As Star Trek has shown us, even the appearance of godlike beings doesn't mean there is a truly supernatural force out there. Atheism could be disproven but only if you demonstrated something which existed and functioned purely or partially outside of all scientific possibility. A super-evolved individual or species could meet criteria for omnipotence and/or omniscience, and do so within realms that were explicable, albeit in an exhaustively complex way.
Perhaps a god could be able to exhibit a logical paradox.
That would have interesting consequences per the explosion principle.
Having your OWN experience is going to be a lot more meaningful than someone feverishly describing their experience. Deities that rely on word of mouth are pretty goosed up.
I mean should it be more meaningful? We feel very comfortable saying that other peoples personal spirit-visions dont reflect reality. Why when it happens to you does all that skepticism go out the window? Do you just say "oops, guess I was wrong, God existed all along?"
Simulation argument will go nowhere because anything you can think of could be handled by a simulation of sufficient absurdity. You don't even know if the simulating universe has gravity.
Sure. My point isn't the simulation argument; my point is we have heaps of reasons to disbelief other people when they rave about their visions, but we don't apply the same scrutiny to ourselves? I would. I would think: "I must be losing it". No less than the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) initially thought the same thing. http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/demons.htm and that sort of initial self-doubt is common in prophets who later prosthelytize for deities they at first had trouble believing in the existence of.
I guess I'm interesting in the steps from: "this is a hoax, I'm dreaming, I'm possessed by demons, this is obviously bullshit" to "this is sufficient evidence for me to upend my entire strongly held beliefs about the nature of existence" Sure given sufficient evidence that change in opinion is the right one to make; but what constitutes evidence? Is it just: because it's happening to me and not someone else it's evidence? Doesn't that validate every bum on the street who has so-called "divine visions"?
Revelation becomes hearsay the moment they open their mouth. It is logically consistent for them to believe and you to doubt, since we are more or less stuck interacting with the world as we percieve it. If I see a wall and have no contrary evidence, it would be irrational for me to doubt that the wall is real...
Having your OWN experience is going to be a lot more meaningful than someone feverishly describing their experience. Deities that rely on word of mouth are pretty goosed up.
I mean should it be more meaningful? We feel very comfortable saying that other peoples personal spirit-visions dont reflect reality. Why when it happens to you does all that skepticism go out the window? Do you just say "oops, guess I was wrong, God existed all along?"
We're talking about magic here, not something falsifiable and subject to scientific inquiry, how the heck else am I to get a meaningful experience of it?
Someone saying "I saw Shiva for real" isn't enough for me to believe that Shiva exists given the current available data.
A deity making my brain acknowledge "Oh hey I saw Shiva for real" is going to override my reliance on data.
And if I suddenly believe deities exist, well shucks, I guess they do exist. It would be like finding out that there are in fact lizard people in public office.
Simulation argument will go nowhere because anything you can think of could be handled by a simulation of sufficient absurdity. You don't even know if the simulating universe has gravity.
Sure. My point isn't the simulation argument; my point is we have heaps of reasons to disbelief other people when they rave about their visions, but we don't apply the same scrutiny to ourselves? I would. I would think: "I must be losing it". No less than the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) initially thought the same thing. http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/demons.htm and that sort of initial self-doubt is common in prophets who later prosthelytize for deities they at first had trouble believing in the existence of.
I guess I'm interesting in the steps from: "this is a hoax, I'm dreaming, I'm possessed by demons, this is obviously bullshit" to "this is sufficient evidence for me to upend my entire strongly held beliefs about the nature of existence" Sure given sufficient evidence that change in opinion is the right one to make; but what constitutes evidence? Is it just: because it's happening to me and not someone else it's evidence? Doesn't that validate every bum on the street who has so-called "divine visions"?
It depends on the individual's personal criteria and what you're trying to prove. The more incredible the claim, the more difficult to demonstrate, and the more incredulous the person, the harder it will be.
If your claim is "If you bite your thumb and fart at the same time, a fireball will shoot out of your nipple" and it does, every single time, and we can study how it works and the variations and specifics of how it works, yeah I'll probably believe you after the studies are in.
If your claim is "This cat made the universe and then became a normal cat." well good luck.
