Well believe that you want to , and then go and do it.
It’s turtles all the way down. If you believe that you want to then you will want to. Unless there is some physical reason why you can’t do it then the only limitation is your belief.
The key words are really want to do so. I think your post is an accurate and welcome way to learn about ourselves and others. Usually speaking when one really wants to change there is a reason for it. In frustration one may say “there’s got to be a better way,” and then seek that way by examining and changing self defeating beliefs. That’s basically what you said.
The catalyst for change can be many things, from personal experience, to insights, or the discovery of new data. People can change from atheists to theists in one personal experience, and the reverse is true also.
Keeping your mind set open to new data is the key to knowledge and finally wisdom. If you really believe you have the answer to everything your mind is locked. You become static.
Not believing in something is not a belief. It isn’t anything. No one runs around squinting their eyes tight in the hard effort of non-believing. Not believing is just something one doesn’t do.
I choice not to believe may indeed be a choice, but that doesn’t make non-belief a belief. And one can not believe without even actually choosing to do so: one might never even encounter the idea, or never consider it.
Non-belief is not a belief in the same way that not having an apple is not a type of apple.
[quote]
But I will quit that line of reasoning to be civil if you wish.[/quite]
You can’t quit a line of reasoning if it’s isn’t a line of reasoning to begin with.
Thanks, we will continue to use the English language with your blessing! 
You may want to keep an open mind. You may want to do some studying and consider new information. I don’t think you specifically want to change what you believe. I think that just happens as a result of the others.
I don’t think that’s true in this case though. There are so many people who believe in religion and and such a long history of belief in religion that it is in fact the default poistion, or at the very least a reasonable default position. Most people are told that gods and the afterlife exist from the time they can talk. Because of that not believeing in religion is a belief. Not a faith based belief perhaps, but a belief nonetheless.
To use an analogy, I am an anthropogenic global warming skeptic in the same way that an atheist is a god skeptic. I have yet to see sufficient evidence to convince me that such an entity exists, though I remain open to having my mind changed on presentation of fresh evidence. It would be extremely disingenuous of me to start saying that my lack of belief is some sort of default position, that I don’t need to put any effort into such a position despite the monumental number of people of all stripes who are diametrically opposed. Of course it requires effort. All else aside it requires an effort to find alternative explantions of the observed facts.
Religion is no different IMO. Of course it requires an effort not to believe in gods or the afterlife in the face of constant testing of that position by theists. It requires an effort, howver minimal, to counter the arguments of the Kirk Cameron’s and Jack Chicks of this world when they argue that religion is required to explain life, or to form a a basis of morality.
This is another debate of course, but I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to say that it requires no effort to disbelieve evolution, or to disbelieve anthropgenic global wamring, or to disbelieve a heliocentric solar system. I suspect that it takes a huge amount of effort to disbelieve those things because they are default positions. And for the same reason I believe that it requires effort to disbelieve religion.
Uh… which case? You mean in the case of unbelievers? Well, in that case, you’re just wrong. It’s not hard to figure out what is and isn’t a belief, and for many many many unbelievers, including the majority that aren’t even interested in threads like this, it isn’t, plain and simple.
That’s not how it works. Philosophical default positions are those in which one doesn’t assert anything in particular, and they work out from there building on claims. They are not synonymous with the ad populumn fallacy. Nothing about the sheer number of people believing in anything makes it more or less reasonable.
Look at the plain English meanings of the words you are using, and you’ll see that they don’t make any literal sense. (i.e. not believing… is a belief) Furthermore, ignoring that and pretending that even if they did, your argument is still lousy. Because lots of people believe something and even if you were taught it, losing that belief is itself a belief? That’s just pure confusion. Maybe what you want to say is that people who were once believers but later are not often have ideas and explanation ABOUT why they left or discarded their religion, or put effort into getting out of old habits of thought and so forth. But that isn’t the same thing as making their actual lack of belief in religion itself into a belief. Nor is it always even true. Myself, I was raised and confirmed Christian. But did I have a big moment of suddenly even rejecting that belief? No. I simply forgot about it, became involved in other things and never even realized that I had stopped actively believing. It was only later that I realized that I wasn’t a believer and thought about the issue in more depth… and figured out things like how silly it is to talk about not believing AS itself a belief.
