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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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No one can prove if a god/satan exists BUT I have proven that no MEANINGFUL (to our universe/existence) God(s) and/or Satan(s) exist and have done so far beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt.
We can prove that god doesn't exist be showing how biology is created from chemistry. The means for determining this is the Paradigm of Types that is presented in the essay "An Introduction to the Paradigm of Types through its application to Cosmology and Biology". The essay is located at http://home.spin.net.au/paradigm/ts.pdf
paradigm
Just use simple logic to help determine the principles relating to the origin of the universe to help reduce the probability of a god existing.
Everything in the universe has a cause and effect relationship attributable to the laws of physics.
Each effect with a scientific cause ultimately must be preceded by a relatable scientific effect and so on, If the second law of thermodynamics is applied, that being entropy, the each preceeding effect and cause is more simple than the one that follows.
Therefore at the point the universe began it surely is at its most simple stable state. Thus its cause is not complex but rather more simple which would account for scientific explanation and is logical. #
The interference of God in this throws the whole sequence out of logic as an omnipotent all knowing being is surely the most complex entity and so does not coincide with creation of the universe . In rational terms if god physically existed then its creation would be the final process in the formation of the universe as its the most complex rather than the first.
who's to say a theoretical god started out simple and evolved complexity over time?
Shock of God
Is this basic logical concept of how the universe functions both theoretically and practically good enough to answer your request for proof that the probability of God existing is negligible :)
The existence of God cannot be verified. Hence, it is possible that God exists or not. However, the burden of proof lies with those who's proving. In this case, believers must provide credible evidence for God's existence and not rely on faith and the Bible because these two are not scientific nor historical. Similarly, though anything is possible, we cannot conclude based on that, otherwise we're committing a fallacy of possibility.
Agreed it makes no sense once so ever to try proving something does not exist, its a waste of time. How would someone prove something nobody has access to does not exist anyways?
It all gets to the semantics of the word God. As seeming intellectual beings, who have constructed a method (Language) to communicate various ideas to each-other. the problem with the word "God" is that it can mean many different things to many different people. This event of "misunderstanding" tends to occur fairly often. How one defines God is a purely personal affair. So one can say that the universe's own existence is proof of what someone might call "God" and be communicating in essence the same idea as someone saying, "There is no proof of God in the universe." A possibly more accurate depiction of the ideas or feeling they're trying to communicate is,"We have no idea what is going on, how it all started, or how it all will end." But that just one thought...
I was talking about this concept recently in another context - we were discussing the extreme problems that have arisen in the health system due to the overclassification of symptom clusters into the named diseases. See, the diseases were never actually "tings", but one we came up with a word to describe an otherwise to long to list group of symptoms, the disease became a "thing" that doctors had to get together and decide that whether patient had it or not. Meanwhile, this disease, which never existed until we named it, is really just an endlessly variable cluster of symptoms that may or may not be correlated, and may or may not have different causes, effects, and ramifications. It's really botched the hell out of treatment and research, but for some reason the industry at large (especially the ultra cumbersome insurance and financial aspects of it) can't understand that when we're talking about a syndrome, we're not talking about an actual thing that we can hunt down and chase out of a person with a pharmaceutical exorcism.
humans have this terrible way of treating concepts as objects, assigning names, and classifying things, and then completely in an instant forgetting that the order was made by us, and we don't have to be ruled by it. We can define, we can redefine, but for some reason people can't seem to *undefine*. <--- See? That's not even a real word.
Stephen hawkings claimed god couldn't make the universe as time did not exist.
Source is stephen hawkings 'Did god create the universe?' documentary.
"It all gets to the semantics of the word God."
Agree, without defining the term god one cannot even start the argument.
If we take into consideration the christian god, i can prove that it is a false god with just pure logic.(check more specific topics on this)
If if is just a supreme being, then yes god could very well exist.(thought the burden of proof lies on the one making the claim)
If it is just a thing that connects us all, or even part of us, yes there is growing evidence that we are somehow connected in some way.
