(May 29, 2013 at 8:35 pm)whateverist Wrote: A while back Drew created a thread asking what case may be made for atheism. My only reaction is to ask "why do we need to make a case for not believing in something?"
I don't have to make a case for atheism. I am an atheist because my decades-long attempts to make a case for theism failed. I think someone already said something to that effect, that the case for theism is the case for atheism.
Most of the attempts to get us to 'make a case for atheism' rest on bad arguments like "prove that god DOESN'T exist" or the god-of-the-gaps approach, which was my impression of Drew's topic. I get the impression that, frustrated with having to prove something that cannot be proved, theists try to reverse roles and demand that atheists justify their atheism. But we don't have to. Yahweh isn't going to toss me in hell for realizing he was never there.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
