The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #131699   Message #3022374
Posted By: Steve Shaw
03-Nov-10 - 06:42 AM
Thread Name: BS: The God Delusion 2010
Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010
If you claim that you had a prayer answered there's nothing anyone in the world can do to prove you wrong. If you say there's a God there's nothing anyone in the world can do to prove there isn't. If I tell you that a blue china teapot is in orbit around Mars there's nothing you or anyone else can do to prove there isn't. Geddit, Jacko? But making claims is easy and lazy. Anyone can claim anything. I can claim I saw a ten-foot jellyfish flying over my garden a minute ago and there would be nothing you could do to prove there hadn't been. I don't happen to think that the celestial teapot is there, but if I did and I said so wouldn't you think it reasonable to put the onus on me to provide evidence? Likewise, the burden of providing evidence sits on the shoulders of both those who claim God exists and those who claim they've had a prayer answered, not on those who demur. Calling on sceptics to provide "proof" is just putting the whole issue arse about face. It's a dishonest ploy to divert attention from the real issue, which is your lack of evidence. I've been ticked off for requiring scientific evidence for God's existence. I'm sticking to that but I'll compromise. Any evidence that's objective and independently-verifiable will do me. Something concrete would go quite a way (like that Lourdes person growing a new leg, a flesh-and-bone one I hasten to add, not a concrete one). But large numbers of people making unverifiable claims is not evidence, nor is the fact that religion has been going a long time, nor is the fact that some people of old wrote down stories, nor is the fact that we have magnificent cathedrals... All that is just what people do. You need to show us what God can do and it has to be verifiable by independent persons with no axe to grind. So far, there's nothing in the universe we know of that can't be explained, either right now or in the future, unless we invoke God. And science is relentlessly closing the gaps in understanding all the time.