Religionists? You mean like Pascal, Descartes, Liebnitz, and Newton?
Boy, they were too dense to understand such a simple concept.:dubious:
If you were discussing atheism with those guys, would you just say: “I have no belief. You are wrong, I am right”? Or would you try to bring them up to speed in geology, physics, chemistry, and genetics, and point out there are now naturalistic explanations that they hadn’t considered?
I have no belief. I have been given no logical reason to have a belief. That is all there is to it, and if any of your listed religionists were alive and had access to the information mankind has gathered since their heyday, you might be more surprised than I as to how they would think.
What set that in motion?. Whatever set that in motion ,in turn had to be set in motion.
That line of thinking never ends . The first cause argument is a treadmill.
You obviously don’t understand quantum physics. The universe is not a pool table.
Nice side step. :rolleyes:
BTW, I didn’t ask you what would happen if they had access to recent information, and you don’t know what they would think or who would be more surprised. Nice idle speculation, though.
And, in case you missed the point, there are intelligent people today who believe in the existence of God. Do you think if someone makes a claim, you are entitled to ask for evidence for that claim? I’m guessing yes, although you might quibble with “entitled”.
You said this:
I dispute your claim that “I have no belief” is the most reasonable option out there.
Please provide evidence to support your claim.
That’s right.
Of course we can then go a level beyond and say why does atheism seem a more reasonable position to me than theism, and the answer is in my case is for a number of rational reasons, such as Occam’s, the burden of proof etc.
So you may say “Ah, so atheism is built on particular rational principles…”, but while this may be true in many cases, it’s true for a vast chunk of human knowledge too, both formal and practical. If atheism is built on rational foundations, then so is, say, pottery.
And note that believing that we should think rationally is not the same as making the claim that the universe is rational.
I’d probably find this impressive if those intelligent people were independently “discovering” God, instead of of just following the line of least resistance and parroting the beliefs of their parents and/or peers.
And even more impressive if they had all believed in the same god.
So those are “reasons” and not “presuppositions”? What do you think is the relevant difference between the two in relation to atheism?
Also, you accept the validity of Occam’s razor, but I’m sure you disagree with Ockham on this:
Do you just dismiss Ockham’s presupposition, or do you have a counterargument? It does appear that it was the foundation of the Razor, so how do you still accept the Razor without the foundation? I’m not saying that you must accept it. I’m just wondering how you justify not accepting it.
Of course, the two parts of your sentence are different but it seems that you are suggesting that there is no relation of one with the other.
Okay, I’ll say this with a smile: Please provide support for your claim. 
(BTW, as you know, saying “note that …” does not make a claim true.)
You mean the way that you have independently falsified geocentrism, and verified evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, genetics, and the age of the universe?
Oh, wait! That has nothing to do with atheism. You can be a reasonable atheist without having any idea of how the world works. All you have to do is not believe in God and get on with your life.
If you are bringing up the religiosity of scientists in the past, it is perfectly acceptable to doubt that they would have the same opinions today. I’ve been reading a collection of scientific writing from before 1800, and several writers discussing the age of the earth make reasonable, to them, but quite wrong assumptions. I’m pretty sure that given the information available today they’d have a different opinion. While some intelligent people believe, atheism is more and more accepted the higher you go in education and scientific accomplishment. That should mean something.
I can do this easily - noting that you are confusing support for a logical argument with support for a fact about the world.
The null hypothesis has to be that there are no gods, since otherwise we’d have to choose a god as the default. This could only be done by claiming strong evidence for a particular god (which is what we are trying to show,) choosing a default god for invalid reasons (mommy believed) or choosing one randomly.
To falsify the null hypothesis, one would have to provide significant evidence. In the old days this was that there were no know origins for the earth and universe except gods. That is no longer the case. So, the null hypothesis of no god is the logical default, and atheists, as we should, ask theists again and again to provide evidence to falsify it. The lack of such evidence is support for this claim.
Galileo: the point is that none of them have replicated the experiment in which somebody found god(s), not that all of them haven’t.
I agree with your penultimate and last sentences, though.
Oh, really? Please explain how quantum physics negates what I said. And please be specific.
When a stranger tells me he has an invisible pooka friend named “Harvey”, I don’t bother with “counterarguments”-I just tell him I disbelieve and move on, unless he has some evidence for his position of course.
When a group of people tell me that they have an invisible friend that can grant wishes, I don’t bother with counterarguments-I just disbelieve and move on.
When a large group of people tell me that their invisible friend created the whole world…no, the whole galaxy…no, the whole universe…no, he is the whole universe!..and…and…and you can’t find him 'cause he lives outside the universe!!-I don’t bother with counterargument(where the hell would you even start?), I disbelieve, and wonder why anyone would think that adding impossibility upon impossibility would make a claim more believable, and not less.
That’s the point, that you keep going back further and further. But at some point you NEED a First Cause. If not, you have an event happening without a cause. You do realize that runs smack in opposition to all scientific discovery, right. So, you choose a position for which there is ZERO evidence of it EVER happening and counter to the one that is proven true a trillion trillion times every nanosecond? Do you really think that that is the more rational position? If so, why?
Could you please respond to the post I just made to gonzomax?
Thanks.
Of course not. It’s a craps table!
No prob, dude.
I have not acquired enough information/evidence/facts to make an informed decision on the matter, yet. Your guess is as good as mine.
I’m not doubting the intelligence of these people - I just don’t find their belief in God impressive. Lots of intelligent people believe in God. So do lots of dumb people. It’s not the individual’s intelligence in some specific field like math or physics that matters - it’s how readily they absorbed the indoctrination of their parents.
If intelligence was relevant to belief, I guess we’d see religious breakthroughs coming daily from smart people worldwide, as we do in science and technology. With the increasing power of information technology, religion should be advancing at a geometric pace. The smartest people would have religious beliefs that were more nuanced that those of average people, or something. Instead, we get “Isaac Newton believed in God, presumably the same God that Norman the inbred sheep-fucker believed in.” Big whoop.
If you want to claim, or at least imply, that there must be something to this “God” business because smart people in history bought into it, go ahead. It’s just not a very compelling argument. If anything, it makes me feel sorry for the geniuses trapped in a more primitive time. I feel likewise about modern prodigies who have the misfortune to be born in the crappier parts of the world, like wartorn Africa or North Korea or the Phelps clan, where their talents can’t reach their full potential.
Fair enough. But I’m just asking that given the information you do have, which position is the more rational one? One in which there was a First Cause or one in which there wasn’t?