"Supernatural" exists only in the domain of fiction, because fiction is describing a world whose rules are literally different from the natural world. Any "deity"' that manifested itself in this world, would be, by definition, natural. And this isn't even a semantic argument - the ability for a deity to provide phenomena which appear to break natural law must themselves be bound by a set of not-yet-understood laws, or how could the deity provide such phenomena?
A god could present me with a sphere of matter that is simultaneously solid and liquid or whatever, and my first instinct would be to immediately experiment on it to figure out whatever properties I could divine (ha!).
This is probably why I enjoyed Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality despite it being a dunning-krueger jerk-off session.
Having your OWN experience is going to be a lot more meaningful than someone feverishly describing their experience. Deities that rely on word of mouth are pretty goosed up.
I mean should it be more meaningful? We feel very comfortable saying that other peoples personal spirit-visions dont reflect reality. Why when it happens to you does all that skepticism go out the window? Do you just say "oops, guess I was wrong, God existed all along?"
We're talking about magic here, not something falsifiable and subject to scientific inquiry, how the heck else am I to get a meaningful experience of it?
Someone saying "I saw Shiva for real" isn't enough for me to believe that Shiva exists given the current available data.
A deity making my brain acknowledge "Oh hey I saw Shiva for real" is going to override my reliance on data.
And if I suddenly believe deities exist, well shucks, I guess they do exist. It would be like finding out that there are in fact lizard people in public office.
Simulation argument will go nowhere because anything you can think of could be handled by a simulation of sufficient absurdity. You don't even know if the simulating universe has gravity.
Sure. My point isn't the simulation argument; my point is we have heaps of reasons to disbelief other people when they rave about their visions, but we don't apply the same scrutiny to ourselves? I would. I would think: "I must be losing it". No less than the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) initially thought the same thing. http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/demons.htm and that sort of initial self-doubt is common in prophets who later prosthelytize for deities they at first had trouble believing in the existence of.
I guess I'm interesting in the steps from: "this is a hoax, I'm dreaming, I'm possessed by demons, this is obviously bullshit" to "this is sufficient evidence for me to upend my entire strongly held beliefs about the nature of existence" Sure given sufficient evidence that change in opinion is the right one to make; but what constitutes evidence? Is it just: because it's happening to me and not someone else it's evidence? Doesn't that validate every bum on the street who has so-called "divine visions"?
It depends on the individual's personal criteria and what you're trying to prove. The more incredible the claim, the more difficult to demonstrate, and the more incredulous the person, the harder it will be.
If your claim is "If you bite your thumb and fart at the same time, a fireball will shoot out of your nipple" and it does, every single time, and we can study how it works and the variations and specifics of how it works, yeah I'll probably believe you after the studies are in.
If your claim is "This cat made the universe and then became a normal cat." well good luck.
I claim my dog did not make the universe amd then become a normal dog. This is not testable. Your response?
Having your OWN experience is going to be a lot more meaningful than someone feverishly describing their experience. Deities that rely on word of mouth are pretty goosed up.
I mean should it be more meaningful? We feel very comfortable saying that other peoples personal spirit-visions dont reflect reality. Why when it happens to you does all that skepticism go out the window? Do you just say "oops, guess I was wrong, God existed all along?"
We're talking about magic here, not something falsifiable and subject to scientific inquiry, how the heck else am I to get a meaningful experience of it?
Someone saying "I saw Shiva for real" isn't enough for me to believe that Shiva exists given the current available data.
A deity making my brain acknowledge "Oh hey I saw Shiva for real" is going to override my reliance on data.
And if I suddenly believe deities exist, well shucks, I guess they do exist. It would be like finding out that there are in fact lizard people in public office.
Simulation argument will go nowhere because anything you can think of could be handled by a simulation of sufficient absurdity. You don't even know if the simulating universe has gravity.
Sure. My point isn't the simulation argument; my point is we have heaps of reasons to disbelief other people when they rave about their visions, but we don't apply the same scrutiny to ourselves? I would. I would think: "I must be losing it". No less than the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) initially thought the same thing. http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/demons.htm and that sort of initial self-doubt is common in prophets who later prosthelytize for deities they at first had trouble believing in the existence of.
I guess I'm interesting in the steps from: "this is a hoax, I'm dreaming, I'm possessed by demons, this is obviously bullshit" to "this is sufficient evidence for me to upend my entire strongly held beliefs about the nature of existence" Sure given sufficient evidence that change in opinion is the right one to make; but what constitutes evidence? Is it just: because it's happening to me and not someone else it's evidence? Doesn't that validate every bum on the street who has so-called "divine visions"?
