Incorrect. Believing that there is a unicorn, named Barry, who has 7 wives, 18 sisters and 13 brothers that lives on mercury and is 40 thousand years old is NOT the same as believing this same unicorn does not exist.
I agree that Carathorn's statement doesn't really hold water, but unless Barry has billions of people believing in him for millennia, changes culture in radical ways, affects law-making and human rights, etc., I don't think it's any better of a comparison than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which I always thought was a puerile argument.
Eventually you must be forced to some kind of belief. Did a personal, eternal being bring everything into existence? Or did it spring forth from nothing, or exist eternally? Either scenario requires a pretty hefty belief!
The gods that have been written about in text defy the laws of physics and all that stuff. So it is quite logical to believe they don't exist as it contradicts all known knowledge about the universe.
As a counter-point to that, why would you expect a God who created everything to be unable to defy the laws of physics if he chose? That belies a materialist worldview, which rules out anything supernatural by definition, and sounds an awful lot like dogma to me. A skeptic is one thing, a dogmatist is another.
As previously mentioned, arguing semantics and saying 'well you know you can't ever TRULY prove a negative' really doesn't help anyone and IMO is an unnecessary road black to a flowing conversation.
Agreed.
As the only mention of gods appear in human writings and direct evidence has never been verified it is exactly the same as believing harry potter is real. Believing harry potter is not real is not equivalent to believing it is real.
Disagree. To make a comparison between the two is to grossly misunderstand the implications. Humans have had religion for as long as we know, it is deeply embedded in everything we do. That alone is no proof (there are many more differences), but it is not even remotely comparable to believing in Harry Potter.
Also, as just a comment, I disagree that there is no direct evidence, but obviously there are many things some people accept as evidence that others don't. And interestingly, a God who revealed proof of himself at the whims of every skeptic, would be no God, but a slave, a genie. A God who revealed himself directly to one in an audible voice, would be doubted later---perhaps it was a hallucination, or perhaps we misunderstood his words. It seems therefore natural that if God existed, he would reveal himself by his own choosing, and if he chose to do so by written word, that would be the best means of preserving and being able to repeatedly see what he revealed about himself.
I don't plan on involving myself in debate, but didn't want to let this pass without comment.
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