First of all, I have more in common with atheists than religious people, so my intention isn’t to come here and attack, I just want to hear your opinions. Maybe I’m wrong, I’d like to hear from you if I am. I’m just expressing here my perception of the movement and not actually what I consider to be facts.
My issue with atheism is that I think it establishes the lack of a God or gods as the truth. I do agree that the concept of a God is hard to believe logically, specially with all the incoherent arguments that religions have had in the past. But saying that there’s no god with certainty is something I’m just not comfortable with. Science has taught us that being wrong is part of the process of progress. We’re constantly learning things we didn’t know about, confirming theories that seemed insane in their time. I feel like being open to the possibilities is a healthier mindset, as we barely understand reality.
In general, atheism feels too close minded, too attached to the current facts, which will probably be obsolete in a few centuries. I do agree with logical and rational thinking, but part of that is accepting how little we really know about reality, how what we considered truth in the past was wrong or more complex than we expected
I usually don’t believe there is a god when the argument comes from religious people, because they have no evidence, but they could be right by chance.
Based on our understanding of human history, we KNOW that toasters were created on earth and that it is unlikely one is in orbit on the sun… This is based on knowledge. Even if based on knowledge, I could be wrong.
Now, what do you KNOW about the creation of the universe or the nature of reality?
This is my whole point. I’m not saying it is wrong to have solid opinions about some things. I’m saying it is wrong having solid opinions about things we really don’t understand.
So there is actually a valid critisism of Russel’s teapot, or toaster in this case, that there could be a detectable causality that put the object in orbit even if the object itself cannot be observed (such as a rocket to deliver it). However, this (minor) flaw in a popularized analogy does nothing to reject what the analogy represents: A stupid idea that cannot really be falsified, even though it is false (see what I did there?).
Atheist do not carry any belief in not believing (this even sounds stupid). We simply have come to the conclusion that there is no basis for believing in any particular denomination, nor some unspecific general one for that matter.
Yeah, I guess it really comes down to semantics.
Does “I don’t believe” mean “I believe there is no god” or “I don’t have a belief”? I think there is a very important distinction here. The first one says “based on my experience, I think it is unlikely there is a god”. The second one says “I really don’t believe anything about it, one way or the other”.
My point targets the first one. The experience and evidence built by humans is just relatively insignificant… This is my problem with this line of thought. “There is no evidence” doesn’t give any degree of confidence at all when it comes to this matter. There no evidence for most of the things that make reality exist, and yet here we are.
Atheists mean by the second that they find as little material basis for believing in god as in [insert whack theory here (teapot, spaghettimonster, etc.)]. We do make a judgement one way or the other, we say that our default position is not believing literally incredible things without proof.
The bar for what needs to be proven unless assumed false is higher the more that is claimed. Since god (especially to monotheistic denominations) are by definition the highest being claimed to exist, there is a huge burden of proof required for believing in it. Since there exists none, we choose to assume that the statement is false.
The reason we make all these stupid analogies is to hammer through the point that we, like everyone else, make a lot of assumptions that unproven things are false. The question of god is not really special in this regard, except for the historical and biological conditions that makes people inclined to believe in the fairytale absent of any good objective reason.
There is no precedence for the existence of deities.
For belief in deities, yes, but not for their existence.
That is all we need to say if we believe in the existence of deities; prior plausibility.
Staying in the middle ground of “maybe, we don’t know” makes no sense, because it puts the plausibility one step further towards “yes” than is warranted based on the evidence we have.
“There is no precedence for the existence of deities”
What makes you think humans have the capacity to perceive or understand deities?
It feels like you guys are really not understanding my point. Please put human existence into perspective and tell me how much we really know. Now, how much is there to know?
It’s like a blind person saying color doesn’t exist because he can’t experience it. You see? Humans will live and die in the relative blink of an eye. Chances are we won’t really get to know what’s actually going on. Right now we don’t really know, so having any opinion about what’s happening based on lack of evidence is really pointless. We have no evidence for most things that are actually happening in the universe.
Sorry for my very late response.
In your example of color, there are people who can, and people who can’t see colors.
Is there any analogy between that and god belief?
Not just belief, because anyone can believe anything. I mean knowledge, or sensory input.
If no one can sense (detect) deities, then how can anyone say that there is one?
And if we can’t say that there is one, why would it be unreasonable to conclude that there probably isn’t one?
That is all I as an atheist believe. That, lacking any evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that there probably aren’t any deities.
All this talk about it being beyond our understanding sounds like begging the question if you can’t demonstrate it.