LuisGarcia

It's certainly good to hear you've found support here.


Don't let that trouble you. One of the best points of being rational is that you get to change your mind when new arguments or evidence are encountered. If it becomes an issue with anyone, just tell them that you've looked into it more, understood more, and are now happier casting yourself as a weak atheist.

It's a hot topic in lots of places. What should worry you is when the battle lines and talking points are incorrectly established, eg theists making ignorant mischaracterisations of atheists.

I don't see why. Presuming you are arguing for a reduction in religions influence in a christian setting, why not turn things on them properly? If believers in possible but unevidenced entities should have a disproportionate say in law making, for example, then why will they not allow Muslims or Hindus to make the laws?

And I bet they won't.

So, if it's just their religion that is allowed special privileges, the onus is firmly back on them to show why they are special.

And if they will then they have the interesting dilemma to solve of why they are equating atheism with religion as "just another belief", then privileging "belief" but not atheism.

bad move.

Seriously.

I don't think this is going to get you very far.

Well, it's better than the previous bit.

Just repeat 10 times before bed each night "I see no evidence for any of the god hypotheses I have encountered" and you will soon find yourself able to argue the weak atheist case rather convincingly.

If, as seems possible, this moves into a discussion about the influence of religion, can I suggest a new thread in Positve Atheism, for example? (And if you want me to follow you, could you PM me? I'm not the brightest bulb in the ceiling and I may not spot it)

kennethamy

[QUOTE=ThorsHammer;4743548]Actually, I don't think I need any evidence to know that I won't be able to put anything into Bucket B. Somehow, I just know that. I haven't been able to find many things that don't exist in my neighborhood. Maybe you live in a different neighborhood.

RAFH

Yahzi's Genuine Patented Baseball Bat Reality Test works better.

RAFH

It's not a matter of intelligence, but adherence to a rigid world view. Theists simply adopt their world view and that's the end of it. In most cases, they are able to filter and bend whatever experiences and observations they have to fit that world view. Occasionally, something will come along and really shake their confidence in their world view, but it happens only rarely. Even rarer is the event that causes a complete re-assessment of their world view and its subsequent rejection. This is because even if an event does shake things a bit, for the most part, the only means they have of evaluating experiences is to run it through their world view which is, as noted, very rigid and can only result in a given range of answers. You might as well speak Kwankanese to them, the response is going to be the same. It's only if the experience so fundamentally shakes them it shatters their worldview so thoroughly it can no longer be used.

It's pretty much the carpenter's syndrome, he will always consider his hammer the solution to any problem. Doesn't matter what it is, the only issues afe what kind of hammer to use and with what force and how many times to use it. If's possible the consideration may include unusual techniques for using the hammer, overhand, sideways, upper cut, mulitple rapid blows, double-handed, etc. But the basic solution will involve a hammer. How does he then bake a cake?

Nuwanda

How does "the logical problem of evil" etc., prove God's non-existence?

And, since you use philosophical conclusions as "evidence" is it then fair game, for you, if theists also use philosophical conclusions as their evidence for God?

I was under the impression that atheists usually mean scientific evidence in these debates.

Gawen

Hypothesis or not, it is still an assumption...a presupposition. "God exists" must be their starting point. With no empirical evidence, the entire presupposition rests on religious "faith".

The error or deception here is to imply that anything that is not a scientific statement (one supported by evidence marshaled forth the way scientists do in support of their scientific claims) is a matter of faith. To use 'faith' in such a broad way is to strip it of any theological significance the term might otherwise have.

Such a conception of faith treats belief in all non-empirical statements as acts of faith. Thus, belief in the external world, belief in the law of causality, or even fundamental principles of logic such as the principle of contradiction or the law of the excluded middle, would be acts of faith on this view. There seems to be something profoundly deceptive and misleading about lumping together as acts of faith such things as belief in the Virgin birth, transfiguration, resurrection and belief in the existence of an external world or in the principles of contradiction or verification. Such a view trivializes religious faith by putting superstitions, fairy tales, and delusions of all varieties, and all non-empirical claims in the same category as religious faith.

aa5874

I don't think you should 'fight' myth with science. You should use myth to counteract myth.

