The Case for Atheism

[frasierc]

Here's the problem with this whole line of thinking. You don't have 500 witnesses - you don't have a *single* witness. What you do have is an an unevidenced, uncorroborated claim that there were 500 witnesses. Furthermore, that claim was made by anonymous writers who recorded events that supposedly occurred decades prior, that they themselves did not claim to witness - and even if they did, so what? We have no idea who they were.

In other news, monkeys flew out of my butt this morning, and there were 500 witnesses to that fact. Who were they? Beats the hell out of me.

You're right we don't have any 2,000 year old men or women eyewitnesses of Jesus resurrection!

The writer who made this claim wasn't annonymous it was the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15). He's writing between 10-20 years after Jesus death and saying to the Corinthian church if you have doubts about the resurrection ask them as most are still alive.

I think someone making a claim of 500 eyewitnesses to an event happening in say 2003 or 1993 - would be a pretty strong claim particularly if they offered for me to talk to these eyewitnesses (so they're hardly unknown to Paul or the Corinthians). If you also factored in that many of the eyewitnesses (such as Peter, James etc) who saw Jesus after the resurrection died on the basis of their testimony about the resurrection.

I don't think its quite analogous to your 500 unknown witness to monkeys flying up your butt .

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Generally? Or only regarding god claims?

Generally - there's been a lot of literature on the problems with the null hypothesis testing approach for many decades. A fun article is Cohen's Earth is round (p<.05) which should be freely available.

Regarding the question of what constitutes evidence, well that would depend on the claim, wouldn't it? Can you imagine a courtroom scene in which the counsel for prosecution asks the defence counsel what evidence she'd accept?

The analogy's a good one because the whole point of a courtroom is that you share the same understanding of reality (the codified law of that particular land). But where two people have different understandings of reality we at least need to understand one another and our assumptions in order to be able to communicate. This happens in cross-cultural communication all the time - and can lead to many amusing misunderstandings if not which I can testify to with experience.

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A slight mischaracterization of the position. The simplest, easiest way to phrase the atheist position is just "theists have not met their burden of proof". There is no positive argument for atheism (SOME atheists might make the positive argument "god does not exist", but atheism as a concept is just lack of belief in theist claims).

You do have the burden of proof, as you are claiming something. We just don't think you've made your case. That's it.

I can accept the argument that atheism isn't making a case (just lack of belief in theist claims). But naturalism is making a case that the world is explained exclusively by natural phenomenon. If you're going to make a claim - I would think you would want to provide evidence for that claim rather than just presume it and expect others to disprove you.

[pocaracas]

This guy is hopeless.

[Esquilax]

So I'm not sure whether we'll gain any further clarity if we can't really agree on a pretty foundational assumption. You've argued I have the burden of proof - I disagree. Its difficult to proceed from there.

Simply asserting your claim to be true without providing any evidence makes it pretty difficult to have a discussion. I can't understand the logic of you wanting me to present evidence for my claim whilst not being willing to do that for your claim.

Its been great fun discussing these issues but I think we've ended up just arguing in circles.

I'm not making a claim, and your dogged insistence that I am making a claim, that you know what I believe better than I do myself, is immensely, and I hope unintentionally, arrogant.

You don't have to assume anything in order to come to conclusions about the world. You just have to critically examine all the claims that come in, which I can tell just from the arguments you gave, you aren't doing for your god beliefs. That's the problem here; not any presumption of naturalism from us, just that you're willing to accept your god claims based on bad arguments.

Honestly, looking back over what you presented, it's the same old tripe we see wheeled out over and over; Kalam is so flawed it's barely an argument at all, the argument from fine tuning only becomes an argument if you're already assuming the conclusion, Plantinga doesn't know what he's talking about and your 500 witnesses claim is laughable in so many ways it's not even funny. Worse still, with the exception of the last claim none of your arguments even address your particular god, making them poor justification for your christianity to begin with. And as for the last one... would you be convinced if some other religion had written down in their holy book that five hundred people witnessed their prophet performing a miracle? If not, why would you be convinced of yours? It seems like special pleading, from here. The fact that you didn't even bother to respond to my (admittedly quick, but I can expand if you like) refutations of your other arguments also says a lot.