Ah, so is this a backhanded way of trying to call me disingenuous?
But the reality is that you are wrong, in both cases. Not believing in something is the default position. It really doesn’t require effort or thought. That is neither necessarily laudable or criminal. It only is if and only if you are ignoring compelling evidence this way or that, or missing some important truth. But that doesn’t make lack of belief any more or less the default position. Global warming proponents may have the burden of proof on their side, but if and only if they have established a good empirical case for it. The philosophical default there too is not about what most people believe at any given time. Think of how silly that would make philosophical default positions: instead of being timeless referrents, we’d have a different one each week with the waxing and waning of different ideas in the public! One week, the idea that Saddam had WMD would be the “default” position, and the next week the opposite!
And what were people who existed before anyone had ever heard of global warming? Disingenuous believers in non-global warming?
Again, I suspect that you may mean something a whole lot weaker than “default position” in the sense I and most people use it in a philosophical way. Maybe you just mean: “it’s the general environment and the peer pressure of ideas for most people.” Well in that case, sure. But then that more frank description doesn’t really get you where you want to go in establishing that not believing is a belief, or any other such bizarrity.
Really? What observed facts support the claims of religion? Which is the burden of proof that has been established in favor of… wait, which God is the true God again?
Like lekatt, you seem to be confusion belief in no God with having opinions about the quality of arguments made by theists for God. But you can’t equivocate like that. They aren’t the same objects. Not believing in god isn’t the same question as “what do you think of religion or the claims made by believers.”
Lots of people make arguments. I can find them compelling or no independently of what I believe (or I can just never pay attention to them because all I think about are hot chicks and tax returns). So?
Worse, many THEISTS don’t find their arguments very good, and counter them. Does that make them unbelievers? By your own tortured definitions it would: they are, after all, engaging in the exact same behavior you say is sufficient to qualify as an “atheist” belief.
Well, that isn’t my experience, sorry, and you really have no business telling other people what they do or think, or how much effort they put into things, or whether they believe something or they don’t. You also probably confusing several different things in your mind: whether people make ongoing efforts to not believe or have all sorts of beliefs about no Gods, and whether they make efforts to counter religious arguments or have opinions about religion and so forth. The latter does not translate into the former.
And that is an argument from assertion, plain and simple.
I say that is is extremely hard to figure out what is and isn’t a belief, yet for most unbelievers, including the majority that aren’t even interested in threads like this, it is plain and simple. Now where does that leave us? Simple gainsaying doe not amke a debate,
We aren’t talking about philosophical default positions. We are talking about psychological default positions. It is important for you not to confuse the two.
Philosophically the default position may be to not assert that the Earth is any shape, but we all know that the psychological default position is to believe that it is flat or gently curved. It comes as quite a shock to people when they are first told that the Earth is a sphere. This is yet another example of where believing nothing in fact takes an effort. It would take a real effort for a human not to believe the Earth was flat.
Well it’s a jolly good thing that nobody has utilsied an ad populaum falacy or said that the sheer number of people believing in anything makes it more or less reasonable.
But thanks for the strawman.
They make perfect literal sense.
That’s right, just as a negative number is a number.
I suspect the problem here is that you are arguing from your conlcusion. You have started with the premise that “not believing” is an absence of belief and then tried to use that premise to wangle a literal semantic inconsitency. Of course th eporblme is that you are simply begging the quetsion. “Not believing is an absence of belief” is your conclusion. You can’t use it as your premise.
