Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Sedecrem
I tend to agree and disagree with you at the same time so this will be interesting.
I agree, as a scientist, whole heartedly that one cannot prove that God does not exist. We have no definitive proof that God does not exist and as some others have said we can never do. We can speculate on the existence of God as a probability though. To be an Agnostic i would think you either a) do not bother yourself with such though at all or b) think the chance of a deity existing to be more or less equal with the chance of it not existing.
Considering that if you were 'a' you probably would not be posting in this thread you would most likely think that God has equal chances at either way of existence. One must base probability on the evidence we have. Yes the evidence against God is not condemning but it does not need to be to shift from Agnosticism. (If you are aware with Hypothesis Testing in Mathematics then you will know what i am talking about)
The existence of God is just as likely as the existence of fairies and neither can be 100% scientifically disproved. However simply because something cannot be completely proved nor completely disproved does not mean the likelihood is 0.5 (50%).
|
You can't really frame the existence of god as a matter of probability in any sort of technical sense. Doing so implies that you have some sort of data, i.e. you've studied a number of universes and a certain portion had a god, or that you have enough knowledge of the innate workings of the universe so as to come up with some numbers for the probability of the existence of god. Neither of these is true. You haven't studied other universes to determine whether there exists a god in any of them, and assuming that ours is the only universe the idea of "probability of god" is completely meaningless. And, you can't possibly have enough information to make any sort of meaningful claim on the probability of a god's existence- if you do i'd like to hear about it. The existence of god is just as likely as the existence of fairies, which is just as likely as new zealand acquiring nuclear weapons; which is to say that they all have a probability of x, where x is some number less than one.
Probability comes up in discussions of god's existence only as a means of trying to lend scientific sounding validity to matters of pure speculation. It's a scientific sounding way of saying, "Well, i've thought about it and my gut says probably not." It's not science in any sort of meaningful sense.