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Originally Posted by politicophile
What does this tell us about the Easter Bunny or unicorns? Surely you don't believe that it is equally rational to either believe or disbelieve in those? I am my bedroom right now and cannot see my living room. Despite my lack of proof, however, I sincerely believe my living room to be free of llamas. Further, I would have some doubts about the rationality of someone who believed without proof that my living room is indeed home to one or more llamas.
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It doesn't tell you anything about the Easter Bunny or unicorns nor should it. Science only delves into the known. It's senseless bringing up unknowns as science can't dispute their validity. If someone says that there are llamas in your living room, then you can easily form a hypothesis and test it. Simply walk into your living room and check to see if there are any llamas walking about. If there aren't, then you can safely conclude that there are no llamas in your living room as, through induction, llamas have been observed to be visible and a lack of visible llamas would be equated to a lack of any llama in your living room.
Now, if I tell you that God is in your living room I'd love to see you dispute it. You can't, as induction (The basis of science) is useless. We can't observe God and, thusly, can make no rationalizations about his being. Remember, science can't test the unknown; Only the known.
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Originally Posted by willravel
My favorite of all non-arguments. "You can't prove god doesn't exist, therefore you're all wrong." You cannot prove a negative, so the burden of proof is in theist's court.
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Now, if that were my argument I would have said "Science can't disprove God there he must exist!" which, as I'm sure you're well aware, I didn't. I hate repeating myself, but sometimes I feel I must. The aim of science isn't to
prove, but rather to
disprove. Science follows statistical logic. You have a hypothesis and you have a null hypothesis. To accept the hypothesis you must reject the null hypothesis. If you can't reject the null hypothesis then either one of two things is correct:
1.) Your hypothesis is wrong or
2.) You're unable to form a conclusion with the given data.
There are only two possible hypotheses (God exists and God doesn't exist), neither of which is disprovable. Therefore, science simply states that God
might exist but there is no scientific evidence supporting that claim. Therefore, it's inherently faulty to claim that God doesn't exist because you can't prove him.
(I know this will be ignored.)
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I'll tell you what, assemble a panel of the most distinguished thinkers of all time from every field of expertise. I'll make a claim that I can turn an empty coke bottle into a star with nothing more than my remote control for my tv. They have to disprove it. Guess what? That's what you're asking of us.
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I'm pretty sure they could disprove that (Hell, I could disprove that) as it'd be easily observable that the coke bottle would do nothing/go nowhere
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What people that make this non-argument don't understand is that logic actually works this way: You cannot prove the nonexistence of something. All you need is a complete lack of proof for something.
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Ummm... No. You would be laughed at if you walked into a scientific convention and said "<Insert name of object here> doesn't exist because I can't prove it!". A lack of proof doesn't equal non-existance. Disproof of existance, however, equals non-existence
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God is the most complicated and unlikely answer of all because he/she/it is said, in religious texts and ancient stories, to work outside of the laws of nature. According to Occam's Razor, god is the least likely possibility in any possibility imaginable.
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Not really. The existence of God has a higher statistical probability than dose that of various multiverses, one of which is able to sustain life. What most atheists assert, however, is that there is a fourth option that we don't know yet which is more likely than God.