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pearljammer on 14 August 2011
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Boutros said:
Troll_Whisperer said:

OK, let's use the Spaghetti Monster. I can't prove it doesn't exist. So you're saying that I can never say 'I don't believe in the spaghetti monster', because that would be implying that there is the possibility that it actually exists.

Actually, I can't say 'I don' believe in this or that' for anything, because I would always be implying that I don't have a belief against it existence and it may therefore exist. I must always say 'I believe this doesn't exist'. C'mon man, that would be a semantic nightmare.

From a logical and everyday situation viewpoint: not believing in X=believing there is no X

And that's true but it's not the two only options. There's also the idea of simply saying 'I don't know'. I don't know if there is a god. I don't if there's no god. That's what I'm talking about.

Sorry to interject. Feel free to ignore me and just respond back to troll whisperer if you'd prefer to.

Well, nobody knows. Take Santa Clause, for example. We can neither prove nor disprove his existance, but we can think with such certainty that he doesn't so that we can comfortably say that he does not exist. (I do realize however that Santa Clause isn't used to explain phenomena that we do not understand - but that just brings me back to Occam's razor, essentially when two theories are as equaly explicable, the one that makes the fewest assumptions is the best.)

This stance is not intellectually dishonest, it is not ignorant, it is not unreasonable (not saying that you said it was). I think many here are getting far too caught up in the semantics of it all.