this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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I don't have to proof something doesn't exist, someone that wants to be taken seriously has to proof why they would believe something does positively exist.
"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
"Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony (2010) argued that despite the use of Hitchens's razor to reject religious belief and to support atheism, applying the razor to atheism itself would seem to imply that atheism is epistemically unjustified. According to Antony, the New Atheists (to whom Hitchens also belonged) invoke a number of special arguments purporting to show that atheism can in fact be asserted without evidence."
If only you could read, maybe you'd be more tolerant, but I doubt it, sigh.
The sheer arrogance to post a philosophical minority opinion paired with an insult and then end it with a sigh.
And while I am not particularly familiar with Mr. Antony's work I can tell you that he either didn't understand or purposefully misused Hitchen's Razor insofar as you indeed can not apply it to Atheism the same way you can apply it to christianity.
The reason for that being that there is no particular thing at all you have to believe to be an atheist.
Atheism in and of itself doesn't assert anything at all.
So there is nothing that could be dismissed.
Atheism says there is no reason to believe in god.
How does Hitchen's Razor dismiss that? It doesn't.
Not to mention your quote still is no argument towards the positive existence of god.
And if you don't show me how I am supposed to be intolerant, I will take it as the baseless insult that it is and will no longer discuss with you.
Reported.
Well, shutting you up was that easy, who would have guessed.
This is some serious goalpost movement. You just said there was proof.
I did what now?
I said there are millenia worth of disproven lies.
Which there are.
Like that the whole world was flooded and repopulated by one single family, which is disproven by DNA samples.
Or that it is gods will that priest stay unmarried, which is historically agreed that it was a measure to keep wealth inside the church organization.
Or so so many more.
I never said there was prove god doesn't exist.
And like I said, there doesn't need to be as long as there is no documented sign whatsoever that points towards god actually existing.
I see where I misunderstood. To reframe, you're saying that claims made by various religions/churches, which are presented as evidence of God, have been disproven, not that God has been disproven.
Obviously, the fact of whether or not there is a creator cant really be disproven, but I would say that any of the gods conjured up by humans have a pretty substantial amount of evidence going against their existence.
If there is a creator of some kind, it is so far beyond our comprehension that it is pretty much useless to ponder on.
Also, I'm not the person you were going back and forth with. I apologize for jumping in the conversation at a strange point.
You also said: "A nonexistent almighty being". Did you mean no gods exist, or did you mean all the gods people claim to exist so far have been debunked?
More importantly, for the claim "no god exists" specifically, I disagree that no proof is required in general. There needs to be an actual proof as much as there needs to be a proof of the negation, that "a god exists", for either to be worth accepting. If neither can be proved, why commit to believing the truth of either?
Additionally, disproving particular examples doesn't prove the general rule. Having no documented sign pointing to the existence of a god does not confirm the absence of a god anymore than having no documented signs of a gas leak in your home confirms the absence of a gas leak in your home. Perhaps the detector you are using is broken, perhaps the type of gas leaking in your home is not detectable by your detector.
It would also be incredibly hard to design any kind of empirical test to confirm or disconfirm the existence of gods in general (not just the christian flavored ones).
If you are claiming something doesn't exist you should prove it. Why should I take your argument seriously without proof? You see how this goes both ways?
No it doesn't go both ways.
If something exists it should be easy to prove.
There should be some form of sign of it.
On the other hand it is hard to disprove the existence of anything at all.
How do we know there is not some teapot in outer space?
We can't.
But that is no reason to believe there is one.
This is absolutely not true. Things can exist without being accessible to you directly in a manner that makes it easy to prove their existence.
Proving non-existence is not always hard. If we were arguing about the food in your fridge and I were claiming you had food in your fridge when you did not you could easily prove me wrong by just showing me the contents of your fridge.
More importantly, why does the hardness of doing a thing give you special status to make claims without proof? Seems like you are artificially constructing rules here solely because they benefit your position.
The universe is massive. There are teapots here. Why is it not plausible to believe some other alien race would not also construct some kind of teapot? Also, consider the fact that all teapots here on earth are literally teapots in "outerspace" in some sense.
It doesn't. But, "God doesn't exist" is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim "God exists". The very concept of a higher power didn't even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it's been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
The counter-claim of "God doesn't exist" needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of "God exists" actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the "evidence" if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so... I'm not too worried.
ETA:
The other person you replied to worded this bit poorly. The original analogy is trying to convince people on Earth to believe that there is a teapot(which is too small to see with a telescope) orbiting the Sun independently somewhere in between Earth's and Mars' orbits. It's completely illogical to believe seeing as humans haven't sent anything without scientific value beyond maybe the moon, and there's no evidence aliens have visited our solar system let alone left a teapot in orbit. But since it can't be proven there isn't a teapot orbiting by itself, does that mean you should believe there is? No, of course not.
