Mullibok

If pressed I'd admit to a certain vague possibility, but that goes for a lot of things and I don't spend a considerable amount of time worrying about them.

Biff the unclean

The ideas you are refering to are more sophisticated only in the context that they are more complicated. They have the same bases in reality though that the Easter bunny has...the product of pure imagination.
I've noticed that believers love to point out that "we don't know everything." Then they behave as though we don't know anything, which is far from the case. We know quite enough to show that God (the one true God of Jesus fame) is a myth not worthy of consideration.

The argument from ingnorance fallacy falls apart on it's own lack of merit. But we aren't really ignorant so that gives it the double whammy. Please notice that those who argue a "god of the gaps" have already abandoned the Christian God...whose story provides more than enough details to prove it fictional...and have taken up a god of their own imagination.
I'm not about to worry myself over someones personal fantasies.

Starboy

Hi DBT9522. I guess it all depends on what you mean by an atheist. If you were saying that an atheist is someone who states with absolute certainty that there is no god, well than I would agree with you. It would be hard to understand how such an atheist could have the knowledge that would remove all doubt. But I am not that kind of atheist. I am the kind of a-theist that has no belief in god(s) in general. Now of course this is still a simplistic answer. If I asked if you believed that the god Zeus existed my guess would be that you would say that it didn't exist. And if I asked you: �How sure are you?� my guess would be that you would say that you were very sure. Now it might be that we could all be wrong about Zeus. But I think that you would agree that we have to go on what we know not what we want wish to be so and that until good evidence for Zeus comes to light there is no point in jumping to conclusions about the existence of Zeus.

So I guess in that sense everyone that has no believe in all possible gods is some kind of an a-theist, which of course would make just about everybody an a-theist. In my particular case I don't see any good reasons to think that any of them exist, but I could be wrong. That being said, none of the gods advocated by any of the religions that I am familiar with seem at all likely to exist.

Starboy

Heathen Dawn

Hi Starboy! Welcome back.

Starboy

Thanks Heathen! It is good to be back. (On good behavior, of course.)

Starboy

sodium

Personally, I wasn't brought up Christian, and the environment I grew up in wasn't particularly saturated with Christianity. We had Bible readings in elementary school, but the Bible doesn't really teach Christianity. So I've always tended to put Christianity in the same category as Greek mythology. If you asked me to prove that Athena was never born from the head of Zeus, I couldn't really prove it. And yet, somehow, I don't give it any credence whatsoever. And I don't feel I am exercising faith-style mental discipline to do this. My view of Christianity is the same.

My view of God is a bit different, because when I was younger, I did desperately try to believe in God, because I was afraid of death and wanted some kind of afterlife. I never could convince myself of any of the arguments for God's existence, and I found the Argument from Evil fairly cogent against his existence, but I satisfied myself that there must be some way around the Argument from Evil, even if I couldn't see it.

Anyway, eventually I decided I was fooling myself. I guess I'd have to admit that I could be wrong now, in the sense that I could be wrong about anything. But there's some things that you seriously wonder if you're wrong about, and some things that you admit the possibility of being wrong for purely philosophical reasons. And I think of the no-god hypothesis as being in the latter category.

Everywhere you look in the universe, it appears to be fundamentally indifferent and impersonal. Now if we're having a philosophical debate, I will admit that this could just be an elaborate trick. For all I know, I'm just a brain floating in a jar, or maybe the idea of a brain in the idea of a jar. Whatever. Deep down, I can't really make myself believe these things are possible.

DBT

Thank you all for the response,I am happy with all the reply's,
I started this thread on a comment made by somebody on another website.
He was a Deist who had been here to debate but had gotten badly beaten and bruised, he made the accusation that hard atheists were the caunterpart of fundies and also depend on belief for their stance.
As for me,I simply lack belief.
The only religion that ever appealed to me was the Allan Watts version of Hinduism, but of course there is no evidence for it,another fantasy,oh well.

Polycrates

Yeah I occasionally have doubts, and I suspect it may have something to do with my upbringing where being 'christian' was the usual, natural thing to be, but kinda like gravity or something, it wasn't something anyone really thought about (or went to church or anything), it was just something that was accepted as being just one of those things. So occasionally, I'll have momentary doubts about my atheism, but usually I can intellectually deal with that.
But to be frank, I find myself far more often having irrational doubts about other things, no matter how often I tell myself they can't be real. Zombie apocalypses, in particular, seem to rate much higher on my doubt-o-meter than the existence of a god.
So I guess it probably isn't really a manifestation of deep insecurity in my atheist stance.

keyser_soze

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy