But no one’s trying to argue that here. Oakminster and I seem to basically both be saying “Don’t be smug bastards thinking you’re absolutely right.” Everybody that tries to tie this to the Judeo-Christian God is completely missing the point. The Judeo-Christian God is not relevant to this discussion.
What’s your opinion of elves on the moon?
Things I have witnessed (no pun intended) Christians doing that I have never seen atheists do:
Have my seat mate try and convert me during a long plane ride.
Begin a meal at their home by having me hold hands and acknowledge their belief.
Start a school day, in a public school, with recitation of their belief.
Start a school day with a pledge that includes affirming their belief.
Have a recitation of belief at the beginning of graduation ceremonies.
Come to my door and try and convert me.
Put their religious beliefs on my currency.
Scream at the top of their lungs at a college campus during lunch in an attempt to scare me into accepting their belief or be punished for eternity.
Get a tax break on their meeting places.
Leave stupid comic books on my car windows.
Have the local parking authority modify parking fees and rules to accommodate their belief.
Mention their beliefs when I sneeze.
This is getting tiresome. The existence or nonexistence of God or gods is a subject about which there is no evidence. The Holocaust is not such a subject. Evolution is not such a subject. Please stop trying to argue by analogy when the analogy doesn’t hold. If you want to posit pixies or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters, that’s fine, but historical events and laws of nature that have substantiating evidence are different from theoretical unprovable supernatural entities.
I never asserted it was meaningful to talk about. I think metaphysics, as a whole, isn’t meaningful to talk about. It’s just interesting.
I know a lot of Atheists that do this.
So what are the characteristics of the god that is relevant to this discussion?
Occam’s Razor is a useful tool for forming hypotheses. It is a piss-poor tool for validating them.
Again just to be clear, you DO agree that it’s perfectly reasonable to be certain that the Judeo-Christian God and others like it do not exist? As long as we make an exception for something like a pure deist.
Unless you believe in a an omniscient, omnipresent god that is involved in the mechanism and workings on earth. Then it inescapable. You have no choice but to deal with it. Of course it quickly gets into an ugly dance with illogic and blind belief your dancing partners.
They’d be provable insofar as they wished to be. They’d be beyond the scientific method until they decided otherwise. Again, design an experiment to prove whether or not a generic, noninterfering god exists. I’ll wait.
Well, that’s hardly true. At least, it’s the type of supreme being that everybody posting in this thread is likely to be most familiar with, most likely to have believed in at some point, and most likely to be encouraged to believe in. It’s also the type of supreme being with the particular attributes that theists like to use to explain why we can’t observe or interact with it. “But this is different,” is what we constantly hear when God is compared to equally silly fabrications, like the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
We’re not really talking about deities like Thor when we have these discussions. Things like fairies and unicorns are good examples for illustrating the silliness and nonsensical nature of religious belief, but I think it’s dishonest to remove it from a specifically Judeo-Christian context.
My position is that anyone who claims to be certain that there is no god is no better from an objective standpoint that one who claims to be certain that there IS a god. I never said it was arrogant to not believe in a god, I said it was arrogant to be certain in that belief to the extent that you judge those who come to an opposite conclusion to be inferior or defective in reasoning ability.
I’m not here to ‘prove’ the existence of a supreme being. I’m not here to offer anyone anything to believe or disbelieve, other than the tenet “Thou shalt not be a smug, superior asshole, full of false certitude.”
I always say Gesundheit – “good health.” “Bless you” always struck me as disingenuous coming from an atheist, although I realize that the term has become so genericized as to have largely divorced itself from its religious roots.
Well, you have no choice but to deal with it either way. It simply becomes a matter of what, if anything, you turn to in order to cope: Deal with it rationally or smother it in religion?
Amen.
And both are worthy of opposition.
But do you think that anyone who claims to be certain that there are no elves on the moon is no better from an objective standpoint than one who claims to be certain that there are elves on the moon?
I don’t know, never met’em. Do they vote Democratic?
Your question contains a faulty assumption. There is no specific god relevant to this discussion.
I’m not arguing by analogy, I’m outlining consequences of ditching the requirement of keeping your explanatory entities minimal in formulating hypotheses. If you can postulate entities willy-nilly, then there exists a theory of gravity in which it is caused by little tiny fairies that in their spare time killed six million Jews during WWII which, since it explains the trajectories of the planets and of thrown stones as well as Newtonian gravity, ought to be judged as reasonable as the latter theory – since, after all, there is no evidence that such fairies don’t exist. That’s the point – if you want to keep the ‘maybe’ stance on everything that could exist, then each and every proposal about the world is equally reasonable as any other.
That depends entirely on the kind of supernatural entities you wish to posit. There are innumerable history-faking wizards, evidence-conjuring demons, experiment-tampering leprechauns you can posit with as much justification as any god, even a generic one.
You do talk about as if it were meaningful, though. And metaphysics, containing both epistemology and ontology, is the basis you need before you can talk about anything at all – before you even can define something like ‘meaning’.
I’m siding with the folks on your side of the discussion who reject populism as a relevant factor. Just because Yahweh gets the most votes on American Idol doesn’t mean he’s representative of a generic ur-god. If someone else wants to engage you on those points, then fine, but I’m not gonna waste time arguing about inconsistencies in Christian belief.
Why is that arrogant? Or perhaps more specifically, why is it not arrogant when it comes from the other camp?
Moreover, does that line of reasoning stand if you replaced “god” with any other thing for which there is no evidence of existence and no way to test for it?
There comes a point in any search for truth when one must accept something as being the absolute truth for an extensive lack of any shred of evidence to the contrary. If you spend eons looking for something and finding no evidence of its existence, you must logically conclude that the possibility of its existence has approached so close to zero that one must assume it simply doesn’t.