Atheists delusional?

[Russell_SA]

If you can not demonstrate your supernatural reality is any different than Hogwarts, then yes it is indistinguishable from an imagined world with magical powers. This is not at all the same as Einstein’s mathematical proof of gravity waves because that is not on the same level of a shift of reality than suggesting magical beings exist in other realms. That is why we spend money on research for claim about this verified reality and very little for research of the supernatural because every claim hasn’t even passed preliminary tests. The level of the claim needs that level of evidence. Currently there is as much evidence of your claim as there is for Voldermort.

 

[KindredSoul]

Currently there is as much evidence of your claim as there is for Voldermort.

I’m gonna need to see the evidence for Hogwarts where documented, existing people willingly died for their insistence that Hogwarts was real NOT because they “just believed it” but because they had claimed to see Hogwarts and magic with their own eyes, in obvious and spectacular fashion that they could NOT easily have mistaken; where an empire’s worth of powerful people tried desperately to stamp out these people and a few simple bits of evidence of the movement’s falsehood, at the time when the claims WERE far more falsifiable, could not be produced; where no one contemporary to the movement’s roots, seems to have ever claimed, despite being enemies of the movement, that Dumbledore wasn’t even a real person, even at the time when he was supposedly walking the Earth barely yesterday and his falsehood would have been very easily argued if he didn’t exist; where throughout history countless people claimed to witness appearances Harry Potter and his magic firsthand, many of whom gladly died rather than recant; where for an unbroken chain of 2000 years not one person has turned up convincing evidence that Harry Potter and his friends were all verifiably fictional characters, despite that nearly every other fictional character of the last 2000 years is more verifiably false.

And don’t even begin to compare to the handful of other religions that can boast similar indications, because that’s shifting gears. Had you compared it to other such religions, your claim wouldn’t have been so ridiculous. No, you chose to compare it to Hogwarts. You used a ridiculous exaggerated comparison, and now it’s on you to back it up, Mr. “Verify.” If you cannot see how religion–yes, religion in general even, although I do believe Catholicism in particular has an edge–differs from Harry Potter then you “verify” how biased you really are, because even IF it WAS false, anyone with a truly fair and balanced mind could see it had substantially more going for it than Hogwarts or Middle Earth. I’m not Islamic, but I can admit Islam has more going for it being real than Harry Potter, because I’m not so insecure that I have to slanderously paint every competing Truth claim as being posited out of thin air, when a common sense review of the facts can show that, even if it can’t be conclusively proven, there ARE factors that make religion substantially stand out from someone’s clearly made-up story.

 

[KindredSoul]

And even IF none of what I just wrote was so painfully true as it is, your response would still be weak, because you’ve still failed to verify your claim. Even your comparison to Hogwarts was a dodge of the matter at hand, and don’t think I haven’t noticed: You cannot verify that Catholicism is false. You cannot verify that it is imaginary. And you’re the one, not us, who insists one should only believe in what is demonstrably verifiable. Witty retorts and smug comparisons to pop fiction are not verifications, are not hard evidence. They are, subtly, appeals to emotion: “If I can compare their truth claim to something laughable, it will prove it’s ridiculous and false.” Appeal to humor or embarrassment. A failed appeal, in this case, but an appeal. That’s not proof.

So, as before I still await the verification. Otherwise you’re just one more person taking a leap of faith in a truth claim you cannot and have not truly verified. That’s OK. Most do, and it’s necessary if you’re going to believe anything in the “this religion vs that religion vs. no religion” questions, which is my point. You’re in good company by taking a leap of faith to believe in your own particular view on these questions, even if I believe you’ve chosen wrongly. Just don’t be so condescendingly unaware of your own leap of faith. The irony, and especially your total unawareness of it or (alternatively) your refusal to see it, doesn’t bolster your implicit claims of being grounded, rational and clear minded compared to the rest of us.

