I'm a strong atheist

(January 21, 2010 at 4:17 am)TruthWorthy Wrote: I'm a strong atheist

Ok thanks for letting me know! If you could please answer the 2 q's from my OP, could I ask you another?

As a Strong Atheist do you say "There is no God" or "You have faith that there is no God"?
Which most characterises you?

5 pages in, we have numerous definitions of methods for establishing fact, numerous definitions of faith, and you still haven't made any argument, which I hold you could have done in 3 lines:

1) Faith is believing in something without good reason or without good evidence.
2) Believing "there is no God" is a belief without good evidence, or good reason.
3) Therefore believing "there is no God" is a faith position.

Of course, I suspect some strong atheists would question number 2, but the fact is that you can never have "good evidence" for the non-existence of something, because we work from a position of adding things to our knowledge that we didn't know before, and adding them requires them to exist. Even if we created a perfect vacuum, and someone said "There is nothing in that vacuum", we could easily point to things that could be in there (does time reside in vacuums? I think so). The statement requires an absolute belief in materialism, which isn't provable. Realistically, there could be any number of things residing in the vacuum as long as they weren't comprised of matter.

Fact is truth for which the basis is in its testability.
There is no god suits me as a true theory.
Faith is stupid.

How do you test the "theory" that there is no God then? Outline some tests that demonstrate the truth of that statement.

There's no evidence suggesting "god" is a part of anything physical which is outside the human dimention. I don't need to assert anything about something I have no reason to believe in. The theory being the basis of its existance makes the theory supporting its existance the basis of truth in that existance.

Yet you do assert something. You assert "God does not exist".

There being no evidence isn't valid evidence against the existence of something. There is no evidence that there is a larger star than VY Canis Majoris, but that doesn't mean a larger star doesn't exist somewhere. When we find the evidence, it becomes evidence in favour of the larger star, but until then we cannot say anything about its existence.

Your argument is an atheist version of the "God of the gaps", except instead of God existing in all the "gaps" of knowledge, whenever we close a gap, you say "See, there's still no evidence of God, therefore he doesn't exist".

As for your last sentence, repeating the words "theory", "basis", and "existence" doesn't help a person reading it. Could you rephrase so I know what you are talking about?

Hmm, you make an interesting case. To be clear, the theory that there is no god has more truth in it than the theory there is one. Since I have to work from hypothesis and work from an unknown I do believe I'll go with the theory there is no god. That way I wont try to factor in the rules of religion, and I can work with those things which exist

"more truth"??? How can you quantify something that is either true or false?

How do you know there is "more truth" in the theory that there is no god? What evidence do you have that sways more to one side than the other?

If I were a strong atheist I would argue that the null hypothesis would be that something does not exist until evidence that something does exist comes along. I would feel no need to actively look for evidence against a thing to claim its non existence.