Put this in you respond. It's basically a strawman argument. [YOU RESPOND]
Offline From: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2008 9:01 AM
Subject: [Defend my God!] Rational Response?
Sam sent a message using the contact form at
http://www.rationalresponders.com/contact.
Hi there,
Somehow I stumbled on to your site while researching a philosophy of
biology paper, and while I found the Christian hate mail you guys get
amusing, from a purely impartial perspective, I’ve got to say that your
site is lacking some rationality itself. I couldn’t find a reasonable
argument on why exactly you guys think it’s rational to say God dose not
exist.
Logically speaking, no evidence that God exist does not mean that God does
not exist, just like the historical example of no evidence that swans are
black dose not mean that no swans are black (before discovering Australia
all swans were assumed white).
Your website doesn’t address this issue in a clear way, which means you
guys 'believe' that God doesn’t exist. To be clear, I’m not a theist,
this is just the argument as it stands, and you guys really need to respond
to this if you want to be taken seriously as a 'rational response squad'.
Cheers
Feel free to put this in the [YOU RESPOND] section; I’d really love to
hear a good response. Just please don’t send me gibberish replies.
________________________________________
FROM ADMIN *HINT*: For most users here this is essentially a strawman "you guys think it’s rational to say God dose not
exist." Someone please explain that considering there is no good reason to believe in a god, the only rational position left is non-belief. I think he already knows, and is just used to the strawman.
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Absense of evidence is evidence of absense. Not immutable evidence, of course; just one piece of evidence (from the standpoint of probability). I'm dubious of your swan assertion (...moreover, claiming that all swans are likely white is different from claiming that an invisible omnibeing created everything with a few waves of it's hands).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
You haven't read much on it then, have you? I have pointed this out countless times. From my own writing:
The argumentum ad ignoratium or the argument from ignorance, is surely the most oft-abused and most poorly understood fallacy in the whole of debate, which is most odd, considering it is extremely simple.
The fallacy is double edged:
X is true because it has not been proved false
X is false because it has not been proved true
Precisely analogous to the positive argument from ignorance from theists would be an atheist saying:
Being that there is no evidence of God, God does not exist
Which commits the negative version of the argument from ignorance.
The misuse of the argument from ignorance is indicated heavily when one argues regarding atheism. Most theists do not understand that atheism is inherently dichotomous, meaning there are two schools of thought. The first is mutually compatible with agnosticism, hence called agnostic or weak atheism. The position:
-There is no evidence for God. This absence of evidence does not mean that God does not exists. It just means we should not believe he does.
This is mutually compatable with agnosticism
This is different from the strong atheist position:
-God does not exist. I believe God does not exist (this is clearly different from stating I don't believe God exists).
Obviously the strong atheist position requires the formulation of some sort of argument against the existence of God as opposed to merely accepting the fact that there is no evidence for God and that theist a priori and a posteriori arguments are not satisfying. And many strong atheists have indeed formulated arguments against God.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Good evening, I hope you are well.
Your analogy does not hold well. Positing a black version of an existing instance of bird does not equate with positing a big supernatural version of supernatural stuff. Serious, the No Black Swan Hypothesis was falsifiable and was, chuckle. There is no such test for God that has proven successful in modifying doctrine or other aspects of Theology.
Serious. One can note, for example, that a test for an OmniBenevolent, OmniPresent, and OmniPowerful being would be to see if there is evil in the Omni's creation.
For a logician (or a rational dog) the conclusion is inevitable.
For a Believer, the conclusion is impossible.
And BTW, this newbie will rephrase what has undoubtably been put better before:
No God requires No Evidence. No Evidence is what we got.
No God is expected to provide views of reality. No views from any God is what we got.
Noting that I suspect support for FSM and IPU's. ...
I.e. Rationality is only necessary to laugh.
tq
No fooling on that countless. If I had to guess, between all high level mods and core rrs people (about 10 people) it's been addressed somewhere between 500 and 1500 times. It's probably been addressed in 20-50% of every single thread in which there is a theist/atheist debate on the site.