 

[pocaracas]

The only way to verify your presumption (that it definitely IS imagined and that therefore no God exists Who would intervene and enlighten another prophet were all the current knowledge erased) is to test it by destroying all knowledge of that particular religion and having no prophet ever successfully recreate it.

You haven’t done this, nor provided any valid means of it.

I think it may have been done before… Several times.
How many religions have been lost to forgetfulness?
Akkadian? Inca? Countless forms of druidism?
We don’t even know if those belief systems had prophets, or what.
They died. We know they existed, because of clues left behind… The akkadians left some writing, but the belief system has never been recreated.

 

[KindredSoul]

I think it may have been done before… Several times.

How many religions have been lost to forgetfulness?

Akkadian? Inca? Countless forms of druidism?

We don’t even know if those belief systems had prophets, or what.

They died. We know they existed, because of clues left behind… The akkadians left some writing, but the belief system has never been recreated.

From an earlier post of mine:

Surely, you won’t try to appeal to some dead religions for your case: You did say “your religion” and unlike people, dogs, etc, religions are not verifiable as “fundamentally the same” so surely you’re not venturing to posit the unverifiable–that our religion is no different from those that HAVE died.

A core claim of most religions is to be THE religion, so the death of other religions, just by nature, never verifies that this religion (whatever “this religion” may be) will meet that fate. It would be like if a man said “I am a superior man, and will outlive everyone in this room” and someone said “But the 2000 other guys who said that and who were in the room with you all died.” Due to specifically what he is claiming, the fact that they made the same claim is neutralized by the fact that their deaths also bolster his claim, canceling out the significance of their deaths in proving that he is “just like them.” Because it does make it understandable to think he MAY be “just like them” (“I’ve heard that one before!” etc) but at the same time it feeds into the very claim he’s making, which depends on their claims of similarly outliving everyone else being false. So their similar claims and subsequent deaths are simply canceled out as relevant evidence for his own particular claim one way or the other.

But do know my main beef here, I don’t think, is with you or just anyone who is Atheist, pocaracas. Though I’m not certain, and could be thinking of someone else, it seems like I’ve seen other posts of yours that show you are respectful and don’t necessarily have some need to believe/“prove” that the rest of us are fundamentally not as rational as you in holding our beliefs. My current squabble with Russell (and Atheists similar to him) isn’t over his Atheism, but his smug and ironically presumptuously confident views against religion, which are subtly different things. And yes, lest I be thought guilty of irony, I have also mentioned far earlier that I don’t approve the original post’s calling atheists delusional, so yes, the respect goes both ways. A little benefit of the doubt for the other side being both sincere AND rational goes a long way, and that’s what’s at issue between me and Russell currently, not his mere personal Atheistic worldview.

 

[Russell_SA]

"You cannot verify that Catholicism is false. " - Logical fallacy here. You are the one making the claim about reality. The burden of proof is on you to produce that evidence. The default position on every claim is to not believe it until you have been convinced of the other person’s position. If religion taught people how to think instead of what to think, I wouldn’t have to keep pointing this out all the time to them.

"You cannot verify that it is imaginary. " - Your religious claims are indistinguishable from the imaginary since you can not demonstrate how it is any different than the imaginary other than you keep asserting that its not. Ok, yes it is. That seems to be the only standard that means anything to you for how to demonstrate something is true. This snake oil cures cancer. No it doesn’t , yes it does.

I’ll - again - ask you or your deity to do this - Produce one verifiable piece of evidence that the supernatural exists. You or your deity want to convert people to its side, well I’m telling you what would first convince me that the supernatural claims are anything different than an active imagination for a cultural tradition that grants people special social privilege.

 

[KindredSoul]

Logical fallacy here. You are the one making the claim about reality.

