No reason justifies disbelief.

[Jackalope]

Meh, I guess not?

The boards aren't making sense using logic and sound reasoning, there's little to nothing here which interests you, and you have nothing to contribute personally beyond some comment that you have nothing to contribute.

Well yes, I rather not contribute to the rotting pile of insanity around here.

[Nay_Sayer]

Meh, I guess not?

The boards aren't making sense using logic and sound reasoning, there's little to nothing here which interests you, and you have nothing to contribute personally beyond some comment that you have nothing to contribute.

Well yes, I rather not contribute to the rotting pile of insanity around here.

What a pitiable lost lamb.
Bless.  RAmen.

[Pat Mustard]

At work.

I think, Gae Bolga, that the Christian asserts their diety is 'All good'.

Though, how they can square that away with their diety also creating/instigating evil and suffering etc?

Yah, seems quite contradictory to me.

Funny, that in 2000 .  That the problem of evil remains such an embarrassing paradox for Christians.

I quote Epicurus again, because I think he's pithy:

       “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

― Epicurus   .

---

At work.

Uhm.... given the dates... isn't it that the Christian's took inspiration from the classical Greek philosophers?

 If they did I'can't think of any examples.

I don' want to be flippant, because I  don't  know.  Not wanting it to be true is not good enough.

I'm open to any ideas, backed up with evidence.

Augustine of Hippo basically stole all his ideas from Plato. The whole idea of the soul comes from Greek philosophy and their concept of psūkhḗ, so much so that even the idea of Cartesian dualism is essentially a bastardisation of Platonic thought. Interesting to note that, like with excommunication, judaism didn't have a concept of a permanent soul until after the jews had to live in subjugation to christianity. Everything in catholic thought, and most of protestant thought derives from Augustine's larceny.

[Pat Mustard]

To simply declare that there is no reason to disbelieve is just that, a declaration.

Simply to make a declaration is not to make an argument. 

Some people feel there are reasons to believe. You say there aren't.

Do you have any reasons for your assertion, or is it made for no reason? You have heard the reasons given by religious people, and you have declared that they are not in fact reasons. Did you make this declaration according to some reasonable standard, or according to nothing?

You assert, we reserve judgement. As long as a claim is being made evidence for that claim has to be supplied. You're making the claim, therefore you have to give the evidence.

As long as you (any theist) fail to provide evidence it is the rational, logical, sensible and proper position to not believe in god.

[fredd bear]

Funny, that in 2000 .  That the problem of evil remains such an embarrassing paradox for Christians.

I quote Epicurus again, because I think he's pithy:

       “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

― Epicurus   .

---

 If they did I'can't think of any examples.

I don' want to be flippant, because I  don't  know.  Not wanting it to be true is not good enough.

I'm open to any ideas, backed up with evidence.

Augustine of Hippo basically stole all his ideas from Plato.  The whole idea of the soul comes from Greek philosophy and their concept of psūkhḗ, so much so that even the idea of Cartesian dualism is essentially a bastardisation of Platonic thought. Interesting to note that, like with excommunication, judaism didn't have a concept of a permanent soul until after the jews had to live in subjugation to christianity.  Everything in catholic thought, and most of protestant thought derives from Augustine's larceny.

 ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((0)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Fascinating. I haven't read Augustine. The mind/body dichotomy has been around for a very long time, with no consensus even today.

 I'm not doubting your claim.My discipline is Social Anthropology; I tend to be very cautious about claims  of cross cultural fertilisation. A very hard thing to prove to a high degree of probability. Quite often, correlation is simply that ,without a causal relationship.

Didn't know that about Jewish thought either.  I'm aware the Jewish concept of an afterlife is a bit vague. I once asked a Rabbi at an online Yeshiva.He said something like"we focus on life now" . Nor does Judaism have a concept of an eternal hell. That's a christian invention, which slowly evolved over centuries.

It came as a shock to me to learn that the concept of 'soul' and "afterlife'  was not universal among ancient religious  beliefs

What about the influence of the Egyptian notion of the Ka?.  I think that predate the Greeks.  I'm not going to drag in the putative enslavement  and  exodus of the Hebrews/Canaanites/Jews. Just wondering about broader influence

A most interesting post, with what is for me, a couple of original ideas.  I think I'll do some digging. Thanks.

