No. If you take our best testable, falsifiable understanding of how our senses, our brains, our bodies work, then you can logically conclude that nothing happens after death. This does not require faith.
We could exchange emails, then exchange phone numbers, then exchange addresses. Then we could visit each other.
But let’s not. 
But we could prove the existance of each other if either of us cared enough to do so.
Since you cannot prove a negative, lets make your position a positive. Tell me if you disagree - When the physical body ceases to support life, the consciousness and non-physical aspects of the recently deceased person cease to exist.
Can you prove that? I know, maybe I am putting words inyour mouth and asking you to defend them, but you see where I am going with this. If you disagre with my premise, then give me a positive statement about the atheist view of the afterlife, then defend it.
Why on earth would you think that? Religion may be important to you, but it’s not to me.
By your definition, “faith is the belief in things not seen”.
Atheists do not believe in an afterlife.
An afterlife is not seen.
Atheists do not have a belief in a thing not seen.
Atheists do not have faith.
This is the error, right here. You are assuming there is a “spiritual world and the afterlife”.
In the strictest sense of the defintion, one might argue that atheists, who deny that God does exist, do so on faith. This is true of hard atheism, which very few people really adher to. Most “atheists” are really agnostics, but I say I’m an atheist because most people misunderstand what agnosticism really is. Could there be a God? Yes. Have I seen any evidence tha there is a God? No. Do I need to postulate a God to explain the physical universe or anything about it? No.
You mean a person who has no belief, either way, about what happens when we die?
I would call that person remakably uncurious.
Atheism is not exclusively a matter of belief in what happens to people after they die. In any event, what happened to my father after he died was that his inert body was displayed for a couple of days, then put in the ground. This is not a belief on my part; it is an observed fact. I suppose we could dig him back up to see what changes he has undergone since he was put there in September 2001, but I can’t really be bothered.
I daresay you yourself comfortably disbelieve a lot of things you can’t disprove – that we’re all brains in a vat being fed false sensory data by computers, that our lives are just a dream in the head of a kid from St. Elsewhere, that we are constantly surrounded by invisible pixies, ect. It’s not that much of a burden. But it is common to find Christians believing that somehow their own unprovable notions are the ones that should be keeping people up at night. On the contrary, many athiests find that once they’ve accepted that there is no god, they at last find peace.
I personally believe there is more to the world than we can physically observe. X-rays, radio waves, solar wind, the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, all of these things have existed for as long as the universe. But man has only relatively recently become aware of them, because our own senses were not capable of detecting them, even though we have always been surrounded by them.
A deaf man may never believe music exists because he lacks the capacity to hear it first hand. I am just willing to believe there are things going on beyond our physical ability to observe them. I would think that accepting that the possibity of a realm beyond our physical senses would be what most open minded people would profess.
Don’t muddle “speculation” with “belief”. I don’t believe I know what happens when consciousness is removed; I can but speculate.
However, since I was once knocked unconscious, I speculate that my death will be similar: i.e. nothing.
The big problem with this is that the OP abstracts one line out of context from the Epistle to the Hebrews, assigns a nebulous meaning to it, and then produces a somewhat sophomoric argument about the degree of “faith” it takes.
Well, dark matter is by definition not observed. Therefore, theist and atheist astrophysicists have equal faith, according to whether they “believe in” the dark matter hypothesis.
Try this on for size, instead: “Faith” is trust, in the religious sense placing trust in a deity and his/her purported promises. The existence of that deity, the validity of those promises, are immaterial to the term.
Now, drawing our parallel: In a good marriage, each spouse trusts his/her spouse implicitly. He/she has faith in him/her. Not religious faith, but the same sort of non-rational (but not irrational) confidence in the good intent, integrity, and loyalty of the marriage partner. (This does not deal with rocky marriages, or with whether the spouses in open marriages are “cheating” by someone else’s definition – as I understand it, it’s possible for a spouse in an open marriage to “cheat” by having an affair with someone outside the bounds of the spousal agreement, even though sex with someone with the partner’s approval is not “cheating.”)
