Wednesday, 12 May 2010
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Proving a negative
I got this comment yesterday from starlight_22 [emphasis mine]....I hear those bolded parts time and time again - so frequently, in fact, that I can't believe I haven't written up a suitable response to copy/paste from as I have with so many other arguments. I guess there's no time like the present.But the evidence doesn't disprove a God either. Evidence just proves your disagreement with a doctrine or a text that suggests how, for example, the universe was created. Also, science doesn't address why these things occur. Science address how something like the universe was formed but never explains why it was formed. Does this make science wrong? Not at all but it also doesn't explain why a God could not exist and why the god isn't the driving force for these actions to be put in motion. Then again there could be nothing behind why these things happen but science does not seek to answer these questions. It takes just as much faith to believe in in a God or to believe there is no higher power.
JT, I'm curious to your take on the concept above and as to why you are so sure science discredits an existence of God when at best I can only logically reach (so far) that you cannot prove it either way and must just make a leap of faith. Hopefully that makes sense, I'm not the best at explaining my thoughts as clear as I would like in writing. Always so much better at the science and math side of things.
It should be noted that starlight_22 was very cordial, and did not grow an enormous head and yell that I prove she doesn't have a baseball. I just thought the image was a good illustration of the admonition that I prove a negative."The evidence doesn't disprove god"What would that evidence look like? I mean, if something doesn't exist, what more evidence could we have than the lack of any evidence? The evidence also doesn't actively disprove the existence of smurfs. Does it really take more 'faith' to believe smurfs don't exist? After all, what more evidence do you have that smurfs don't exist than you do that god doesn't exist?
Furthermore, what does this scenario tell us about god? If a god exists who elected to use only natural means to create a universe and chose to mask any evidence of his existence, it can only be concluded that such a god does not want us to believe. Additionally, that he would use a means to produce humans/biological order like evolution, which requires millions of years of a sick rewards system in which animals must often kill each other to survive, and in which the weak often die painfully, suggests a god indifferent to suffering (since a malicious god would start us in hell and a benevolent god would conceive a more compassionate system). An indifferent god is hard (I'd say impossible) to discern from a pitiless universe that functions through unfeeling forces, and nothing more. There are plenty more problems like this, and they all point to a god that virtually no human being believes in, and for which a godless universe is a better explanation.
But apart from simply pointing out that no evidence whatsoever exists to suggest a god was at work anywhere, we have plenty of evidence to support the conclusion that the universe is without god.Evidence supports a godless universe
For one, the universe produces order all by itself via mindless forces acting on inanimate objects. So you cannot simply point to an instance of order and say, "There is complexity, hence it must have been designed!" What's more, thus far whenever humankind has explained a phenomenon, it has been shown to be the result of natural forces with no appeal to god being necessary. All of them. Now imagine you've watched two horses race hundreds of thousands of times, and every time the same horse wins. They're getting ready to run another race and you have to bet your life savings on one of them. Which horse do you pick? Do you need "just as much faith" to pick that horse? Yes, we have other unknowns out there, but to say that it takes just as much faith for me to assume that we will continue to find natural explanations rather than supernatural explanations is simply wrong.
Second, life is very difficult to get started via natural means (go here and read the section "abiogenesis"). A godless universe therefore predicts that we would find ourselves in a very large, very old universe, so that things that have a very low probability of occurring would become probable. That is exactly where we find ourselves.
Third, the flaws in design don't make any sense if a god created anything, since such a god would necessarily be more crafty than humans. If that were the case, it's incredibly odd that we could pick up mistakes that such a god would miss. These are things like the existence of the appendix, babies' heads being bigger than the birth canal, and the clunky nature of DNA.
Fourth, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that our universe had a beginning, and the existence of a god before there was any time or place to think is illogical. Moreover, it is up to the theist to explain how a bodiless mind could both exist and accomplish anything. So far as we know, minds only exist as machinery powered by tissues constructed of cells which, themselves, are made up of elements that took time to create within stars via r and s processes, which means that a mind could not exist before stars. Also, if thought does not require a functional brain, why do we have them?