It depends on the individual's personal criteria and what you're trying to prove. The more incredible the claim, the more difficult to demonstrate, and the more incredulous the person, the harder it will be.
If your claim is "If you bite your thumb and fart at the same time, a fireball will shoot out of your nipple" and it does, every single time, and we can study how it works and the variations and specifics of how it works, yeah I'll probably believe you after the studies are in.
If your claim is "This cat made the universe and then became a normal cat." well good luck.
I claim my dog did not make the universe amd then become a normal dog. This is not testable. Your response?
I believe someone said something to this effect already, but it bears repeating. "God" is a really loosely defined term. I feel like that's the main reason for the somewhat indirect answers being given. Like, I'm fairly certain that in this context you mean god as in something similar in power and relevance to humanity as the Judeo-Christian God, but since you're asking a fairly big question, people are trying to make sure they've thought the question out and as such come upon the question "what does the word god even mean," and as such answer the question using broader, extremely vague definition of god.
For example, my answer to your question if going with the "something like the Judeo-Christian God" definition of god would probably be that I'd first want some demonstration of being capable of performing feats of the scale performed in the bible (preferably in a way that does not involve the significant earth-side destruction involved in many of those feats), or if we're not talking the Judeo-Christian god then just substitute bible with the equivalent holy book. Then, I'd want hard evidence of some of the unearthly realms (afterlifes and whatnot) that whatever particular religion we're talking about claims to exist, as well as of the actions the deity is claimed to have taken on Earth in the past, particularly the larger scale ones. If these conditions were met, then yeah, I'd be willing to say that this entity is probably what it claims to be. With the demonstrated capabilities of the entity, there would probably, of course, be the possibility that it faked the archeological evidence because it just feels like pretending to be a god to fuck with us, but that seems unlikely. Such an entity probably wouldn't have much reason to give a fuck about that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, for the "wait really, what the fuck does that even mean?" definition of god, my answer would probably be "wait really, what the fuck does that even mean?"
Question for atheists: is your atheism falsifiable? Say a guy appears and claims to be the returned Jesus Christ; what evidence would convince you OK this guy really is Jesus Christ Lord of Lords, King of Kings?
I feel like I would dismiss that guy as a nut, and if I saw him perform "miracles" I would more readily doubt my sanity and that of everyone around me rather than admit to the sudden, unprecedented intrusion of the truly supernatural into what I thought was hithero a purely material world.
Unfalsifiable belief is a problem for me. So, theoretically, what would convince you guys?
I think this touches upon the larger question of what people (atheist or otherwise) mean by God. There was a Domincan theologian who taught at Oxford named Herbert McCabe, who would debate atheists. He'd always begin by asking the atheist to define what they meant by "God", listen to it, and then go on to say that he didn't believe in that idea of God either - but of course he's got another conception of God that he does believe in and will go on to argue about. Usually this takes the form that God isn't a being among beings, but rather is "being itself", or what the theologion Paul Tillich calls "the ground of being".
Now, my intuition is that there's something kind of dishonest going on here when apologists argue this way, because I've never seen one who would raise this argument if, for instance, the counterparty accepts or is unable to refute an argument for a non-contingent being or the ontological argument (the argument for a maximally great being). It seems like it only comes out when the other person is prepared to argue against the sort of god that is a being. I also think it's a bit tricky to get to Christianity (in particular) from this point. While a conventional monotheist could argue that "the ground of being" is what they mean God, it would seem pretty difficult to assert that one simultaneously believes that God is the ground of being and that Jesus is also God and so also not a being but rather the ground of being. The concept would render the Gospels as unintelligible when you consider it a story about the ground of being giving foot baths and riding donkeys and what not.
I'm going to be a little cheeky here and distinguish between "god-as-greatest-being" and "god-as-being-itself". If some one is claiming to be Jesus in the "god-as-being-itself" way, it's not really an argument based on evidence either for or against. I should note that while I'd say I'm an atheist, or at least non-religious, if some one asked, I don't really disbelieve in "the ground of being", rather I'm skeptical of the notion that it could be described as the sort of God that reveals itself to people in the desert and tells them not to be gay or eat lobster. It would be like some one saying "I am the set of all prime numbers", or "the set of all prime numbers has revealed to me that soft shelled tacos are forbidden" - it's not that I don't believe it as such, just that it is an unintelligible concept.
