Snagglepuss 2

You Can't Prove God Doesn't Exist
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=You_can%27t_prove_God_doesn%27t_exist
"It is not uncommon for apologists to make statements like, "You can't prove God doesn't exist," when they are challenged to support their own claim that God exists. Such statements are intended to shift the burden of proof, and therefore represent a logical fallacy."

I guess my efforts to defend the existence of Snagglepuss are continuing.  Look at that last sentence.  If there's a site called "Stuff Atheists Like" I'm guessing "Phrases They Learned In High School Debate Team" is on there.  Never trust a man who says "therefore."  Here's something better:

Philosopher Bertrand Russell posed a famous counter-argument to this claim by stating the following:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

And finally, the Great Pumpkin objection to the argument:  "Many people might object that if belief in God is basic (i.e., rational without evidence), why can't any belief, such as a belief in the Great Pumpkin, also be basic?"

Do you see the problem with all of these things?  A theist says "You can't prove God doesn't exist."  The atheist says "You can't make me disprove it and you can't disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster either so FSM is just as possible as God."  That's when I say, "Yes.  I agree."  You can not prove that there is not a magical cat named Snagglepuss or a Flying Spaghetti Monster or God, in whatever form you want to color him.

That means there's a possibility.  That even if you account for 99% of all knowledge in the universe forever and ever and ever, you can not say "There is no God" because you don't know what's in that 1%.  You can't say "We are not a butterfly's dream" as long as that 1% exists.  There is some fancy debate team term for this argument that sounds really dismissive, I think.  Doesn't change the fact that it's true.

I hate to talk on dark matter because in ten minutes the information will be out of date, but I'll do it anyway to illustrate a point.  We currently have no way to prove that dark matter exists.  If you know more than me and this is not true, substitute in another cutting edge substance.  If you want to get snobby and in denial and say nothing like that exists because science, remember we used to worry about ptomaines and caloric.

So dark matter is trusted to exist but can't prove it.  We can see how the universe reacts around where we think it is and then we try to make up rules that bring us closer to an understanding of the truth.  We can't prove it and we can't disprove it.  But stuff is happening around where we think it is that doesn't have a scientific explanation.

Is this sounding familiar?  Kinda sound like Snagglepuss?

Yes, no one can prove Snagglepuss exists.  Yes, no one can prove Snagglepuss doesn't exist.  Yes, no one can prove Russell's Teapot doesn't exist.  Yes, no one can prove the Great Pumpkin doesn't exist.  It's not an argument against the existence of Snagglepuss.  It's an argument for the possibility of the existence of Snagglepuss.

I don't know what the debate team term for putting words in someone's mouth is, but "You Can't Prove God Doesn't Exist" are not the same words as "God Exists".

I don't think I bookmarked the "God of the Gaps fallacy" because the language on the site was SO bad.  (I mean really, theists being apologists [implying wrongness] and atheists being counter-apologists [implying successful countering of wrongness] is one thing, but just calling a whole subset of beliefs "arguments from ignorance"?  They're not even trying to seem fair.)  Anyway, God of the Gaps is another one of those things that atheists say and never think about.  They just feel all smug about using a new phrase that sounds dismissive to add to their debate team vocabulary.

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During World War II the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terms in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison.^[4]Bonhoeffer wrote, for example:

"...how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."^[4]

In his 1955 book Science and Christian Belief Charles Alfred Coulson (1910−1974) wrote:

There is no 'God of the gaps' to take over at those strategic places where science fails; and the reason is that gaps of this sort have the unpreventable habit of shrinking.

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So God of the Gaps means we used God to explain why the sun rose until we learned about the solar system.  We used God to explain disappearing birds before we learned about migration.  Anything we did not know was traditionally explained with "God did it."  So the current version is something like "God exists in ever-shrinking gaps of knowledge."

Again:

"God exists in ever-shrinking gaps of knowledge."

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when an atheist says this and sits back, folds his arms, and smiles.

"Yes.  I agree.  God does exist."

Look at the original quote.  It's not atheism!  "We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."  Sound like Galileo?  "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."  Stephen Hawking, Einstein, they all have quotes like this.

But yes, we have gaps in knowledge and will always have gaps in knowledge.  That is why intelligent people will never say "There's no God" and why I will say "There's probably a Snagglepuss."