Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Pantagruel]

How about thinking about what I wrote instead?

Do you think that "Nothing can travel faster than light" is not falsifiable?

Do you think that it's not an ontological claim?

Do you think that ontology is not metaphysics?

I think that the scope of the original question is a respectful place to stand. Unfalsifiability does not necessarily have implications for reasons for believing, both in general, and specifically when it comes to reasons for believing in god.

Perhaps you would be happier starting another thread to share your own unique brand of falsificationism?

[Terrapin Station]

How about thinking about what I wrote instead?

Do you think that "Nothing can travel faster than light" is not falsifiable?

Do you think that it's not an ontological claim?

Do you think that ontology is not metaphysics?

I think that the scope of the original question is a respectful place to stand. Unfalsifiability does not necessarily have implications for reasons for believing, both in general, and specifically when it comes to reasons for believing in god.

Perhaps you would be happier starting another thread to share your own unique brand of falsificationism?

Such a simple thing to be incapable of having an original thought about. Weird. Because otherwise you come across as reasonably intelligent.

[woodbine]

"So first, if one accepts that something is unfalsifiable, then nothing can falsify it. That's what it means to be unfalsifiable.

If you accept that something is unfalsifiable, however, that doesn't imply that you can not believe the unfalsifiable claim. It only implies that you would say it's unfalsifiable.

In order to say that it implies you can not believe the unfalsifiable claim, you'd need an additional step, a step that makes it explicit that you feel you shouldn't believe unfalsifiable claims."

What I am saying is that no possible evidence is useful in distinguishing between Gods existence or non existence, therefore any belief is unjustified.


"And of course, one doesn't need to accept that something is falsifiable. One could argue that it's falsifiable instead. For example, one could find the idea of a "cause of the universe" incoherent, which would falsify anything claiming to be that."

Someone finding an objection to a "cause of the universe" is not inconsistent with a first cause God existing. Gods actions could be incoherent to mortals?

I can't fathom how to post post/format answers yet so please bear with me.

[woodbine]

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

"Yes, definitely. ... Provided you also conclude that there is no reason whatsoever not to believe in a God. And the reasons are the same in both cases. No evidence = no analysis = no conclusion justified or justifiable."

Yes, of course you cannot falsify of verify an unfalsifiable claim with evidence, but positive belief has the burden of proof so the redundancy of evidence is non trivial regarding this claim.

[Pantagruel]

positive belief has the burden of proof so the redundancy of evidence is non trivial regarding this claim.

The argument from ignorance fallacy applies equally to the claim that something is false because it has not yet been proven true.

[woodbine]

Correct. Evidence is useless at distinguishing between Gods existence or non existence. Therefore we cannot know and cannot be convinced by evidence. Therefore belief in God is unjustified. (As is the assertion - no Gods exist). The correct position would seem to be "we cannot know".

[woodbine]

So first, if one accepts that something is unfalsifiable, then nothing can falsify it. That's what it means to be unfalsifiable.

If you accept that something is unfalsifiable, however, that doesn't imply that you can not believe the unfalsifiable claim. It only implies that you would say it's unfalsifiable.

In order to say that it implies you can not believe the unfalsifiable claim, you'd need an additional step, a step that makes it explicit that you feel you shouldn't believe unfalsifiable claims.

Of course, that step would rule out all sorts of claims that you probably believe, so you'd need to be careful there if you want to be consistent.

And of course, one doesn't need to accept that something is falsifiable. One could argue that it's falsifiable instead. For example, one could find the idea of a "cause of the universe" incoherent, which would falsify anything claiming to be that.

You should neither accept or reject an unfalsifiable claim based on (any possible) evidence. You can believe an unfalsifiable claim - you can believe in fairies - but that belief would be unjustified.

Finding the "cause of the universe" incoherent is not evidence inconsistent with God because God by our definition is beyond nature and its laws. They only came into being after the first caused caused the universe. Gods actions could seem incoherent to us without being incoherent to Him.

(I'm still struggling with posting replies - I've sent Scott a message for help.)

[woodbine]

First ever post.

Welcome to our dance!

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Yes, definitely. ... Provided you also conclude that there is no reason whatsoever not to believe in a God. And the reasons are the same in both cases. No evidence = no analysis = no conclusion justified or justifiable.

Yes, of course. Evidence is useless in both cases. So the correct conclusion is that we cannot know. Belief in God is without any evidential basis.

[woodbine]

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

I'm not sure whether having a reason to believe in something is related to the actual truth or falsity of the belief in any way?

