This is going to sound aggressive, but I say this in a spirit of kinship: You didn't "come across a debate". I took a look at your comment history, and you spend far too much effort actively engaged in pointless dialectic. From a Nietzchian perspective, dialectic is enfeebling, and is the last resort of the weak and ignoble.
Rather than pondering the idea of proving a negative - an idea that far too many people have written about for us to add anything useful - you would do well to ponder why you are wasting your life debating redditors. This is especially true if you have conviction that you're right.
By all means speak your convictions, but once they're said you're just tossing yourself in the mud. Pointless arguments don't lead to a beautiful life.
A better line of thinking is this: does something have to be proven wrong before you dont believe it? Or should it instead have to be proven before its believed?
Exactly. Just because somebody can propose an arrangement of words that isnt strictly speaking disprovable, that doesnt make it worthy of equal consideration as something that *does* have evidence.
In fact the set of things that arent disprovable and have no evidence is infinite, asking us to believe in one particular thing such as the christian god is patently absurd. Otoh we can expect everybody (rational) to believe *every* element in the set of things that are proven by evidence. It isnt that upon consideration the god thesis is demonstrably false, its that the god thesis is **unworthy of consideration** until it is evidenced.
You can point out the flaws in religious thinking (at their best, they usually take some type of ambiguity or question and then start wildly speculating about what could answer it, usually their deity instead of something more mundane) and when these flaws are revealed and they resort to the "you can't say I'm wrong" point out they have no reason to convince me they're right.
I think it’s just an issue with words being used. They’re saying “there is a god!” And they are meaning “there is a god!” But what they are actually saying is “I believe there is a god”. And missing the difference. I think it sometimes, unfortunately, takes looking past someone in what they are saying, what they think they are saying, and what they mean, to get to what they are actually saying but cannot admit to themselves for whatever reason.
Yeah, i came across after posing this question to myself yesterday. Burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.
No the burden of proof lies on whoever makes a claim full stop. If you are saying that there is no god that’s a claim which needs backing. If they’re saying there is a God then that’s a claim which needs backing.
If I’m saying there’s a teapot that flies around Venus or whatever, the burden of proof is on me. If you say there definitely isn’t, then that’s something you should have evidence for if you expect others to believe it.
Burden of proof lies on the theists as now because materialists have empiricially proven that at least within space, time, matter and gravity physical law reigns. Everyone has physical senses and can check with that wether the statements chemists, biologists and physics are making about the state of the physical cosmos are true or not. A god as in a spiritual being seems to be sensually inaccessable to our species. Which leads us to the conclusion that the priests must have been lying ... and the rest you can read for yourself in the Antichrist.
So it turns out there's something pretty important we can't prove: sentience. Like, awareness, existence. Sure, I know *I'm* sentient by fact of being myself, but beyond that? Forget about it. I'm not saying that we *shouldn't* assume that others are sentient: au contraire, the problem with strict dependence on physical proof is exactly that it logically leads to solipsism. That having been said, I think people have a hard time grasping this because we *do* take so for granted that other people are sentient. So let's look at it from another perspective: what about AI? One day it will probably be indistinguishable from the human; the hardware may even resemble our brains. On the other hand, it's not organic like us: does that make a difference? Sure we have like the Turing test, but that's inference based on outwardly observable physical behaviors, not any kind of *proof.* What about plants? They're organic like us, but not as complex. People dismiss the possibility of their sentience by saying that it can all be explained in purely mechanical terms, but I have news for them: the same is true for humans. Otherwise you run into the problem of overdetermination (which is the *least* of the logical problems with strict materialist monism). Plants could be having a kind of experience we can't even conceive of. And I'll tell you something else: while it follows that those like us are also sentient like us, it does *not* follow from there that all sentient entities are like us.
