Main Reason For Atheism

[AnAtheist]

Chris W:

Are you saying the unprovable assumptions of theism are illogical?

No. Illogical could only be the reabased upon those assumptions.

Or are you saying the assumptions of naturalism are more simple …] than theism?

Exactly.

Why would logic need to be justified?

Logic is a tool to establish the truth of statements or to draw conclusions from presumptions. If the rules by which logic operates are not commonly accepted, ie justified in a sense, there would be no agreement on the conclusions.

 

[john_doran]

AnAtheist:

There is one and only one god, who is somehow divided into three parts [insert strange explanation here].
That god has created the entire universe.
There is an afterlife.
What kind of afterlife one enters when dead is decided by that god.
There is a certain similarity between that god and humans.
etc etc

i think we’re misunderstanding each other…

none of those popositions are assumptions: they are, in fact, conclusions.

assumptions would be things like that my senses are reliable, that the future will be like the past, that there ***is ***a past, that there are other minds, that there is a mind-independent reality, that propositions cannot be simultaneously true and false. and so on.

 

[AnAtheist]

john doran:

none of those popositions are assumptions: they are, in fact, conclusions.

Conclusions from what then?

 

[john_doran]

AnAtheist:

Conclusions from what then?

other premises and, in turn, other assumptions.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

I said:

*Give us one shred of scientific evidence as opposed to philosophical.
*
You said:

Long term observations of Mount Olympus did not show any council of gods.
Insects have six legs.
Rainbows do not lead to Asgard, nor have they an end, where a pot of gold could be found, nor are they a no-more-floods sign.

This is scientific?

To trivialize a discussion is to admit you are in full retreat.

Come back and play by the rules.

 

[Chris_W]

Another couple of open questions to whomever would like to respond:

1. Is there a difference between a **lack of belief in God ** (due perhaps to a perceived lack of evidence) and a belief there is no God? I perceive a difference. I think the latter position should require evidence supporting the belief that there is no God, not just a statement that there is no evidence for belief in Him (which would only justify the first position).
2. Are both positions commonly held by people who consider themselves atheists, or just the latter?

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

2) Are both positions commonly held by people who consider themselves atheists, or just the latter?

I don’t see any substantive difference. The end result is the same. In both cases one lives as though God does not exist.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

ChrisW

*I think the latter position should require evidence supporting the belief that there is no God, not just a statement that there is no evidence for belief in Him *
I think so too, but when I have asked AnAtheist to supply the evidence … oh well.

 

[AnAtheist]

Gilbert Keith:

This is scientific?

Yes, it is, you just do not see the implications yet, but just read on.

Come back and play by the rules.

And what rules are that? Any scietific approach to detect God will be rejected by theists, as God is by definition outside the scientific realm. Therefore, science can only test religious statements, that are - well - scientifically testable. If a religion claims, their god resides on Mt. Olympus, we can have a look there. No god there = religion is wrong with that. If a religion claims, the Earth is 6000 years old, while we know that it is much older, we can conclude that the religion is wrong there.

Granted, that says nothing about the reality of gods, but it says something about the infallibilty of that religion. Which in my eyes is necessary for the claim to know the absolute truth.

Leaving the natural science aside, when I now apply some logic on claimed attributes of God and conclude that a god with those attributes is logically impossible, you will most probably claim logic cannot applied to god (or something similar). (So we do not play by the same rules either.)

Even if I drop science and logic and just think about some philosophical implications connected to gods and the Christian God in particular, the concept of most gods and of the Christian God in particular are not convincing.

To summarize:
There is scientific evidence against a lot of claims religions make.
Logic rules out certain types of gods.
Proposed god images are not at all convincing, even if I do not apply the strict rules of logic and science.

Combining all that, that is a pretty good reason for Atheism to me.

 

[AnAtheist]

2) Are both positions commonly held by people who consider themselves atheists, or just the latter?

Both.
Gilbert Keith:

I don’t see any substantive difference.

Me neither.
Gilbert Keith:

The end result is the same. In both cases one lives as though God does not exist.

Exactly.

Even with agnostics, which come in more than one flavour, out of my head I can think of 4 different types, the end result is the same.

 

[TTM]

AnAtheist:

Sort of, yes. But the unprovable assumptions of that system work in every day reality, so we have good reason to assume them.

Hm, sounds just like my faith.