Okay. In a marriage, as finetuned by the above, then, the spouses have “faith” in each other. A very practical humanist use of the term in a non-religious sense. Do you all grant that?
Now, what’s wrong with the OP argument is that it’s saying – “No single people can distrust his or her spouse, because he/she doesn’t have a spouse. Therefore, single people have more faith in their spouses than married people.”
Reductio ad absurdam? Or am I missing something?
We can physically observe X rays, radio waves, solar wind, ultraviolet, etc. We have devices that we use to reveal and measure all of these examples.
Yes, there are many phenomenon that exist that our 5 senses alone cannot detect. That is why we invent machines in order to understand and utilize them. Scientific progress isn’t faith. It is a concrete and measurable process.
Any exercise which asks atheists to prove that God does not exist will serve only to test your own faith. You are gratuitously asking us atheists to tickle your parietal lobes- and I find that kind of… icky.
Please pose this question instead: “Religious persons: please explain how or why you feel that your God exists.”
I can prove you are married or unmarried.
Did these things exist in the 1300s? Yes. We just were not aware of them.
I honestly could not begin to explain it. I only know that I believe it. You may call that irrational, I call it my faith.
Another problem with your postulate is that you think that we’re coming to our conclusions about the non-existence of god using the same flawed methodology that you use to come to your conclusions about his existence; namely, we simply believe it, even in the absence of evidence. But we actually have a better methodology – reason. I disbelieve in god, the christian god at least, because of considered logical analysis which proves to me he can not exist – not just 'cuz I don’t wanna. Ergo, while you exercise faith for your belief, I don’t exercise faith in my non-belief; rather, I’ve simply done the math.
–Cliffy
I would say that people have always tried to understand the world around them. When they didn’t have the knowledge, experience or equipment to investigate things they went with the god opinion. As time went on these gods or god theories become more sophisticated. I see no reason to believe in pre/post-bronze age superstitions anymore.
If there is an observable phenomenon that science hasn’t found the answer to yet then so be it. We’ll get to it some day in the future when we have learnt more and built better machines to observe the world with. I see no reason what so ever to place a god behind it though.
This makes perfect sense to me. It isn’t a ‘faith’ as you seem to define it. It is just a understanding of how the world works that I am happy and confortable with.
So what? All these things were eventually observed by man as we grew. Do you think that we will eventually be able to observe God? Why would that be ever possible? If you beleive there is a God then surely the reason we can’t prove anything about him is part of his plan. Why do you think that would change?
Actually, I’d propose a slightly different definition of faith.
For the purpose of this thread, I define faith as “the tendency to log onto message boards and initiate debates containing half-baked arguments founded on simplistic generalizations that have not been taken seriously by anybody for hundreds of years with the superficial intent of rationalizing the fundamentally irrational and talking people into abandoning their philosophies but with the true underlying purpose of trying to reason oneself into feeling better about one’s own beliefs.”
By that standard, you have way more faith than I do.
Haven’t you just answered your own question?
I’ve got an idea of how to explain it.
When a theist looks at the world, they see some evidence that gods exists. This evidence is not conclusive, however, so to make up the gap between how much evidence there is and how much evidence there would need to be to be certain about their god, they have faith.
Now, on the same level, when a strong athiest looks at the world, they see no or little evidence that gods exist (or some evidence that gods don’t exist). The evidence isn’t conclusive, so they too make up the gap between the evidence they have and the evidence that would be needed to say gods certainly exist. That’s also faith
However - most athiests are not strong athiests, but weak athiests. Weak athiests look at the world and they too see no or little evidence that gods exist. Unlike the other two groups, though, they don’t say “We know from this that gods do/don’t exist” - they don’t go as far to say no gods exist. What they do say is "There’s no evidence that gods exist. They do not have faith, because they have no gap between the conclusion the evidence would suggest and the conclusion they draw; they are one and the same.
Polycarp, you argue our side so convincingly. Thanks.