Justify the belief that gods do not exist.

[wiploc]

Some people believe that gods do not exist. (One can call this position "atheism" or "strong atheism" or "anti-theist perversion," anything you want. But we aren't going to argue terminology in this thread. Clarity is good, so you can explain what you personally mean by "atheist," but you shouldn't suggest that other usages are inferior.)

This thread is to make a list of arguments, of reasons to believe that theism is false.

And we can discuss the soundness of those arguments.

I'll start:

1. The Parable of the Pawnbroker.
(I'll just post titles here, so as not to take too much space at the top of each thread.)

2. Presumptive Falsity of Outrageous Claims.



Feel free to add to this list.

[otseng]

Unless I’m mistaken, this was in the context of discussing the need for a universe to have a Creator. So, if you’re not saying the lack of scientific evidence available to explain the origin of the universe necessitates the need a supernatural explanation, then what are you saying?

If our universe is what is considered natural and if the cause of our universe was not by itself, then it must've had a supernatural cause.

But, given that the only thing anyone knows about god are in the holy books, and there are factual errors in the these holy books (I assume you agree with this, correct?), aren’t we already starting off with this proof?

Actually, I believe one can reach Deism (and even Theism) without any holy books.

I’d love to hear them.

Perhaps some other time. But not in this thread.

I maintain that “there is zero evidence for god� is indeed a solid argument. If you have evidence which disproves my claim, I’d love to hear it, as I’m sure many here would as well.

The origin of the universe.

[Danmark]

Unless I’m mistaken, this was in the context of discussing the need for a universe to have a Creator. So, if you’re not saying the lack of scientific evidence available to explain the origin of the universe necessitates the need a supernatural explanation, then what are you saying?

If our universe is what is considered natural and if the cause of our universe was not by itself, then it must've had a supernatural cause.

Indeed this is a key question, perhaps the key question. But what is the evidence that the universe has not always been, in one form or another? In the alternative, what is the evidence the universe did not cause itself in the singularity that resulted in the 'Big Bang?'
For me the key is that we know the universe exists. We have no reason to suppose it has not always existed or in the alternative that it did not cause itself via the 'Big Bang' as some theorize. In any event we do not doubt its existence and we only speculate on its origin if indeed it has not always been.

However, by supposing it had an unknown cause and labelling that cause 'God,' we have entered into the region of pure speculation.

[instantc]

The truth value of a proposition isn't affected by the person who proposes it - nor the reason it was proposed, nor where it was proposed, nor when. That is the genetic fallacy.

The likelihood of a claim being true varies depending on the person who proposes it. If an appreciated academic tells me tomorrow about a new kind of a dinosaur that lived ten million years ago, I have all the reasons in the world to believe that it is way more likely to be true than if my three-year-old daughter proposes the same thing.

Fallacies have got to do with logical deduction. If A is said to follow from B, when it in fact doesn't, then the deduction is fallacious. If the likelihood of A is said to have increased due to B, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with logic at all.

I am not inclined to start looking for academic sources for this, but I stand my ground and maintain that any scientist of the relevant kind would confirm that ad hoc claims are generally likely to be untrue.

[Danmark]

The truth value of a proposition isn't affected by the person who proposes it - nor the reason it was proposed, nor where it was proposed, nor when. That is the genetic fallacy.

The likelihood of a claim being true varies depending on the person who proposes it. If an appreciated academic tells me tomorrow about a new kind of a dinosaur that lived ten million years ago, I have all the reasons in the world to believe that it is way more likely to be true than if my three-year-old daughter proposes the same thing.

Fallacies have got to do with logical deduction. If A is said to follow from B, when it in fact doesn't, then the deduction is fallacious. If the likelihood of A is said to have increased due to B, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with logic at all.

I am not inclined to start looking for academic sources for this, but I stand my ground and maintain that any scientist of the relevant kind would confirm that ad hoc claims are generally likely to be untrue.

It is true that testimony will have more or less weight depending on who offers it, but that has more to do with the reliability and credibility of the person who testifies, as opposed to the validity of the proposition. As Jashwell says the genetic fallacy has to do with the merit of the proposition itself, regardless of who proposes it.

