tribalbeeyatch

In the same way that your not believing that I'm presently wearing pink socks need not entail believing that I am instead wearing green socks.

reprise

There are certainly theories about what came before the BB and what caused it, but Hawking's take on it (I'll stick to his because it's the one with which I'm most familiar) is that none of those theories yet adequately explain everything associated with the BB. In other words, we can't totally explain it yet, but we are confident that further investigation will reveal more evidence which allows us to fully explain the BB.

It can take hundreds of years to test scientific theories - pity the poor astronomers who will very often not live long enough to see their theories validated or refuted. That the ALL of the evidence necessary to support a given theory has not yet been discovered does not mean it never will be. Science looks for evidence of that which we cannot yet explain; religion does not.

tribalbeeyatch

That is the root of your misunderstanding. An atheist doesn't need to actively disbelieve in a god, he need only lack such a belief.

PandaJoe

No, the atheist would be saying, "I don't know, so I won't assume it has anything to to with magical leprechauns."

But it doesn't explain anything. It merely bumps the question back a step. Instead of "What created the universe?" we're stuck with "What created god?" How is this better?

Charles Darwin

Well now we're talking about agnosticism -- that's another thing. I'm wondering about atheism, not agnosticism. You say "only a few atheists will claim that no deity of any kind exists," but, in fact, those are the only real atheists. The rest are agnostics.


Your analogy doesn't work because the blobs may not exist, but the universe (or my impression of it at least) does exist. Somehow, existence came about. Now you can explain it in various ways, but you cannot avoid a religious belief, of some sort, just because you are electing to deny that God did it and you are opting for some naturalistic explanation which requires just as much faith.

Charles Darwin

You make a key point: "It happened." Somehow, the universe came into existence. I understand you are not particularly concerned with how it happened. But as an atheist, you are committed to the claim that God did not make it happen, as you deny there is a God.

No, I'm not saying you have faith because you don't care about the details. I can understand that cosmology is not down your line. But by the very fact that you are denying that God did it, you are placing your faith in some other mechanism / explanation.

This is not making a religion out of disbelief; it is a religious belief in the sense that it requires an unsupported, metaphysical claim about ultimate reality. Whether you like it or not, your belief system must entail the claim that existence comes about without God (pick your favorite explanation: an uncaused Big Bang that somehow just happened; an infinite cycle of Big Bangs that just keep on coming; whatever). You have precisely zero facts to back this up. Call this what you will (faith, metaphysical, ...) I call it a religious belief.

Gawdawful

Because it doesn't matter. We are here, how we came to be here is really of little importance. What we do while we are here is of much more importance, particularly if one has no belief in an afterlife. At least the Big Bang theory has the scientific observation of red shift to back it up rather than the ravings contained in a flawed ancient text sometimes referred to as a bible or some other theory not based on evidence or observation.

I've only been hanging around the IIDB for about a month now and already I tire of the same old arguments for the existence of god; we non-believers must still provide the evidence for the nonexistence of something we don't even claim exists. I now believe the Invisible Magic Woman poofed us into existence one morning when she was bored with The Nothingness (TM), creating the whole universe as we know it last Tuesday at 11:01 AM with the built in memories and all the physical evidence necessary for us to think we'd been here for quite a while, most of us anyway. With my "belief system" you only think you know that you existed before that and any evidence to the contrary is countered by my belief that she made all that too at the same time, she covered all the bases, believe me. She's really good too, omnipotent even; she did it all in an instant, one moment, not taking a whole six days to do it. Plus she took no day of rest afterward either, unless you count yesterday which she spent on the beach in Tahiti working on a tan. There, that's one explanation for existence. Prove me wrong.

Warren in Oklahoma, a state of denial

Charles Darwin

That's an agnostic, not an atheist.

Charles Darwin

That is an agnostic.

That is a good question, and there are answers to it which you may or may not like. But your question (and implied point) do not lessen the fact that atheism entails religious beliefs.

You may make the argument that God is not a very good explanation for existence (or consciousness), and therefore you prefer other explanations, and that you prefer atheism. I think such an argument is problematic, to say the least, but that is neither here nor there. Even if you are convinced your argument is a good one, the point is that you are committing yourself to a religious belief, of some type.

Charles Darwin

Unfortunately you seem to have missed the point of this thread. No one is giving the same old tired arguments for the existence of God here, nor is anyone asking you to justify your belief system. What you are being asked to justify here, is why you think your belief system is not a religious one. If you are an atheist, do you agree that you have made a religious committment? If not, why not?