Fifth, as I said in the first part of this response, the existence of suffering is incompatible with an all-powerful being. An evil god would have us suffer more, and a benevolent god would not allow suffering to continue. That life is based on a system that requires millions of years of agony spread over millions of species of animals is inexplicable via the god hypothesis.
Sixth, if god existed there would not be so much confusion among the world as to which God existed or what he wants from us. Often people say they have experienced god and that's how they know one exists. But god would not be giving everyone contradictory messages and experiences of the divine, nor would a god allow this confusion, since compassion would compel him to give us the best chance of being saved, not the worst.
Seventh, the universe is indescribably vast. It is so large than the human brain cannot comprehend it without invoking logarithmic functions. To give you some perspective, a particle of light will travel around the entire Earth seven and a half times in one second. It would take that same particle 5.3 hours to reach Pluto, and four years to reach the closest star, and there are roughly 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and there are trillions of galaxies. That same particle would take 93 billion years to go from one end of this universe to the other. As I pointed out earlier, such a universe is precisely what we would expect to find if life arose from natural causation. It makes absolutely no sense that such a universe was created for something so mind-numbingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things as humans.
There are many, many more, but you get the picture. Any evidence to support a godless universe is evidence against god's existence. I will go further to assert that no evidence whatsoever exists to support the conclusion that god exists. This makes a godless universe (far) more likely, and makes it difficult to contrive a more inaccurate statement than, "It takes just as much faith to believe in a God or to believe there is no higher power."Rebuttal to other argumentsIn her comment, starlight says...Science address how something like the universe was formed but never explains why it was formed.Who says there has to be a why? The cosmos appears to be chugging along just fine with its mindless processes and inanimate objects. I address this question more in-depth here.
She also says...[Science] doesn't explain why a God could not exist and why the god isn't the driving force for these actions to be put in motion.It also doesn't explain why leprechauns couldn't exist. That's because no evidence exists to support them so it would be a waste of time. In philosophy, you cannot prove a negative because there will always be gaps in our knowledge, so we must always allow the distant possibility that even unlikely things like leprechauns and gods will turn up. What we can say with as much certainty as humanly possible is that any person claiming to possess evidence that a god exists has not submitted it scientific scrutiny or, if they have, it has been shredded like any other unsupported idea. Moreover, if you believe in god just because we haven't combed our universe to the very edge to make sure there's no place god might be hiding, thus 'disproving' his existence, then it's curious why you don't believe in smurfs, unicorns, leprechauns, and seventeen-legged insects with candy apple horns, since we can't/haven't disproven those things either.
Lastly, science is not a matter of faith, which I'm sure you're aware of. It is supported by evidence and obviously works. When science does not know something, it freely admits it. This is how intellectual honesty works - no faith involved, only what we can rightly claim to know. However, to believe in something for which there is no evidence, that requires faith, and that's not a good thing even though many religious people will throw that word out as though it absolves any shortcoming in reasoning. In fact, it's just another shortcoming. Similarly, it is not a matter of faith for me to say that this universe appears to be godless or that those saying otherwise do so for crummy reasons, if they even advance reasons.
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Comments (57)
One of my biggest complaints in argumentation of any kind is when someone asks me to prove something that cannot be proved either way. For example, mental intensional states -- I got a big debate with QuantumStorm recently on his pulse about suicide. He said "Suicide is the most selfish act a human being can commit." And, because I tend to feel about it the way you do (which is rationally) I told him "Essentially you're saying that mental illness is the most selfish illness a person can have." Eventually we got around to debating whether depression could ever get so bad that it, in his words, "overrides free will entirely." He said "Prove it! Prove that depression overrides free will entirely" and I told him, "You can't, it's intensional, you'd have to experience it." Which shut him up, but proved nothing.
