I think Atheism is as much pure belief (delusional if you will) as any other religious dogma. I wouldn’t say the same for those who are agnostic on the matter. I think if we are shooting for intellectual rigour, we would have to agree we simply don’t know.
Plenty of times, absolutely. We’ve done it for years now as technology and science push God into an ever-receding pocket of ignorance.
Even if you can’t open the safe, it doesn’t mean you know what’s in there, either.
Atheism doesn’t require affirmative belief, so “we don’t know” is not inconsistent with atheism.
mishagoe: Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy? No? You must be delusional!
PS: read what I said earlier about agnosticism. Most atheists are also agnostic.
And if you’ve never seen it, it must not exist.
So explain this god thing, again?
40 proofs of God’s existence: 40 Proofs of God's Existence - YouTube
Maybe you aren’t looking hard enough. Science assumes that we can’t know a lot of things, for instance.
No scientist I know of thinks we’ll ever have a time viewer or anything like that. So no watching Carthage or learning how to pronounce ancient Egyptian with an Alexandrian accent. There is a lot we don’t know and never will know.
Because there has never been evidence of a supernatural event. Prayer does nothing, for instance.
I was religious for the first twelve years or so of my life. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.
I have read the bible, and it is so utterly obviously the rantings of a particularly ignorant group of stinking bronze-age goat-herders it does not make a compelling argument.
No evidence that you might accept, perhaps? Or is this an absolute statement of fact?
Of course I can prove it: self-consious beings exist. Stating that is no more self-important than to state: planets exist and are an outcome of the starting conditions. Why should self-conscious being be any less or more priveledged to exist than planets?
Provide the evidence and we’ll see.
The ghost of DtC lives on.
In MB atheism “There is no proof of a God”, and “There is no God” are qualitatively the same statement.
Will any of you own up to your faith?
Any of you?
Of course there has been evidence. That is MB atheism confusion; the type of confusion that thinks that “evidence” and “proof” are synonyms.
Read my post above. There is no reason that something possible has to happen.
It’s possible you’ll have an aneurysm and die as you’re reading *this *word. It was possible, but it didn’t happen.
We don’t have enough information to know how likely life is. Which is where science is different than religion. Religion would just make up an answer.
Privilege is a human concept that doesn’t factor into it. It seems to me that as you move from the largest scale down to the smallest, there’s more and more random chance involved. There would be no life on earth if it was a bit closer to the sun or a little farther from it, or if its composition was a little different. Just because something turned out one way doesn’t mean it couldn’t have possibly turned out any other way.
Yes I am delusional regarding the Tooth Fairy. Since most atheists are also agnostic then no need to classify anyone with a different belief as delusional. I am also delusional about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. I’m not a perfectly rigorous intellectual.
What evidence in particular?
Note, feeling extra-special when you see a sunset will not be considered evidence for this purpose.
True, but that is only important for us earthlings I would argue there is bound to be life somewhere in the Universe.
I didn’t make either statement, but OK.
It’s as close to absolute as you can get.
Speaking of which, and since there’s already been attempts to custom design word definitions in this thread, I’ll say that I regard “agnosticism” as code for “can’t admit that atheism is obviously the truth”. People don’t take “agnostic” positions on anything unless they are trying to defend something obviously false, like religion. You don’t see adults using agnosticism as a defense for believing in Santa Claus. The evidence is overwhelmingly against the claims of the various religions of the world even being possible, much less true; and if it was treated like any normal belief that means “religion is false” would be perfectly acceptable. Instead for religion we are supposed to apply a standard of knowledge that can only be achieved in pure mathematics.
But that statement is made repeatedly, and often; both implicitly and by association.