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NarcissusSavage
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25 Apr 2013, 7:21 am

CSBurks wrote:
Claiming to know that there is or is not a God is stupid.

It cannot be proven or disproved.

I don't believe in God, fairies, or leprechauns but I can't prove or disprove their existence.

I simply say I don't believe in them because there is no evidence.


That isn't entirely true. You can prove quite a number of interpretations of the word "god" to be false. A god of coffee spilling, who spills your coffee before you can ever drink it, and who always does so. This god can be proven to not exist, by simply drinking some un-spilt coffee.

I do think you are headed in the right direction with your reasoning though.

How you define the word, the concept you have of what the meaning of the word is, matters a lot when discussing it. What you mean by "fairies", for example, could be somewhat different than what I think of. The concept for which I have of a fairy could very well be falsifiable. But, then again it could also have a logical loophole built in, so that it becomes un-falsifiable... but then it becomes meaningless by default.

That is what I see when I follow the logic and reason to its end, something is either falsifiable or incoherent meaningless chatter.

As far as I am aware, all falsifiable concepts of god, have been falsified... and all un-falsifiable concepts of god are, well, irrelevant and meaningless.

I gladly await the day someone can show me otherwise… I may be ignostic, but I’d gladly be shown to be ignorant of a greater truth instead. No one has yet been able, but maybe someday.


_________________
I am Ignostic.
Go ahead and define god, with universal acceptance of said definition.
I'll wait.


Spiderpig
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25 Apr 2013, 5:16 pm

you_are_what_you_is wrote:
I'm an atheist, and I'm not agnostic. I knowIf you consider yourself agnostic, I'd be interested to see what your conception of knowledge is. What conditions must a belief meet for you to count it as knowledge? Given those conditions, why do you consider yourself agnostic?.


I haven’t thought a lot about my conception of knowledge, but “justified true belief” is probably good enough for me so far. We’re likely to disagree on the meanings of justified and belief, though.

Unless a given religion actually makes scientific (i.e. falsifiable) predictions, any deity it postulates is, by definition, a concept outside the realm of any possible human experience. I don’t think any belief about such concepts can be justified, and I certainly have no idea whether it’s true or false, or even if this actually means anything. Therefore, I don’t claim or believe I know there is a god or there is none.

I don’t give the concept of “god” any special treatment, either. I don’t know whether there are aliens living in a distant, unexplored part of the Milky Way, a completely undetectable monster laughing right now in front of me, or a wifhukptabg. Yeah, this is a made-up word with no meaning, but the question of whether a god exists or not doesn’t mean much to me, either. Just because we can string some words together grammatically, the result doesn’t need to make sense.

This is what being agnostic means to me.