catman

Proof is relative.

You could just as easily say that nothing is provable, as well as you could say God IS provable.

Oxymoron

Yes, I'm a bit concerned about the 'absence...' mantra as well. It trips so easily off the tongue that one hardly notices it.

The problem seems to be specificity of what is purportedly 'there'. If I said 'there is a duck on my table', and there patently wasn't, clearly the 'absence of evidence...' thang just doesn't work. But if I said 'there's a duck somewhere in this house', I couldn't just look to see if it was on the table, no it isn't, and so conclude that there was no duck anywhere - then the 'absence' mantra works quite well.

In other words, for a well-posed problem which refers to a specific phenomena occuring under certain criteria with defined initial conditions, absence of evidence and evidence of absence are identical. For all other problems, they are at the very least not necessarily identical.

Vesica

Absence, Evidence and the continuing quest to prove Existance/Non-Existance

I think there is a problem in using the astronomy or duck examples here...In the case of the astronomy narrative, you are not really talking about evidence as a broad category but rather visually gathered evidence utilizing technology specifically designed to enhance visual acuity. That's a heck of a lot more complex and involved that it seems in your statement. While the prescence or absence of a certain feature can lead to some conclusions about its frequency, even that will not prove or disprove existance. Tools designed to meet the known needs are not always helpful in exploring the unknown...An example, the 'discovery' that elephants use low-frequency sound to communicate over large distances...Before someone took the sensor/gizmo out onto the savanah, there was a lot of seemingly unconnected 'incidents' or 'patterns'.

About the duck, I get what you mean but if the existance of a diety was as easy to settle as "Do you see it?" we would not have these threads going on and on. We know a lot about ducks; they are birds, they are not prone to becoming invisible, and they are large enough to be seen with the naked eye...Therefore if you don't see the duck, there is no duck.

As far as I know we have no real evidence for or against the existance of a higher power. Such an entity has been defined in such a way that it is not easily measurable by any of our natural senses nor do any of our current technologies record data about it. But it is very short-sighted to argue that this equals non-existance. After all viruses, black holes and holes in the ozone all suffered from the same lack of data at one point or another.

In short, I am thrilled to see this thread! Hopefully this means we will see less threads trumpting "God's Non-Existance Proved!".

Shadowy Man

And I said that it wouldn't be proof of non-existence. But if someone claims that something exists and you can't see it wherever you look, you can rightly be justified in doubting its existence.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

In the absence of evidence, one should not believe.

One can hypothesize without evidence, but beliefs should only be based on evdience. Absence of evidence for 'God', only shows that believing in 'God'--given a lack of evidence--is irrational.

Keith.

PotatoError

"surely we have the tools and ability to prove that something CANNOT be proven to exist"

We can. We can prove that X cannot be proven to exist if X doesn't exist. (as if we proved it existed then it would exist!).

But can we prove that X cannot be proven to exist even though it does? (I'm using X here because it's either that or I use the word "something").

Thesists say "You can't disprove God" while saying that "God does exist". Can God both exist and be unprovable? (Using logic of course).

For something to be proved to exist it must be observed.

So the main question would be "Is there an X exists which we cannot physically observe?".

X could be an imaginary number (in the sense of imagined) which due to some mathematics could never be found.

Or it could be a physical object in a box.

If anyone can come up with a successful example of an X then they would prove that some things can exist and never be proven to exist. The thesists could then use this as an argument of God's existance (or even as "proof" I imagine).

ARGHHH!
<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Mr. Sammi

DefiantHeretic,

We are not as real as our neurotransmitters because we, as what we percieve and act upon, cannot percieve or act at the rate of neurotransmitters. Here the whole is less than itz parts?

The same with the universe, we are not as real as some elements in the universe because of our inability to percieve those elements perhaps even in itz totality.


Sammi Na Boodie ()

notMichaelJackson

Thinking like this leaves a great deal of room for not investigating an unproven yet possible concept. For example, atoms have existed since about one million years after the Big Bang. There were no creature who even considered the possibility of atoms existing until the Greek a few thousand years ago. If it had not been for people believing in the existance of atoms, there probably would not have been investigation into their existance, and they never would have been proven.

tk

Actually ~(~A) is equivalent to A. What you mean is that ~exists p (Proposition(p) and Provable(p))<1> isn't equivalent to exists p (Proposition(p) and Provable(~p)).<2> But this is going out of the `safe' world of first-order logic...

<1> there doesn't exist p such that p is a proposition and p is provable -- absence of evidence
<2> there exists p such that p is a proposition and ~p is provable -- evidence of absence

There's a difference between believing in something and speculating about something. Actually we're not quite sure yet whether the concept of "atoms" correspond to any concrete thing in the physical world, or whether they're manifestations of some lower-level phenomena.