But as an atheist I do not accept either position. I am not convinced a god exists. I am not stating a god does not exist.
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Interesting if commonplace view. Pity you are unable to support it with evidence.
Logic is not a reliable tool to arrive at a truth. So far, in written history, nobody has managed to argue god into or out of existence.
Say you had managed to infer god into existence. That single fact does not permit any inferences about god/gods. He might be benign like Jesus meek and mild, or he might be a total cunt like YHWH of the Torah. OR there might be more than one god, each with different attributes, like Greek or Norse gods.
Without exception, every god reflects the society which invents he/her/it as well as the individuals who believe . YHWH began as petty war god of the ancient Canaanites/Israelites. He even had a wife, called Asherah. The people who invented YHWH were illiterate bronze age goat herders. Their lives were nasty, brutish and short. Naturally, their gods reflected that reality. Gods usually change as societies evolve.
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My position is that that Iām unable to believe in gods due to a lack of evidence. I demand empirical evidence and will accept nothing less. There the believer has a problem. Unless there has been a change overnight, all claims about gods are unfalsifiable.IE Cannot be demonstrated to exist or not exist .
This atheist has no problem with that. I state only that I do not believe, I make no claims. The burden of proof falls to the one making the claims. In this case you
IF you want others to accept your position as other than fantasy and superstition, you will need to demonstrate your god exists .Not good enough to simply prove a god exists . You have endowed your god with unfounded attributes. Those attributes need to be demonstrated. Perhaps begin by explaining how a benign god can allow evil and suffering to exist .
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Unfortunately, this is where we butt heads. You claim a person has a āpurposeā. Please prove that.
Additionally, do you advocate beating and torture just because you had a bad day? Because you are drawing your morality from that god. And please do not casually discard these immoral acts of your god. Slavery, torture, raping of children, genocide.
I operate to a higher standard than set down by any bible or objective viewpoint.
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Yes please. If only to see how views can vary.
Over the last 30 years or so, in the absence of evidence of any other view, I slowly reached the following conclusion:
Life in and of itself has a definite purpose; itselfā¦ By that I do not mean the selfish and limited survival of ego. As far as I can tell, every form of life strives to reproduce itself. Individual ego comes and goes, in a blink of an eye.***
It is also my opinion that the function of religion is to provide some comfort with the fear of death. It also provides an illusion of individual purpose, meaning and control over life.
The following is the pithiest statement about religion Iāve ever seen:
āReligion: Manās attempt to communicate with the weatherā (Graffito, Cambridge, 2000)
***I have entered my āgolden yearsā All that means in practical terms is that I am far closer to the end of my life than the beginning. Over the last decade or so Iāve noticed time seem to pass more quickly than it ever has . I can look back over 50 years and it truly seems like yesterday.
Those are indeed two claims that are logical negations of each other, but theyāre misleading here, because whilst theism is a claim, atheism is not.
Itās also a logical fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam) to claim A is remotely valid, because we canāt know that Not A is invalid. Otherwise we would have to believe all unfalsifiable claims, which would be absurd.
Well thatās another claim, again I would disbelieve it in the same fashion it has been offered, without any evidence.
Another argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. A claim is neither validated nor invalidated by a lack of contrary evidence. We get this attempt to reverse the burden of proof by theists on here all the time.
Wrong, it can be either the or untrue, but again Not A is a claim, atheism is not a claim, it is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities, and I can remain an agnostic in the absence of knowledge, but still disbelieve any claim presented without sufficient objective evidence.
I operate under the assumption that all living things have two directives imprinted within their genes. They are survival and propagation. Most of our actions, including ego, are driven by those two imperatives.
If I was asked āwhat is the meaning if life?ā my sincere response would be to eat and screw.
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A vulgar way of putting what I wrote.
True story: late teens, at a party with dadās mates and their wives.
One of the wives said to me " Gee my boy Les is a bloody rough bugger. I donāt know why"
:
To summarize, though, the primary reason I believe in a Supreme Being comes down to the basic idea that, if you have two propositions:
A
Not A
Those are indeed two claims that are logical negations of each other, but theyāre misleading here, because whilst theism is a claim, atheism is not.
Itās also a logical fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam) to claim A is remotely valid, because we canāt know that Not A is invalid. Otherwise we would have to believe all unfalsifiable claims, which would be absurd.
You are misapplying the term argumentum ad ignorantium, which asserts that if you have two propositions, and you canāt prove (or donāt have evidence) for one you must believe the other. Thatās not the argument Iām making. The argument Iām making is simply using three premises and then applying modus tollens and disjunctive syllogism.
kw31416:
For me, a foundational belief is that there exists a purpose, and a morality, within the Universe which is transcendent
Well thatās another claim, again I would disbelieve it in the same fashion it has been offered, without any evidence.
Very well, thatās your choice; you donāt believe in a morality and purpose which is transcendent.
kw31416:
And I canāt conceive of how that purpose and morality can exist in the absence of a Supreme Being.
Another argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. A claim is neither validated nor invalidated by a lack of contrary evidence. We get this attempt to reverse the burden of proof by theists on here all the time.
