Belief... or lack thereof

[ThinkingSapien]

I’m forever bemused by the insistence of Christians to tag atheism as a religion. Presumably so that they can counter the ‘faith’ claim.

There may be multiple motivations for it, a device used in arguments may be one. Another seems to be from framing the behaviour of others in terms of one’s own behaviour. This isn’t something that is specifically Christian. There are anthropologist that admit to doing this when describing something from some culture being studied.

While the tendency to do so might act as a type of scaffolding for understanding the perspective of another it can also interfere with understanding when that scaffolding is calcified and a person refuses to consider the possibility that their understanding might be less than perfect.

There is also a problem of someone to be classified as being in a polarized position even when that person’s actual position isn’t quite so polarized. This can and does happen in several social domains including religious. It can be difficult to make one’s position known against a backdrop of “you are either for us or against us!”

 

[You]

likely its because atheists are really agnostics, as in if you cannot prove a Creators existence you cannot disprove his existence. So in all honesty you’re left with agnostics ‘I don’t know’ or atheists unproven belief in a non-Creator.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

likely its because atheists are really agnostics,

Some identify as both. There are different semantics for the word. Even for those that take a prescriptive approach to dictionaries there can be entries found that support either set of semantics. If someone self identifies with the label it may be necessary to ask the person some questions on their stance on the God proposition to have an understanding for what their position may be since their usage might not conform to one’s own.

There was a lengthy discussion on the differences in semantics here earlier this year.

 

[pocaracas]

Um, so “extraordinary” means “non-ordinary”…? Looks rather circular…

Also, “extraordinary” can mean many things. For example, would you say that claims about “Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops” held last year need more evidence than claims about “Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops” held this year…?

Extraordinary - non-ordinary… you say it looks circular because?.. why would people come up with two words for basically the same meaning?
Yes, it can mean many things - like you said… in that case, I think it’s applied to mean non-ordinary, as in an assembly which is gathering at an abnormal time. Perhaps, such Assemblies are supposed to be held every 2 or 3 years, but some urgent business required it to be held in advance of the usual, normal, ordinary, schedule.

Um, so finding out what evidence is extraordinary is also almost impossible? I’m afraid that it makes the whole “rule of thumb” very hard to use…

Unsurprisingly, in cases when it really is used, “extraordinary claim” often becomes “claim I do not like” and all evidence is always found to be ordinary…

I’ve seen the claim that “I just had dinner with the president of Russia” to be held as an example of an extraordinary claim. I would require somewhat natural evidence to substantiate it, but you wouldn’t just accept it in the same way as if I told you “I just had dinner with my wife and kids”, right?

The extraordinary character applies to how believable the claim is… how out of the ordinary it is…

The claim for the existence of a particular thing requires that such thing be shown to exist… what does it mean “to exist”?

Well, in the ancient times, Abraham is said to have heard the voice of God, right? Moses too, right? Heck, for Moses, He even wrote on stone!
Then he became unable to affect chariots of iron…
And now… immaterial.

Not that it’s inconsistent, just the way it’s presented…
At first, it’s like God actually creates sound waves that travel to people’s ears… then he becomes more powerful and physically alters some rock… then nothing.
God was a being with some physical representation, a physical existence… and now… not so much…

Anyway, the point that evidence can add up is very good. For that matter, at one point Edward Feser has posted an outline of steps one should make from materialistic atheism to Christianity “the right way”: edwardfeser.blogspot.lt/2014/05/pre-christian-apologetics.html. Just the outline leaving out most of the actual arguments is long enough to overwhelm any thread here… And reaching Catholicism (as opposed to Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy) would require going through still more evidence.

Good link…
I got stuck on II. Natural theology. If I don’t accept this bit, what use is it to go further down?
The cosmological argument… again…
The begin to exist thing is flawed. What does it mean to “begin to exist”? That’s the first premise on such arguments… “everything that begins to exist has a cause”… As far as we know, everything in existence began to exist with the Big Bang (we can’t tell beyond that - it’s an information barrier), so which philosophical argument is put forth to justify that first assertion?
Chairs and tables, usually… -.-’

And the consciousness which needs no material substrate… I find those ideas lacking in honesty… and overflowing in human presumption and ego-centrism.
I find it baffling how can a consciousness with no substrate act in one way with a full brain and act in a different way with a partial brain. Clearly, to me, the brain is acting as the substrate on which consciousness is built or generated.
Of course, I may be wrong. This is not scientifically set in stone, but it seems damn near.