I wrote my thesis on Kantian morality and feminist ideologies; but a close second was in fact the idea that nothing can be "proved" only "shewn" -- that we can give evidence, but never know for certain. I admit it's a bit Hegelian I know but I stick by it. Just ... don't ask me to prove it!
Good work. I'm not sure number 5 is a good bit of evidence against God but the rest is pretty great.
I think this is the question my parents give me the hardest time on. Besides my mom none of them are really against my Atheism but they do like to ask "How can you prove he doesn't exist?" after telling me they "just know" he's there. I don't really know what to say to them. I can't really give them much more then "It's not exactly easy for me to prove something doesn't exist."Everything you use as a logical counter is, as always, eaxacting and wonderful. However, I have seen Smurfs on TV and in coloring books. Ergo, Smurfs exist, and the prove, as with Christianity, is in the books that illustrate Smurfs.
I wanted to go out and take a picture of a leprechaun just for shits and put it on my blog and say, "look everyone, a leprechaun! god must also exist! hurrah!"
Another well-written post. I particularly enjoyed the fourth point.
As someone who's spent most of his life within the indoctrinations of faith, most of the people in my life are somehow tied to the sort of thinking you have exposed here. I understand when people need an optimistic construct to handle life's realities. For the most part, I'm happy for them to find meaning where they choose. But I think the saving "grace" for most theists is that they really don't *live* consistent with their beliefs.
I'm glad you said it. I was beginning to doubt the existence of Smurfkind. I know those three apple high motherfuckers are real....strolling the forests of Belgium..and nobody can tell me different.
Here's what strikes me. Science changes based on new findings...ALL THE TIME. Hell, if it were up to religion, electricity might not have been discovered and this very intrynets that we read all of this on would not exist either. Science texts change yet the Bible stays the same. Can we base anything in the modern era on a book that is a couple thousand years old? Seriously. Yet, it's okay for those same people to dismiss science. Fuck, forget it. We know from the Bush years that the more you push back with facts, the more the idiots will dig in and believe even harder than they did before.
You know what the irony is....if Jesus came back to prove the Bible is 100% correct (which it cannot possibly be due to contradictions) the same people who believe in him would not believe it's him. He would be dismissed as a nutter and probably beaten up the way the Romans did. He would tell us all to end wars and share our wealth and the most "sanctimonious" would call him a commie or a hippie.
If Papa Smurf came back...same thing.
"So far as we know, minds only exist as machinery powered by tissues
constructed of cells which, themselves, are made up of elements that
took time to create within stars via r and s processes, which means that
a mind could not exist before stars."
can you find the fault with the above comment? ("So far as we know") This isn't a valid argument
6th... this argument doesn't eliminate the possibility of an asshole god.
The burden of proof doesn't fall on the religious though, it falls on those using science. The religious folk are not required to provide proof for a belief, but for someone trying to provide a counter argument against a belief, it is your job to provide a logical proof that holds up against centuries of mythology. You can't convince people that what they believe is wrong unless the evidence you provide is so overwhelming that the cartoon baseball analogy is actually applicable. I am not much of a writer, nor am I much of debater, but I do think that if your goal is to bring people to reason, you must have something concrete to disprove the existence of deities. Your argument is just the polar opposite of the ones theists use as a proof there is a god, so my question, and please don't get me wrong I do agree with you, how do we disprove the disprovable?
** OFF TOPIC **
Do you realize how many "so-called" atheists believe in Ghosts? I was on a forum a couple days ago where a bunch of self - professed atheists were arguing about the existence of ghosts....
@Jeremiah S. - "The burden of proof doesn't fall on the religious though, it falls on those using science. The religious folk are not required to provide proof for a belief, but for someone trying to provide a counter argument against a belief, it is your job to provide a logical proof that holds up against centuries of mythology. "
That is 100% false.If I tell you there's a leprechaun under my desk it is not your job to prove me wrong. It's not as though you either have to believe it or have evidence against it. it's totally reasonable for you to say "I will not believe there is a leprechaun under your desk until you provide some evidence."
