If God rides down from heaven hurling lightening bolts in all directions and wantomly altering the very nature of reality, I will consider atheism to be falsified. This is an extreme case, but there are many observations that could falsify, or at least provide very strong evidence against, atheism.
Don’t confuse unfalsified with unfalsifiable.
God is normally considered to be outside the universe; why do you say he is usually assumed to be fundamental?
Either God can be reduced to something else or he is fundamental. No conception of God that I have ever heard of can be reduced (I’m not show how he could create the universe if he was reducible) so it seems likely he is usually assumed fundamental.
Also note that there are many conceptions of God, some of which actually are something like fundamental even if isomorphic to a more detailed description (with less errant connotations) of the structure of the ensemble universe.
I’m afraid I can’t understand what you mean here.
Every single thing we have ever seen has a cause.
The universe itself has no observed cause, so this statement is false. It seems likely that there is at least one uncaused thing, since otherwise you have an infinite regress, and the universe seems like as good as bet as any for what that thing is, since it has no observed cause and it belongs to a very different reference class to everything else.
We have seen peoples’ consciousness fade in and out as they go to sleep or fall into comas. We postulate that it is thus probable that death is like an endless coma.
Ah, but we have never observed conciousness to be ended permanently except by death.
You may challenge that this is not evidence since it is true by definition, but if you think about it the fact that the universe has no observed cause is also true by definition, since if it did have an observed cause we would just have included that thing in ‘the universe’ and then asked what caused it.
This is only because we already have a word for ‘superintelligence’. Most people don’t. My point was that we shouldn’t be automatically contemptuous of concepts that are really damn similar to the ones we’re already postulating just because they’re labeled in the language of the enemy.
Its not about ‘God’ being the language of the enemy, its about the fact that it has been used by too many people to mean too many things and it has reached the point where even to use it is to imply many of those things. If someone wants to talk about the cause of the universe they should call it ‘Flumsy’, since that way nobody gets confused.
Think about it this way. If you are working on an algebra problem and you have some complicated term in your equation that you want to define so you don’t have to write out the whole thing every line, you might decide to call it ‘x’. This is a perfectly legitimate step (it is a primitive operation in most mathematical formal systems) unless there is already a term called ‘x’ elsewhere in your equation, in which case it is making the unjustified and quite probably false assumption that these two things are equal.
Calling this cause you postulate ‘God’ is the same kind of mistake.
If God rides down from heaven hurling lightening bolts in all directions and wantomly altering the very nature of reality, I will consider atheism to be falsified. This is an extreme case, but there are many observations that could falsify, or at least provide very strong evidence against, atheism.
Don’t confuse unfalsified with unfalsifiable.
Either God can be reduced to something else or he is fundamental. No conception of God that I have ever heard of can be reduced (I’m not show how he could create the universe if he was reducible) so it seems likely he is usually assumed fundamental.
I’m afraid I can’t understand what you mean here.
The universe itself has no observed cause, so this statement is false. It seems likely that there is at least one uncaused thing, since otherwise you have an infinite regress, and the universe seems like as good as bet as any for what that thing is, since it has no observed cause and it belongs to a very different reference class to everything else.
Ah, but we have never observed conciousness to be ended permanently except by death.
You may challenge that this is not evidence since it is true by definition, but if you think about it the fact that the universe has no observed cause is also true by definition, since if it did have an observed cause we would just have included that thing in ‘the universe’ and then asked what caused it.
Its not about ‘God’ being the language of the enemy, its about the fact that it has been used by too many people to mean too many things and it has reached the point where even to use it is to imply many of those things. If someone wants to talk about the cause of the universe they should call it ‘Flumsy’, since that way nobody gets confused.
Think about it this way. If you are working on an algebra problem and you have some complicated term in your equation that you want to define so you don’t have to write out the whole thing every line, you might decide to call it ‘x’. This is a perfectly legitimate step (it is a primitive operation in most mathematical formal systems) unless there is already a term called ‘x’ elsewhere in your equation, in which case it is making the unjustified and quite probably false assumption that these two things are equal.
Calling this cause you postulate ‘God’ is the same kind of mistake.