I Know That God Does Not Exist

You think the world is only populated by your kind of Christian? But yeh, it's yet another dumb religious idea. I just read your book and take it at face value. Actual believers of the book tend to ignore, 'interpret' and 'put in context' the bits that are a bit tricky for them.Mark 10:21 ESVAnd Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”Luke 14:33 ESVSo therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

Well if we're talking about your Christian god, he lives in heaven with his angels and saints which is a real place just above the earth. Every Christian until a few hundred years ago believed that to be true because it's written in their book and their shaman told them.But of course it wasn't true. So now believers have to invent something else which just happens - as always - to be just outside science's knowledge.I doubt you'll find many sane people now saying that heaven is physically real - but there will be plenty of others that do, you have to be raptured to somewhere.So now this god entity is apparently beyond time and space so conveniently undetectable. And yet he is supposed to routinely intervene in human life, speaking directly to individuals in revelations, performing miracles, guiding the development of life on our planet.And yet everywhere we look for evidence of these interactions with our world we find nothing. Miracles are fiction, prayers aren't answered, our planet's development uses unguided natural forces and processes and there's no objective evidence of any personal conversations with any god.After all this time and all this effort, nothing. This god of yours is being pushed further and further away in search of 'places' to hide from us. You've now got a virtual god.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Thanks for the apologetics.The problem you have is that the bible - which is an edited collection of many myths by unknown authors over thousands of years - contradicts itself all over the place even in the heavily redacted form we have today. This requires 'reading in context', 'interpreting' and having its 'truths' revealed to suitably trained shaman. All very convenient and makes it possible to believe what you like - hence the 30,000 different Christian sects each with their own 'truth'.But in the end it is what it is, simple stories for simple people. Catholics teach all sorts of things dependent on their mood.Like almost all religions their main line is that only their beliefs get you into heaven and they tell you that only those that are baptised as Catholics can enter heaven. Where do the rest go then? Traditionally this is hell.They invented two other places - Limbo, for unbaptised babies that are otherwise without sin. (Hilariously they're currently backtracking on this one because in several third world countries with high infant mortality, mothers would rather not sign up for that so they're losing converts to their Muslim competition who don't have that evil idea.)They also invented Purgatory, a kind of punishment waiting room for Heaven. This one is really convenient because in return for cash you could get time off in Purgatory by buying 'indulgences' from your priest. Plenary indulgences were the best - getting you directly into heaven, but of course they cost more. The Catholic empire was built with this cash. It was a great scam and still exists today - you can get indulgences for doing all sorts of things. Oh, you'll find there are millions of people who know who are and who aren't going to hell.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

When it's not the 'same old stuff' it will be a very interesting day. Please let us know when you have anything new that might provide just a morsel of evidence for your god. Ok, but like Hitch used to say, even if it was possible to show that a god exists, still you have all the work in front of you to show that it's any particular religion's god. Style 'knows' god doesn't exist in the way you 'know' that he does exist - it's a belief. Scientifically and philosophically it's not possible to prove that a non-interventionist god does not exist. Rationally though it *can* be deduced not to exist beyond reasonable doubt.I'm in the same boat, I say I know he doesn't exist but what I mean is that Im sure beyond reasonable doubt - rationally there has to be a tiny chance of a non-interventionist god, but equally rationally it's so remote that we know there really isn't. And, I should add, it's irrelevant anyway as the deistic god has no interest in us. No afterlife, no heaven, no hell, so it's not an issue that should concern us beyond the academic. It's a reasonable deduction from the lack of evidence. Personally, I don't think it's possible to know whether god exists or not - the use of the word 'know' in these contexts is incorrect. What people on both sides have is a belief. On the atheist's side that belief is based on evidence - both of natural causation and absence of evidence where it should be found. That is the case for a pure deistic argument. It is impossible to prove that a non-interventionist god doesn't exist. Similarly it can't be proven that it does either.But no religious believer is a deist. They are, by definition, theists and there is ample evidence that those beliefs are bunkum.

Testable and provable Testable and provable. Not testable, not provable In an evidential and/or testable context Sure, we know there's no sharksfin soup on MacDonald's menu.

So's Stile he just missing one step. No worries, Bruce.

I made the distinction between a deist form of god and a theistic one.The deistic god can't be proven not to exist because he doesn't intervene and exists somewhere beyond our means of observing. To all intents and purposes, he's irrelevant to us anyway.The theistic one that all the believers here talk about *does* intervene and therefore could be observed, yet hasn't been, so to my mind can and has been proven not to exist. 'Though it could be argued that we've really only just started to look properly. In the deistic case we cannot know - we can only say that there's no evidence. He's a black swan - we can only actually know in a positive way if he shows up. We can never eliminate that possibility. But we can say with some confidence that he doesn't.The theistic case I believe to be proven but I think it rational to have some tiny element of 'don't know about it'; I've not researched every theistic god, have you?

Santa lives either in Lapland or the North Pole or some such. He delivers presents on a sleigh, has dwarves and reindeer, climbs down chimneys etc etc etc etcAll easily falsifiable. Before you can say anything like that you have to demonstrate that a deistic god is an irrational concept. I don't think that's necessarily true. After that you have to establish whether it matters whether it IS an irrational concept. Just because H. sapiens rely on a rational brain to know things with confidence doesn't mean that the things they set out to know need follow that rule.The rest of your post is about the meaning of the word know I'm taking the meaning of know to mean knowledge of something - in a conclusive sense. I don't think black swans pass that test - unless we've looked everywhere we can't know for sure.Part of the problem is that we don't even know where everywhere is, but our current knowledge of what is beyond our planet is enough to tell us that we haven't even begun to start. Let alone every when.