I'd agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don't agree that counter claims aren't claims themselves. The wording "counter claim" seems to me to indicate that "counter claims" are just claims of a particular type?
"God doesn't exist" is surely a statement right? If I tell you "god doesn't exist" (in response or not to something you've said), this feels like I am claiming the statement "god doesn't exist" is true.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
I don't think we need proof to reject a claim like "god exists". There's no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn't say X too.
This ties into the part you absolutely agreed with. The word "God" as it is defined now would not exist without the original unproven claims that God. Even if you're not responding "God doesn't exist" directly to someone who said "God exists", you are if nothing else still responding to the original millennia old claim that they do exist. For that reason, it is always a counter-claim.
As for what makes counter-claims different from regular claims, it's simply that the burden of proof lies first with the original claim. A counter-claim has no responsibility to prove their claim until such time as the original claim presents evidence supporting itself.
I absolutely agree. That was kinda my point. If the claim ever did get some actually noteworthy evidence, then it would certainly need to be properly proven or disproven... but I don't think that will ever happen.
The problem with that is I at least in theory could have looked up the tax code, remembered it, and then told you it correctly. Sure, I could have lied or remembered wrong, but it was 100% within my capacity to give you the accurate information, and even show you where I got the information from. With a claim about God's existence, that's impossible for either side of the debate as far as we know, and since the original claim was "God exists", that side is, possibly forever, stuck holding the burden of proof.
If I say god doesn't exist to you I feel like I'm making a true or false factual claim to YOU rather than to a bunch of old dead people or some greater historical/cultural context. The history of the word/definition might be relevant for deciding what the word means, but the claim is aimed at YOU. The actual truth status of the claim (even if we call it a counter-claim) that I might be making is either true or false (assuming we subscribe to bivalence like that) regardless of the history or culture that lead us to the discussion.
It seems like a silly double standard for only one side to have a burden to prove their claim, but the other gets to claim the negation is true with no burden of proof.
For example, if you say "2+2 is 4" and my response is "NO IT IS NOT. IT IS 3! I REFUSE TO PROVE IT THOUGH", not only will I be wrong in a classical arithmetic sense but I have presented no argument for why you ought to believe my new counter claim to your original claim. It would make no sense to believe me without more info in such a case.
The fact that you can look up tax code is not really a problem for my hypothetical example. It is not particularly hard to come up with hypotheticals where you just can't easily obtain the answer. We could rephrase the context, perhaps we are stranded on a desert island? We could rephrase the question, perhaps it is about what some obscure historical figure had in their pockets on the day they died?
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue for or against the existence of god. My issue is that there should be a burden of proof for the CLAIMS "god exists" and "god does not exist" if somebody is claiming either is true. I don't think there's any kind of burden for believing some random claim without proof, but I think it's silly to commit to the negation of a claim without proof unless you have a reason to believe the negation. You can always just not commit and say you don't know in such a case, rather than believing the claim or its negation.
Why is it silly that the claim originally presented should have to present evidence first? The counter-claim only has zero burden of proof so long as the original claim has failed to give any proof of their own.
You wouldn't have to present an argument yet, at that stage. I'd think you're really dumb for needing something like that proven to you, but the initial burden of proof would still be on me. However, when I quickly and easily provide proof that 2 + 2 does equal 4, THEN the burden of proof falls to you to prove your counter-claim.
That's not what I'm claiming. I'm saying the claim AND counter-claim should provide evidence/proof before either one is accepted. Blindly believing not B because you can't prove B is just as bad in my opinion as believing B itself with no proof.
A lack of evidence or proof for some claim B is not sufficient proof for not B. It doesn't really matter what claim we assign to B here.
For example, you might not have evidence/proof that it will rain today (i.e. B is the statement "it will rain today"), that doesn't give you sufficient evidence/proof to now claim that it will not rain today. You just don't know either way.
I agree with your points. I just want to add that what OP was talking about is that the existence of a deity or higher power is not falsifiable and thus is impossible to logically disprove. I'm sure many, many, many people have tried on both sides.
My favorite proof against any higher power is from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
Edit: changes "logically prove" to "logically disprove" as that's why the concept of a higher power cannot be disproven.
My issue here is with what I perceive as bad argumentation, double standards and general ignorance to the field of study where these sorts of questions are applicable on the part of the person I am replying to.
Edit: I want to be clear that I'm not saying you are doing that. I am referring to the other people I have been replying to.