From Wikipedia:
"The genetic fallacy, also known as fallacy of origins, fallacy of virtue, is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context.

The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit. The first criterion of a good argument is that the premises must have bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim in question. Genetic accounts of an issue may be true, and they may help illuminate the reasons why the issue has assumed its present form, but they are irrelevant to its merits."

[Divine Insight]

I mean, this thread is about justifying the belief that gods do not exist. Well, in the case of the Hebrew God the justification that the Hebrew God doesn't exist is simple. The Hebrew God is claimed to be "all-righteous" but the Hebrew mythology has this God doing totally unrighteous ignorant things that I would expect to see only from truly disgusting people.

However, it does not actually demonstrate that God does not exist. Such a God that you describe of being a disgusting God could actually still exist, even if you do not like such a God.

That's irrelevant. The Hebrews are the ones who claim that God is all-righteous. So they don't have the option of allowing him to be an unrighteous jerk like Zeus.

The Greeks did allow for that. Zeus was allowed to do anything he so desired. He didn't need to be righteous or trustworthy. But the Biblical God is supposed to be trustworthy. Therefore the Biblical God doesn't have the luxury if being "disgusting".

I just can't understand how anyone can support Hebrew mythology. That's like supporting the idea that our creator has the mentality and immorality of a truly sick and demented barroom drunkard.

I don't think anyone is really supporting your version of Yahweh.

Again it doesn't matter. If I can't trust Yahweh then he's untrustworthy. It doesn't matter if you think you can trust him.

If Yahweh would do any harm to me at all on purpose, then he's an untrustworthy God. If I can't trust him to be righteous, then I can't trust him. Period amen.

And as I always say, if he truly is righteous then I have nothing to worry about.

The mere fact that I am being open and honest about how disgusting I feel the biblical claims are, from God cursing eve with greatly multiplied pain and sorrow in procreation, to God taking part in the crucifixion of his own demigod son, or condoning this in any way as being a criteria for salvation, is nothing short of an act of pure honesty on my part.

Therefore if Yahweh were to be upset over me being honest then he most certainly would indeed be unrighteous and untrustworthy.

If you had a father who beat your mother and abused your sister and then threatened you with damnation if you voice your honest disapproval, would you consider your Father to be righteous or trustworthy?

If I can't be open and honest with God then clearly God has no respect for honesty.

You can't have a God condemning me for being honest and simultaneously try to claim that he is somehow righteous.

This is a major flaw in this religion. This God will condemn you for merely being honesty and this is proof positive that this religion is a farce. Because this religion claims that this God values all that is good and that righteousness is high on his list of important priorities.

Yet the religion simultaneously demands that this God will condemn me if I honestly fail to believe the absolute absurdities that it preaches. Therefore this religion preaches of a God who does not honor honesty and is therefore untrustworthy.

It doesn't matter if you buy into the religion. That is totally irrelevant because I am being outcast by this religion for merely being honest.

And because of this, this religion is necessarily a fraudulent man-made cult. It can't have anything to do with any righteous God who values honesty.

[FarWanderer]

There is no widely accepted principle that suggests that unparsimonious explanations are not true or likely not true.

Correct, but beside the point. I'm not talking about a lack of likelihood, but a lack of usefullness.

Categorically, unverifiable entities are epistemically unnessesary entities. That means they are useless even as hypotheticals. So why set aside room in your mind for their possibility?

That's what I mean when talking about parsimony: keeping meaningless considerations out of your head.

[Divine Insight]

I don't think anyone is really supporting your version of Yahweh.

Oh yeah, by the way, think about this long and hard.

If even you, a mere mortal man, can easily recognize that I have a "wrong" or "mistaken" view of Yahweh, then what would that mean?

That would clearly mean that I'm not rejecting the "Real Yahweh".

Instead what I would be rejecting is a totally wrong, false, incorrect view of Yahweh.

Now if that's true, and even you as a mere mortal man can recognize this, then surely Yahweh himself would also be intelligent enough to recognize this.

