I assume a string atheist has no belief in string theory.
Anyhow, congratulations on demonstrating that your position is intellectually bankrupt. Good job.
I remember only dimly, but Michael Scriven, in his book “Primary Philosophy,” put together a “Basic God.” A fairly standard “Nice Big Sky Guy” without infinite attributes, but who was more powerful than anyone else, knew more than anyone else, and had a “good” moral code. He might or might not have created the universe; he might or might not judge souls to appropriate afterlives. Scriven “defined” this God for purposes exactly like this thread.
I do not believe in this God, but I do not reject it as logically self-contradictory. I just see no more evidence for it than for Zeus or Odin, or, indeed, Elbereth, whom we know is fictional.
(I’m a “string agnostic,” as I think String Theory might be true. Kinda hope so, anyway: it’s pretty!)
There are gods that have so many attributes and/or claims about them that they become self-contradictory, there are gods that are so vague that it doesn’t really matter if they exist or not, and there are gods that are some combination of the two. What all gods (to date) have in common are a lack of evidence pointing to their existence, leading me to not caring enough about them to believe or disbelieve unless pressed by insecure religionists to give an opinion one way or the other about their particular God-Of-Choice.
There’s the problem in a nutshell. I think string theory might be true also. In fact I based the advanced technology in an sf story around it. But I’m a weak string atheist - I have no belief in string theory, lacking experimental evidence, but I don’t believe that it is not true.
If however you think the experiments that would be needed to demonstrate string theory are impossible (as opposed to being well beyond our current abilities) being a string agnostic is fine since we’ll never know.
Yep! Of course, if we could prove that no experiment can ever confirm the theory, that’s cutting very, very close to disproving the theory.
If you could prove “No one will ever know if there is a God,” that doesn’t really differ, operationally and functionally, from “There is no God.”
In information theory, it would be a little like proving that a given code can never be broken.
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Do you believe that unicorns currently exist?
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If not, and you were presented with one, would you change your mind as to whether they exist?
Hey, I’ve seen one! “Living Unicorn Project.” Cute little booger!
why, because i refuse to play “silly buggers”?
It is “strong” not “string”.
Making fun of typoes is frowned upon here, and is a intellectually bankrupt position.
Do you?
It is? Have you been reading the same board as I?
I was pleasantly surprised at how some posters took your typo and ran with it in a direction that was actually relevant to the topic under discussion.
On the other hand, I don’t think there’s much to be gained by you continuing to challenge others over what they do or do not profess to believe. No one’s on trial for heresy here.
This was the post under discussion, and as i pointed out there are at least three such people in this thread.
But of course God can prove his existence. (In a weak sense of prove, of course.) If God changed the stars to write a message to us, confirmed by astronomers, that would do it for me. We can’t prove there are no gods, of course,
God being shy is not an indication that a proof of his existence is impossible.
In fact a god would know exactly what we would need for a proof - and be able to provide it.
[quote=“DrDeth, post:773, topic:917474, full:true”]
A belief that there is no god is quite different from a claim that we know there is no god, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Can this really be so difficult to understand.
My little joke, made because I was bored with waiting for a response from you (and I knew full well what you meant) did lead to an interesting discussion of agnosticism. I may be a strong atheist about gods, but I’m a weak one about string theory.
Let’s go back to ETs. I may believe that some exist, since it is a big universe, but point me to a particular star and I’ll tell you that I lack belief that aliens exist around it. But I have no reason to believe that they don’t, unless it is a type of star unlikely to have habitable planets for one reason or another.
And I have no knowledge of anything about this.
That you are now worrying about the intellectual support for a joke means that you maybe should stop digging. It was quite a nice typo, to be sure. A big juicy slowball of a typo.
I’m just going to have to assume that your answers to those questions won’t help your case any, otherwise you would have answered.
Your notion that atheists are “hard” atheists (who refuse to ever believe in a god) or “soft” atheists (who admit that there could be a god, but until they experience they don’t believe in it) just doesn’t hold up. Atheists believe what they can observe. If an atheist someday observes a god, they will then believe that a god exists. Virtually no atheist has ever said that if they are faced with an actual visible proven god, they will refuse to believe it.
The only people I know who refuse to believe something when faced with overwhelming opposing evidence are religionists. Maybe that’s why you keep clinging to your argument - you’re projecting your own irrationality onto others.
It’s not “my notion”, there was a cite. Go fight the cite, tell them they are wrong.
Can’t remember who they were but I saw a clip of a debate between a theist and an atheist. The latter said, “We’re not so different, you and I – I just believe in one fewer god than you.”
Moving the goalposts.
No one said that even a hard atheist might not accept god if a giant hand reached down and told him to. Somer simple say that they are sure there are no gods.
Oh… Jeepers, I’m sorry, but that’s actually my view too. There really are different “flavors” of atheists, some very firm and some not so definite. And it isn’t binary, but a broad spectrum of fine shades of insistence. (And, as noted, applying differently to thousands of different proposed Gods.)
I give up. You cut off the rest of my remarks. You can’t take one sentence out of context.