Personally, I did change my mind from atheism to agnosticism just because a lack of evidence isn’t a proof and you can’t prove a negative. Established religions reek of control and manipulation, but I had to also conclude that it was naive to have faith that there isn’t anything more to whatever this reality is beyond what we can tell with science.
At the very least, there’s future scientific discoveries we can only guess at, but there’s also unknowable things, at least given the limitations we currently have as beings of this reality.
The proposed existence of unknowable things, however, isn’t an argument for the religious explanation. Claiming something is unknowable but then also supposing it might be this specific thing is contradictory. Draw the line at saying “we can’t know” not “you can’t prove it doesn’t exist”.
Also, that slippery scope where the same stance of “you can’t prove it doesn’t exist” applying to things like unicorns, space teapots, superheroes, midichlorians…
Yes, the only conclusion you can logically draw is that it’s impossible to know if they do or don’t exist. Instead of seeing the world as a set of ideas that either resolve to true or false, I see it as a set of ideas that resolve to true, false, or unknown.
Which also “resolves” a bunch of language paradoxes that depend on the only options being “true” or “false”. Like “this statement is false”. It also works on the halting problem, though still doesn’t make it trivial to solve (it just defeats the paradox proof if you allow a third option for paradoxes instead of insisting it only returns true or false).
Personally, I did change my mind from atheism to agnosticism just because a lack of evidence isn’t a proof and you can’t prove a negative. Established religions reek of control and manipulation, but I had to also conclude that it was naive to have faith that there isn’t anything more to whatever this reality is beyond what we can tell with science.
At the very least, there’s future scientific discoveries we can only guess at, but there’s also unknowable things, at least given the limitations we currently have as beings of this reality.
The proposed existence of unknowable things, however, isn’t an argument for the religious explanation. Claiming something is unknowable but then also supposing it might be this specific thing is contradictory. Draw the line at saying “we can’t know” not “you can’t prove it doesn’t exist”.
Also, that slippery scope where the same stance of “you can’t prove it doesn’t exist” applying to things like unicorns, space teapots, superheroes, midichlorians…
Yes, the only conclusion you can logically draw is that it’s impossible to know if they do or don’t exist. Instead of seeing the world as a set of ideas that either resolve to true or false, I see it as a set of ideas that resolve to true, false, or unknown.
Which also “resolves” a bunch of language paradoxes that depend on the only options being “true” or “false”. Like “this statement is false”. It also works on the halting problem, though still doesn’t make it trivial to solve (it just defeats the paradox proof if you allow a third option for paradoxes instead of insisting it only returns true or false).