(we call consciousness or collective consciousness)
If it is something else, please be more specific in your claim to get a more specific answer.
Finally.... I love that answer!!!! Great Job... i get so frustrated about trying to discuss something as complex as the idea of God but it definitely Hinges on Semantics... That is the seemingly most logic answer to the Question does God exist. So interest of further discussion what if i choose to define God as the Infinite? That which has always Existed has no beginning and no End.
Very interested in your response.
Matthjar
Missed this post(i apologize)
Infinite god? You need to be more specific on his attributes.
is he a theistic type where he has a character and is able to think/love etc?
or is he just a deistic god where there is no real definition of it except that it is not a theistic one?
Hey look proof that god exists.
http://www.atheistrepublic.com/news/tea-party-darling-louie-gohmert-prov...
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P4r7LswHu2c
In Many way i think that You are my best evidence to support the existence of a Creator God. ;-).
You simply describe a non tangible non detectable being thats always existed.
Everything has a beginning its the argument you theists always use when you fail to understand the big bang.
If were proving how the big bang happened you should prove how god happened.
Fair is fair. Call it a race winner gets to rule the world that is what theists want after all.
Proving that the christian god does not exist is really quite easy.
According to the christian bible, which they believe is the direct word of their god, when a city (Sodom and Gomorrah) or the entire world (Noahs Ark) rebelled against god, he annihilated them.
At the last estimate only 33.39% of the worlds population believe in the god of the bible.
In China alone over 1 billion people don't believe in the christian god.
In Indonesia 93% don't believe in the christian god about one quarter of a billion people.
What has happened to this christian god? Instead of being omnipotent has he been reduced to just being impotent?
Why hasn't he wiped out all these rebellious non believers like he did according to the ludicrous book of christian fairy tales?
Could it possibly be that he is just a figment of the christian imagination? That he does not exist.
Can I ask, what compels some one to ask for evidence to disapprove something that lacks evidence of existing to begin with? Wouldn't disapproving evidence first require the evidence of something to disapprove in the first place? Do you think that the lack of disapproving evidence is valid evidence of existence? If not, what compels you to question it to begin with?
This is an interesting post. with a one practical fault. We need to make assumptions on occasions in order to arrive at the truth. If we did not then we would have rejected both Darwin's Theory of Evolution and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, both were not provable when they were published.
It's a modern distinction, falsifiability, and also an altruism we will never live up to. It's a disingenuous conceit we all buy/do not buy into to support our chosen pet theory as and when it suits us.
Those of us with a normal psychology have developed through the stage where we spontaneously create invisible, sentient beings and ascribe natural phenomenon to them, the charioteer in his chariot of fire that is the sun, the man in the moon, the monster under the bed, the bogy-man at the window (note: the Flying spaghetti monster does not fulfil this brief and as such is not a valid alternative), even the make-believe friend.
Gods, and similar entities, are artefacts of our psychological development, and as such are as real as gravity (they have an effect on real world neural architecture). But having served its purpose in most of us it fades into memory, except where it is co-opted by perpetrators of the unique brand of physiological abuse that is religion or mangled into the species-centric delusion that is the belief we unique among the animals because of our ability to manipulate our environment.
The reality is nothing can be proved, just predicted. Making a distinction between god and gravity (for example) is just a prop for our particular flavour of delusion.
WD
Einstein's theories made predictions which were were tested and verified, just as all scientific theories do. Religious texts sometimes make predictions, none of which are verified.
Science works, otherwise we wouldn't be talking here....I suppose we could pray to each other instead.
Einstein did make predictions, as did many other scientists who were not so astute as Einstein or Darwin and who's names we don't remember because they were not proved (the infamous 'phlogiston' springs somewhat amusingly to mind). It is utterly misguided and totally disingenuous to suggest that there haven't been some whopping mistakes made in the name of science, luckily we can have this debate from a position of knowledge.
I have no idea what you mean by 'science works', that's just rhetorical nonsense. I don't pray, I'm an atheist, have been for the last 30 years.
