Image transcription: a section of a Wikipedia article titled “Relationship with Reality”. It reads “From a scientific viewpoint, elves are not considered objectively real. [3] However,” End transcription.
claiming to know for an absolute fact that there is no god
When it’s never been proved otherwise, it’s a weird hill to die on.
That’s precisely what I’m saying. If you can’t prove that something is true, it’s weird to go to such lengths justifying an affirmative belief that it’s true, instead of taking the position that you simply don’t know and therefore don’t believe any claims made about it either way.
If you can’t say god doesn’t exist, you are willing to say anything is possible. I believe 100% the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning. I guess with your reasoning, I shouldn’t discount the chance that the sun will rise from the horizon in which it set. We don’t know anything!
I mean we’ve repeatedly demonstrated tens of millions of times throughout human history that the sun rises in the east, we can verify that the earth spins eastward with instruments and spacecraft, and we have extremely reliable models of reality that give us good reason to authoritatively state that the sun will rise in the east.
I need you to understand that there are no models or experiments that give us reason to authoritatively state that no deity exists, as surely as the sun will rise in the east in the morning. It is entirely possible that a deity exists. I don’t believe there is one, but until it can be proven that there isn’t one with the same veracity as any other claim, the only reasonable position is “I don’t believe it.”
Lemme paint you a word picture here. Don’t pull out a calculator. If I tell you that 11,441,612 divided by 17 is equal to 673,036, is it most reasonable to say that “no, it definitely isn’t” because I just pulled those numbers out of my ass, “yes, it definitely is,” because you have faith in my quick math calculating, or “I don’t know, but almost certainly not?”
The big difference between that and a claim about a god is that you can easily pull out a calculator and definitely state whether or not it’s true, but you can’t make that authoritative claim until after you’ve checked it.