In short, your position is poorly justified, and I think reflects the fact that you just want to believe in your religion and so went looking for confirmatory arguments regardless of their efficacy. They're easy to tear to shreds, so I guess it's much easier to just demand that everyone who disagrees with you has a bias against your argument, than to critically examine what you're using. But you don't know us, and you don't get to tell us what we believe.

The writer who made this claim wasn't annonymous it was the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15). He's writing between 10-20 years after Jesus death and saying to the Corinthian church if you have doubts about the resurrection ask them as most are still alive.

Paul never met Jesus, so going to Paul about a claim of what happened to Jesus is pretty insane. And nobody from that time is still alive, that's madness. So we can't really ask anyone, at all. This whole argument is just... just terrible.

You are seriously asking us to believe a miracle claim based on the fact that it was written by a guy who never met the man who performed the miracle, and thus was not there when it supposedly happened, who claimed that a lot of people saw it, despite not actually having done that himself so he wouldn't know, and then claims a further impossible thing. That is the only argument you've made so far that actually points to your god in particular.

We all "presume naturalism," because we won't accept that claim as true.

[Jenny A]

Atheist or religious persons would't know what scientific proof IS if it was thrown in their faces!! 75% of you all didn't even take Trig...let alone calculas...maybe got B+ in High School chemistry. Oh, yes I know there's smart people from Harvard that are atheist, but their also religious people too from Harvard. Most atheist replace biblical gods with scholastic ones. Atheist always argue for scientific proof, but most of them don't have the education or only have a psuedo knowledge from wikapedia to know what exactly is scientific proof. Just keeping attributing you reasoning to your scholastic gods because obviously the majority just don't have the brains to for reasoning or contemplation

And you think you're superior? Like to see a little more evidence for that before I take you as "gospel."

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...what we're trying to explain to you is that your question demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what exactly atheism entails.

I believe it, atheism, entails much more than you currently allow. Even just the lack of belief influences the beliefs you do have. The exclusion of God, gods, divine influences and transcendent principles all have logical conclusions. While such exclusions make a good working methodology for science, it is an impoverished way to approach all of life.

It isn't the exclusion of, but the lack of evidence for. Should evidence turn up, I'll rethink.

But I admit there are logical consequences that follow from not believing. For example, we are on our own and moral behavior is up to us.

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Once again I've read fore and aft in this old thread and there's nothing new. Christians try to shift the burden of proof to show there is no god.

But the burden of proof to show anything exists (no matter how many people believe it does) rests on the proposer. There is no more evidence that Yahweh exists than that Zeus does. You ready to believe in Zeus?

[Jackalope]

Here's the problem with this whole line of thinking. You don't have 500 witnesses - you don't have a *single* witness. What you do have is an an unevidenced, uncorroborated claim that there were 500 witnesses. Furthermore, that claim was made by anonymous writers who recorded events that supposedly occurred decades prior, that they themselves did not claim to witness - and even if they did, so what? We have no idea who they were.

In other news, monkeys flew out of my butt this morning, and there were 500 witnesses to that fact. Who were they? Beats the hell out of me.

You're right we don't have any 2,000 year old men or women eyewitnesses of Jesus resurrection!

We don't have any *accounts* of the supposed witnesses.

The writer who made this claim wasn't annonymous it was the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15). He's writing between 10-20 years after Jesus death and saying to the Corinthian church if you have doubts about the resurrection ask them as most are still alive.

Paul wasn't there, and didn't even claim to be there, nor did he claim to have met Jesus in-the-flesh, as I suspect you very well know, if you've read the epistles - which, by the way, I have.

Nice try.