But what would that mean? That would mean that Yahweh would realize that I'm not rejecting him at all but instead I'm rejecting a totally wrong picture of him that holds no truth at all.

He would be elated and extremely pleased with me for not believing that false, incorrect, and wrong picture.

So if you claim that I have Yahweh all wrong, then you are actually supporting the idea that I can't be "rejecting Yahweh". On the contrary, according to you I'm rejecting a totally incorrect, false and wrong picture of Yahweh.

So once again, if this God is the slightest bit righteous, then he would surely not hole me responsible for that. I'm clearly not alone in this view. Many atheists and even non-Christian spiritualists feel the same way I do. The popular Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and all the others also have proclaimed quite passionately that they see an extremely "immoral God" being portrayed in the Bible.

So I'm by far not alone in this. On the contrary, if there is any blame to be had it would necessarily be with the God who had inspired all these convoluted hearsay rumors that have been canonized into the collection of stories we call the "Holy Bible".

I'm certainly not the only person who sees a sick demented God in these stories.

[instantc]

The truth value of a proposition isn't affected by the person who proposes it - nor the reason it was proposed, nor where it was proposed, nor when. That is the genetic fallacy.

The likelihood of a claim being true varies depending on the person who proposes it. If an appreciated academic tells me tomorrow about a new kind of a dinosaur that lived ten million years ago, I have all the reasons in the world to believe that it is way more likely to be true than if my three-year-old daughter proposes the same thing.

Fallacies have got to do with logical deduction. If A is said to follow from B, when it in fact doesn't, then the deduction is fallacious. If the likelihood of A is said to have increased due to B, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with logic at all.

I am not inclined to start looking for academic sources for this, but I stand my ground and maintain that any scientist of the relevant kind would confirm that ad hoc claims are generally likely to be untrue.

It is true that testimony will have more or less weight depending on who offers it, but that has more to do with the reliability and credibility of the person who testifies, as opposed to the validity of the proposition. As Jashwell says the genetic fallacy has to do with the merit of the proposition itself, regardless of who proposes it.

From Wikipedia:
"The genetic fallacy, also known as fallacy of origins, fallacy of virtue, is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context.

The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit. The first criterion of a good argument is that the premises must have bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim in question. Genetic accounts of an issue may be true, and they may help illuminate the reasons why the issue has assumed its present form, but they are irrelevant to its merits."

I agree. However, I am only offering adhocness as an indicator of untruthfulness, not as evidence for falsehood. It's simply a pointer that we give certain amount of weight based on our general experience. By virtue of our experience, on which much of philosophy of science is grounded, we are justified in believing that a claim that is woefully ad hoc is probably false.

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 528 by instantc]


I could (and in the example did) reach the same conclusion as you for an ad hoc defense of theism. This is probably how people got the idea that he was "outside space and time" in the first place.

What you are suggesting is that a proposition can be true, and then someone else can suggest it in a different way that then makes it probably false.

[instantc]

[Replying to post 528 by instantc]


I could (and in the example did) reach the same conclusion as you for an ad hoc defense of theism. This is probably how people got the idea that he was "outside space and time" in the first place.

What you are suggesting is that a proposition can be true, and then someone else can suggest it in a different way that then makes it probably false.

I'm not quite sure whether we are on the same page. Here's an illustration of what I suggest.

Suppose someone tells you that his neighbor dresses up at night and goes out to fight crime. You then pick a few random nights to go check on his neighbor in order to verify the claim. It turns out that both on Tuesday and Thursday nights the neighbor stays home. When confronted with this, your friend tells you that in fact the said neighbor only fights crime on every other day except for Tuesdays and Thursdays.

In my view, at this point his claim has become woefully ad hoc, and we can rightfully assume that it's false in the absence of any positive evidence for it. At least we are more justified in assuming that this claim is false than we were with regard to the original claim. At face value both claims are equally plausible, but it's the ad hocness of the second claim that gives us a justification to reject it.

Timelessness and spacelessness of God are not ad hoc properties, but rather they are grounded on the speculation that whatever caused time and space in the existence cannot reside inside time and space.