Did Jesus Christ really exist?

"There are no blue fairies frolicking on the moon" is a belief. I happen to share it, and pretty convinced I am too.

Are you saying you don't believe there are no blue fairies frolicking on the moon?

I am saying that I dont' believe there are blue fairies frolicking on the moon. I don't see what point you are trying to make using double negatives.

Basically, what you are saying is: "I believe that I do not believe" is a belief. Fine then, I'm not going to argue with these semantics.

By the same token I could say you "dont believe that there are no gods". What on earth is the point in talking like this?

Fact is you either:

-1. I believe (there is enough evidence, I have faith, I just do, whatever)

-2. Do not believe (there is not enough evidence, I dont have faith, etc)

No amount of linguistic backflips from you will negate this fact. Incidently, why do you refuse to believe in one non-rational proposition (the fairies) but you believe the other (god)?

Wasn't really a double negative. However to indicate that, I accept I should have put quotes around "there are no blue fairies frolicking on the moon".  Not believing a statement that contains a negative is not a double negative.

"I don't not believe" would be a double negative. But, incidentally, "I don't disbelieve" is not the same as "I don't not believe".

I don't believe in God. Any god. I don't see why you think I should. I don't believe there are fairies on the moon. I believe "there are no fairies on the moon."

You said

If something is not a belief, how can you be said to believe it?

My point is that both atheism and "there are no blue fairies frolicking on the moon" are beliefs.

Personally I believe in neither the existence of gods nor the non-existence of gods. If you name any particular god, I think the probability of its existence is vanishingly small, so I would say, for instance, I don't believe that Jehovah or Osiris exist. But no god(s) at all is too much of a stretch.

(I believe Jesus probably existed, because I can't see why anyone would make him up. I don't believe he was divine.)

Nope. Neither statement is a paradox. The Continuum Hypothesis can neither be proved not disproved. That's not a paradox. G�del demonstrated that in all sufficiently complex systems there must be some assertions that can neither be proven nor disproven. There's nothing paradoxical about not being able to prove or disprove something.

Anyway, the only reason I can't prove anything about you is that you're not around to observe. If you were, I could.

(It is in fact proven already that you, whoever or whatever you are, respond to stimuli, and therefore exist and are sentient. God on the other hand has never been observed to respond to stimuli.)

You make the same mistake again when you say 'if one believes the world is round, one does not "not believe that the world is not round"'.

Too many 'nots' or the quotes are in the wrong place. If one believes "the world is round", one does not believe "the world is not round", i.e. one does not believe "the world is flat".

You're getting much too tied up in nots.

Semantics? Sounds more like syntax to me.

Nope. One's default position should be based on the a priori probability of the proposition, or the opinion of people one trusts, not on whether the proposition is phrased as a negative or a positive.

Should I believe quarks exist? Or that they don't exist? No-one's ever given me direct proof. How about black holes? For that matter, how about viruses?

You are saying that if you tell me you do have an appendix, I should assume you are lying. On the other hand, if you tell me you do not have an appendix, I should assume you are telling the truth.

Personally I'll believe you whatever you say.

The second 'therefore' is invalid. That god is not required I agree. However the final deduction should be more like 'therefore we should assume god does not exist'.

I could if I could see you. It's easy (well, straightforward anyway) to disprove someone is invisible. I can't on the other hand prove you are invisible, because if I can't see you it might be because you are not there.

I agree there's no point (from an epistemological point of view9 in asserting god exists, given that by god you mean something ineffable and unobservable. However that doesn't apply to the thing about you being 20 feet tall, invisibile and a gazelle. Even apart from the fact that the three attributes are logically self-contradictory, each on its own is eminently testable.

And I'd be willing to bet you fail the tests. (Like can you throw a basketball down through the net while standing on the floor?)

You're getting much too tied up in nots. Fine. I'll conseed then that you can believe either in the existance or non-existance of something, fdor the purposes of this argument. However, I still maintain that the onus of proof must be to the person asserting existance, not to the sceptic that doubts it. Should I believe quarks exist? Or that they don't exist? No-one's ever given me direct proof. How about black holes? For that matter, how about viruses? For that matter, how about viruses? I do believe all of these things have substantial evidence supporting their existance, otherwise they would never be defensible in the scientific community. Something for which there is no evidence is always rejected by the scientific method.

There's no evidence for string theory being true. Should one believe strings do not exist? Or just keep an open mind, bearing a priori probablities in mind?

Yes there could be. You'll have god-people jumping all over you if you say that. All it would take is for god to appear and confirm his existence, possibly by sending everyone who rejects him to perdition.

The point is not that there could never be any evidence SUPPORTING the existence of god. The point is there could never be any evidence proving he did NOT exist.

Again you push it a bit too far. There are lots of reasons to say it may exist, otherwise I don't suppose anyone would ever say it did.

There's a very big difference between assuming something does not exist, and saying it doesn't exist. Ther's just as big a difference between assuming something does exist and saying it does exist.

Back to quarks and strings and so on.

See above about the ease of proving something is visible and the ease of proving it is or is not 20 feet tall.

You'd have a better example if you said you were an unclassifiable being of unmeasurable height that is sometimes visible and sometimes invisible.

THAT would really be hard to prove or disprove. It would also be closer to the thing about god.

Only if you are invisible, which in fact from my point of view at the moment you are. Provably. From direct observation. The point is though that if I could see you, that would DISPROVE that you were invisible, and very probably also disprove that you are 20 feet tall and a gazelle.

Your original contention was that the statement was neither provable nor disprovable, which isn't true.

Then I have to invent a test that does not require your willing participation. Which isn't difficult.

You said the default view of a proposition that something exists should always be that it is false. Then you added unless there was generally accepted evidence for it. That would imply that you should, as a default position, reject string theory since there is no evidence for it.

If you're now saying that you should accept such a position if it is USEFUL to do so, then I wouldn't disagree. It would however have been better to do that at the start.

God IS a model. A construct invented partly to explain certain phenomena, partly for other reasons, like justifying political power grabs and whatever.

I agree it is an unnecessary concept to explain observable phenomena. That was never an issue here.

My point is you have to watch the tightness of your arguments or you give people all sorts of loopholes. The existence of God could be proven. If you say it couldn't be you're weakening your position. Which ought to be simply that the existence of God could not be disproven. That's the reason to reject the hypothesis.

But now your analogy is much closer to what I suggested. If you propose that something exists that is undetectable and does not interact with its environment, then of course that is neither disprovable nor provable and useless.

However the commonest position among the religious is that God exists and is usually undetectable and usually doesn't interact with the material universe. The kicker is in the word 'usually', because it allows for the proposition that God could make himself apparent, and if he did, that would be proof of his existence.

However, it remains a useless proposition because it cannot be disproven

I don't think we are different, at least not very, in what we believe. My major point here is that I think your enthusiasm sometimes carries you away and leads you to dropping your guard.

Which is a pity.

I believe Jesus Christ existed! He was in that time like mother Theresa of modern days!

I don't believe what people wrote after his death.