Youāre twisting my statement to come back to your favorite charge. Iām not saying it (morality and purpose) canāt exist aside from a Supreme Being; Iām simply saying that I canāt come up with how it could happen. Not looking for the perfect explanation; just the best one that I can find.
kw31416:
So the proposition āNot Aā cannot be true,
Wrong, it can be either the or untrue, but again Not A is a claim, atheism is not a claim, it is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities, and I can remain an agnostic in the absence of knowledge, but still disbelieve any claim presented without sufficient objective evidence.
This almost reads like a restatement of what I said earlier. Yes, āNot Aā can be true or untrue and yes, my assertion that āNot Aā cannot be true is a claim I make based on the arguments Iāve presented.
Since youāve already stated that you donāt believe in a transcendent morality or purpose, independent of individual or collective desires of humans, I think weāre done.
The universe exists.
It has either always existed, in which case one has the issue of infinity: from an infinite point in the past the universe has crossed time an infinite distance to reach the present. That is by definition of infinity impossible. Therefore not true.
Or the universe is finite in past history. This must be true.
Either the universe had no cause and came from absolutely nothing, or it had a cause. Something from nothing is impossible. To reduce it to the absurd, if something can come from nothing then there is no reason why we do not see things spontaneously generating around us and the universe follows a logical and consistent order.
So the universe had a cause.
The cause? Well, if it were a physical cause such as virtual particles or something quantum, or anything physicap, then we have the issue of what caused that cause, and so on, and once again we have an issue of infinity.
Therefore the cause must have been non-physical, but itself must have a finite history, not an infinite history, and cannot have been caused itself, always having existed.
What has the power to cause while being non-physical?
I say thus: God existed timelessly, changelessly. He made a motion, and created the world, and time, and caused the first change, and thus he is finite in past history, uncaused, and non-physical. This, I believe, is the only logical explanation of existence.
I will debate with anyone who is civil and makes no ad hominem arguments and acts relatively sane, and clarify my points to anyone who finds them unclear. Iāll also clarify definitions to anyone who asks.
I am here to sharpen myself, not convert. I wish to fine-tune my arguments and become more effective in debates.
OK - Iāve read all the responses to my original post, including the ones following this one, from yourself and others. A guy strolling into a forum for atheists who states his reasons for believing in God is going to get a lot of replies, and there just isnāt time to address all of them.
Setting aside the presentation of one of my primary reasons for belief in God, which Iāve communicated in the discussion with Sheldon - here is how things seem to fall out:
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Rejection of the idea of morality or purpose as Iāve described (or proposing an alternative definition). Sure - but thatās my starting point. Everybody has their opinions on the matter. If someone doesnāt accept my viewpoint theyāre clearly going not going to accept my reasoning.
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Demand (or request) for evidence to support my position regarding morality and purpose - Iām not sure what evidence for purpose would look like. However, the larger point, for me, is that I think there are a lot of choices in life that have to be made without the evidence we would prefer. Whatās a reasonable ground for believing something in the absence of a closed proof? I donāt think weāre going to come to agreement on that, based on what Iāve read.
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There are the questions about how I can believe in a God that I claim is good when, for instance, He either permits or enables violence, suffering, etc. Thatās a much more complicated answer than the one I give to āDo I believe in a Supreme Being.ā In a forum setting, if I got 10 responses to the question I addressed about simply whether or not God exists (as opposed to what His qualities are) Iād get 100 one this one - it would be an incoherent cyber-melee. If someone really wants that discussion and really wants to know (as opposed to just argue) the forum probably has a messaging capability and we could take that question up there.
Other than that, this well has probably been exhausted.
This has not been falsified. First you need a ānothingā - as of yet, this has not been accomplished. We donāt know if itās impossible.
This again is an assumption and a conclusion without evidence. Firstly, the quantum āworldā operates differently than our scale of the physical world.
Second - you are describing or attributing ālogicā and order to processes and interactions that ended up producing āusā. So? You are like the Extremophile praising the logic
that brought it aboutā¦
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Then we have no reason to attempt to communicate with each other. Have a good day.
Do you see the contradiction in those two statements?
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(1) And? This isnāt contest, itās just an internet forum, there are no shoulds. We have no right of expectation for anything we post.,
(2) In reality: Horsepucky.
Most atheist here are reasonably open minded.
IF you produce a reasoned argument with evidence where needed, you view will probably be at least be considered
IF you insist on making unsupported claims you will be called or ignoredā¦
(3) Regardless of claims made by Sherlock Holmes and Mr Spock,(fictional beings) logic does not dictate truth. Logic is a poor tool for discovering truths.
People have been trying to argue god into existence fort at least two thousand years. So far, no one has succeeded. Believers are still trying to argue Prime cause/intelligent design/irreducible complexity. The first of whom Iām aware of making that same argument was Aristotle. It was wrong in the 4th century bce and itās still wrong,
Why is that impossible? Can you expand on that?
I have never heard that phrase before. Sounds kind of woo-woo.
No. Would you point it out?
Just a grammatical error. Put āinfinityā in quotations if you like. I thought it was clear.
I still donāt have a clue what you are saying there. Were you offering a definition of:
- the word infinity?
- the word impossible?
- the phrase infinity impossible?
- something else?
My perception of your argument (and it is not concise) is that infinity is impossible. But later on you intimated that your god was infinite.
FYI, ātimelesslyā does not make sense. If something, anything exists, it is experiencing time.