Gawen

The bolded part of my quote above. Equally. For example:
The statement “All roses are flowers”, it would come under the heading of an ethical claim and can be verified. The statement, “All roses are good”, comes under the metaphysical realm and cannot be verified and the meaning lies beyond the statement. An ethical claim would only have meaning insofar as it spoke of something capable of empirical verification. Ethical statements do not have intrinsic meaning (of or relating to the essential nature of a thing) but are merely functional in that they express something for the moment. But this leads us into the realm of relativism, which is out of the scope of this argument.

The statement "God exists" is unverifiable. We cannot say whether it is true or false. This is because God is not a 'fact' to be observed and subjected to empirical testing. People do not see God in this way.

kennethamy

Why is "All roses are flowers" an ethical claim. Isn't it a botanical claim? Don't roses fit into the botanical definition of "flower" like lily or daisy? It isn't about ethics, about what is good or bad, or right or wrong. I have no idea how you are using the word "ethics". People have claimed that metaphysical claims are unverifiable. And that may be so. But how does it make them meaningless? An example of a metaphysical claim is "Every event has a cause". Well, maybe that is unverifiable (I don't know). But I know what it means, and so do you. So how could it possibly be meaningless?

Have you been going to lectures that deal with logical positivism or logical empiricism, and getting them a little mixed up?

whichphilosophy

When taking a broad perspective, neither Dawkins nor Bertram Russell offered anything more than the shaman.

There is a fundamental question one has to ask and to be honest few are looking at this whether Atheist or Theist etc.

The question is simply whether the cause of the chain of events leading up to now and continuing thereon is live, conscious or not.


There is no proof that life was caused by something live just as much as there is no proof that the ultimate cause was caused by something that was not conscious or live.

There is no burden of proof or balance of evidence either way on paper. Thus a person can look at these factors and really they can only arrive at a subjective conclusion that they feel comfortable with.

MrWhy

The shortest answer.

We come to the conclusion that a god does not exist by examining the evidence that religions are created by people, and the lack of evidence that a god exist.

ecco

Zorathruster:

Let’s see…One can blindly agree with ones parents, siblings and peers and “know” that god exists…or…One can study history and the bible and realize that the bible stories carry as much weight as the stories about Santa Claus. Which takes more intelligence?

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-thinkingchristians.htm
Emphasis mine.

The article then goes on to list 31 studies coming to the same conclusion and ends with …

fishbulb

The question is considerably more complex than that. There is also the issue of when you decide you've reached the beginning of the chain -- or whether there is any place that can meaningfully be called a beginning. Even if we were to discover that our Universe was, in fact, created as the result of a willful act by an intelligent agent, does that make that agent god? How did that being itself come to exist, and where does or did it exist, if it created everything that we now understand as existing.

There are always two possibilities: either A is true or not A is true. But it does not follow that, if you don't have any evidence either way, both are equally likely. There is no evidence for or against me being the heir to the Spanish throne, but that does not mean that it is equally likely that I am descended from Spanish kings as it is that I am not. It is not equally likely that my car is red as it is that it is not red, even though you have no evidence to support either possibility. The chance of my ticket having won the lottery is not 50%, even though there are only two possibilities: it is a winner or it is a loser. Likewise, it is not equally likely that the Universe was created as a deliberate act by an intelligent being as it is that it wasn't.

There is, of course, an important difference. In the case of car colors, royal lineage, and lottery winnings, we have enough knowledge to come up with a reasonable estimate of the probabilities. When it comes to the question of the origin of the Universe, we don't even know if the Universe had an origin or what the circumstances of such an origin could have been like, or if the concept is even meaningful. Because of this, we cannot say much of anything intelligent about first or ultimate causes, except that any given explanation or hypothesis is probably wrong. This means we can readily dismiss all of the myths and theological claims made about god and the origin of the Universe as nothing more than fanciful conjecture with no basis in fact or evidence, until such time as actual evidence can be brought forward to support those claims.

Gawen

It has been said that Logical Positivism, by rejecting metaphysics is also rejecting the possibility of there being an ethical foundation to society. An ethical claim would only have meaning insofar as it spoke of something capable of empirical verification. Ethical statements do not have intrinsic meaning (of or relating to the essential nature of a thing) but are merely functional in that they express something for the moment.

But this leads us into the realm of relativism. What is the meaning of 'meaning'? If we claim the statement “All cats are cats”, it would come under the heading of an ethical claim and can be verified. If we make the statement, “All dogs are good”, the statement comes under the metaphysical realm and cannot be verified and the meaning lies beyond the statement. But this isn't the forum to discuss this one.

Still, the word "God" is meaningless as it is can not be empirically tested to provide evidence of "God". "God exists" is EQUALLY meaningless. This is not far from ontology vs, metaphysics. Ontology is the attempt to say what entities exist. Metaphysics, by contrast, is the attempt to say, of those entities, what they are. There is a logical difference between saying "God is" and "God is X”. But it is all meaningless without evidence to support the claims.

One may argue from the assumption that the statement "God exists" has some meaning. The theist may say it’s true, the atheist may say it’s false, the agnostic may say it may be true or false but we can't tell and the non-theist says it’s true under certain conditions. But (I will grant you) if Logical Positivism claims the statement, "God exists" is meaningless then these positions are meaningless also. Therefore, Positivists are neither theist, atheist, agnostic or non-theist and have thrown out the argument concerning the existence of God altogether except under certain circumstances. However, Logical Positivism refers to the meaning behind the statement and not the statement itself. Regardless of who says what, if the statement cannot be verifiable, Logical Positivism says the statement is meaningless. In this regard, I am a Positivist.

GPLindsey

I just composed a long-winded post directly relating to this topic that discusses how the Christian apologist abuses the verb "to know" (I wrote it before I came across your post). In a nutshell, theists are limiting the definition of the verb "to know" to situations of 100% certainty, and demanding that the atheist can only say "God does not exist" if he knows it with 100% certainty. The theist does not impose this threshhold of knowledge for their position--quite the opposite. They feel theism is logical so long as the notion of God cannot be disproved with 100% certainty--that tiny, tiny fraction of plausibility is all they need to embrace faith. I argue that the best way to fight off this argument is to clarify what is meant by the verb "to know," and the ramifications of accepting their claim that nothing is knowable unless it is known with 100% certainty.

kennethamy

Yes, I agree. And, there is no justification for so using the word, "know".

Draygomb

Draygomb's Paradox Proves that God Doesn't Exist