h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

exactly. they *are* the only kind of knowledge. that is to say, our knowledge is limited, and not true knowledge. we can be certain of nothing except our own existence. this means we are technically agnostic about everything. it certainly means we are agnostic about god.

It would seem that Jowot is a bit of a logical positivist!

ooh dear. thats his first mistake right there...

I'm always confused by how people manage to use Occam's Razor AGAINST theism.

Consider the usual atheistic view of how life got here - loads of theories that are still not agreed upon, that took millenia to be devised in their first form, based around having a load of chemicals that managed to come together to form amino acids, which then formed proteins, and somewhere along the line DNA came into existence, somehow forming a cell complete with it's centrioles, ribosomes, cell wall, lot's of RNA bases and everything else necessary for reproduction ... (there's lot's more that could be said, but you get the idea - it's a pretty complex theory).

The theistic view is that an intelligent God designed us and created us.

The former, though believed by many people, is understood by very few. The latter can be adequately understood by the average three-year-old.

Which is simpler?

the idea of a god is not simple. infinite god? where did it come from? what about evil? how does it create? its not simple AT ALL.

"It would seem that Jowot is a bit of a logical positivist!"

Oooh take that back. I am a critical rationalist. In particular a logical positivist must regard all scientific laws as meaningless, since they can't be observed directly, and can't be empirically verified (only falsified).

Logical Positivists do not regard all scientific laws as meaningless because they CAN be empirically tested. Logical positivists divide statements into three main catergories. Analytic, these are statements that are true by definition e.g. unmarried men are bachelors. Synthetic, these are statements which can be verified empirically and scientific laws CAN be, they don't necessarily need to be observed directly, but they can be tested. And Meaningless statements which cannot be tested or verified empirically, e.g. God exists.

OK, if postivism has moved on from verifiability to testability, that is a good step.

Now I would call your third class of statement metaphysical, and I would not necessarily hold that it is meaningless. In particular arguments about the merits of positivism are metaphysical, and are therefore, according to positivism, meaningless. A postivist may conclude that positivism is therefore unassailable, but I would conclude that it is therefore nonsensical.

The critical of critical rationalism demands that all ideas should be open to criticism, where postivism would condemn criticism of either philosophy as meaningless.

Now I don't hold all metaphysical statements to be meaningless, but I do think that "God exists", at least without a little more detail, is meaningless. But this is not based on a simple criterion of meaningfulness, such as a positivist might use.

"Which is simpler?"

Occam's Razor isn't about simplicity.

Its about not postulating entities that aren't absoluteely needed.

Atheism postulates the observable universe. Theism postulates the observable universe, plus God.

Which postulates more entities?

Theism does. Therefor, Occam's Razor says that atheism is more likely correct, unless God is needed to explain something that atheism can't ezplain.

"Which is simpler?"

The atheistic view is simpler.

The "God created it" explanation is no explanation at all. Because.... who created God?

Science has some explanation for the richness of our universe by describing how mysetrious and complex things can arise from simpler less mysterious things.

The religious "explanation" is about mysterious and complex things being created by a considerably more mysterious and complex thing. This leaves rather more to be explained than we started with.

NOTE: 'more likely correct' not 'correct'

this is the same as agnosticism.

Yes, Occam's razor is often formulated in terms of probabilities. I prefer "better explanation" to "more likely to be true" because it can be conceptually problematic assigning probability values to statements which are actually either true or false (so the probability of truth is either 0 or 1)

However the terms atheist and agnostic refer to people not to razors.

Somebody who believes there is no god is an atheist. Somebody who does not believe that there is a god may also be called an atheist, if theism is about having belief in god. Somebody who believes that there might be a god is an agnostic. This is not inconsistent with the second atheist.

