I apologize for being a random prick, but trying to impress people with a shitload of pompous pseudo-intellectual bullshit… well it’s your right. So I’ll stick a sock in it.

I hope you don’t actually talk to people like this though. People who do that invariably get hit by cars.

I refuse to address the actual argument… it doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure half of that out. Probably just a latte or two and a golf hat.

I love how Christians can be so hypocritical. You know what, Pat Condell is right. Its not God that wants to see us non-believers burn, its you. You people would LOVE to see that happen to us. What does that tell you about yourselves? Fuck religion, the mind is our only tool that can save ourselves from the stupidity of religion.

I know I’m gonna get a lot of hate for this from the random Christians who come here only to bash our arguments. BRING IT CHRISTFAGS.

What this quote means, essentially, is logically valid. The absence of any evidence (proving that A exists for example) having been discovered is not sufficient evidence to claim that something (again the existence of A, to maintain the previous example) does not exist.

If that were the case, then gravity would not exist. Evidence is not a fact, evidence is logical justification of a claim (apriori or empirical), with that understanding of the word, how could you argue that without Newton (say that no other physicist after him ever had the same ideas about gravity) we would have had evidence for gravity? We would not have had evidence for gravity if it were not for Newton offering his ideas as evidence, in fact there would be an absence of evidence for gravity.

As far as I am understanding your piece, the absence of evidence (logical justification) would sufficiently prove that gravity does not, in fact, exist. But gravity does exist. Not having evidence at a specific moment in time does not entail that there will never be that evidence in the future.

Now if you read the quote alternatively as “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of that absence of evidence” then you would be right in saying it makes no sense. That is not what the quote suggests however.

You can come to the knowledge of the existence of God via Thomas’ 5 ways - which is predicated on the ability to have _any true knowledge at all_ of reality (rather than probability) - this means that the whole Kantian corpus (it’s mostly bullshit anyway) is out, as well as much of post-Cartesian philosophy, and any pretensions in the direction of deconstructionism - none of them have real knowledge, so they can’t have real knowledge of God. Positivism fails since it’s contingent on the observer and reproducibility - none of which are prerequisites for objective reality (reality can have one-offs that science will never, ever, be able to deal with, since it’s not reproducible. Individuals, for instance, are excellent examples of this - science can’t account for one person. It can account for statistics, it can account for the hows and whys of their body and much of their mind, but their uniqueness and individuality are _entirely left out_. Okay, so much for the limits of science.)

So, what’s the take-away?

1) Most people get faith wrong. The Catholics - that is, what the Catholic Church teaches rather than what many bad Catholics believe in ignorance - (specifically St. Thomas, St. Anselm, St. Augustine, Tertullian, Pseudo-dionysius, and the various councils, and Pope Benedict) got it right, philosophically. If you’re coming from a protestant background, then it’s really not surprising you have the retarded notions that are glaring in this article. If it wasn’t for the Church, I wouldn’t believe either. (Not that I’m the perfect Catholic, I’m still working on being nice.)
2) You’re bad at philosophy. Stop it. If you must continue, pick up Authentic Metaphyics in the Age of Unreality by….um…Sweeney (I had to look that up - I should have remembered, though, it’s definitely a good book). Then, go back and read a serious chunk of Aristotle’s corpus (metaphysics, de anima, and a few others) a bit of Anselm and Aquinas, and real modern catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain, Garrigou-Legrange’s philosophical rather than theological works, Pieper, and Chesterton. Then go pick up Sheed’s Theology and Sanity. It should have started clicking about somewhere through Maritain, but by the time you get to Sheed, it’s a slam dumk.
3) After that, swallow your fucking pride and get your ass in the Church where you belong, you idiot. Then, you can read the saints at your leisure.

The Catholic Church makes a truth claim, since the God-man made a truth claim. He said “I am …the truth”. You can either investigate the truth claim - which about a billion of us (many of whom are reasonably well educated and tolerably smart - some of whom are fucking brilliant) find is credible, you ass.

Or, you know, you can just write an article to pretend to have proved it logically inconsistent, and can go fuck yourself.

Or are you doing as so many people do and equate evidence with proof.

I have never heard the slogan you said, although I have heard people say “the absence of proof is not evidence of absence” which is much more salient.

