Ahem, Xanakis:
“Also Natural theology uses reason alone to understand God, as contrasted with revealed theology which is founded upon scriptural revelations.”
In other words, the evidence of Natural theology is contrary to the Bible.
Scriptures are certainly signs that people write about deities. They are not clearly signs of deities.
Not about hobbits specifically. But about leprechauns, fairies, witches, wood nymphs, sun gods, etc.–yes, for thousands of years. These writings do not, to me, constitute evidence of the existence of those things.
**
Actually, I can. Stories are stories. Hearsay is hearsay. They are possibly valid as evidence (not proof) only if we can reasonably trust the intelligence and intentions of the ones who started the stories, as well as all the people who have repeated, handed down, translated, and interpreted the stories. Hearsay is weak at best. When we have so many generations, languages, cultures and political agendas to consider, as in the case of the stories of the Christian God, repeated stories have virtually no credibility. They don’t count as evidence from where I stand.
“Also Natural theology uses reason alone to understand God, as contrasted with revealed theology which is founded upon scriptural revelations.”
I think you have misunderstood skepdic here, GIGObuster. Natural Theology is not contrary to scriptural evidence, it is in addition to it.
They used the word “contrasted” which, I agree, was not a good idea since it has obviously lead to some confusion on your part.
Mr O:
“Scriptures are certainly signs that people write about deities. They are not clearly signs of deities.”
They are not absolute proof, if thats what you mean, but they exist as eyewitness accounts and therefore constitute evidence.
Please understand, you or I may choose not to be persuaded by that evidence but that is another matter.
“Not about hobbits specifically. But about leprechauns, fairies, witches, wood nymphs, sun gods, etc.–yes, for thousands of years. These writings do not, to me, constitute evidence of the existence of those things.”
True but these are different things altogether, we are talking about belief in a Supreme Being, a Creator. Leprechauns only have the hearsay evidence in their support not Natural Theology.
“Actually, I can. Stories are stories. Hearsay is hearsay. They are possibly valid as evidence (not proof)”
Thats all Im saying - evidence not proof.
“only if we can reasonably trust the intelligence and intentions of the ones who started the stories, as well as all the people who have repeated, handed down, translated, and interpreted the stories.”
I think we probably can
“Hearsay is weak at best.”
Agreed, I would never become convinced of something on the evidence of hearsay alone although I may, in certain circumstances, consider it evidence.
“When we have so many generations, languages, cultures and political agendas to consider, as in the case of the stories of the Christian God, repeated stories have virtually no credibility. They don’t count as evidence from where I stand”
Yes, they do count as evidence simply for that very reason. There are so many of them, they all tell much the same story and they are global in nature.
This is evidence. You are free to dispute it as much as you want, and you wont find me disagreeing with you but its still evidence.
Evidence that God (defined as the author of the inerrant and infallible Scriptures as recorded in the Protestant Christian Bible) does not exist:
Various Biblical contradictions and errors.
Evidence that God (defined as the creator of the world in six 24-hour days within the last 10,000 years, including both Earth and the Solar System and the Universe as a whole, and including all existing “kinds” of living things as separately created) does not exist:
All of cosmology, astronomy, geology, and biology.
Evidence that God (defined as a perfectly omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being, with free will, who was incarnated as a human being in the person of Jesus Christ, becoming fully human while remaining fully divine) does not exist:
There is of course no real “evidence” in the traditional sense for this definition of God. There may be theological arguments in favor of this conception of God. There are a number of counter-arguments against this conception of God, pointing out various logical problems with the definition. (Problems of reconciling free will, either human–for those varieties of Christianity which accept human free will–or divine, with divine omniscience; problem of evil; logical incompatibility of the “two natures” of Jesus Christ–how can one entity be both “fully human” and remain the omni-, omni-, omni- God of Christian theology?, etc.)
Evidence that God (defined as the sum total of the orderly natural laws of the Universe, including human consciousness) does not exist:
Well, no real “evidence”, merely a semantic debate about whether or not it makes sense to so define the word “God”.
