'You can't prove God exists' proves God exists

In this video, I make a meta-argument for God's existence based on the evidence for God's existence.

[sathviksidd]

I felt like this when I first heard the ontological argument lol

[roderictaylor]

Hearing this, I can't help but think of the Babel fish from Douglas Adam's "Hitchiker's guide to the universe." Not making an argument either way, I just think it's funny.

“The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you hear decodes the brainwave matrix.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist, " says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But, " says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."

"Oh dear, " says God, "I hadn't thought of that, " and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy, " says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.”

[ExploringReality]

Great work! I used this in a debate recently. The visuals you provided would have helped a lot lol

[caseydemarco]

Great vid square! I would also love to see a video maybe with no theory, where we get to learn a little more about your faith! Maybe some of your favorite verses/books, and maybe a little of your testimony if you were comfortable!

[rationality]

Great video! I think to cash this argument out in a standard Bayesian framework though you’d need the prediction to be about “the distribution of credences among people at a given time” or something more direct than “the abstract, overall level of evidence for theism at any given time”, since this kind of meta-level prediction runs into exactly the sort of problems to do with self-reference and recursive stability that you talk about about the end! (Or maybe there are some fixed-point theorems here, could be a cool result?)

[Nickesponja]

I think the problem is that you reached the conclusion "God doesn't want his existence to be 100% obvious" by assuming that God exists and then observing that the evidence for it isn't that good. I may apply the same argument to leprechauns, for example, to conclude that they want the evidence for their existence to be low (maybe because they know humans wouldn't leave them alone), and then the argument tells us that the fact that there's very little evidence for leprechauns, *is* evidence for leprechauns. How bizarre!

[mf_hume]

I wonder if this argument is compatible with Pascal’s wager type arguments? Two individuals with vastly different credences can take the wager and rationalize identical actions on pragmatic grounds. So why think that god would care about maintaining religious ambiguity (To use John Hicks language) if it shouldn’t make a difference to our actions?

[ac]

So god can’t reveal himself he’s not omnipotent. God can’t change the laws of logic? Then the laws of logic are more powerful than god and he is dependent and subservient to those laws.

[Finfie]

(2:04)
Or, it just has shown that those arguments, where just god of the gap arguments.

[mistermkultra]

Hi apologetics, Which do You consider the Best books abouts Arguments in defende Of The existence Of God ??

[CsmicNINJA]

This argument seems like it’s better at pushing atheists towards agnosticism than theism because if that thesis is true both theism and atheism would expect the argument to be disproven. I love this argument! It’s useful when feeling with divine hiddenness, but it’s fun to think about it in terms of showing God’s existence.

[xianartman]

Ah paradoxes can be fun sometimes… not as proofs however.

[DeconvertedMan]

I made a video response. Its called "can't prove Lobsterisem is true proves its true!"

[Oskar]

There is this bayesian principle that if E is evidence for some hypothesis H, then -E must be at least some evidence against (it can be super miniscule though)

What is barred is simply that both E and -E is evidence for H. This makes sense, if you know before that both E and -E occurring will raise your credence, you should just raise your credence now.

For example, you are about to go interrogate a suspected murderer, you say to yourself. If he confesses then I will be more confident of his guilt, and if he doesn't confess I will be more confident of his guilt and those are the only two options. Then you might just as well just raise your credence in his guilt now. Unless you think there is some third option where you wouldn't raise your credence in his guilt then it is irrational to not have the higher credence now.


But let E be "the evidence for God is better than it currently is"

Squared wants to say, the fact that -E is actually evidence FOR God.

Thus we can infer that more evidence for God would.... not be more evidence for God. This seems contradictory.

I think what he should say is that this mitigates against the evidence against God from divine hiddeness. That way he can say, our current lack of evidence is some lack of evidence, but not as much as you might think. If we got more evidence that would of course be more evidence.

[malvokaquila]

Fantastic video. I came to this conclusion as well.

[nicholaswheeler]

We can't even prove our own existence.

[DavidJohnWellman]

I'm hard of hearing and your captions are in Vietnamese, so I may be completely missing the point of your video here, but a successful cumulative case for God would have to a) incorporate elements which are at least somewhat persuasive on their own, and b) consider at least all the major arguments against the existence of God.

[Nithin_sp]

So it's basically impossible to provide a defeater for this argument. It's exactly like that theodicy "You can't say that there is no greater good in 2 year olds having cancer because you don't have God's vision and you can't see the future and know the justice being done in the afterlife"

[badatpseudoscience]

So ... what your are saying is that heaven, where we know that God exists, is a tenable place to be.

[codygillard]

Help, I've been kidnapped by Sam Harris, all he lets me eat is potato pancakes, and all I can drink is orange Gatorade. I believe I have died and gone to hell