Atheists - prove it.

Post Reply New Topic

Why do you need a Christian to explain this? Free will is commonly acknowledged to be the ability to choose between two different actions, no?

By the same logic, the opposite is also true--it's foolish to be so positive about unprovable claims such as the NON-existence of God.

I love the workaround: "I do not believe that God exists." It's a carefully-worded statement that avoids the burden of proof, and one can offer up all sorts of reasons why he or she thinks that. The reasons themselves might even be reasons FOR the existence of God. Personally, I think it's just an excuse to be incoherent.

Edit
*In science the onus is not to prove a negative*. -> What I mean by this statement is the following; I could make a fictious character up who is invisible all powerful and tempermental, there is no way to experimentally verify his existence prove that he does not exist.

Answer the question if god does not exist then what?

In order to whether god exists lets say we hold an experiment. For this experiment we get several christians to buy lotto tickets. You would expect god would have no problem performing a miracle on a devout Christian - so have this Christian buy a mega millions lottery ticket, and if he wins, that will go a long way to proving the existence of god - if he looses then, that's what we'd expect to happen if there were no god.

Even if we performed this experiment a billion times and no one won - even though it was statistically probable - that would still not disprove the existence of god, all that it would prove is that he didn't perform a miracle in this particular instance.

The other reason this is difficult is there is no single definition for god - or the definitions that do exist are so abstract they don't tell us anything useful. So when some miracle does not happen we change our definition of what god would do - perhaps what he is and is not capable of.

Suppose we devise a machine which can search every inch of the universe and suppose we look for god with this machine, and we find nothing. There god does not exist because the definition of not existing is not being present anywhere in the universe. But suppose we conducted the experiment and that was the result - I severly doubt even that would convince a devout Christian. Because they would probably say something to the effect of "That machine can't look into my heart." At which point the physicist throws up his hands, looses his mind takes off his clothes, and well you get the idea.

Last edited by wcoltd on 18 Jul 2011, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Of course you can... but Dr. Craig puts it best:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpNYIbSJFPQ[/youtube]

Forget Craig. I will now prove a negative. There do not exist integers m, n such that (m/n)*(m/n) = 2 and such that m,n have no other common divisor than 1

Proof. Suppose such integers existed. Then m*m = 2*n*n So the square of m = twice a number which makes it even. But the square of an odd number is odd so m must be even . Therfore m = 2*k

(2*k) squared = 2*m-squared
4*k-squared = 2*m-squared
divide both sides by 2 and get
2*k-squared = m-squared.

but this implies m is even also which violates our hypothesis that m, n have no other factor in common than 1.

QED.

A negative have been proven and God was not invoked even once.;

ruveyn

Sure, I never claimed God was needed to prove a negative. Your choice of mathematics in your demonstration is interesting though. Since the universe does not need to exist and that the existence of mathematical truths is not dependent on the universe for their existence. If one then accepts that mathematical concepts only exist in the mind, you then have a mind that is powerful enough to exist apart from any universe while also grounding all mathematics. While I would not go so far to state QED... the conceptualist argument is compelling.

wtf? 91, mathematics is nothing but a description of how the universe works. Formal math is a model made in our minds that represents the reality of the universe - without humans, the reality is still there. The core truths that mathematical models are based on exist entirely independent of human minds - and the idea that something is 'independent of the universe' because it exists in a (physical) human mind is, frankly, laughable.

You can prove a negative, alright, as both 91 and ruveyn pointed out. I could, say, hand you a box I knew beforehand contained no oranges and prove there are no oranges in the box by opening the box to show an empty box or a box with some other kind of fruit or object. The statement "I do not believe God exists" is one of those supposed "bulletproof" atheistic statements which I think is really just incoherent (as I've said). Either one merely does not know with any certainty God exists, or one really believes God doesn't exist. I would say more people properly identify as atheistic-leaning agnostics rather than "true" atheists in a strict sense; however, wikipedia seems to identify both as atheists proper. From my perspective, self-identifying as atheist in the sense that one "does not believe God exists," when you really get into the heart of the matter, really is a positive statement beneath the surface. For all practical purposes, even if you don't say it outright, I think you really do make a positive statement whether you intend to or not.


Then nothing.


I would argue the opposite, actually. Gambling in any form is discouraged by the Bible. That a Christian would lose a lottery is evidence that God cares for those who belong to Him and actually winning would really just be rewarding bad behavior.

And then there are Christians who HAVE won the lottery. The only justification I can see that MAY be Biblically consistent is playing games of chance for the sole purpose of benefitting a cause. You have a "chance" at material gain, but that is not your main pursuit in gaming. You have excess money, and throwing it away for, say, supporting better school facilities and possibly giving a poor person a break is not an inherently bad thing--but if that's your intent, why not donate money to a school district for the purpose of a building program and then pay a homeless person's rent for the rest of his/your life? Regardless, gambling is not ever really the best option that truly benefits all, not to mention people who become addicted to gambling and end up in serious financial trouble over it. If you wonder why God doesn't bless you when you blow money on lottery tickets, and you call yourself a Christian (and actually BELIEVE, of course), could it be that what you're doing is really not what God wants? I mean, I do get the point of what you're saying, but it's really a poor example.


