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This one is for the atheists

61
EPR-radar5/11/2015 7:04:25 pm PDT

re: #60 EiMitch

And Nyet just accused me of moving goalposts. The conversation was about what is or isn’t falsifiable, and “souls” most certainly aren’t. Outside of religious faith, there is no reason to believe a “non-material soul, usually immortal” exists, nor is there anyway to disprove the existence of a soul. It is entirely untestable.

Of course the existence and fate of a soul is untestable. That’s really my point. You seemed to be arguing that religious believers have retreated to a notion of divine activity that is indistinguishable from natural events. That seems to me to be false on its face (e.g., souls, heaven and hell, doctrines of major faiths etc.). There is more to most religion than an inherently unknowable deity that only acts by mimicking natural events. Your argument that theists would inevitably retreat to that position when pressed isn’t very strong. What would compel someone to give up their belief in a conventional Heaven/Hell Christian afterlife?

From your reply to Nyet, it also appears that you aren’t really interested in religion as actually practiced, and are arguing from a definition of god (i.e. a god that acts only via effects that are indistinguishable from natural events) that makes its unknowability true by definition. I’ll happily agree that god defined in that way is inherently unknowable, making agnosticism with respect to that god trivially true. In other words, that agnosticism is simply a consequence of definitions, as opposed to being some kind of observation.

I disagree that this notion of god is in any way popular. It seems pretty close to Deism, which is a known thing, but hardly a major branch of religion.