God exists since you cannot prove that She does not.
This involves a difficult to prove negative as premiss. But you could equally argue -pace St. Thomas et al. They were not interested in proving a She anyway...
God does not exist because you cannot prove that She does.
Ad ignorantiam has nothing to do with proving a negative per se. It is simply that not being able to prove X definitively does not entail that not-X or vice versa that being unable to prove not X entails X.
By definition logic can be reduced to math...is this reverse Russell-Whitehead? I was going to respond to Grimes but this is getting tiresome. The example has nothing to do with what we are talking about except in very remote family resemblance way.
CHeers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chip Berlet" <cberlet at igc.org> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2001 6:40 PM Subject: Re: A note to the exorcists
> Hi,
>
> Well, the raven paradox is part of it, as were the fallacies noted by
Yoshie:
>
> 1. Argument from Ignorance/Appeal to Ignorance (argumentum ad
> ignorantiam) -- a fallacy
>
> 2. Shifting the Burden of Proof
>
> And thanks to Chuck Grimes for the mathametical proof demonstrating the
issue of
> proving a negative, since all logic, by definition, can be reduced to a
math
> proof.
>
> Folks can look up the raven proof paradox using a search engine. It
actually is
> quite clever and easy reading. The raven proof paradox was part of
"Studies in
> the Logic of Confirmation" by Carl G. Hempel. The raven proof leads to the
idea
> that all proofs in science are actually arguments for what is more likely
rather
> than less likely, not anything that can be considered definitive.
>
>