True.


I don't think that's really a difficulty. I think the Christian concept of God is transcendent across most cultures--the idea of a omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent supreme being. It's not unique to Christianity, but I do think the Judeo-Christian tradition is probably the best-developed monotheistic religious code. As opposed as I am to Islam, I'd even have to include them as part of it. This breaks down in particulars, though, but still...


OK, but exactly what is it that the machine is built to detect? I can admit that God doesn't exist in strictly physical terms. So if you're looking for a physical being, yes, your search is going to be frustrated. So a better line of reasoning I think is whether the physical plane of existence really is the only one.

If you could build a machine that could traverse the spirit world and detect spirit beings, then you'd at least be on the right track. It could be that the only being that can detect a spirit being is another spirit being, in which case you have human beings themselves. But then you have the challenge of hard empiricism calling into question whether intuition is valid data-gathering and whether "feelings" are valid. I.e. how is this different from a delusional, mentally ill person? For the Christian, personal experience goes a long way to affirming faith in something more tangible. For someone who lacks that or is somehow predisposed against any kind of faith-based knowledge, there is no solution.

This will be an amusingly overlong debate. The idea though that we, who are apparently ignorant of the workings of math, have enough knowledge on it to use this knowledge for these kinds of advanced claims is laughable.

That is true of some mathematical systems. Some mathematics are purely formal creations and pursued as a kind of art, rather than a practical application.

ruveyn

You all are right, I cannot believe I wrote that. That was very stupid and I understand if you think everything I say from now on is complete rubbish. What I meant to say was "In science the onus is not to prove a negative."

The burdon of proof doesn't rest on the doubter, it's up to the people claiming this extraneous thing called god to prove he exists, otherwise there is no reason for me to believe it. There are many extraneous ways of looking at the world, you can suppose many things to complicate our understanding of the world - the burdon is not on the scientist to disprove the existence of all these fictions, the onus is on the person to prove it. Without proof there is no reason to suppose it's existence.

Exactly, how can we prove god does not exist when there is no consequence between him existing and not. Isn't that a proper description of something not existing, when there is absolutely no consequence, whether or not it does infact exist.

In otherwords if you can't tell the difference between god existing and not existing, then how is that different from it not existing?
That's how we define nonexistent - having no consequence.





You only justify it's existence by introducing another fiction. What is there to suppose there is a "spirit world" in the first place?[quote]

Last edited by wcoltd on 18 Jul 2011, 10:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Its just an argument from necessarily existing abstract objects. Its a conceptualist argument.

1) The number one exists
a) The number one is not contingent on the existence of the universe in order to exist
2) Therefore the number one exists apart from space and time
3) The number one can only be perceived by a mind
4) The universe requires the number one to exist
5) Therefore the best explanation for the existence of the number one is a mind that is separate from the space and time

My intention with ruveyn was to show that there is room for less simplistic thinking in relation to proofs and as AG says, it is an unresolved argument, it depends on whether or not you deny the existence of abstract objects or not.

Well, yes - but my second point kicks in there. Just because the model exists within a human mind does not make the model somehow independent of the universe.

This is false. In a pre-big-bang 'universe' (yes, I know that's a really bad word for it), neither time nor space nor numbers existed. Intergers are proven to have independent reality in this universe, outside of our own minds, by the periodic table: exactly one proton = hydrogen. In some other possible universe, with other physical laws, intergers might not exist in the same way that they do here. Everything might, for example, be continuous, rendering intergers such as "1" arbitrary placeholders without real-world meaning.

Well am aware of a number of major criticisms that have been made of the argument from abstract objects. This is not one of them. The demonstration of the flaw in the logic of this criticism is that if the universe were to then encompass a multiverse, there would no change in the laws of mathematics. The number of universes could still be counted. The fact that we are talking about one universe at the moment, does not change the reality one bit. I also think we have good reasons for thinking that numbers are necessarily ordered, as they are and that it could not be otherwise since there is no logically possible universe where 1 plus 1 could equal 10,000. Also, you position that 1 is an arbitrary placeholder, is not reflective of the reality that numbers have ontological significant. They exist in a way that is testable outside of the mind, so to accept your position would be to reject almost any standard of knowledge; you would have killed verfication, empiricism and even falsificationism. The position you have put forward has an incredibly high price attached to it. That said, you could just embrace nominalism... I have yet to find any way to annihilate that position and criticism and as such it remains a viable, coherent position (even if it does not account for their ontological significance properly).