[Belacqua]

Simply to make a declaration is not to make an argument. 

Some people feel there are reasons to believe. You say there aren't.

Do you have any reasons for your assertion, or is it made for no reason? You have heard the reasons given by religious people, and you have declared that they are not in fact reasons. Did you make this declaration according to some reasonable standard, or according to nothing?

You assert, we reserve judgement.  As long as a claim is being made evidence for that claim has to be supplied.  You're making the claim, therefore you have to give the evidence.

As long as you (any theist) fail to provide evidence it is the rational, logical, sensible and proper position to not believe in god.

You may have me confused with someone else. I am not a believer. I am only trying to be careful about how we make arguments.

[The Grand Nudger]

Then be more careful?  Part of that includes realizing when an apologists argument is specious.

[Amarok]

You may have me confused with someone else. I am not a believer. I am only trying to be careful about how we make arguments.

Too bad you never get around to that

[possibletarian]

It's just the difference between a scientific demonstration and a metaphysical one. 

Science, as you know, very wisely limits itself to certain kinds of knowledge. Empirical, intersubjectively repeatable, quantifiable, etc. That's why it works so well. 

But that leaves a number of big questions. For example, the assertion that empirical evidence is the best or only way to know things is not itself demonstrable through empirical evidence. What experiment could be devised, using empirical evidence, that there is no other kind of evidence? 

Since Plato, serious arguments for God do not consider God to be a sensible object, knowable in the way that other sensible objects are. Sometimes people mistakenly treat God as if it were Bigfoot -- we'd get proof if we knew where to look. But God has always been considered as a non-material or even noetic thing. Actually, non-thing. Some theologians even happily agree that God doesn't exist, because God is itself existence. 

A standard although very limited analogy is to numbers. We say that the number 5 exists, though we've never seen it. Only examples of fiveness or symbols.

Evidence by it's very nature has to increase our knowledge of something, lets look at the definitions.

Evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
Fact: a thing that is known or proved to be true.
Information: facts provided or learned about something or someone.

*bold mine*  I think you are playing fast and loose with word definitions here, how can imagining something that is not testable in any way increase information, add facts or proof of any kind ?  So when you say 'other types of evidence' what are you talking about, and how does it fit the definition of evidence ?

As for numbers, they are completely meaningless without a something, so saying 5 is completely redundant, it adds no information whatsoever and is a way created by minds to describe 5 of something, not 5 of nothing.

I guess I should make clear that no theologian reads the Bible the way most atheists do -- literalist sola scriptura. 

Well no, taken as is it is clearly a story, it would have to be necessarily taken in a very different way even to the point of disagreement over which parts should be taken literally or not. A quick look at different sects of any religion will tell you this, This is where evidence and not belief comes in.

A long and involved metaphysical logical argument has to do with the fact that things existing are held in existence by things that are essentially (not temporally) prior, and it appears that the chain has to go back to one non-contingent thing that holds everything else in existence. I know I'm going to get into trouble for citing this one -- people really get worked up by Aristotle. But it's just an example of what I mean by a non-empirical demonstration.

I sincerely hope you don't get in trouble for mentioning any philosopher, my problem is again this just may be me being a little simplistic is that even when i was a theist I saw no merits in these arguments, I always thought of them simply as a way of avoiding saying 'I don't know'  It always looked to me as if they had just given in with the questions they could not answer and created an unaccountable deity that did not have to answer any question therefore closing the question. Though Gae answered this question more precisely than I ever could.

I prefer to go on asking the questions, how are you and I able to tell the difference between a real deity and made up in a logical argument ?  In my mind at least they are not arguments for a god so much as what a god would have to be like if he existed, they then go on to give it completely unprovable and untestable attributes.  Or even worse 'A thing that holds everything else in existence', what does that even mean as a way of knowing what god is?

I'm not philosophically trained, and never claim to be. I am however familiar with some of the arguments put down over the centuries  but to me at least it's simply human minds fighting against simply saying 'I don't know'. I admire them for trying to answer the questions of the day but don't believe they have answered a question, so much as avoided one.

[Jehanne]

This has been posted on this board before (not by me), but it is a great clip: