Oh the irony of Claus...
He accuses of me of claiming to determine who is and isn't a "true skeptic" when I've never done so-- and here is doing what he has accused me of! But an opinion is not a fact. And Claus's opinions of me matters even less to me than my opinions of him matter to him.
We need more people like Dawkins to handle the too many people like Claus.
When/if Dawkins returns to TAM, I'll let you ask him what to do about people like me.
Epistemology. Ontology. Look them up. Learn the difference.
I know the difference, thank you.
Of course I can't disprove it, but at the same time saying that it DOES exist makes just as much sense as saying for sure it DOESN'T. In fact, with no evidence and no actual way to come to that knowledge, it makes far less sense.
Sure. But without evidence and no actual way to come to that knowledge, what's a skeptic to do? It isn't even about disproving (we can't do that anyway), we just have to acknowledge that there is a third option: We don't know - yet.
Plenty of times. I'm not saying that we DO know for sure. However, doubt is perfectly skeptical when the claim is outrageous. Outrageous claims require outrageous evidence. That's another thing Sagan was big on. A perfect lack of doubt and a blind acceptance to any claim that can't be tested for or against is antithetic to doubt, and therefore to me, antithetic to skepticism.
A god creating the universe and then stepping back? Outrageous, how? Why? Because it doesn't fit with our scientific world view, which is based on our knowledge of the laws of nature? Sure! But we don't know anything about how the laws of nature worked before the universe began: The laws of physics could have been the same, but they could also have been something that allowed what we think of as "outrageous".
We can't judge what happened
before the beginning of the universe based on what the laws of nature were
after the universe began.
The thing you have to learn is that there is a difference between saying "We don't know" and "I don't know, but it's perfectly fine for you to live your life and affect my own life thanks to it".
You can't tell me for sure that there isn't a teapot circling saturn. You can't tell me for sure that there isn't an invisible elf in my backyard. So, according to your arguments here, I can say that, for sure, there IS, they DO exist. The elf in my back yard tells me that the internet poster known as Larsen is a blasphemer and is being invisibly controlled by his arch nemesis, the Invisible Dwarf.
No, that's not what I'm arguing at all, quite contrary: I keep pointing out that if we don't have the possibility to find out, we can't say that either X exists or it doesn't.
In those cases where we can - e.g, do psychics talk to dead people - we can look at the evidence and come to the provisional conclusion that they can't.
In those cases where we can't - is there a teapot circling Saturn - we can just say "Well, it's bleedin' unlikely, but
very remotely possible."
What some here miss is that, in those cases where we, based on the laws of nature, judge something that we don't the framework for, we simply have to say: "We don't know - because we can't know".
Nothing testable here, so therefore you can't say that I can possibly be wrong. After all, if it's not testable, therefore I must be right.
I'm not saying that, and neither are deists. They recognize that they don't have evidence of their belief.
What do you mean there is no testable claim? A theist claims there is a god who created the universe and still has his finger in the soup. A deist claims there is a god who created the universe but has had nothing to do with it since creation.
All of these are testable claims. None has stood up though. Theists and deist make the simple mistake of believing that their OPINION is evidence.
How do you test what happened before the Universe began? You can't use the laws of nature, because you don't know if they existed then.
It has been shown that the god of every religion on Earth cannot do what their followers believe they are capable of. Gods have been pushed back to the Big Bang and beyond. There is nowhere in our universe for them to hide any longer. They do not exist here.
Let me remind you that the concept of a deist god of non-intervention came way before the discovery of Big Bang and all that.
I think we say "We don't know" when there is a reasonable doubt. Saying "God done it!" for anything prior to the Big Bang is as absurd as saying it for anything after. There isn't a shred of evidence that there has ever been a god and certainly none that shows any god has done anything at anytime.
How do you know what happened before Big Bang? You'd have to, in order to call it "absurd".
Religionists are so self absorbed they actually believe that their opinion can carry as much weight as actual evidence.
Religionists, as in "all who believe in a God"? That's demonstrably false: Deists don't claim evidence - they can't, because if they did, they would believe in an interventionist god.
Be careful not to lump all religious people together with those who claim evidence of their god beliefs.