Evidence that God (defined as Zeus, the bearded, thunderbolt-wielding, philandering Lord of Olympus and first of the Olympian Gods) does not exist:
Sheer personal incredulity, mainly. It’s just blatantly absurd on its face to believe in Zeus. Practically no one spends any time coming up with sophisticated counter-arguments against the existence of Zeus, although presumably one could point to our modern understanding of natural phenomena (including atmospheric electric discharges).
Evidence that God (defined as the intelligent creator and designer of the Universe) does not exist:
Simply a lack of evidence in favor of the idea. I therefore do not believe in God (by this definition) because I have been given no compelling reason to believe in such an entity. Note that this is not the same as the positive disbelief I feel towards some of the other definitions of God given above.
There are of course many other definitions of God, with many other responses.
You see, practically no non-believer, atheist, agnostic, or what-ever, views all definitions of God with equally certain disbelief, unbelief, nonbelief, or lack of belief. “God” has been used to mean a lot of different things. Towards some of those definitions, I am a vehement denier. Towards others, I shrug my shoulders and say “I dunno. Where’s the evidence or argument in favor?”
Sorry Xanakis but many other sources do show what Natural Theology is:
http://www.meta-library.net/theogloss/natth-body.html
Again, no Bible needed for knowing god. And in many other articles:
http://www.faithdefenders.com/pro7.html
Well, to get back to the OP: it is beginning to be obvious that trying to call yourself an agnostic is really the problem here. I have no trouble at all that you think the Bible and Natural theology are evidence of god. But just as you can say, “This is evidence. You are free to dispute it as much as you want, and you won’t find me disagreeing with you but its still evidence.” I have to say you can not dispute the evidence at hand: you are not an agnostic.
Ingersoll, one of the most famous agnostics, will disagree with you calling himself an agnostic:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/why_i_am_agnostic.html
Your evidence prevents you from doing that. But do not fear, nobody is taking your faith away, only your peculiar definition of agnosticism.
What’s this “we” business? Do you own any bookstores? I don’t.
I think that when you own a bookstore, you can stock whatever you bloody well want. In the meantime, the bookstores are going to stock what sells or is likely to sell. In the meantime, you can special order any book you want from your local Waldenbooks or B&N. Trust me, if the folks at the corporate level in those stores notice a sudden surge in special orders of books on atheism, they will begin keeping more of them on the shelves.
I used to work for Waldenbooks, and several times a year we conducted inventories of how many copies of each title we had on the shelves, reconciled them with the suggested number from the corporate folks, and added to that any special order information. That information was then compared with the sales records for each title. If a title wasn’t selling, it was removed from the suggested inventory from that section, or reduced to one copy. Shelf space is valuable.
Because there are more Christians in the United States than atheists.
Hehehe…I love how Christians capitalize anything related to Christianity: Christian, Lord, God (and their respective pronouns!), Christianity, etc. while atheists don’t with atheism: atheist, non-believer, atheism, freethinker, etc. Perhaps they’re subtly boosting their already over-inflated egos 
In either case, the definitions of an atheist and an agnostic are debatable, and I as an atheist find the debate boring. I know I’m an atheist because I do not believe in a deity or deities. I’ve seen all too many definitions from “an atheist is someone who knows 100% sure without any doubt in his mind that anything ever said by any religious person is untrue” to “an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in the fundamentalist Christianity on this TV show…now BEGONE demons from this poor blind man’s skull PUNCH KICK STAB”
Xanakis, I’m not sure where you were going with the bookstore argument, but the argument is flawed. Religon is not some democratic institution. There are many more Budhists in the world than there are Christians. There are only a handful of books about budhism in the average American library. What does this mean? Absolutely nothing.
To the atheists, as I have stated before there is evidence of the existence of God. This evidence is anecdotal rather than emperical, of course. If the police were trying to solve a murder, had no forensic evidence, but had 57 witnesses, they would not dismiss the evidence because it was hearsay. Similar logic applies to religon. You can not dismiss the words of people throughout history just because they are human and fallible. Weigh them first, and then decide whether or not you agree.
