Last night I was watching an interview on Canadian TV with Richard Dawkins. He was interviewed alone, and made some wonderfully lucid points. I have decided to get a copy of “The God Delusion”.
But what interested me was that the Dawkins interview (30 minutes) was followed by a panel of theists (also 30 minutes) dumping on Dawkins. I guess this is supposedly what the media calls faireness and balance. Although I would like to see what they would say if an atheist group asked for a rebuttal period after the “seremonette” on a TV station. Or even just asked if their group could have some “sermonette” time along with the Priests, Rabbis, Ministers and Imams who get to appear on a rotational basis.
But I digress. The point is that the theists all took turns dumping on atheism. At the host’s invitation, I, like many others watching the program, emailed a question. Unfortunately, it never got on the program.
So maybe I can ask it here, and see what the dopers have to say. Here it is:
"I note that you have a Muslim, a Catholic and a Protestant on our panel. I would like each of them to answer the following questions in one word: yes or no.
"Do you believe Jesus Christ was the only-begotten Son of God?
"Do you believe Mohammed was the final prophet of God, and that the Koran is God’s revelation?
"Do you believe the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth and infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals.
“And finally, since you three “experts on God” obviously cannot agree on some pretty basic facts about your deity, how do you expect an atheist like me to be converted to believing in his existence?”
Your OP actually highlights a big problem I have with atheism. I am an agnostic which many people claim to be the same as atheists but they are not at all in my mind. I generally hate atheist thinking for a few good reasons.
The way that I approach the problem is that we have evidence of at least one miracle: creation itself. I keep up with modern physics just as an amateur and I find much of it mind-blowing. The universe doesn’t really exist in the way we perceive it and the deeper theoretical physics gets into it, the stranger it gets. That certainly doesn’t mean there is a god but it does point to our limitations of our vantage point.
I don’t really see the point of becoming an atheist by rejecting a handful of the biggest religions. That is irrelevant in my mind. We are still left with this universe that is terribly strange and arose in a way that many scientists say is impossible to know (it sounds oddly like the beginning of the Old Testament creation story just as an aside). Atheism has always said to me that we know enough about the origin, fate, and working of ourselves and the universe that we can comfortably say that we understand the system and there is almost certainly no god in it. We aren’t at that point right now. It may be unlikely that there is a god like the Christian god for example but I am open to anything.
Honestly Shag, I’m not sure what you are talking about. You seem to have an awful strange idea of what atheists are like and think. It is PRECISELY because there are limitations on our knowledge that keeps most of us atheists atheists. I don’t think any atheists I know say or think anything even close to the idea that “we know enough about the origin, fate, and working of ourselves and the universe” to then conclude from that knowledge that there is no god.
Why is the universe a miracle? Compared to what other universe do think it particularly, notably strange? It certainly is pretty strange compared to our everyday lives, but why would we think that all of existence would necessarily have to conform to the very limited realm and ecological niche we occupy?
We are saying basically the same thing yet arriving at a different semantic conclusion. I have heard atheists say things like “We are born, we live, and we die” and that strikes me as terribly uninquisitive and unimaginative even if the statement itself is factually correct. I think the existence of the universe does qualify as a miracle even though atheists tend to say there are no miracles.
I like to call myself the world’s only fundamental, evangelical agnostic.
Let Atheists agree before they have the nerve to criticize theists!
I’m not seeing much utility in carrying through with a discussion of that.
Theists are split, and Atheists are split, and Agnostics are all over the map. If there’s a truth to be had, many on all sides will turn out to be wrong.
Trying to sum up a person’s entire outlook on things by paraphrasing a single thing you say you’ve heard is a bit weak. I don’t see how you can characterize someone as unimaginative based on just that, nor do I see how you manage to claim that people are arrogant because they DON’T assume more than they know. Again, if you charge about atheists is that they are unwilling to even entertain or imagine all the infinite number of possibilities that might be possible… well I have to say that strikes me as a pretty big straw man/caricature of the sorts of people most non-believers are, and their positions on things.
The problem is that word actually presumes a whole lot in itself that you don’t really know: it’s exactly the sort of grand pronouncement that you are, I think falsely, accusing atheists of making.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absense. Simply because we do not not how the Universe arose there is not reason to assume any type of miracle. In fact the general lack of miracles in the part of universe that you can perceive should cause you to question why you make this assumption.
Except of course the Christian God, and Gods that resemble him, right?
Honestly it kind of sounds like you could be an athiest but dislike the flavour and connotations that are attached to the label. Most atheists are open to anything too (I am, for one) but I have a few empirical hoops I like ideas to jump though before I’ll proclaim myself a true believer. God has yet to oblige, and I think Thor must have call display because he won’t answer the bloody phone.
What about Athiests who say things like “The meaning of your life is yours to make,” and other similarly inspiring and uplifting things. Athiesm is not equal to cynicism, and if you feel that it is you’re talking to the wrong athiests.