Well you can increase the difficulty of finding evidence by making him invisible, but his presence is made obvious by his presents :-) (pleased with that :-) Sure - so long as you define you Santa as being not interventionist out of time and space and undetectable by any objective method he becomes exactly the same as an deistic god. Unkowable. Yes, you've simply defined him that way. But of course the 'real' Santa does intervene and does leave objective evidence that can be tested. Those that say that the possibility of a deistic god is a rational concept would say that the existence of something (and rather a lot of it) rather than nothing and that we so far have no rational explanation for it leaves open the possibility of a Godly cause. That's not correct is it?
We can know all sorts of things using our rational methods. It certainly seems to work very well with what (little) we know so far. But the question is whether that works for *all* things everywhere and everywhen. I think that's an unknowable question and a rational person would leave it an open question. I don't think it's reasonable to conflate knowing that there's a chair in the room or not with knowing whether a non-interventalist god deistic god exists outside of time and space. They're different problems. You can form conclusions all you like, mostly they'll work. But if you're forming a conclusion that there is no possibility of a deistic god, I think you're actually pushing beyond knowledge into speculation and belief. And that's the predominant - but not universal - atheistic position. Hence their bus slogan Atheist Bus Campaign » Humanists UK

Well once again you've assumed your premise - that it's irrational to leave any room for doubt. But I think it's irrational not to, give the scope of what we don't yet know, the paucity of our instruments, the scale of the search area and the determination of the deity to not be found. The argument is only about this meaning of 'know' and as soon as you get to that point you're basically arguing about semantics which I always find a waste of my life. You just get down to how we can know anything.The best I can do for you is say that the rational hypothesis given the lack of evidence is that a deistic god doesn't exist. The only way to falsify that is to find it. You can't prove he doesn't exist and without that, you're left messing around with the meaning of words.

Some of it's semantics and some of it is poor logic. No. You can't mix up deistic gods and theistic ones. It's the intervention that turns the theistic god into Santa. He becomes observable.A non interventionist god outside time and space can't be observed - and incidentally, makes himself irrelevant.I don't accept that it is irrational to leave a tiny space for that possibility. I think the opposite; it's irrational not too.As for our fishbowl - in the scheme of things I doubt we know much more than our stone age friends about the outside of it yet.I'm not even going to discuss keys and bananas! 'fraid not. Apart from conflating deism and theism, you're missing the fact that I'm an atheist - I *know* that gods of any kind don't exist. All I'm saying is that word ”know’ is incorrect usage. Like most atheists I feel that rationally there has to be a small element of doubt, that last 0.000001% is more like a belief. It's certainly not knowledge.Percy is a deist may be he can help you understand that position.

I really think you need to re-think that. Firstly, we have only very recently been able to observe anything small or far away on our own planet. Is a microbe or a black hole an irrational concept? We can't observe quantum mechanics but see its effect - like the invisible Santa - and only mathematical models hypothesise about many aspects of our universe.Is it irrational to build mathematical models? I've made it twice now - you just don't like it. That's fine, I don't like yours :-) Er no, I don't understand that. I've heard that said and argued many times and think it philosophical bollox. I'm a pragmatist we know things based on our own definitions and our own abilities. That's good enough for me. Again, there's a category difference between knowing whether there's a chair in the room or whether there's something happening far beyond or current abilities to understand. Thinking you can apply your current reasoning to everything is a kind of belief. Well being a deist suggests that Percy has a different view to yours. One of you is wrong - how does that get resolved?

The problem he has is that if he thinks that we can't actually know anything absolutely then he can't say he's an atheist, because that's a binary position. There's no room for any doubt.Personally I think it's a 'beyond reasonable doubt position. The step to absolute certainty becomes a belief - although a reasonable one.

We do now. Was it irrational to say that such things don't and can't exist before we had the capacity to observe them? You misunderstand. We have indirect evidence only for QM and invisible Santa. Santa himself is hidden from us. Children just calls him Santa because they've been told that's who it is. I think it's always rational to build models because they're all attempts to understand our universe. But I suspect that neither you nor I could tell whether there's actual 'real' evidence for the big physics stuff that people are doing these days. Incomprehensible and unprovable in many/most cases. Sorry stile this is just undergraduate bollox, the Monty Python 'what do we mean by mean' nonsense.As for the word games about 'know'. I'm using it in the normal everyday, practical way. That's good enough.

But I don't have a position on chimeras! From the knowledge I have about biology I agree that science says they don't so there's good reason to accept that. Is that 'know? Probably. Ask me about dark matter and I don't know and will never know, I will have take whatever science tells me on trust.The questions 'does god exist?' and 'is there life on other planets?', are simply not the same as 'is that a chair you're sat on?' or even 'do chimeras exist' - I know things with different degrees of certainty. It's not binary no matter how much you want to make it so.Knowledge is owned by society as a whole, works by consensus and is not homogeneously right or wrong. Beliefs, opinions positions etc are personal, subjective. What you call 'know' when you're talking about things we know nothing of, is actually an opinion regardless how reasonable.