No, not in this particular conversation. That’s you. I’m not saying Catholicism is true. I clearly believe so, but I’m not arguing here that it is. You’re arguing it’s false. Your claim about reality is that reality positively is not Catholicism: Otherwise you cannot argue it is imaginary, because the imaginary is, by definition, false–not merely unproven, not merely unverifiable, but FALSE. That’s not a mere withholding of belief on the matter until/unless it is verified (to your personal satisfaction). That’s a statement about reality. A truth claim. I’m disputing that claim, by the standards you claim to hold: You haven’t proven it. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not arguing Catholicism is true. I’m saying you don’t know it’s false.

You’ve made an appeal to emotion (embarrassment, hilarity) on several occasions now by trying to paint it along the same lines as pop culture myths, like aliens, etc. However, you’re at a disadvantage you haven’t seemed to realize: I’m willing to admit I dismiss those things by taking a leap of faith. I don’t claim that I have to verify (nor find personally/presently verifiable) everything I believe first hand. Sometimes I trust certain things first, based on a mixture of reasons and factors, then I take a leap of faith that what I trust stretches to the things I can’t “test.”

But you’re the one who claims everything must be verified or verifiable before anyone should believe it. And that’s a self-defeating proposition. In rejecting the unverifiable as false, not merely tabling it as an unknown, you’ve believed in the unverifiable: Its falsehood. Yeah, we do that all the time, as humans. But we also need not go around claiming, in oxymoronic fashion, that we should withhold belief in whatever we cannot verify.

 

[KindredSoul]

As for your specific objections, you make several errors, not least among them several false equivalences and “all or nothing” thinking. A prime example of both is that you make a false equivalence between someone willing to die for something they just claimed to “know” to be true based on their own reasoning or strong zeal or strong opinions, and a group of people willing to die for something they would KNOW was false (if it was) because they based their beliefs on extraordinary, obvious things they all claimed to WITNESS AND SEE. Yeah, that doesn’t utterly “prove” their claim to a third party who wasn’t there, but if you really believe the latter suggests absolutely nothing intellectually striking or of any importance (even if there ARE competing claims that can say the same), and if you believe someone who accepts the claims of the latter sort of testimony (from people who claimed to WITNESS the thing they’re dying for) has an equally flimsy basis as someone who accepts the claims of the former (the people who merely had strong zeal or opinions), then you’ve demonstrated an “all or nothing” approach to what does and doesn’t count as (soft) evidence or reasonable argument, as apparently there is NO sliding scale for you between “I see it, or think I could if I wanted to, with my own eyes” and “There is absolutely no reason to believe this whatsoever,” based on your granting NO evident difference between these two strikingly different sorts of testimonies. This “all or nothing” standard, where it seems one should treat all truth claims that are not backed up by hard irrefutable evidence the exact same with no sliding scale, makes your insistence on asserting certainty after certainty which you can’t prove (this is false, that is false, that is imaginary, etc., as opposed to “we just don’t know”) all the more ironic.

 

[gregoryphealy]

I’ll - again - ask you or your deity to do this - Produce one verifiable piece of evidence that the supernatural exists. You or your deity want to convert people to its side, well I’m telling you what would first convince me that the supernatural claims are anything different than an active imagination for a cultural tradition that grants people special social privilege.

What would God have to present to satisfy you?

Do you want something that appeals to your senses? Why couldn’t that be the result of hallucinations or some other neurological disorder? Or what if it was aliens or an eccentric billionaire messing with you? Or what if some mind control technology exists unbeknownst to you? These are all things that (theoretically) could exist in the natural realm that would obviate the need for God as your explanation. How could you trust anything provided to you in the natural world as reason to believe in the supernatural, and why would you resort to the supernatural for explanation of a piece of evidence that is received through natural means?

