Post No.: 0074
Fluffystealthkitten says:
What if a sentient god (who is or was more stealthy than me!) designed DNA and the process of natural selection on purpose?
The problem with this argument strategy is that it can enter unfalsifiable territory (i.e. we cannot ever prove it to be false), and it’ll also involve constant goalpost-shifting too if one keeps on rebutting with ‘okay, you’ve found evidence for an alternative explanation to a god or gods doing this thing – but the reason for this alternative explanation is because this god or these gods put it there or made it so’ (e.g. a god put all these fossils in the ground to make it look like life on Earth existed for far longer than 6,000 years).
However, another main point for this post is that it’s not impossible to conceive of this (that a god did put these things there or made it so on purpose to fool us or test our faith) and it can never ever be 100% ruled out as a possibility – that’s the nature of knowledge if one studies epistemology, and this is something to always bear in mind.
I can imagine that if humans lived long enough and gained enough knowledge and power over creating life, humans could effectively become like gods and create the seeds for terraforming a barren planet with new life – such a human wouldn’t be an omniscient, omnipotent and/or omnibenevolent type of god but would be a type of sentient and creationist god to this new life nonetheless. So maybe this could’ve been what really happened to create life on this planet and therefore we truly have ‘creator gods’ too?
We cannot ever 100% rule out the possibility of some kind of creationist god (even if we could hypothetically go back in time to explore what really happened during the creation of this universe, if we find no sentient god involved, one could argue that an omnipotent god has messed around with our time machine or even history itself so that we’ll never ever discover the truth with our own senses)… but for many philosophers this cannot amount to a justified belief because we have no clear and unambiguous evidence to support this hypothesis, and it’s especially doubtful when we have a lot of clearer, less ambiguous, more consistent and more coherent evidence to support a number of alternative explanations that are more probable.
You cannot ever 100% rule out the possibility that there’s an invisible and incorporeal **** on your head that’s mind-controlling you (and whenever you claim to believe you’re not being mind-controlled then that’s just the **** telling you to think and say that!) Therefore we shouldn’t just believe in things merely because we cannot categorically prove that they are false. We ideally want our beliefs to be based on theories that are falsifiable i.e. can be proven to be wrong. Should you be thrown in jail just because you cannot prove you didn’t steal the money? Should faith be enough to convict you? (And if you turn your house upside-down and we find nothing, we’ll say you’ve spent the money already, and if we cannot find any material goods you could’ve bought with the money, we’ll say you spent it on a holiday, and so on with the shifting of the goalposts to prove your complete innocence…)
Meow!
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