(September 20, 2015 at 11:42 am)Randy Carson Wrote: It seems to me that atheists begin with the presupposition that GOD DOES NOT EXIST, and all the rest of their efforts are geared toward explaining away anything that suggests otherwise.
Why do believers keep insisting on this flawed notion?
Tell me Randy, how should an honest person approach any claim for existence of anything?
- Claim: fairies exist and are running around in their own world preparing the upcoming season... then, overnight, they cause all the changes we see when seasons change.... they pain the leaves brown... they tell animals to prepare for winter, etc...
- Investigate fairies: first step - assume fairies exist; second step - look for them.
Is this what you propose?
- Claim: the chupacabra is killing a bunch of goats and sucking them dry.
- Investigate chucapabra: assume such an animal exists; look for the beast and take pictures.
Should we do that?
- Claim: Ra is the sun god; Helios is another sun god.
Investigate: Assume both exist; look for them near the sun.
Keep going for any crazy claim anyone can make up?
Or, is it better to assume nothing and, when evidence for any of it does surface, analyze it and, if it manages to pull through, then we accept it.
Thus far, all the "evidence" for any god falls under two cases, both flawed:
- Accounts of some past deed by some prophet - a person claiming to be in contact with the particular god. These accounts suffer the problem of having been produced with an agenda in mind, thus rendering them untrustworthy.
- Personal relationship - a supposed relationship with a deity which has no expression out of a person's mind... how can we tell that apart from some psychological phenomenon? In particular, confirmation bias can easily lead one who presumes that a god does exist into having some mental notion of fluff or whatever and which leads that person to think it was performed by that god.
Under the lack of presupposition of an existing deity, and confronted with faulty evidence, why should anyone move to assume that such a deity does exist?
