Navin thinks that my throwaway line about it being impossible to disprove the existence of God deserves a post by itself. Not really. It is quite simple. If an omnipotent God does exist, by definition He controls everything including logic. He can create a universe where there exists irrefutable proof that there is no God. Why? God only knows, but it is certainly possible. So whatever proof you claim to have, it cannot stand up against that fundamental objection, viz “God might have created it that way”
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\nIt is a bit like some Biblical creationists who claimed that God created the world 3000 odd years back, but that He created it with not just a complete fossil record, but also other telltale evidence fooling people into believing that the the universe has existed for much longer than that – something like a movie starting in the middle of someone’s life. You can’t argue against such beliefs, but thankfully, they were rather quickly abandoned because they must have sounded silly even to the true believers.<\/p>\n
I did say that the idea isn’t important enough to make a post out of, but as I have started anyway, I might as well discuss two more interesting things. Buddha too had an interesting proof that there was no God. The “proof”, as I understand it, went something like: <\/p>\n
If you are baffled by the above “proof”, do not be. Just remember that in Buddhist belief, desire is the root of all suffering. The aim of life is to attain Nirvana, a state of desirelessness, a state which is as close to perfection as you will get. Once you accept the above tenet, the logic is impeccable. There cannot be a Buddhist God. <\/p>\n
Incidentally, I’ve heard people claiming that it is impossible to prove a negative. That statement is not quite true. For example, it is<\/i> possible to prove that there is no cat sitting on my chair right now. It is more correct to say that it is difficult and unnecessary<\/i> prove a negative. The burden of proof is always on those who would make an assertion, not the other way round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Navin thinks that my throwaway line about it being impossible to disprove the existence of God deserves a post by itself. Not really. It is quite simple. If an omnipotent God does exist, by definition He controls everything including logic. He can create a universe where there exists irrefutable proof that there is no God. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}