Atheists - Check Mate!

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PPR is all about the perversion of concepts.

I did accept Orwell's argument. Let us say the absence of God is statement p, and the presence of God is statement q. Then Orwell's statement is that "absence of evidence for q is evidence for p". I agree with this. But also, the opposite is true as " "the absence of evidence for p is evidence for q". I believe this is very confusing and I am very sorry. I apologise if "nullify" was anaughty term. I mean that the argument can be used in the opposite way.

EDIT: I was silly and believed initially that Orwell was taking part in the God argument. So my above argument is not against him, but to be used in the God argument.



^^ I must say that sometimes I feel that I agree with you a little here Awesomelyglorious. I believe greatly for animal rights (a very broad term, however I shall not explain too much here) and gay rights. However, I become very scared when individuals deny these rights with no logic or reason. I understand they believe strongly in their own beliefs, but sometimes I feel it would be happy that they also try to use a little logic and reasoning as well.

But in such a circumstance, where a human with conflicting beliefs to my own was to harm another individual, then I believe that I would fight them and attempt to stop them. But if they do not, then their opinion (in my opinion) is as valuable as my own. (It is still perhaps valuable also in the above situation, but I must do what I feel is right, as must they).

Orwell, I am very much enjoying this debate with you and Awesomelyglorious. Now, concerning the USB stick in your room. Suppose you cannot find your USB stick. But, an acquaintance (name this acquaintance A) is absolutely certain that they saw the USB stick in your room only a few moments ago. Now, this evidence in my opinion. This is what I mean for the above. This is not proof. And, of course, they may certainly be incorrect. But so may you in your searching. No matter how many times you search, there is always a possibility that you have missed the USB stick. However, of course, the more you look and do not find the stick, the greater the probability that the stick is not present in the room.

However, there is a very big difference between this problem and the evidence of God. In the above problem, we can very much search the entire room for the USB stick. We know what the USB stick looks like. However, for the existence of God, where do we look? We cannot search the entire Universe near once, never mind that fabric of existence. We do not really know what form a God takes, so looking is not really a possibility. I suppose this maybe countered by saying that you have not experienced God in the past. But how do we know? God may have caused the Big Bang. There is no evidence against this (if indeed the Big Bang did take place).

Again, I am sorry if I am very naughty, however the above are reasons to doubt, but not to dismiss completely, the existence of a God. (Again, particular Gods and religions are very different).

I am very sorry if I am incorrect.

The story seems somewhat more sensationalist than necessary. 17% of physicians know of a problem colleague, and 2/3 of them do report the colleague to the relevant authority. This is just another example of extremely high expectations in the industry. Where else do you have such high rates of whistleblowing?

Curious though, as one statement is a positive claim (X exists) and the other is a negative claim (X does not exist). The evidence for a negative claim is usually the lack of evidence supporting the positive claim.


Correct. It is far easier to determine whether my USB drive is in my apartment than it is to determine the existence of a higher power. It may or may not be easier to decide the existence of specific conceptions of God, but a God in the abstract sense is probably unfalsifiable.

^^ Greetings again Orwell. Thank you for discussing with me. I believe this is very fun. In response to the above quote, a positive claim is the negative of a negative, and therefore your statement applies to positives as well. I believe this may be explained using set theory.

Not quite. Perhaps you can form some set theory analogy that will make sense of it, but in reality I would say that there is a difference between positive and negative statements. To go back to my USB analogy:
Positive claim: The USB drive is in my apartment.
Negative claim: The USB drive is not in my apartment.

Now, what evidence could exist for either statement? If I find the USB drive, then I have not only evidence, but proof that it is indeed here. If I fail to find it (an absence of evidence) then I might conclude it is not here (is evidence of absence). But how can there be an absence of evidence for the negative claim? The only way that is possible is if I look under my bed and discover that the missing USB drive is indeed there, but then there is no longer an absence of evidence; rather we have proof on one side. An absence of evidence that it is not in my apartment would be failing to find the drive elsewhere, providing I searched the entire universe and thus concluded that the only other place it could be is my apartment. So you see, the argument really does not work very well at all in reverse, because the notion of searching the entire universe and failing to find the flash drive and thus concluding that it might be in my apartment is ridiculous.

Yeah, that is in practice a rejection of Orwell's argument. Basically, you are accepting the position Orwell is rebutting against, which kind of entails not accepting Orwell's argument. That being said, you are basically asking that negatives be proven. That is to say that p = ~q Which means that the absence of evidence for ~q is evidence for q, but the issue is that you are saying that you have to have evidence of a negative in order to not be agnostic about a claim. The issue is just that this doesn't work for the following reasons:
1) Evidence of an absence is by far less easy to find than evidence of a presence in most instances.(what would count as evidence of an absence of unicorns without being an absence of evidence of a presence?) And thus, evidence of presence or the lack thereof would be more important in most schemas even if we did take your position to be relevant.
2) For the most part things are doubted until evidence, rather than held as agnostic until evidence, which does not fit in with your schema. If I told you that there were floating clowns in space, most people wouldn't be agnostic on the matter, it seems silly and absurd, and lacks evidence.

