Stop talking shit about me.
I’m not.
Oh yeah? prove it.
The invisible pink unicorn is the traditional atheist approach.
tl;dr for others
A: “I have an Pink Unicorn inside the trunk of my car. It vanishes the moment you try to open the trunk or look at it.”
B: “What? That’s absurd”
A: “I know it exists. It’s up to you to disprove it”
B: “But there is no way one can capture/observe/understand it with any sort of scientific instrument”
A: “Don’t care. Skill issue”
By simple analogy. You can prove that there are white crows by finding a single white crow, but to prove that there are no white crows you must conduct an exhaustive search of every corner of the earth and never find a single one and somehow be absolutely certain that you didn’t miss one somewhere.
The only way to be absolutely certain that you didn’t miss something is to be able to look everywhere all at once, otherwise a white crow might evade your notice, and that’s impossible.As such all you can say is there probably aren’t any white crows because we have lots of experience seeing crows and there has been no evidence of one yet.
Russels teapod is a good example imho
He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
I love that one of the arguments against this analogy, shown in the Wikipedia, article is the following:
the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit.
… what a time to be alive!
If you subscribe to classical logic (i.e., propositonal or first order logic) this is not true. Proof by contradiction is one of the more common classical logic inference rules that lets you prove negated statements and more specifically can be used to prove nonexistence statements in the first order case. People go so far as to call the proof by contradiction rule “not-introduction” because it allows you to prove negated things.
Here’s a wiki page that also disagrees and talks more specifically about this “principle”: source (note the seven separate sources on various logicians/philosophers rejecting this “principle” as well).
If you’re talking about some other system of logic or some particular existential claim (e.g. existence of god or something else), then I’ve got not clue. But this is definitely not a rule of classical logic.
Are you talking to a conspiracy nut? If so, you can forget about reasoning with them. They don’t play this game by the same rules as you do.
No amount of logic, facts or evidence will ever help. They have emotional issues, so you need to use an emotional solution.
This is correct. Call them fat. When they argue this accuse them of beating their wife. Now you understand how fox news works.
