Nobody has the answer! Where's the evidence!

if someone who has the answer would pipe in.

Atheism is provable...yes, Atheism exists.
Atheism is the disbelief in deities...yes, that seems to be the definition of Atheism.

Therefore...
Atheism, the disbelief in deities, is provable.

It doesn't consider what the definitions are and treats the words as primitives.

Theism exists.
Theism is the belief in deities...yes, that seems to be the definition of theism.

Therefore...
Theism, the belief in deities, is provable.

Bam. You've just proven that A and not-A are true.

But no, you haven't. All you've shown is that it's provably true that the two words have meanings. "Unicorn" can go through the same process. "Verfligle," the property of an object to be invisible only at a height of 18 meters above sea level in countries with an e in their name (in Russian) in light and at the temperature of 83.5 degrees F on days with a t in them in odd numbered years not divisible by 3 can also be shown to be provable by the same means.

The means mean little.

Last edited Fri Jun 22, 2018, 08:42 AM - Edit history (1)

saying that you can't prove there is no god.
Of course since there is no evidencet for the existence of a deity the onus is on those who make the claim for proof.

No one needs to prove invisible unicorns don't exist.

seems to imply what something "is" and define it.

to "as" it would work, the problem is the person was quoting someone else, so that don't work.

If i read it that way. That it is what atheism is. They are wrong. Atheism is the lack of belief in a deity. Or disbelief, depending on how it is defined.
The provable, unprovable part is a side debate.

Argy-bargy

requires talking? Argy-bargy indeed.

proves there is no God.

I suspect that the belief, disbelief, or failure to believe in something is a pretty pointless thing to argue. I can believe in all kinds of things that exist and all kinds of things that don't exist. The belief is; it's a mental state and those are ultimately difficult to verify, but I see no reason to think that if a person says they believe in something and there's some sort of action reasonably based on that belief that the belief doesn't exist.

Now, does the thing, fact, act, object that belief is in exist?

That's completely uncoupled from the act of believing (or the absence of the act of believing, or the act of disbelieving). I can't see how my mental state would affect something unrelated to my mental state or unaffected by my immediate actions based on my mental state.

If I choose to believe that Putin is a little green android from the planet Stalin in the Constellation Lenin, whose star forms a nice Einstein Ringo as seen by the Chubbie Space Telescope, it doesn't mean that it's true.

If, at the same time, I choose to believe that there is no such place as "Moscow" and that Putin's headquarters is in a pingo located in Greeland and subsidized by the Danes, there's also no reason to think my disbelief in Moscow's existence suddenly means Moscow's blinked out of existence. So does it matter if nobody thinks something exists?

Well, we've a long, long series of "discoveries" of things that nobody thought existed. From neutrons to the Sun's being the center of the solar system to the vacuum of space or the absence of an ether. It's unlikely that these things suddenly found existence at the moment the first believer decided he'd socially construct reality in that particular way. In other words, you phrase the issue as belief or disbelief; the ultimate issue goes back to the existence of a deity or deities. If they exist, atheism in its distinct forms is false, a belief unhinged from reality; if they do not, theism or deism in their various guises is false.

Whether something is judged to exist depends on your standard for proof. if you require documentary evidence in in the form of contemporaneous documents then Jesus, Plato, and Homer never existed. If you require that we see something clearly, then there are no quarks, we infer their existence from energy spikes that match theoretical predictions. I like the scientific standards for proof, by and large--they've been a remarkably productive tool. But are they ultimate truth? That depends on the definition of "ultimate truth" and whether it exists.

probably meant "unproveable as to truth value," but that's not what he said, and he took another poster to task for contradicting himself simply by providing a definition of "atheist." He implied that if someone defines a word, he must also believe whatever the word defines, as if providing a definition of unicorns means that person believes in unicorns.

Thanks.