Oh, and one more time…
and my favorite.
No, I don’t.
There has been no consistent usage of any of the terms in this thread. I asked for a list of common terms to please you people, but the contradictions continued. I give up. I am going to revert to common usage and dictionary definitions, while retaining the descriptors: hard and soft. In short, I will largely be using Mr O’s definitions. I no longer care if I offend any sensibilities by not using someones personal “technical” or “correct” connotations, and if anyone gives me another “the dictionary is wrong” argument, I will consider them pedantic and feeble-minded.
These are the terms I will be using. Feel free to use whatever terms you like. Just don’t bitch at me for not using your personal connotations.
-Beeblebrox
“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
This is not true.
O.K. maybe not, I didn’t actually look it up. I had assumed that most asians were Budhist, so that would follow. I guess my point was that number of books sold is directly related to how many people in said area might buy those books and means nothing more than that. Demographics just don’t have a whole lot to do with the ideas discussed in this thread.
-Beeblebrox
“Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”
I like Mr O’s, actually, so if you use them, I will be perfectly happy. Hard/soft, strong/weak, makes no difference to me.
xanakis, we live in a predominantly Christian society. More generally, society is predominantly religious, rather than atheist or agnostic. To expect retailers or publishers to provide a fifty-fifty mix of religious works and atheist/agnostic works would be ridiculous. Their reson to for existence is to make money, and they do that by supplying what the market demands. Christians want to read about Christianity, so those are the books that sell. Artificially flooding the market place with books on atheism and agnosticism would be unlikely to bring about a sudden surge of enlightenment, anyway.
I’m just wondering if I can make a busload of money from xanakis by selling him a copy of my newly-discovered lost book of the Bible, “The Book of Jojo”. Since Jojo himself wrote that his words were the divine word of God, it must be true – which makes my one and only copy extremely rare, and therefore it should fetch a high price from devout believersb looking for new evidence… 
It’s been done.
Actually, there all several books that are claimed to be “lost” books of the Bible. One that immediately springs to mind is The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Almost all Christians consider this book apocryphal. The author is not considered a credible witness.
The authors of the books included in the bible are considered credible.
-Beeblebrox
“The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
By whom? I don’t see any citations, footnotes, or references in my copy…
Heck, given the well-documented contradictions between Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John alone, you can make a very good argument that the books included in the Bible are not credible.
Well, lets not drift too far away, just for peace I am willing to accept this modern terminology, but we should never forget were the terms came from, there are indeed hard atheists, but early Agnostics do back me in my assertion that Hard Agnostic and Soft Atheist are the same:
Many current soft atheists subscribe to this. Also: MrO’s definition of Soft atheist looks the same as hard atheism.
So just remember that I will interchange the terms Hard agnostic and Soft atheist freely from now on.
We can be flexible with those terms if we do not ignore their origins.
However, I need to know: who originated this modern terminology? I know Thomas Huxley originated Agnostic, but who originated this modern terminology?
We have advanced. In a few years the Christians will become – let us hope – humane and sensible enough to deny the dogma that fills the endless years with pain. They ought to know now that this dogma is utterly inconsistent with the wisdom, the justice, the goodness of their God. They ought to know that their belief in hell, gives to the Holy Ghost – the Dove – the beak of a vulture, and fills the mouth of the Lamb of God with the fangs of a viper.
Ingersol – Why I am an agnostic
By “anecdotal evidence” I assume you are referring to the Bible? I have weighed this evidence. The anecdotal evidence is internally inconsistent and self-contradictory. It frequently contradicts known facts of history, archaeology, or science. Textual analysis indicates that the anecdotal evidence is often not what it purports to be; i.e., things attributed to Moses or Daniel were probably written much later. I have weighed the evidence and found it wanting; thus, with respect to the God of a Biblical literalist, I am an atheist.
If by the “anecdotal evidence” you are referring not just to the Bible but to the total of human reports of encounters with the divine, that evidence is even more confused and contradictory than the evidence of the Bible alone.
:shrug:
Ask 10 Christians what the definition of “Christianity” is, and see how many answers you get.