Is it within the realm of logical possibilities that God exists and that there is no possible proof of his existence?

If not, why not? If so, why keep demanding for proof as if it's some requirement?

First, I didnt demand proof. I pointed out that his statements were not proof of god.

God being within the realm of logical possibilities, is not a justification for a belief in god. It seems like you are saying, well its possibly true, therefore my belief is valid.

Proof IS a requirement when you make statements and expect someone to accept your position as valid. especially when you use the word "proof" in your statements.

If there is no possible proof of his existence, that is essentially the same as him not existing. I mean, if god is undetectable, has no detectable effect on the universe, then he doesnt exist in any meaningful way, since no events can be attributed to him, and reality is the same with or without the belief in god.( i feel like I havent articulated this very well, not sure how else to put it)

It is the classical empiricist position. If there is no observable evidence, then there is no evidence. If there is no observable evidence, nothing supports the claim.

Evidence is also a better word in this context than proof. It's splitting hairs since proof and evidence is used interchangeably in everyday context. Formally speaking however, proof for shows that A is true, while evidence for A supports A.

It should be noted that a person saying "I just know God exists!" is evidence of God, but it wouldn't be acceptable empirical evidence. But these kinds of argument for God (from the fluffy hippie kind down to the cosmological argument) are typically rationalist positions and void the need for observable evidence, maintaining instead that you can deduce that God exists from thought alone.

There is a middle-ground position though. The "indirect" god, or perhaps we could name it the "dark matter" of theology. Maintaining that perhaps you can't know exactly what God is, but that he can be deduced by looking at the universe. Personally I think these range from bad (intelligent design) to quite clever (simulation theory or deism). Liberal variants of revealed religions might hold that these religions are inspired by divine events rather than exactly describing God.

Huh? You're implying here that without evidence no belief is valid.

It is? When someone expresses their emotions to you, do you discount their position because they offer no proof that their emotions are genuine? Is what someone is feeling invalid because there is no proof that their claim is true? I hear people say crap like this all the time, but it goes directly against pretty much the entirety of human interaction.

What you're really doing is establishing a standard that is actually impossible to meet, imposing that standard upon people you disagree with, and then judging their position based on their inability to reach your standard. It's the oldest atheist trick in the book. Disingenuous, unfair, and unwarranted, not to mention basically a strawman intended to shut down discourse.

Nonsense.

Of course one possible alternative is that God exists, he is just missing from your life.

A truly free thinker or open mind would look at genuine expression of a lived reality that billions of people on earth express as something that shouldn't just be tossed out the window with arrogant dismissal.

Not sure what you mean by valid here, but yes, beliefs should be supported by logical, factual evidence, in order to have the best possible picture of reality.



So you are equating feelings with facts? Im not sure where you are going with this, but the statement "God exists" is different from the statement "I feel like god exists".

If someone expresses to me "I am feeling X", I dont need to automatically believe them. The statement alone can be evidence that they are in fact feeling X, but I will also take into account their actions and trustworthyness. If they express that they love someone, and then go on to treat that person ****tily, I can start to question whether they do in fact feel love.

I find how you are trying equate questioning someones statements to invalidating and gaslighting them, very dishonest.



Let me get this right, asking someone for evidence of their beliefs is disingenuous, unfair, unwarranted, and designed to shut down discourse?



Not at all. If he has no detectable effect on the universe, its equivalent to not existing. Note this doesnt mean that he doesnt exist, I suppose he may exist in some unreachable dimension.

You said

note, you said "no POSSIBLE proof", I took that to mean, that there is no way to determine whether he exists. If you have a way to determine that he exists, please feel free to share ( this is also whats known as evidence, or proof). If your method of determining that he exists, is illogical or not based on reality or contains flawed reasoning, I am perfectly entitled to point that out, or not accept your statement as true.

Asking for proof is arrogant dismissal?

Why? In reality, no beliefs are supported beyond a certain point.




No, I'm illustrating that someones subjective experience of reality may be different from yours, but just that fact doesn't make it less 'valid.' Some people experience God. You may not. When you claim others' experiences aren't correct or valid because you aren't sufficiently convinced of them, or you don't experience them, or that they don't mean some arbitrary evidentiary standard you pulled out of your ass due to some limited understanding of the scientific method, you come off as an arrogant idiot.







No, setting up an evidentiary standard for something that it might not be possible to provide empirical evidence for, which is also not required for valid human experience, and then judging someones position based on that standard is those things.





For you it doesn't. I've met people who were deeply transformed when they 'met God.' I'm not as arrogant a sonofabitch as to claim I have access to why they transformed. You can conjecture all you want here, which I suspect you will; you'd be missing the point again.



Via your silly, limited evidentiary standard that you pulled out of your ass, correct. That doesn't mean God doesn't exist. In fact, why would you expect that God would want to be clear and available to your senses in the first place? Because everything else is (everything else isn't, btw)? Lol. Think outside your little box man, cmon.