The problem is that if you have to examine all evidence to find out if the claim is “extraordinary”, what are you going to do in order to find out if the evidence is extraordinary? In that case we would have a different “rule of thumb”: “Extraordinary claims are wrong.”.

Hey… that one isn’t all that bad!
(jk)

[cont.]

 

[pocaracas]

First of all, it seems a bit too vague to do that. Second, note that you did not say that it is more likely to result in acception of true beliefs and rejection of false beliefs, only that it would be “more profitable”. Let’s look at the next answer:

“Profitable” to the others… those who convince you of their claims.

Well, if we want to “maximise profit”, why isn’t Pascal’s Wager that tries to do just that explicitly the way to go? It is even more moderate, since it is only meant to come into play when we have no way do decide which claim is more likely to be true.

In here, profit would go to those other persons. We are seen as believing (or acting as if we do believe) in their stories.
Are we wanting to maximize their profit?
Or is it better to maximize our profit where we maximize our acceptance of true things while minimizing our acceptance of false things?

Also, is is primarily meant for “decision-making”. For example, in case of question “Should I go to Mass this Sunday?”. You can act as if you believed in God and go, you can act as if you believed that God doesn’t exist and refuse to go. No “agnostic option” exists (going halfway doesn’t look reasonable) and the decision has to be made. If you really lack both the belief that God exists and belief that God doesn’t exist, those options fit your beliefs equally well, thus they are equally honest, none of them is “pretend belief”. And anyway, Pascal promises that choosing the “theistic option” consistently will result in a very real belief - eventually.

Eventually… even if by imposition on future generations.

I am often remembered of the “New Christians”, a few centuries ago, when Portugal banned Jews: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Christian.
Did the first Jews who became “New Christians” really become believers in Christ and took all the precepts of the Catholic Church? Well, they invented a kind of sausage to prove to the authorities that they were eating “pork”, as a way to prove that they were no longer Jew… however, this sausage, called Alheira contains no pork.

We also use something similar in other fields - for example, in medical screenings the inconclusive result is treated as if it was positive, as false positives are less costly than false negatives (failing to diagnose present disease).

Yep, the same applies to my windows anti-virus.
But, somehow, I don’t think it applies to religion… What’s the worst that can happen? I skip going to church? I don’t learn all the biblical stories? I don’t hear the advice spoken from the pulpit? An advice which sometimes carries some political undertones (I’ve heard it first-hand)…
Or am I to gain something after death?.. well, I’ll be dead, then, so what’s the use?

#####################

Yes, that’s a good example. Yet finding out what evidence is “sufficient” still needs a “rule of thumb” of its own.

So, how about the “rule of thumb” from Conan Doyle’s “Sign of Four” - “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”?

What is the impossible, when we are considering an all-powerful immaterial being?

Actually, it looks like in real Criminalistics the methods are similar (for example, the first book “Google” found: “Principles and Practice of Criminalistics: The Profession of Forensic Science” by Keith Inman, Norah Rudin, around p. 172, books.google.lt/books?id=6OTqqqGooccC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=Criminalistics+hypothesis&source=bl&ots=8dmQ1fqzbj&sig=eNPwpJw8BCCHqZ6k4AZYqHQpgT4&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Criminalistics%20hypothesis&f=false).

This “rule of thumb” avoids all problems with finding out what claims are “extraordinary”.

Well… criminals tend to be humans, bound by physics and biology, at least.

 

[pocaracas]

poca-

As you know, we’ve talked a fair bit here and elsewhere, but refresh my memory…WHY are you an atheist?

Be concise and specific. In as few words as possible, tell me what your biggest, bottom-line objection is to the existence of God.

Thanks.

Hey Randy!
Long time no see!

My biggest objection?.. In the shortest possible way? Psychology.

People believe things way too easily.
People mostly believe because they’re strongly influenced by their parents and other social acquaintances.
People need to fit in to some social group.
People believe false things.
People lie.
People want an easy answer to any question.
People don’t want to think. That’s why TV caught on so marvelously.
People are averse to change.

People are wanting to convince other people that they should believe the same as them.

People everywhere. Everywhere where you have a believer, you have the presence of the concept of God (or any other god)… So God is everywhere… that is, everywhere where a believer is.

 

[pocaracas]

All the statements above basically say that you arrived at your belief system without requiring any justification.
" I just arrived at the state of non-belief and found it was ok."
But then you also said

“my mind is satisfied as it allows for everything that we see and experience to be caused by natural means.”

So if “natural means” can not explain or don’t have an explanation for everything you see and experience, would you still stick to your belief? Is this the basis for your belief? Since you challenge us to pick apart your atheism, I’d give it a go. But obviously, if you have no basis for your belief, then there is no way I can pick apart your atheism because it is based on nothing that can be debated on. It is just a choice of no consequence because you can also switch the next day to believe in God because “you arrived at the state of belief and found it was ok”. I am sure you wouldn’t accept religious people to rationalise their belief that way either.

The state of non-belief is not a belief… why do you ask about “my belief”?
My lack of belief is also not a belief.

My assumption that humans made up the concept of gods is a belief, for I have no empirical data to serve as evidence for it. People weren’t exactly recording their thoughts at the time… It does have some other kind of backing, based on the present-day absence of any god which primitive people would have had physical access to in order to come to the acknowledgement of that god’s existence and then passing it on to subsequent generations… for example.

 

[eddie_too]

i am not interested in picking anything apart.

however, most everyone can understand that being must be infinite, without any limits.

also, most everyone can understand the being must be eternal, without a beginning or an end.

while some might not agree, it is improbable that the infinite and eternal being would be less conscious than a human being or not have the self-consciousness of a human being. to presume that infinite and eternal being is lesser than finite and mortal being, seems to me to be an error whose support i have never encountered.

now, if anyone, including any atheist, can demonstrate in any way that somehow being cannot be infinite, i welcome their demonstration. i equally welcome their demonstration of the concept that being is not eternal.

regarding the self-consciousness of infinite and eternal being,

 

[eddie_too]

in my previous comment in this thread, i focused on the use of logic and reason. however, there is far more to believing in God than mere logic and reason.

for example, their are miracles. skeptics dismiss miracles as impossible, but they have nothing to support such assertions.

another example is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. of course, the Resurrection can be doubted and even dismissed, but doing so requires believing that all that has derived from the Resurrection is of no more significance that the existence of the Roman Empire (now extinct) or the existence of the empire of alexander the great (now extinct), and would occurred naturally. that implies a conclusion for which, in my judgment, there is no evidence.

this next should have been included in my prior post. if there is not Supreme Being, there is also no such thing as love, mercy, justice or hope. these four, and others, become mere psychological concepts that are mere electric currents in the human brain.

finally, the positing of the atheists require greater faith than faith in our Creator. the atheists have NO EVIDENCE that only the physical universe exists, none, nada, nothing. for this reason, the faith of the atheist is a completely blind faith without the support of logic, reason or evidence.

i am completely open to any atheists who wish to refute my comments and points. hopefully, should that occur, they will be able or organize their writings in a manner that addresses each of my points individually.

 

[eddie_too]

atheists totally have a belief that only the physical universe exists. they have no evidence to support this belief.

atheists totally believe that the love, mercy, justice and hope human beings experience are nothing more that electrical charges occurring in the human brain. they have no evidence to support this belief.

 

[pocaracas]

I have to start remembering your names.
Hi ericc!

Many people arrive at their religion because they have done extensive study and came to the conclusion. They are not less intelligent than you. They may have done more research than you. Your statement “Once you believe what you’re told, you then believe in the concept that was conveyed and live out your life as if that is true.” presupposes that they are not capable to discern what they believe. That smacks of arrogance and inability to accept that there are people who can arrive at conclusions that are different from yours.

“Arrive at their religion”… from a prior state of non-belief? Surely it happens.
From a prior state of belief in some other religion? Surely it happens even more. Why would that be?

Do we always believe what our parents tell us? May be once upon a time when we were very little. But as one grows older, goes to college and perhaps receive more education than our parents, we don’t do that any more. Of course we may give in to them to stop their nagging but that doesn’t make it true. Do you still believe everything that your parents tell you?

Come now… I’m not talking to college age… I’m talking younger, much younger less than 10.
Those parental influences stick.

But I will ask why so many billions Christians believe in what they believe.

Really? You’re asking that? Don’t you know? I was taught that in history class way back in 7th grade.
How did this religion get ahead of others? Implemented empire-wide - the whole of Europe was practically forced into accepting it… then Europeans spread it to the Americas and Africa and Australia and a few more outposts in Asia.
They had the guns, they imposed their system on the natives; they brought in colonists who already believed, which only reinforced it.

