What are your thoughts on “You can never be sure 100% that there isn’t a ”
Well I’d like to think I am sure but I’m open to logical arguments
My views are it is so unlikely it can be discounted. I do put on the same level as Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny in terms of made up characters.
Solipsism is easy. The universality of doubt can only be a starting point. Yes you've stated that we're not 100% certain of X but also that we're not 100% certain of anything. This alone would simply put X in the same category as everything else in the entire universe. However our degrees of knowledge are not so black and white. Can we not say that though we cannot be 100% certain that Ted Bundy was a murderer we can find more reasons to believe it than to believe that the tooth fairy is real. Different claims have different qualities of evidence supporting them. The question of whether we can be 100% certain of something can be a meaningless distraction unless we build upon it to ask how reasonable it would to doubt it. How much evidence, and what quality of evidence would we need to discount in order to apply such doubt.
Yikes sorry about the typos. A mixture of iPad typing and Siri. Embarrassing.
Yes one can never be 100% sure of any contention being true or false under all circumstances.
For example under laboratory conditions, a group renowned scientist could leave milk and cookies at the base of a chimney in a house where "Nice list" children live every christmas eve for one hundred years, and then measure the resulting consumption and monitoring the following morning.
IF in 1% of cases, the cookie is nibbled and the milk sipped, IF on 1% of the cases a jolly fat man with a sack is recorded coming down the chimney and making off with the Blu-ray player, it still does not prove the existence of Santa, (as a mystical being or as a burglar) is proves there are unaccounted variables.
Because of such a study I am not going to leap at the one % and start becoming an ardent Santa-ist again hoping to be, one day, a good enough boy to wake up one December 25th with a stocking full of goodies in the fireplace, and I am certainly not going to reinstall a coal fire and chimney for especially this purpose as an act of faith!
“You can never be sure 100% that there isn’t a ” is the argument from desperation, the last act of a drowning man clutching at a razor blade.
It is the scientific equivalent of the sulking spoiled kid, sticking out a pet lip, stamping a foot and sulking because they can't get their own way.
The fat thing od virus has struck again stealing your th ins.
I'm inclined to agree that you can never be sure. A part of me still ponders that our existence might be part of a failed experiment that's been stuck on a shelf somewhere, while whoever created it goes on to try again (and again and again) to see if they can get it right.
I believe there's sufficient evidence to amount to proof that there is no benevolent God. Nobody up there listening to your prayers, making sure life treats you better if you have faith and pay your respects than it does if you don't.
But the origins of the universe and life? Science needs to pull a little more out of its hat than it has so far to prove beyond doubt that these things happened naturally, without any intervention from a sentience. In the meantime, I don't feel comfortable categorically stating that there was no intelligence behind the origin of the universe and life within it. Though I stand firmly by the belief that if that intelligence exists, or ever existed, it has either died or moved on and we are no longer of consequence to it.
And yes, I know the burden of proof isn't on us to justify our lack of belief. But the burden of proof is on us if we wish to tell people that they are wrong to believe. Both sides of this argument operate as belief systems. Just ours isn't a religious one.
The surest things in life are that our hundred or so elements that make up all material substances will always react with each other in the way that they do IF they get close enough to each other. However, following a wipe out, it can take other millions of years to return life giving molecules. There may be interjection of life molecules from another planet. What other type of thing do you want science to do
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