Re: teaching atheism re: Excellent article

In article <h6l5s2$rg5$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ymir wrote:
> Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> Said the more usual way, any claim whose truth
>> you cannot demonstrate to a hostile audience is a
>> false claim.

> This doesn't strike me as a particularly useful
> concept.

> P1: God exists.
> P2: God doesn't exist.

> According to the maxim which you give, both of the
> above are likely false claims which is a
> contradiction.

Well, no, them both being false is not a
contradiction, since there is no way to present
valid evidence for either position being true.


Those are really claims about knowledge absent
evidence, and they can happily both be false.

For any given definition of 'God', they cannot both be false. Saying
that their truth values are not known is rather different from saying
that they are both false.

Alternately, one could adopt a more Ayerian position and claim that they
are both meaningless claims, but that again is different from saying
that they are both false.

All you've demonstrated is that binary logic can be
insufficient to describe complex matters.

This has nothing to do with limitations of binary logic. Multivalue
logics still don't allow you to claim that a proposition and its
negation are both false without contradiction.

P3: The existence or non-existence of God is not
capable of being determined by available means.

Yes. That would be a defensible position. Note, however, that it is
consistent with both P1 and P2, but not with both.

John Wilkins' recently URLed paper on the meaning of
atheism describes the issues using set notation,
better than I can, not that I'm pretending to know
if he agrees with me.

> The idea that one should formulate arguments with
> a hostile rather than sympathetic audience in mind
> is valuable, but I definitely wouldn't go so far
> as to adopt the above.

We are certainly permitted to disagree on the issue.

xanthian.

Yes, I once did a computer project for automatic
resolution of propositions expressed in multivalued
logic. It worked, but I'm not sure it meant anything.

.

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