My premise is that “not believing” in things like a flat Earth or religion is in fact a negative belief. It is no more an absence of belief than a negative temperature is an absence of temperature.
No, it isn’t, but your entire post seems to be this sort of argument from assertion.
It is exactly the same thing.
So what is your point? That every atheist is like you?
If you knew my reputation you would know that if I wanted to call you disingenuous I would do so.
It was my way of saying that If I applied your position to my own ciscumstance sI woudl be disingenuous, because I know that my skeptical position requires effort. In your case I belieev you have adopted you position out of genuine ignorance, which is very different.
Really? So you are saying that if we picked a random 6 year old and asked him what shape the Earth was he would say that he didn’t believe in it being flat because such a lack of belief is the default position? What absolute nonsense. A child believes the world is flat as the default position. He believes his parents love him as the default position, he believes the sun will rise tommorow as the default position.
The idea that any human being adopts a default postion of no belief is patently absurd. As soon as any human being has any reason to even consider an issue he immediately believes something about it as the default. That is why scientists need trianing: to learn how not to accept that default belief that we call “prejudice” or “common sense”.
Here you go again with the “philosophical default” line. We are not talking about philosophical defaults. We are talking about psychological defaults. What happens within your philosophy is irrelevant because we are tlaking about what requires effort.
Are you really trying to contend that it takes less effort to have no belief concerning the effects of dropping an object than it does to believe that it will fall to the ground?That is ridiculous. The psychological default position to is to believe that a dropped object will gfall to the ground. Nobody in the history of the world has ever adopted a default position of having no belief that solid objects fall.
No, they were people who had no concept of global warming. That is very different from the case of an atheist in the modern world who quite clearly can not have no concept of religion. Quite frankly your comparison is bizarre.
Again you seem to be working under an assumption that we are discussing philisophical default positons, which we never were.
Is this meant to be rhetorical? The very existence of complex life was held to support religion by the greatest minds until what, 200 years ago. To claim ignorance of this observed fact supporting religion is extremely peculiar. Of course we cna now if we wish accept an alterntaive position that it simply supports evolution, but that simply brings us back to my original contention: it takes as much or more effort to disbelieve religion by adopting an alterntaive belief in evolution as it ever did to believe in it.
Nice strawman. Please quote where I ever said that that a burden of proof has been established in favor of a god or gods otherwise withdarw the question.
No, I am doing no such thing.
Exactly, so? What is your point here? This seems to be a total non-sequitur. My point is that when a person is presented with a statement of the way reality is that is suported by argument and evidence with no evidence or argument counter to it the default position is simply to accept the statement. The idea that an argument with evidence and no refutation can be other than compelling is nonsensical.
WTF 
Maybe this makes sense on bizarro world, but on this one it just makes my head hurt. Of course a theist who doesn’t believe the arguments of another theist is an unbeliever in the arguments of that other theist.
I can only assume that you are trying (poorly) to employ a fallacy of composition; that since an “unbeleiver in a specific argument for a specific deity” is an unbeliever and and an “atheist” is an unbeleiver they must somehow both be atheists. You may call my defintions tortured but at least my arguements aren’t composed of blatant logical fallacies like this one.
So your experience has been that people find it just as easy to disbelieve that the walls are solid and accept quantum physics as the find it to believe that the walls are solid? All I can say is that your expereince really must be of Bizarro world because on this world peope have great difficulty disbeleiving that apprently solid objects are solid and stuggle with quantum physics for precisely that reason.
:eek: Dude your level of bald-faced hypocrisy is staggering.
The sole reaon that I was drawn into this debate is becasue you told me that “No one runs around squinting their eyes tight in the hard effort of non-believing.” I was drawn into this because you told me what I think and how much effort I put into things.
Pot- kettle. Kettle-pot.
At least I had the good manners not to try to tell you not to do it. This is GD my man. I will tell you what you do or think, or how much effort you put into things as I choose, and it will be my business until such time as the Mods decide it has stopped being a debate.