Why so many billions of muslims believe what they believe?
Caliphate-wide implementation - the whole Saudi peninsula was practically forced into accepting it… then it spread to North Africa, the rest of the middle-east, Turkey… Indonesia. They had guns, blah blah blah…

Yes, I am wondering why many are still attached to theories that seems to have run out of validity but irrational people refuses to let go, such as Darwinism. If the evidence does not support it, it is time to let go and find a new theory, rather than presupposes it is right except evidence hasn’t been found yet. It really requires a lot of blind faith.

Why do you say that?

How did you arrive at that conclusion that belief is first arrived via “emotional connection”? Please provide evidence!

It’s my own observation…
Most people get there through parental trust… emotional connection.

Is religion based on base desires? You think it may be so but there is no evidence that you presented that it is so. Some religions don’t promise life forever. Some aim for nothingness. Many don’t want to be special. Monasteries and convents are place where they are out of the public’s eyes. There are many that do good quietly. Many people want to help others, religion or no religion. So that is not a good reasoning. Prayers and wishing people well are nice gestures but that is a poor excuse for a religion.

You don’t seem to know much about religious people but making a number of assumptions that you think they are such and such. I suggest you do more research before coming to those conclusions. There are too many types of religious people that it is almost futile to put them in silos with tags.

Yes, many people do things one way, many people do things in another way… I merely pointed to examples of some common ways. Surely they don’t cover all bases and are contradictory in some instances.

So according to you, belief is not rational. And that would applies to you equally. You believe in your belief system and you have not provided that it is the rational thing to do.
“I just arrived at the state of non-belief and found it was ok”. Is this rational?

There you go again… non-belief is a belief?

You conclusion on Pascal’s Wager is irrational and actually emotive. It asked which option has the higher pay back. If the maths works out, then the correct answer is the one that has the higher payback. An answer that is not to your liking is not emotive. How did it became emotive? It became emotive because you chose the wrong answer and you didn’t want to be wrong.

Perhaps there is a more complete Pascal’s wager, where the “choice” is not between non-belief and belief in the Christian God, but rather… between non-belief, belief in the Christian God, belief in the Jewish God, belief in the Muslim god, belief in the Hindu gods, belief in the ancient Egyptian gods, belief in the ancient Greek gods, belief in the ancient Roman gods, belief in the Norse gods, belief in Maya gods, belief in Aztec gods, belief in animal spirits, Chinese Shen, etc, etc, etc, etc…
Which to choose? decisions, decisions, decisions…

 

[pocaracas]

I was mainly talking about humans with the male versus female anatomy.

God created everything, the insects, trees, humans, animals, etc. God doesn’t make mistakes.

I don’t believe God “tinkered” with anything. God is flawless, sinless, and as I said before, doesn’t make mistakes. God has and always will get it right, regardless of what anyone may think. It is His will that matters. His will is perfect. His timing is perfect.

Well, I’m glad you think that…
God didn’t tinker with anything, his will is perfect and so was not required to kick start life on planet Earth… he made the Universe so perfect that it just happened on Earth… as planned and through natural means.
That’s what you’re saying, right?

 

[pocaracas]

Crystals do not have life, can not create life. They do not replicate. 1 pound of sodium chloride cannot replicate to 2 pounds of sodium chloride. They crystallize because of physical conditions. Remove those conditions, and they are no longer crystals. Put the conditions back, they form crystals again. Like water/ice/snow flakes. They do not contain information that they can make use of.

The same goes for biological tissue…
Ever tried to breed bacteria without water? Or without proteins?
How would your gametes do without the machinery in your body?
Things replicate under particular conditions.

Remove those conditions and they stop replicating. One part of the evolution theory in a nutshell. The extinction part.

You presuppose that those elements already know how to self replicate. How to join together , became alive with RNA from unknown (name removed by moderator)uts of information and violating other natural laws in the process. How did it know how to metabolise, how to reproduce? How can nature provide the information to do it when nature does not have the information in itself?

Do crystals know how to self-replicate?
Are non-living carbon-based self-replicators that far-fetched?

Exactly which piece of information is bogus? I’ll go and smack them.

Start at number 1?
“Lack of a viable mechanism for producing high levels of complex and specified information. Related to this are problems with the Darwinian mechanism producing irreducibly complex features, and the problems of non-functional or deleterious intermediate stages.”

