I'm sorry, but I apply science principles to everything. That is because it is the only meaningful way to gain knowledge about the world. Making things up doesn't give meaningful knowledge.
You think those are the only two options, science and making things up? What about logic?
If you have a problem with apply basic scientific principles to the topic of "proof" of a god, perhaps you can explain why?
I've nothing against scientific principles at all. My problem is your claim to always use
only scientific principles. If someone comes at you with a claim that is self contradictory, for example, you don't need science to tell them they are wrong. Simple logic tells you that what they say cannot be true if it leads to a contradiction (surely you don't dispute this?)
What you certainly don't want to do in these cases is to say that because their claim cannot be made sense of therefore science cannot evaluate it therefore we cannot say if it is true or not. This is what you seem to be doing with repect to claims about the existence of God. You are ignoring the possibility that we can dismiss the theists claims on purely logical grounds.
No. It is not false until proven so.
I just did. Let me run it by you again.
1) If your definition of "God" is meaningless then your statement "God exists" is meaningless. Some agnostics claim that this means we must conclude that if we cannot come up with any meaningful definitions of God then God's existence is unknowable. However...
2) ... the statement "it is true that God exists" is FALSE.
Let's break down statement (2). "God exists" is meaningless, from (1). It is neither true nor false. So the claim that "God exists is a true statement" is false. This is the same as "it is true that God exists", which is therefore also false.
The point of this is to show that having a definition of God that is meaningless is tantamount to saying there is no god.
Er...no. Arguing the existance of something should not be the realm of epistemology. Either God exists or he does not exist.
As Piggy would say, either
what exists? We need to define what God is before we can even ask the question. This isn't epistemology, I'm not asking what can we know about God, I'm asking what do we mean by the word "God".
I'm guessing your objection is something like this: even if everyone has meaningless definitions for God it doesn't mean that God doesn't actually exist, after all. The question of his existence is seperate from the question of how we define or think about him.
But, the problem is, this "God" that could actually exist does not correspond to anyone's definition of what God is (he can't do given our assumption that all these definitions are meaningless and thus cannot refer to anything). So we are not justified in calling him God at all. All we can say is that there could be
something that we don't know about that exists and that doesn't correspond to anyone's God definition. No doubt there are many such things. But we wouldn't call any of them God if we discovered them.
It is not the concept which is meaningless, but any knowledge gained from that concept.
I've no idea what you mean by this.
Based on this you are:
I consider myself a "weak atheist". A weak atheist being the term I have learned for someone who does not have a belief in any god, but does not belief any god does not exist. I.e. lack of belief not positive disbelief.
What you described is a form of agnosticism. Agnostic non-believers sometimes use the label weak atheism and sometimes agnostic atheism. Strong atheism is non-agnostic atheism i.e. a positive belief that God doesn't exist.
Says whom? If there were evidence for the existance of God, I would accept him. I do not have a positive disbelief in the existance of God, therefore I am not a strong atheist.
I'm assuming that God, by definition, is supernatural. If you are convinced that the supernatural logically
cannot exist then you are a strong atheist. That is assuming you accept that God is supernatural, by definition.
This is pretty obvious. If there is no supernatural then there can be no supernatural beings. If you think it is correct to say that there is no supernatural then you must think it correct to say there is no God.
I am 'swayed' in that the induction of such an argument immediately means that the concept is unfalsifiable.
Which means that science can say nothing about it. Good job we are not limited to science
.
As I've already said, I do not agree. Empirical science is applicable everywhere, to one degree or another, or the philosophic principles of science. If it is 'outside the universe' it is unknowable to science. As only things which are knowable by science produce meaningful knowledge, anything which is outside the universe produces meaningless knowledge.
Logic, mathematics and philosophy are not science and neither are they "outside the universe".
It is sometimes rational to claim certainty that something doesn't exist.
Not without evidence, it isn't.
Four-sided triangles don't exist. No need to search for evidence, we can see that they don't exist just by reflecting on the meaning of the word triangle.
Oh, and I never claim 100% certainty in anything. I am an 'epsitemologic atheist': No knowledge is certain, not even this statement. However, my epistemologic philosophy is that the closest we can come to certain knowledge is through science.
Empirical statements cannot be proven to be 100% true. Purely analytic* statements can. You don't doubt that 1 + 1 = 2.
*A statement whose truth depends solely on the meaning of its terms e.g. all triangles have three sides or all bachelors are unmarried.
