(July 27, 2009 at 3:55 am)Anto Kennedy Wrote: No evidence that God doesn't exist though, which makes atheism an irrational leap of faith.I agree with you that there is no evidence that God doesn't exist; the existence of such evidence would be illogical since you cannot prove a negative unless you are omniscient (we aren't).
However, there is likewise no evidence that God does exist.
To make a leap of faith, someone has to make a positive claim about something in light of a lack of evidence, in this case either that "God does exist" or "God doesn't exist".
Neither atheist nor theist makes this claim on a purely semantic level, since theism is the belief in one or more gods, and atheism is the disbelief in gods. Beliefs are not claims of absolute knowledge, neither are they positive claims of knowledge, they are personal opinions on a specific subject.
If you make the positive claim that "God exists" or "God does not exist" you are being gnostic about your theism/atheism respectively. Gnostic theists & atheists, unless they can present verifiable evidence for their claims of knowledge, are making a leap of faith as you say.
One could further make the argument that since there is no evidence to suggest that God exists, even agnostic theism itself is a leap of faith, and that agnostic atheism is the only logical position to take until evidence appears to the contrary.