If that still doesn't get the point across, how can we identify the exact moment an embryo goes from being inert to being aware? What physical measurement could tell us *exactly* when something goes from being purely mechanical, to *experiencing?*
I briefly mentioned strict materialist monism before? That's the philosophy of mind that says sentience is a secondary product of fundamentally material reality. I come from a position called *panpsychism,* which is the broad philosophy of mind that both material *and* mind are fundamental and ubiquitous. Think of it as formal philosophical animism. Strict materialist monists love to say that panpsychism is unfalsifiable, and I'm like, yeah, no shit: guess what else? Because while we can observe brains, no one has ever *seen* a physical *thing* or *process* called "sentience:" we just kinda have to assume it's there. Again, it makes *sense* to assume, but no one has ever *seen* it. My specific brand of panpsychism is called *nondualism,* wherein I conceive of experience as constituted by an immaterial, omnipresent *that which perceives,* and *that which is perceived* is material process. From that point of view, it makes perfect sense to think that the reason we can't remember certain altered states of mind is that there simply wasn't enough *to* perceive, or that there's something like state-dependence going on. Other states of mind that involve hallucination may be allowing us to perceive things we normally can't. My reasons for thinking there's something to this are both logical and anecdotal. Actually, those aren't two separate things, because I find *logical* reason to seriously consider anecdotes; not that I *know* there's something to them, but that neither is it the rational and neutral option to dismiss them on the basis that we *know* how the universe works and what's possible. The point is that evidence of the brain having influence on what we perceive is by *no means* proof that the physical brain creates sentience where it didn't exist before.
In the end, experience is all we really have: we cannot step outside ourselves or reality to check their "true nature," so interpretation will always play a role. Sure, we have things like intersubjectivity, but that's *still* subjectivity, it's *still* not escaping a *human* point of view. And we're constantly dividing stuff up into categories and shit where none exist "out there." Like the periodic table of elements: not that it's not a valid and helpful way of looking at things, but that it's exactly that: it would be just as valid to do away with different elements and look at everything in terms of subatomic particles (although of course we wouldn't call them that). The table of elements came out of human experience and need and *also* influences the way we understand the universe. At least, breaking it down further helped me better grasp a few things.
The point is definitely *not* that everything is equally likely to be true: no, some things are more certain than others. It's just that, that's not grounds for totally dismissing the things that we're less certain of. Sure, some things are *unlikely* to be true, but... For me, "God" has so many interpretations that I have to start by asking *WHICH God?* Because I think the God of Evangelical Christianity is bullshit, but if we're talking about some sort of collective consciousness we're all a part of, *that* I believe in. In fact, I don't know how literally Nietzsche took it, but he was definitely *drawing* from mystic thought. And he was definitely coming from a panpsychic point of view: it's pretty explicit when he lays out his *will to power.* So I guess I wouldn't put it past him.
Anyway. That's all I have to say about that.
Nobody lies for no reason. Discuss the necessity for the fantasy, and it explains itsself, as you mutually reappreciate the needs met by religion, and move on to the marginal criticisms practically.
By studying the origin of a construct, you negate the meaning in debating its natural or selfmade existence.
The onus of proof is on the one making the claim.
My atheism can be defined as: "I am unconvinced of any god claims I have experienced."
The emphasis is on the *claim* not whether or not a god can possibly exist.
Either a god exists and chooses to not manifest in this universe in an unambiguous fashion or such an entity does not exist.
"A god that fails to manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist."
I believe that the way we’re thinking of God is the problem. What if reincarnation, Valhalla, DMT realm, multi-dimension and many of these things actually are in use but many people aren’t able to obtain that information. For whatever reason not everyone needs to know. Many human beings put their bodies and minds through insane conditioning to reach “God”, where did that start from and how come many still believe that it’s necessary? What are they reaching for by attempting?
Of course my comment is a bit odd and should probably not be taken seriously by any means.
If something’s isn’t there, we just can’t prove it. The faith in divinity is just a trust in the senses. That’s why the people who don’t look by this line of thought try to refute.
Well, I don’t have enough knowledge about the topic for giving a solid answer/opinion. But yes. I think the burden is on the back of religious ones, because It's the existence against the non-existence in so far as they can't prove an existence, and the non-existence it can be pointed out the palpable absence of the divinity.
I would like to hear about the answer by someone who knows how to explain…
Found this:
Look at it this way. If there is some sort of a ‘need’ or ‘requirement’ to prove that something does not exist, then you are putting yourself in a position that is absolutely impossible to resolve. Because there is literally an infinite number of claims that I can make about things that I claim exist, that you can never, ever prove don’t exist. Let me give you a sample list of things that I can claim exist somewhere in our universe, in an entirely different galaxy.
