Suffice to say, it’s flatly dishonest to equate religious faith (belief in the absence of and perhaps defiance of various evidence) with “scientific faith” (belief supported by and refusing to ignore any evidence). And once you recognize that equating the two terms is dishonest, you then recognize that applying the term ‘religious’ to scientific belief is hyperbolic. Put simply, science is not a religion. Period. If it even begins to approach being a religion, it’s long since stopped being anything resembling science, and we’d be able to tell that immidately by the rampant idiocy which would have grown up surrounding it.
This business about God being inaccessible and therefore unprovable is garbage. the term capital-G-God does not refer to some deistic entity that observes passively from the wings; it refers to an entity that meddles with detectable reality regularly. And, just like we regularly detect things only indirectly, through their effects, similarly we could theoretically detect God by its effects. Gravity’s invisible too, but that doesn’t stop us from scientifically studying it.
Regardless, the atheistic position is the rational defaut position, realizing that the rational atheistic position would accept good, compelling evidence for God (or for Odin, or Thor, or Vishnu, or ghosts, or leprachauns, or unicorns, or FSMs, or orbiting teapots), if such evidence should arrive and present itself in a way that unambiguously suggests that God (or whatever) is the actual cause of the evidence in question.
Of course, not such evidence has appeared, which is why there are still athests. Enough said.
They don’t have to establish his non-existance, his existance has to be established first. There is no reason to jump to a ‘god did it’ conclusion when everything we’ve found so far shows that it he didn’t have to do it. Until god can be shown to have done something, there’s no reason to believe he did anything.
Of course there’s a dispensation, and it has nothing to do with anything you’ve talked about. Religion has been the norm for so long, and is so ingrained into most people’s upbringing, that saying anything against it is considered taboo.
Um, why bother with another system? Rationality works just fine. Name something that is known to be true, but was not arrived at using any form of reason.
This is gibberish. Why is a consistant system never complete? And why is a system that strives for completeness not consistant? What about mathematics? And what makes you think religion strives for completeness? From what I’ve seen this is not the case.
Actually it’s been shown that any sufficiently powerful (mathematical/logical) system will not be “complete”; that is, it will not be able to calculate the truth values of all correctly formed (non-gibberish) statements. Specifically the sorts of statements it will not be able to calculate are ones like “This statement is False”: self-referencing statements that either don’t have a truth value, or it can’t possibly be calculated. This being proven was a great shock to mathematicians at the time, but really doesn’t effect things much for most people in practice.
The real joke, here, is that somebody’s trying to apply Godel’s theorem and use it as a defense of religion, by claiming that religion is trying to be complete. By that definition of the term, for it to be complete, it’d have to be able to tell you the (correct) answers to all mathematical questions. As in, what’s the catholic opinion on the value of the square root of two? How does one use the bible to find the solution for various specific differential equations? Is there a variant solution for polynomials in the protestant church?
Of course, the joke on top of the joke is, no system can be complete, and an ‘aspiration’ to completeness certainly doesn’t imply inconsistency, since incompleteness is (mostly) just about being unable to answer questions that don’t have an answer. However, despite it never being necessary for anything to be inconsistent, he admitted that religion is inconsistent anyway. And there’s certainly no reason to use an inconsistent system.
Very much so. But only as far as the baseball viewing analagoy is concerned. I’m not questioning the intellect of the Cubs fans at all. I’ll wait until the season starts to do that.
(I was, and still am to some extent, a big Cubs fan)
You’ve got to be off your head. Putting words in one person’s mouth in a debate is bad enough, but to give a totally contrived quote and attribute it to everyone who is “athiest”?
Hmm, I overlooked this. Congratulations, you have just placed your picture in the dictionary next to “strawman”. What, are we not stupid enough for you? Is our position so much better than yours, is atheism so much more better than theism, that you have no alternative but to make up something stupid and argue against your made up tomfoolery, in the vain hope of convincing somebody that we are as stupid as you pretend?