On the topic of "god-as-greatest-being", my standard of evidence isn't super high and I would be relatively easy to convince. I mean if some one who exhibited the powers of a Dungeons and Dragons type god showed up, said they were either a god or the god, and started raising the dead and healing people or creating things out of thin air or whatever, then I would probably accept that they're a god or at least what humans used to refer to as gods. Heck, if it was some one who just had Superman's level of power, I'd accept that he's some sort of god if that's what he's claiming. Sure, there is the possibility that this is an alien super wizard playing me for a chump, but that's effectively like me going back and tricking an australopithecus - tricking him successfully would say more about me than it would about him
On the topic of "god-as-greatest-being", my standard of evidence isn't super high and I would be relatively easy to convince. I mean if some one who exhibited the powers of a Dungeons and Dragons type god showed up, said they were either a god or the god, and started raising the dead and healing people or creating things out of thin air or whatever, then I would probably accept that they're a god or at least what humans used to refer to as gods. Heck, if it was some one who just had Superman's level of power, I'd accept that he's some sort of god if that's what he's claiming. Sure, there is the possibility that this is an alien super wizard playing me for a chump, but that's effectively like me going back and tricking an australopithecus - tricking him successfully would say more about me than it would about him
Yeah if Evil Superman came to earth and demanded to be worshiped as a god, and I said "what if I don't" and he vaporized the guy next to me with his heat vision, I'd get on my knees pretty fast.
If he probed my mind and figured out that I still thought he was a space alien and not a god, well, shit, what do you even do at that point? Sucks to be me I guess.
In the "Hi, I'm Jesus"-scenario, I suppose I'll be impressed if he shows me some simple party-tricks with his powers. I don't think that defining what's special enough for the prestigious "god"-title is actually worth doing.
If he turns playing-cards into doves, I'll wonder how he did it, but I'll accept that he can make doves appear.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited September 2015
As Apothe0sis has mentioned, I tend to think that agnosticism is a much less interesting or defensible position than many people take it to be. As a merely sociological fact, survey data indicates that this is true of philosophers generally (both inside and outside of the philosophy of religion): around 90% of philosophers "accept or lean toward" either atheism or theism, with only the remaining ten percent or so indicating "other"--the percentage of agnostics would presumably then be even lower, given that 'other' also includes e.g. non-theistic but religious views.
Sometimes people defend agnosticism by defending the claim that we can't really know that God doesn't exist. It is unclear to me that this is so, since I think the argument from evil is fully adequate ground for actually knowing that classical Christian theology is false, but forgetting that--allow that we cannot know that God doesn't exist.
It is commonly accepted that lack of knowledge is fully compatible with arbitrarily high confidence. Imagine a fair lottery with N tickets. The chance of each ticket being a winner is 1/N. As N becomes arbitrarily large, the chance of any given ticket being a winner becomes arbitrarily close to zero. Yet most people who consider lottery cases still accept the judgement that no matter how large N gets, it is never correct to say that you know that a given ticket is a loser--so long as you have no special reason, aside from the odds, for thinking so. After all, it still could win, and one of them has to! As such, you can be arbitrarily confident that a ticket will lose while still refusing to claim knowledge that it will lose.
If this is the sense in which we cannot know God doesn't exist--the sense where we can nonetheless be arbitrarily confident that he doesn't--then, okay, whatever. I (like many, though not all others) think that 'rational confidence' rather than 'knowledge' is the more interesting concept, not least because confidence is the mental state which directly governs rational action. For instance, it is your confidence that a given lottery ticket will win (in conjunction with the payoff) which is relevant to how much you should value a given ticket, not whether you 'know' or not. So I don't really care much about whether we can know God (doesn't) exist.
A more robust agnosticism, then, would be one which held not just that you cannot know whether God exists or not, but that it is rational to have intermediate confidence that God exists--to assign the proposition that God exists roughly even odds, as it were. This, I think, would be a substantive doctrine, much more so than the claim just that we can't know one way or the other. I also think it has little plausibility (and as noted above, this seems to be a generally shared view among philosophers). But why that is so would be a separate issue.
In the "Hi, I'm Jesus"-scenario, I suppose I'll be impressed if he shows me some simple party-tricks with his powers. I don't think that defining what's special enough for the prestigious "god"-title is actually worth doing.
