Post
by Seth » Fri May 23, 2014 7:06 am
To say that there is no evidence of god(s) is irrational, because there is plenty of evidence. Centuries of it in fact, much of it carefully documented by the Catholic church. The problem is not the lack of evidence, it's simply a disagreement about the standards that apply to such evidence.
Atheists insist that only "scientific" evidence is credible and worthy of consideration, and that without scientific evidence it is irrational to believe in unexplained phenomena that is generally labeled "supernatural" because it defies scientific explanation.
That however seems to me to be quite myopic and arrogant in that human knowledge is incomplete at best, including scientific knowledge, and thus it cannot be authoritatively said that any unexplained phenomenon that cannot presently be explained by science is ipso facto supernatural. For this to be true, scientific knowledge would have to be perfect and complete. The examples of things thought to be supernatural in the past that are now explained by science as aspects of the physical world are too numerous to catalog.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
and;
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
and;
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The first quote is from "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", in Profiles of the Future (1962)" (Wikipedia)
It's been a long time since I've had reason to use one of my coined phrases, "poverty of imagination."
That's what Atheism suffers from, poverty of imagination. Like the three blind men examining an elephant by touch, Atheists proceed from a faulty premise. Really several faulty premises.
The first faulty premise is that in the absence of scientific validation, any claim to phenomena that occur outside the known physics of science must be classified as "supernatural." That premise is flawed because it assumes (again) perfect scientific knowledge, whereas the phenomena may in fact be perfectly natural and within the laws of physics but outside the understanding of the laws of physics that lie within the intellectual grasp of human beings today.
The second faulty premise is that God(s) don't exist because there is no credible evidence that they do. This is of course merely a burden of proof fallacy. And yes, I'm aware of the typical Atheist prevarication of saying that Atheists don't believe gods don't exist, they are just withholding judgment until the evidence is all in. This of course is just a convenient rhetorical evasion.
It has been said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but with respect to God(s) there is plenty of evidence, as I said, but an intractable dispute about the probative nature of that evidence.
Atheists insist that science is the metric, while the faithful do not try to hold God to the rules of knownphysics in examining God's interactions with the universe.
And the other faulty premise is the "I ain't seen no evidence" Atheist claim.
Three things are possible with respect to this premise: First, there may be no evidence; second, there may be evidence that the Atheist is unaware of; and third there may be evidence that the Atheist is aware of but that the Atheist dismisses because it does not meet the Atheist's standards of review.
God, if God exists as is claimed by the faithful, being omnipotent and omniscient, would certainly be capable of denying evidence that might compel an Atheist to believe if that is God's desire, even while simultaneously showing compelling evidence that the faithful believe to them. Evidence of this sort of behavior is seen frequently in Catholic records, where visions and miracles are granted only to some people and not to everyone.
Why God might choose to act in this way is unknown, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility.
So faith is the process of examining experience and phenomena outside the strict boundaries of known science and making judgments about the nature of those experiences and phenomena with due recognition and acknowledgment of the paltry and often flawed understanding of the physical universe we humans have.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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