What part of “all the knowledge humans have” irrefutably proves that god does not exist?
The burden of proof lies solely on the ones making the claim that god DOES exist.
Has there ever been irrefutable evidence, provided by any of the religious leaders over the last many thousands of years, which proves that god exists?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Russell’s Teapot. If someone claims there is a teapot floating in space, cool, they need to prove its existence and the rest of us can go around as if one doesn’t exist. If someone claims there isn’t a teapot floating in space, now the burden of proof is on them. We can quickly exercise some critical thinking and realize that, while there might be a teapot in space someone brought with them and left, it’s not going to be beyond the asteroid belt.
Now do every belief system with empirical evidence. You can’t, primarily because belief in the logic used to prove that empirical evidence is the best evidence is itself a belief system. Changing any one of the axioms that underpin your methodology completely changes the methodology (eg parallel lines meet at infinity turns geometry into hyperbolic geometry). Furthermore, we can extend Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to any formal system, like you’re attempting to employ, and show that they can’t prove themselves.
In other words, we must take things on faith if we want to use logic and pull out statement related to logic like “burden of proof is on the positive.” You can believe whatever the fuck you want; you just can’t prove it and, in most metaphysical cases, you can’t disprove it either.
If someone claims there is a teapot floating in space, cool, they need to prove its existence and the rest of us can go around as if one doesn’t exist. If someone claims there isn’t a teapot floating in space, now the burden of proof is on them.
Disagreeing with the first claim doesn’t put the burden of proof on you. It merely keeps the ball in the first claimant’s hands.
You can believe whatever the fuck you want; you just can’t prove it and, in most metaphysical cases, you can’t disprove it either.
Again, nobody is expected to disprove metaphysical claims. Claims for the metaphysical should be proven by whoever is making them.
Trying to disprove something that hasn’t been proven to exist could be as easy as saying “It doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist”, and that would be logically and factually sound.
The person who is holding the belief in god(s), ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, Santa Claus, Men in Black, a flat earth, a young earth, and anything else you can dream up is the only person who has to justify those beliefs.
This is why I wish we had more people like James Randi around, who put up real money to anyone who could prove their claims of paranormal, magical, psychic, or other metaphysical claims to be true. In over 50 years, nobody could prove what they claimed. Randi didn’t have to disprove anything.
Again, fundamental misunderstanding of Russell’s Teapot. You’re attempting to talk about proof, using the language of logic, to make sweeping claims that logic cannot make.
If you’re saying we can neither prove nor disprove the metaphysical, we’re on the same page.
If you’re saying the metaphysical doesn’t exist because no one has proved it and they have to prove it first, you don’t understand how logic, as we understand it today, works.
Edit: to highlight your issues a little, “it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist” isn’t logically sound. Unlike Russell’s Teapot, circular logic is an actual, provable fallacy rather than a rhetorical tool that is not a result of logic. More importantly, you’re depending on logic as a system of faith, just like religion, unless you’ve found some results that contradict Gödel and company. We’ve made all of it up and, with our understanding today, it is not objective.
No one is trying to make you or anyone else believe, they are just believing and doing their own thing therefore no need to prove anything considering both parties are approaching respectfully to eachother. OP was asking why people haven’t dropped religion. Since there is no proof of inexistence of the god, there is also no reason for people in 2024 to stop believing.
No one is trying to make you or anyone else believe, they are just believing and doing their own thing
Unfortunately, that’s not true at all. Religions are designed to spread, like a virus.
They go door-to-door, stand on corners (with loudspeakers or just to give you flyers), they visit underdeveloped countries in missions to convert others, they use their power to influence laws related to reproduction and sexuality, they harm children (i.e. protect pedophiles within their congregation), they demonize and persecute gay people, and so on.
Organized religion, for several thousands of years, have started wars and killed countless people “in the name of god”.
And that’s only the major religions. If you get into smaller religions, then you’re talking about anything from harassment to mass suicide to child wives and beyond. Anything goes when “god is with you”.
OP was asking why people haven’t dropped religion. Since there is no proof of inexistence of the god, there is also no reason for people in 2024 to stop believing.
You can’t prove the non-existence of something… and it’s nobody’s job to prove that something does not exist.
To the OP: There’s a small book called “Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith Paperback” by J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer, which would be of interest. You can probably read it in an afternoon, but it’s insightful.
You can in fact prove the non existence of a thing that is logically incoherent. Obviously the default position to be is agnostic, but you can actually disprove the existence of specifically a tri omni God via the problem of evil.
If an all knowing, all powerful, all loving being existed, we would not observe evil in the world as it would be knowledgeable enough, powerful enough, and care enough to get rid of it. We observe evil, so this being does not exist.
Of course, a lot of behaviour of God in the bible suggests that he is not all loving, which would trivially resolve the paradox, but a lot of Christians believe in a tri omni being anyway, which makes my prior argument non entirely irrelevant.
