Image transcription: a section of a Wikipedia article titled “Relationship with Reality”. It reads “From a scientific viewpoint, elves are not considered objectively real. [3] However,” End transcription.
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Link in case anyone’s curious:
Wow, they really dance around that. The belief in elves is real, champ, not the elves themselves due to that belief. This isn’t a Terry Pratchett novel.
It’s written that way to be as neutral as possible.
Replace “Elf” with “God” and you’ll see how important it is to “dance”
There’s the same amount of evidence for gods as there is for elves and orbiting teapots.
Yet gods and elves change the world and teapots are content to remain unobserved
There is absolutely zero necessity to dance around the non existance of god. There is objectively no god.
What a thing to say. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that there’s insufficient evidence to believe in any gods, but to state that there is no god as a matter of fact is as presumptive as saying that there objectively is.
What evidence do you have to back up that claim?
I love how nobody is responding to you, because the truth is: we can’t know, but most of us are very sure whether there is a god either way. It’s nonsense to call what an atheist believes absolutely “true,” because we can’t know. I’m an atheist, but it’s just pseudoscience to suggest that we can scientifically prove that there’s no god.
Agreed and well-put. Lack of evidence cannot give creedence to a claim. It’s all well and good to believe in (the absence of, or possibility of) supernatural being(s), but to state such beliefs as objective is not follow the scientific method.
Would you say that feelings, thoughts and numbers do “exist”?
Would you say that God has the same power as the number four?
Where enough people have believed in the reality of elves that those beliefs then had real effects in the world, they can be understood as part of people’s worldview, and as a social reality: a thing which, like the exchange value of a dollar bill or the sense of pride stirred up by a national flag, is real because of people’s beliefs rather than as an objective reality. Accordingly, beliefs about elves and their social functions have varied over time and space.
There are a few crusades and jihads that point towards gods being just as meaningfully real to us as dollar values and national pride
Again, that’s actions taken by people based on beliefs, not actions taken by that in which they believe.
duendes