A lot of you 'evidentiary atheists' have a deeply narrowminded view of reality, all the while carrying a hubris of understanding you don't actually possess.

subjective experience !=fact. the fact that different people can have different subjective experiences, does not mean that facts are not facts, or that you can believe whatever you want. I mean, you CAN believe whatever you want, but I can dismiss your beliefs as irrational or illogical if they arent supported by evidence. I realise that you are likely going to claim that subjective experience of god is evidence of god, and it might be for the person who has the subjective experience. I do not have to accept your belief as true, just because you had a subjective experience.




If its not possible to provide empirical evidence, then I can dismiss your belief as irrational or illogical. Why should I believe in something there is (little or) no evidence for?




Im not claiming anything here, other than that I dont have to believe in god, or even accept their belief as valid, just because they had an experience.




I never said it means god doesnt exist. In fact I stated at least once that it was possible for god to still exist, but for us not to have any evidence.

Its not about what god does or doesnt want. Its about your claims about god, and whether I need to take them seriously or not. If you have no evidence, I dont need to take them seriously.

Why are you getting so abusive and nasty? I havent insulted you, or said anything abusive?

What you obviously don't understand, mostly because you're quipping the same mundane talking points all Dawkins readers do, is that EVERY belief is unsupportable at some point. Including your belief that beliefs require evidence.

I am not claiming that. I simply refuse to play your game with the rules you invent. No belief is ultimately supportable by evidence, including the belief that beliefs require evidence.







Sure you can. Go ahead. That doesn't mean it is irrational though, which you again seem to be missing somehow.

No one is telling you what you should believe. You are in fact telling others what they shouldn't believe. Amazingly, actually.






You don't have to believe anything you don't want to. Belief in God is certainly a choice.






No? If God exists in the form most people agree upon then in reality everything is about what He wants.

I haven't been abusive or personal in any way. I'm simply making general statements based on my history of interactions with most atheists.

belief without evidence is, by definition, irrational.



I cant choose to believe in something that there is no evidence for.

what you are saying, is that all beliefs are equal, no beliefs are better than any others, no beliefs are more valid( or invalid) than any others.

but your actions dont bear that out. You favour some beliefs over others.
you are also saying that the belief in god is better than a belief in no god. You are applying a standard, if its not an evidence based standard, then what standard are you applying?

Also, Im pretty sure you dont apply this to other aspects of your life. You dont look out the window, and see its sunny, but you know that all beliefs are without evidence, so you get dressed up in 3 layers of clothing with an umbrella and raincoat. You apply a standard in other aspects of your life, why does this one belief get a different standard?

Nonsense. Tell me, where is the evidence that your claim that beliefs require evidence is true? Where is the evidence that that evidence is true? And where is the evidence that that evidence is true?





Yes you can. People do it every day. Faith = trust without evidence

If you took any of that personally you are a highly sensitive person.

All beliefs are ultimately without evidence

It is possible to go down a route of ultimate skepticism. Ala "I can't know that what anyone else tells me they experience is actually what they experience or that what they experience actually happened". Of course, you would also have to concede that your own senses are deceiving you when people rely on measurements (a common component of empiricism) to support their assertions. But it's just a very wasteful and needlessly exhausting way of saying "I'm right because I am right".

It's also possible to go down a route of absolute skepticism. "It is not possible to know if something is true". That argument of course defeats itself.

And then of course, there is the simple little fact that people who argue these things do not actually believe in them. The world does operate under certain rules and they are actually possible to know. I challenge anyone who dispute that to hold their hand right over a lit candle for 15 seconds and report back to this forum with their findings.

To be truthful to absolute skepticism is to go even further than this, in which your skepticism causes you to transcend your rationalism. Thinking that the argument defeats itself is still within a rationalist belief system, and not absolute skepticism. There is still some hedging taking place in that instance. Absolute skepticism should paralyze you and take you out of your head and into your body.

To which the sceptic can just accept that it is not possible to know the proposition it is not possible to know if something is true.

1) People make measurements
How are those measurements certain?
Because the instruments were calibrated
Why are the calibration techniques valid?
Because we used a ruler
How do you know your ruler is accurate?
Because we lazer measured it
How do you know your lazer is accurate?
Because it was programmed with Pi and convert radians to degrees
How do you know Pi works?

When you dig into what you and neeeell call the scientific method and empiricism it comes down to sloppy human slapping around and assumptions. The religious point of view comes down to the exact same thing. So when someone asks for 'evidence' of God that's about the same thing as me asking for evidence that our number theory or that logic is correct. Give me direct evidence that the law of noncontradiction exists.

Ah, but then he also has to accept that he can't know that he can't know that it is not possible to know the proposition it is not possible to know if something is true.

And so forth.

What skepticism painted with broad brush strokes find (in my not-so-humble opinion) in this rather exhausting loop is that truth is an instrument of language and information. By claiming truth is not possible (or rather following that or similar statements to their conclusion), we find that language dissolves into gibberish.

Yeah universal skeptics will just argue that knowledge of something is impossible including the proposition we can't know something.