This book (The blind watchmaker, by R. Dawkins) addresses the problem… it may even address a few others in that page made for creationists… referencing “articles” from the “discovery institute”…

And a guy whose expertise is not in fossils should not tell those folks who do fossils how to do their job. But evolution scientists commonly agree that the earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. The first sign of life appeared 3.5 billion years. And for 3 billion years life is just these simple organisms e.g. algae/cynobacteria. Then the last 500-600 million years, the Cambrian explosion, biology equivalent of the Big Bang. Massive new life forms with new body parts, diversity, variety with NO precursors. We have fossils of bacteria and single cell organisms belonging to the pre-cambrian times and suddenly boom, new life forms with no intermediate forms. Darwin couldn’t explain this and decades later still no explanation. Your gradual small steps carbon replication theory ends up in the garbage bin.

Have you seen the “fossils” of those early bacteria?
I have… they’re not what you’d expect. Go look them up.

And, from that very feeble kind of fossils, we then “leap” to fossils of animals with a shell… something that is hard enough to withstand the process of fossilization.

Not unsurprising, if you ask me.

Neither am I and I am also providing a layman perspective. And it would serve you well to know that Gaps of the Fossils does not sound like the scientific method. If, the scientific method says it must be there, and you look at fossils before and after the period in question, and it is not there, the logical conclusion is that the theory is wrong. No predictive value.

What do you expect to find that isn’t there?
Soft bodied slug-like aquatic creatures that were buried by some dirt and got fossilized?
oh… news.discovery.com/animals/earliest-known-animals-120628.htm

The Cambrian explosion lasted about 5 to 10 million years, some claim 20. In evolutionary terms, that is nothing. So how did life forms get so sophisticated in so short a time? Pre cambrian data doesn’t show the evolution to those life forms. Pre cambrian life forms were just simple soft bodied organisms. Can your carbon-based self replicators do it in 5-20 million years?

In early organisms, mostly microbial, that is an eternity!
Tell me, how long did it take for microbes to pick up the trait of nylon eating?
MRSA?

 

[pocaracas]

Fossil records show single celled organisms (various types of algae) and bacteria. They don’t have hard shell exoskeleton. That argument was used trying to avoid the explanation of the missing fossils. But evidence didn’t support that escape hatch.
columbia.edu/~vjd1/precambr_life.htm

Why RNA? Because it was there. You need RNA to self replicate. Then tell us how did your carbon crystals became alive and replicate then? How did it assemble itself? How did it know what to do. What got it going?

Do you really “need” RNA to self-replicate?
How do you know it was there?

I don’t know how it assembled itself. I know people are working on that problem. I wouldn’t know where to start, so it’s for the better that it’s them and not me doing that job.
What got it going?.. well, you said it earlier: the right conditions… those were there.

The Hebrew people wrote it down. You want to argue with history? Their books are all over ancient near east.

Are we to believe the Hebrew people’s writings over… say… the Egyptian people’s? or the Akkadian’s?
Could all of them be describing a wrong perception?

Symbols don’t make a religion. But if you want to look at them, they are there in archaeological digs. But I won’t spoon feed you. What do you know about the god that people worshiped back there? Tell us.

Very little, I’m afraid…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism#Hypotheses_on_origins
“Shamanic practices may originate as early as the Paleolithic, predating all organized religions, and certainly as early as the Neolithic period. The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP) in what is now the Czech Republic.”

Obviously , spiritual experiences require a living person who has a working brain. If that is what you mean. Oh I am not denying that people couldn’t have mental problems. They do. Even atheists do have mental problems. But is the mental problem caused by their (dis)belief? All I am asking is that can you prove that people that experienced spiritual experiences have a mental problem? Science can test for mental problems. There is no point in making a sweeping statement that says people who have encountered a spiritual experience are nuts. That is at best your hypothesis. The scientific method require you to conduct certain standard tests to determine whether a person is suffering from a mental disorder. It is not "are you a Christian? And if the answer is “Yes”, deserving a "you are nuts’ conclusion.

LOL

Maybe that’ll happen when someone is hooked onto an EEG and has such an experience.

I’m not saying they’re nuts… I’m only saying that it’s in their heads. Their interpretation is different: that experience was implanted in them from the outside.
Considering how glitchy our brains are, on occasion, is it more plausible that some outside entity plants those notions in a person’s mind, or that the brain produces them, on its own, like waking dreams…?

 

[pocaracas]

but a human brain did not appear out of itself… like those other things… they needed the complex brain to become real.

