What part of “all the knowledge humans have” irrefutably proves that god does not exist?
The burden of proof lies solely on the ones making the claim that god DOES exist.
Has there ever been irrefutable evidence, provided by any of the religious leaders over the last many thousands of years, which proves that god exists?
No one is trying to make you or anyone else believe, they are just believing and doing their own thing
Unfortunately, that’s not true at all. Religions are designed to spread, like a virus.
They go door-to-door, stand on corners (with loudspeakers or just to give you flyers), they visit underdeveloped countries in missions to convert others, they use their power to influence laws related to reproduction and sexuality, they harm children (i.e. protect pedophiles within their congregation), they demonize and persecute gay people, and so on.
Organized religion, for several thousands of years, have started wars and killed countless people “in the name of god”.
And that’s only the major religions. If you get into smaller religions, then you’re talking about anything from harassment to mass suicide to child wives and beyond. Anything goes when “god is with you”.
OP was asking why people haven’t dropped religion. Since there is no proof of inexistence of the god, there is also no reason for people in 2024 to stop believing.
You can’t prove the non-existence of something… and it’s nobody’s job to prove that something does not exist.
To the OP: There’s a small book called “Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith Paperback” by J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer, which would be of interest. You can probably read it in an afternoon, but it’s insightful.
You haven’t shown that an insurance decision is correct. You also didn’t show that a court decision is right.
Are you suggesting that insurance companies and courts simply roll the dice to come up with a verdict or conclusion? That none of the evidence presented means anything?
How do you make decisions if you can’t believe anything? I can’t imagine having a worldview where evidence counts for nothing and faith guides my every choice. It’s simply nonsensical.
Your faith is that evidence trumps all.
Evidence removes faith from the equation. And the more of it you have, the better the quality of the evidence, the more people can test the conclusion, etc., the stronger your claim/belief/hypothesis is.
This is something we learned as young children: “how did you come up with that result?” requires explanation. If you can’t explain it, then you have no understanding.
If it is so self-evident, you should be able to explain why your faith in evidence trumps anyone else’s faith in anything else.
Why evidence based truth is better than no evidence faith? Again, are you trolling?
What makes you believe the messages you send are being received? Faith?
You pound the “evidence trumps everything” pulpit yet can’t explain why, logically, that might make sense.
I’ll assume you aren’t trolling.
If I make a claim, there are pretty much three options:
I can either substantiate that claim, often with evidence.
Or, I can say that “The claim is true, and while I can’t prove it, I have faith”.
Or, I can say " I’m not sure if the claim is true or not, but I will gather enough evidence, data, test the claim, repeat it, and see if it still holds true (a distilled version of the scientific method).
Only 1 and 3 will validate the claim, while 2 doesn’t even try.
From what it sounds like, you believe that option 2 is as valid as options 1 and 3 for validating a claim and finding what’s true.
What makes you think that?
You keep saying that I haven’t explained why options 1 and 3 are right. I’m saying they are the best options we have.
Absolutely, 100% better than option 2, which is lazy and completely disregards any truths.
If you’re saying we can neither prove nor disprove the metaphysical, we’re on the same page.
Give me an example of a metaphysical claim, and I will tell you whether it can be proven or disproven. Simply talking about broad subjects doesn’t help to clarify the discussion.
In the context of religion, some claims made would be pretty easy to prove if they were true.
For example, many Christians believe that the earth is approx. 6000 years old. This would be very easy to prove, but we’ve already disproven it 1000x over.
Another claim, for example, is proving whether prayer works. When actually tested, we know that it doesn’t (at least, not in the spiritual/“direct connection with god” sense).
If you’re saying the metaphysical doesn’t exist because no one has proved it and they have to prove it first, you don’t understand how logic, as we understand it today, works.
I’m not saying that AT ALL. I’m pretty agnostic about most claims.
If someone makes a claim, be it metaphysical, paranormal, or otherwise, then that claim needs to have been formed on some basis of evidence. If that evidence cannot be presented and/or observed and/or tested and/or repeated, then it doesn’t support the claim.
People who KNOW that heaven exists have never proven that it does. Neuroscientists can give a dozen reasons why someone might have a near-death experience where a person claims to have “visited heaven”, yet someone steeped in religion will never accept those explanations.
Really, that’s part of what makes religion so awful. It causes people to believe things that are so illogical, that you’d have to suspend reality in order for it to make any sense. And even then, it’s 99% crazy.
Edit: to highlight your issues a little, “it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist” isn’t logically sound.
I disagree. If I were to hold out my empty hand and say that “the ball in my hand does not exist because it does not exist”, that would be true, would it not?
Unlike Russell’s Teapot, circular logic is an actual, provable fallacy rather than a rhetorical tool that is not a result of logic.
Circular logic is a strategy used in religious debates almost as a means to deadlock the debate (which is to their advantage, since they can’t prove anything otherwise).
That’s why the rebuttal, in the context of a religious claim, “It doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist” is as lazy and unhelpful as saying “god exists because god exists”.