WD
Theories which were disproved were discarded, that's what science does. That's how the truth emerges. Our whole world works because of science. It keeps me alive, for instance, for which I'm very grateful. I'm trying to work out why you're anti-science?
I'm not anti-science, but it speaks volumes that you think I am. I like technology, I like the world I live in, I'm saying scientifically there is no universal scale by which we can measure human progress. Progress is very specifically a movement toward a destination state, or at very least a movement against a scale that demonstrates movement toward a destination state. Evolution has no destination, it is a random drift of genes. Scientifically and empirically no such scale exists.
You might feel like suggesting all kinds of things are 'better' or 'progress' but this is a very narrow and artificially terminated view. Fifty years ago lead in fuel was considered progress, we now know different. It is impossible to predict the impact of technology regardless of our intent when we deployed it. Even medical changes are not necessarily progress, just look at penicillin, we can now see that it will lead to bacteria that we cannot kill with anti-biotics, maybe in a few decades time a pandemic, we simply don't know. It's the same as suggesting god exists because there has to be a prime mover (One of St Thomas Aquinas' proofs). It's clearly nonsense.
The reality is the products of science - knowledge and technology - are neither good nor bad, it is the human use to which they are put that determines this in the short term but long term no one knows or can predict. To arbitrarily say 'science is good and leads to human progress' is simply not falsifiable and therefore not scientific, in fact it has more to do with faith than it does a disinterested examination of fact. It's an irony that is lost on so many people.
In saying science does not mean progress I am not implying the opposite, which you seem to have assumed. I'm simply saying it is neither good nor bad, it just is what it is and any attempt to apply some weight to it in terms of human progress is unscientific and much more aligned to religion than the disinterested pursuit of fact.
I'm glad you are alive but that is the same argument that Christians use, the 'personal experience of good', next you'll be telling me I don't understand because I don't love science...
Seriously, do you want to turn 'science' into a religion?
WD
@Shock of God "I won't ask you to disprove the existence of God, but do you have any justifiable evidence against His existence that suggests that a divine being should not or cannot exist? Likewise, do you have any justifiable evidence to suggest that the views expressed by atheism should be expected to be true, or to suggest that atheism is more probable than improbable?"
Yes. Absence of evidence is (contrary to the opinions of theologians who fail to understand that propositional logic only works on things that can be subjected to logical scrutiny under valid a priori assumptions), evidence of absence. For instance, the lack of any archaeological evidence for the Exodus of the Jews leads us to conclude that the Exodus didn't happen, because if half the population of Egypt did in fact trek across the desert for 40 years, there'd be evidence of that. It's extremely improbable, I would say even impossible, that such a trek left nothing behind. There is no evidence of the Exodus, therefore there is no Exodus.
The contradictions in the bible, the failed prophecies in the bible, and the proven falsity of many of the bible's so called "scientific claims" and "historical claims" show that the bible is inherently untrustworthy. If a document contains the assertion of its total validity and is found to be partially false, then the claim of its total validity is a lie. If one part of it is a lie, there's no reason to suspect other parts of it are true.
At any rate, the claim that there is an invisible transcendental force that metaphysically defies the known paradigm is a specious and silly claim in and of itself. If a claim cannot be analyzed logically, much less disproved, because its level of abstraction defies logical analysis then the claim should be dismissed, for it is the very definition of nonsense.
