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Author | Topic: I Know That God Does Not Exist | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Stile writes:
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.
There is no rational indication that a McDonald's menu exists on another planet.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Panda writes:
Exactly.
Which puts you in the position of saying that you do not know anything about what is (or is not) on the McD's menu. Panda writes:
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.
It also puts you in the position of not being able to say that you know anything.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Stile writes:
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." "I know that God does not exist.""I know that sharkfin soup does not exist on McDonald's menu on Earth." I really do not see a difference in the statements. 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.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Panda writes:
True. When you tell me how delicious my cake is, that could all be in my own imagination too.
You (according to your logic) do not know anything - because you can imagine unfounded reasons for your knowledge to be wrong.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Straggler writes:
So do I. And I also have a high level of confidence that god isn't going to turn up anytime soon. 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.
Straggler writes:
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.
Are these snakes also hiding their poo and eliminating all other forensic evidence of their presence in Stile's garden? Straggler writes:
My knowledge of that planet is based on exactly the same foundation as your knowledge of God - the absence of contradictory evidence.
Unless you are claiming to have been to this certain planet orbiting this certain star....
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Straggler writes:
I haven't said anything about absolute certainty. I'm talking about confirmation. Which is why absolute certainty is a stupid measure of knowledge. 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.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Stile writes:
God could have evolved as a being which we may learn to detect by natural means - like bacteria.
A rational indication that sharkfin soup might exist on another planet has nothing to do with any rational indication that God might exist on another planet. Unless you are trying to make a claim that God evolved as a natural being on Earth? Stile writes:
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.
But it remains true that we have looked for a rational God (as defined in Message 63) in all proposed rational areas. Stile writes:
Yes, I know you like flinging the word "irrational" around.
A "God" that has nothing to do with humans, or the creation of life, or morality seems irrational to me. Stile writes:
I don't think there's any rational way to distinguish between a god and an alien.
It is mangling the word "God" in such a way that the being shoud just be called an "alien" instead. Isn't that what an alien is? A being that's not-from-Earth that has nothing to do with humans or the creation of life or morality?
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Straggler writes:
At one time, we didn't know elephants existed. They were only a product of our imaginings until we found them.
We know elephants do exist. So the chances of an elephant parade through your front room would seem considerably higher than the product of your imaginings actually existing. Straggler writes:
No, we're not talking about anything immaterial or ethereal.
Then we are back to Immaterial Unicorns and ethereal squirrels and suchlike. Because we haven't scoured the universe for these either.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Straggler writes:
That's not a very sensible standard of "knowledge". Now it might be that the next time we investigate somebody's concept of god that we actually find a god at the end of the rainbow (or wherever). This is some sort of philosophical possibility. But I doubt it will happen. In fact I know it won't by any sensible standard of "knowledge". Doubt is not knowledge. Lack of knowledge is not knowledge. Possibilities lead to knoledge.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Tangle writes:
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.
rngo writes:
Those that had evidence of elephants knew they existed. Those that had no evidence didn't imagine them. At one time, we didn't know elephants existed. They were only a product of our imaginings until we found them.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Tangle writes:
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.
It's more likely it was like most other things we know - like the elephant - they just found it because they were curious. Tangle writes:
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.
The other type of god - the one that is supposed to have created all this stuff we see around us but takes no interest in us and is holed up outside time and space, there is no evidence for either, but it's fair to say that not finding evidence for that kind of god is to be expected. So there not being any evidence describes nothing one way or the other.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Tangle writes:
And nobody is saying that it does. But it does preclude knowledge of his non-existence.
Just because it's not possible to totally exclude the existence of a god does not magically make one exist.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Rahvin writes:
... "knowledge implies a tentative position that is currently thought to be the position vastly more likely to be accurate than alternatives."Rahvin writes:
There is no standard current thought on whether that position is more or less likely than the alternatives. That alone disqualifies it as "knowledge".
... and I "know" that the things called "gods" do not exist.
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Straggler writes:
How can you find something that isn't even a concept?
Were they even a concept before anyone had found them?
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ringo Member (Idle past 438 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Rahvin writes:
And they didn't "know" that the earth was flat.
For centuries the "standard current thought" was that the Earth was flat, even after an educated few had become aware of the evidence for a roughly spherical planet. Rahvin writes:
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.
... but if I can say that I "know" whether a pen is on my desk, I can with the same level of confidence assert that I "know" there are no "gods" by any definition of the term you or I would recognize.
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