Say there is a man living on an island, and every night a hen comes out and lays an egg by his hut. But the chicken never comes out when the man can see her. So he formulates a belief that the egg "grows" there, like mushrooms do perhaps.

The man "has a reason to believe" that "eggs grow like mushrooms". Although that belief is certainly false. I don't see how knowing whether the belief is falsifiable or not-falsifiable enters into the origin of the belief. Having an opinion about the falsifiability of one's belief is tantamount to criticizing the belief before it has been formed. In other words, what you would be talking about would no longer be a belief, strictly speaking, it would be something else.

The claim that evidence is useless in distinguishing between Gods existence and non existence says nothing of the truth of the claim that God exists it just means it is beyond what we can know.

In the mushroom analogy, "eggs grow like a mushroom" is falsifiable and therefore can be subject to investigation and verification, that's how we know how they in fact grow. If we were to say that undetectable fairies initiate the growth then that would be unfalsifiable and as such beyond the scope of evidence and investigation. The crucial point to me is that all evidence would be consistent with the unfalsifiable fairy hypothesis independent of its truth value.

So all evidence is consistent with God and also no God therefore we cannot use evidence to decide.

The claim "no possible evidence can distinguish between Gods existence and non existence" includes by definition holy books, testimonies personal experiences and I suggest even logic and reason as they too are contingent on the laws of the universe.

Therefore we are left with nothing. There is no reason to believe in a God.

[woodbine]

No possible evidence can distinguish between Gods existence or non existence.

Personal experiences are possible evidence.

Personal experiences cannot distinguish between Gods existence or non existence.

We're in really confused times I think, where the west carries a lot of cultural baggage and assumptions on this topic. It's a bit like 'either bible or naive forms of reductive materialism with your atheism - anything else doesn't matter because it's held by too small a minority to matter' and this seems to shine a light on the trouble - ie. that this isn't a topic where people would normally seek truth and it has far more in common with conformity, identity branding, family heraldry, and tribalism, just like politics - they're really part-in-parcel in terms of how they behave.

"Possible evidence" would encompass any information received from the senses and I suggest, logic and reason. This seems a non trivial point.

Without books or testimonies or personal experiences, or appeals to logical arguments, there seems nothing evidentiary left.

Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Thoughts?

I think what personal testimonies that break the assumptions of reductive materialism (as a total worldview) and suggest either panpsychism, functionalism, or some form of idealism conservative enough to give us the world we see and experience - these just question reductive materialism as a totalizing ontology.

The God question - if we really want to consider it in the realm of facts or ideas to be evaluated and separate from its political and tribal ramifications - is something where we can acknowledge that to even meet something vast that might claim to be God isn't even proof that it's God. The term 'God', outside of specific faiths, only makes sense as a claim that the super-set of all things is self-consciously aware in a similar way to how we are or perhaps even more aware, and I can't think of any such evidence for that.

So on its face this really should be a question where we're comfortable with true agnosticism, ie. that if something's as distant from us in scale as that then there's probably no way of knowing and it's extremely doubtful that there's any fire waiting for people who are agnostics, apatheists, or who follow the wrong religion.

Where it does matter is politics. It's probably more accurate for us to say that we find certain group's imperial behaviors obnoxious, ie. their deities are just grouping symbols by and large to beat the war drums in fealty to (whose will is dictated by their priesthood), ie. it's memetic warfare of the sort that's worked in nature since time immemorial and the tribe who believes in a more emboldening and unifying batch of BS will typically dominate and possibly destroy, subsume, or enslave the tribe who doesn't believe in useful fictions that aid military conquest and brutality.

Worth thinking about that if we want to survive as a species we need strong antidotes to this kind of this sort of brash lineage selection behavior or at least far more innocuous or peaceful repackagings that don't put us face to face with things like nuclear war or populating ourselves out of a substrate. OTOH the God question is largely irrelevant here in the real sense and my advice on it - we actually should be looking at the sorts of 'miracles' that seem to violate the laws of what we currently think not as successful chicanery always (though sometimes that's true) but rather something for us to get a deeper knowledge of, untangle, and actually use the disunity in that deeper realm of consciousness - assuming it exists - to actually disprove any idea that the holy books are anything more than tribal jingoism.

Thank you for your thoughtful insight. Much to think about.

[woodbine]

[yid][/yid]

First ever post.

If we accept that the God hypothesis, (where God is defined nothing more than the prime mover, uncaused cause of the universe) is unfalsifiable then by definition no possible evidence can be used to distinguish between the truth or otherwise of the God hypothesis.
...
Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Thoughts?

woodbine.