No… the human brain “appeared” out of a primate’s brain, that “appeared” out of a mammal’s brain, that “appeared” out of an amphibian’s brain, which “apeared” out of a fish’s brain, which… I don’t know… what came before fish that had brains? slugs or snails?.. they do have some rudimentary nervous system…
It took lots of evolving to get to the human brain…

 

[pocaracas]

i am not interested in picking anything apart.

Oh well… then just throw anything at the wall and see if it sticks!

however, most everyone can understand that being must be infinite, without any limits.

I’m sorry… This “being” you’re talking about is it an entity or is it the property of “being” (from the verb to be), of existing?

I don’t think an entity that creates our Universe need necessarily be infinite… certainly it should be more than the Universe’s initial stage

also, most everyone can understand the being must be eternal, without a beginning or an end.

while some might not agree, it is improbable that the infinite and eternal being would be less conscious than a human being or not have the self-consciousness of a human being. to presume that infinite and eternal being is lesser than finite and mortal being, seems to me to be an error whose support i have never encountered.

now, if anyone, including any atheist, can demonstrate in any way that somehow being cannot be infinite, i welcome their demonstration. i equally welcome their demonstration of the concept that being is not eternal.

regarding the self-consciousness of infinite and eternal being,

Man… the way you wrote all that… “being” can be one of those two options I put above… I can’t decide which you’re using!

 

[pocaracas]

in my previous comment in this thread, i focused on the use of logic and reason. however, there is far more to believing in God than mere logic and reason.

for example, their are miracles. skeptics dismiss miracles as impossible, but they have nothing to support such assertions.

Just like believers have nothing to support their assertions that miracles exist.
Anecdotal jotting down of amalgamated witness reports?

another example is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. of course, the Resurrection can be doubted and even dismissed, but doing so requires believing that all that has derived from the Resurrection is of no more significance that the existence of the Roman Empire (now extinct) or the existence of the empire of alexander the great (now extinct), and would occurred naturally. that implies a conclusion for which, in my judgment, there is no evidence.

What has derived from the belief in the resurrection is truly wonderful. I agree.
However, that belief does not mean that the thing being believed truly happened… it does not mean that Jesus actually resurrected.

this next should have been included in my prior post. if there is not Supreme Being, there is also no such thing as love, mercy, justice or hope. these four, and others, become mere psychological concepts that are mere electric currents in the human brain.

Ah… so you were going to “being” as entity…
And what is so wrong about concepts being patterns of neurological activity?

finally, the positing of the atheists require greater faith than faith in our Creator. the atheists have NO EVIDENCE that only the physical universe exists, none, nada, nothing. for this reason, the faith of the atheist is a completely blind faith without the support of logic, reason or evidence.

ermm… no evidence that the physical universe exists?!
I’m baffled… How do you reckon that?

i am completely open to any atheists who wish to refute my comments and points. hopefully, should that occur, they will be able or organize their writings in a manner that addresses each of my points individually.

I hope I managed… either you write too fast, or you’re not a native speaker… some parts required extrapolation… if I failed, please try again!

 

[pocaracas]

atheists totally have a belief that only the physical universe exists. they have no evidence to support this belief.

atheists totally believe that the love, mercy, justice and hope human beings experience are nothing more that electrical charges occurring in the human brain. they have no evidence to support this belief.

Oh… “only” the physical universe exists… oh… that changes it… Damn… and it was on that other post as well… I missed it! sorry!

Only…well… if anyone has evidence that something beyond the physical universe exists, the James Randy foundation is offering you 1 million dollars… oh… was… and will do so again: web.randi.org/home/jref-status

Until then, that the physical Universe is all there is… is quite a good hypothesis.
Sure, we have this physical substrate which can think, store information, make decisions, operate on abstract concepts, etc…
None of those mental activities seem to be possible without the brain acting as a substrate.

 

[Randy_Carson]

The state of non-belief is not a belief… why do you ask about “my belief”?
My lack of belief is also not a belief.

I understand your position is that God does not exist.

Is that a true statement? IOW, do you really believe it to be true that God does not exist?

 

[pocaracas]

I understand your position is that God does not exist.

Is that a true statement? IOW, do you really believe it to be true that God does not exist?

I can’t, in all honesty, make that claim, no.That’s why I’m on the agnostic camp.
However, it’s a working assumption… I lead my life under the assumption that no god whatsoever exists, and that includes God. That’s why I’m in the atheist camp.

Hence the “agnostic atheist” label I put in the OP.