Can anyone mathematically prove that god does not exist?

1+1 is always 2. No matter if God is in the equation or not. So your debate isn’t a very good one.

No. We can look at a preponderance of evidence and conclude that god is highly unlikely, but you can never prove that god does not exist, mathematically or otherwise.

@ChocolateReigns really so if god decided that 1+1=3 would that be true?

I believe this will answer your question.

You can’t prove that god doesn’t exist, but the burden of proof is on the person who claims there is a god. And they can’t prove it either.

@erichw1504 LMAO

I believe in science!

Ah, a valid argument. But you’ll find that if you carry the 6 and round to the nearest thousandth, Darwin never actually existed and therefore there is no survival of the fittest.~

And numbers never lie?

1 +1 =10. Ask any computer programmer. You can’t prove a negative by logic or by mathematics.

In 7th grade I prayed to God to help me pass a math test and I failed. Case closed.

@pdworkin Nailed it!

There is no way of knowing whether the presence of god would necessarily change the results of 1 + 1. God may operate in such a way that he/she/it never alters such fundamental principles. Or he/she/it may do it so rarely that we would never expect to witness it. In the words of the old SAT word problem answer choices: Not enough information is provided.

I can prove mathematically that Milo doesn’t exist, but here he sits, shedding on my lap.

I found a thread a while ago that showed how Einstein proved God existed. Remember, everything in religion today isn’t all true.

Imagine it like a movie that is “based on a true story” but most of it is made up. Think about it.

@pdworkin i did not know that

@Harp Even God thought you should actually learn your math.

@Op To me this question is a bit close-minded. It’s a classic example of “disproving” something because it doesn’t fit into your own box of understanding. Even as a Christian I admit the remote possibility that He doesn’t exist because I’m a reasonable man. However, I believe He does. There is no faith button on your calculator.

@RomanRealtors No. Remember kindergarten math?
“Jill has 1 apple. Jack has another apple. Jack gave his apple to Jill. Now how many apples does Jill have?”
The answer is always 2. God decided that when He created the world.

@ChocolateReigns Is it different on other worlds? Or do we live on the only world?

let me see if I’m getting this straight: God doesn’t exist because the concept of God almost always includes the quality of omnipotence and the quality of omnipotence defined as the ability to do anything even altering the outcome of 1+1. Since we have never seen 1+1 equal anything but 2 that means that God doesn’t exist? is that right or am I missing something here?

God would have to say 1+1=2 because God can not lie.

At some point in the series, Homer Simpson did, I don’t know what happened with his efforts.
I think it was when the crayon in his brain was removed at the screaming mokey medical research facililty

@jaketheripper I think that’s it. The flaw in the logic is that even if God is omnipotent, that doesn’t mean that he/she/it has ever used all of his/her/its abilities. Nor does it imply that an omnipotent God couldn’t just make us always believe that we’ve never seen 1 + 1 = 42, even if we had. That’s the catch with omnipotence. But if God isn’t omnipotent, then God can’t make 1 + 1 != 2.

@jaketheripper thats pretty much the lot of it since mathematics is universal, but 1+1= 10 in computers according to @pdworkin and that is true

God would say, 1+1= Shut the hell up!

This reminds me of the Epicurean paradox:

“God…either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them?”
—Epicurus as quoted by Lactantius (A.D. 260–230) in A Treatise on the Anger of God .

Why couldn’t 1+1=2 except in cases where God intervenes and these cases are extremely rare?

<SnAp> Broke my pencil lead!! Oh, well…that’s the end of that.

What if God doesn’t give a whit about math and cares for art more? Maybe God hated school too.

@pdworkin I think it would be the same in other worlds. I don’t know much about outer space, but I don’t think it could change that. I think it’d be very possible for there to be other worlds with intelligent life on them. Have you heard how many millions of billions of solar systems are out there?

Not yet.

@ChocolateReigns I think he meant other worlds we couldn’t travel to spatially like alternate universes

I can pretty much sum God up. Created division, his fanbase mysteriously multiplied, I have minus faith in his existence, a fraction of his believers are wack jobs & add to this equation, maths is for the intellects among us not the self righteous. Yours truly, Al Gebra.

@ChocolateReigns I am of the opinion that Fermi’s paradox is actually the answer to creationist’s claims that life could not have evolved independent of God. It’s kind of like the infinite monkeys theorem. Suppose that the likelihood of intelligent life evolving is so small, that the only reason it exists on earth is that there are so many planets that the universe exceeded that very small probability. And we got lucky.

