RE: what is atheism
December 26, 2012 at 2:31 pm
(This post was last modified: December 26, 2012 at 2:33 pm by Whateverist.)
(December 26, 2012 at 8:14 am)pocaracas Wrote: Now, probabilities...
Some people have managed to account for all the gods that humanity has followed. They came up with something like 2800 different gods. You can add to these any gods you may come up with, but you'll know there's no believers for those, so just forget about it
How do you know which of those 2800 is the real one? if any!
What are the odds that a given deity you end up following, turns out to be false, man-made, imagined...? 1/2800.
What are the odds that the absence of gods ends up being real?... 1/2?
Equally probable?
Alternatively, if you truly believe that the probability of any god's existence is 50%, then there are probably 1400 known gods that exist. I always want to ask a pure agnostic whether any god I deliberately make up in my imagination would receive the same probability analysis as the traditional ones. And then what is the possibility that there are gods who have not bothered to enlist human followers? Or what about the super heroes of comic books? At some point the idea that everything whose existence is uncertain has a 50/50 chance of being real begins to appear absurd. Agnosticism does not require assigning a 50% likelihood to everything unknown.
For things lacking any physical evidence such as gods, which are often described as other worldly or ineffable, it is impossible to assign any measure of certainty one way or the other. There is simply no basis to do so. As genkaus already said, where no evidence is available, beliefs abound but can never be what we would describe as knowledge.
Of course no religious person comes to belief in their god through a fair analysis of the relative likelihood of all the known variants. They each come to understand themselves and the world around them as revolving around the deity known to their community. Any theist who wishes to redeem their reason, should concede that their faith is not based on reason. It is instead a belief regarding what cannot be proven which they accept uncritically and embrace gladly since they like their life better that way. Then they may take their place beside other right thinking human beings with their heads held high. They are no more absurd for holding their defacto belief that their god cares about them than I am for believing godlessness is the way of the world. So long as we can each agree on what there is good reason to acknowledge as being known, true, valid and well supported, we are both rational.