I think we only create a loop if we refuse to acknowledge the sceptics response when they accept that they don't know that knowledge is not possible. Modern epistemology post Gettier can't even agree on what knowing something entails given that Justified True Belief is no longer deemed sufficient. Contextualists acknowledge that at some level we have to admit that we don't know something but that we know in other contexts when the stakes are lower.

Just ask a journalist; they know everything. QED

It's just a question of what knowledge really is. Some knowledge is informed by evidence, empiricism, or whatnot and some isnt. Theology is a type of knowledge. Just like theoretical cosmology its useless to some, informative and truth containing to others. Anyone who argues it isnt is just wrong.

I think the loop is simply an artifact of language and symbols. When we handle information, we need qualifiers like truth, fact, knowledge. Information and communication is based on "true", "false" and varying degrees of "maybe".

I think what this particular strain of skeptics are really observing is that it seems impossible to know if information is complete.

But to jump from that too "we can't know anything for certain" is just folly. I usually ask such people to do stuff like "put your unprotected hand in a fire" or "jump off a tall cliff with no safety gear and report back to me". It is tongue-in-cheek and said jokingly, but there is an element of seriousness to it. Our models for the world work just fine. That we might not be able to use language to prove its own infallibility doesn't mean everything is possible and nothing so far in our existence or history indicates that it is.

So how do we find knowledge in such a system? That's actually rather brilliantly simple. We compare it. We might not know if information is complete, but we can look at specific pieces of information and see if they work. As long as the claims actually relate to something, this is not problematic. And now everything is not possible. If person A says "Hamburg is the capital of France" and person B says "Paris is the capital of France", it is trivial to show that one of them is right.

And if someone objects "Well, the information is incomplete, under some specific criteria we don't know yet everybody might be wrong about Paris!" - then you simply note that their objection defeats itself. We could construct a similar scenario where their objection is also incomplete. By going down their route, they are implicitly making language meaningless. And if language is meaningless, we can't use language to object to anything.

The problem isn't the skeptic. The problem is the person claiming to be a skeptic, but who just wants a cheap excuse to ignore anything he dislikes.

Before we can find knowledge it seems we should have an understanding of what knowledge is, the problem post Gettier is that lots of people have tried and so far failed to provide a definition that is immune from the kinds of challenges Gettier poses. I may refuse to put my hand in a fire because I believe it will cause me pain, my belief is enough to determine my actions my belief does not need to be knowledge.

I don't think that is necessarily true. You can have some general idea of what it is and a fairly specific idea of what it is not, and that should work just fine.

Again, I think we are confusing the internal references of language with what we are referencing with the language externally (it is for the purpose of this discussion irrelevant if the external exists or not).

Let's say we look at one apple and then we buy another apple. Now we have 1 + 1 apple, and that equals 2 apples. But the only thing we are referencing externally are apples. We aren't observing the one, the two, the plus, the equals sign and we aren't observing truth. Those things are symbolic constructs of the language itself.

So even if we somehow missed the third apply that was lying under the plastic bag, we haven't found any fault with truth and we haven't found any fault with knowledge. We haven't even found a fault with how we gather knowledge. We have have merely demonstrated some caveats of information and how we attain it. It doesn't mean anything can be true, it doesn't demonstrate that nothing can be certain. It just demonstrates that there are cases where we should be careful with making claims of certainty.

And then perhaps someone now suddenly wants to deconstruct the entire thing. Perhaps make a claim that truth and knowledge are completely separate entities from what we reference. That is not true either. They would not exist if we did not need them to reference something. We can't separate language and information from neither observation nor from the discussion, because the former wouldn't be the same without it and the latter wouldn't exist without it.

But no, there is probably no philosopher holy grail. Some concept or idea that could verify language and give us the tool to verify everything else. First we would have to verify everything, and then verify that we verified everything, and then verify that we really verified... and so forth. And we seem to live in a finite universe, so that is not going to happen.

Can't tell if you're defending theists or attacking them, as your argument is so vague and devoid of linear thought that it could apply to anyone with limited knowledge about something.

Sticking your hand in a fire or jumping off a building to prove your pain response or your mortality says almost nothing about whether or not God exists (or really any human experience outside of physical stimuli), and it's just a strawman to think that immediate mental or physical responses to stimuli are somehow akin to the metaphysical questions like what it means to be human or if we were created with a purpose etc

Your reasoning leaves out the possibility of transcendent experiences which is really what ultimately defines us as human

Gettier_problem

From above link:

The main idea behind Gettier's examples is that the justification for the belief is flawed or incorrect, but the belief turns out to be true by sheer luck. Thus, a general scenario can be constructed as such:

Bob believes A is true because of B. Argument B is flawed, but A turns out to be true by a different argument C. Since A is true, Bob believes A is true, and Bob has justification B, all of the conditions (JTB) are satisfied. However, Bob had no knowledge of A

Also:

gettier/

Also, just because:

It wouldn't matter if I clubbed Gettier to death, crushing his entire cranium with a sledge hammer, or hacked his hideous head off with a blunt axe. The scumbag would still be dead, dead, dead. No matter the supposed inadequacy of the information and how transmitted. QED.