Can We Prove a Negative?

While I don't think anything can be proved in the area of metaphysics, still we can indeed have sound arguments showing God doesn't exist. See Jeffrey Jay Lowder and Richard Carrier on this. [Thanks to Andrew Atkinson for reminding me of these essays].

10 comments:

GordonBlood said...

Obbviously one cannot prove a negative. But if there is no evidence supporting that which we are asked to believe then it is unneccessary to believe in that being. Of course, I think there are good reasons to believe in Christian theism however so here I part ways.

jonmarck said...

The Lowder article makes sense but the Carrier one is problematic.

Emanuel Goldstein said...

Actually, since Loftus comes to the conclusion, in his book, that everthing came by chane "from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing" one would wonder why he would make such a claim.

A claim that is certainly negative, and came after his "years" of study.

What I would like to see him do is prove it...as that is a claim that goes beyond anything science can tell us.

Chris said...

I do not quite understand why so many folks seem to think you cannot prove a negative. Consider the following universal, negative claim:

"No square circles exist."

A proof can be given for such claims by noting that a square circle is a logical impossibility because it requires the truth of a contradiction.

jonmarck said...

Yes, this is discussed in the articles.

Shygetz said...

Chris, you cannot prove a negative through evidentiary means, unless it is a quantified negative (no bees fly, or no bees except one flies, etc.) Logical proofs are still possible, but uninteresting outside of formal systems.

Eli said...

jon, I would love to know in what sense you find the Carrier article problematic. It resonated with me in particular because, when I try to debate God's existence (and, in particular, the Problem of Evil) with Christians, I get responses like the following:

"It *may* be that God has to creature [sic] humans with EF ["Earth Freedom"] that allows us to choose between good and evil. This simply has to be possible and it is plausible that it is possible. ... I don't have to prove anything."

This is precisely the kind of wildly ad hoc proposition that Carrier argues cannot be accepted in a reasonable debate, and I wholeheartedly agree. Not only is there no possibility of finding empirical evidence to support this claim, it's introduced without any particular logical relationship to any of the premises of the argument (God's defining attributes, the state of the world, modal systems, etc.).

Do you think statements like this should be taken seriously in philosophical debate? If so, how can we proceed in any direction? If not, why is Carrier's article problematic?

jonmarck said...

I found more problems in the article than his treatment of the problem of evil but for sake of time and focus let's concentrate on that.

Here, I think, is the statement that Carrier relies upon to support the problem of evil:

"yet I know that what demonstrates someone as compassionate is the alleviation of all suffering known to them and safely within their power to alleviate."

Is it compassionate for a parent to do their child's homework for them? What if they really, really, really hate homework? No, that is not compassion. In fact, it is more compassionate to make the child suffer through it because of what they'll gain through their suffering. Let's not see the forest for the trees. Our suffering leads to great rewards, both for God and for us.

The reason why such untestable/unobservable statements are valid is because this is not a scientific claim, it is a philosophical one. I justify it by describing a similar instance that we already accept and understand. I don't justify it through observable evidence.

He also suggests that such arguments are invented on the spot to weasel out of the question. This is hardly true. Christians have always believed that the purpose of life is to choose right over wrong, regardless of the stakes, because choosing right glorifies God.

As it is, such a proposal is related to the argument because we are discussing God's defining attributes, which are described as contradictory to the state of the world. There is nothing "unrelated" about explaining through analogy how these attributes are not actually in contradiction.

If you wished to proceed you could try to show how God should be forced to instantaneously fix all problems because this might either be a better solution than what I suggest or you could try to show that my analogy is not applicable. There might be other ways to proceed too.

Eli said...

"Is it compassionate for a parent to do their child's homework for them? What if they really, really, really hate homework? No, that is not compassion. In fact, it is more compassionate to make the child suffer through it because of what they'll gain through their suffering."

I think you're probably misinterpreting his definition. I think the resulting suffering of the child would violate the "safely" clause - in other words, that doing a child's homework is not a safe way of alleviating suffering for that child. Can you find a problem with that interpretation? (Further, it is a much more significant task to prove that it isn't safe for God to alleviate our suffering, one that is so significant that it would not be wise for us even to embark on it at this point. Just know that your comparison doesn't exactly hold water.)

"I justify it by describing a similar instance that we already accept and understand. I don't justify it through observable evidence."

What are "similar instances that we already understand" if not "observable evidence"? The point is, there *is no* observable evidence that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being nonetheless cannot create a species with the ability to free choose only between morally good and morally neutral acts (just to continue with the example I used). (In fact, I claim that I have observable evidence to the contrary, but this is tangential to the point.)

"He also suggests that such arguments are invented on the spot to weasel out of the question. This is hardly true. Christians have always believed that the purpose of life is to choose right over wrong, regardless of the stakes, because choosing right glorifies God."

Can't you see that these are unrelated? How does choosing right over wrong justify the kind of argument I quoted? The reason that these kinds of premises are unrelated to God's attributes is because neither you nor any other Christian thinker would ever in a million years have come up with the idea that God has to create us with the ability to do evil before we can go to heaven. At least, you wouldn't have, if it weren't for those of us who challenge your ideas. If you can deductively prove that God *must* create humans with the ability to do evil only from God's defined attributes and other helpful definitions (i.e., good, evil, free will) - *without* assuming that God exists - I will concede this point. Otherwise, the best you can do is to say, "If God exists, then there must be a reason for all this suffering and evil," which is patently obvious.

Eli said...

Or, rather, you wouldn't have come up with that premise if it weren't for us antagonists *and* the presence of evil. If we lived in a world without suffering or evil, there would be no possible way of reaching the conclusion that God must have created us with the ability to do evil. In fact, anybody who asserted that would probably be considered insane, even though (as a necessary statement) it would be equally true in that world as in this one. The only evidence that there "must be some reason" for God having created us with the capacity to do evil is the evil itself, which, in order to explain, you have to tie back to God's defining attributes. This is the challenge that Christians "weasel out of."