But in aside from your hypocrisy your argument is nothing more than logical fallacies: attempting to shift the goalposts by focussing solely on philosophical defaults, fallacies of composition, straw-men, begging the question just to name a few. Added to that are your bizarre claims that in your experience people have no belief in a flat earth, no belief in the solidity of objects and no belief in gravity as a default position. I really don’t know what world you are drawing your experience from, but it’s not the one I inhabit.
Blake’s tortured logic reminds me of the last chapter of Dawkins’ The God Delusion, in which he discusses a “proof” given by the Catholic Church for the existence of purgatory. Essentially, the argument was: Many people pray for the dead. But it wouldn’t make sense to pray for the dead unless they needed it for something. Therefore there must be a purgatory.
The idea that an assertion becomes the “default position” because a lot of people believe in it is sheer nonsense.
The idea that I should believe something because a lot of people believe it is even worse. Too many people are too stupid or too gullible to make this a reasonable position to take.
Yes, I do want to change my beliefs to come ever closer to the truth of reality. That is why I read material opposed to my belief system. I can’t learn anything from those who think as I do. I keep hoping I will find some new data that will change what I believe and put one more piece into the puzzle of life. I believe what I believe through experience, reason and logic. Tough logic, brutal honesty, that often goes against my preferences. I post here because it sharpens my focus, and on occasion gives me new data.
Blake, if you ask a child if the shape of the world is round and such child doesn’t have any information one way or the other, he will say “I don’t know” or will probably say, “It seems flat to me”. If you ask the same child if there is a dragon floating beside him, in the absence of any evidence, that child will say no. The difference here is absence of any evidence. If you’ve seen the sun rise every morning, you would have some evidence in your belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is in no way analagous to a belief in a deity for which there is no evidence.
Yes, and the fact that the Sun rises (not really) everyday is evidence of intelligence. There is a great deal of evidence that points to the existence of God. The precise order of our Universe. Precise orbits of the planets, the cooperation of vegetation, and animals to balance life. The currents of the ocean and winds. All this implies intelligence, a director who put the systems in place and monitors them. Then there is millions of people who have spiritual experiences every day. There is not one society on earth that didn’t believe in an after life. The evidence is plentiful and abundant. Some of us have experienced God. There is research that shows consciousness continues after the death of the body. I could write a book of the evidence you can’t seem to find. But each to his own beliefs.
No, no, please do go on about the evidence.
No, I think lekatt is right. They covered this in the movie “The Man With Two Brains” (Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin). It’s real. I swear.
By all means, write the book.
Cooperation like in the case of parasitoid wasps, who lay their eggs in the living bodies of their hosts? (Kind of like Alien, but messier.)
And what do you mean by precise orbits? The ancient thought the orbits of planets had to be “perfect” circles, but they are in fact ellipses, just as we’d expect if only gravity was responsible. Not to mention asteroids and comets whose orbits are perturbed, and end their lives crashing into planets. The craters of the moon show that the early solar system did not consist of a lot of bodies in perfect orbits, but a cosmic pinball game, (maybe pachinko is a better image) that only settled down when most of the debris had been absorbed by planets or had crashed into them.
Finally, any evidence of any deities doing anything to keep the system in order, or did they just monitor as the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and perhaps the really nasty one in the Permian did a far better extinction job.
In fact, you are correct, but unfortunately you’ve run into the one realm in which argument from assertion is 100% legitimate. What is that realm? It’s the question of asserting what a given person does or does not believe: the contents of their own mind, of which only they have actual access to. The ONLY standard of relevance to that is what the person in question asserts. And given that unbelievers DO assert that they really are non-believers, and not believers in some rarefied non-god philosophy, what more is there really to say?
There is no debate when it comes to people reporting what’s in their minds. Either you accept what they are saying is true, or you basically just accuse them of either lying, or you knowing better the content of their own thoughts, which is pretty darn presumptuous.
