If that is evidence for God’s existence, then there is evidence for all other gods that have been written about.
I agree. I also find that evidence to be insufficient to prove the point, same as you and all other atheists.
In fact, if any religionists want to use the ancient stories of miracles in the Bible as “evidence”, then I’ve got a ton of evidence of more modern miracles they should be willing to accept at face value.
As soon as I get over to my mother-in-law’s place to dig out all of her old copies of The Weekly World News, that is.
It’s not a belief system, because it’s not a system; it’s just the lack of belief in one thing.
And AGAIN, that analogy doesn’t work. “I don’t know but it’s possible” is the correct statement about alien life; “I don’t know but there’s no reason to believe so, the people who claim it’s true are consistently wrong and contradict each other, and it appears to be impossible” is the correct statement about gods. The two claims are grossly different.
More like “I don’t know but it seems quite possible and contradicts no known physical laws”. Again, not like claims about gods.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes: That’s why you keep ignoring so much of what I am saying.
I certainly never said it was a religion, I said it was a “belief system”…but if you want to create straw men…do so. When you get back to what I actually said I’ll deal with it.
Yup. I have lots of friends…and I mention them all the time. Got a problem with that?
No need for “other words”…I did respond…and you just don’t like my response.
But…atheists are like that. They want to pretend their arguments are more cogent than theistic arguments.
They’re not!
If you want to get past the “I can diss you” stage and engage in a grown up discussion…I think that would be nice. I thought this kind of playground play was off-limits for this forum.
I’m not going away, Der.
I am ignoring most of the gratuitous insults…and the silliness.
If you have one particular item that you think has been short changed…bring it up in a single instance…and let’s discuss it until you are tired of it.
I’ve been doing Internet discussion stuff for over a decade now…and I never have dodged anything.
And I honestly don’t mind someone making themselves feel better about themself by pretending I am doing so. Just wanted to put you on notice that I see through all this nonsense.
Now…if you have an item in mind…bring it up. Let’s discuss it for as long as it needs discussing.
It’s not a belief system either. Again, you dodge actually addressing my point.
It’s such a standard defensive line that it isn’t very believable.
You did no such thing. You keep ignoring - among other things - my and other posters’ attempts to point out that there isn’t any equality between claiming that something is possible that we know is possible, and claiming something to be possible that we don’t know is possible; something that in fact appears to be impossible.
They are, like it or not. Overwhelmingly so. Atheists have all the evidence on their side, their position is logically consistent and consistent with physical laws, and their claims that no gods exist have never been violated by gods showing up. As opposed to believers, whose beliefs are against all the evidence, ignore logic and physical laws, and have been shown to be consistently wrong.
In other words, you are again not actually responding to my arguments; just pretending to intellectual superiority instead and hope no one notices.
Nonsense; you’ve been dodging plenty right here in this thread.
Calling atheism a system is stretching it, in that there is only one thing that every hard atheist believes. You can believe in the supernatural and still be an atheist.
Do you believe that knowledge of god is impossible? Then you are an agnostic. Agnosticism and atheism can mix in any combination. It is possible for a theist to be an agnostic, saying we cannot know if god exists while still believing. I’m not an agnostic, since I think we can know if god exists - though we can’t know that no god exists.
I’ve read Huxley, by the way.
I lack belief in unreasonable ones, but I neither believe nor disbelieve that some random one you just came up with exists. The null hypothesis - in this case that no gods exist, is the only reasonable one given the lack of evidence against it.
I don’t know that no god has interacted with us, but if one did it was an incompetent god, which probably means it is not a god at all. Again, given lack of evidence lack of contact should be the default belief. I also don’t believe in flying space dragons. Are you agnostic about them also?
Averting an asteroid collision would not be a violation of the Prime Directive, since that doesn’t distort the natural growth of a culture. Going down to the planet, marrying a native and having a kid with her does. 
Do you think that the story won’t spread far and wide? We keep seeing movies about angels coming down and George Burns doing miracles for John Denver, but these things seem hard to get evidence of in real life.