I think someone making a claim of 500 eyewitnesses to an event happening in say 2003 or 1993 - would be a pretty strong claim particularly if they offered for me to talk to these eyewitnesses (so they're hardly unknown to Paul or the Corinthians). If you also factored in that many of the eyewitnesses (such as Peter, James etc) who saw Jesus after the resurrection died on the basis of their testimony about the resurrection.

Given that the *only* writings we have with known authorship are from Saul (Paul) of Tarsus, who we very well know was *not* there, and a whole slew of writings from unknown authors who don't even make a claim of having personally witnessed anything, what we're left with is nothing but hearsay accounts.

Perhaps that's good enough for you. That's your business.

[Whateverist]

Here's the problem with this whole line of thinking. You don't have 500 witnesses - you don't have a *single* witness.

An even more basic problem is that we don't know if the bible is best used as a literal account of anything. Allegory might be a better use. In that case worry about the number of witnesses is misplaced.

I don't think its quite analogous to your 500 unknown witness to monkeys flying up your butt .

Nice lighthearted use of vulgarity for humorous effect. (Kudos to you I say.)

I can accept the argument that atheism isn't making a case (just lack of belief in theist claims). But naturalism is making a case that the world is explained exclusively by natural phenomenon. If you're going to make a claim - I would think you would want to provide evidence for that claim rather than just presume it and expect others to disprove you.

Atheists are all over the map on this one. Some atheists do believe in supernatural phenomena, just not gods. Some may want to quibble over whether there is anything at all in the supernatural category while allowing that the category is coherent. But many of us, myself included, think it is actually a definitional matter.

To 'explain' anything by classifying it as supernatural, is essentially the same as saying you have no idea how it works. So it fails as an explanation. To identify how the natural world gives rise to or at least is compatible with a phenomenon is what we mean by explaining a thing. That everything is explainable exclusively by natural phenomenon then isn't a claim so much as it is what we mean by "explainable".

Now do atheists agree that everything is in fact explainable? I don't think so. I hope most of us would agree that an adequate explanation of everything does not yet exist. Of course some atheists seem to believe science will inevitably achieve such a thing. I don't. But I don't think science will fall short because some things are correctly classified as supernatural. Rather, I just note that the more we understand about what we already know, the more it seems we discover stuff that we didn't know. I'm not at all sure that any amount of information about the world will ever be complete.

[Chas]

First of all, bad user, don't necropost.

Second of all: evidence of naturalism? Do you not agree that the natural world exists? And that we can easily observe it?

Now give me some evidence that a god exists.

First of all sorry if I necroposted - wasn't intentional.

Second - you misunderstand my point about naturalism. I'm not asking for evidence for the natural world existing. I think we can agree on that.

I'm referring to naturalism as the 'philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.' (OED)

Third - from your post I don't know if you presume naturalism or not.
If you're presuming naturalism then you've already ruled out the possibility of evidence for God's existence. So if that's the case the more meaningful discussion is on the basis for naturalist assumptions.

I don't presume naturalism. However, in our experience the answer to inquiries about reality has never been supernatural. Not once. Not ever.

So, there's that.

[The Grand Nudger]

Indeed, there may be truly strange things "out there", we just haven't needed them in service of an explanation as of yet. It's a bridge we'll have to cross if/when we come to it.

[Jackalope]

Indeed, there may be truly strange things "out there", we just haven't needed them in service of an explanation as of yet. It's a bridge we'll have to cross if/when we come to it.

I dunno, man - quantum physics is pretty damn strange. Still not supernatural, though.

[FatAndFaithless]

Indeed, there may be truly strange things "out there", we just haven't needed them in service of an explanation as of yet. It's a bridge we'll have to cross if/when we come to it.

I dunno, man - quantum physics is pretty damn strange. Still not supernatural, though.

QP is bizarre but really cool..unfortunately hardly anyone has a good understanding of it (I sure as hell don't). The two words that turn any theist's argument into white noise for me are "quantum" and "metaphysical".