There is no proof of God and there never will be, not in our 4 dimensional space-time continuum in any event, except on an individual bases. However, there is lots of evidence, one need only open your eyes.

PS i like how your troll made the first of his three thousand posts “ug not like read so much”

“The most annoying thing about this phrasing is that it simply isn’t true at all…”
Your example of why this phrase isn’t true commits a logical fallacy, that of a false analogy. They say you cannot compare apples to oranges, yet in this case you compare apples to a metaphysical and abstract concept of Deity. This is an egregious stretch. It is preposterous to assert that something tangible behaves and can be known in the same way as something abstract. Perhaps a better example (but less helpful for your position) would be to see a man sitting on a bench and to say, “That man must (not) have morals. I see him doing nothing wrong (right), therefore he has (no) morals.” This, in the same vein, is the argument from ignorance. But how can you say this is false or true? A person watching who believes the bench man is moral cannot tell another viewer that believes he is immoral that his assertion is wrong. Even if they were to watch him over time acting in a way that gave evidence of his moral standing, then the positions become even more convoluted as it must be discussed concerning what is a moral action, are morals subjective or objective, what of mental defect, etc. All in all, to say that a person who holds to the phrase in question cannot be told they are wrong, nor are they, solely based on that premise alone.

Also, your example of the Logician eaten alive by the monster the he logically doesn’t believe in is a bit oversimplified. Any logician worth his salt would not apply such a proof to science; it well known that “If X then Y, Y, therefore X” is not equivalent to the factors involved in scientific study. There are many more factors involved which renders the self-supporting aspect of the fallacy moot. I also find the sudden lack of value in logic and rationality a bit odd and possibly self-serving. Are you asking me to trust science more than logic? Is logic wrong? If logic is wrong, how will I know what is right? Or might that be due to some of the big questions that science and atheism cannot answer that a belief in God might? Or that the evidence you claim to have supporting your belief could just as well be understood to support a belief in God? You cannot deny the brilliance of mind that was and is displayed by those who believe in deity just as much as those who believe in God cannot pass off great atheist thinkers as fools. To set up a straw man in your last paragraph is another egregious over-simplification of the evidence for God, especially after planting a seed of doubt in logic.

Yet in your overall premise, I would stand with you. I say all this in an effort to further the discussion. No one should rest their belief in a lack of evidence against their belief. Those on both sides of this proverbial fence can benefit by actually conversing about the issue rather than arrogantly standing for or against what they “know” to be “true.”

no, the simple argument here is that if it exists, it can be examined and understood better through science. this is a FACT.

if gods were real and had an observable influence on things, you would call that reality, yes? science deals with that reality. if you are unwilling to use the scrutiny of the scientific method it means you are afraid your ideas will not hold up to them. if you really believed in your god, you would be jumping up and down to prove, scientifically, that it exists.

if gods were real and influenced the world, there would be a new branch of science, Deityology or somesuch. because this would be based on events that actually happened and deal with an actual thinking entity, there would actually be some consistency, instead of just sounding like the cacophanous collected insanities of uncounted multitudes like it is now. religions claim to have direct links to these entities, and are even able to question them. because this entity or entities would be both observable and willing to interact with humanity, we could collect some good, solid data on it. now, we might not understand that data. it might not be the most accurate. it would be at best a handful of different subjects to study. we might have to be gods ourselves to figure out the unified theory of deityhood. but the important thing is that there would be a body of real fucking data on these so-called ‘unknowables’. and in the mean time we can work on the lesser theory’s of God’s Favorite Pizza Topping or whatever the fuck it is you obsess over at his fanclubs.

you do see this sometimes, but it is almost invariably mockery of religion. here is an example of how we can divine god’s will simply from how he allows the world to play out:

http://www.gendersanity.com/orlando.shtml

this really isn’t that hard. religions make claims all the time and they are very frequently scientifically testable, and testable to be FALSE.