“Can anyone mathematically prove that god does not exist?”
What?

…what.

…seriously, what? This… you… it… math… what?

(brain explodes)

@ChocolateReigns Wait! I am confused! I thought God created the Earth, and then hung the luminaries. You mean it all doesn’t just revolve around us, the way the Bible tells us?

If only God would give me some clear sign!
Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

E=mc2 is enough proof for me!

@pdworkin What do you mean by “You can’t prove a negative by logic or by mathematics”? Many things mathematicians have tried to do ending up being proved impossible to do (what I would think of as a “negative” result).

A number of mathematicians/logicians/philosophers have tried to prove that God indeed exists. I imagine there may be some who have tried to prove the negative. Most would say that this question really does not lay within the scope of logic and/or mathematics.

Didn’t even understand the question. Does that mean I’m a) mathematically challenged or b) godless?

But if you come up with the answer, you can tell me how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I’ve always wondered about that one.

No, stop asking.

69=45.

There is no god.

There is no spoon.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop GA, I think you nailed it. The problem does not lend itself to the scientific method.

God is the square root of any negative number.

@pdworkin
The burden of proof is part of the scientific method, though. And that principle renders the problem moot.

@Blondesjon i is the square root of any negative number. And yeah, I got the joke. I’m just pedantic :)

@Blondesjon
@daemonelson
Is the square root of a negative irrational, imaginary or just non-existent?

Help a Humanities student out. :P

1 + 1 = 0 (mod 2).

What one can prove mathematically depends on which axioms one adopts.

Kurt Goedel, often called “the greatest logician since Aristotle,” concocted a “proof” of God’s existence. He never published it, but he shared it with a few colleagues. I don’t believe that many have found this proof compelling.

@Fyrius . . . It’s existence is impossible but also necessary. A very divine integer indeed.

God cannot be disproved mathematically. God is a fluid concept, which may adapt to increases in knowledge. However small and complicated the space we leave for him becomes, some people will always find a way to squeeze him into accepted knowledge.

It can be shown that God is unlikely to exist, or that the existence of a God is irrelevant to human life, but that is through philosophical reasoning rather than a mathematical proof.

Look at this.

@daemonelson I can out pedantic you. ;) i is strictly the square root of -1.

sqrt(-x) = i sqrt(x), where x is any real number greater than or equal to zero.

@Fyrius A real mutliple of i is called ‘imaginary’. A more general number of the form (a + bi) were a,b are real numbers is called ‘complex’.

An irrational number is a real number that cannot be expressed in the form of a fraction with integers in the numerator and denominator.

1+1= 3

Imaginary and complex numbers quickly became accepted as legitimate objects of inquiry once the notion of the complex plane was developed. This gave them a concrete geometric interpretation. The beauty of Euler’s formula helped greatly too.

@pdworkin Thank you. Mathematical methods are not able to prove contingent facts of the universe. Was Einstein born on the 14th of March, 1879? Was JFK killed by a lone gunman or not? Did the Confederate States of America lose the Civil War? These questions require physical evidence to resolve. The existence or not of God (define God first!) would seem to me to be most likely a question of this sort.

“It is a law of logic that one is never called upon to prove a negative. The real issue as far as man is concerned, is that when you accept such an important issue as the creation of the universe on faith you are destroying your confidence and the validity of your own mind. It has to be either reason or faith. I am against god for the reason that I don’t want to destroy reason” —Ayn Rand.

I’m just an empirical sort of guy.

Who are you, @pdworkin, John Locke?

David Hume. Can’t you get anything right?

Is anybody hume?

We’ll have to see about that. We’re empiricists.

Prove it to me.

Where’s my missing shade of blue?

Cogito, ergo I’m right and you’re wrong.

The proof is in the Buche de Noel.

Bingo! By George, she’s got it!

@gailcalled That took an awful long time to compose. Nevertheless, it was an amuse buche.

@pdworkin Isn’t it “cogito ego”?

@janbb;I was busy feeling nasty, brutish and short. (If you’re feeling vulgar, amuse-bouche becomes an amuse-gueule)

Kant seem to stop.

Sure @gailcalled, just Hobbes on our bandwagon

The greatest minds of all time now have great bodies to match!

Locke me up for the night.

@pdworkin Well, @gailcalled gets high marx for trying even if her engel is a little off.

OK. I am fox-trotskying off into the night.

@gailcalled What’s a matter, your humor is stalin’?

