Imaginary orbiting tea cups and pink unicorns are popular atheist analogies. Unless time is actually spent refuting evidence submitted by proponents of tea cups and unicorns, the attempted analogy misses. Wouldn’t something like a sasquatch(bigfoot) analogy be a little more accurate? Although the evidence is not conclusive, it exists for both. Serious and intelligent people can come to differing conclusions and others to no firm conclusion. I don’t BELIEVE in bigfoot and don’t expect one to be discovered but would not be completely shocked if a large primate species were confirmed. Until 1913 the giant panda was considered to be a mythological creature by people who would now consider it to be real. Can you imagine God being real?
Posted: October 24th 2008
Eric_PK
There are a couple of different questions lurking in there, so I’ll take the last one…
Can I imagine that god is real?
There are widely differing definitions of what god is, and that makes the claim “god exists” categorically different from the claim “bigfoot exists”.
So, until you can provide a reasonable definition of what god is – and something along the lines of how bigfoot and nessie are defined – the question of existence will have to wait.
Your bigfoot analogy is interesting. You say that you don’t believe in bigfoot, but there is evidence that would lead you to conclude that bigfoot exists.
I’m in the same position WRT god. Assuming you can tell me what this “god” thing is…
Posted: October 27th 2008
George Locke
You don’t mention what evidence you’re referring to, so it’s hard to respond to your question very specifically.
Overall, your main point seems to be that since I’ve been wrong before, mightn’t I be wrong about god? This is an extremely weak argument. The simple fact of human fallibility does not suggest that God exists. It does suggest that absolute certainty in all its forms is ill conceived, atheist and theist alike.
Serious and intelligent people can come to differing conclusions and others to no firm conclusion.
Serious and intelligent people used to believe in witches. This is no argument for anything.
I don’t BELIEVE in bigfoot and don’t expect one to be discovered but would not be completely shocked if a large primate species were confirmed.
Actually, the evidence for sasquatch is much better than the evidence for god. Sasquatch, if it exists, would be a large ape or ape-like creature. The fossil record contains non-human bipedal apes, so it’s at best very unlikely (rather than obviously incredible) that such a beast lives today despite being unobserved.
Until 1913 the giant panda was considered to be a mythological creature by people who would now consider it to be real.
Giant pandas, as far as I know, were first seen alive by Europeans in 1913. If someone were to tell me that an unusual large mammal existed somewhere on earth but had never been recorded by science, I would be skeptical. However, I know that large mammals exist on this planet, so the idea is not entirely out of the question. The proposition of god’s existence is much more of a stretch.
Neither I or anyone I know of has ever produced convincing evidence of a non-corporeal intelligence, let alone one capable of creating or even influencing our universe. Until such evidence is available, I will continue to act as though events in the world are caused by physical entities within the world. This hypothesis has borne quite a good deal of good fruit.
Posted: October 26th 2008
SmartLX www
The supposed evidence for Bigfoot, whether or not it’s genuine, is positive evidence rather than the absence of contrary evidence. Just like unicorns, celestial teapots and gods, there is no way to disprove the existence of Bigfoot without being omniscient with respect to life on Earth.
If you believe there is evidence for God, the teapot analogy (officially named “Russell’s Teapot” after Bertrand Russell) is moot. If evidence exists, you have a positive case for God and you don’t have to resort to pointing out the lack of a negative case. The analogy is aimed at those who don’t think there’s any available evidence for God, either because we haven’t found it or He hides it, but believe in Him anyway while arguing, “You can’t be sure He doesn’t exist.”
The important thing is, you’ve gone and said that there is evidence for God, if not conclusive evidence. It’s that evidence we should be discussing. Feel free to group it into topics and put it into new questions, after checking that existing answers don’t already cover it.
Posted: October 25th 2008
logicel
The impossibility of proving the non-existence of unicorns and celestial teapots is used to demonstrate that null hypotheses can’t be proven. (There are no unicorns, celestial teapots, and gods are all null hypotheses.) To extrapolate any further regarding the lumping together of god/pink unicorn/celestial teapot beliefs is missing the implication of that point—the burden of evidence is on the believer. In addition, using obsolete/obscure beliefs like believing in pink unicorns/celestial teapots has the added boon of cutting through the personal attachment many have to non-evidential religious beliefs that are being presently practiced.
Once the potency of that point is understood, the believers in the various religious brands will then earnestly launch their faith boats (poorly disguised as decisive speed boats slicing through waves of criticism), only to unsuccessfully navigate their flimsy boats through such challenging seas because they are armed just with wonky tools of deductive/rhetorical fallacies as: appeal to authority, argumentum ad populum, non sequiturs, petitio principii, plurium interrogationum, strawmen, tu quogue, ignoratio elenchi, equivocation, etc., to substitute for the lack of evidence for their particular god belief.
They are so busy trying to save their non-seaworthy faith boat from being scuttled by busily bailing out the rising waters and stopping up the increasing number of holes, that they fail to see that they are drowning. Maybe it’s oxygen deprivation caused by slow drowning that allows them to insist that logical fallacies substitute for evidence?
To sum up, there is no substantial evidence showing that the supernatural plane (or on the natural plane, that Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster) exist(s) on the level of the interlocking body of evidence supporting the scientific theories and facts of evolution, gravity, etc. In other words, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If we did not follow that rule, then we all would be drowning in a global sea of snake oil.
Can I imagine that gods exist? Only in the way that I can imagine pink unicorns and celestial teapots exist, that is, in a subjective and totally imaginative manner. My imaginative version of the celestial teapot is most likely worlds apart from another person’s subjective and imaginative notion of it. Who, then, has the one and only true concept of the celestial teapot?
Though imagination and intuition both have played significant roles in our discovering facts, we must not embrace them on their own. Solid, collaborative evidence to what they are pointing needs to be supplied in spades before we can conclude they represent reality.
EDIT: Other answers to a similar question can be found here.
Posted: October 25th 2008