- Joined
- May 16, 2013
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1. The Bible/Quran is a religious book, so you can’t use the Bible/Quran as your source of information on what’s written in the Bible/Quran.
2. Implied: Just because you Christians/Muslims are the ones who experience and practice faith, and just because you’ve been examining it and writing on it for centuries, doesn’t mean you have any authority to speak on what faith is.
3. I’ll tell you what faith is: it’s thinking without reason.
All conclusions reached by objective inquiries, be it science, history, or whatever, must be falsifiable. The theory of general relativity, for example, is testable, and could in theory be disproven through experimentation, if it were wrong. Any statement that is designed such that you cannot disprove it even if it were false is worthless. For example:
You can't prove me wrong now, can you?
So, when it comes to God, exactly what would religious persons take to be disproof of his existence? Because it seems to me that these religions have been cleverly marketed to be unfalsifiable:
No matter what evidence comes out that points towards the lack of existence of God, religious people will simply bend the facts to suit their predetermined conclusions. In science, history, or whatever, this type of reversed inquiry is called "bias". In religion, it's just called "faith".
2. Implied: Just because you Christians/Muslims are the ones who experience and practice faith, and just because you’ve been examining it and writing on it for centuries, doesn’t mean you have any authority to speak on what faith is.
3. I’ll tell you what faith is: it’s thinking without reason.
All conclusions reached by objective inquiries, be it science, history, or whatever, must be falsifiable. The theory of general relativity, for example, is testable, and could in theory be disproven through experimentation, if it were wrong. Any statement that is designed such that you cannot disprove it even if it were false is worthless. For example:
There exist invisible pink unicorns that you cannot detect by any means, and that do not register or affect the universe in any manner.
You can't prove me wrong now, can you?
So, when it comes to God, exactly what would religious persons take to be disproof of his existence? Because it seems to me that these religions have been cleverly marketed to be unfalsifiable:
- The Bible says God created the Earth in six days, that he created Eve from Adam's rib, that there exists a talking snake, etc.? No, that's just allegorical.
- The Bible tells you to kill your children if they are disobedient? No, that's just...well, I haven't really heard an excuse for this one.
- God didn't answer the starving, dying young girl's prayers? That's just a part of his plan.
- Study shows that prayer doesn't work beyond placebo? That's because you're testing God.
- Science demonstrates that the universe runs on a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws, with no room for miracles or divine intervention? God just manipulates physics when nobody's looking.
- No evidence for God? God's just hiding his existence.
- Person died and claimed to see nothing? Obviously God wipes people's memories in some near death experiences...sometimes...
- etc.
No matter what evidence comes out that points towards the lack of existence of God, religious people will simply bend the facts to suit their predetermined conclusions. In science, history, or whatever, this type of reversed inquiry is called "bias". In religion, it's just called "faith".