The trouble with believing that there might be a god, is that is uses probability to measure our own uncertainty or lack of knowledge about something. It takes a lot of work to poorly explain what probability means in this context. Unless I have a good use for this sort of subjective probability concept, I would rather do without it and maintain that "there is a god" must logically have a probability of 0 or 1, and then state either that I do not know which it is or that I believe it is one or the other.

it has a probability of 1 or 0 granted. but we arent in full possetrion of the facts to make this judgement

Very true. There is no way around the fact that we do not even nearly have all the evidence to conclude without any doubt that God does not exist. Therefore we have to leave the possibility of God's existence open. To me atheism does not even seem rational.

Atheism is at least as rational as any other belief, and a great deal more rational than most of them.

You do not have evidence to "conclude without any doubt" that you are not in a Matrix-like simlulation of reality, but this does not make the belief that you are not in such a simlulation irrational.

Agnosticism is either
i) not a belief = "I do not believe anything about the existence of god either way"
ii) an irrational belief = "I believe that the statment 'There is a god' has a random truth-value, so that it is meaningful to assign it a probability other than 0 or 1"


i) is perfectly sound, just as it is logically sound to be agnostic about any other statements about the universe or metaphysics.


But you said something very interesting "...the fact that we do not even nearly have all the evidence to conclude..." So are you saying that such further evidence could exist (if indeed there isn't a god). What would this new evidence look like?

I don't see how there could be any more evidence against the existence of god. There are no points of contact left where we (I) still think that god may be interacting with the physical universe. So no further observations which fail to detect the actions of a god will tell us anything new.

"You do not have evidence to "conclude without any doubt" that you are not in a Matrix-like simlulation of reality, but this does not make the belief that you are not in such a simlulation irrational."

The important word here is BELIEF, saying that there is no possibility, and saying that i do not believe are two different things. I could say that i don't believe in that i'm in a "Matrix-like simlulation of reality", but i accept it as a possibility.

"There are no points of contact left where we (I) still think that god may be interacting with the physical universe."

Sorry but thats just ridiculous. We have not even nearly seen all of the universe let alone understand it! How can you possibly say, well i havent been to X or even seen X let alone understand X, but i know God doesnt exist in X. And have you ever considered that there may be non physical parts of the universe we don't, and possibly can't understand.

"So are you saying that such further evidence could exist (if indeed there isn't a god). What would this new evidence look like?"

What i'm saying is that we do not know all there is to know about the universe and beyond, and what we do know is limited and mostly theory, we do not even know how our universe came into existence, let alone what was there before it. Maybe evidence wasn't the best word to use, but what i'm trying to say is that our knowledge is so limited about the universe and beyond that it seems irrational to conlude that God cannot possibly exist.

yep. im not, i might add, religious. im just saying that atheism is a statement of belief as much as religion. i dont care whether you personally find evidence compelling or not. do we have to take this back to bloody descartes?

OK, but I don't see how our lack of understanding of much of how the universe works has any bearing on the question. It only seems to have any bearing if one would accept that the existence of god would be an explanation for things that we don't understand.

I think this is dead wrong. For one thing, if god exists and is eternal, it will continue to exist even when we come to understand things that we don't currently understand. Also if a god must be eternal, but doesn't exist now, then it didn't exist when we understood much less.

I can accept that there may be phenomena in the universe that we may never understand for whatever reasion, or that we may never even get around to observing. This is an observation about what we have done or can do, and has nothing to do with whether god exists.

And as I said before, if you explain some phenomenon as being due to the physical intervention of god, that is never a good explanation, as it begs the question of how can god physically intervene. (You could also try to consider why god would want to intervene in only such limited ways.)

This debate is rapidly turning into a language game.

"I can accept that there may be phenomena in the universe that we may never understand for whatever reasion, or that we may never even get around to observing. This is an observation about what we have done or can do, and has nothing to do with whether god exists."

Here you seem to have taken my point completely out of context, and this is NOT only an observation about what we can or cannot do. My point, which you seem to have missed, is that BECAUSE there are certain things we can't do, we cannot conclude without a doubt that God doesn't exist.

descartes: i think therefore i am.

he couldnt prove, and nor can anyone else, that anything other than he existed, as a consciousness. therefore we dont know that each other exist. therefore we dont know that god exists. however, we do not know that he does