"A million light years away at point XYZ a being of pure flubadubical energy exists, called Lord Flubadub, who controls all other energy in the universe, and this must be true, because it can't be disproved, plus somebody wrote a book about it and lots of people believe in it. Disprove it if you can, but I warn you, you will be banished to the realm of non-Flubadubery where your reanimated corpse will suffer serial instances of numerous pineapples in the rectum for the rest of eternity. But Lord Flubadub loves you, and even though he is so powerful that he sees every possible existence, he chose this suffering existence for you to prove to you his love. He saw other existences, and due to his immense and infinite power he could have created any predetermined paradigm with any conditions and given humans any level of psuedo-free-will in any universal system, even one without suffering, but he chose for you to suffer because he wants you to come to him because he loves you. I promise, it's true. And don't believe anybody who says anything different because they'll lead you to pineapple-in-the-rectum land. Lord Flubadub made you, but your makeup was fundamentally predisposed to be less than his arbitrary expectations and so now you're left to a life of total unbending psychological tyranny. Isn't it so awesome that he sent his reincarnated self to die gruesomely to prove to you that he suffers, too? Aww. And yes, yes, he did see every moment of your existence before you existed, and he did choose to create that paradigm knowing whether you would go to the fiery pineapple-place or not. In fact, he foresaw that most of his creations would go to the endless insertion of pineapples and he could have created diferent conditions but alas this is the creation he chose. Now, do as we, the authority of Flubadub command, and by the way, Lord Flubadub needs money. Lots of money".
"Yes. Absence of evidence is (contrary to the opinions of theologians who fail to understand that propositional logic only works on things that can be subjected to logical scrutiny under valid a priori assumptions), evidence of absence."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
It is just absence of evidence for a claim.
A claim is rejected(or not yet considered enough) because there is Absence of evidence as default.
The real problem is the wording.
Evidence of absence means, there there is logical or physical evidence of something including (eg: absence)
If there is no evidence it cannot be evidence.
It is not a theological argument.
It is a fact, Evidence is not NO evidence.
Just because there is no evidence of how a black hole was created it does not mean it was not created.
There is no evidence for now, there might be in the future though.
There might be also evidence that it was always there maybe?
Absence of evidence does not mean evidence that it was not created. Period.
"For instance, the lack of any archaeological evidence for the Exodus of the Jews leads us to conclude that the Exodus didn't happen"
Nope, it leads to conclude that there is no evidence yet for it to happen in that manner described.
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim, don't try to take the burden of proof on yourself.
If a person wants to claim that the exodus happened, he has to present evidence, else he is ignored by default.
Btw
Shock of God has mental damage, debating with him is like talking to a wall.
You cannot reason with him.
WilfDisney - "Making a distinction between god and gravity (for example) is just a prop for our particular flavour of delusion."
That is a bridge too far.
No, not really.
Let's not forget that science provides us with no empirical evidence of what will happen in the future. Sure we have lots and lots of very accurate and repeatable records that tell us so far in history up to the point at which the observation was made we were able to record our observations of a particular event empirically. The best we can do is use this to make a prediction about the future, in and of itself it is only an historical record, it is not evidence of future events. Personally I'm perfectly happy with that, science is a predictive 'guess', that works for me, but then I'm not pretending it's anything other than that.
So without any proof whatsoever that the laws of physics will be the same tomorrow you would state (based on your 'guess') that they will. This is a leap of faith no different to suggesting that a god exists.
For me science is my chosen religion, but I'm happy to acknowledge that, are you?
WD
"So without any proof whatsoever that the laws of physics will be the same tomorrow you would state (based on your 'guess') that they will. This is a leap of faith no different to suggesting that a god exists."
You actually see no difference between those two things? That surprises me. It seems quite a black / white view of things. Thinking that the laws of physics will be the same tomorrow is based on actual evidence, measurements, etc. It does not require a leap. It barely requires a baby step. The existence of a god, however, is based on what?
"Thinking that the laws of physics will be the same tomorrow is based on actual evidence, measurements, etc. It does not require a leap. It barely requires a baby step. The existence of a god, however, is based on what?"
Hang on... it 'does not require a leap' or it 'requires a baby step'? This is a fallacy of contradiction.
You see how easy you slip past the facts hoping I will not spot your contradiction. It is pre-programmed into your mind, you are prepared to jump to your conclusion before you have examined the facts you use in your own reply.
The 'mine is a smaller leap of faith therefore is more valid' type of argument is another fallacy.
You are not presenting a rational argument but an emotional one that doesn't hold together.
WD
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