God bless!
TTM

 

[john_doran]

AnAtheist:

And what rules are that? Any scietific approach to detect God will be rejected by theists, as God is by definition outside the scientific realm.

well, i don’t know about this. what about indirect evidence? i mean, if the existence f something implies (necessitates?) the existence of something else, why isn’t the stetment of that implication “scientific”? isn’t that what we do when we interpret tracks in a cloud chamber or flashes of light in a particle accelerator?

but at any rate, the assumption that only the empirically verifiable is meaningful is difficult to motivate; in its logical positivist form it is self-refuting and was abandoned decades ago.

i’d be interested to hear how you make your version work.

AnAtheist:

Leaving the natural science aside, when I now apply some logic on claimed attributes of God and conclude that a god with those attributes is logically impossible, you will most probably claim logic cannot applied to god (or something similar). (So we do not play by the same rules either.)

not necessarily. i would claim - and have many times before - that you’ve presented an unsound argument.

at least all your arguments on this point in the past have been unsound; maybe you have a new one…

 

[TTM]

AnAtheist:

Combining all that, that is a pretty good reason for Atheism to me.

Yah, I used to think a bit like that too. Nowadays, I tend to think that it was due to lack of information. I think the key is the hunger for truth - seek and you shall find.

Bless you!
TTM

 

[AnAtheist]

john doran:

me:

*And what rules are that? Any scietific approach to detect God will be rejected by theists, as God is by definition outside the scientific realm. *

well, i don’t know about this.

I was told that often enough by theists. But I’ll happily exclude you from that group.

what about indirect evidence? i mean, if the existence f something implies (necessitates?) the existence of something else, why isn’t the stetment of that implication “scientific”? isn’t that what we do when we interpret tracks in a cloud chamber or flashes of light in a particle accelerator?

But how do we recognise indirect evidence as evidence? We make a theory #1 that explanes phenomenon A. It may also predict phenomenon B. If we detect phenomenon B, that is proof for theory #1. If we detect something contradicting B, something is wrong with #1. Right?

Treating God as the theory to explain the world, could only be verified or falsified, if that theory made some verifiable or falsifiable predictions about this world. Those predictions are pretty hard to make, when God is free-willed, omnipotent person not bound to the confines of this world. Such a god can always be constructed in a way, that it is compatible with the observable data, you simply claim, “that’s the way he did or intended it”.

There is no data, direct or indirect, that necessarily needs a god to be explained. When it comes to the Christian God, the data is inconsistent enough with that theory to raise some doubts.

Take the tiny Earth in the huuuuge universe for example. It is consistent with some God having created it the way it is, and it is consistent with a naturally evolved universe, big and old enough that even the tiny possibility of evolved life came true, and perhaps consistent with some other theories, I don’t want to make a false dichotomy here like most Creationists do. If the sole purpose of the universe was to bring forth humans, one planet with some lights in the sky would do, with humans inhabiting it from the start. That leaves a strange feeling of doubt, that the purpose of the universe might be something else.

not necessarily. i would claim - and have many times before - that you’ve presented an unsound argument.

You do not agree on my presumptions. The logic deriving conclusions from those presumptions is flawless. Of course semantics is a source of arguments and disagreement too, like what exactly is knowledge?

 

[john_doran]

AnAtheist:

Treating God as the theory to explain the world, could only be verified or falsified, if that theory made some verifiable or falsifiable predictions about this world. Those predictions are pretty hard to make, when God is free-willed, omnipotent person not bound to the confines of this world. Such a god can always be constructed in a way, that it is compatible with the observable data, you simply claim, “that’s the way he did or intended it”.

i’m not thinking of intelligent design - i’m thinking kalam cosmological argument, where the existence of an uncaused cause is entailed by a few fairly common assumptions about the world and the way it works…

AnAtheist:

There is no data, direct or indirect, that necessarily needs a god to be explained.

sure. but so what? there’s no data, direct or indirect, that necessarily needs any proposition to be explained: so by that standard we aren’t entitled to believe in reliable senses, an external world, a past, other minds, our own existence, and so on.

it’s about the most plausible explanation - the most reasonable one, not about the only possible one.

