| Subject: No, no one can prove absolutely that there is no God...or that there IS a God, either. |
Author:
One-eyed Jack
|
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 00:25:49 08/01/04 Sun
In reply to:
Yo
's message, "Dang" on 19:51:59 03/25/04 Thu
So far I have seen no evidence at all that the supernatural exists in the real universe. That doesn't mean that tomorrow I might see a genuine, undeniable miracle occur and become convinced that supernatural forces do indeed exist. On the other hand, deeper knowledge may show me that what I had at first thought was a miracle was in fact perfectly explainable by natural forces--and therefore that there is no evidence for the existence of God after all.
Without being able to review all the evidence--and that means just about all the evidence in the Universe--I cannot honestly assert any absolute proof of God's non-existence. But there's certainly no absolute proof that God does exist, either.
Think about it: today Believers say that because we don't know exactly how the first self-replicating molecules arose then it must have been by the Hand of God. But a hundred years ago we had no idea exactly how the characteristics of one mouse were passed to its offspring--the DNA molecule and its role in inheritance was unknown. Heck, 2000 years ago we had no idea why fire was hot; chemical reactions were completely unexplained and fire was the province of the gods. Today we know quite a bit about the heat released by oxidation of wood. It's not such a holy mystery after all.
Just because our knowledge is incomplete at any particular time does NOT indicate that the stuff we don't know is evidence for the supernatural.
This particular dynamic--"God's hand is apparent in the stuff we don't know yet"--has been around since at least the Renaissance, but Christians still trot it out like its fresh meat...and, ironically, they really appear to believe in it! Sheesh.
---
Now, theodicy has shown that the definition of God as perfectly good, omnipotent, and omniscient is inconsistent with the existence of evil.
Briefly, the argument runs like this:
1 God is omnipotent and wholly good.
2 If God is omnipotent, he must be able to prevent evil.
3 If God is wholly good, he must want to prevent evil.
4 Yet evil exists.
5 Therefore such a God does not exist.
Christians blow this off, usually saying that unquestioning faith is better than logic, or that their personal definiton of God gets around the problem, or most commonly in my experience, simply saying that God is incomprehensible and it's a damned sin to even raise the question of His connection with evil. ;)
Some Christians are knowledgeable enough to use the freewill defense, which claims that in order to to give man free will God had to allow the existence of evil. That of course is nonsense--it is simply a way of redefining God so that He is not omnipotent, because the freewill defense says specifically that there is something God could not do. But in fact theology offers us a perfect example of a world without evil: there will be no sin in Heaven, yet God is not described as turning saved souls into zombies without free will, either. Therefore Heaven is a perfect example of a world created by God in which free will exists without the necessity for evil.
But the only real proof for the existence of God would be obvious and undeniable miracles--events which defy the laws of physics. So far such evidence is neither obvious nor undeniable.
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
| |
Feedback: 