If I say the universe was created by a three legged pink aardvark you don't have to either believe me or have evidence against that claim. there is the third option of simply refusing to take it as truth until you see evidence of it.
The fact that lots of people believe it doesn't make it true. Lots of people believed the world was flat.
"You can't convince people that what they believe is wrong unless the evidence you provide is so overwhelming that the cartoon baseball analogy is actually applicable"
Why is pointing out that you have absolutely no reason to believe what you believe not convincing? that's how I became atheist.
"how do we disprove the disprovable? "
I'm assuming you meant something different here than what you wrote, because obviously if something is disprovable it can be disproven.If you meant, 'how can you prove a negative?' the short answer is that you can't, but that doesn't matter b/c it's not as though you have to disprove something in order to not believe it, like with the leprechaun example. the long answer is that sometimes you can prove a negative if the thing in question is logically impossible. like you can prove there are no round squares because it is logically impossible for such a thing to exist. if a particular definition of god is logically possible, then you can't prove with 100% certainty that it does not exist, but that doesn't mean it's something you should believe. I can't prove with 100% certainty that we aren't in the Matrix right now, but that doesn't mean I should go around preaching that we are.
The idea of atheism isn't to disprove the existence of god, it's just doubt. You might be confusing agnostic atheism and gnostic atheism (what most atheists are). agnostic atheists don't think that they know there's not a god with 100% certainty. agnostic atheism is simply doubting the existence of god and demanding evidence.
Being atheist doesn't mean you're automatically intelligent or reject everything supernatural, it just means you don't believe in god. i would argue just as vehemently that there is no good reason to believe in ghosts to someone who believes in ghosts regardless of their belief in god. the fact that some atheists believe things for which there is no evidence does not mean that all atheists do or that atheism is an untenable position.
"If a god exists who elected to use only natural means to create a universe and chose to mask any evidence of his existence, it can only be concluded that such a god does not want us to believe. Additionally, that he would use a means to produce humans/biological orderlike evolution, which requires millions of years of a sick rewards system in which animals must often kill each other to survive, and in which the weak often die painfully, suggests a god indifferent to suffering (since a malicious god would start us in hell and a benevolent god would conceive a more compassionate system). An indifferent god is hard (I'd say impossible) to discern from a pitiless universe that functions through unfeeling forces, and nothing more. There are plenty more problems like this, and they all point to a god that virtually no human being believes in, and for which a godless universe is a better explanation."
This paragraph is so fraught with misunderstandings, I don't have time to respond to them all right now. So I'll just pick one point (emboldened above). You never responded to my question from many posts ago of how to explain the human capacity for mercy (not merely compassion which you don't dispute the existence of, but rather compassion in the face of injury) in a "pitiless universe that functions through unfeeling forces, and nothing more." There is absolutely no natural basis for mercy. I propose that mercy is a supernatural act. And if there is a supernature, then there is, by definition, something beyond the frame of reference made up by this universe.
Wait... There are no smurfs?!
For one thing the universe produces order all by itself.
Such a statement is at best an expression of religious faith or at worst an expression of totally irrational stupidity. To explain the faith and/or stupidity you linked to another one of your lies:
This argument usually claims that life on Earth or some other aspect of nature is too well designed for evolution or natural processes to explain it Using yourself to prove yourself is not acceptible any reputable academic circles. But we'll leave that one alone.
The design argument says simply that since everything in the universe has purpose it must, necessarily have design. You bringing up the attribute of omplexity is just one of your hallucinated irrelvancies whose purpose is to side track the discussion.
One may arrive at things being purposeful by taking advantage of the wonders of science. Science is continually finding out how things are designed and how they work.
The problem for atheists is that by science proving that things have purpose and design there is also implied the existence of a designer.
For design cannot happen without a designer. That God exists is logical and reasonable. Science implies as much.
