I Know That God Does Not Exist

Nor is there any rational indication that a McDonald's menu doesn't exist on another planet. It is rational to suggest that life evolving on another planet might have some similarities to earthly life forms - e.g. warm-bloodedness, large brains, opposable thumbs, etc. Thus, it is also rational to suggest that a McDonald's menu might evolve on another planet.

Exactly. I still know how to bake a cake with a pretty high level of confidence. If you tasted my cake, your confidence in my knowledge would be high too. However, I don't claim to know how to make shark fin soup.

The difference is that you moved the goalpost in the second statement but not in the first. It shoud read, "I know that God does not exist on earth."You only "know" about the places where you have actually looked. Your surmises about the places where you haven't looked are not very valuable.

True. When you tell me how delicious my cake is, that could all be in my own imagination too.

So do I.And I also have a high level of confidence that there isn't going to be an elephant parade through my living room any time soon. That's a long way from claiming that I "know" elephants don't exist. You and I both know that Tangle has not examined his garden with the forensic thoroughness of a crime scene. Neither has he or anybody else examined the entire universe with that kind of thoroughness for signs of God. My knowledge of that planet is based on exactly the same foundation as your knowledge of God - the absence of contradictory evidence.

I haven't said anything about absolute certainty. I'm talking about confirmation.I say I know how to bake a cake because you can taste that cake and confirm that I know. I say that I know how to get to France because I can take you by the hand and show you France and you can confirm that you are there.Knowledge is what we can show others we know. Which is why absence of evidence can be evidence of absence but it isn't knowledge of absence. When you show somebody absence, you're only showing absence in the tiny area where you've looked.

God could have evolved as a being which we may learn to detect by natural means - like bacteria. Sure, it's easy to define God out of existence but if we want to talk about the possibility of His existence, we have to define Him in a broad way, not a narrow way. Yes, I know you like flinging the word "irrational" around. I don't think there's any rational way to distinguish between a god and an alien.

At one time, we didn't know elephants existed. They were only a product of our imaginings until we found them. No, we're not talking about anything immaterial or ethereal.

That's not a very sensible standard of "knowledge".Doubt is not knowledge. Lack of knowledge is not knowledge.Possibilities lead to knoledge.

Consider bacteria then. There was no evidence that they existed until somebody hypothesized that they existed and figured out where to look for the evidence.

That's what I've been saying; you have to be curious. If you hope there aren't any snakes in your garden, you might succeed in not finding any. As I said in another post, it's easy to define God out of existence - but if you do, you're not honestly producing "knowledge". You're just reinforcing ignorance.

And nobody is saying that it does. But it does preclude knowledge of his non-existence.

There is no standard current thought on whether that position is more or less likely than the alternatives. That alone disqualifies it as "knowledge".

How can you find something that isn't even a concept?

And they didn't "know" that the earth was flat. As I've already pointed out more than once, you're not using the same goalposts for the gods as you're using for the pen. You know that there's no pen "on your desk" and you know that there are no gods "where you have looked". But you haven't even begun to scratch the surface of all the places you'd need to look before you could know that gods don't exist at all.