one, you can’t call him/her dumb because it’s not against any proven fact, it’s just that he thinks that life around him is enough evidence that someone out there exists, and there is nothing unscientific or unreasonable about that, and spouting hate comments against them and claiming they are dumb, banning them for wearing a piece of clothing is just wrong, no matter how you look at it.
Hey first and foremost, thanks for the good faith discussion.
I want you to be reassured that I don’t hate you for your religion.
And I don’t think you or any religious person is necessarily dumb.
We just happen to fundamentally disagree on certain points that seem to hold at least some value for both our lives.
And I will gladly admit that believing in god has the fundamental difference to believing in a flat earth that you described. The flat earth is soundly disproven and the existence of god is not.
I would in reply try to refine my point to saying that I think believing in god is comparable to believing in the easter bunny or the often quoted flying spaghetti monster (that I purposefully didn’t want to invoke earlier).
Yes you are absolutely free to believe in any of those things.
I would fight to defend your right to believe in them.
But I cannot ever accept it as truth or even an educated opinion to hold without any proof pointing specifically towards the existence of any god.
And not to end on a negative note.
I love life around me, I love nature, I love animals.
I think the world is a wonder.
I do not believe any god made it the way it is.
I have no reason to believe that.
I just love it for itself.
Nobody is saying that people should be judged by their religion. People here are saying Religion itself encourages anti-science and bigoted views.
Secondly, it’s absolutely unscientific to believe that the lack of disproof is sufficient evidence for belief. This is fundamentally unreasonable and is just as much proof as saying that pigs can fly when nobody observes them.
No, religious people are not morally wrong for being religious, and they are not to blame. Religion itself is.
Listen everyone! According to cowbee, we should make sure that from now on, nobody will ever put out any hypothesis ever again! It’s absolutely unscientific! Any claim should be absolutely 100% correct and if not, we should leave it at there!
No, that is not what I’ve said.
Believing firmly in a hypothesis without confirmation of said hypothesis is not sound. Again, pigs flying when nobody can see them, and firmly believing in it.
This gets additionally dicey when religion is used as a tool to restrict women’s rights, and uphold homophobia, transphobia, and racism.
The scientific method works by creating a hypothesis, and testing it to verify. It does not work by creating a hypothesis and firmly believing in it until its disproven. You take an agnostic approach until confirmed one way or the other.