That would be Occam’s Razor – with the corrollary, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” I.e., positing the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient and interested supernatural being is a claim so extraordinary that it should not be seriously considered until every alternative explanation for observed phenomena has been definitively ruled out – and even then, leaving a question mark in place seems to make more sense.
That’s a bit of a false dichotomy - the third argument (and I presume there are several others, such as “connecting with the universal human soul”) is that there is a supernatural “something” that everyone feels, but gets interpreted differently by different faiths, and that is what is being felt.
The above point-of-view is tremendously common amongst the religious/spiritual people with whom I have discussed religion. Here’s my attempt at a counter-argument, but it’s a bit woolly and verbose.
So, they don’t pass around a collection plate at your church?
Even, if they don’t, however, I thought we’d gotten past the “I’m an exception, you can’t say that!” shit around here.
Guess not.
-Joe
If they believe in anything remotely like the classical God, another argument is the limitations imposed by the laws of physics. The don’t allow miracles; they impose all sorts of limitations, and most certainly don’t allow omnipotence or omniscience. Of course, they can say that God transcends all that; but they have no evidence of that; you do have evidence for the laws of physics.
And if they refuse to admit that evidence matters, don’t bother arguing except for your own amusement; you can’t win an argument with someone who’ll just handwave any facts or logic you present away.
That third argument I would have said is covered by the second. Whether the misunderstanding comes from thinking there is a feeling when there is none, or the misunderstanding of actually another god, or like you say a general supernatural “something” being misinterpreted, it shows that people in general can be wrong.
Here are few good links that seem to fit the bill:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1781,A-new-website-addition-Debate-Points,RichardDawkinsnet
God? I have no need for that hypothesis.
I don’t care what you or anyone personally believes, I refer instead to the power structures that have grown up around the various formal religions and how it is perfectly valid to be suspicious of their motives when they go beyond simple harmless belief and start creeping into politics, law, or education. The key argument for atheism is to be suspect of anyone who tries to push theism. Somebody somewhere is making a buck off it.
Fixed title.
This is from the opposite angle: an attempt to show that religious practice can be resolved/recreated scientifically.
This article: On the Neuropsychology of Religious Experiences attempts to locate the source of that mysterious “feeling” that many devout feel is proof of the divine.
This is a much more user-friendly article from Discover Magazine in which scientists attempt to tickle the parietal lobes of an atheist in an attempt to recreate the sensation of a religious experience.
From one poster’s angle: religion is a political device employed to control the masses. From another: religion is a device of the lazy employed to easily explain that which is unknown. A third will claim that religion is a pacifier meant to calm the fear of dying or losing a loved one. From my angle: the feeling of meditation, prayer, receiving the holy spirit, etc imparts a rewarding sensation that is somewhat similar to the stimulation of hormones that occurs during sex, nursing, drug use, and other feel-good activities. In other words: the devout practice because it feels good, and once a believer registers the positive physical feedback of worship they tend to want to replicate it over and over.
Of course the results of these studies can be waved away with “He created/wired our brains this way in order to better understand Him” so I am not sure that even empirical evidence is of any use in this debate.
How? I ran out of room.
Do you see many of the theists at the Dope pushing theism? I haven’t. And I haven’t attacked atheism.
As I stated in my response, I’m not an exception. Your response set up a straw man that did not apply. Sorry that it did not work out for you.
I forgot about what I gave in the offerings, but I do know where it is going. And later this week I will be going to buy mittens, hats and scarves for the people who live on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Some of them have no heat at all in their homes. It is the poorest county in the United States. My church does this every winter. Some of the members also go to the Reservation in June to work on repairing the buildings. They sleep on the floor while they are there.
These volunteers are decent human beings and they don’t deserve the portraits that you paint of them here.
You are free to write whatever you will, of course. If you choose not to be honorable, that speaks for itself.
There are other more intelligent and centered atheists here that I can rely on to speak with integrity. When you feel well-grounded in your own beliefs, perhaps you will have no need to perpetuate stereotypes.
I wish each of you well.
It’s a miracle!
:bows down before Czarcasm:
Refute that one, Lobsang!
I’m operating on the assumption that the OP is looking for ways to counter people who are pushing theism and attacking atheism. I didn’t assume he was looking for reasons to jump on random people in the street and challenge their beliefs.