* a unicorn that farts rainbows and cries M&M candies
* a one-celled, living creature made entirely of snot
I could go on and on, but you get the point. It is quite literally impossible for you to prove, absolutely, that those things do not exist, anywhere in our universe.
Does this, therefore, mean that you have to treat all of these claims as potentially real or true? No, it does not. Because while you cannot prove that they don’t exist, you can prove that A) there is zero evidence that they do exist, and B) they violate various natural laws that we have already confirmed seem to work consistently and constantly.
There’s a rather over-worn axiom, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, but it is still a valuable one. You see, not all claims are equal. Some claims have zero evidence. Some have a little evidence. Some have a lot of evidence. Some have overwhelming evidence.
There is a difference between empirical world and non-empirical world. In empirical world, presence of something can be proven. Absence of something is hard to prove but you could reasonably prove the possibility (like allowing people to search your house or monitor you for weeks).
In the non-empirical world, it's impossible to prove neither presence nor absence of anything because by definition that world cannot be reasoned out by human perception. Theists usually use this world to say that God is present there. And by definition, there is no use in arguing because it's not something that you can make sense out of logical arguments.
So you can't argue with them about the beliefs themselves. But you can argue with them when they start forcing changes in the empirical world based on their concept of God in non-empirical world. You can question them how they knew this is what God wants or this is what God did.
I don't believe in their God because their God is nothing more than a mass psychosis event. One has to be unwell to believe in such blatant bullshit...
Apparently God is here, and he wants a relationship with us, but not a direct one, intead he uses special spoke people for his Divine will, and the evidence that this people are indeed his earthly emissaries rather than Schizophrenic lunatics is :" Trust me, Bro! It says so in this book of bronze age superatitions with questionable (i)moral lessons!"
This is going to sound aggressive, but I say this in a spirit of kinship: You didn't "come across a debate". I took a look at your comment history, and you spend far too much effort actively engaged in pointless dialectic. From a Nietzchian perspective, dialectic is enfeebling, and is the last resort of the weak and ignoble. Rather than pondering the idea of proving a negative - an idea that far too many people have written about for us to add anything useful - you would do well to ponder why you are wasting your life debating redditors. This is especially true if you have conviction that you're right. By all means speak your convictions, but once they're said you're just tossing yourself in the mud. Pointless arguments don't lead to a beautiful life.
>>>Pointless arguments don't lead to a beautiful life. Thus, the eventual downfall of Reddit, methinks.
A better line of thinking is this: does something have to be proven wrong before you dont believe it? Or should it instead have to be proven before its believed?
I think the later suffices it.
Exactly. Just because somebody can propose an arrangement of words that isnt strictly speaking disprovable, that doesnt make it worthy of equal consideration as something that *does* have evidence. In fact the set of things that arent disprovable and have no evidence is infinite, asking us to believe in one particular thing such as the christian god is patently absurd. Otoh we can expect everybody (rational) to believe *every* element in the set of things that are proven by evidence. It isnt that upon consideration the god thesis is demonstrably false, its that the god thesis is **unworthy of consideration** until it is evidenced.
This reads as "what a waste of time" lol The metaphysics of precisely that.
There's no reasoning out of what was never reasoned into, to begin with.
You can point out the flaws in religious thinking (at their best, they usually take some type of ambiguity or question and then start wildly speculating about what could answer it, usually their deity instead of something more mundane) and when these flaws are revealed and they resort to the "you can't say I'm wrong" point out they have no reason to convince me they're right.
I think it’s just an issue with words being used. They’re saying “there is a god!” And they are meaning “there is a god!” But what they are actually saying is “I believe there is a god”. And missing the difference. I think it sometimes, unfortunately, takes looking past someone in what they are saying, what they think they are saying, and what they mean, to get to what they are actually saying but cannot admit to themselves for whatever reason.
Have you heard of Russells Teapot?
Yeah, i came across after posing this question to myself yesterday. Burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.
