To demonstrate how I think this is a fallacious position, I will give an analogy of a man on a beach.
A man with a metal detector is walking along a beach searching for a plastic ball buried somewhere in the sand. The man's metal detector is extremely powerful. As powerful as a metal detector may be, in fact. The man visits this beach every day with his metal detector searching for this plastic ball. He does this for 50 years and never finds it. Therefore, the man concludes, the plastic ball doesn't exist because all his exhaustive efforts to find it so far have shown no evidence of it.
However, logic would tell us that it's still possible that this plastic ball is there. Just because there's no evidence of it doesn't prove its non-existence. To assert so would be the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
The best we can say about God is that we don't know. Of course, we should still go on with our lives as if there is no God. We can still disbelieve that there is one. We merely can not assert that there is no God.
And how is this an appropriate analogy? You seem to be saying that the man can't find the PLASTIC beacball because he is using a METAL detector, implying that we are using the wrong tools to find God.
Firstly, how have you determined that we are using the wrong tools to find God? Maybe we're using the RIGHT tools, and haven't found God because there is no God to find?
To continue your analogy, let's say the man was looking for a metal coin, but he doesn't find it after searching the whole beach. There are two possible explanations.
- He is using the wrong tool.
- The coin just isn't there
Now, you've completely discounted one of these options, but given absolutely no justification as to WHY you've discounted that option. Please justify it before proceeding.
Oh, and before you say, "Maybe he hasn't searched the entire beach yet," let me point out that there are certain times when we don't need to conduct a complete search to know something isn't there.
Allow me to use my own analogy.
Imagine a swimming pool. You want to know if there is any water in the pool. You only need to look in a small area of the pool to know if there is water in it - the bottom of the pool. After all, you know where the water will be if there is water in the pool - on the bottom of the pool. Even if the pool is full to the brim, there will be water at the bottom. You know that the water won't be floating a foot above the bottom. So if you check the entire bottom surface of the pool and find no water on that bottom surface, you know for a fact that there's no water in the pool.
The point made by this analogy is this:
If we know where evidence for a particular thing MUST exist, and we look for that evidence in that place and find nothing, then we can say that the thing does not exist.
Applied to the pool...
If we know water in a swimming pool MUST be on the bottom of the pool, and we look for that water at the bottom of the pool and find nothing, then we can say that there is no water in the pool.
Another example? Okay.
A full grown African elephant sitting on my computer.
There is evidence that MUST exist if there is a full grown African elephant sitting on my computer - a crushed computer (if you can think of a way to have a full grown African elephant sitting on my computer without crushing it, I'd sure like to know).
So, if my computer is NOT crushed, I can safely say that there is no full grown African elephant sitting on my computer.
And we can apply it to God as well.
If we know where evidence for God MUST exist, and we look for that evidence in that place and find nothing, then we can say that God does not exist.
So, the question comes down to "Is there anything which claims that evidence of God exists in the real world?"
And the answer is YES. It's called the Bible. And there are texts for other religions as well.
The Bible gives plenty examples of things which, if found, would provide a huge amount of support for Christianity. Noah's Ark (the Bible tells us where it should be), the foundations for the tower of Babel. The Ark of the Covenant. The Holy Grail. However, none of these things have been found. Indeed, apart from the Bible, there's no evidence that they even exist!
Secondly, assuming God exists, he's given us a great tool to find out about the universe - the ability to Reason. And yet, this tool does not indicate God at all. The only way we can get any indication of God is by using Faith - a completely unreliable tool which gives no verifiable results at all. I mean, just look at the huge numbers of different beliefs out there! The polytheistic Hindu faith, the monotheistic Muslim faith, and even among Christianity, there are so many different interpretations - not just between denominations, but even in the same denomination. How can there be any reliable way of using faith to determine anything? Faith, by it's very nature, can never show ANYTHING to be true. It's little more than wishful thinking.
So, your analogy is flawed. You say that I am using the wrong tools to look for God, but the only tool that will ever indicate the existence of God is completely unreliable. And even if you use an applicable analogy, you've failed to consider every possibility.
Try again please!
"X is false because there is no proof that X is true."
It's the argument from ignorance.
How about this:
"X is false because the proof which MUST be there if X is true is absent."
