sabvre42 said:
By making your null hypothesis you are by also assuming a paradox which just simply doesn't work in science. The concept of reality is far too abstract for you to make a binary "This is" vs "This is not". My whole point is that your hypoethesis vs null hypothesis does not work on something that is NOT testable. You cannot prove, and you cannot disprove. This is why this is a theological/philosophical discussion rather than scientific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan "On atheism, Sagan commented in 1981:
An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.[66]" God is an abstract concept. I'm not asking you to believe. That is not the argument occuring here. My point is that when it comes to defining the fundamentals of reality it is just as arrogant and niave to assume that someone has to prove to you something that is neither provable or disprovable. You are claiming that x cannot be true because their is no evidence, even though the lack of x causes a paradox. |
By making your null hypothesis you are by also assuming a paradox which just simply doesn't work in science. The concept of reality is far too abstract for you to make a binary "This is" vs "This is not". My whole point is that your hypoethesis vs null hypothesis does not work on something that is NOT testable. You cannot prove, and you cannot disprove. This is why this is a theological/philosophical discussion rather than scientific.
No. You are not assuming anything. All you are saying is that it has not been proven. That doesn't mean that you believe the universe came from nothing. You can not believe either.
Let's say there is a jar of marbles. You say that the number of objects in the jar is even. That is your hypothesis. The null hypothesis is that we can't prove the number is even.
If I accept the null hypothesis, that the number is not even, that does not mean I am saying the number is odd. It simply means that I don't accept the hypothesis that the number is even.
Even though even/odd is a binary proposition, that does not mean that rejecting one means accepting the other. I can also take the position "I don't know". As in the null hypothesis is true for both "god exists" and "god doesn't exist". I can, and do, reject both of these claims.
An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.[66]"
Firstly, that doesn't say that atheist's believe in nothing.
Secondly, Sagan is simply wrong. If you look at dictionary definitions, the definitions provided by American Atheists, or the definitions given by prominent atheists, they would almost all disagree with Sagan. For example, from Christopher Hitchens,
"We don't say on non-truth claims or faith claims that we know when we don't.....atheists do not say that we know there is no god. We say to the contrary, no argument and no evidence has ever been educed that we consider to be persuasive......The same with the afterlife. Of course we don't say that we know there isn't one. We say that we don't know anyone who can bring any reason to think that there is. "
Sagan is not an absolute authority, and neither is Hitchens, but the vast majority of atheists would go with the latter definition. This definition also agrees with the etymology of the words.
God is an abstract concept. I'm not asking you to believe.
That is not the argument occuring here. My point is that when it comes to defining the fundamentals of reality it is just as arrogant and niave to assume that someone has to prove to you something that is neither provable or disprovable. You are claiming that x cannot be true because their is no evidence, even though the lack of x causes a paradox.
It's good that you're not asking me to believe. What would be even better is if you would stop trying to tell me what I believe.
Again, and I don't know any better way to describe this, the position of atheism, and my personal position, is not that god doesn't exist.
I am not claiming "x cannot be true". I am claiming "x cannot be demonstrated to be true so I don't believe it."
And god is just as paradoxical. Making up unjustifiable claims like he exists outside of space time does not resolve the paradox. Existence outside of space and time is simply another paradox. You've just pushed it back one layer.