If he turns playing-cards into doves, I'll wonder how he did it, but I'll accept that he can make doves appear.
The existence of god cannot be scientifically tested. This is usually where the "can't prove" flavor of agnosticism comes from I think. You also can't arrive at either conclusion in a logically valid manner (with respect to deductive reasoning, or a mathematical proof) without starting from premises that can be reasonably objected to.
So it's fair to hold the opinion that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of the divine.
Of course, this statement is not in and of itself agnostic - plenty of theists would agree.
If God exists, then I do not, since omniscience and omnipotence prevent the existence of independent agents. If god controls all aspects of everything we're all just pieces of God. As such, God cannot persuade me he exists since his existence and mine are mutually exclusive.
When people start using the "god is being" stuff I start smacking them with dictionaries.
Edit: It's bad enough that we use the same word to describe Shinto guardians of small towns and omnipotent omniscient universe-makers.
I think it's an interesting point if you're going to have a conversation with a real philosopher. I think it's utter bullshit when the conversation is later going to involve passing the hat or insisting the ground of being wants me to vote No on Proposition Whatever.
When people start using the "god is being" stuff I start smacking them with dictionaries.
Edit: It's bad enough that we use the same word to describe Shinto guardians of small towns and omnipotent omniscient universe-makers.
I think it's an interesting point if you're going to have a conversation with a real philosopher. I think it's utter bullshit when the conversation is later going to involve passing the hat or insisting the ground of being wants me to vote No on Proposition Whatever.
A linguistics philosopher maybe.
It's goalpost-shifting definition-swapping rubbish. "What if by God I mean running away from squirrels."
If God exists, then I do not, since omniscience and omnipotence prevent the existence of independent agents. If god controls all aspects of everything we're all just pieces of God. As such, God cannot persuade me he exists since his existence and mine are mutually exclusive.
That assumes an omnipotent and omniscient god, however. Not all deities of all religions are both, or either.
If God exists, then I do not, since omniscience and omnipotence prevent the existence of independent agents. If god controls all aspects of everything we're all just pieces of God. As such, God cannot persuade me he exists since his existence and mine are mutually exclusive.
That assumes an omnipotent and omniscient god, however. Not all deities of all religions are both, or either.
Also, omnipotence requires that said god be able to create independent agents. It's the old "can god make a rock too heavy for him to move" question.
Of key importance... omnipotence does not require that it be exercised.
@valiance John Wright is encompassed in the body of things I refer to when I say, "The overwhelming preponderance of fraud,"
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
edited September 2015
agnosticism is a knowledge claim and lies in the field of epistemology
it is not a position that is anywhere on the spectrum of atheism to theism
the layman's interpretation is a grid approach
agnostic theist (most people are; "i have no personal knowledge there's a god, but i believe in one or more"
agnostic atheist (most atheists are; "i have no personal knowledge that there's not a god, but i believe there are none"
gnostic theist (a small number of people are ; "i have personal experience of 1 or more gods, so of course i 'believe' in it/them"
gnostic atheist (nobody except teenagers; "i know there is no god")
agnosticism is generally not a position you can act on. while it's important to recognise that you are - in most cases - agnostic, you can't make decisions on this claim, hence the need for the terms theist and atheist. this can be demonstrated with a relatively simple thought experiment:
suppose you must consider that behind you is a invisible, intangible god that can nonetheless kill you. in 5 seconds the god will kill you unless you move.
if you don't move, you're defaulting to atheism; if you do, you're defaulting to theism
there's no option that you can act on for agnosticism. you either don't accept the existence of the proposed god, or you do, even if you recognise you cannot know for certain
a/theism is a pretty poor definition, and we've known this for ages. you get things like pantheism and panentheism which, as general thought exercises, stretch the limits of what we call a 'god' (since god, as a term, is empirically meaningless to begin with). there are also a variety of practised religions that have very weird ideas of what a god or prime force is to begin with (buddhism, various interpretations of the demiurge not being a single 'being', etc.)
some attempts get made by today's atheists to come up with better terms. skeptic was used for a while, but is generally viewed as being too associated with negativity (skepticism as 'poo pooing' others' ideas) and not helping the "atheist image" too much. "brights" were contributed by, i think, dawkins, and therefore sound incredibly pretentious. i haven't paid much attention in the last decade if there's been any new ones.
it's generally accepted that although atheism does not cover spooks, spaghetti monsters, flying chocolate teapots, and the unseelie court, most atheists do not believe in beings that cannot be falsified or proven to exist by science. obviously exceptions exist person to person, and obviously because everyone is fallible, you still get atheists who believe in homeopathy, or don't believe in evolution, etc. etc.
