(May 10, 2011 at 5:33 pm)diffidus Wrote: I don not believe in God. But I like you do not have all the evidence required to deny the existence of God. I would agree that, based upon our current undertsanding, the odds are in favour of God's non existence but since our knowledege base may be only a drop in the ocean it cannot be ascerted that God does not exist, it is at best a belief based upon current understanding.
What would be required to even consider that there may be a god? You have to be willing to consider that a) a spiritual being exists in this physical universe or b) that a spiritual realm exists outside of our physical universe. Or else, we would have to change what we mean by "god." Even if our current set of scientific facts is rather non-exhaustive with regard to how much we will come to learn in the future, to suggest that a god could exist in theory would be to suggest that there exist some laws other than the known natural laws. Every piece of knowledge that we have accumulated through science screams to an exactly opposite reality. It seems to me that to let the possibility of a spiritual realm or spiritual beings begin to creep into our thinking (This is what agnostics do implicitly by refusing to say no gods exists) is to let every other sort of mysticism or mythology creep in. Agnosticism seems to leave those realms open for discussion by not taking a position, but there is no reason to think it should be open for discussion, given hundreds of year of serious scientific inquiry and philosophical thought.
Our Daily Train blog at jeremystyron.com
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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