Right, and even adding a “for the time being,” “even though I personally feel it’s open to debate,” “I’m probably out to lunch but,” or an “until empirical evidence dictates otherwise” does not put it in disagreement. There would still be plenty to debate but whether we’re in agreement about the existance of God wouldn’t be on the table.
What Czarcasm said. As well, just how many pure theists are there ? The vast majority of theists have a large collection of religious beliefs, of which belief in God or gods or goddesses is only one.
Funny, I thought that atheists knew that the presence of miracles should not lead one to assign a deity or a special power to them.
It is like in medicine a doctor telling a patient that only 1 of 200 do recuperate of an ailment, then if one does make it we call it a miracle, but those are pretty good odds. I wish I had odds that good when playing lotto. In lotto, you have 99.999993% chance of not picking all the right numbers. Yet some do.
Given a large enough sample, even the most unlikely events will happen. When I think of miracles I go for the definition of a very unlikely event, it seems to me that it is the followers of organized religion that make a great deal of attributing to their god unlikely events that are in reality falsely attributed to that respective deity, the thing that is peculiar to me is that some rules of those deities supposedly are against “being a false witness” and that then leads me to fluctuate between being a deist an agnostic or a soft atheist (The only thing I’m certain nowadays is that old time religion is not what it claims to be).
Miracles are not a good idea to use to support organized faiths…
Which is irrelevant. Theism merely espouses A god. It does not specify which god that is, as that would be beyond the scope of mere theism.
Moreover, while theists may differ on the particulars of God’s characteristics, I fail to see how this implies that God does not exist. Seventeen witnesses to a car accident would quite likely differ in their accounts of the precise events. Does this imply that the accident did not occur? Not by my reckoning, it doesn’t.
Again, irrelevant. Theism only addresses the issue of whether God exists. All other beliefs lie outside of theism.
You seem to insist that “pure theism” means belief in God alone, excluding all other religious beliefs. I see no reason to accept that definition. Moreover, it’s an eminently ridiculous standard to uphold, as belief in God would generally result in additional beliefs on matters of history or morality. By your standard, a “pure theist” should be content with believing in God, and should thus refuse to explore the matter any further. That is hardly a virtue in my eyes.
All atheists do not believe in a god. Running around claiming that there is no such thing as a god is simply unnecessary and overreaching. And it doesn’t characterize all self-labeled atheists.
100% correct.
A little less correct, because in the case of most actual, in practice beliefs, there are specific claims of how we know a particular god, many of which are mutually contradictory. There are no witnesses to a single car accident: there are instead different claims of different revelations, many of which deny the others.
Except that there is an actual car accident, right there. There is no evidence for God, beyond people asserting some sort of personal revelation or experience; if those revelations disagree on so much else, why believe the one that there is a God ?
And is naked theism a belief that any number of people hold ? The belief that there is a God, and that’s it ? And are these pure theists the people criticising atheists that the OP complains about ?
That is precisely my point. Trying to pretend atheism and theism are the same the way Squink did doesn’t work, among other reasons because there is no, or almost no, just-plain-theism for it to be contrasted to. That is one of the differences between atheism and theism, despite all the attempts by the religious the draw a false equivalence.
:dubious: Which is part of what I said; the defining quality of atheism is disbelief in gods, and nothing else. You make no sense.
If they couldn’t agree on the model, make or year of the car, on whether there were one, two or three passengers, or even where or when the accident happened, and any direct witnesses waited twenty years to come forward, and the car has disappeared off the face of the earth without even a broken headlight to show that it was there, well…you do the math.
But don’t you think it’s patently obvious that our vantage point is limited? After all, we live on a planet where we can’t even see most of the universe. We are stuck moving through time at a fixed rate, unable to intuitively even comprehend what time is. What’s more, our senses can only register that which is necessary for our survival. We can’t see things that are extremely small, and we can’t see things that are extremely far away. It’s like a blind man fumbling around in a closet trying to figure out what’s in it, and he can’t touch anything directly; he can only bounce basketballs off of things and listen to which way they rebound.
The universe is not miraculous; we’re just really bad at figuring out how things work that have nothing to do with day-to-day survival. We have no intuitive grasp of time dilation, singularities, or action-at-a-distance because those things have nothing to do with how we live our lives here on Earth, so our bodies and minds aren’t physically adapted to do that. I suppose it’s pretty amazing that we’ve figured out as much as we have, but that’s no miracle, it’s just a result of our having relatively oversized brains and being really really good with tools.
No, atheism doesn’t say that. Atheism simply means you don’t believe in God - there is no component to it that says you possess all knowledge. You don’t really sound like any agnostic I’ve ever heard before.
For me, liberal theists, with the “all climbing up different sides of the same mountain” argument, appear to deny that the god/gods/goddesses in which the multifarious religions indulge are often mutually exclusive. The Abrahamic god cannot exist if the Shinto gods do. They are not different takes the same thing, unless the theology that surrounds them is wrong. It’s a dichotomy that is often swept under the carpet. IMO, in order to remain logically consistent liberal theists must accept this.