The only one confused is yourself. If you do not (as I addressed later on), mean philosophical default position, then you have no argument at all.
So then you are claiming that one should go around asserting that the “Earth is flat” is the “default position”?
You most certainly did. That has been pretty much the entire thrust of your argument: that somehow just because lots of people believe something, that one cannot not believe it without believing the opposite, or believing anything in particular.
Not so. Not going to the bank is not a way of going the bank. If I don’t buy an apple, I don’t then own a TYPE of apple. Not believing in something is not itself a form of belief. Plain English. In plain logic, there is a clear distinction between B~X and ~BX. I don’t know how I could make it any simpler to understand.
This is a facetious example. We aren’t talking about negatives, but lacks. Lacking something is not the same thing as having a type of something. Negative numbers are types of numbers: they are defined as such. But lacking any number value for something is not itself a number.
No, I have started from English and logic. Not doing a particular something is not a form of doing. That’s what “not” means. This is pretty basic, and it might well looking like I’m begging the question. The problem is that you really can’t do what you are doing without breaking apart logic and language entirely.
Again, a completely facetious example. Negatives are simply defined as points in a certain direction on a continuum. Not even remotely the same thing as either having something or not having it.
This isn’t a response, it’s a dodge. My argument is not simply an assertion, it’s asking you to look at your own words and see that they make no logical sense. Losing belief X does not require any particular new belief. Never having belief X does not require having any other particular belief.
I at least bothered to address your arguments in more than a rapid fire bunch of “you are rubber, I am glue” drivebys. Could you maybe do the same?
It isn’t the same thing because the objects of beliefs are different. One is a belief or opinion about the soundness of CLAIMS, while the other is a belief about the universe (i.e. do I believe that it contains a god or not)
Again, tossing out a few token words in order to pretend to respond to me doesn’t cut it: this was an example of how losing a belief required no particular effort or thought or new belief, which flatly contradicts your premise, even if it ever happened once.
I’m coming to my own independent assessment of you then, I think.
You are simply using “default position” here as “what often is the case today,” which is utterly toothless as a proposition, and does nothing to demonstrate that losing a belief in the flat earth, or becoming skeptical of it, requires that one believe something else. One merely has to find their reasons for belief suspect and discard them. Or simply forget about them entirely.
Every human being is born without the ability to believe in propositions. They gain it as they grow. Some people may be taught the proposition that there is a god, and believe that. Others might not be, and never believe it. Of that latter group, how can it possibly be said that not believing is a belief?
Yes, being humans living on a planet with gravity, the evidence for gravity really does pile up pretty darn quickly, perhaps even aided by some predisposition to find the idea compelling. But a baby raised on a space station wouldn’t have the same experience at all. So talking about one baby’s position as being the “default” seems awfully parochial and hence of dubious usefulness in establishing anything, let alone proving that not doing something is a form of doing something.
You are neglecting all the perfectly real and common categories such as “I don’t know” “I don’t care about the issue” “I find the claims made FOR this unconvincing” and so forth. None of those require some special anti-belief. Rejecting a belief you once had may well take some amount of effort, but not a new belief. As far as the question of God goes, the general move is to find the arguments for God to be dubious, and then simply to give up the belief IN God, and simply not move back to not knowing things that the God idea once supposedly explained.
Again, this is all pointless then. If you claim that it requires thought to see that arguments are unconvincing, and these arguments are very common in our particular time and place in history, then what you are saying is certainly often trivially true in the here and now, though as I pointed out in my case, not always true. But it most certainly doesn’t get you anywhere near establishing the idea that BELIEFS are necessary to discard other beliefs, and that simply not believing in something is itself a belief.
