prometheus bound

"I just couldn't be truthful to myself if I maintained my belief in the face of all the empirical evidence."

there is no empirical evidence that proves God does not exist, that's ludicrous! existence itself is something atheists cannot expain in God's absence (even through reason) every attempt to explain it shows they have fallen into the intelligence trap themselves


as far as your strawman accusation, i think i showed that it indeed was not a strawman but the essence of Wonder's error.
by the way i never said heart knowledge is an end in itself, i was indicating that it is part of the equation of human knowledge

"Naturally even atheists have emotions about their beliefs, like everyone, but we have to try to recognize how those emotions effect the way we think, to avoid becoming caught in the Intelligence Trap."

very good point! a point i would agree with but emotion and heart knowledge are not necessarily contradictory or inferior to reason-- they both have there limits, atheist have often exalted reason to a pinnacle place of essetial deity and the ultimate arbiter for truth, i would not say that existential experience, empirical evidence, or rationality are the ultimate arbiter for truth-- God is.
can i prove it? no. but nor can you prove through any of the above mentioned means that God does not exist. in fact you violate the above means by doing so.

Godless Wonder

[QUOTE]Originally posted by prometheus bound So we agree, you are unreasonable.
So let's see, you think there are limits to reason (I agree) and that there's something else besides reason ("faith" perhaps?) which allows you to know with absolute certainty something which you can never know by means of reason alone, and furthermore, this "something else" is not subject to being tested by reason. Is that about right?

Here's a problem with that. Let me attempt to test this "something else" with reason anyhow. 15% of the population is atheist or agnostic (probably not quite that much, but I'm being generous.) That leaves 85% with some kind of "faith". But many of those faiths contradict one another. Not all of those people who use faith can be correct. If we are generous, and assume that of the people who use faith, the ones who arrive at the most popular conclusion happen to be the ones who are correct, then we assume that the Christians are correct, and the others are wrong. With 33% of the earth's people being Christian, that means 33/85 = 39% of the faithful are right, and 61% are wrong. From what I can tell, all of those people who are relying on faith are relying on the exact same "something else besides reason", and best case scenario, 61% are getting the wrong answer. Faith doesn't work as a means of getting accurate information by any measure, even the most lenient measure possible. Why should anyone think the Christians are correct when what they are saying makes no rational sense, and the means ("faith") by which they attain certainty in spite of these discrepancies with reason has proven itself to be so unreliable?

Yahzi

But your proof that reason is limited is presented in terms of reason.

You are using reason to prove to us that reason cannot prove everything.

But if reason cannot prove everything, then why should we listen to your reasoning in the first place?

To put it another way: the only reason you have to doubt reason is reason itself. If you're going to doubt what reason tells you, and reason tells you that reason is limited, why not doubt that?

See, we can do word salad too.

McNamara

Quite true. There is no empirical evidence against every single god that man has thought of. Some can be easily debunked (like the Greek gods), but many others lack evidence for or against their existence. So using pure reason, the most logical position would be agnostic. But I apply a little intuition and a little Occam's Razor to move to the position of strong atheism; that's just my conclusion. I'm not disrespecting theists or agnostics.

I have never heard a theist explain the reason for existence outside the context of their own religion, so why should you expect atheists to provide an explanation? I personally don't think there's any reason or purpose for us to exist, but we do. God was invented to provide a convenient explanation for why we exist. It's unnecessary and quite irrelevant.

I don't feel any need to prove that God doesn't exist. It's probably impossible to do so. I don't have any desire to change your beliefs. Since neither of us can prove the unprovable to each other, the point is moot. So I'm perfectly fine with the fact that people have religious beliefs I find personally ridiculous. It's your right, so long as it does not harm me.

The problem is that some religious people are so sure of what they believe, they think they have the right to trample on the rights of those who disagree with them. You DON'T sound like one of these people, and I respect you for that. But I hope you see the futility in arguing that I have some mistaken world view because I have a different standard for knowledge than you do.