Rational people will adopt the simplest and most obvious explanation as why there isn’t any proof that gods exist, and conclude that it’s because no gods exist. If and when we find that there’s any flaw in this reasoning, then we can change our minds and consider other possibilities; but until then there is no reason …
Category Archives: Epistemology
Spirits are invisible, aren’t they? God is a spirit, so God is invisible. But if God was visible, would there still be atheists?
Atheists are generally rational people. Rational people believe propositions that there is clear objective evidence for. If there was clear objective evidence that gods existed, then atheists would believe in gods. But there isn’t, so they don’t. And that would require more than just visibility. To be accepted as a god, the candidate of your …
Why do people use science to back up their claim that there is no God? From what I can gather, there is no scientific proof either way or the other.
The absence of any evidence for gods is the proof that they don’t exist. If super-powered sky folks actually were running the universe, then we would expect to know all about it, just as the citizens in the Marvel Comic Universe know all about the Avengers. Nobody has ever given us a convincing reason why gods, if …
I learned in a university class that proving that something does not exist is very hard to do. Given that is true, how could we know for sure religions or a God does not exist?
It really depends what you mean by ‘proof’. Many people—possibly including the people who ‘taught’ you this—seem to think that ‘proving’ something to them means ‘making me say something I don’t want to’. If you accept that definition, then it’s clear that you can’t prove a negative, or a positive, or anything else, to someone who’s stubborn …
If evolution is a fact then why is there no proof?
Science doesn’t do ‘proof’. It recognises that humans are limited and fallible, and that any answers we come up with may turn out to be wrong. Unlike religion, it doesn’t claim to have a hotline to eternal truths about reality; so, unlike religion, when science turns out to be wrong, it can put itself right. …
Continue reading “If evolution is a fact then why is there no proof?”
What does the traditional empiricist think about modern science and philosophy’s inability to rely on the ‘finality of sense-data verification’?
Sense-data, direct and indirect, is ultimately all we have. If there’s some other source of information, then we don’t have access to it, and so it’s useless to us. We have to build our science on sense-data because there is no alternative, and hope that it works. Luckily it does work. Generally speaking the observations we make …
I am not an agnostic, because I understand what ‘know’ means
My claim to be a strong atheist, and to know that no gods exist, is founded on my understanding — as an educated and fluent speaker and writer of English — of the way that the word ‘know’ is used in ordinary English speech and writing. This allows me to make claims like the following, …
Continue reading “I am not an agnostic, because I understand what ‘know’ means”
‘You might be wrong!’ is not an argument
So many of the questions atheists are asked on Quora and elsewhere boil down to a simple formula: “You might be wrong!” In the following example I’ve tried to show why this is a futile and vacuous assertion. The scene is a university lecture theatre. Professor Wai is speaking: PROFESSOR: “Thus we can see that …
Why isn’t ‘Goddidit’ an explanation?
Something only counts as an explanation if it tells us how to achieve a goal, or how we could achieve it if we had the resources. If you successfully explain to me how to make brownies, then — given the ingredients and an oven — I can make brownies. But if you tell me ‘brownies …
What if God is not…
… inside time and space? … in our dimension? … comprehensible to human minds? … etc, etc… The short answer is that if a god is any of these things, then he (or she, or it) is irrelevant. Something ‘outside time and space’ — whatever that means — can have no impact or interest or value …
Jon's Quora content 