 

[Russell_SA]

Imaginiary is not false. It is true that people have imaginary claims. All I am stating is that your claims of the supernatural are indistinguishable from an imaginary claim. You can not demonstrate that it is any different. The religious are claiming that they believe it is actually a true description of reality, so are you, but you can not demonstrate that your claim about religion is any different than an imaginary claim. It is true you can have an imagination, but how do we tell the difference between an imagined claim and a claim about actual reality? You have to demonstrate the difference. You are claiming your religion is different. Show the world how that is the case. Otherwise, yes it is indistinguishable from the imaginary. It’s all just an assertion. Snake oil does work. Well prove it. All I get back is, how arrogant is it of you to ask for evidence by demanding the snake oil supplier demonstrate their claim. That’s dodging the request for evidence. Or prove my snake oil doesn’t work. That’s shifting the burden of proof. No amount of evidence will convince you. You have not provided any, not a single piece of evidence of the supernatural. Stop dodging around the point and just produce your evidence of the supernatural.

Here’s the wall: “that we should withhold belief in whatever we cannot verify.” - Yes we should based on the level of the claim and again, the default position is to not believe until the claim is justified to you. Not all claims are the same level. Such as claiming you have a pet dog. I’ll just take your word for this since its a trivial claim. We have all experienced dogs existing. But you are not making that level of claim. You are claiming magical beings exist and there is another realm and we have invisible immortal ghosts of ourselves, etc. Sorry but I am not going to argue these splitting hairs here. The religious are claiming to have a pet dragon. This is no where near the level of insignificant claim as having a pet dog. This is soo self evident to the readers and you and me that I don’t think you’re being intellectually honest here.

 

[pocaracas]

I know this isn’t aimed at me, but I’d like to take a stab at answering, if I may.

Personally, what I’d consider enough was simply some guidance and counseling of everyone on earth, in person, periodically, or whenever the person needed it.
That way, everyone would have first hand experience of divine wisdom, not as an inspiration, but a talking entity. It’s the fatherly figure often brought forth. I’d expect that figure to have shown up since homo sapiens first congregated into tribes, and lasting until no human exists anywhere in this universe.

That such hasn’t been the case is… Telling.

 

[gregoryphealy]

So auditory schizophrenic hallucinations but helpful? I wouldn’t be sufficiently convinced by that. Please find a better means of convincing people like me so that I can be convinced and reach Heaven with you.

Snide remark aside, I hope you see the futility in ever trying to sufficiently convince everyone.

 

[Est]

What is an atheist/naturalist said this:

I agree that the universe, that is all things being, has no “meaning” and “value” unto itself. However, I have real, articulable “meaning” and “value” to myself, and I find same in things in this the universe that “matters” to me. For example, I myself am an “objective” (existing independent of my faculty of self-reflection) standard of value. For example, a promising career in medicine might be an “objective” value. The meaning I get from it indeed is my own feeling of satisfaction (“subjective,” perhaps), but there’s no clear reason to draw the distinction.

In other words, aren’t the concepts of “meaning,” “purpose,” and “value” uniquely human concepts? And do they not objectively exist and indeed make fundamental sense only in a human context? Say we ascribe “meaning” to, e.g., a meteor whose “value” is explosive collision with other physical objects and whose “purpose” is to blow planet Earth to smitherines. Clearly, this only makes sense by reason of analogy to uniquely human concepts and attributes. Before mankind came on the scene to anthropomorphize such natural events/causalities, the whole underlying, elemental motivation to pose such a question would be frustrated. (note to “pose a question,” is also distinctly human, and I struggled to find an inanimate verb, which is apropos).

 

[KindredSoul]

Stop dodging around the point and just produce your evidence of the supernatural.

Despite that it’s not been me making a truth claim, but rather you, I have implied the evidence, clearly enough that you picked up on the implication, and due to your “all or nothing” thinking you’ve rejected it as meaning nothing. You lumped people trusting in those evidence/arguments with people just making stuff up out of thin air, in a false equivalence so severe as to bring your own intellectual honesty into question.

Yes we should based on the level of the claim and again, the default position is to not believe until the claim is justified to you.

The default conclusion that would truly follow from a “should withhold belief in whatever we cannot verify” is to withhold belief, not to apply positive “DISbelief.” If a friend tells me he saw flying saucers fly from the sky, and I claim I don’t believe in things I cannot verify, passive disbelief (a non-truth claim) would be to simply withhold my judgment on the matter. “You’re full of it,” on the other hand, is a positive, conclusive truth claim. I’m willing to sometimes make those, but I don’t claim to only believe in what I can verify.

