RE: Atheists, what do you believe is the best argument for the existence of a deity?
July 13, 2011 at 5:30 pm
(This post was last modified: July 13, 2011 at 5:35 pm by everythingafter.)
(July 12, 2011 at 12:41 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: I said faith is the only way belief in God is possible, considering the Christian position. Therefore arguments for material existence don't address that subject.
This sounds like the argument from nonoverlapping magisteria to me, which some scientists make from the other point of view, obviously.
So if I said I had faith in talking unicorns as benevolent, all-powerful beings, science could say nothing about whether they exist or not? Would you then have to accept my faith in unicorns as perfectly logical? "Faith" can make it acceptable (and untouchable) to believe in anything at all if science has to step back and not challenge such theories about spiritual or mythical creatures. As humans we no longer worship the sun and the sky and everything else as deities but people once did. Should we accept those beliefs as well and say that science can't for sure tell us whether a god abides in the sun because someone has (or had) faith in him? What makes the Christian god any different? How is not a scientific question that a human being was born of a virgin or that the said human ascended on the third day after his death? It either happened, thus breaking what we know about how people are born and die, or it didn't happen. How is not a scientific question that a god made the physical world and now apparently intervenes in millions of people's lives? So no, if God is real, I don't think we should be able to come to think this is true solely on faith. He either works in our physical world and in people's lives and there should in theory be some way to discover this, or he doesn't. If it's the latter, he's completely irrelevant. If it's the former and there is no way to discover this in theory, he is capricious at best and totally random at worst, thus rendering him far from being worthy of our worship or contemplation.
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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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