I made that step over 30 years ago. The Theory of Knowledge class I took in college made me very sensitive about the use of “know”. But believing that no gods exist is a very different claim from claiming to know that no gods exist. You clearly believe in the absence of perfect knowledge. My belief in the lack of gods is supported by continued lack of evidence for them, as I demonstrated. Given evidence I might change my belief - as someone who does research, I’ve got to do this all the time. The difference between this and the faith of the theist, as I think you’d agree, is that they believe in the face of evidence.
Der…when you regain control and actually ask one question so that we can discuss that question rationally and calmly…I’ll re-engage you. In the meantime, I’ll just continue to enjoy what is obviously some form of transference coming from you.
Voyager
Thank you for your reply. I can see this discussion can easily get out of hand…and as with Der, I will confine my reply to just one item…and when that is exhausted, go on to whatever other items you want to discuss.
I call atheism a “belief system” because I have seen a systemic “belief” protocol shared by almost all atheists I’ve ever encountered. Items in that system are (not limited to):
A “belief” that there are no gods involved in existence.
A “belief” that there is sufficient evidence to allow gods to be excluded from any possibility of being included in existence.
A “belief” (carried to an almost absurd extreme) that the guesses atheists make about the Reality are more logical than the guesses theists make…when in fact, neither are logical at all. Both are merely pretences as to the true nature of Reality…in one case, what has to be included and in the other, what must be excluded.
A stubborn commitment to the rationalization that variations on “They cannot produce a god for inspection” or “There is no need for a god to explain existence”…are evidence that there are no gods.
So, I see beliefs organized into a system…with wide variations just as there is in theism…and consequently I consider it to be a “belief system.” I do not see this as a stretch at all.
If you disagree…point out why and let’s discuss it.
This isn’t a belief. It is a lack of belief. There is no actual belief involved, just the complete and total lack thereof. Atheism is a belief the way not collecting stamps is a hobby.
This isn’t a atheist belief, it’s a strawman. I already tried to explain this to you. Atheism does not hold that there cannot be a god by any definition whatsoever, just that we don’t have any reason to believe a god exists right now. You keep trying to ascribe things to atheism that just aren’t there. You’re attacking an argument that atheists as a general rule do not hold.
And here we get to see it in all it’s shining glory. You really are just ignoring what’s being said to you, because you already know all the answers. Multiple people in this thread have tried to walk you through the logic. You have either ignored them, or simply asserted that they were wrong without giving a counter argument. An example:
You simply stated that I was wrong without giving a reason for it, and repeated your strawman argument. Once again: atheists do not assert that there is no possibility of any gods at all. This is a made up argument you are attempting to pin on atheism and then argue against as if it was something we claimed. It is. You might as well try to tell us that atheism claims chocolate pudding gives magic healing powers, and then tell us that it doesn’t.
What you are doing is like saying that newspapermen are accountants because when they report on events they are giving an account of what occurred. Which is to say, you are using a definition of the term which is nonstandard and deliberately contrary to the common use of the term. I say ‘deliberately’ contrary because I suspect that you know you are using the term wrong, and are doing so in a deliberate effort to establish a false equivalence as an attack on atheism.
This theory of mine is underscored by the horsecrap you just laid down that that the “guesses” (gag me) that atheists make about reality aren’t more logical than the guesses theists make. In Reality (why do you capitalize it?), there are these things called “probabilities”, and they’re not the same for all things. For example, I might tell you that I own the golden gate bridge, and will sell it to you for two hundred thousand dollars. Most people would laugh me off, but it’s still logically possible that I might actually own the bridge, so you should send me the money right away. It’s an excellent investment, I swear!
Most atheists I know (including myself) don’t believe those things.
Also, do you claim that everything should be assumed to exist until there is evidence otherwise?
In other words, despite your claims you ARE going to dodge my arguments. And everyone else’s. Instead, you are going to ignore most of them since you don’t have any good answers.
This “I am far too intellectually and morally superior to you to respond to your arguments” tactic pretty much amounts to an admission that your position is intellectually bankrupt. You try to equate religion and atheism, then ignore the arguments about why that isn’t true, while posting about how you don’t dodge arguments.
I spent many years on alt.atheism before I wandered over here, so I’ve discussed this with a lot of atheists. I used to be a soft atheist. I’m sorry to say the reason was that I confused belief with knowledge, and somehow had the impression that hard atheists claimed to know that no gods existed, which I thought, and still think, is absurd. Once I finally got the difference through my head I switched to hard atheism, for reasons I’ve already given.
