Agnosticism vs. Atheism

Who cares about that god? He gets trimmed away by Occam's Razor soon enough, anyway.I guess, as an (agnostic) atheist, I only care to know that the consequential gods don't exist, which they don't. I couldn't care less if a hands-off, non-involved god exists. There's nothing I could know about such a god that would lead me to change my life in any way. Hey, I'll be right there with you. Gnostic atheists take it too far. They need to come sit on my fence.

By demonstrating that any significant god would leave more evidence of its existence than we find. And I don't particularly care about insignificant gods. No, because I don't expect much evidence of transitional forms. The difference between what we find and what we expect is therefore relatively low, and so the lack of evidence is insignificant.A significant god would leave significant evidence. That this is not so is enough reason for reasonable people to reject that a significant god exists.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-22-2003]

An interesting idea, let's play around with it.If a group of blind scientists wanted to know if there was anything to this "sight" that some people keep talking about, they might construct an experiment where they would show (well, hand) the same object to people who claimed to be able to "see". Now, they know that people who "see" claim that objects have "color", some kind of quality that only they can detect.If "color" really exists, and is not in their mind, they might expect different "viewers" to report the same color when shown the same object.Now, take it back to god. Do the persons who claim to have knowledge about god - who might be said to have this god-sense you're talking about - tend to agree on the qualities of that god?The vast, vast scope of religous experience by humanity implies that no, they do not. If the people who could be said to be experiencing god can't agree on their experience, why is it fruitful to assume that they're not just making it up?

But it was predicted by our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum.From what scientific theory do you predict the existence of God? What data can only be explained by the existence of a creator god? What hypothesis do you propose on the existence of god, and what tests can we perform to confirm or reject it?

Well, I would ask the person who is asking me if God exists or not. Or I would ask people who believe in god whether or not their god had activity in the physical world or not. A statistically significant pattern of interventions to a statistically significant portion of the population, for whom the only common factor was their belief in the same god. Says you. I say it is. I say that absence of evidence is exactly what we would expect of a non-existent entity, especially an entity that if it did exist, would leave significant evidence. Yes, you can't deduce from a position of ignorance. But I'm saying you can infer from a position of knowing what you don't know; that there's no evidence for god where we would expect to find it if god existed.Granted this only works with the definitions of god that we know of. The lack of evidence for any god that has been thought of is no evidence at all for the lack of gods yet unthought of. Once you've thought up those gods, though, I can come up with potential evidence that they should be leaving, if they exist. If certain, easily identifiable groups of people never succumbed to disease, violent crime, and other random, uncontrollable misfortunes, that would be evidence of the intervention of god. If people of faith had near-universally consistent ideas about what god says on any subject, that would be evidence for god. If there was only one kind of religious experience that people had, that would be evidence for god.That none of those things is true is evidence against the existence of any god popularly held to exist. It's not evidence against all gods, but I never said it would be. There are some gods that I can't prove don't exist. They're just totally useless gods that nobody feels the need to be particularly worshipful of. When you capitalize "God", I assume you're talking about the Chrisitan God of the Bible. Such a hypothesis about his existence might be: "If God exists, random misfortunes won't happen to those who are faithful to him." The null hypothesis would be "if God doesn't exist, misfortunes will happen at random, to believers and non-believers alike." Since that's largely the case, we can accept the null hypothesis: God doesn't exist.(If you're response is "maybe God just doesn't care", that's fine, but that's moving the goalposts. The God of the Bible would care, and that's the God we were talking about.)

I would like to point out that I've taken Intro to Logic, and none of this was on the syllabus. Actually I'm trying to use the specific forumlation "If the Christian God of the Bible exists, then He will leave evidence on this world." I'm not saying I know everything about every dark corner of the universe, or the evidence that could conceivably be there. But the God we're talking about wouldn't leave the evidence in a corner, it'd be here on Earth, in front of us.If that God existed it would be obvious to the most casual observer, if He did things like it says he does in the Bible.I'll try and be clearer. I'm not arguing against all possible ideas of god, just one. The biblical one. If a god like in the bible existed, there would be evidence galore for it. That we instead find none at all is more than enough reason to say that such a god doesn't exist. Well, I agree that I can't know that, but I can infer it to a reasonable degree of accuracy. After all, all the things that we know exist have left evidence that they did so. While it's not certain, it's highly likely that anything that exists will follow the same pattern.If you can show me something that exists without leaving nearly as much evidence as we expect, then I'll be amienable to changing my mind.

Easily explained by altered states of conciousness, like self-hypnosis. They all have the same kind of brains, after all.

Well, religions across the world have worked very hard to explain to people what kind of god they worship, so I just take them at their word. I assume that, given thousands of years of religious experience, humans have more or less identified most of the gods that are worth believing in. Every single one of those is falsifiable from the lack of evidence that we would expect from them.I grant that I cannot falsify a god who takes no action. But even as an atheist I feel no need to, because it doesn't matter if such a god exists or not. It's very inaction is tantamount to non-existence, in any practical sense. Yes, and if I falsify one quality of the god they're talking about, then I falsify their god. If they believe in a god with certain qualities, and the god that exists has different ones, then the god they believe in doesn't exist. It's not a falsification of all gods but it is a falsification of their god.If I falsify all gods worth believing in - the ones that act in this world - then all that's left are the potential gods that never act, and they're as good as non-existent anyway, by definition. A god? Or all gods? One particular definition of god, or all definitions of god? Like I've said, I can do the former, but not the latter.

How would you know? To know that, you'd have to know that universes don't just get created - that there has to be a god to create them.Wouldn't that put you in the position of having to have evidence that universes that aren't created by gods don't exist? And wouldn't that put you in the position of having to have evidence of non-existence? Which, you seem to argue, is impossible?

Yeah, I had a good time. I'm sorry if I wasn't occasionally very clear on what I meant - I've never really had to defend atheism to people who actually paid attention to logic.