AnAtheist:

You do not agree on my presumptions. The logic deriving conclusions from those presumptions is flawless. Of course semantics is a source of arguments and disagreement too, like what exactly is knowledge?

sure. like that there is a set of all true propositions. or that “omniscience” is only plausibly definable as identical with that putative set. we may even disagree on the ontology of mathematics…

the point is that your arguments for the incompossibility of traditional divine attributes rely on enormously controversial premises, which makes them anything but decisive.

 

[AnAtheist]

john doran:

i’m not thinking of intelligent design - i’m thinking kalam cosmological argument, where the existence of an uncaused cause is entailed by a few fairly common assumptions about the world and the way it works…

I disagree on presumption #1 of the Kalam argument, “everything that begins has a cause”. And even if that was true, the argument shows only that the universe has a cause, that had no begin. To identify that cause with Allah (Kalam was Muslim afaik, but that of course is irrelevant) is a far fetch. And, what some people do, to formulate this identification as a presumption, is the same as stating “God exists” without any argument.

it’s about the most plausible explanation - the most reasonable one, not about the only possible one.

:yup: Yes it is. And we disagree a great deal on the particular order of plausibilty and reasonability.

the point is that your arguments for the incompossibility of traditional divine attributes rely on enormously controversial premises, which makes them anything but decisive.

Every argument for or against a god I have heard so far is not finally decisive, for every argument there is someone brought up a more or less reasonable argument against it. Weighting all those arguments brings us back to the plausibility issue.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

AnAtheist

*To summarize:
There is scientific evidence against a lot of claims religions make.
Logic rules out certain types of gods.
Proposed god images are not at all convincing, even if I do not apply the strict rules of logic and science.
*
Lots of claims with not a shred of scientific proof!

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

AnAtheist

Every argument for or against a god I have heard so far is not finally decisive, for every argument there is someone brought up a more or less reasonable argument against it. Weighting all those arguments brings us back to the plausibility issue.

---

I tend to agree here that every argument “is not finally decisive” so far as the atheist is concerned.

He always finds an objection and imagines one when there there is no evidence in sight. For example, when the Big Bang theory came out, certain atheist scientists could not deal with it. How could the universe be finite and begin at a moment in time. Ugh! That sounds like Genesis!

So now they concoct escape routes from the Biug Bang without a shred of the scientific proof they always insist on when they complain about the theist’s proofs. For example, they hypothesize the existence of a parent universe out of which this one “bubbled.” And so by this back door eternity and infinity are restored … so far as they are concerned.

You are right, AnAtheist, to complain about the plausibility issue. How plausible is it, without a shred of scientific evidence, that our universe bubbled out of another?

Is it more plausible, less plausible, or equally plausible than the existence of a creator God?

Why?

 

[Chris_W]

2) Are both positions commonly held by people who consider themselves atheists, or just the latter?

I don’t see any substantive difference. The end result is the same. In both cases one lives as though God does not exist.

It would be helpful for the sake of productive dialogue if I knew which position an atheist is taking. As it is, it seems like one time I get a response of “there is no proof” and then later statements like “I would need to abandon reason to believe in God”. I would like to understand the more precise position an atheist is taking so that I can determine how to respond. If a person says there is no proof of God I will try to supply evidences for His existence. If a person says “there is no God” then I will the burdon of proof on that person to justify thier claim. Instead the dialogue seems to change directions constantly.

The end result is the same (unbelief) but in talking to Naturalists I often feel like I am playing that computer game where you are supposed to put the cursor on the icon, but as the cursor moves toward the icon, the icon moves. That’s why I see a need for the distinction.

If the position of An Atheist is that “there is no God” then we should be able to focus the discussion on the evidence he believes proves his statement and, for the time being, consider the evidence suporting belief in God as irrelevent to the immediate topic matter (the main reason for atheism). Does that make sense?

 

[AnAtheist]

Chris W:

The end result is the same (unbelief) but in talking to Naturalists I often feel like I am playing that computer game where you are supposed to put the cursor on the icon, but as the cursor moves toward the icon, the icon moves.

I feel quite the same sensation when talking to some theists, Gilbert e.g.

If the position of An Atheist is that “there is no God” …] Does that make sense?

Yes.

1. My position is “there is nothing super-natural” to be precise. I do not believe in astrology, spirits, gods, or Rumpelstielzchen.
2. To amount evidence for or against “God”, we must make sure that we are talking about the same thing. In discussions like this one, some philosophical concept of the divine and the very personal Christian God are often interchanged. The Kalam argument is a perfect example.