Abacus

I am about as confident of the fact that there is no God as I am certain that there are no elves or fairies living in the forest near my home. Could I be wrong? Sure. But to assert that it requires as much faith to be an atheist as it takes to believe in any one of mankind's numerous gods is being pedantic.

southernhybrid

It takes faith to believe in things that have no empirical evidence. God and religion are man made concepts. There is no observable evidence of God's existence. Atheism requires no faith at all. There are no requirements that atheists believe in anything supernatural. Atheists simply lack faith in Gods.

Why is that so hard to understand?

Arvel Joffi

I mainly asked the question because I was thinking of a friend of mine who believes that there is no god, no gods, no spirit, no afterlife, no collective conscious, no anything not explained in the mundane universe. But his support for this is that he knows it to be true. He has complete faith that there is no god/godthing, and refuses to budge one inch from that idea.

His atheism is his faith.

Amos

But there is a difference between God and religion and faith in God translates into faith in yourself because you, and each one of us, has the potential to become God to the same extent as that you, or me, are the continuity of God. So to have the mind of God (which is our mandate in the bible), is equal to be God.

Therefore atheism is an impossible postion except for ignorance.

Arvel Joffi

That's a strange notion. Why does theism manifest itself more clearly than atheism and therefore require less faith?

Quote:

It is important to note that if there was no reason for people to believe in God, then we would not be aware that such a being could exist. This doesn't mean that God must exist, but it does raise some interesting questions.

Primitive man needed to explain what was happening the mysterious world around them. Gods were a convenient tool. I think it pretty much stops right there.

Amos

Translated from my point of view this means: his ignorance is his faith.

Arvel Joffi

I just finished reading all of your responses.

To state emphatically that there is no god or eternal essence or whatever the hell you want to call it, that without a shadow of a doubt there is nothing in this universe that you can't see and touch with your hands, is - until you have lived a million years and explored every single nook and cranny in the whole damned universe - a statement of faith. To state emphatically that there are no extraterrestrial beings in the universe because it hasn't been proven that there are is a statement of faith. To state that anything does not exist - emphatically - because it has not been proven to exist is a statement of faith.

It means that you believe that your worldview is the correct one, even it is only in this one matter, without empirical evidence to back it up.

Does common sense dictate that there is no god? Yes. Do I believe the likelihood of there being a god to be so absurd as to be irrelevent in any way that I can think of? Yes. Will I state, as a matter of scientific fact, there is no god, no anything godlike, nor anything beyond my comprehension, nor anything eternal in all of the Universe? No. It would be just as foolish and shortsighted as Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Satanism, and Brach Davidianismismsim.

I tried to state my question is simply as possible and my point suffered for it. I have met many atheists, aside from below-mentioned my friend, who have a religious approach to their atheism. They have complete faith in their view.

I should have been more clear.

And Digital Chicken, I don't buy into the weak/strong argument at all. It's all as nuanced and varied as humanity itself.

Psycho Economist

Never mind me: you answered my question while I was writing it, and even addressed some of the implications I was thinking of...

What do you mean by faith?

If it's profession of a belief in the absence of evidence, then Christian who believe there is evidence or proof for the existance of their God do not have any faith; they have a fact so far as someone can substantiate their so-called evidence. Fideists (sp?) who believe there is not and cannot be worldly evidence to substantiate God's existance do have faith. Agnostic atheists do not have faith, and gnostic atheists ("strong atheists") again do.

Would you allege that every born-again who claims to have seen an "angel" or something in a surgical theater doesn't have faith?

Your allegation hinges on how you define faith... and also how you characterize deities, the supernatural, and atheists.

Your argument raises an interesting point about gnostic atheists, whether they have a faith that their agnostic brethren lack... but we're (in the broader sense) still going to have to agree on a definition of faith to have this debate.

Triple Six

Seeing that I haven't personally derived all the current scientific theories from first principals, nor conducted experiments to prove them, nor performed my own archealogical searches, etc you could say I was taking an awful lot on faith only. After all we could all be vicitims of some massive conspiracy

We are talking a matter of degree here, just about anything is possible including invisible sky gods pulling our strings but the probabilities are so small as to be negligible. To compare the "faith" in an atheist who has rejected a deity by calling an extreme improbability an impossibility with that of a theist who has no problem ignoring massive inconsistencies and illogicallities is not valid.

fando

Atheism does not require faith. You don't need faith to not think about a subject. In the case of atheism, we are not thinking or caring about the concept of God(s) except when performing thought experiments.

In practice, simply state that anything we don't know about the universe from a Scientific viewpoint is not to be bothered with. If someone comes to you and claims that there exists a Foo that can perform miracles, ask for Scientific evidence. If none is procured, continue as before and not bother thinking about Foo. There's no reason to believe Foo exists or even think about Foo if there's no evidence for its existence.

If someone who believes Foo presses for Foo-based interaction with you, just amuse yourself by pretending that Foo exists. There's no need to have faith to carry out thought experiments.