Vessel, thank you for your prompt response, but I did write my previous post understanding the difference between knowledge and belief. Please re-read it and you will discover that I had included words like "meaningless" [belief], or "rationally", or "true[th]." The point is that an atheist believes in the non-existence of God, but he cannot know that God not exist.

Vessel, your second post further solidifies a lack of philisophical ingenuity by offering the simplistic yet lackluster rhetoric, "prove a God exists."

This clearly misses the point. I am not asking for proof of theism, rather the falsifiability of atheism.

These two are not the same statement logically. As for your request for falsifiability of theism, I must admit that is entirely too large a chunk to bite off at once; rather I give you the falsibiability of Christianity: 1 Corinthians 15:17. Given the biblical and extra-biblical documentation of the historical person Jesus, demonstrate that He did not resurrect from the dead.

So you admit that hard atheism and hard agnosticism are about as rational as a belief in the blue watermelon? I do not wish you to forsake your ability to think and become a Christian; I want that you not run head-long into something that is not falsibiable. If you think both theism and atheism are unfalsibiable, then both can be true. Therefore one need only move to another area of evidence.

Try design for example. How does a person, who considers an ultimate designer nonexistent, account for design found in symbioses, cell structure, physical constants, physical laws, et al?

Anyone can find four stones, one stacked on the next in an open field, and determine with a high degree of probability that its cause was intelligent.

But can he then look at nature in all of its grandeur in astronimically higher degrees of complexity and design and logically deny a designer, accrediting that which he sees to mere happenstance?

Magilum, am I shifting the burden of proof by asking what can falsify your belief? Perhaps had i asked for you to prove that no God exist, but not with my original request. Right? In no way is this a shift in the burden of proof.

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When faced with conundrum, it defeats the purpose of inquiry to turn to ad hocism. We normally think there are two ways of reasoning, inductive and deductive. Deductive is “top-down” and involves a priori reasoning, whilst inductive is bottom up and involves a posteriori reasoning. But there is a third way, called abductive reasoning, which has repeatedly been abused by theists.

Abductive reasoning is the task of choosing out of a set of hypotheses where we don’t have enough information to move one of them to theory status. It is very important in science, but as you have probably guessed already, is little more than a plug-in for experiment-based inquiry. Abduction relies on which hypothesis would best explain the phenomenon in question. Since theism seems wedded to the idea that the God concept is essentially a panacea to unexplained phenomenon, naturally, they would think they have a firm handle on abductive reasoning. But “best explanation” does not mean “explanation which covers the most bases simultaneously”. This is called appeal to ad hocism, it requires one vastly stretch the available pool of facts. Consider a zealous Popperian and a strong empiricist who have travelled through Europe seeing white swans wherever they go, and the two of them head for Australia where they find astonished, a black swan. The Popperian would simply say that they have discovered a fact that has indeed proven the hypothesis of all swans being white false, whilst the strong empiricist might say the following:

-All Swans are white except for this one, because it is a “mutation”

-Someone spray-painted the Swan black as a joke

-I’m hallucinating

These explanations are a lot “simpler” than the existence of black swans, since the latter postulates that there are two distinct groups of different swans, which is invoking a more complex proposition than “all swans are white”. But Occam’s Razor does not say “the simplest is usually correct”, it says “that which requires the least unsubstantiated proposition is usually correct”, and the way to spot ad hoc is that it has a vast affinity towards unsubstantiated proposition. Now, all a posteriori arguments for God take the following form:

X

If ~Y, ~X

Y

Basically, some phenomenon (X) is observed, and X cannot occur without Y, therefore Y exists. This is called reverse proof, or proof of impossibility of the contrary. It has interesting applications for the topic under discussion, and demonstrates that theism requires one to greatly stretch the capacity for abductive reasoning to the point where we just abandon the pretense of “reasoning” at all and cross into the fray of ad hocism. Or, rather, to return to the previous analogy:

Black Swans are observed

Black Swans can only be explained by that a white swan was spray-painted as a joke

Therefore, this black swan is, in fact, a spray-painted white swan

We can see the ad hoc is in P2 in this case. So, theism generally abuses the Razor and abductive reasoning by wielding it in such a manner that “whatever can explain the most phenomenon simultaneously wins”. This is not how abductive reasoning works. It would be rather nice to postulate this omnipotent superbeing as a simultaneous one solution to the metaphysical questions already raised, but abductive reasoning has more criterion than just “how few explanations are needed”. Furthermore, I cannot defend this proposition, as theists do, by appealing to ad hoc, as we saw with the Pick-and-mix nature of theology where phenomenon which we know are wholly empirical thence a posteriori to Metaphysical questions are being invoked as answers to metaphysical questions, either that, or they just employ a rhetorical tautology like “higher being”. Both are eviscerated by properly understanding how abductive reasoning works.

Obviously, firstly I wish to point out that whatever we are employing abductive reasoning on, theism takes that and runs with it and ends up with propositions which have absolutely no relation to what we started out with. It’s astonishing. Abductive reasoning (the method being used in every a posteriori argument for God) . I hope, firstly, that we understand that abductive reasoning is indeed being employed here. We are indeed choosing a proposition for which we have no empirical evidence whatsoever, which makes it little more than a hypothesis. Rather, we are making a posteriori observations and then saying “Is this the best explanation” not from actual direct evidence of the explanation itself, but rather from how many solutions it can hold down at once. This is what makes it different, from, say, science, which requires that the explanation be treated with the same rigour as the observation of the phenomenon which caused us to cast the explanation. Newton’s Inverse Square Law was not created because we needed something to describe gravity’s relation to mass of bodies, and that we rather liked the words “Inverse” and “Square”, rather it was because the law itself was empirically derived from data. In the case of the theistic proposition, this is not the case, at absolute best, with abductive reasoning (a very limited tool), the very best we could ever do is establish that it may be a reasonable hypothesis to conclude that there is some sort of conscious intelligence behind observed phenomenon X. To keep rolling from there to link to propositions regarding God and the Devil and the Afterlife and Jesus etc, is quite simply to gleefully abandon the pretense of rational inquiry in favor of storytelling).

