Your ideas about “deityology” or whatever are kind of funny, but still lacking in any sort of sophistication. By saying “God x influences world y in such and such a way” you’re making an implicit assumption that God x is a separate “thing” from world y. Spirituality is the idea that you can see with your own eyes that God x is world y, and the only way to understand the importance of this is to see it for yourself. You say you’ve heard the same old BS about unity, connectedness… but you must not have been paying attention if you still think God is a separate “thing” apart from everything else, controlling things from afar like a puppeteer. Of course, this is certainly how many religious folks view the world and I think it’s dead wrong… but the philosophical leap to scientific materialism is just going to another extreme. Science examines reality based on a set of assumptions about how things work, and is only geared towards objective phenomenon. Subjective experiences are not scientific and hence trying to study a subjectively experienced phenomenon is utterly futile. Also, you can get high and call it a transcendental experience, but that doesn’t mean you understand what it means.

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.”