On Existence

I got into a great discussion today with Charlie, a recent law school associate whose intellect I greatly admire. What started as a normal discussion on religion and me attempting to show that God is improbable and therefore we should not postulate his existence led to an interesting discussion on existence itself.

"Existence and the probability of existence are independent of each other. Probability is something that the individual observer attributes to a concept, but has no bearing on whether or not that concept actually exists. Something either exists or it does not."

While I may be mis-interpreting I do believe that this was the claim argued for. This was really the only thing that I could not rebut because my training is in political philosophy, not metaphysics. Everything else we argued about I felt I had an appropriate answer to.

I do believe he was attempting to undermine the concept of the burden of proof in regards to determining the probability of existence. Science, as well as reason and logic, demand that the positive existential claim bear the burden of empirically confirming that claim. I attempted to apply this to the concept of God we were mulling about and I questioned the necessity of postulating such a being. As Carl Sagan so aptly put it: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Charlie's argument sounds suspiciously like the agnostic claim that denies that one is unable to prove or disprove the existence of God. If existence truly is independent of probability, then we lack the means to say anything meaningful about God. God either exists or he doesn't and we lack any definitive means of proving either.

The answer to the agnostic is Bertrand Russell's Celestial Teapot, which I tried to put forward as a possible resolution to the problem of existence. What if, says Russell, I say that there is a china teapot orbiting between the Earth and Mars that is undetectable by both the naked eye and the best telescopes? You can neither definitively prove nor disprove the existence of this celestial teapot. The point is that the Celestial Teapot is analogous to God or really any unjustified thing such as fairies, leprechauns, Thor, etc. We should all be teapot-agnostics but most people, when pressed whether or not they believe that the teapot exists would say that they do not. Why is God afforded special status from the rigors of logic and evidence? Just because existence is possible, does not mean that it is probable. Or rather the chance of a thing existing and not existing is not equi-probable. If this is all sounding familiar, then yes, this is a rehashed version of Richard Dawkin's own succinct arguments.

I suppose that I am saying that you cannot divorce existence and the probability of existence from each other and still be coherent. Existence is an assumption that everyone makes in order to function, else you end up in Descarte's dream world, uncertain whether what you experience is real or whether it is an imagining or manipulation.

He is however, right, that the probability of existence stems from perspective. We perceive things to exist all the time that do not exist in reality: dreams, hallucinations, mirages, false memories, etc. Whether or not things exist independent of the perceiver borders on solipsism, and really adds nothing useful other than mental masturbation.

There was another point that Charlie made that I felt I did not answer to my satisfaction and that is the problem of the definition of life. However I have posted too much for one entry and I'll write about that tomorrow.