Is atheism self-contradictory ?

[Mister Agenda]

Hello everyone ,

This is my first thread on the forum, and I hope to get convincing responses to a question I stumbled upon concerning atheism.

I see you're no exception to the rule that theists who come here wanting to know about atheism tell us what atheism is and what we must think. In fact, you're the second person with the 'question I stumbled upon concerning atheism' person we've had in the last week. Not very refreshing, but I did not have much of an expectation. At any rate, welcome to the forum, I hope you like it here.

Assuming no God can be proven by logic, how can one trust his judgment about religions/existence of god if his mind itself cannot be trusted ? How can I trust any atheist/agnostic's claim that all kinds of proofs that have been given by scholars or philosophers of religion throughout history are false ?

It does not follow from the fact that a god cannot be proven with logic, that the mind itself can't be trusted. You seem to have skipped some steps in making that claim. But the claims are not necessarily false in their conclusions, they are unsound. That is, if there is a God, none of the arguments presented thus far successfully establish that. There's no 'proof' given by a scholar or philosopher that both contains no logical fallacies and rests on sound premises that any reasonable person would assent to.

Therefore, rejecting belief is in itself belief that your mind possesses some kind of an absolute power that makes you distinguish between good arguments and fallacies. I don't want to talk about evolution in this thread, but since the brain is the product of random alterations of our genome, how can it be trustworthy ?

You say therefore, but no argument preceded that conclusion. You're claiming not believing something is believing something, that's a strange claim to make. If you asked us what we think instead of telling us, you'd find that most of us just aren't sold on the deity you're trying to sell. There might be ghosts, but I don't believe in them. I'm not going to believe in literal ghosts (or Bigfoot, or alien abductions, or Amway) until I'm presented with sufficient evidence to convince me. Do you believe in things without sufficient evidence to convince you?

The initial variations in our genome are random within a certain range of possibilities, but which variations are conserved isn't random, evolution is (vastly oversimplifying here) a process of culling disadvantageous variations while conserving advantageous ones. I can reasonably infer that my brain has evolved to deal with the environment that actually exists, and while it may be imperfect, it does the job. And we've come up with science to help us with our blind spots (and there are many of them).

You'll say to me that this power is simply logial reasoning, but, you see, logic is based on axioms, i.e. basic FACTS taken for granted. What are you taking for granted to refute any logical argument whatsoever ? And why do you TRUST your thinking in the first place ?

If logic doesn't work, logic in support of God doesn't work in the first place, by definition. Stop refuting yourself.

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What proofs are you referring to? Would you like to discuss one or two specifically?

I'm referring to all of them. All variants of the cosmological argument, arguments from morality, fine-tuning of the universe, etc. Do you seriously think that all people who simply reject belief studied all of this and came to the conclusion that all of them are absurd ? 

You only need one that contains no fallacies and rests on sound premises to change the world. The reason there are 500 arguments for God is because there's not one good one.

My position is that you can't philosophize, argue, or debate a god(s) into existence. That only supports a belief. 

Well, this means that you simply reject the assumptions upon which any argument of god's existence is made. Take the cosmological argument for example, since it is unsound according to you, you boldly reject the causality principle. When I think about every assumption that needs to be taken down/reconsidered to rationalize atheism, there's just too many of them. 

Maybe if you can give an example of something else that can be established to exist solely by argument, that same argument might work for God.

Atheism starts and stops with : You say there's some sort of actual deity. I say I don't believe you. And I usually also say 'how do you know that?'.

Whose thinking should I trust if not my own? 

You didn't answer my question, why should you trust your OWN thinking if your brain is simply the product of random changes of your genome during the process of evolution ?

You didn't answer his question. To an extent, we don't have any choice but to trust our thinking. How would someone who didn't trust their thinking behave? Insanely, perhaps. But one alternative we have to trusting our own thinking that seems to have the virtue of being demonstrably useful is science. It allows us to test our thinking based on reality in a way that screens out our inherent biases.