I Know That God Does Not Exist

Right, so you're as sure that god doesn't exist as you are that you're sat on a chair? Does that make sense to you? Still gobbledegook.Your former position was that if an idea was irrational it could be ruled out prima facia. In other words it's a hurdle test you formed like this#1. Is the idea rational?If the idea can't pass that, then it can't be correct. I - and others - have called bullshit on that for various reasons the main one being that your test is whether an idea is rational is whether it can be tested or has firm evidence to support it. Ie a scientific test.I'm telling you that because there are many rational, logical and respectable philosophical arguments for the premise 'god exists' you can't rule it out under your own rules. Whether you disagree with those arguments or even if they turn out to be wrong, they are still rational. You need to drop that hurdle, it's not rational.

If ever there was a distinction without a difference, that's it.You've discarded an idea - 'god exists' - because you say it's not rational, yet there are many rational arguments for it. You have made yourself your own arbiter of what is rational. That's not rational. Really? You've been here for years and don't know the basic philosophical arguments? Ontological, teleological, cosmological whatever. It doesn't matter that you personally don't like them or even if they're wrong, they *are* rational. So they pass your test.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It's the word 'irrational' that's causing the problem, if you replaced it with 'wrong' the problem would go away. It's a red herring.

Now, now, quite the patronising tone already!I'm not at all confused, I'm simply pointing out that you're wrong. It's perfectly possible to have rational idea that turns out to be wrong. It doesn't then become irrational. Geocentricity was a wrong but rational idea.Whether you like it or not there are perfectly rational - but wrong imho - arguments for the existence of god. So your hurdle test fails.And no, I'm not going to argue with you about ontological proofs of god or any other, because we both believe them to be wrong. But they are rational.

So now the hurdle test has been modified, it's no longer just 'rational' that it has to be, it now has to be - presumably - externally rational - whatever that is.It seems that 'externally rational' simply resolves to scientific knowledge - stuff that is tested by the scientific method. Which you have previously denied. You have to deny this because science can't prove things absolutely don't exist or even that things it thinks it knows about are absolutely right. There's always an element of uncertainty. Around these parts it's called tentative.

Er yes. But, for example, the ontological argument for the existence of god is exactly applicable to whether god exists or not. And it's rational.It seems that internal consistency means something other than being rationally consistent to itself and its argument, and nor is externally consistent anything to do with, well what exactly? so I admit to be struggling here.

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That's what I've meant from the very beginning of this thread when I've said the argument needs to be rational.

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I don't know many people that would call people like Descartes irrational. Wrong maybe, but irrational no.Is Rene Descartes' ontological argument irrational?

It became a cultural meme. Religion is taught not revealed.No one on earth ever, independently, without being told about it beforehand, felt the need to pray to Jesus.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

That's the deistic god concept and it can't be disproven.But we can't know that it's absolutely wrong either. We just say that it's so unlikely that for all normal purposes it's at best irrelevant and almost certainly an error.What I find interesting is that the two self-proclaimed deists here - Percy and RAZD don't chip in here.

Things were clear before. You're still wrong for the same reasons because you're still saying the same things ;-)Essentially you want to exclude any argument from consideration except those that can be physically tested. You waffle a bit about this testing, but it resolves to using some form of scientific methodology. This renders everything else you say about being rational redundant. Just apply the normal tests that modern science uses to test reality.But if you do that you hit the problem that science can't test whether a non-interventionist god exists or not.At this point you say that you therefore know that he doesn't and I say that you can't know but a rational person would form the provisional conclusion that he doesn't exist and if he does it doesn't matter.

Well why not? It's what we do, try to find stuff out. But I think we're going about looking for this guy the right way by default anyway. Just by trying to understand what's in front of us. By doing that we've pushed him further and further away. Almost to the point where it's rational to say he ain't there. Almost.

Um, who said anything about avoiding using our best methods?The point is that we don't know and can't know whether the tools we currently have are up to the job of finding what we're looking for.No microscope, no microbes.

And again, who's saying we should avoid using our best methods?

Plainly we can, we've been saying all sorts of stuff about it for thousands of years. Certainly we've made zilch progress so far. Can we definitively say we never will? Not to my mind.Does this mean that I think it a real possibility - no it's obvious garbage. But that's not real knowledge, just my opinion.

Only you are saying that. You've made the only argument a scientific test which is fine by me. We've done this. Several times. Science knows what it knows so far. It has a habit of finding out more. So to say that something that science knows nothing about doesn't exists is non-scientific.Obviously the fact that science is pushing back belief and is not finding a god anywhere, means that we can conclude, tentatively, that there is none. Pending further evidence. But absolutely *know* it for sure? Nonsense.

We're just studying the universe as it appears to us with whatever tools we can develop. We'll see what occurs. Well I say nothing. But that's not something anyone can be totally sure about.