For most people, “there is only the physical laws of the universe” would be a reasonable way to define atheism.
In order to spin that god’s wishes into whatever man wanted, to give some explanation for the things in the world to comfort people who need to cling to something, but to remain ambiguous enough to apply to nearly all situations.
Because at least with the god of the Bible, which is what we mostly deal with in America, evolution has no room whatsoever for things like a literal Adam and Eve, Noah’s arc, and Genesis. It’s like saying “I have never understood why going to the Moon is evidence of a non-flat Earth.”
Why is a god needed to do that? Life fills whatever niches it can, not the other way around.
If you want to call it that, fine, but then you’re just defining god into existence. It’s also not the way most people define gods. The physical laws of the universe don’t have any agency, desire, jealousy, or vindictiveness that we know of to invoke wrath and smite those who don’t obey it.
We may be around here in a bit of denial about how for a plurality if not a majority of the population, all that “we” supposedly “know” about the belief itself in the reality of a God or of gods or a spirit plane or whatever (as opposed to specific doctrines of a denomination) being unnecessary and having no foot to stand on, has never been relevant to their everyday – that is, to them, “believing in God”, by itself, has not been a problem for them. It did not create in them a cognitive dissonance or an existential paradox. Now, they may have had issues with some act or some doctrinal teaching of the tradition they were brought up in, but then what a huge number of those people will do is switch religions, not go atheist. They conclude the problem is with the specific religion, not with there being or not being gods.
This is true. I think it’s a function of the fact that more moderate Christians are (a) less vocal about their beliefs in the public sphere, and (b) less likely to attempt to influence public policy and others’ behavior based on their (the Fundamentalists’) own beliefs.
But that still doesn’t answer the question of “why are we here.”
My opinion is that the existence of the universe is irrational, god or no god. If you don’t like the god explanation, at some point we have no answer for why matter exists, why the laws of the universe exist, why the world functions. I do tend to have some sympathy for the existence of order in the laws of the universe to encourage seeking out more order. Because frankly, the only rational universe is no universe at all. That answer requires no origin story. All existing universes require an origin story, one way or another.
All these people who all agree everyone on earth is really really stupid but them. What will they discover? Gosh I am on the edge of my chair here.
Nor does goddidit, of course - not that you were suggesting that alternative.
But I think the idea of an ultimate origin explanation in any restrictive specific sense is incoherent. If (for example) we come up with a set of laws that fully explain the origin of this universe, that just begs the question of where those laws came from.
Why not “everything that is not forbidden is allowed”? That seems equally valid a priori, and it certainly has the advantage of not being ruled out by the fact that something does, apparently, exist.
Not even that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing “Nothing is still something” which is little more than a word game rather than a concrete empirical description.
But even if nothing existed there would still be an explanatory gap; still the question of why nothing exists.
But of course no one around to ask that question 
I’ve always thought it presumptuous for a species of sentient primates to believe that all of existence must be in some way comprehensible to them.
There is no reason to believe that the universe was created/developed in a manner such that it could be understood by/would make sense to humans.
The accounts we have in the gospels aren’t written in the form of tribal myths.
However, Lewis did call the story of Jesus a “true myth.”
See also:
I did specify “Genesis”; i.e. the accounts of a supernatural creation.
Agreed, though I’d phrase it slightly differently:
There are lots of things we don’t understand yet, how/why anything can exist being just one of them.
It would be nice to know, but we don’t. It would be like claiming to know how many planets have life just because we really, really want to know.
The only difference I guess is that existence itself also seems intractable…something that will always leave an explanatory gap. But we do not know if it will always seem this way, perhaps there are ways of conceptualising this that are currently beyond us.
Yes, but that just pushes back the logical need for an uncaused creator. You could push it back a billion times, a trillion times, and the universes both need and do not permit an uncaused trigger. An infinite regression of moved movers is illogical.
Granted, even if this makes sense, it does not argue for a particular type of creator. Maybe the Spaghetti Monster guys are right after all.
This has always seemed intuitively accurate to me. The only thing that makes sense, absent an uncreated creator, is that there should be nothing. The fact that there’s something, anything at all, is astounding.
Sure, so his myth is true, but everyone else’s isn’t.
Accounts of a supernatural creation are very common in “tribal” myths, whatever that means. So are accounts of Gods knocking up mortal women and their divine children going on adventures and defeating Death.
What makes you think I’m an atheist?
Modnote: Actually, drop this line. It is a hijack of the thread. Your beliefs and what Czarcasm thinks they are are not important to this thread.
Which appears to be the case for everywhere in the known universe today, save for our little pocket of civilization. Well, at least as far as life goes anyway. Nothing/no life seems to be the consensus everywhere else.
The tribal myths of the Hebrews; which pointedly do not include ascribing any divinity to Jesus.