You are claiming magical beings exist and there is another realm and we have invisible immortal ghosts of ourselves, etc.

We know I believe in God, and souls, and Heaven, yes. But that has not even once been the point in this argument. You keep trying to shift the burden of proof to the one who, IN THIS ARGUMENT, has not been trying to “prove” that religion is true. If I demanded verification for everything, I’d be an agnostic. If someone could call me an atheist in that case, it’d certainly be “soft.” I’d have no real opinion on the matter. Is there God? Dunno. You, on the other hand, are making a positive claim: Catholicism is not real. It is make-believe. You’re not withholding judgment. You’re coming to a conclusion. One you cannot prove.

Sorry but I am not going to argue these splitting hairs here. The religious are claiming to have a pet dragon. This is no where near the level of insignificant claim as having a pet dog.

I’ve never said it’s as trivial as having a pet dog. You’re shifting the goal posts by suggesting I have. There are very significant things that people, even atheists, take for granted based on the testimony of others that they haven’t verified for themselves, that are certainly higher than “I have a dog.” Assuming you tend to trust scientific discourse, there are all manner of things (given the width and breadth of science) of things so specific, convoluted, and inaccessible without special tools, that you take for granted, without having verified them yourself, that go beyond something so obvious and self evident as “Well duh, dogs exist, I have one!!” A great deal of science is less “I have a dog” and is more “I have a kangaroo” or “They can now take close pictures of Mars!” as told on the phone to a small town USA kid with no necessary tools, no internet or means of travel. Yet most of us tacitly trust it. Atheists included.

 

[KindredSoul]

At any rate, again, I’m not claiming anything in this argument about religion being positively true. You’re claiming it should be–effectively–assumed false. Imaginary =/= real. If it’s real, it’s not imaginary. So yes, indeed, you’re saying religion is false when you say religion is imaginary. Your claim IS the one in this argument claiming a level of confidence or certainty in this argument, and you seem just as committed to it as any religious person. It’s clearly very important to you to believe that religion IS imaginary, IS indistinguishable from a work of known fiction, that the arguments and claims and witnesses for explicit, grandiose miracles in history should be taken NO more seriously than the events of a MODERN NOVEL.

If your personal atheism was all you were positing, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. But you are not merely asserting your own atheism, you are belittling religion, and belittling the apologetics, testimony, soft evidence (by definition that means it does not irrefutably prove the thing, and no one is claiming it does), and many other factors as counting for nothing. You are dismissing the complex, thoughtful reasons of generations upon generations of religious people–which go beyond anything you and I can say here, and to which you have a wealth of access at your fingertips–as meaning nothing more, NOTHING more (or pathetically little more) than someone who randomly decided to believe in Harry Potter. That is all a far cry from merely being an atheist yourself.

And if you claim you can’t see that, if you claim that what you are doing is not self-evidently unreasonable, biased, and intellectually unfair, if you claim that this argument is about me trying to push a religious claim onto you when I’ve not once tried to convince you to NOT be Atheist but simply to admit that people who ARE religious are not, inherent to their religiosity, being unreasonable, gullible lemmings or just “making stuff up” compared to atheists, when all I’ve done throughout the entire argument is to argue against your positively ANTI-religious claims rather than to try to push my own beliefs, then I have difficulty believing in your intellectual honesty. And any reader who would question my own honesty, even after all I’ve pointed out here, I would strongly suspect already shares your strong bias against even being willing to acknowledge that religious people can believe what we do and have far better intellectual reasons than just “making it up” or wishful thinking or whatever.

 

[gregoryphealy]

I have no idea what would convince me of the supernatural, but your deity should know. I am not going to be soo arrogant as to be able to tell the difference between a superior technologically advanced race and a deity or a lesser deity to a higher deity. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Your deity should know though.