Hopefully that makes some sense.

A better comparison might be, "This flash drive exists."

I search my entire apartment, and cannot find the flash drive. Does this mean that the statement is false, and that the flash drive does not exist? Or does this merely mean that my search parameters were inadequate to demonstrate the truth or falsity of the statement?

As for Eris - hey, Eris has a planet named for her! Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury - they all have planets named after them. Is there a planet named for this God person? Didn't think so! Ha - that means Eris is more real than God!

^^ Hello again Orwell. I perhaps believe that the USB drive analogy begins to fail here because this is a finite example. As DeaconBlues has said, we are not looking for a God in a particular place. I shall try to use set theory as an analogy to explain and compare the USB drive analogy with the actual existence of God.

Suppose A is the set of all places that your USB drive could be in your apartment. Then in many ways, A is a finite set. Then, B=U/A (where U is the set of all places in the universe and / is the set subtraction operator) is an infinite set. So we could search all places in your apartment and not find the drive, which would provide evidence that thd drive is not in your apartment. But we can not search B, and hence if we cannot find the drive there then this would provide evidence that the drive is in A, as B is infinite.

Now if we consider God. Now we have

Positive claim: God exists
Negative claim: God does not exist

Evidence for the postive claim may come in many forms, for instance the bible. If God does exist, then he may not be physical, and thus we cannot find him in the same way as the USB drive. Absence of evidence for the positive claim would be no accounts of humans interacting with God or such (but the bible is such an account).

What is evidence for the Negative claim? I am not really sure that there can be evidence for any abitrary God, but for a particular God, there could be if his definition is somehow contradicted. (For instance, with the evolution debate). Absence of evidence for the negative claim would then, for instance, be a lack of such contradictions.

Sorry if this if silly of me.

^^Greetings AwesomelyGlorious. I believe that your reasons against my agnosticism are very subjective. The difficulty of finding evidence does not matter. If there is no conclusive evidence on either side, then I shall consider both sides. Although even if there was, and the humans in question did not believe the evidence, I would personally still respect their beliefs. (Although as I have said, sometimes I become scared and frustrated when this would harm others).

I feel that your second point is not logically argued. In many ways, I feel this basically says "Everyone else does this, so you must too".

Well, the issue is that at a certain point "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is justifiable, so I think there is a need to to recognize that there are circumstances that that is valid, given the notion that a conclusion based on lack of evidence is related to the appeal to ignorance fallacy.

I think that the issue related to USB drives can be easily fall into error, depending on who makes the claim and wether the search was made througfully, I don't think I can claim evidence of the negative from a USB drive from just one search though, as I would need to confirm that, probably several times, and with help. I mean, I can claim and claim that my USB drive is not in my apartment, when it turns out to be actually there, at some spot that it was very difficult to see, so the negative claim turns out false, although I believe you could say that the negative claim was falsifiable.

We may agree though that it is safer to say that a negative claim is actually proven when the positive claim is replaced by another. Such as "My USB drive is in my car."

And well, "pressumption of a negative for lack of a positive evidence" seems to do better than "evidence of a negative for lack of a positive evidence" in general terms.

My second point is an appeal to an intuition that I consider myself to have and that I consider common. Perhaps you would actually think clowns in space is more credible than I do, and that is something that would have to be addressed if there was such a difference in views in moving forward. After all, all things we know start from our intuitions and conceptions of how the world works.

Those are, from my perspective, effectively the same thing. You say you will presume the negative until given evidence of a positive, I say that I take the lack of evidence for a positive as evidence for a negative. The inputs and outputs for both thought processes will mirror each other, so differences in the details of the execution are irrelevant.

^^ I am sorry if I am being difficult Awesomelyglorious. My reason for agnosticism stems from that fact that I believe I must at least consider the possibility that all that I know may not be true (from Descarte's first and second meditations, though I disagree with many of his other works). I have, in the past, written an explanation for why I feel it is illogical to act as though this is the case, but I feel just to take it into account is perhaps best. Mostly because this allows me to respect the views of others.

I am generally not a fan of Descartes. I think Cartesian foundationalism is wrong, and I side more with an even more skeptical tradition.

All that I know may not be true, BUT that doesn't mean that I am going to be an omni-agnostic. That's just fallibilism and fallibilism doesn't mean a lack of judgment.

As a general practical operating rule sensible people don't operate on the black and white standard of true or false. It is a system of more or less probable and as data is taken and integrated into usable practice it weights data and speculative theory as being more or less probable. Religion in general, at least for me, has very small probability.