You can mathematically prove the Biblical god doesn’t exist since the Bible contains numerous numerical contradictions.

Just Hume or me, Kant you?

@Qingu such as? I’m not doubting there are numerical inconsistencies but rather that they disprove the existence of God, so which ones did you have in mind?

@ratboy According to Martin Davis, Samuel Clarke, a disciple of Newton, published a “proof” of God’s existence in his Being and Attributes of God in 1704. Davis writes that Boole used this proof as a example of how complicated deductions could be simplified by algebraic logic.

@jaketheripper, the most embarrassing one is the difference between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Genesis 1 says God creates plants and animals before humans. Genesis 2 gives the opposite order.

Other numerical contradictions:

• 2 Sam 24:9 lists a different census count (800,000/500,000) than 1 Ch 21:5 (1,100,000/470,000)

• 1 Kings 7:26 says Solomon’s palace held 2,000 baths, while 2 Chr 4:5 says it held 3,000.

(There are a bunch of such numerical contradictions between the Deuteronomistic histories and Chronicles).

In the synoptic gospels, Jesus is reported as going to Jerusalem once; in John he goes there three times.

Here’s a huge list of them:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/inconsistencies.html

Note that this doesn’t disprove “God” in an abstract sense, or even in a liberal Christian sense. It just disproves a god who is defined as inspiring an inerrant Bible.

That said, the concept of the Trinity is a mathematical contradiction. If you believe that God exists as a Trinity you have to disregard mathematics and say it’s a “mystery” that supersedes human logic.

@Qingu holy sh… my brain asploded!

@Harp HAHAHAH If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is!

No. The existence or non-existence of God is a belief.

And 1+1 is not necessarily 2.

1+1=1 in boolean algebra.

1+1=10 in the binary system.

Or try fuzzy logic when 1+1=2 might only be a little true.

One remark on that binary system point…
It may be true that 1 + 1 = 10 in the binary system, but that does not mean that one plus one makes ten in the binary system. Even in the binary system, one plus one still makes two. You just write “two” as 10 instead of 2. Mkay.

But I’ve been told that 1 + 1 = 3 for very large values of 1.

@Fyrius On the internet, everyone knows you’re a dog, but you’re still pretty damned smart!

Yep, it’s all about semantics. There’s an infinite amount of meanings for the sequence of digits 1 and 0. It actually means six in the senary and twenty in the vigesimal system.

Too complicated even for Google. Did you mean scenery? Huh?

Or “seminary” system?

Yes, a seminary system where they teach that 1 + J = 10

or 1 = 3.

Mathematics operates by rules of logic. One of the basic principles of logic is that one cannot prove a negative proposition. A positive assertion may be either proven, disproven or left as an unproven hypothesis.

@ChocolateReigns 1+1=2 in base ten, 1+1=10 in base two.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land
Please read that last post out loud, the one you just wrote. Go on. I’ll wait.

Now…
Did you just pronounce “1+1=10 in base two” as “one plus one makes ten in base two”?
Because it really doesn’t, you know. 10 does not mean ten in base two, that’s the point. Ten in base two is 1010. 10 is just the base two notation of two.
In other words, the math is the same, only you write it differently. It’s like challenging the notion that all cats purr by saying French cats don’t purr, they ronronnent.

I know, I’m repeating myself. Sometimes I like repeating myself.

@Fyrius One plus one equals one-zero in base two, there is no “ten” in base two, The representation of “ten” base 10, is 1010 base two. The point that I was trying to make is that 1+1 does not equal three just because some religious leader says so. Perhaps I expressed myself poorly. I think we basically agree but were tripping over each others semantics.

Why are so many people suffering the delusion that mathematicians and logicians can’t prove negative statements?

Why just this morning on my Topology homework I proved that there is no (See the “no”? That makes it negative.) homeomorphism from the reals under the usual Toplogy to the reals under the finite-complement topology. (Never mind what that means, suffice it to say that it is a negative statement and I have proved it.)

A positive statement implies its negative contrapositive, so for every positive statement one proves, one is also proving a negative statement. Therefore to say that negative statements cannot be proved is ludicrous.

A simple example. Consider it proved that 1 + 1 = 2. We have also now proved that there is no number which is not 2 that 1 + 1 is equal to. Do you dispute the proof of that negative statement?

However, whether one can mathematically prove or disprove God is debatable. I would guess not.

I think you’re confusing us with scientists, who can’t prove something’s non-existence.