The problem with this faked up “atheist position” of yours is that so far as I know no atheist holds it. Don’t buy everything you read on a message board; some of us have been known to wax hyperbolic, especially when arguing a point. (And, how do you know that all the offending posters were atheists anyway? I’ve known theists that are emotionally attached to their kids too.)
Now, why would you possibly think that anyone would buy your little strawman? Hmm, let’s try something, turn it around and see how that works?
“God exists. God is everything. The only proper objective is to obey God, to ensure py place in the afterlife by doing any damn thing I think my God wants… By whatever means possible. If I have to nuke one or more continents to carry out my God’s desires as I understand them, then bring on the radioactive fallout, (even over my offspring, of course.)”
How is that not a perfectly reasonable thiest mindset? Why should I care about **anything ** other than my God and what it wants? Other things have importance only as they relate to that.
Ah! The light dawns. You think the atheists are as dogmatic about their survival as theists are about their God. Sorry son, that’s not how it works. We have to weigh all the relevent factors; no single factor has power to tell us unilaterally what to do.
You may have answered this Raindog, if so I apologize, but you’ve been flailing around in an apparent panic, so I’d like to put it to you again:
A theist believes that there is a god having no evidence whatsoever. Feel free to post any you may have found, you would however be the first person in history to do so.
An Atheist notes that there is no evidence for god’s existence. Much as there is no evidence for invisible zombies. To believe in one of the two with no proof is silly. An Atheist doesn’t hold a faith based belief, he examines the available evidence for god (which as I said earlier amounts to no evidence), and comes to the conclusion that there is no reason to believe in a moronic fairy story that is designed to placate soft-heads.
One is faith, and in fact is iconic of ignorance. The other is reasonable based on our scientific discoveries.
Will you admit that Atheism isn’t a faith? Science is no more a religion than engineering is. Why do you suggest it is the equal of religion? Science has evidence backing it up. Theism has nothing but hopeful wishes.
I’m curious if he’ll give you an answer - though the real answer is that it’s so much more convenient for the theists if atheism is not a more sensible thing to believe. After all, if atheism is obviously the more rational and intelligent thing to believe, then what does that make the theist?
I did. Summation: I think that he should not bring up the subject with his mother unless her religion causes her to start doing something he considers heinous. Though, if she should happen to bring up the subject to him, he should explain the reasoning behind his beliefs, preferably as straightforwardly and simply as possible, and drop the subject when she does.
I also complained about the hijack, and was promptly goaded as a result.
begbert2, my question wasn’t directed at you. I’m sorry if it seemed that it was. I read your earlier reponse. I think your response was brilliant - since I agree.
It was a sort of general question/comment. Interesting though the various posts have been, they have wandered off a bit.
And, I believe I’ll frame this as well. Not only does it accurately represent our positions as subjective, (our ‘reason to believe’) it implicitly acknowledges that this God those theists keep spouting off about may actually exist.
Why should I be afraid? I’m among my own kind,; in fact I’m a Charter Member! No, I feel quite at home here, although I appreciate that you have my back.
As to your question, there is no scientific evidence that objectively establishes the existence of God. (as Apollyon so elegantly put it, “who is not detectable by scientific methods.”)
Alas, of course, using scientific methods I can’t establish his non-existence either.
No worry though, I have no interest in looking for this God fellow any more than I have in looking for Zombies.
So, I am an atheist. I choose to believe no such God exists.
You go boy!
Well put. Worthy of framing. 'We have come[s]to the conclusion that there is no reason to believe.'
Exactly. Exactly!
I’d tread carefully here. I’ve always thought it best to under promise and over deliver, you know? The fact is, many of those theists are quite bright. At the same time, many of our kind our abject idiots. It’s been my observation that both brilliance and ignorance are fairly evenly distributed.
It’s best to stress that our beliefs are reasonable, as you’ve noted.
Sure!
The word faith is generally associated with a belief in God. The theists sometimes describe it as ‘the assured expectation of things hoped for but but not beheld.’
And while that accurately describes the tenets of atheism, and in fact, parts of science we haven’t yet objectively proven, it is a word that is bound to piss someone off.
It does me.
I prefer to call it, *“a subjective belief system with roots in objective science, and my own deductive reasoning, logic, and common sense.”