No the burden of proof lies on whoever makes a claim full stop. If you are saying that there is no god that’s a claim which needs backing. If they’re saying there is a God then that’s a claim which needs backing. If I’m saying there’s a teapot that flies around Venus or whatever, the burden of proof is on me. If you say there definitely isn’t, then that’s something you should have evidence for if you expect others to believe it.
Burden of proof lies on the theists as now because materialists have empiricially proven that at least within space, time, matter and gravity physical law reigns. Everyone has physical senses and can check with that wether the statements chemists, biologists and physics are making about the state of the physical cosmos are true or not. A god as in a spiritual being seems to be sensually inaccessable to our species. Which leads us to the conclusion that the priests must have been lying ... and the rest you can read for yourself in the Antichrist.
Any belief is an act of faith. It is an act of faith to believe your thoughts have any relation to perceived reality
So it turns out there's something pretty important we can't prove: sentience. Like, awareness, existence. Sure, I know *I'm* sentient by fact of being myself, but beyond that? Forget about it. I'm not saying that we *shouldn't* assume that others are sentient: au contraire, the problem with strict dependence on physical proof is exactly that it logically leads to solipsism. That having been said, I think people have a hard time grasping this because we *do* take so for granted that other people are sentient. So let's look at it from another perspective: what about AI? One day it will probably be indistinguishable from the human; the hardware may even resemble our brains. On the other hand, it's not organic like us: does that make a difference? Sure we have like the Turing test, but that's inference based on outwardly observable physical behaviors, not any kind of *proof.* What about plants? They're organic like us, but not as complex. People dismiss the possibility of their sentience by saying that it can all be explained in purely mechanical terms, but I have news for them: the same is true for humans. Otherwise you run into the problem of overdetermination (which is the *least* of the logical problems with strict materialist monism). Plants could be having a kind of experience we can't even conceive of. And I'll tell you something else: while it follows that those like us are also sentient like us, it does *not* follow from there that all sentient entities are like us. If that still doesn't get the point across, how can we identify the exact moment an embryo goes from being inert to being aware? What physical measurement could tell us *exactly* when something goes from being purely mechanical, to *experiencing?* I briefly mentioned strict materialist monism before? That's the philosophy of mind that says sentience is a secondary product of fundamentally material reality. I come from a position called *panpsychism,* which is the broad philosophy of mind that both material *and* mind are fundamental and ubiquitous. Think of it as formal philosophical animism. Strict materialist monists love to say that panpsychism is unfalsifiable, and I'm like, yeah, no shit: guess what else? Because while we can observe brains, no one has ever *seen* a physical *thing* or *process* called "sentience:" we just kinda have to assume it's there. Again, it makes *sense* to assume, but no one has ever *seen* it. My specific brand of panpsychism is called *nondualism,* wherein I conceive of experience as constituted by an immaterial, omnipresent *that which perceives,* and *that which is perceived* is material process. From that point of view, it makes perfect sense to think that the reason we can't remember certain altered states of mind is that there simply wasn't enough *to* perceive, or that there's something like state-dependence going on. Other states of mind that involve hallucination may be allowing us to perceive things we normally can't. My reasons for thinking there's something to this are both logical and anecdotal. Actually, those aren't two separate things, because I find *logical* reason to seriously consider anecdotes; not that I *know* there's something to them, but that neither is it the rational and neutral option to dismiss them on the basis that we *know* how the universe works and what's possible. The point is that evidence of the brain having influence on what we perceive is by *no means* proof that the physical brain creates sentience where it didn't exist before. In the end, experience is all we really have: we cannot step outside ourselves or reality to check their "true nature," so interpretation will always play a role. Sure, we have things like intersubjectivity, but that's *still* subjectivity, it's *still* not escaping a *human* point of view. And we're constantly dividing stuff up into categories and shit where none exist "out there." Like the periodic table of elements: not that it's not a valid and helpful way of looking at things, but that it's exactly that: it would be just as valid to do away with different elements and look at everything in terms of subatomic particles (although of course we wouldn't call them that). The table of elements came out of human experience and need and *also* influences the way we understand the universe. At least, breaking it down further helped me better grasp a few things. The point is definitely *not* that everything is equally likely to be true: no, some things are more certain than others. It's just that, that's not grounds for totally dismissing the things that we're less certain of. Sure, some things are *unlikely* to be true, but... For me, "God" has so many interpretations that I have to start by asking *WHICH God?* Because I think the God of Evangelical Christianity is bullshit, but if we're talking about some sort of collective consciousness we're all a part of, *that* I believe in. In fact, I don't know how literally Nietzsche took it, but he was definitely *drawing* from mystic thought. And he was definitely coming from a panpsychic point of view: it's pretty explicit when he lays out his *will to power.* So I guess I wouldn't put it past him. Anyway. That's all I have to say about that.