I’ve spent too many hours watching “debates” where the religious side will simply spiral into a black hole of laziness as to render the entire debate a complete waste of time. They’ll say “you can’t know that god doesn’t exist because you don’t know everything”, yet they’ll turn around and say that they are 100% certain that god exists because they know god exists. I mean, where can you go from there?
You’re very focused on religion and seem to be missing all of the points about logic.
Religion is quite literally the topic that the OP brought forth. And there is no logic when it comes to religion, so why bother sidelining the thread with discussion about logic rather than region?
<span style="color:#323232;">If someone makes a claim… it needs… evidence
</span>
This is problematic without a rigorous definition of evidence. I’m assuming you mean something along the lines of repeatable and independently verifiable since you won’t take a claim at face value.
I think you’re overcomplicating things.
If someone says that a character named Noah put two of every species of animal on a boat, can that be verified? Is it even possible mathematically, knowing what we know about how many species of animals exist, and the volume that two of every species would take up? Yes, and mathematically, the story is BS.
What about the age of the earth? We know that it’s older than 6000 years, so that’s another religious belief thrown out the window.
What about the age of humans? The bible has people 400+ years old. Can this be proven? We know that there are no humans alive or ever alive, that could be that old.
It gets even worse when you think about the miracles of saints. Why is it, at a time when we could absolutely be able to verify whether something is a miracle or not, we don’t get miracles.
God was doing all sorts of things merely two thousand years ago. Crazy thing like turning people into salt and raining fire down from the sky.
These things don’t happen any more, conveniently.
In other words, you can’t use logic and reason to say those that believe in religion are idiots because you have just as much proof as they do (just faith) if we accept the basic axioms that drive our logical system.
I’m asking them to prove what they believe in to be true. It’s as simple as that.
People devote their entire lives believing. They ruin their kids lives through their beliefs. They also ruin the lives of others through the stripping away of basic rights, all based on their own beliefs.
It really isn’t too much to ask for their beliefs to be challenged.
The lack of something in your hand is not necessary and sufficient to prove the ball’s existence. The only claim we can make is that your hand is empty.
And yet I can claim that there is a god, without producing evidence of that god, and everyone is to believe that the god exists? Because that’s what religious folks are doing.
At least with the ball example, I proved that it doesn’t exist by showing you that there is no ball. Why is there no ball? Because it was made up. It never existed. See how that works?
Here is a metaphysical claim for you to chew on: it is possible to know whether or not it is possible to prove a claim.
Yes. Courts, scientists, and insurance companies do it all the time.
Do you have an example of a claim that we can test this out on?
You want to attack the metaphysical for its belief system yet you completely miss when you make the same logical leaps for yours.
I want to challenge baseless claims. My sarcasm in response to baseless claims is intended to show how completely useless “logical leaps” actually are. I’m surprised you haven’t caught on.
How can insurance companies prove something?
Interviews, dash camera footage, police reports, etc. Evidence of what happened is gathered.
If a court makes a decision, is that the correct one?
If they are applying the law fairly and without prejudice, then it is often correct.
But in a court, you at least have the opportunity for both a plaintiff and defendant to present evidence of their position.
If you had someone in court say that “god told me to do it”, they had better have some strong evidence supporting that, no? In those cases, that person’s lawyer may try to argue that their client is insane, and rightfully so.
Only you can’t use logic or anything that comes from logical systems because, based on your attacks on religion, you’re not allowed to use the faith to prove the faith.
Faith = the belief in something without evidence. Faith itself is not evidence for anything.
If religion is going to use faith to “prove” all their claims, they will be challenged.
Why are 1 and 3 the correct options? Why are they even correct? Why is 2 wrong?
Why aren’t they correct?
And why isn’t 2 wrong?
you’ve done nothing other than say “if I provide evidence,” that’s enough.
I’m saying that providing evidence is better than not providing evidence, if the objective is to verify/confirm/support a claim.
This is universally accepted and applied to just about every aspect of life. It’s how you make daily decisions, too. I’m sure you’ve based 100 decisions on this method just in the last day.
Here’s a thought experiment. I take you into a closed room, put purple film over a window, and tell you the sky is purple. You’ve now got irrefutable proof that the sky is purple.
Sorry, but you don’t have irrefutable proof that the sky is purple, but you can say that the sky appears purple from inside that room. You haven’t been able to explain why it’s purple, you’ve only made an observation.
Science has already explained why the real sky appears in colours, and it was done through more than believing the lie of a single person.
From everything you said, it would be just as right to believe (the lie) without any further investigation. Or even worse, you’d make up a story about the gods being upset with you, and they turned the sky purple.
But wait, you say! I can go outside and find different evidence, so clearly having evidence alone is not enough.
That makes no sense. Going outside to get a different perspective, realize that the sky does not appear purple, and enter a line of further inquiry and investigation is exactly how you’d get answers.
The more evidence you gather, the closer you get to the truth. And when you have enough evidence, you’ll be able to prove and test your claim with mathematical precision.
We could even sidestep the problem by saying that the sky is colorless; it’s the refraction of the light that makes the color. Different frame; different counter.