So it’s a god’s job to convince you of its existence for what purpose? Disregard Catholic theology because you’re not even convinced thus far of any god, let alone the Catholic God. Why does any god need to convince you of anything? How far does this pursuit of convincing extend? What of the obstinate person who wishes not to be convinced or willingly rejects god? Is god just not trying hard enough, or do we possess the capacity to disregard evidence regardless of veracity to suit our perception of reality?

This of course is predicated on the notion of free will, which we can assume exists, lest this be an exercise in predetermined mental masturbation.

What did it take for Harry Potter to believe magic exists when his reality had no magic in it? Well demonstration was a good place to start. Repeatable channeling of the power. Schooling to understand how to manifest that power, etc. All that was enough for him to believe magic was now part of his world. However, the religious are just Hagrid showing up with an umbrella, pointing it at the fire place, and nothing happens. Then there’s all the excuses in the world that comes out: Oh your arrogance got in the way of my spell. Prove Hagrid couldn’t start the fire in the fire place. Hagrid can bring over other people that can vouch for his ability to light the fire in the fire place. Just start the freaking fire with a spell. That would be a good start.

Why do you instantly jump to demonstrable fiction to demonstrate your disbelief in a god? Wouldn’t a god be more akin to an undiscovered element on the periodic table (something unknown) rather than fictional characters we know to be written up by JK Rowling?

Do you have proof of the existence of intellects or causes? Do they exist?

If causes exist, can we agree that we are the product of a series of causes? Can we agree that if the series never terminated at a “first cause” there would be no means by which any subsequent cause could be supported (akin to a chandelier always one chain link short of the ceiling)? And can we agree that nothing can be the cause of itself (that is, the universe did not spontaneously create itself)?

If you take issue with any of that, I’d be interested to hear where. We tend to refer to the uncaused cause of all things as “God”.

 

[Elf01]

Why do you instantly jump to demonstrable fiction to demonstrate your disbelief in a god?

It shows his attitude to God is not merely lack of evidence, despite his attempts to claim the contrary.

 

[KindredSoul]

I’m not sure if this will be my last post in this thread or not, but for the sake of any unbiased readers, I want to clarify something. I have not been trying to argue that religion is true. I believe that, but I have never denied it requires an element of faith. And I’m not claiming that believing in the Resurrection is intellectually the exact same as believing that the pictures of Mars are real, etc. I’m not arguing that it doesn’t take (at least somewhat) more Faith to believe in religious claims such as “Jesus Christ rose from the dead” than in peer reviewed scientific data that one has not actually verified for oneself, but one is convinced one could at one’s own leisure solidly and abundantly clarify (though I have, not unfairly I think, asked one to consider whether one is rationally sure of one’s personal ability to do that or just taking it for granted). I’m rather pointing out that faith vs. verified fact is a sliding scale, and that for most believers religious faith is FAR from the arbitrary, irrational wishful thinking that the other side in this discussion has insisted it is. I’m challenging the “all or nothing” approach to verified fact, which would insist that anything short of something (in theory) utterly verifiable or verified should be handled the same exact way as believing a modern fictional novel is real, or making up some fantasy on the fly. I’m challenging the notion that religious people may as well have just believed in a comic book or written a short story and they’d have been just as likely, or even close to as likely, to be right. I’m disagreeing with the anti-religious bias that basically (and explicitly at one point in the discussion) reduces religion to an absurdity, precisely because beyond the comfort zone of that bias’s own standards, it treats every truth-claim the same instead of recognizing a sliding scale of reason and faith.

