Certainly. The two don’t even refer to the same thing - “unproven” is a measure of the extent of evidence for a proposition, while “reasonably impossible” is a specific position taken.
A proposition can be reasonably improbable or even reasonably likely to be impossible, but it can only be impossible in fact.
Those are distinctions without difference for what I mean. It can’t be proven if it’s not physically possible, and both qualifiers apply to the argument of god. One can confidently step into a position and be assertive about it if it literally can’t happen. I argue that you’re imposing faith onto this by merely entertaining the idea of a gap, which would be a false dichotomy. And that’s where my second point is where you try to insert faith into disbelief. That only works if there’s any hint or suggestion of a reality where that exists. But the world doesn’t work that way and we’ve known this for generations meaning there are no god variables in physics.
And any gap between what can be proven to be true and what is nonetheless asserted to be true is and can only be filled by faith.
But the gap does not exist because it can’t be disproved and we have no evidence and nothing major in our understanding has room for it. That’s the sole reason we invented Russell’s teapot, the Pink Invisible Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti monster. They all point out this glaring incompatibility.
If I asked you if you believe in the Pink Invisible Unicorn’s omnipotent and omnipresent existence, would you have faith answering no?
(PD: Sorry about the abuse of atheist tropes. I’m painfully aware. It just seems like it’s such an old and fundamental issue that has been argued for ages when people say that Atheism is a religion because it’s allegedly a position of faith–even though we’re not the ones reminding ourselves of our dis-belief everyday via prayer, but I digress.)
that has been argued for ages when people say that Atheism is a religion because it’s allegedly a position of faith.
And there’s the straw man, right on schedule…
If you go back and read what i actually said, I never made that broad and obviously inaccurate claim.
My point, literally from the very first sentence that I wrote, concerned only those atheists, like Dawkins, who don’t stop at disbelief, but instead hold to an affirmative belief that God does not exist.
Like it or not, that belief does not have sufficient evidence to prove its truth, and therefore to hold nonetheless that it is in fact true is an act of faith. That has nothing at all to do with religion either way - it’s just simple epistemology. A claim of likelihood can be supported with incomplete evidence, but a claim of certain truth must and can only be supported by incontrovertible proof, and there is not incontrovertible proof for the assertion “God does not exist.”
I fully recognize that that’s not the position held by all atheists, and I sincerely doubt that it’s even the position held by most - it’s likely that most simply content themselves with disbelief in the assertion that God does exist. It is, exactly as I said, a position held by some, and most notably by Dawkins.
And more broadly, that’s exactly why I never claim that it’s a universal position and I never make claims about atheism broadly, and in fact, every single damned time that I try to address this topic, I go out of my way to make it clear that I’m referring only to the specific subset of atheists who do in fact hold to that belief.
And yet, just like clockwork, every single time I bring the subject up, someone like you shows up and slaps that damned strawman on me and proceeds to tediously recite all of the same tired and entirely irrelevant cant you’ve now recited.
So honestly, if you have some issue with having to cover all that same ground again, that’s entirely and completely your problem, since none of it’s relevant to what I actually said in the first place.
Those are distinctions without difference for what I mean. It can’t be proven if it’s not physically possible, and both qualifiers apply to the argument of god. One can confidently step into a position and be assertive about it if it literally can’t happen. I argue that you’re imposing faith onto this by merely entertaining the idea of a gap, which would be a false dichotomy. And that’s where my second point is where you try to insert faith into disbelief. That only works if there’s any hint or suggestion of a reality where that exists. But the world doesn’t work that way and we’ve known this for generations meaning there are no god variables in physics.
But the gap does not exist because it can’t be disproved and we have no evidence and nothing major in our understanding has room for it. That’s the sole reason we invented Russell’s teapot, the Pink Invisible Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti monster. They all point out this glaring incompatibility.
If I asked you if you believe in the Pink Invisible Unicorn’s omnipotent and omnipresent existence, would you have faith answering no?
(PD: Sorry about the abuse of atheist tropes. I’m painfully aware. It just seems like it’s such an old and fundamental issue that has been argued for ages when people say that Atheism is a religion because it’s allegedly a position of faith–even though we’re not the ones reminding ourselves of our dis-belief everyday via prayer, but I digress.)
And there’s the straw man, right on schedule…
If you go back and read what i actually said, I never made that broad and obviously inaccurate claim.
My point, literally from the very first sentence that I wrote, concerned only those atheists, like Dawkins, who don’t stop at disbelief, but instead hold to an affirmative belief that God does not exist.
Like it or not, that belief does not have sufficient evidence to prove its truth, and therefore to hold nonetheless that it is in fact true is an act of faith. That has nothing at all to do with religion either way - it’s just simple epistemology. A claim of likelihood can be supported with incomplete evidence, but a claim of certain truth must and can only be supported by incontrovertible proof, and there is not incontrovertible proof for the assertion “God does not exist.”
I fully recognize that that’s not the position held by all atheists, and I sincerely doubt that it’s even the position held by most - it’s likely that most simply content themselves with disbelief in the assertion that God does exist. It is, exactly as I said, a position held by some, and most notably by Dawkins.
And more broadly, that’s exactly why I never claim that it’s a universal position and I never make claims about atheism broadly, and in fact, every single damned time that I try to address this topic, I go out of my way to make it clear that I’m referring only to the specific subset of atheists who do in fact hold to that belief.
And yet, just like clockwork, every single time I bring the subject up, someone like you shows up and slaps that damned strawman on me and proceeds to tediously recite all of the same tired and entirely irrelevant cant you’ve now recited.
So honestly, if you have some issue with having to cover all that same ground again, that’s entirely and completely your problem, since none of it’s relevant to what I actually said in the first place.