Please, tell me, when I sit down playing World of Warcraft and thinking about getting some better gear, which is my “non-god” belief that’s actively going in around in my mind? The answer is: nowhere. I’m not a believer, and so the subject doesn’t even come up. When it does, what I see are arguments that I don’t find to be very good, or which I’ve considered and found wanting, and so hence take no action on them in regards to a new belief about the cosmos. And then back to living my life I go, without any constant straining not to believe at all.
That is, in fact, how all people in the world begin. It is only with experience that they learn how the world works: when objects really DO behave in a certain way over and over.
The case is far far weaker with religion. Religious belief is mostly something that has to be taught (though certainly some people can come up with such ideas on their own, as they can about anything), and isn’t always. It makes little sense then to assign it as general default of any sort, unless you are just overly impressed by the numbers of people that believe something in this present era. And even if it did, that would be totally irrelevant as to whether or not discarding that belief required making further beliefs to replace it.
Not in the least. While there are few people who have no concept of religion, there are plenty that passively have not taken any interest in it, which amounts to the same thing. The same for global warming, even. Some people haven’t even looked at the evidence, much less formed an opinion about it. And some have. But do those that have really need to run around believing that it doesn’t exist? Or can they just have looked into the matter, been unconvinced, and gone about their daily lives exactly as before they had ever even heard of the concept? Seems to me that the latter is both common and completely refutes your idea to boot.
Either we were and your argument was going somewhere, or we aren’t and it doesn’t go anywhere. I already discussed this at the end of my post.
You keep switching back to this “effort” thing, which is very disingenuous of you. sure, in the particular set of circumstances of the world today, it might take effort for someone raised to believe in god that to see that this belief is unwarranted. But that still does not make discarding that belief itself an act of belief.
And my response was based on your claim that there is a legitimate body of evidence to contend with and explain away in the case of global warming. We simply do not have the same thing in the case of religion. We have instead a commonly assumed body of evidence that turned out to be wrong. But that assumption was neither necessary nor universal. Nor was the conclusion ever mandated. Culturally, sure, it was very common. But so what? How does that magically transform the process of seeing that an ARGUMENT is flawed, and rejecting it and the beliefs it implies, into a belief itself. You speak of great minds, but many people like Hume rejected the argument of design without believing in any particular alternative.
Give me a break. You compared this issue to global warming and then brought up the idea that there is lots of evidence that has to be explained away, not me. You can’t just call out logical fallacies at random to speed through a response.
Sure you are. That’s exactly what’s going on when you keep jumping back and forth from “effort” to “belief.”
Not at all. This is what the burden of proof is. The burden is on the claimant to make the case. It’s not default on anyone to accept their case, or even to care about their case.
Maybe you’re so confused precisely because of that argument/conclusion thing I have been trying to point out. It’s a pretty important idea, basic to all logic.
A false characterization isn’t particularly fair. I am pointing out that you are claiming that one person is a believer (in atheism) and another is not, despite the fact that the behavior of each is the same, and in the former case the behavior is sufficient for you to claim that they have a belief.
Nice try, but you’ve yet to establish anything even close to the idea that religion has the sort of established burden of evidence as solid walls. And given that you basically proudly demanded I retract claiming that there was a body of evidence for religion, the fact that you come back to basically implying the same thing again is a little silly.
Give me a break. Are you really trying to assert the opposite? Believers spend time and effort believing in their god. Most non-believers spend their time doing and thinking about other things than religion questions. Even those that do think about these questions, like myself, spend time thinking about evidence and logic and the validity of arguments: what we don’t do is constantly strain to NOT BELIEVE, as if this took some sort of constant exertion of effort to resist on our part. No doubt there are some non-believers like that who are so ingrained into belief that it is a habit they slip into. But even those people may eventually put that behind them, at which point there again, is no effort expended, let alone do they have any particular BELIEFS about the non-existence of deities.
Please stop making things up: I did no such thing.
It’s hardly good manners for you to tell me what I think, when you have absolutely no way of knowing. As Lincoln noted, claiming to know something you have no actual ability to know is flat out lying.