Considering he was researching for a paper, and his research skills are obviously not that good, seeing as how he's willing to make an assertion without proper evidence, I wonder if he passed. If it was a Christian teacher/class and he exhibits poor research qualities, he likely got an A. I know he said he's not a theist, but since he seems to be a sheep for a pastors viewpoint I couldn't help think he's like the many other liars who have come on as theists and say they aren't theists. As if shitty arguments become good when you are no longer a theist.
Thanks for the posts on the matter.
My research lasted 2 minutes, I did one search using the google search and picked the first two threads involving the issue...
The first one I pulled is from the YouRespond section...
link
Quote:One: I don't say there is no god.
Two: In order for your beliefs that all other gods are false to be facts, you would have to know everything.
______________
A very prominent page on our site came up: AM I AGNOSTIC OR ATHEIST stated on page...
ALL RRS CORE MEMBERS ARE BOTH AGNOSTIC AND ATHEIST.
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I'm not. I'm a strong atheist, as you can see from this thread: Does incoherence/meaningless lead to strong atheism, or non-cognitivism?
EDIT: Oh wait. Core members. Right.
EDIT EDIT:
I think Hamby is too, judging from the same thread.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
I am having an existential crisis with regard to my strong/weak status.
Actually, not really, but I am having a hard time deciding what to call myself, because I'm really both. I assert with certainty that the Christian god does not exist. I know (in the ontological sense of the word) that it cannot exist. Therefore, it does not exist.
Similarly, any god whose definition includes incoherency or contradiction cannot exist as defined. I am a strong atheist towards them all.
Since I cannot guarantee with deductive certainty that a coherent definition of an entity qualifiable as a god (in any possible sense) will not be produced in the future, I cannot claim strong atheism towards any and all gods. I suppose it's remotely possible that one day, on the planet Blargg, we'll find toga-wearing athletic looking human(ish) men who throw thunderbolts around and call themselves gods.
Or... was that Star Trek...
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Any person who uses the "absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence" argument has a duty in debate to follow up with stating clearly therefore what criteria he or she uses to presume absence of anything.
It is, in terms of physics (and metaphysics) a simple inversion, a gainsay against established fact, and is therefore a proposition in itself. The fact that is being gainsaid has physical evidence to support it, and so too therefore should its counterclaim.
If the proponent finds this demand unreasonable then it is they who are shirking reason, not the rationalist.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I AM, therefore Gawed exists. I AM, so God doesn't exist.
Wait, this is so confusing. Anyone know the right spelling for the WTF thingy ?
B-i-r-d-s ? They are WTF's indeed .....
Can we pick on religion now ? WTF is a no brainer, ain't it ? I AM confused ....
Atheism Books.
I consider myself a strong atheist. I believe there is substantial evidence to support the non-existence of the regulation-issue God accepted by most theists.
However, as it would be impossible to disprove the existence of, say, Eloise's God (a deistic God who hides in the realm of the quantum, near as I can tell), it's hard to be a strong atheist on all counts. Not that I find her arguments any more compelling, as they still appeal to ignorance and speculation, and as such are subject to the usual skepticism and burden-of-proof issues. In those cases, I'm merely an agnostic atheist.
Anyway, I guess this is just a rambling way of saying, "Me, too."
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
And then you get the "well, god is just another way of saying nature really, isn't it?". Usually followed by a challenge that you can't claim to be opposed to nature.
To which of course one has to reply, if god is nature let's discuss "nature", not god.
Or another one is the person hooked on "essence" - "god is the essence of everything, isn't it?" - usually spoken by someone whose eyes have already begun to glaze over after the "sub-" in sub-atomic particles or think "quiddity" is a word invented by Clive Barker.
Desperate stuff, in other words. People clinging by the thinnest extreme of keratin to their addiction to magic.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy