Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist

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ASimon said:
Nothing has changed his view. Agnosticism and Atheism are answers to two different questions. An Agnostic says he doesn’t know if God exists or not (because it’s not knowable). An Atheist says he doesn’t believe in God (because there’s a lack of compelling evidence).

You can be Agnostic and an Atheist simultaneously. Dawkins is, and so am I. There’s no contradiction between these positions.
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Just to help out those that are unfamiliar

Wiki said:
Agnostic atheism, also called atheistic agnosticism, is a philosophical position that encompasses both atheism and agnosticism. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do not hold a belief in the existence of any deity and agnostic because they claim that the existence of a deity is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact. The agnostic atheist may be contrasted with the agnostic theist, who does believe that one or more deities exist but claims that the existence or nonexistence of such is unknown or cannot be known.
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ASimon said:
Given that I only have one life, sure. That’s not a tough call.

I’d fly on a plane with a 2% chance of crashing too. But the difference is that in a lifetime, I’ll probably fly several times. And if the statistic is more than just descriptive, then it means if I fly 50 times, the plane will crash once.
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No, it doesn’t mean that. You could fly a thousand times and never crash. Or you could fly just once and crash. A two per cent probability of crashing simply means that of all the flights that would ever fly, have flown, or will fly two percent will crash. But there’s no way of knowing where in that immense string those crashes would occur.

Here’s a better example: The probability of a coin coming up heads is 1 out of 2. But tossing a coin up twice does not guarantee that one of the tosses will be a head. In fact, if you tossed the coin a thousand times you still couldn’t guarantee that it would come up heads on one toss. It’s pretty likely but not a certainty.
 
buffalo said:
**First Antony Flew, now perhaps Dawkins?
**

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Richard Dawkins: I can’t be sure God does not exist
kjkjkjk

**He is regarded as the most famous atheist in the world but last night Professor Richard Dawkins admitted he could not be sure that God does not exist. **

He told the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that he preferred to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist.

The two men were taking part in a public “dialogue” at Oxford University at the end of a week which has seen bitter debate about the role of religion in public life in Britain.

more…
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An atheist:

Someone who believes that nothing made everything.

Poor souls.
 
He isn’t out to prove or disprove the existence of God, only to find out more about the world.
 
cornbread_r2 said:
I think that depends on which god is being discussed. For instance, I’d be shocked if many at CAF would allow for even the slightest possibility that Zeus exists.
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Philosophically you can’t prove that Zeus does not exist, as you can’t prove a negative (you can’t prove that fairies don’t exist either); but the evidence on his side isn’t very strong. The evidence for God’s existence IS very strong - "The FOOL has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’.
 
ASimon said:
Given that I only have one life, sure. That’s not a tough call.

I’d fly on a plane with a 2% chance of crashing too. But the difference is that in a lifetime, I’ll probably fly several times. And if the statistic is more than just descriptive, then it means if I fly 50 times, the plane will crash once.
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If the probability of something happening is 2%, that does not mean that it will happen once out of 50 trials. It means that as the number of trials increases, the frequency of the event will approach closer and closer to 2%.

A great antidote to Dawkins (as well as Hitchins and Dennett and others) is “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies” by David Bentley Hart.
 
robindenver said:
If the probability of something happening is 2%, that does not mean that it will happen once out of 50 trials. It means that as the number of trials increases, the frequency of the event will approach closer and closer to 2%.

A great antidote to Dawkins (as well as Hitchins and Dennett and others) is “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies” by David Bentley Hart.
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I think I made it clear that I was aware that a stat like that is basically descriptive. Occasionally, depending on the event, we can also take it to be predictive. None of the nit-picking actually deals with my point. Which is that if you’re telling me there’s a 2% chance I’ll go to Hell for not believing in God, then I’m fine taking those odds. As I’m equally fine getting on an airplane that has a 2% chance of crashing. These are not scary odds at all.
 
It doesn’t really mean anything to say that you can’t be sure that something does not exist. That’s where the whole “flying spaghetti monster” paradigm comes from. You can’t be sure that there doesn’t exist a flying spaghetti monster in space, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it exists. Replace flying spaghetti monster with any arbitrary, made-up thing. In reality, it is very unlikely that the flying spaghetti monster exists. But you can’t be 100% sure that it doesn’t exist (or that anything doesn’t exist, for that matter). The point is that if you make a positive claim, such as “God exists,” you need to have an objective reason why you believe that claim. If you don’t have evidence for the claim, then the claim is unworthy of belief.

There are, however, many reasons to believe in God if you actually study about it.
 
ASimon said:
I think I made it clear that I was aware that a stat like that is basically descriptive. Occasionally, depending on the event, we can also take it to be predictive. None of the nit-picking actually deals with my point. Which is that if you’re telling me there’s a 2% chance I’ll go to Hell for not believing in God, then I’m fine taking those odds. As I’m equally fine getting on an airplane that has a 2% chance of crashing. These are not scary odds at all.
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Well. You are not scared about getting on a plane that has a 2% chance of crashing? You should be. Unless you have a death wish.
 
robindenver said:
Well. You are not scared about getting on a plane that has a 2% chance of crashing? You should be. Unless you have a death wish.
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I don’t. And while I’m happy to concede that a 2% crash risk in a hypothetical example is probably far riskier than any generic flight I could be on right now, at the end of the day, what you’re asking me to fear is akin to pulling a black marble out of a hat with only two black marbles, mixed among 98 white ones.

If you’re worried about that outcome, given those odds, I would suggest therapy for you.
 
ASimon said:
I don’t. And while I’m happy to concede that a 2% crash risk in a hypothetical example is probably far riskier than any generic flight I could be on right now, at the end of the day, what you’re asking me to fear is akin to pulling a black marble out of a hat with only two black marbles, mixed among 98 white ones.

If you’re worried about that outcome, given those odds, I would suggest therapy for you.
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And I would suggest a new occupation for you - experimental test pilot. Unless you already are one.

No one would fly and there would not even be an airline industry if the odds of a (commercial) plane crash were that high, or even within two orders of magnitude of it.

But you are right - it is peripheral to your central point, which seems to be that you’ll take a 2% risk of suffering eternal damnation without much worry.
 
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