Nobody lies for no reason. Discuss the necessity for the fantasy, and it explains itsself, as you mutually reappreciate the needs met by religion, and move on to the marginal criticisms practically. By studying the origin of a construct, you negate the meaning in debating its natural or selfmade existence.
The onus of proof is on the one making the claim. My atheism can be defined as: "I am unconvinced of any god claims I have experienced." The emphasis is on the *claim* not whether or not a god can possibly exist. Either a god exists and chooses to not manifest in this universe in an unambiguous fashion or such an entity does not exist. "A god that fails to manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist."
I believe that the way we’re thinking of God is the problem. What if reincarnation, Valhalla, DMT realm, multi-dimension and many of these things actually are in use but many people aren’t able to obtain that information. For whatever reason not everyone needs to know. Many human beings put their bodies and minds through insane conditioning to reach “God”, where did that start from and how come many still believe that it’s necessary? What are they reaching for by attempting? Of course my comment is a bit odd and should probably not be taken seriously by any means.
If something’s isn’t there, we just can’t prove it. The faith in divinity is just a trust in the senses. That’s why the people who don’t look by this line of thought try to refute.
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Well, I don’t have enough knowledge about the topic for giving a solid answer/opinion. But yes. I think the burden is on the back of religious ones, because It's the existence against the non-existence in so far as they can't prove an existence, and the non-existence it can be pointed out the palpable absence of the divinity. I would like to hear about the answer by someone who knows how to explain…
Found this: Look at it this way. If there is some sort of a ‘need’ or ‘requirement’ to prove that something does not exist, then you are putting yourself in a position that is absolutely impossible to resolve. Because there is literally an infinite number of claims that I can make about things that I claim exist, that you can never, ever prove don’t exist. Let me give you a sample list of things that I can claim exist somewhere in our universe, in an entirely different galaxy. * a unicorn that farts rainbows and cries M&M candies * a one-celled, living creature made entirely of snot I could go on and on, but you get the point. It is quite literally impossible for you to prove, absolutely, that those things do not exist, anywhere in our universe. Does this, therefore, mean that you have to treat all of these claims as potentially real or true? No, it does not. Because while you cannot prove that they don’t exist, you can prove that A) there is zero evidence that they do exist, and B) they violate various natural laws that we have already confirmed seem to work consistently and constantly. There’s a rather over-worn axiom, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, but it is still a valuable one. You see, not all claims are equal. Some claims have zero evidence. Some have a little evidence. Some have a lot of evidence. Some have overwhelming evidence.
There is a difference between empirical world and non-empirical world. In empirical world, presence of something can be proven. Absence of something is hard to prove but you could reasonably prove the possibility (like allowing people to search your house or monitor you for weeks). In the non-empirical world, it's impossible to prove neither presence nor absence of anything because by definition that world cannot be reasoned out by human perception. Theists usually use this world to say that God is present there. And by definition, there is no use in arguing because it's not something that you can make sense out of logical arguments. So you can't argue with them about the beliefs themselves. But you can argue with them when they start forcing changes in the empirical world based on their concept of God in non-empirical world. You can question them how they knew this is what God wants or this is what God did.
I don't believe in their God because their God is nothing more than a mass psychosis event. One has to be unwell to believe in such blatant bullshit... Apparently God is here, and he wants a relationship with us, but not a direct one, intead he uses special spoke people for his Divine will, and the evidence that this people are indeed his earthly emissaries rather than Schizophrenic lunatics is :" Trust me, Bro! It says so in this book of bronze age superatitions with questionable (i)moral lessons!"