About the leprechaun analogy… I would say… I am agnostic about the existence of leprechauns. I can’t prove that they don’t exist or that they do exist.
There’s some confusion here about “agnostic” and “atheist,” and it’s no one’s fault in particular because different people use those words to mean different things.
The way I use them, an “agnostic” is one who “does not know” whether a position is true or not. An “atheist” (or “aleprechaunist”) is someone who “does not have a belief” that the position is true. They’re not mutually exclusive – one deals with knowledge, the other deals with belief.
You don’t know whether leprechauns exist or not, so you’re an agnostic with respect to leprechauns. But do you currently hold the belief that they exist? My guess is that you don’t have a belief in them, so that makes you both an agnostic and aleprechaunist.
I too am an agnostic and aleprechaunist with respect to leprechauns. I’m agnostic and atheist with respect to most gods I’ve ever heard of.
How about you give me an explanation of how we came to existence.
Well, as it so happens, I don’t know how the universe began. We have some good explanations based on what we’ve figured out so far, and it’s amazing that we know so much: for example, we know how the diversity of life developed on this planet, and we know that we live in an expanding universe that began expanding with an event called the Big Bang.
No one knows exactly how life arose or precisely what came before the Big Bang (if anything).
Anyone who claims to know is just making stuff up or speculating. Just because we don’t know the answer to something doesn’t mean that the answer is any more likely to be, “A god did it,” any more than it means that the answer is more likely to be, “A unicorn did it.”
It could very well be that something natural is behind the universe, something we don’t understand. Or it could be that the “stuff” that preceded the Big Bang has always existed. Or it could be some other completely natural explanation of which we have no idea right now.
We’ll probably know more in the future, but for the time being, the correct answer is “We don’t know.”
Dokimas:
Why does a theist have to produce evidence for you or anyone that God exists?
Well, you don’t have to, of course. But we are on a discussion board, and presumably you think I should agree with you. Since you’re the one making the claim that a god exists, it’s up to you to supply evidence if you think others should believe your claim (i.e. if you believe your claim is something reasonable, and not just something you choose to believe because it makes you feel good).
If no god exists then what is the basis for morals? Why would I be wicked for killing my neighbor? Why should I love my neighbor when it may benifit me to kill him, take his money, his property, his food, etc? A purely secular society has no grounds for morality if God is out of the picture.
Well, first of all, this isn’t evidence at all. It’s a pretty clumsy appeal to emotion.
But second of all, I’ll answer your question. People’s actions come from values, the things that we attach value to, and those values come from a lot of different sources, including biology, reason, tradition, society, and probably other sources we don’t know yet.
Based on those values – things like valuing a good society, the company of others, the good feeling it gives you to help people, the sense of obligation that you owe to a society that has benefitted you in numerous ways – people have plenty of rational reasons to help each other out. In fact, I know quite a few atheists who give their time and money to help others – one of my atheist friends, for example, volunteers at a local library to tutor a child every week. I know another atheist who volunteers at a soup kitchen. There are secular charities and atheist philanthropists like Bill Gates.
And seriously, the religious people who do charitable things – if I could prove to them that god doesn’t exist, do you seriously think that most of them would stop doing charitable things? I am quite confident that most of them would go along doing what they’re inclined to do by their values.
The final point on this is that I personally – and this isn’t all atheists – I personally do think that “morality,” in the sense of rules that must be obeyed, is nonsense. There’s no such thing as behavior that is intrinsically “good” or “bad”; there is only each individual’s actions, motivated by values, and each individual’s personal judgment of others’ actions based on his or her own values. So I wouldn’t consider you “wicked” for killing your neighbor; I’d consider you dangerous to society, and I’d want you locked up or at least kept as far away from me and my family as possible. Luckily, most everyone else in this society would agree with me.