With evidence to support that hypothesis, you would be as close to right as you can be.
It would surely be better than blindly believing the liar, no?
You can’t prove the non-existence of the god(s) that today’s religions worship, because their goalpost is always moving and logic isn’t in their belief system. That’s because religiosity allows someone to suspend logic and rational thought. This leads to someone believing in illogical things as fact, even if fact hasn’t been established.
Yes, the fact that evil exists would prove that an all-powerful, loving god who will do anything to protect “his children” doesn’t exist.
But then the religious folk would say, “evil things happen as part of God’s plan.” and that shuts down your evidence. It’s always like this, because faith is quite literally “believing in the absence of evidence”.
It’s super easy to disprove, for example, the “power of prayer”, but the person claiming that prayers are answered should be the one to prove this, in a way that can be tested and verified.
If someone claims there is a teapot floating in space, cool, they need to prove its existence and the rest of us can go around as if one doesn’t exist. If someone claims there isn’t a teapot floating in space, now the burden of proof is on them.
Disagreeing with the first claim doesn’t put the burden of proof on you. It merely keeps the ball in the first claimant’s hands.
You can believe whatever the fuck you want; you just can’t prove it and, in most metaphysical cases, you can’t disprove it either.
Again, nobody is expected to disprove metaphysical claims. Claims for the metaphysical should be proven by whoever is making them.
Trying to disprove something that hasn’t been proven to exist could be as easy as saying “It doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist”, and that would be logically and factually sound.
The person who is holding the belief in god(s), ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, Santa Claus, Men in Black, a flat earth, a young earth, and anything else you can dream up is the only person who has to justify those beliefs.
This is why I wish we had more people like James Randi around, who put up real money to anyone who could prove their claims of paranormal, magical, psychic, or other metaphysical claims to be true. In over 50 years, nobody could prove what they claimed. Randi didn’t have to disprove anything.
I haven’t had a SINGLE adblock message when I use YouTube with Adguard + Ublock origin and the FF “strict” option for privacy.
But I also don’t log into any accounts.
My wife was getting messages all the time (logged in) with the same adblockers. I installed an add-on that speeds up ads so fast that you don’t even notice them. LOL Problem solved!
Wanting to put together some backpacks filled with cold weather stuff like hats gloves and a thrifted puff jacket to hand out to the Homeless in my area, what are some other inexpensive items you would recommend I put in them?
Before using the Adguard Temp Mail service, check to see if your own email provider offers the same.
I’m with Mailbox, and they offer temp emails, email aliases, and email extension (“+” to separate email addresses.
Side note, as a paying Adguard customer, I’m salty that they got rid of their active support forum. I will not go to Reddit or some third-party site to ask questions. Their support forum was really helpful for many years, and removing it is a massive step backwards.
I love it. In fact, I ended up getting a second account for small business.
For Linux, I couldn’t really tell you how well it works. It works well with Thunderbird on Windows and Fairemail on Android. But I usually use the web interface, which works everywhere 😀
I use DavX on android to sync my contacts and calendar without any issues.
The price is great, and I appreciate their transparency and privacy-respecting business model.
I don’t know if Reddit is just trying to be a dick or what, but as I started to delete some comments, I’m not able to see any comments in my profile “hasn’t commented on anything”, but if I visit actual posts where I’ve commented, I can clearly see my comments there....
Because it’s not about productivity, it’s about obsessive control.
If it really was about productivity, most places would consider 4-day workweeks, flexible time-off, bathroom breaks without punishment, additional training and support to those who need it, a focus on work/life balance, and just basically treating workers like human beings and not robots.
Why in the year 2024 and with all the knowledge humans have now do people still believe in religion?
Youtube has better anti-adblock now. Other than Invidious, any way around it? Purging and re-dowloading the ublock stuff didn't work
Google Update Reveals AI Will Start Reading All Your Private Messages (www.forbes.com)
Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages (lemmy.world)
Greetings everyone! Daniel here, I’ve been working on Linkwarden part-time over the past few months....
What are some good items to put in a cold weather care kit to hand out to Homeless folks in my city?
Wanting to put together some backpacks filled with cold weather stuff like hats gloves and a thrifted puff jacket to hand out to the Homeless in my area, what are some other inexpensive items you would recommend I put in them?
AdGuard Temp Mail: new temporary email service launched (www.ghacks.net)
Started deleting my Reddit comments, now my profiles shows no comments at all, despite them being there!
I don’t know if Reddit is just trying to be a dick or what, but as I started to delete some comments, I’m not able to see any comments in my profile “hasn’t commented on anything”, but if I visit actual posts where I’ve commented, I can clearly see my comments there....
‘Constantly monitored’: the pushback against AI surveillance at work (www.theguardian.com)
2FA for Apple ID... you need two hardware keys that you use ON A REGULAR BASIS??
I wanted to add hardware 2FA to Apple ID, and noticed this particularly strange requirement....
How to stay safe on Strava (cyclingmagazine.ca)
Some good tips to preserve a bit of privacy for those who use the Strava platform....