The only proof is that I know I personally have no belief in a deity, any deity. The only argument comes up when other people (hi mom) are convinced this is a choice I made rather than a simple statement of fact. From my point of view, the choices only come into play for those who do belive in a deity and can therefore choose what flavor of deity and religion they think is right for them.
Original Title:
“SDMB Atheists… point me in the direction of the most convincing arguments for Atheis”
Modified Title:
“SDMB Atheists…point me in the direction of the most convincing arguments for Atheism”
Answer-what was not there is now not there. 
For me, it just seems so much more logical and obvious that man created God than that God created man. I mean if you look at all the major cultures of world, they all have these often very different religious beliefs. I was just at the American Indian Museum in Washington a few weeks ago and saw their creation stories. For example, the native Americans of the Pacific Northwest had a story of a raven carrying the earth in its mouth. It is just abundantly clear to me that people need explanations and the purpose of religion is to provide them. As time has gone on, of course, there is less and less room for God. We no longer need gods to carry the sun across the Heavens for example and we think of the Greek and Roman notions of a sun god and such as quaint.
So, if you want to believe in god, then which god? The answer that most people give is the god that they happened to grow up with, which seems kind of goofy. I mean, why were you so lucky to be born into the culture that happens to have the right god while the others have the wrong god. (In that respect, I at least have more respect for people who adopt a religion different from the one that they were brought up in or who simply believe that all the different religions are somehow right…and it is just different aspects of the same god…although it does then seem awful hard to reconcile many of these!)
[By the way, a side note on the raven creation story that those native Americans had: I watched a video in which one of the people in that tribe had created this sculpture of the creation story in the video. What was interesting is that the way he talked about it made it sound like, while it was an important part of his culture for him, he didn’t literally believe it to be true (although I will admit that I am inferring here as he didn’t make any direct statement on that point). I thought it was sort of interesting to contrast that to our modern society here in the U.S. where we have tens of millions of people…hell, something like 1/4 to 1/2 the population, depending on how you measure it…who apparently still literally believes in their creation myth. It just seemed kind of pathetically backward to me (sorry to state it so harshly if that offends anyone, but I am just expressing my own feelings) and makes the native Americans look a lot wiser in my mind.]
No matter what, there has to be a First Cause. This First Cause, where did it come from? The Big Bang, where? There will always be an unanswered question as to First Cause so what difference how many layers? If there is no compelling argument for atheism, then it is a simple choice.
Then I hear there is no evidence of the existence of God. But this applies only to the person saying it. There are literally millions of people who believe there is considerable evidence for the existence of God including "being in the presence of, seeing, and hearing God. Now you can say all these are only personal experiences and that would be correct, but you can not say all these are illusions or not real. There would be no way to know that information. So I think there is faith involved here.
Actually, there is. If some of those experiences contradict others, then we can say some must not be real.
Oh, another little anecdote: My girlfriend has had occasion recently to be proselytized a bit recently both by a Christian colleague and some Muslim students. In both cases, since she said that she believed more in science than religion, they gave her booklets that tried to argue that either the Bible or the Koran has in it scientific facts that couldn’t possibly have been known by the people at the time. We had a fun time comparing the two.
I have to say that the Muslim booklet won hands-down in my view. The Christian one took on many more facts (over a hundred, I think) but was hampered by the fact that they were very cursory and many of them were weak to the point of being pathetic (e.g., the notion that the ancients couldn’t possibly know that each star was different, having different brightnesses and so forth as we know today…a claim that anybody living before the advent of modern industrial society and light pollution would have just laughed at)! Another problem was that many of them were more anti-science “facts” than science facts since the Christian booklet couldn’t resist arguing against evolution and for some sort of Young Earth Creationism with the usual idiotic points (e.g., evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, …). The Muslim one, by contrast, seemed to accept all the modern science that they talked about (including some things that would go against a sort of young earth / young cosmos point-of-view) and the science it talked about was talked about pretty in-depth and, frankly, pretty well from what I could tell, complete with nice pictures and figures and the like.
So, I was jokingly telling my girlfriend that on the basis of these 2 booklets, I definitely would have to go with Islam. Of course, in reality I don’t really buy either one of them but the Islamic one would, in my opinion, be considerably more challenging to refute.