davidm wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2017 8:13 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2017 8:05 pm
davidm wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2017 7:22 pm
Right. And you don't know that God
does exist, right?
Now, why would you jump to that assumption?
For the same reason you tout the fact that no atheist knows that god does NOT exist.
Non-sequitur. There's no path from "I don't know," to "You can't know." To assert the latter requires rational justification. And what would that be?
But now the argument cuts both ways. The next person along has experiences you've NEVER had. Maybe this person KNOWS that God does NOT exist.
But the evidentiary standard is different for the two sides. The Atheist situation is epistemologically indefensible and hopeless. The Theist situation, if evidence for God does exist, is comparatively straightforward.
Put it this way: what would you have to do in order to justify the claim that God does not exist?
Richard Dawkins knows the answer, and it's the reason he won't call himself an Atheist -- it's that Atheism is inherently irrational, being dependent on a claim that simply cannot be warranted with adequate tests or evidence. There is no empirical test for ruling out the hypothesis that God exists: not travelling the world, not living at all times, not travelling outside the known cosmos...because as a concept, God is understood to transcend all these things.
In fact, if the Atheist could say this: "I've travelled the world at all places and all times, seen all phenomena, explored the entire universe, and eliminated all parallel and transcendent dimensions; having done so, I am in an empirical position to declare definitively that God does not exist," then he'd be wrong. For if the Atheist
could do all those things, he would BE God.
Yet short of all that, he can never be in a position to rule out the hypothesis that God may still exist, despite his doubts.
So the Atheist is in a hopeless position, scientifically. Nothing he can do can justify a blank confidence that there is no God. And that's why Dawkins freely admits, as you have seen, that he cannot disprove the existence of God, and is a "Strong Agnostic," not an Atheist. He doesn't want to get caught in an unscientific position of claiming factual knowledge of something that he manifestly cannot know. He'd lose every debate before he started.
But let me ask you this: how many
genuine miracles would I have to show you in order to justify, beyond a reasonable doubt, that God exists? How many men would
genuinely have to rise from the dead? How many
genuine revelations from God would I have to produce, before your Atheism was decisively disproved?
That's right: if you are honest to yourself, you know it's just one. One
genuine such thing, and Atheism would be dead forever. It's like, "How many platypuses would I have to show you to prove platypuses exist? Just one.
So the Atheist's last defence is to claim no such thing CAN be ascertained as genuine. But this too is a hopeless response. For how could the Atheist claim to KNOW that? What scientific procedure would be adequate to prove that's right? Again, there is none. Moreover, IF (for argument's sake) a Supreme Being were to exist, it would be terribly easy for Him to demonstrate it. He who created the cosmos would doubtless...if He exists...be quite capable of performing all sorts of things adequate to show His existence...all the way from personal revelations to massive interventions, should He so choose.
And all the Atheist could do then is what Atheists do: refuse to acknowledge
any evidence as evidence.