There are some exceptions, but this is mostly true.
Very rare in my experience, and it depends on what you mean by gods. Almost all atheists - and you’ve seen this in this very thread - talk about lack of expected evidence for gods, not evidence against gods, the nature of which eludes me. Some atheists do reject the supernatural, but only because they say that supernatural things that show up would be natural by definition, though the laws of physics might have to be expanded to take in new phenomena. It is an interesting discussion, but moot until we find something that looks supernatural.
Atheists, and scientists in general, know that our theories are just approximations of reality, and involve models of reality. However logical, and in fact mathematical, models work extremely well.
I don’t think atheists qua atheists claim to make guesses about reality, but they in general support scientists who do; and whose logical guesses about the nature of reality have been very successful over the past 400 years or so. We say that theists guesses have been much less successful. Any dispute about this? How do you measure success?
We don’t expect any given theist to give evidence for anything except one god. We also don’t demand that they produce this god, but wonder why, if the god cares about our belief, he, she or it doesn’t show up. Believers in Western varieties of God talk about evidence damaging faith in some way, which ignores the many Biblical instances of God interacting directly with people. When you integrate over all varieties of theists, there doesn’t seem to be much there. Most theists lack belief in any god but their own, but can’t answer why their god is more believable than the god of the temple across the street.
I have a bit of a leg up since, being Jewish, I was never indoctrinated in Christ belief, and the whole thing seemed like a pile of hooey even when I still believed in God.
I trust that you don’t believe in astrology, in fact I trust that you believe it doesn’t work. Why do you think this, and yet are so reticent about believing that no gods exist. In either case you can change your mind given new evidence.
I’ve met some atheists who are far more wacko than anything you describe (not in the SDMB.) Atheism has no entrance exam. I’ve never met an atheist who disbelieves in God in order to get out of hell, but if one existed they would still count as an atheist, albeit a stupid one. A belief system has to be prescriptive in some sense; your list is descriptive of some but not others.
Your argument appears to boil down to the idea that we can’t know everything, and somewhere it what we’re missing there might be a god.
Yes, that’s certainly possible, but we can only dismiss the values of god we are presented with. If you posit that something exists which we cannot apprehend or have not yet apprehended, then you are correct.
However, that something might be a giant apple at the core of our galaxy, or a psychotic alien species that resembles the platypus and has mastered interstellar travel. It might also be something we would identify as a god (or gods), but it almost certainly isn’t.
You assume that all possible undiscovered entities might be god. This is true. They might also be anything else we can imagine, or anything we can’t, for that matter. Since we would not call these things god(s), for the purposes of this discussion it does not matter if they exist or not.
Let us simplify matters: we can be absolutely certain, based on objective weighing of evidence (and, indeed, based on lack of evidence) that no entity which a human might describe as a deity exists. If you’re going to keep defining god as anything which might exist within the bounds of possibility than we’ll keep talking in circles forever.
I would just like to take a moment to say how much I dislike agnosticism. Theists might be wrong, but at least their position could be logical, in some alternate reality where there is evidence that deities could and do exist. There is no universe where you can say the same of agnosticism.
It’s mental masturbation at its worst, a shallow and invalid excuse to pretend to be more rational than thou by taking a middle ground less reasonable than either of the extremes.
This isn’t entirely true. Flavius Josephus, a first-century Jewish/Roman historian, mentions Jesus, Jesus’ brother James, and that Jesus was believed by some Jews to be the Messiah. The exact passage has pretty clearly been embellished by Christian copyists, but he does at least mention the name. Flavius’ writings are contemporary with the (canonical) Gospels.
And to the OP, it’s a matter of faith and it is a circular argument. I don’t think that the Bible is God’s word, and I am (in some ways) Christian. I think it was written by falliable men, embellished and added to later by unscrupulous men, and generally full of holes from any real perspective you look at. There’s some pretty poetry, but the truth of the Bible is not an article of faith for me.
I understand that the term ‘Belief system’ really only makes sense from the point of view of the theist. Personally I’d describe it as a paradigm.