Monday, 09 March 2009

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  Argument from ignorance?

  I had a very interesting discussion with an online blogger over the last week.  He is not a Christian but he is also against the idea of Atheism.  We are still in the midst of a very interesting debate, but the most recent thing we discussed was so interesting, I thought I would share it with you.

  His position against atheism is that it is an argument from ignorance.  He states that it is illogical to assume that "we don't know X (where X is the possibility of a god concept), therefore -X ("not X" or the opposite of X) is valid.  For this, I will let the cat out of the bag...

  Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a box with a quantom mechanical killing device that may or may not activate based on the result of a quantom event.  While the box is closed, we cannot know whether or not the cat is dead.  All we have is a probability that the cat is either alive or dead.

  Pretend that a religion is a presumption that the cat is definetly dead and an assumption about what caused the cat to die.  (Which is something that can't be known, only theorized.)  If every "religion" in this sense can be debunked based on scientific facts that we do know, how many religions must be theorized before we agree that it is more likely that none of them will be correct.  Isn't it more likely that the cat is alive?

  I would assume this blogger would argue that "non-religions" can be theorized off the same "unprovable" principals in favor of the cat being alive, which would make the probability of both 50/50.

  If this is extrapolated to the idea that within the box of the universe, there is either a god, or not a god, and nobody even knows if the box will ever be opened, then logically, god existing is just as likely as god not existing.

  I have to hand it to him, this is daunting.

  But in a sense, Atheism isn't really an argument against god.  It's an argument against the idea of god/s from the perspective of entropy.  (Basically entropy means, "here we are, we must be here." is the only safe assumption we can make about reality.)  Since entropy is a natural observation, it's up to those who believe there to be more outside of the scope of our senses (any explanation that is supernatural) to prove that this is so.  I would say that Atheism isn't an argument from ignorance.  It is an argument from entropy.

  In formal form:  Believer:  There is magic afoot!

                          Atheist:  Nuh uh.

  Note that the Atheist position requires the believer to argue his point first, for without a topic, there is no argument.

  While I don't agree with him that atheism is the same, logically, as theism, we do agree that the whole thing is just absurd.  What do you guys think?

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