*
Absolutely 100% spot on true.
I have never [contextually] said that science was “the equal of religion.”
Not once. Not ever.
Lurker Alert
For those playing at home, and who may be concerned that a loved one is being caught up in the cult of “science as religion”, a tell tale sign is the use of science and atheism interchangeably.
Science may make up the bedrock of [our] atheism, but in the end a non-religionist atheist doesn’t defame science by ascribing positions about the existence of a supernatural God that it does not, and cannot take.
In this post Lobohan has consistently rendered the words “science” and “atheism” as qualitatively the same, and used them interchangeably.
That is a sure sign that someone has tried to co-opt science to render his subjective beliefs as objective truths.
You’ve got it backwards. Because science can find no evidence that something exists, even though people still believe it does, it gets called supernatural. Science says that it has never found evidence of god, not that it isn’t capable of doing so.
Yeah? Name one.
Were they detectable? Yes. Could we detect them? No. Did they exist, from our point of view, until we could? No.
Um, yeah, it kinda does. Science has never detected ghosts. In any form, any manner, nothing, no ghosts. So we have no reason to believe that ghosts exist. Functionally, from our point of view, science can behave as if ghosts do not exist without making the statement that they don’t. If you claim that something exists, in some other dimension or plane or something, but that thing can’t interact with our universe at all and can’t be detected at all, then what’s the difference between that and it not existing, from our point of view?
It doesn’t have to. No evidence has been presented to make us think that god does exist. It isn’t up to science to disprove god, that’s a ridiculous expectation. It’s up to the believers to prove god exists, and then science can look at the evidence.
And you would be wrong. There is no reason science cannot establish the existence of something, provided we have evidence for it. If we have no evidence for it, why bother believing it exists at all? Science doesn’t need to get involved until there is actual evidence to examine.
Um, nope, I don’t get this. It’s part strawman, atheism is not a belief. And I don’t get the last part at all. If there are no bodies or people missing or other evidence, why claim OJ is a murderer? With no evidence whatsoever, why claim that god exists? Obviously, without that whole ‘something to not believe in’, there is no atheism, just like there is no a-large-mecha-cow-floating-in-orbit-around-jupiter-ism.
Um, no. It sounds like you don’t quite understand what science is. Anything that effects the universe, actually changes it in some way, is potentially observable, even it isn’t direct. That whole observability thing is kind of what science is built on.
Yeah? Prove it.
Um, no. Where do you get subjectivity in what should be seen as a very objective statement? And yes, once again, atheism does acknowledge that god may actually exist. Because of the complete lack of evidence that god exists, however, it is perfectly rational to behave as if he didn’t.
It doesn’t matter what you prefer to call it. You’re twisting words to make it fit the pattern you’ve already decided. Atheism is not a belief. It’s simple really, if athiesm is a belief, then name the thing athiests believe in.
This is a distraction tactic, falsely accusing a poster of something which you gave no proof of him doing. Where does he defame science? Where does use science and atheism interchangeably? This looks malicious, and is almost enough of a reason to dismiss anything you say out of hand.
I’ve finally seen the message board version of the wookie defense.
From this I take that you think Religion gets a special pass. That even though science can’t prove or disprove god, somehow that makes it more likely than bigfoot.
One must take a moment to reflect on the similarities between bigfoot and wookies…
Okay, so what I’m getting here is the idea that you think religion is somehow special. And good for you. I wish I could live in a batshit insane fantasy world and pretend everything was groovy.
Science has no proof for god. There is then no reason to believe in it. Just like bigfoot. Atheism is the recognition of that fact and stating it. It isn’t the opposite of religion, and anyone can see that. You are choosing not to. Or simply incapable of seeing the obvious.
On Topic:
Mojo, let your mom have her beliefs. Someone who’s invested their whole lives in believing in fairy stories isn’t going to give them up. Religion makes people believe things with no proof. You can’t unprove it to them. If she’s happy and not self-destructive good for her. If you want to further the cause of atheism, work on the people who haven’t surrendered reason yet.
Nicely put.
