It is easy to assert that there might be a god, just as it is easy to assert that there are pink elephants on the dark side of the moon, that Saturn’s moon Titan is populated by Care Bears, that the Earth has an underground population of gremlins living their lives unknown to us, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. You can assert anything to be true, and nobody can prove you wrong, but you do not deserve to be taken seriously if you cannot provide any evidence to justify such belief. Such claims like these, that cannot be proven nor disproven, are neither true nor false; they are arbitrary and as such cannot qualify as knowledge.

George H. Smith deals with issues of what can and cannot constitute knowledge in great detail in his book “Atheism: The Case Against God.” I am planning on writing a short review of the book for my first post here, when I get the time.

I am atheist against most gods (Zeus, Christian God, Muslim God, Native American Gods, etc…) because they have a definition. You can look at the bible (or whatever appropriate religious text) and read claims about these gods and disprove those claims. The earth is 6,000 – 10,000 years old is a good example. The bible says god did this and it is obviously and one hundred percent incorrect. You take all these statements about the gods, put them together and determine a probability based on the collective knowledge of science. These gods are are false and I am absolutely atheist against them.

Now, lets say thats not what you mean and I actually think you do mean this. But lets say you define god as some omnipotent being that exists in the universe and we haven’t seen him or her or it because it’s powers are so vast that we cannot comprehend it. Well in that case I would be less certain because you are defining a very abstract god and thats where Dawkin’s comparisons to the flying spaghetti monster come into play. You can’t disprove a lot of things but you can say that they are unlikely. I still find an abstract god unlikely though because science understands so much about the inner-workings of our universe that god is no longer necessary in explaining natural occurring phenomena. But like you said it’s impossible to disprove but then again we could all be living in the matrix right now and you would have no way if disproving that either. However, I’m sure you find that scenario very improbable and thats because, whether you know it or not, you have assigned some chance to that being a truth.

And another thing about probability… when I say something is improbable or not, it’s based on current human understanding and knowledge. Obviously the answer is either a yes or a no but when you take the entirety of human understanding, mix in a little common sense and a dash of personal bias you come up with probability of the subject in question. And yeah I know I had to say “bias” because even if you take everything that science knows about reality, you still have to come up with a number based on some personal opinion about what the data points to, especially in such an abstract case like this.

That was supposed to be just one sentence long but I got carried away. Anyways, like I said earlier, I agree with most of what you said and look forward to more thought provoking posts from you in the future.

It is sound logic and sound reason, however it is blind to any outside or contradicting logic. That’s why the Christian science museum or whatever has displays of men riding dinosaurs. I mean, the Earth is only 6,000 years old, right? So, if we have dinosaurs and humans, well obviously god’s creations would own them as pets. I wouldn’t call that rationality, I believe it’s called in the symbolic logic circles “stroking ones self”.