Bethryn on
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
it's generally accepted that although atheism does not cover spooks, spaghetti monsters, flying chocolate teapots, and the unseelie court, most atheists do not believe in beings that cannot be falsified or proven to exist by science.
What if I believe in Schrodinger's cat?
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
it's generally accepted that although atheism does not cover spooks, spaghetti monsters, flying chocolate teapots, and the unseelie court, most atheists do not believe in beings that cannot be falsified or proven to exist by science.
What if I disbelieve in Schrodinger's cat?
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
it's generally accepted that although atheism does not cover spooks, spaghetti monsters, flying chocolate teapots, and the unseelie court, most atheists do not believe in beings that cannot be falsified or proven to exist by science.
What if I disbelieve in Schrodinger's cat?
Fortunately as it's Schrodinger's cat and not someone else's both of your beliefs are right.
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Omnipotence.
That would have interesting consequences per the explosion principle.
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I mean should it be more meaningful? We feel very comfortable saying that other peoples personal spirit-visions dont reflect reality. Why when it happens to you does all that skepticism go out the window? Do you just say "oops, guess I was wrong, God existed all along?"
Sure. My point isn't the simulation argument; my point is we have heaps of reasons to disbelief other people when they rave about their visions, but we don't apply the same scrutiny to ourselves? I would. I would think: "I must be losing it". No less than the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) initially thought the same thing. http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/demons.htm and that sort of initial self-doubt is common in prophets who later prosthelytize for deities they at first had trouble believing in the existence of.
I guess I'm interesting in the steps from: "this is a hoax, I'm dreaming, I'm possessed by demons, this is obviously bullshit" to "this is sufficient evidence for me to upend my entire strongly held beliefs about the nature of existence" Sure given sufficient evidence that change in opinion is the right one to make; but what constitutes evidence? Is it just: because it's happening to me and not someone else it's evidence? Doesn't that validate every bum on the street who has so-called "divine visions"?
Of course then we get to illusionists.
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We're talking about magic here, not something falsifiable and subject to scientific inquiry, how the heck else am I to get a meaningful experience of it?
Someone saying "I saw Shiva for real" isn't enough for me to believe that Shiva exists given the current available data.
A deity making my brain acknowledge "Oh hey I saw Shiva for real" is going to override my reliance on data.
And if I suddenly believe deities exist, well shucks, I guess they do exist. It would be like finding out that there are in fact lizard people in public office.
It depends on the individual's personal criteria and what you're trying to prove. The more incredible the claim, the more difficult to demonstrate, and the more incredulous the person, the harder it will be.
If your claim is "If you bite your thumb and fart at the same time, a fireball will shoot out of your nipple" and it does, every single time, and we can study how it works and the variations and specifics of how it works, yeah I'll probably believe you after the studies are in.
If your claim is "This cat made the universe and then became a normal cat." well good luck.
A god could present me with a sphere of matter that is simultaneously solid and liquid or whatever, and my first instinct would be to immediately experiment on it to figure out whatever properties I could divine (ha!).
This is probably why I enjoyed Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality despite it being a dunning-krueger jerk-off session.
I claim my dog did not make the universe amd then become a normal dog. This is not testable. Your response?
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"I can't prove a negative."
For example, my answer to your question if going with the "something like the Judeo-Christian God" definition of god would probably be that I'd first want some demonstration of being capable of performing feats of the scale performed in the bible (preferably in a way that does not involve the significant earth-side destruction involved in many of those feats), or if we're not talking the Judeo-Christian god then just substitute bible with the equivalent holy book. Then, I'd want hard evidence of some of the unearthly realms (afterlifes and whatnot) that whatever particular religion we're talking about claims to exist, as well as of the actions the deity is claimed to have taken on Earth in the past, particularly the larger scale ones. If these conditions were met, then yeah, I'd be willing to say that this entity is probably what it claims to be. With the demonstrated capabilities of the entity, there would probably, of course, be the possibility that it faked the archeological evidence because it just feels like pretending to be a god to fuck with us, but that seems unlikely. Such an entity probably wouldn't have much reason to give a fuck about that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, for the "wait really, what the fuck does that even mean?" definition of god, my answer would probably be "wait really, what the fuck does that even mean?"
