What part of “all the knowledge humans have” irrefutably proves that god does not exist? Just because you think our limited knowledge of the universe implies the inexistence of the god, doesn’t mean it is the absolute truth or everyone should be coming to the same conclusion as you.
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.
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.
Religion has never been about god. Religion is about control and unlike more intelligent mechanisms we created to assign positions of power, religion (by design) assigns power to the worst kind of scum.
So proof of non existence of god is not required to wonder why species calling itself intelligent still believes in vile shit that historically and factually demonstrated itself to cause nothing but grief, suffering and incessant delays to progress.
Alright cool, lets assume religion is ALL about control, all the religious people are being controlled by “religious” people in power. Without the existence of the god (or a similar omnipotent being) how are they going to control the people? Its always about so called god’s will and providence.
There is no way any sort of control is going to stay if the inexistence of god is irrefutably proven. Saying religion not being about god is comical at best.
You’re describing religion as a theoretical concept, but unfortunately it is part of our reality with all the inconvenient facts you’re choosing to ignore.
It is able to survive because gullible or often evil parents and vile predators in the form priests, imams and rabbis continue to peddle various versions of this bullshit to unfortunate children thus sustaining the wicked concept. God has nothing to do with it since it has never presented itself to humans so saying organized religion cannot be sustained without God is nonsense at best.
If god exists or doesnt, the control is there and has been. You cant prove a negative so irrefutable proof of nonexistence of anything isnt going to work. I’m sure you’ve heard of the teapot orbiting past saturn? It’s highly unlikely to exist, but cant be proven to not exist.
None of the knowledge you mentioned overturns religion
Why not? It makes sense to me, it carried me through some very difficult times and is a good way to think about how I interact with the world and my moral framework.
I believe in “at least one god” as a Thelemite and a Freemason. I wasn’t raised religious at all, in fact my secular parents actively discouraged me from taking part in faith-based activities with my friends. When I grew up, though, I realized this couldn’t be it and went on a Quest for the Truth.
God is Math. God is the Sun. God is NOT an imaginary friend, as they say, “hanging around up there”.
Can you explain why God is Math? Or the sun? Those statements don’t make any sense to me.
The sun gives light and life to the World. Every winter, it dies on the cross for three days and is thus resurrected. Since time immemorial people have worshipped the sun.
Math, on the other hand, is literally the reason our atoms hold together. It’s the reason the planets form. It’s ubiquitous and ineffable, tying together the universe in ways we do not understand.
Calling common things of nature “God” is just adding unnecessary complexity and trying to give purpose to what has none. Things don’t exist to serve us, we adapted to these things for us to exist.
About the “math god”, math doesn’t hold the atoms together, it just explains it.
Science doesn’t concern itself with the existence of God so I’m not sure what knowledge you’re referring to.
The vast majority of religions do make explicit falsifiable claims about the natural universe that go far beyond the existence of a god.
A random Jewish preacher coming back to life, for instance, or a random Arab religious reformer casually taking a midnight flight to Jerusalem.
A random Jewish preacher coming back to life, for instance, or a random Arab religious reformer casually taking a midnight flight to Jerusalem.
I mean, these claims are only falsifiable if you assume the religions are false. It’s circular reasoning. For example going “God doesn’t exist so there’s no way Muhammed could’ve went to Jerusalem” doesn’t do much to disprove that God exists. Taking this particular event as an example, you’d need to, independently from the existence of God, find evidence that Muhammed didn’t go to Jerusalem. Especially since Islam provides evidence for its claim that he did go there.
No, that’s not what I mean by ‘falsifiable’.
That there exists some external force or entity that is completely outside the realm of anything observable is not a falsifiable claim, because there is absolutely nothing we could ever observe that would absolutely contradict it. It is, quite simply, not a statement about the observable universe, so it’s definitionally outside the domain of science. Science will never disprove the existence of Heaven, because Heaven is by definition not observable.
That’s a very different kind of claim from “If you’d sneakily observed Jesus’ crucifixion and followed him as he was buried, you’d eventually see him come back to life, move a stone away from his tomb, and wander up into Heaven after having a few chats with friends”.
To be clear, I’m not saying that those religious claims have been absolutely proven false, only that they hypothetically could be proven false. Of course, there are other religious claims that have been proven false, like young earth creationism, but those have a funny habit of being either abandoned or significantly re-interpreted after conflicting facts come about. It’s also probably just a coincidence that the more fantastical claims all tend to be from long enough ago that gaps in the historical record provide a significant amount of fuzziness. Why God got tired of performing miracles after the invention of the camera is just one of those mysteries.
It needs to be emphasized that I am not making the absolute positive claim that Muhammad never flew to Jerusalem. What I’m saying is that someone with sufficient information could possibly make a clear determination of the truth. Muhammad himself, for instance, presumably knew the truth of the matter. It’s falsifiable in that it could be falsified given sufficient observed information, unlike the existence of Heaven, which categorically cannot be.
(It’s also worth mentioning that the Qur’an itself actually contains only the slightest and briefest mention of the Night Journey; the story is greatly expanded upon in the hadiths, which he himself did not directly write but are rather traditionally attributed to him).
