(September 21, 2015 at 9:13 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(September 21, 2015 at 8:39 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: What you said is true, but Atheists usually take it further. They take the stance that people should not believe in God. And I've only seen one person (Tiberius) be humble enough to say perhaps people do know God exists, he doesn't know that, just that he doesn't believe he knows God exists.
That to me is a respectable Atheist. I respect him for that. But to argue you don't know whether or not God exists, and other people should then all not know it, is another stance all together. The only way to justify the stance is either to show God doesn't exist or why if he does exist people can't have knowledge of his existence. Good luck with either.
Those two positions aren't mutually exclusive, you know. Maybe there are people who know that god exists, but for some reason that doesn't stop their evidence from being very poor, meaning that they may in fact know something I don't, but that from my perspective it is impossible to rationally accept their claims on the basis of what they are showing me. So from where I'm standing- which is the only place I can argue from- people should not believe in god because every indication I have shows this to be either a false or unsupported belief.
I simply cannot accept the arguments and evidence being presented for god, because the fallacies and inaccuracies don't go away just because the person making them might be right. If you're right, you're right, and nobody can take that away from you... but that still doesn't make your arguments good. The existence of a god is ultimately separate from the arguments and evidence for one, but I can only accept or reject the claim based on the latter, after all.
Most Theists don't give a crap about philosophical arguments for God and are not interested in them. They are still strong in faith in God and don't care for a single argument. They believe they are connected to God and they know by the power of faith.
And please don't simply call "faith" "blind belief", because, that's not what Theists believe it is. They believe it's a seeing power, it's a connection.
If most Theists were relying on arguments like first cause, design etc, then you may have a point. But from my experience, there is very few Theists who actually have faith in God from philosophical reasons, and even those, probably have faith from other then that, but just seek to strengthen their case against Atheists.