I think this touches upon the larger question of what people (atheist or otherwise) mean by God. There was a Domincan theologian who taught at Oxford named Herbert McCabe, who would debate atheists. He'd always begin by asking the atheist to define what they meant by "God", listen to it, and then go on to say that he didn't believe in that idea of God either - but of course he's got another conception of God that he does believe in and will go on to argue about. Usually this takes the form that God isn't a being among beings, but rather is "being itself", or what the theologion Paul Tillich calls "the ground of being".
Now, my intuition is that there's something kind of dishonest going on here when apologists argue this way, because I've never seen one who would raise this argument if, for instance, the counterparty accepts or is unable to refute an argument for a non-contingent being or the ontological argument (the argument for a maximally great being). It seems like it only comes out when the other person is prepared to argue against the sort of god that is a being. I also think it's a bit tricky to get to Christianity (in particular) from this point. While a conventional monotheist could argue that "the ground of being" is what they mean God, it would seem pretty difficult to assert that one simultaneously believes that God is the ground of being and that Jesus is also God and so also not a being but rather the ground of being. The concept would render the Gospels as unintelligible when you consider it a story about the ground of being giving foot baths and riding donkeys and what not.
I'm going to be a little cheeky here and distinguish between "god-as-greatest-being" and "god-as-being-itself". If some one is claiming to be Jesus in the "god-as-being-itself" way, it's not really an argument based on evidence either for or against. I should note that while I'd say I'm an atheist, or at least non-religious, if some one asked, I don't really disbelieve in "the ground of being", rather I'm skeptical of the notion that it could be described as the sort of God that reveals itself to people in the desert and tells them not to be gay or eat lobster. It would be like some one saying "I am the set of all prime numbers", or "the set of all prime numbers has revealed to me that soft shelled tacos are forbidden" - it's not that I don't believe it as such, just that it is an unintelligible concept.
On the topic of "god-as-greatest-being", my standard of evidence isn't super high and I would be relatively easy to convince. I mean if some one who exhibited the powers of a Dungeons and Dragons type god showed up, said they were either a god or the god, and started raising the dead and healing people or creating things out of thin air or whatever, then I would probably accept that they're a god or at least what humans used to refer to as gods. Heck, if it was some one who just had Superman's level of power, I'd accept that he's some sort of god if that's what he's claiming. Sure, there is the possibility that this is an alien super wizard playing me for a chump, but that's effectively like me going back and tricking an australopithecus - tricking him successfully would say more about me than it would about him
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Yeah if Evil Superman came to earth and demanded to be worshiped as a god, and I said "what if I don't" and he vaporized the guy next to me with his heat vision, I'd get on my knees pretty fast.
If he probed my mind and figured out that I still thought he was a space alien and not a god, well, shit, what do you even do at that point? Sucks to be me I guess.
If he turns playing-cards into doves, I'll wonder how he did it, but I'll accept that he can make doves appear.
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Sometimes people defend agnosticism by defending the claim that we can't really know that God doesn't exist. It is unclear to me that this is so, since I think the argument from evil is fully adequate ground for actually knowing that classical Christian theology is false, but forgetting that--allow that we cannot know that God doesn't exist.
It is commonly accepted that lack of knowledge is fully compatible with arbitrarily high confidence. Imagine a fair lottery with N tickets. The chance of each ticket being a winner is 1/N. As N becomes arbitrarily large, the chance of any given ticket being a winner becomes arbitrarily close to zero. Yet most people who consider lottery cases still accept the judgement that no matter how large N gets, it is never correct to say that you know that a given ticket is a loser--so long as you have no special reason, aside from the odds, for thinking so. After all, it still could win, and one of them has to! As such, you can be arbitrarily confident that a ticket will lose while still refusing to claim knowledge that it will lose.
If this is the sense in which we cannot know God doesn't exist--the sense where we can nonetheless be arbitrarily confident that he doesn't--then, okay, whatever. I (like many, though not all others) think that 'rational confidence' rather than 'knowledge' is the more interesting concept, not least because confidence is the mental state which directly governs rational action. For instance, it is your confidence that a given lottery ticket will win (in conjunction with the payoff) which is relevant to how much you should value a given ticket, not whether you 'know' or not. So I don't really care much about whether we can know God (doesn't) exist.
