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A comment on The Trouble with Bright Kids. Parent comment

Re:The Trouble with Bright Kids by cperciva on Monday November 28, 2011 @11:53AM (#3286575)
FWIW, I agree with you: There's no logical reason to believe that there is a god, and Occam's razor argues in favour of believing the contrary.

My point was just that in a strict logical sense you can't prove that this belief is correct -- or put another way, I'm more militantly logical than I am militantly atheist.

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Re:The Trouble with Bright Kids by mikeash on Monday November 28, 2011 @11:57AM (#3286594)
Do you apply that to other areas? Do you avoid saying that e.g. invisible pink unicorns do not exist?

I think it is reasonable to take everyday speech saying "does not exist" as meaning "appears not to exist, and if it does exist this is indistinguishable from not existing".

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Re:The Trouble with Bright Kids by cperciva on Monday November 28, 2011 @12:02PM (#3286618)
Do you avoid saying that e.g. invisible pink unicorns do not exist?

Come to think if it, I'm pretty sure I've never stated "invisible pink unicorns do not exist". On the other hand, I've never had to avoid saying it either; oddly enough, I've never felt any urge to comment on the possible existence of invisible pink unicorns until now.

But this is immaterial to the issue at hand, which is one of logical arguments, not mere validity of statements. I don't believe that invisible pink unicorns exist, but I would never state that I had logically proven that invisible pink unicorns do not exist.

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Re:The Trouble with Bright Kids by dwwoelfel on Sunday December 04, 2011 @09:00PM (#3312622)
Have you considered that God doesn't fall into the same category as an invisible unicorn?

The IPU is a poor analogy for disproving the existence of God because it gives up too much ground.

God is in the same category as a square circle. Something that is self-contradictory and therefore cannot exist.

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Re:The Trouble with Bright Kids by mikeash on Monday November 28, 2011 @01:37PM (#3287017)
He didn't say that it was logically proven, just that he "reason[ed it] out". That's pretty informal and I think does not need any caveats along the line of "it could exist in such a way that is indistinguishable from not existing". After all, if I reason out that there's no such thing as ghosts, that doesn't mean I'm claiming to have a perfect logical proof that shows that they're impossible, just that according to the evidence it doesn't look like they're real.
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