I am trying to find videos on you tube or anywhere for that matter that can explain how someone can actually be a REAL atheist.
All I can seem to find is “atheists” who point out how ridiculous most religious teachings are (which I completely agree with) but they don’t seem to explain how they believe that matter just came out of nothing with no cause.
I consider myself a Deist because I cannot get rid of the belief that something caused all of this, even though it doesn’t care about its creation and allows everything to happen randomly.
So, are there, in fact REAL atheists who believe that life and matter just occurred out of nothing or are these “atheists” like me and are in fact Deists?
I guess, to put it in the context you provided, you could find someone who could get rid of the belief that something caused all of this, or who never had it in the first place.
Someone doesn’t have to believe that life and matter “just occurred out of nothing” to be an atheist. They could just decline to say those things came from the work of any sort of conscious agent.
As far as we know, matter did “come out of nothing” in the Big Bang. How that happened isn’t understood.
But just because we don’t know how it happened doesn’t mean the default assumption is that some supernatural being must have caused it. A lot of atheists are OK with leaving it at just that: we don’t know (but a supernatural being is much more complicated, and hence much more improbable, than some kind of natural process).
Wouldn’t that god you believe in be part of “all of this”? How is it any easier to believe a god always existed or came from nothing than it is that some particles always existed or came from nothing?
You could look for a show done in Austin, Texas, called The Atheist Experience. Also, search for Matt Dillahunty, President of the Austin Atheists, who is frequently on the show and lectures and debates a lot. Some of his lectures are quite good.
Many atheists believe there is no evidence for a deity. Or more than one deity. They base this on evidence is lacking. Theists (of which I am one) believe despite the lack of evidence that would make it as science or in a courtroom. Because it is contrary to our experience, beliefs and convictions.
It is entirely understandable to me that the universe simply exists, as do we, and without any meaning except what we give it. In short, shit happens.
The same principle that allows the creation of Virtual Particles out of quantum vacuum fluctuations.
I’ve been an atheist since I was 8 years old.
I believe that matter occurred due to the Big Bang and that life is a simple result of selection pressure on replicators.
I believe that there is no way we can currently know what happen at the start of the Big Bang, and that even when/if we do we will only move to another horizon of not knowing. I also think that going from there to Deism is a silly turtles-all-the-way-down security blanket for people afraid of not knowing.
Hello; this shall be my first post on this account [I made an account on here when I was younger but forgot the username when it came time to come back to this website forum(I have since remembered it – oh well)].
With that needless preface out of the way, I do know of a video series my sister introduced me to a long time ago. I don’t know if it will answer the question of how a person could be an atheist but it purportedly covers a brief history of disbelief, at any rate (hence its title). Here now is the youtube link to the first episode:
Causation is a tricky concept. If you find the idea of a universe without cause absurd, and you postulate a Cause (supernatural, conscious, intelligent, or none of the above) then you have to ask what caused the Cause. And if you try to wriggle out of that by saying that Cause was uncaused and didn’t need to have a cause, then you’ve just pulled the same trick you weren’t happy about pulling with the universe itself. And to top it all, you’ve postulated the existence of some entity for which you have NO evidence except a bit of reasoning that you’ve just used to undermine itself.
In fact it’s really REAALLLLLY easy to think of something huge and complex that had no cause. Theists do it all the time. Atheists prefer to stick with what we can see. Sure, it’s really weird that the universe is uncaused, but at least it is unequivocally, undeniably here.
One other point. Every causative relation that we have ever observed, of the form ‘X causes Y’, has involved X and Y being events within the universe, taking place at times Xt and Yt, where Xt<Yt. Current cosmology suggests that time is itself a property of the universe, inseparable from it (it’s one of its four [or eleven?] dimensions). If the collection of concepts that need causative explaining include time itself, how exactly would that work? You could go nuts with this. What caused ‘causation’?
Quick hijack:
You’d better take this up with the mods toot sweet. Having two accounts is strictly verboten and grounds for banning, but if you make it clear it’s an honest mistake they’ll be helpful in getting your old account back (or moving you to the new one, or something, I dunno I’m not One Of Them).
The reason atheist writings don’t explain how they believe that matter just came out of nothing with no cause is that atheists don’t believe that matter just came out of nothing with no cause.
Atheists simply have no belief that matter came from “goddidit”. This doesn’t mean they know the cause, any more than deists do.
Deists don’t know jack about the cause.
If I told you I know how cookies were made and when you asked me to explain how, I said “they are made by something that makes cookies” would you think that was actually any kind of explanation?
“Goddidit” is no better. It’s just that deists take their “it was made somehow” non-explanation, put a white beard and a pair of sandals on it, and then convince themselves they’ve got a handle on the situation.