Would you be an atheist if science and reason wasn't supportive of atheism?

[Zen Badger]

My problem with "technically possible" is that it ultimately goes against reality as we know it.

Imagine you see a Pagani Huayra in your driveway, and you actually do believe it wasn't designed, it's construction, testing, painting, everything wasn't planned. The whole car came about from random chance as dust blew past your driveway over hundreds of thousands of years.


You are still left with Leibniz' question: "Why is there 'something'?"

We know there was a "nothing"- the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, prior to which there was no matter, no energy, nothing.

How in the hell did nothing give rise to something? There's no scientific evidence that this is even possible naturalistically. We don't see things popping into being in our cars, bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, offices, football games.

We've never seen a single incident of something popping into being from nothing.

So I have a hard time believing the universe came about in such a random violation of all known scientific laws, and ON TOP OF THAT was fine-tuned.

That's just improbability multiplied with improbability.

I mean, if you had to quantify the number of empirical examples we have of "something not popping into being from nothing", you would have to multiply the planck-area of the universe times the planck-time of the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units

That's pretty damn close to impossible, bro.

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Unicorns are also conceivable, i.e we can conceive of them.

But until we have concrete evidence we cannot claim they are true.

So you run off, collect your evidence and then you can claim your Nobel prize.

It's not conceivability on its own that matters. It's conceivability + necessity as part of a pool of live options.

The unicorn, if we are using a unicorn, must be one of only two possible explanations of something.

As such, your unicorn is irrelevant, while a non-physical mind capable of creating the universe actually explains something in the universe.

But it has been shown that it is the natural order of the universe that simple systems obeying local law will evolve into complex systems.
No designer necessary.
You could well be right, there could be an intelligent first cause to the universe. But you need to provide evidence that it exists, not bat around probability curves until you get the answer you like and then claim it's the truth.
And even if you do succeed, you then have to prove that it your particular god and not one of the thousands of other gods that humans have concocted.