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Monday, August 19, 2019

Re: the claim that "Religious propositions are both unverifiable and unfalsifiable"

A strange thing I've noticed is that persons self-identifying as Christians (or, at any rate, as Catholics) (*) who say things on the internet along the lines of "Religious propositions are both unverifiable and unfalsifiable" or "It's impossible either to prove or to disprove whether God exists" *really* dislike it when one attempts to show that the claim is false.

Of the two or three people who even know of me (on the internet), at least one likes to jeer because I've "had a run-in" with William Vallicella; well, the genesis of that "run-in" was when I tried to show Mr Vallicella and a God-denying friend of his, using reason (without reference to revelation), that their agreement that one can neither prove nor disprove that God is is false.

So, the post immediately prior to this one is another example of that strange phenomenon. I made that content a stand-alone post on my little blog because the blogger to whom I was responding chose not to allow it to appear in the comments of his blog (**).


(*) Similarly, self-identifying 'agnostics' generally seem more angered than self-identifying 'atheists' by the presentation of an argument which seeks to test the question of God.

(**) He had done that previously, so this time I made a point to save the text of my response until I'd seen what he would do.

If one wishes a mild amusement, pop over to the comments section of the linked blog-post.

1 comments:

Ilíon said...

"If one wishes a mild amusement, pop over to the comments section of the linked blog-post."

Explanation --

I had submitted two comments to that blog-post.

The first was a short comment trying to get him to see that the statements quoted here --

"... Religious propositions are both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. While there might exist evidence for them, there will always be a way to explain such evidence away. There’s copious evidence for the life of Jesus, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, ..."

-- are contradictory. I hadn't kept that comment.

The second comment I submitted is the one which became the prior post on my blog.

After seeing that (once again) he wasn't going to allow a comment to appear which disputes his contention that we cannot test whether God is, I wrote, "I guess I'll be taking this blog off the blog-roll of my dusty little blog, and ceasing to visit."

The amusement is that he allowed *that* to appear. Though, I suspect only because his response, "Bye! Have a nice life!", wouldn't have made any sense otherwise.