now, the only people i have ever, ever, ever seen attempt anything remotely like this seriously are the buddhists. they seem to actually try to understand the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of what they’re doing, and the coolest thing about it is they keep records of their techniques! yes! so that it’s reproducable! double yes! the only thing they are missing is the scrutiny of the scientific method to keep natural fuzzy thinking to a minimum. as such, they have more than a little dogma that they follow ‘just because’ but it is thankfully, at an ignorable minimum compared to most others. (and, certainly, whatever moron religion unlucky enough to have you pulling for it. ) this has given the buddhists some wicked sweet plusses to go with their religion, courtesy of generations of practice, note keeping, improvement, and reasoning (basically, science): if you practice long enough you can totally do shit like cook eggs on your head and stop your own heart. this is completely metal and should make it obvious why your religion should practice scrutiny

“The easy thing about arguing against God is that you get to define the very thing against which you are arguing.”

are you fucking stupid? this is the exact opposite of how it’s supposed to go. YOU morons have the positive claim (there is a magic man who contacts me telepathically and tells me how to behave), and it is YOUR job to define that claim intelligibly. especially when the other option requires so much less made up shit (you are fucking mental and should not be given scissors) when you define your claim nonsensically, of course it is going to be mocked and rightly so. what you are perhaps misunderstanding is that we men of science have been at this for so fucking long we have LITERALLY taken on every single fucking definition you mystics have thrown at us and proven them to be either/and A) logicially impossible B) observably and demonstratably false C) completely indistinguishable from how events would play out sans-deities.

so, do you have a god that interacts with the world? how do you believe he does? why have you not done a simple study on it? surely with reasoned measuring of the many miracles he performs, one could gain much greater insight into the very mind of god.

it is because you know that any study, at all, will show all your beliefs to be based on nothing but how fucking high you got last time you meditated, dude, and how it’s totally so mind blowing, for real.

no, I know the value of meditation. it is mental therapeutic exercise, compared to a physical therapeutic exercise like yoga. it strengthens, it adds flexibility and quickness, and most especially it aids healing. it can let you do some pretty crazy tricks, too. but you would be mistaken to think the lovely high one gets after exercise means anything. likewise, when one meditates, one gets high. it’s a reproducable phenomenon. it is an imbeciles mistake to think that feeling good means anything, however.

beyond that? this transcendental state you are all so fired up over, this proof of something ‘else’?
maybe i’d be more impressed if all i heard wasn’t just the same old tired, rehashed, “the great insight i had while meditating is that all things are connected, all are one, etc. etc. etc.” maybe if all that connectedness actually ever meant anything except that the person has a new set of values to be hypocritical towards. disclosure: i have felt this transcendental state myself. it was a wicked high. this insight of connectedness was very profound at the time, but no more profound than the insight that ‘dog’ spelled backwards is ‘god’ becomes to a stoner, upon later reflection.

what else? surely, this state is so incredible and transcendental of anything and everything we know, we could surely retreive SOMEthing from all the millions of people who do it every day besides the exact same fucking blissing out. SURELY, all those TRANSCENDING OUR FEEBLE AND MUNDANE WORLD TO GO DANCE AMONGST THE STARS could bring back some interesting star stories. instead, what we get is “dude, it was fucking killer. I saw everything! you have to try it.” and “you just don’t get it.” very impressive.

Also, can you provide a source or link to the supposed magnets you claim can recreate transcendental feelings? I would love to see this study, if it is real. There is a great deal of scientific brain research currently being undertaken, particularly magnetic resonance imaging, in regards to meditation. Your understanding of the results so far, frankly, seem to be the sort of hasty generalization that “skeptics” hate.

And to the author, it’s smart to admit that you’re only certain to a degree. However, your overall understanding of what people mean when they say “God” is, though accurate for much of mainstream religious doctrine, very limited overall. You do not seem to understand what “mystical” means, because most mystics would say that God is knowable but indescribable. By “know”, they essentially mean experience. By actively disbelieving it seems to me that you are, in effect, saying “science is man’s only means of understanding the world.” This is the point you should really be arguing.

The easy thing about arguing against God is that you get to define the very thing against which you are arguing. I would argue that God exists but questions such as “did God create the universe” do not actually apply because it is not necessary to believe the Universe was created. If you are going to put so much effort into arguing against God, don’t you think you should have a more sophisticated idea of what religion is really about? Do you ever think about Buddhism or Taoism and how they don’t fit into most arguments against God very well?