I never said that I would never change my mind.
Well in this atheists opinion, god doesn’t exist. I base that belief ( like so many other beliefs in my life ) on the evidence I’ve come across. There are arguments that I don’t ‘KNOW’ but that is irrelevant. Well I feel it is worth noting that it is unreasonable to expect anybody to believe anything without evidence. I never understood why people don’t put this logic towards their religious beliefs. I also think we should drop the topic of possibility of things with unknown or nonexistent variables. It is pointless.
They call it faith, it’s because they got religion shoved down their throats since they were kids.
I’ve seen religious schools, I’m horrified by seeing those children being indoctrinated into a specific religion. The problem is that they cannot choose for themselves.
BECAUSE HE’S WRONG! 
inb4 somebody’s wrong on the internet comic
I’m not really being serious here guys…
So, can someone explain to me how I’m wrong? Like I said, I don’t have a locked mind; I’m willing to learn.
The main fault in your argument is that you say that something is must be impossible because there is evidence against it.
Let’s take something really simple, say a rock. We’ve been observing this rock for some time, and during that span it has shown that it will not move. Basically, all evidence says the rock will not move.
But let’s say that one day the rock DOES move, from a hypothetical earth tremor. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the rock has done the impossible and has moved. All that observation has given us an incorrect hypothesis.
The problem here is that no matter how much evidence you collect on what something has DONE, it cannot fully predict what it will DO. Evidence showed that the rock would not move, yet it did. Evidence shows that gravity cannot fail, yet it may.
Now I’m not saying that scientific research is pointless because of this, not at all. By all means, evidence is the ultimate tool in research and is really all we have to go on when learning about something. Could any of our evidence have shown that the rock would have suddenly moved about? Of course not, and with nothing there to predict that the idea that the rock would never move was in fact, completely correct.
You do have the right idea that for something to be proven it does require evidence. However, evidence simply cannot reveal something that hasn’t happened (or has been observed). So it is false to say that research is a black and white, right or wrong guide.
Who’s to say that gravity won’t simply go on holiday for a week? All our evidence might show that it is an ever present universal constant, but there is a slight probabilty that it would stop doing that, just as our rock decided to stop being so immobile.
But bear in mind that you couldn’t have ever gotten any evidence to show that the rock would move, just like how you can never get any evidence to show that my keyboard won’t morph into an orange leprechaun. The universe presents a thousand “what ifs”, and none of these can be predicted with evidence. So what we go on instead of the “what ifs”, are the “when this” statements.
Will gravity fail? There is a possibility that it will. How high is the possiblity? Evidence shows: almost zero.
Almost.
Okay, but there is a slight flaw in your argument from what I see. The earth tremor caused the rock to move. It didn’t suddenly move for no reason whatsoever. There is a perfectly natural reason for the rock to move (the fact that the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust are shifting).
Also, the rock had to move some time in the past. Otherwise, how did it get there? The rock itself never decided, under it’s own volition, to suddenly become ambulatory; it was influenced by another force. There are many possibilities for this other force (an animal could’ve moved it to there, a flood could’ve brought it in, it was a large boulder that eroded over time, etc). It had to get there somehow. And we have evidence how rocks get to where they are and how they can move.
What we do NOT have evidence for is gravity ever failing or of a god. I know that science cannot predict the future perfectly, but it can and does make predictions. That’s part of the scientific method (1-Look to history. 2-Form hypothesis. 3-Predict what will happen. 4-Test. 5-Observe. 6-Refine hypothesis with outcome. 7-Repeat.)
With what we know from history, rocks can move due to some force. We can form hypotheses about how it moved. We can predict how it would’ve moved under a certain set of circumstances. We can test to see if the rock would move under that certain set of circumstances. We can observe how it does move. If that is right, then we have a theory. If it’s wrong, then we need to refine our hypothesis.
See, the way I see it: We have natural phenomena that we can pull from, and we have things which have never been ever shown to happen in the history of the universe.
Can you tell me why I should believe in something that has zero evidence for it? Why should I believe there is even a minuscule chance of something that has never happened ever?
It’s all about the extent of your observations. For all we know there is some other force or phenomenon that influences gravity. We haven’t seen any evidence for such a thing to exist, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t.
If you’re observing a rock, and only the rock, there is no way to predict if it will move or not. If you’re also observing tectonic plates, or surrounding animals, wind, rivers, etc., you are holding extra forces and phenomena into account, which is something we can’t do at the moment for things influencing gravity.
In science we make observations and make predictions based on that. Since we are subject to time, we cannot be 100% sure our predictions are correct, ever.
Agreed. However, if you’re going to suggest that there’s a possibility that it could happen, then you will need some corroborating evidence that the possibility exists. I don’t see that, though.
If, as you say, you’re observing the rock and only the rock (no plate tectonics, no surrounding animals, rivers, etc) and the rock has never ever been shown to move, if you suggest that the rock CAN at all, even a tiniest chance for it, then you’ll have to, to me, show me what could cause this. Until that time, I will not believe that it can move.
At that point we’re not talking about scientific probability anymore though, so it’s not much more than opinion.
Thank you for explicitly summarizing why I was strangely unable to do more than glance over the past couple posts… I thought I was becoming ignorant by not taking the time to read it.
I think someone mentioned rocks moving, so here’s an image showing how little tiny probabilities in some special cases (nominally: slick mud) can result in strange stuff:
Well, since there is nothing you can present against it you can quite easily say anything will happen to anything. What evidence does is show whether your statement is likely to happen or not.
You can’t prove that gravity will never fail. You CAN prove that it is extremely unlikely to fail. Because that probability is so small one can generalise and say that it is impossible.
So in reality science doesn’t reveal what anything will do, rather it shows what everything SHOULD do.
“You can’t prove that gravity will never fail” sounds awfully similar to “You can’t prove that God does not exist”.
Exactly, I’m arguing that it’s the same. It is stupid to say that there is no god. It is rational to say that it is not very likely that god exists. Just because theists present no evidence for their case doesn’t mean the possibility is elimated.
The thing is: Gravity has evidence. God does not. I mean, good lord, are you suggesting that it’s possible for Albus Dumbledore to exist?