Atheists - Check Mate!

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OK. It is also possible that evidence for a link between clean water and heart disease could be found in the future. The notion of vaccines causing autism has been as completely refuted as is possible in any realm of human knowledge. Look:

If vaccines cause autism, then vaccinated children should have a higher incidence of autism.
Vaccinated children have the same (or lower) incidences of autism compared to unvaccinated children.
Therefore, vaccines do not cause autism.

p implies q.
not q.
therefore not p.

It is quite simple. The only way to disagree with the conclusion is to deny the data; the quantitative empirical evidence.

Oversimplified argument, which assumes that there are no other influences, genetic or environmental, which may contribute to the development of autism. Before you could possibly reduce the argument to a simple modus tollens as you did above, you'd have to exclude all other possible confounding factors BESIDES vaccines, which you haven't done. Just to pull an example out of the air, if all the children in the unvaccinated group were Amish and the ones in the vaccinated group were not, then you have different gene pools going in. There are TONS of variables, so many that you can't POSSIBLY account for all of them, so reducing it to that simple an argument is absurd on its face.

~Kate

My assumption is the opposite, actually: genetic and environmental causes are almost certainly the main contributors.


Properly controlled studies (which were done) eliminate confounding factors as a source of error. They examined large populations of children who were essentially the same, aside from vaccination rates.

Well, if that's true, then, OK, you win. I think you were taking me WAY too seriously!

God is dead, we're working on J.K.Rowling.

(In the nietzschean sense)

If all errors were eliminated from all studies, then there would never be any changes in what we conclude. That is obviously not the case in medical science...just look at what's happened with cholesterol in the last couple of decades. Another good example is hormone replacement therapy after menopause, and I don't think all the data are in on that either. Treatment of recurrent febrile seizures, from my own field. There are many things that were thought to be "settled" and weren't. My fundamentalist Christian debate opponents seize on that all the time as to why their "unchanging" religion is superior to my "changeable" science. My point is that there are data out there that we don't know about, and that may not even be discovered in our lifetimes. The universe is a vast place. We're tiny, and we're about as far from omniscient as you can get. That ought to give anyone pause before being too confident.

~Kate

A mere logical possibility doesn't mean "agnosticism" though. The reason is that most people don't consider debunking a logical possibility as required for disbelieving something. It is entirely possible that Elvis was abducted by aliens and that his corpse was really a very well-constructed fake(aliens did the constructing, after all). The problem is that this is ridiculous and there is no reason to believe it, so I don't and I am confident that it didn't happen.

The rule that "you must completely discount all possibilities of something" to claim knowledge is ridiculous. If it were necessary, then we couldn't ever claim to know anything, period.

I am.


well, the issue is that absence of evidence is related to argument from ignorance, so in some circunstances it seems to be valid.



However, this is much like Orwell's point on the issue.

Yes, not only that but God is a concept, and the concept and idea of God exist in people's minds and "hearts" as well as it has a name, and given that the idea of God exists, therefore God exists, even if not physically, but still.

Revelation exists, as in the revelation of God from scripture, and revelation is not empirical, otherwise it wouldn't be revelation. And atheists, lack revelation, they don't have the spiritual capability to comprehend it, so it is sad.... or perhaps a joy, that salvation is impossible.

There is some merit to Descartes' writings on what we can know, before he got all scared of the Catholic church and started backpeddling...though back in the day they did kill people, so I guess there was something to fear...

But anyway, I digress. What we can know about the physical world is at least potentially able to be pinned down by good scientific method. Non-physical entities like gods and demons and souls...there's no way. Not with the methods we have now. While I *tend* to consider those things woo-woo, there isn't the ability to prove the believer wrong at this point.

~Kate

Not really, Descartes position is still relatively unstable. The fact of the matter is that the skeptical arguments against knowledge can't be defeated, they're just too absurd to accept. And recognizing that ends up requiring that unless we want to dispense with the idea of better and worse ideas altogether, we have to take a stand and say that certain things, even if they can't be outright refuted, are silly to believe. I mean, heck, if you want, we can question whether there really IS a physical world. I mean, I doubt you could refute the idea there isn't. I'm still not agnostic on the matter though.

Gods, are they sensible to believe? Not really, because we are bringing in the possibility of something inordinately complex and well, even if they are not physical, they are generally conceived as interacting somewhat with the physical world. We don't see this interaction or signs of it. Because of this there is little reason to believe in them, and a lot of reason not to.

Demons are pretty similar to gods.

Souls end up tending to tie themselves down to claims about personal identity. The problem is that these claims about personal identity end up running into a large set of hard problems that lead us to question whether there is enough psychological continuity to furnish us something like a person's essence, or whether there is enough of a line between souled and non-souled that the distinction becomes relevant.

Now, you are right, we can continue being agnostic towards these issues, but.... it ends up being silly. You might say "We can't disprove these things", but you can't prove that the world didn't come into existence 5 minutes ago with our memories of a longer time period included! Are you agnostic to the idea that you are really only 5 minutes old, along with everything else???

Have your senses never been wrong about anything? You mean you've never "seen" one of those "puddles" that really wasn't there on a hot road? Hmmmm....*obviously* Descartes had a point. Does that mean we can't know *anything*? No. Does it mean we have to recognize that our ability to know things is limited? Absolutely.




Well...not all gods are perceived as interacting with the physical world...some belief systems postulate god(s) that set things in motion and step back. But I neither believe they exist nor believe they don't, nor do I find compelling reason to "make up (my) mind, dammit" ( )



Again, this can be tested. Non-physical entities cannot.

~Kate

^^Greetings everyone. I am very sorry as I have not read all text within this little topic.

^^ I believe I agree with you very much Meow101, as I believe that I too am very much agnostic.

Now, Awesomely Glorious, concerning your Elvis argument: I believe I consider myself agnostic as I understand that others believe what they believe in as strongly as I believe what I believe in. So, if a happy human really believed that Elvis was abducted by aliens, and I could not find any evidence to contrary, and they were not causing any harm, then I see no reason to claim that I am 100% correct and they 100% incorrect. However, if there is no such individual who believes this, then I will probably not consider the abduction theory as I believe this is very unlikely and do not need to consider beliefs of others in this theory.

Also AwesomelyGlorious, I believe we have discussed within the past that language and definitions may be a barrier. Therefore, I have used the idea of agnosticism as discussed within Wikipedia.

^^Also, Orwell, I find your arguments also very interesting. I agree certainly that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Evidence, indeed, but not proof. This argument also works against you. There is no evidence to the absence of God, either, I believe (perhaps there may be for one particular God, by not for any arbitrary God). So this is evidence to the presence of God, by the above argument. Thus they cancel out one another.

I am very sorry if I have been horrible.

You cannot prove that Elvis was NOT abducted by aliens beyond the shadow of a doubt.

^^I agree with you very much greenblue.