A more robust agnosticism, then, would be one which held not just that you cannot know whether God exists or not, but that it is rational to have intermediate confidence that God exists--to assign the proposition that God exists roughly even odds, as it were. This, I think, would be a substantive doctrine, much more so than the claim just that we can't know one way or the other. I also think it has little plausibility (and as noted above, this seems to be a generally shared view among philosophers). But why that is so would be a separate issue.
Edit: It's bad enough that we use the same word to describe Shinto guardians of small towns and omnipotent omniscient universe-makers.
That god isn't from Earth is a traditional view, but is anybody an alien if god was here before Earth, and Earth was born here?
The topic of space being created makes the concept of locations suspect.
That's a Gob, not a God.
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It's a relative concept, not an absolute one, like "Up."
So it's fair to hold the opinion that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of the divine.
Of course, this statement is not in and of itself agnostic - plenty of theists would agree.
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Sorry about that.
I think it's an interesting point if you're going to have a conversation with a real philosopher. I think it's utter bullshit when the conversation is later going to involve passing the hat or insisting the ground of being wants me to vote No on Proposition Whatever.
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A linguistics philosopher maybe.
It's goalpost-shifting definition-swapping rubbish. "What if by God I mean running away from squirrels."
That assumes an omnipotent and omniscient god, however. Not all deities of all religions are both, or either.
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Also, omnipotence requires that said god be able to create independent agents. It's the old "can god make a rock too heavy for him to move" question.
Of key importance... omnipotence does not require that it be exercised.
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I've read about deities of flatulence.
it is not a position that is anywhere on the spectrum of atheism to theism
the layman's interpretation is a grid approach
agnostic theist (most people are; "i have no personal knowledge there's a god, but i believe in one or more"
agnostic atheist (most atheists are; "i have no personal knowledge that there's not a god, but i believe there are none"
gnostic theist (a small number of people are ; "i have personal experience of 1 or more gods, so of course i 'believe' in it/them"
gnostic atheist (nobody except teenagers; "i know there is no god")
agnosticism is generally not a position you can act on. while it's important to recognise that you are - in most cases - agnostic, you can't make decisions on this claim, hence the need for the terms theist and atheist. this can be demonstrated with a relatively simple thought experiment:
suppose you must consider that behind you is a invisible, intangible god that can nonetheless kill you. in 5 seconds the god will kill you unless you move.
if you don't move, you're defaulting to atheism; if you do, you're defaulting to theism
there's no option that you can act on for agnosticism. you either don't accept the existence of the proposed god, or you do, even if you recognise you cannot know for certain
a/theism is a pretty poor definition, and we've known this for ages. you get things like pantheism and panentheism which, as general thought exercises, stretch the limits of what we call a 'god' (since god, as a term, is empirically meaningless to begin with). there are also a variety of practised religions that have very weird ideas of what a god or prime force is to begin with (buddhism, various interpretations of the demiurge not being a single 'being', etc.)
some attempts get made by today's atheists to come up with better terms. skeptic was used for a while, but is generally viewed as being too associated with negativity (skepticism as 'poo pooing' others' ideas) and not helping the "atheist image" too much. "brights" were contributed by, i think, dawkins, and therefore sound incredibly pretentious. i haven't paid much attention in the last decade if there's been any new ones.
it's generally accepted that although atheism does not cover spooks, spaghetti monsters, flying chocolate teapots, and the unseelie court, most atheists do not believe in beings that cannot be falsified or proven to exist by science. obviously exceptions exist person to person, and obviously because everyone is fallible, you still get atheists who believe in homeopathy, or don't believe in evolution, etc. etc.
What if I believe in Schrodinger's cat?
What if I disbelieve in Schrodinger's cat?
I missed the fraud bit, sorry. Point me to it please.
Fortunately as it's Schrodinger's cat and not someone else's both of your beliefs are right.
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I don't... uh... hrm.
So should I open this bag of catfood or????
Theists say yes, atheists say no, agnostics say that unless you open the box and find a live cat you probably shouldn't worry about it.
Atheists generally say "Not until the cat actually shows up and meows; I'm not falling for Whiskas' Wager."
Living with cats has taught me that if you tap on the top of an unopened tin of catfood, you will very quickly discover how many cats are present.