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Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE Induction versus Falsification, and using abductive reasoning to choose between sticking with induction or opting for the falsification by means of employing the falsification criteria. Or, to put it another way: When the evidence contradicts the theory, do we throw out the theory or the evidence? This depends on whether the “evidence” we have gathered is actually valid “evidence” and the criteria upon which we judge this. The falsification criteria, when not faced with a direct “objective fact” necessitate several things which the God proposition does not stand up to. Not all inductive propositions are valid, but not all falsifications of inductive propositions are valid. This is where so many people trip up. This does not mean that the inductive proposition is valid, but it can be retained. Consider a scenario where we find a black swan that is indeed a spray-painted white span. We can conclude that the falsification in this case is invalid, but that per se is not valid grounds to hold that our induction (all swans are white) is a valid induction (that would be ad logicam). Basically, the point I am trying to stress is that the relationship between induction and falsification is complex.

Now, in my example with the swans, the ad hoc was being made by the inductionist to defend against the falsification of his propositions, but ad hocs can also be made by the Popperian. Returning to the issue at hand, if we consider the swan analogy again, suppose we, Europeans who have always seen only white swans, come across our first and only ever encountered Black swan. Being that we have no data whatsoever except that we have this hitherto unexplained phenomenon of the Black swan before us, it is time to apply abductive reasoning. That is the point of this type of reasoning, to help filter explanations when we have no direct empirical evidence to work with to narrow down to a coherent set of propositions which we may work with and from thence proceed. We might consider the various explanations on offer, from the Popperian that they have indeed found proof that not all swans are white, whilst the strong inductionist might appeal to ad hoc, such as that “all swans are white except that one, that one is a lone “mutation”. This proposition, of course, has no evidence per se, but is employed as an ad hocism to sweep the observation under the rug based on the a priori conviction of the inductionist.

We normally associate ad hocism with induction, trying to force the evidence to fit the pre-existing theory when in fact the evidence entails that the pre-existing theory be thrown out. But the Popperian can just as easily fall into the trap of forcing the empericial evidence to fit his theory (that his falsification constitutes a valid objective fact which disproves the induction at hand).

Either way, we can conclude that within any system, there will be a certain domain of empirical facts upon which we can draw. We can infer propositions form these, but there must be a valid link between the empirical fact and the proposition. The antecedent to a working inference is coherence and direct relationship to the empirical fact, and then we must take into account the degree to which the empirical evidence could be molded to suit other propositions.

Invariably we find that propositions about God don’t stand up to this. There is no link whatsoever between the inference and the fact in question. The inference requires us to stretch our imaginations and postulate explanations which generally get eviscerated by proper methodology, for reasons I have already outlined. Some of them are postulated because they solve so many things simultaneously, rather like the inductionist dismissal of falsificative criteria on grounds that “I’m hallucinating”. This simply shows mangling of Occam’s Razor beyond belief, which has several more criterion than how many leaks in a ship one can plug simultaneously, because when we start discovering underlying problems with the solution, as those I have already pointed out, then we cannot appeal to ad hocism to prevent the solution from being falsified, as this is trying to force the evidence to fit the a priori. Don’t get me wrong, discovering something contradictory does not immediately invalidate the a priori theory because we first need to consider the validity of the evidence in question. If I find a swan which has quite clearly been spray-painted, and my test confirms this, then I have not found valid evidence against the a priori of “all swans are white”. On the other hand, that does not mean that all swans are white, as that is ad logicam.

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The consideration of ad hocisms and the abuse of appeal to ad hocism in the debate. Ad hocisms do not constitute valid proofs. Also, appeal to ad hocism indicates an inability to prove one’s own propositions. Ad hoc propositions cannot be defended on the necessity of a solution, that is an appeal to ignorance, the same error found in Einstein’s Cosmological Constant. In abductive reasoning, it is generally unacceptable to consider the merits of propositions solely on grounds to their opposing counterparts as opposed to considering them independently, the principle failing of Design, to take one example. This usually constitutes bifurcation, but even if it doesn’t, solutions need to be judged by their own merits in relation to empirical observations. If all of my solutions to a certain problem are ad hoc and useless, then there is little point in “choosing” the “best” proposition using abductive reasoning. On the other hand, if a proposition is ad hoc, it shouldn’t even be considered in the pool of explanations, because the explanation was not derived from any actual evidence, but from the desire to keep one’s a priori conviction.

 

Quote: Vessel Even if Jesus did not rise from the dead this would not falsify the statement that the Christian god exists.

Remember what i said about falsifiability of theism: it is far too great a bite to take at once, therefore I gave you the falsifiability of Christianity...

See, Christians hold that a sinful nature keeps him from God, but God loves him and wants to have a personal relationship with him. The human did the crime of sin, and the just consequences of it are death, but this would kind of defeat the goal of happily-ever-after with God. So in an unprecedented act of mercy and grace, God interceded and took the form and constraints of a man and was born in this world to pay for the sin of the human, which man himself was not able to pay. If Jesus were crucified, then the possibility of redemption is there, but what good is a dead savior? Who will plead your case before God? But, if He is risen from the dead, then the sin has been paid for, and Jesus will offer His sacrifice before God on Judgement Day. This is why Paul says in 1 Cor 15:17 that if Jesus did not raise again, then we are still dead in our sin, thus falsifying Christianity at its very core.