@MaxRebo - Can you link me to where you made that comment? It seems like I would have immediately linked you to, or where I explained, the development of empathy, since mercy is a byproduct of empathy-driven compassion. If I didn't, go here and read the section "Do animals have a moral impulse". The biological mechanism that produces mercy would be empathy, and that's very well-understood.
If I did that and you tried to say that mercy is unrelated to empathy, then I probably thought it wasn't worth pursuing and didn't respond further on account of it.
JT
@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - Show me your boobs.
JT
@Caldur06 - @Zerowing21 - You little runts make book doing silly hit pieces on Christians. An Amazon comes and takes you down and all you can slobber is "show me your boobs."
Pathetic.
@Jeremiah S. - "The burden of proof doesn't fall on the
religious though, it falls on those using science."
Rationality requires that we believe a proposition only when there is sufficient evidence or only when we have sufficient past experience with similar occurrences to predict a result. As Jenessa states, we do not need to disprove god, as there exists no good reason to assume in favor of one.
A profound assumption requires rather profound evidence- and god by its own nature requires no negative proof because probabilistically, a being of infinite complexity, is infinitely unlikely.
@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - Amazon, eh? They're bound to be huge then! I can't wait!
I generally start this one with the difference between soft/agonstic atheistm and hard/gnostic atheism, since that is seldom even heard of outside the religious community. After that, I tend to go with many of the excellent points you provided.
@Jeremiah S. - As has been said above, this is incorrect. The burden of proof falls upon the person making the positive claim. The existance of god, invisible unicorns, or gravity is are all positive claims.
With regards to your question regards ghosts, I do not speak for all atheists, but I have yet to meet one who believes in them. I have seen many mull over the evidence (or what is presented as evidence), and in many cases other natural phenomena account for the sitings.
@jonny_quest - According to common folklore, the amazons actually removed one so it would not interfere with archery. I don't know if there is any validity to this, but it may have an impact on the size.
@Dargon - Thanks for the update. I need to reconsider my desire to see said boobs.
JT, I think there was an misunderstanding in some of what I said. At no point did I mean to imply it takes faith to believe science. I like science and its explanations and I absolutly hate radical groups that try to claim things that obviously go in the face of it (like dinos and humans roaming together).
As a side note, for your 7th point, to keep it consistent with the rest of the example, it takes about 8 minutes for a photon to leave the sun and reach Earth. Also like to point out, last I was taught in astronomy (been out of the field now for about 2 years), we have no idea how large the universe actually is as we do not know where the boundary is. We can only see a given distance. It sounds like you've read Hawking and such before (I haven't), and I'm not sure what claims are in there but I just wanted to clarify that point.
"I will go further to assert that no evidence whatsoever exists to support the conclusion that god exists."
That is the point I was trying to make, not that god exists or does not, but that science does not make this claim either way. Science just explains the natural world we are in. The rest of your arguements, while referencing scientific facts, is not you following science but reasoning out why you do not believe. I was trying to link back through to why you think science and faith cannot coexist but I don't have time right now. So maybe today or tomorrow I'll have some follow up questions to that post.
@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - BOOBS!!
@Jeremiah S. - EPIC FAIL. The end.
@MaxRebo - A) mercy is evolutionarily advantageous. Society allows mankind to flourish, and in order for society to function we need to trust that, for the most part, living with our neighbors is better than living as far from them as possible. this means being able to be relatively certain that they won't try to kill you or take your stuff. The best way to ensure this is if everyone feels empathy for one another. If you can understand what it feels like to put yourself in their shoes you probably won't do things to them you don't want done to yourself (especially when you add guilt to the mix), and you probably will do things for them that you hope they would do for you. When you have people who can empathize and pity one another, mercy is a natural consequence.
B) Even if there were no possible way to naturally explain it it would not necessitate a god, and certainly wouldn't necessitate one specific god, only something supernatural.
also semi-relevant tangent, many higher animals display what we would call empathy.
@Zerowing21 - just noticed your comment and realized I pretty much said the exact same thing you did lol. oops