Keith Collyer
2 min readFeb 7, 2022

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Do you believe in the Greek, Roman, Hindu, Egyptian, or any other gods? You must have a boatload of evidence for why each of their creation myths is not the truth.

The fact is that you cannot provide evidence of a negative. You cannot prove that I do not have an invisible, intangible dragon living in my garage. You cannot prove the non-existence of Russell's teapot. But neither of these has any evidence to support it. I cannot prove that there is no God, nor can Dawkins. And he does not claim that he can prove it. He merely asserts, as do I, that there is no plausible evidence for the existence of any god. In the absence of such evidence it is reasonable to act as if there is no good and to claim that you are reasonably certain (note not definitively certain) that there is no god.

You are appealing to the god of the gaps fallacy - we do not know why this happened, so god did it. Well, maybe it was your god. But maybe it was Nyx, Atum, Ymir, Tepeu, Aspu and Tiamet, Brahma, or any of a huge number of other creator gods and goddesses. Many of which are more plausible than either of the contradictory Genesis stories.

On the indifference of the universe, again you are asking to prove a negative. Dawkins presents what he sees as facts on the basis of the evidence. But he is a scientist. If he (or I) were to be presented with irrefutable evidence that contradicted his beliefs, he would change his mind. As Feynman said, I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

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Keith Collyer
Keith Collyer

Written by Keith Collyer

I’m a husband, father, grandfather, retired Systems Engineer, bassist, cyclist and will write on any and all of those things as the urge takes me.

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