If 0 is blind faith, and 10 is “Proven fact I’ve seen with my own eyes” and 9.5 is “I haven’t seen it but I’ve seen something just like it,” and 9.0 is “I haven’t seen it or anything quite like it, but it seems I could easily confirm it for myself with the right mundane tools and the time, so in the meantime I’ll trust it’s true,” particularly anti-religious Atheists like my opponent insist everything below 9 may as well be 0, so that anything from 0 to 8.9 may as well be treated the exact same. That is the all-or-nothing error that I challenge. For most religious people, who haven’t ever witnessed miracles firsthand, religion is indeed at best an 8.9 as far as they themselves are sincerely convinced by the evidence. But believing in an 8.9 or even a flat 7 or so isn’t that enormous a leap if you were willing to believe in a 9, or really anything below 10. Yes, it’s intellectually defensible to draw the line somewhere and say “I’ll go no further” if you think the slope is slippery, but there’s a huge difference between “I’ll go no lower than 9” and “Anything below 9 is effectively zero and should be treated as such, and those who believe in anything lower than 9 are not meaningfully any more justified than if they’d believed in a 0.”

 

[pocaracas]

Hi, I’m butting in again!

So it’s a god’s job to convince you of its existence for what purpose? Disregard Catholic theology because you’re not even convinced thus far of any god, let alone the Catholic God.

If god ever convinced anyone, then he could surely do it again… and again… and again… and again… to every single human being.
Instead, we get the same tactic employed by every other religion: You said it “Catholic theology”.

This of course is predicated on the notion of free will, which we can assume exists, lest this be an exercise in predetermined mental masturbation.

The same free will can be said to exist for any other religion, too…
If Catholicism is the real and true one, why does it keep copying the other unreal and untrue ones?!

If you take issue with any of that, I’d be interested to hear where. We tend to refer to the uncaused cause of all things as “God”.

Yeah… what if you can keep from referring to that first cause as god, and, instead, try go looking for it?
Some scientists have even put forward a neat possibility: space-time.
Where there is vacuum, or nothing (as in no matter and no energy), something can indeed crop up from the fabric of space-time. And it can create both positive and negative energy, thus obeying the conservation of energy, where it starts with zero energy and ends with zero energy, but in two parcels.
:think-about-it:

 

[Russell_SA]

So it’s a god’s job to convince you of its existence for what purpose?

Just to demonstrate that it is different from an imagined deity. Just show that it exists at all first.

Disregard Catholic theology because you’re not even convinced thus far of any god, let alone the Catholic God.

Yes that is what the term atheist means.

Why does any god need to convince you of anything?

How far does this pursuit of convincing extend?

I’ve addressed this already. Please move the conversation forward from our stuck point of me requesting a demonstration of your claim and you dancing around and not doing that.

As to belief about something, belief is binary. You either believe or you do not believe. There is no middle ground. Also belief is not a choice as I understand it. Maybe to you, but that’s not my experience. It is not an emotional thing. You can be irritated that this is what reality presents and keep looking for ways to disprove it, like the religious with evolution, but it’s still how reality has actually presented itself. Example: I am sitting in a chair. Regardless of my emotional connection to the idea of me sitting in a chair, I can not help but believe that I am sitting in a chair. I can lie to everyone around me and profess a belief that I am not sitting in a chair, but I can not lie to myself. That is all I want your deity to provide. Enough evidence for me to conclude/belief that it exists. This has nothing to do with me having a relationship with it, that is a completely separate issue. Just like I can know a bully exists but I choose to not have a relationship with them. But I can not choose to believe that the bully does not even exist in the first place.

Why do you instantly jump to demonstrable fiction to demonstrate your disbelief in a god? Wouldn’t a god be more akin to an undiscovered element

No, because we have evidence of other elements, we have evidence of reality. We have no evidence of the supernatural. Your example would not work if you gave an actual supernatural reference, such as, “wouldn’t a god be more akin to a soul, or chi energy, or healing crystals, or level 3 fire ball spell from a D&D character?”

Do you have proof of the existence of intellects or causes? Do they exist?

Yes intellects exist in a biological mind and computer programs it seems.
Yes we have evidence of causes because the events that lead from A to B is what we have labeled as “causes”.

If causes exist, can we agree that we are the product of a series of causes?

Yes