Being able to list the names of fallacies is not the same thing as being able to substantiate the charges. And nearly effortless, one line fallacy call-outs most certainly don’t suffice for that, I’m afraid.
Depending on whose research you read: 80 to 94 percent of all people believe in God. It is true that many inherited those beliefs from their parents, but most think there is plenty of evidence that God exists. Miracles, visions, dreams, and experiences like out-of-body and near death experiences have convinced many of the existence of God. We look at our world and see the order and beauty of it. So there is plenty of evidence that God exists to believers. I realize that evidence is not good enough for science. But as for me I don’t care that science says there is no God, I experience God on a daily basis. I experience the Oneness of all things, the love and compassion of living in this physical life. To me that is plenty of evidence. I am sorry you can’t feel it or see it. Some religions call it enlightenment. Some conversion. But it is very real to those that experience it.
Helen Keller, blind and deaf as an infant. Her teacher could not communicate with her in any way. So the teacher would stick her hand into a bucket of water, then write the word WATER on the palm of her hand. Helen couldn’t make the connection between the water on her hand and the word written in her palm. For 18 months, every day, the teacher would allow her to experience water and then write the word water on the palm of her hand. Then one day is happened, she understood the connection between the experience of water and the word water written on her palm. For that point on her life change dramatically because she could communicate with her teacher.
That is what enlightenment is all about, one day it happens and you know who you are and what you are doing here. You can communicate with God. Science will never change that no matter how much it preaches there is no God.
Again, this is irrelevant to the question. It’s ad pop fallacy, plain and simple. Worse, all these people disagree on what is true, theologically in very real and very ultimate ways.
The problem with all of these is that they are simply experiences, and internal experiences at that. We can’t directly conclude any specific thing about the world from them. Even if we simply jump to supernatural explanations, there are almost too MANY alternative different ones we could jump to. Did you really experience a NDE, or do you actually gain the power, on body death, to read the minds of other people all around you and then piece together their impressions into a coherent memory of a point of view. Please, please, don’t answer that wasn’t it. The point is that it just as well could be, for all you really know, even if you won’t accept that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on in the first place.
Again, this is just assuming that order and beauty can only come from God in the first place, and that our subjective appraisals of things have objective implications. The fact that we find the world especially ordered and beautiful is just our perspective on things.
Again, what you offer are merely feelings and impressions that you interpret as being God, but which seem to be so vague that other people would and maybe do interpret them with a lot less cosmic bravado (or, as Bender put it on Futurama: “We ALL feel like that ALL the time.”)
If there is a God and he communicates with you, it would be utterly trivial for him to tell you what the Guardsman Protection Plan number of my living room couch is so you could tell me. That is, after all, what it means to say that there is a “conversation” going on: that there is a back and forth exchange of information between two thinking beings. But I suspect that this will never happen, and that the excuse will turn out to be that you meant something much vaguer and more heavily interpreted as a “conversation” (and then only in a somewhat poetic sense) then you originally let on.
The problem isn’t so much science as it is a lack of any reason to necessarily take claims like this seriously period. You can declare that you are enlightened all you want, but for all you know, you are simply reveling in a false impression and WE are the enlightened ones. You can scoff at science as a tool for proof and understanding all you want. But unfortunately, that’s the only known route that would actually be useful for convincing people that what you say is objectively valid.
Science does not “preach that there is no God.”
I realize that this lie is your most dearly held belief, but it is not true. If you continue to reapeat that claim in despite of the evidence that you have been shown on numerous previous occasions, I am going to be forced to conclude that you arer trolling.
If you wish to post that Many/most/some scientists preach that there is no God, that is fine. It is a supportable and accurate statement. If you repeat the lie that “science” (which actually makes no statement regarding any god) “preaches that there is no God” you are going to get Warned for trolling.
[ /Moderating ]
Is this supposed to be the evidence that you have to support this statement of yours?
If so, it falls short by light-years.