Atheism isn’t a belief.
You don’t believe in the other gods. You dismiss them.
Empirical Evidence.
You can’t be serious…
The correct answer is that “we don’t know” whether the universe had a beginning or has always been. No one knows past Planck Time.
Claiming science is a belief is absurd. That’s like claiming mathematics, which is another scientific method, is a belief.
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https://blogs.ams.org/phdplus/2017/04/17/math-is-like-science-only-proof-y/
So its 2-1, Oxford University and The American Mathematical Society vs Tennessee Tech, over to you.
Darn, must be these glasses, I just can’t see the part where NASA say “mathematics is, or uses, the scientific method”. Hmm, could MrDawk be wrong I wonder?
Mathematics is the logic of certainty. Statistics is the logic of uncertainty. (paraphrased from Joe Blitzstein)
@MrDawn watch the boiling point. Warning.
But you know what it isn’t? A belief. And that was the point from the beginning. Sorry you missed it, buddy.
People confuse math and science all the time; because people use both words to represent a wide variety of stuff. From my perspective; science is the prediction of the state of a system at time a, given the state of the system at time b. Math is a great tool used to make this possible; but if reading tea leaves worked, it would be science (but presumably) wouldn’t be math!
Actually, I wouldn’t call it evidence. I’d call it data. You’d need to process the data to get evidence.
I stand corrected then. I was confused. Some articles stated it was and then there was some saying it wasn’t. I always thought certain fields of mathematics went hand in hand with science such as bio chemistry or rocket science. Anyways, I admit I was wrong.
Yup AND then there’s the whole “linguistic” approach as maths are like a language.
BUT let’s not go there. 
I wish I was better at maths! I’d give my left pink toe to be a Mathematician 
Same. I really wanted to get it. I just couldn’t and struggled with it badly in high school.
It’s never been one of my strengths. If it had been, I would have wanted to become a computer programmer. I just didn’t stand a chance with computer science and having to do all of that math work. Damn.
That’s an interesting answer. A huge problem here is that many of us get our perception of “God” from other people, institutions, practices, ceremonies and so on. It colors our perception to a huge extent and makes it very difficult to approach a subject like this in a dispassionate way.
Its’ not God that most atheists have a problem with, its religion and I share much of that with many of them. Few stop to think that at the time of Christ there was no church, there was no Christianity, no easter, no Christmas, no popes, no choir boy abuse, no Spanish inquisition, in fact no Bible! none of that, pretty much every aspect of current “Churchianity” arose afterwards.
Many atheists cannot read the NT without seeing through a lens tarnished with two thousand years of human meddling and politics and abuse and deceit. To read the NT from the standpoint of a dispassionate observer, ignoring twenty centuries of history, seeing what is written in the context of a Jewish society that was as bad as mainstream Christianity is today, seems beyond them.
The things that Jesus said to the Pharisees, the challenge he presented to established orthodoxy, show us that “Christian” society today is a mirror image, what he said then could just as well be said today.
But the uncritical atheist is unaware, they lump Jesus and the NT and the Bible all together with the institutions they despise, they throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak.
The things Christ said to people were truly astonishing, many of the things he said made little sense to the Pharisees and make little sense today. Those calling themselves Christians claim to represent him and represent what is recorded but they do not, if you assume that you’ve been hoodwinked.
Nothing that Jesus did or said makes any sense whatsoever in the context of a Jewish enclave in a corner of a Roman backwater, it is totally unexpected completely bizarre, it seemed bizarre and it was nobody knew what to do with him, he hurt no one yet he was hated, tortured and killed.
Basically you couldn’t make this up - there has to be something to it.
No harm done then, we are all human.
I’ll start a thread…
Thank you. I apologize for being rude. It was uncalled for.
How does anyone know what jesus said? The gospels weren’t written by eyewitnesses and were written decades after the fact, so where do jesus’ words come from? I suspect they were all made up.
Fair enough, that’s a reasonable question. So let me say this then, the things that are written are astonishing, whoever produced them, they are astonishing.
Things like:
“I and the father are one” - Makes zero sense in Judaic culture, there’s absolutely no precedent for such a phrase, it is utterly alien and its meaning still unclear.
or
“Eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood” - incomprehensible now and then.
Can you demonstrate this?