Hi woodbine!

Am I correct in saying that you are asking..given that the God-hypothesis is unfalsifiable...as a consequence of that unfalsifiability there cannot be "a reason to believe"?

If that's accurate, I'd say that, by definition, unfalsifiability cannot be construed as having an influence on belief. I think the strong sense of unfalsifiability relates to types of statements that are by definition unfalsifiable, i.e. truth functionally truths or analytically truths. If it is red then it is coloured. If A knows that something is unfalsifiable, it is because A already knows that it is true. If A knows that red is a colour, then A already knows he could never see something that was at the same time red-but-not-coloured. So A is simply incapable of holding that belief.

In other words, the only way for the idea of god to be "unfalsifiable" would be for it to be already known to be true.

I would say falsifiability logically follows from the definition and is not a matter of opinion. "There is a pink teapot that exists outside of the universe" I know that is unfalsifiable because we would need to investigate beyond that which is possible and could never know when the search was complete, but I do not believe it to be true.


"If it is red then it is coloured" is semantically unfalsifiable not evidentially falsifiable, that is, it is a tautology and as such irrelevant in the context of the evidentially unfalsifiable claim of God.

[woodbine]

If you read the wiki on falsifiability, it explicitly states that metaphysics, logic and mathematics, are unfalsifiable.

"More to the point, the falsifiability criterion does not imply that unfalsifiable systems such as logic, mathematics and metaphysics are not parts of science."

Yet people clearly do have beliefs about all of these things. So unfalsifiability does not, in itself, have bearing on for the reasons for belief in these things.

I would say Logic and maths are tautologically unfalsifiable but nevertheless they are contingent on the universe as it is and their verification or negation would have no bearing on the question of a first cause God.

Yes, people have belief but if it cannot be grounded upon any evidence then there belief is without any justification.

[woodbine]

Personal experiences are possible evidence.
"Possible evidence" would encompass any information received from the senses.
Without books or testimonies or personal experiences, there seems nothing evidentiary left.
Am I right to conclude that there is no reason whatsoever to believe in a God?

Agreed: personal experience = possible evidence.
Agreed: possible evidence would encompass what received from the senses.
Disagreed: without books or testimonies or personal experiences. There are plenty of such, in the Bible, in the Koran, and so on. Some have experienced what can be referred to as miracle. You may take such as accidental, but it can be a matter of opinion.
Agreed: no reason for you to believe in God, but I suggest there is no reason for some not to believe too, and for some to retain a reasonable doubt.
Personal: whether I believe in God or not is immaterial to the debate.

The point is that all holy books (and science) and personal experiences etc will be consistent with the God hypothesis independent of the truth of the hypothesis. Therefore they are useless in distinguishing between Gods existence or non existence.

[woodbine]

positive belief has the burden of proof so the redundancy of evidence is non trivial regarding this claim.

The argument from ignorance fallacy applies equally to the claim that something is false because it has not yet been proven true.

Yes it does. Therefore the God hypothesis is impervious to evidence. We cannot know. So how can people say they do?

[Terrapin Station]

What I am saying is that no possible evidence is useful in distinguishing between Gods existence or non existence, therefore any belief is unjustified.

Thinking that P is unfalsifiable doesn't imply that you think that no evidence can count as evidence for P. That would be uncomfirmable un unverifiable rather than unfalsifiable. But we could say that one thinks that P is both unfalsifiable and unverifiable.

If one thinks that, one still needs an additional step of "Just in case P is both unfalsifiable and unverifiable, then there can be no justification for believing that P." That's not an automatic step. You don't have to feel that belief requires either the falsifiability or verifiability of P to be justified.

Someone finding an objection to a "cause of the universe" is not inconsistent with a first cause God existing. Gods actions could be incoherent to mortals?

The person would also think that incoherent things can't obtain, period. As I think for example.--it's not a matter simply of me not being able to make sense of something. It's a matter of what's proposed being nonsensical period.

I can't fathom how to post post/format answers yet so please bear with me.

First, hit the reply button on the post. That's the double quotation-mark button that looks kind of like this (it's to the left of our avatars):


Then if you want to quote, reply, quote, reply as I did above, you need to make sure you have [q u o t e] without the spaces prior to what you want to quote, and [/ q u o t e] without the spaces (the same thing but with a forward slash) after what you want to quote. Be careful with nested quotes, as it's easy to make a mess of that, as many of us, including me, often do.