First let the theist describe the characteristics of his gods and then simply tell him that some other mythical gods have similar characteristics.

Theist-- My God created the Universe.
Me..... The Gods of the American Indians, Egyptians, East Indians and hundreds of other Gods did that too.

Theist--- My God had a son.
Me..... Apollo, the Greek God, had sex with women and men and had many children.

Theist----What time is it? I have to go to church right now.
Me.... Please, tell me more about God.
Theist.... No!!

Janus

This is very similar to an argument of mine (although when I posted it very few atheists seemed to agree with me! Maybe I'm just bad at presenting my arguments).

One rather minor nitpick: I disagree with your statement that "Evidence of existence is bounded at zero. Things that do not exist do not give us evidence of their non existence. Because they do not exist to do so."

Well, no, I agree with it, but I think you're implying that there can be no evidence against certain things. These non-existent things can't provide evidence "against themselves", as you say, but evidence can be provided by things that do exist and that contradict the non-evidenced things you're trying to disprove. For example, before Watson and Crick discovered the true structure of DNA, there was a small possibility that the structure of DNA was that of, say, a spiral. But when evidence was discovered to support the hypothesis that the real structure is that of a double helix, it was also evidence against the spiral hypothesis.

Likewise, if evidence was found that the One True God is the one described by the Quran, it would automatically be evidence against the God described by the Bible.


Otherwise I agree with everything you've said. My way of putting it is, "A claim that's not supported by evidence is a guess, and we know by logic and from experience that guesses about reality are almost always wrong."

Of course, the more specific the guess is, the more likely it is to be wrong.

fishbulb

As a general principle, we can say that if there is no evidence to suggest some thing exists, it is most likely that that thing does not exist, and we ought to behave as though it did not.

Just about everyone without serious psychological or neurological problems follows this principle most of the time, and most everyone can agree that it is generally valid: when you leave your home for the day, while you are away, you are not agnostic to the question of whether or not your home is still there. Even though you cannot presently see it, and even though it is possible that someone has demolished it in your absence, you probably don't take the possibility seriously, unless there is specific evidence to indicate that it might be. When asked if your spouse is an axe murderer, you probably don't say, "I don't know," even though it is actually possible that she or he does moonlight as a killer. You aren't usually agnostic as to the question of whether you have a job, a brother or sister, or brown hair, even though you are often not in a position to immediately verify these things. It is possible that you could be wrong about all of these things and, unlike god, we know that people sometimes are wrong about these things, but we are still generally confident that we know these things to as close to certainty as possible, unless there is evidence to indicate to the contrary.

I cannot see any reason why we should apply this principle to most everything in life, but when it comes to certain specific questions such as god, we simply throw up our hands and say, "we can't know for sure." If there is no evidence that there is a god, the presumption should be that there isn't. And, the more specific the claims made about god, the more strongly this holds. Just maybe it is reasonable to say "I just don't know" to the question of whether the Universe as we understand it was created by an entity we would recognize as intelligent and purposeful (but this is a far cry from saying that it is just as likely as not) but to answer anything but in the negative when asked if there is a god named Yaweh who will send you to paradise if you believe his son spent the weekend dead in order to save you from your sins is completely unreasonable, given the utter lack of evidence for such a proposition.

It is another matter altogether if there is evidence, but that evidence is ambiguous.

Dante Alighieri

Some very capable atheistic philosophers believe it to still work. For instance, see Jordan Howard Sobel's Logic and Theism. For an online essay, see Quentin Smith's "A Sound Logical Argument from Evil." I myself try to offer my opinion in this thread.

Absolutely, why wouldn't I? (More accurately, both theists and atheists use philosophical arguments which end in a conclusion; obviously, it's not much of an "argument" if doesn't actually argue anything!) I just think that those attempts (the argument from contingency, the Kalam cosmological argument, the general teleological argument, the fine-tuning argument, traditional ontological arguments, the modal ontological argument, etc) fail spectacularly.

Perhaps some atheists do mean that. (Although it is useful to use science as an example of what it means to explain a state of affairs [which are considered to be good examples of explanations] and compare it with theism) I don't.